An Investigation of Somali Women’s Beliefs, Practices, and Attitudes about Health, Health Promoting Behaviours and Cancer Prevention

This pilot study examined Somali women's perception of health/access to care, examined their knowledge and attitudes about cancer prevention, and discussed strategies to improve service provision and education. Using a multidisciplinary approach, twelve face-to-face interviews were conducted with Somali women ages 18 and older, residing in a mid-western city. Open coding was used to categorize and reflect the interview statements and to identify reoccurring themes. Somali women are concerned about a variety of health issues and cited the role of culture and religion in developing prevention strategies.   Participants emphasized the use of religious leaders, health care advocates, oral traditions, and translators in providing culturally appropriate health care services. Religion and culture play a prominent role in the Somali community and impact beliefs about health and wellness.  Health practitioners need to work closely with individuals and community leaders to tailor services that are culturally appropriate and accessible.     

Monomeric ephrinB2 binding induces allosteric changes in Nipah virus G that precede its full activation.

Nipah virus is an emergent paramyxovirus that causes deadly encephalitis and respiratory infections in humans. Two glycoproteins coordinate the infection of host cells, an attachment protein (G), which binds to cell surface receptors, and a fusion (F) protein, which carries out the process of virus-cell membrane fusion. The G protein binds to ephrin B2/3 receptors, inducing G conformational changes that trigger F protein refolding. Using an optical approach based on second harmonic generation, we show that monomeric and dimeric receptors activate distinct conformational changes in G. The monomeric receptor-induced changes are not detected by conformation-sensitive monoclonal antibodies or through electron microscopy analysis of G:ephrinB2 complexes. However, hydrogen/deuterium exchange experiments confirm the second harmonic generation observations and reveal allosteric changes in the G receptor binding and F-activating stalk domains, providing insights into the pathway of receptor-activated virus entry.Nipah virus causes encephalitis in humans. Here the authors use a multidisciplinary approach to study the binding of the viral attachment protein G to its host receptor ephrinB2 and show that monomeric and dimeric receptors activate distinct conformational changes in G and discuss implications for receptor-activated virus entry

Mitigation of Crack Damage in Metallic Materials

A system designed to mitigate or heal crack damage in metallic materials has been developed where the protected material or component is coated with a low-melting temperature film. After a crack is formed, the material is heated, melting the film which then infiltrates the crack opening through capillary action. Upon solidification, the healing material inhibits further crack damage in two ways. While the crack healing material is intact, it acts like an adhesive that bonds or bridges the crack faces together. After fatigue loading damages, the healing material in the crack mouth inhibits further crack growth by creating artificially-high crack closure levels. Mechanical test data show that this method sucessfully arrests or retards crack growth in laboratory specimens

Preliminary evaluation of the CellFinder literature curation pipeline for gene expression in kidney cells and anatomical parts

Biomedical literature curation is the process of automatically and/or manually deriving knowledge from scientific publications and recording it into specialized databases for structured delivery to users. It is a slow, error-prone, complex, costly and, yet, highly important task. Previous experiences have proven that text mining can assist in its many phases, especially, in triage of relevant documents and extraction of named entities and biological events. Here, we present the curation pipeline of the CellFinder database, a repository of cell research, which includes data derived from literature curation and microarrays to identify cell types, cell lines, organs and so forth, and especially patterns in gene expression. The curation pipeline is based on freely available tools in all text mining steps, as well as the manual validation of extracted data. Preliminary results are presented for a data set of 2376 full texts from which >4500 gene expression events in cell or anatomical part have been extracted. Validation of half of this data resulted in a precision of ~50% of the extracted data, which indicates that we are on the right track with our pipeline for the proposed task. However, evaluation of the methods shows that there is still room for improvement in the named-entity recognition and that a larger and more robust corpus is needed to achieve a better performance for event extraction. Database URL: http://www.cellfinder.org

El sistema constructivo

Se describe el sistema constructivo de entramado en madera, “plataforma” (platform frame) utilizado preferentemente en las construcciones de varios pisos en el campamento minero de Sewell, Chile./The following is a description of the platform frame used in several stories buildings in the mining settlement Sewell, in Chile

CELDA - an ontology for the comprehensive representation of cells in complex systems

BACKGROUND: The need for detailed description and modeling of cells drives the continuous generation of large and diverse datasets. Unfortunately, there exists no systematic and comprehensive way to organize these datasets and their information. CELDA (Cell: Expression, Localization, Development, Anatomy) is a novel ontology for the association of primary experimental data and derived knowledge to various types of cells of organisms. RESULTS: CELDA is a structure that can help to categorize cell types based on species, anatomical localization, subcellular structures, developmental stages and origin. It targets cells in vitro as well as in vivo. Instead of developing a novel ontology from scratch, we carefully designed CELDA in such a way that existing ontologies were integrated as much as possible, and only minimal extensions were performed to cover those classes and areas not present in any existing model. Currently, ten existing ontologies and models are linked to CELDA through the top-level ontology BioTop. Together with 15.439 newly created classes, CELDA contains more than 196.000 classes and 233.670 relationship axioms. CELDA is primarily used as a representational framework for modeling, analyzing and comparing cells within and across species in CellFinder, a web based data repository on cells (http://cellfinder.org). CONCLUSIONS: CELDA can semantically link diverse types of information about cell types. It has been integrated within the research platform CellFinder, where it exemplarily relates cell types from liver and kidney during development on the one hand and anatomical locations in humans on the other, integrating information on all spatial and temporal stages. CELDA is available from the CellFinder website: http://cellfinder.org/about/ontology

CellFinder: a cell data repository

CellFinder (http://www.cellfinder.org) is a comprehensive one-stop resource for molecular data characterizing mammalian cells in different tissues and in different development stages. It is built from carefully selected data sets stemming from other curated databases and the biomedical literature. To date, CellFinder describes 3394 cell types and 50 951 cell lines. The database currently contains 3055 microscopic and anatomical images, 205 whole-genome expression profiles of 194 cell/tissue types from RNA-seq and microarrays and 553 905 protein expressions for 535 cells/tissues. Text mining of a corpus of >2000 publications followed by manual curation confirmed expression information on ∼900 proteins and genes. CellFinder's data model is capable to seamlessly represent entities from single cells to the organ level, to incorporate mappings between homologous entities in different species and to describe processes of cell development and differentiation. Its ontological backbone currently consists of 204 741 ontology terms incorporated from 10 different ontologies unified under the novel CELDA ontology. CellFinder's web portal allows searching, browsing and comparing the stored data, interactive construction of developmental trees and navigating the partonomic hierarchy of cells and tissues through a unique body browser designed for life scientists and clinicians