Section IV Replicate Culture Methods - Single "Subculture" in Situ Using Glass Beads

In this laboratory we have studied the macromolecular changes accompanying release of contact inhibition by using a method by means of which a large fraction of cells in a confluent monolayer are released from contact inhibition of growth and division. This is accomplished without chemical treatment of the cells, without change of medium and in such a way that most cells are provided with free growth area. The procedure involves growing the cells to confluence on surfaces uniformly covered with glass beads 200 {microns} in diameter. When confluence has been attained, contact inhibition ma be released by discarding the beads leaving behind numerous spaces, throughout the culture. Removal of the beads dislodges few if any of the cells. After release of contact inhibition by removing the beads, the cultures double in cell number following the first round of DNA replications, and continue to grow until they are again contact inhibited. Cell types used have included several cell lines and strains including both primary cell cultures of neonatal rat heart cells and established 3T3 and 3T6 mouse fibroblast cell lines

SIR+ models: accounting for interaction-dependent disease susceptibility in the planning of public health interventions

Avoiding physical contact is regarded as one of the safest and most advisable strategies to follow to reduce pathogen spread. The flip side of this approach is that a lack of social interactions may negatively affect other dimensions of health, like induction of immunosuppressive anxiety and depression or preventing interactions of importance with a diversity of microbes, which may be necessary to train our immune system or to maintain its normal levels of activity. These may in turn negatively affect a population’s susceptibility to infection and the incidence of severe disease. We suggest that future pandemic modelling may benefit from relying on ‘SIR+ models’: epidemiological models extended to account for the benefits of social interactions that affect immune resilience. We develop an SIR+ model and discuss which specific interventions may be more effective in balancing the trade-off between minimizing pathogen spread and maximizing other interaction-dependent health benefits. Our SIR+ model reflects the idea that health is not just the mere absence of disease, but rather a state of physical, mental and social well-being that can also be dependent on the same social connections that allow pathogen spread, and the modelling of public health interventions for future pandemics should account for this multidimensionality

Rationality as the Rule of Reason

The demands of rationality are linked both to our subjective normative perspective (given that rationality is a person-level concept) and to objective reasons or favoring relations (given that rationality is non-contingently authoritative for us). In this paper, I propose a new way of reconciling the tension between these two aspects: roughly, what rationality requires of us is having the attitudes that correspond to our take on reasons in the light of our evidence, but only if it is competent. I show how this view can account for structural rationality on the assumption that intentions and beliefs as such involve competent perceptions of downstream reasons, and explore various implications of the account

CASTNet: Community-Attentive Spatio-Temporal Networks for Opioid Overdose Forecasting

Opioid overdose is a growing public health crisis in the United States. This crisis, recognized as "opioid epidemic," has widespread societal consequences including the degradation of health, and the increase in crime rates and family problems. To improve the overdose surveillance and to identify the areas in need of prevention effort, in this work, we focus on forecasting opioid overdose using real-time crime dynamics. Previous work identified various types of links between opioid use and criminal activities, such as financial motives and common causes. Motivated by these observations, we propose a novel spatio-temporal predictive model for opioid overdose forecasting by leveraging the spatio-temporal patterns of crime incidents. Our proposed model incorporates multi-head attentional networks to learn different representation subspaces of features. Such deep learning architecture, called "community-attentive" networks, allows the prediction of a given location to be optimized by a mixture of groups (i.e., communities) of regions. In addition, our proposed model allows for interpreting what features, from what communities, have more contributions to predicting local incidents as well as how these communities are captured through forecasting. Our results on two real-world overdose datasets indicate that our model achieves superior forecasting performance and provides meaningful interpretations in terms of spatio-temporal relationships between the dynamics of crime and that of opioid overdose.Comment: Accepted as conference paper at ECML-PKDD 201

Selection of Post-Acute Care for Stroke Patients

Background: Significant variation exists in post-acute care for stroke survivors. This study examines referral practices of occupational and physical therapists for patients after acute stroke. Method: Occupational therapists (OTs) and physical therapists (PTs) were surveyed either electronically or in person at a national conference. The respondents selected the most appropriate referral for each of five case vignettes. The referral choices included Inpatient Rehabilitation Facility (IRF), Skilled Nursing Facility (SNF), Long-Term Acute Care Hospital (LTACH), home with home services, or home with outpatient services. Demographic data included practice location, setting, and duration. The respondents were also asked to rate how strongly 15 clinical factors influence their referral decisions. Results: The 33 OTs and 41 PTs favored similar referrals. Consensus was observed in four of the five cases. No differences were observed among the respondents based on practice location, practice setting, or number of years in practice and the referrals. Prognosis for functional improvement and pre-stroke functional status were identified as the most important factors influencing referral decisions. Conclusion: Further studies are needed to define areas of broad consensus as well as areas of disagreement, with subsequent efforts to clarify optimal treatment algorithms for patients who currently receive variable rehabilitative care

Sexual Dysfunction in Jordanian Diabetic Women

OBJECTIVE—To estimate the prevalence of female sexual dysfunction (FSD) in diabetic and nondiabetic Jordanian women

The pacing stress test: Thallium-201 myocardial imaging after atrial pacing. Diagnostic value in detecting coronary artery disease compared with exercise testing

Many patients suspected of having coronary artery disease are unable to undergo adequate exercise testing. An alternate stress, pacing tachycardia, has been shown to produce electrocardiographic changes that are as sensitive and specific as those observed during exercise testing. To compare thallium-201 imaging after atrial pacing stress with thallium imaging after exercise stress, 22 patients undergoing cardiac catheterization were studied with both standard exercise thallium imaging and pacing thallium imaging.Positive ischemic electrocardiographic changes (> 1 mm ST segment depression) were noted in 11 of 16 patients with coronary artery disease during exercise, and in 15 of the 16 patients during atrial pacing. One of six patients with normal or trivial coronary artery disease had a positive electrocardiogram with each test. Exercise thallium imaging was positive in 13 of 16 patients with coronary artery disease compared with 15 of 16 patients during atrial pacing. Three of six patients without coronary artery disease had a positive scan with exercise testing, and two of these same patients developed a positive scan with atrial pacing. Of those patients with coronary artery disease and an abnormal scan, 85% showed redistribution with exercise testing compared with 87% during atrial pacing. Segment by segment comparison of thallium imaging after either atrial pacing or exercise showed that there was a good correlation of the location and severity of the thallium defects (r = 0.83, p = 0.0001, Spearman rank correlation).It is concluded that the location and presence of both fixed and transient thallium defects after atrial pacing are closely correlated with the findings after exercise testing. Thus, atrial pacing may be used as a stress for myocardial perfusion scintigraphy in patients unable to complete a satisfactory exercise test

Coupling effects in QD dimers at sub-nanometer interparticle distance

Currently, intensive research efforts focus on the fabrication of meso-structures of assembled colloidal quantum dots (QDs) with original optical and electronic properties. Such collective features originate from the QDs coupling, depending on the number of connected units and their distance. However, the development of general methodologies to assemble colloidal QD with precise stoichiometry and particle-particle spacing remains a key challenge. Here, we demonstrate that dimers of CdSe QDs, stable in solution, can be obtained by engineering QD surface chemistry, reducing the surface steric hindrance and favoring the link between two QDs. The connection is made by using alkyl dithiols as bifunctional linkers and different chain lengths are used to tune the interparticle distance from few nm down to 0.5 nm. The spectroscopic investigation highlights that coupling phenomena between the QDs in dimers are strongly dependent on the interparticle distance and QD size, ultimately affecting the exciton dissociation efficiency. [Figure not available: see fulltext.]

Convergent algorithms for protein structural alignment

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Many algorithms exist for protein structural alignment, based on internal protein coordinates or on explicit superposition of the structures. These methods are usually successful for detecting structural similarities. However, current practical methods are seldom supported by convergence theories. In particular, although the goal of each algorithm is to maximize some scoring function, there is no practical method that theoretically guarantees score maximization. A practical algorithm with solid convergence properties would be useful for the refinement of protein folding maps, and for the development of new scores designed to be correlated with functional similarity.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>In this work, the maximization of scoring functions in protein alignment is interpreted as a Low Order Value Optimization (LOVO) problem. The new interpretation provides a framework for the development of algorithms based on well established methods of continuous optimization. The resulting algorithms are convergent and <it>increase the scoring functions at every iteration</it>. The solutions obtained are critical points of the scoring functions. Two algorithms are introduced: One is based on the maximization of the scoring function with Dynamic Programming followed by the continuous maximization of <it>the same </it>score, with respect to the protein position, using a smooth Newtonian method. The second algorithm replaces the Dynamic Programming step by a fast procedure for computing the correspondence between C<it>α </it>atoms. The algorithms are shown to be very effective for the maximization of the STRUCTAL score.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>The interpretation of protein alignment as a LOVO problem provides a new theoretical framework for the development of convergent protein alignment algorithms. These algorithms are shown to be very reliable for the maximization of the STRUCTAL score, and other distance-dependent scores may be optimized with same strategy. The improved score optimization provided by these algorithms provide means for the refinement of protein fold maps and also for the development of scores designed to match biological function. The LOVO strategy may be also used for more general structural superposition problems such as flexible or non-sequential alignments. The package is available on-line at http://www.ime.unicamp.br/~martinez/lovoalign.</p