Rehabilitation and release of marine mammals in the United States : risks and benefits

Author Posting. © Society for Marine Mammalogy, 2007. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of John Wiley & Sons for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Marine Mammal Science 23 (2007): 731-750, doi:10.1111/j.1748-7692.2007.00146.x.Rehabilitation of stranded marine mammals elicits polarized attitudes: initially done alongside display collections, but release of rehabilitated animals has become more common. Justifications include animal welfare, management of beach use conflict, research, conservation, and public education. Rehabilitation cost and risks have been identified which vary in degree supported by data rather than perception. These include conflict with fisheries for resources, ignorance of recipient population ecology, poor understanding of long term survival, support of the genetically not-so-fit, introduction of novel or antibiotic resistant pathogens, harm to human health and cost. Thus facilities must balance their welfare appeal against public education, habitat restoration, human impact reduction, and other conservation activities. Benefits to rehabilitating marine mammals are the opportunity to support the welfare of disabled animals and to publish good science and so advance our understanding of wild populations. In specific cases, the status of a population may make conservation the main reason for rehabilitation. These three reasons for rehabilitation lead to contrasting, and sometimes conflicting, management needs. We therefore outline a decision tree for rehabilitation managers using criteria for each management decision, based on welfare, logistics, conservation, research and funding to define limits on the number of animals released to the wild

Oscillations by Minimal Bacterial Suicide Circuits Reveal Hidden Facets of Host-Circuit Physiology

Synthetic biology seeks to enable programmed control of cellular behavior though engineered biological systems. These systems typically consist of synthetic circuits that function inside, and interact with, complex host cells possessing pre-existing metabolic and regulatory networks. Nevertheless, while designing systems, a simple well-defined interface between the synthetic gene circuit and the host is frequently assumed. We describe the generation of robust but unexpected oscillations in the densities of bacterium Escherichia coli populations by simple synthetic suicide circuits containing quorum components and a lysis gene. Contrary to design expectations, oscillations required neither the quorum sensing genes (luxR and luxI) nor known regulatory elements in the PluxI promoter. Instead, oscillations were likely due to density-dependent plasmid amplification that established a population-level negative feedback. A mathematical model based on this mechanism captures the key characteristics of oscillations, and model predictions regarding perturbations to plasmid amplification were experimentally validated. Our results underscore the importance of plasmid copy number and potential impact of “hidden interactions” on the behavior of engineered gene circuits - a major challenge for standardizing biological parts. As synthetic biology grows as a discipline, increasing value may be derived from tools that enable the assessment of parts in their final context

Escherichia coli MazF Leads to the Simultaneous Selective Synthesis of Both “Death Proteins” and “Survival Proteins”

The Escherichia coli mazEF module is one of the most thoroughly studied toxin–antitoxin systems. mazF encodes a stable toxin, MazF, and mazE encodes a labile antitoxin, MazE, which prevents the lethal effect of MazF. MazF is an endoribonuclease that leads to the inhibition of protein synthesis by cleaving mRNAs at ACA sequences. Here, using 2D-gels, we show that in E. coli, although MazF induction leads to the inhibition of the synthesis of most proteins, the synthesis of an exclusive group of proteins, mostly smaller than about 20 kDa, is still permitted. We identified some of those small proteins by mass spectrometry. By deleting the genes encoding those proteins from the E. coli chromosome, we showed that they were required for the death of most of the cellular population. Under the same experimental conditions, which induce mazEF-mediated cell death, other such proteins were found to be required for the survival of a small sub-population of cells. Thus, MazF appears to be a regulator that induces downstream pathways leading to death of most of the population and the continued survival of a small sub-population, which will likely become the nucleus of a new population when growth conditions become less stressful

Cells Lacking the <i>RB1</i> Tumor Suppressor Gene Are Hyperdependent on Aurora B Kinase for Survival.

Small cell lung cancer (SCLC) accounts for 15% of lung cancers and is almost always linked to inactivating RB1 and TP53 mutations. SCLC frequently responds, albeit briefly, to chemotherapy. The canonical function of the RB1 gene product RB1 is to repress the E2F transcription factor family. RB1 also plays both E2F-dependent and E2F-independent mitotic roles. We performed a synthetic lethal CRISPR/Cas9 screen in an RB1 -/- SCLC cell line that conditionally expresses RB1 to identify dependencies that are caused by RB1 loss and discovered that RB1 -/- SCLC cell lines are hyperdependent on multiple proteins linked to chromosomal segregation, including Aurora B kinase. Moreover, we show that an Aurora B kinase inhibitor is efficacious in multiple preclinical SCLC models at concentrations that are well tolerated in mice. These results suggest that RB1 loss is a predictive biomarker for sensitivity to Aurora B kinase inhibitors in SCLC and perhaps other RB1 -/- cancers. SIGNIFICANCE: SCLC is rarely associated with actionable protooncogene mutations. We did a CRISPR/Cas9-based screen that showed that RB1 -/- SCLC are hyperdependent on AURKB, likely because both genes control mitotic fidelity, and confirmed that Aurora B kinase inhibitors are efficacious against RB1 -/- SCLC tumors in mice at nontoxic doses.See related commentary by Dick and Li, p. 169.This article is highlighted in the In This Issue feature, p. 151

A Televised Social Problem Construction? Pushing Back Against the Invisibility of the Male Rape Victim in American Crime

Building on the view of popular culture as a conduit through which social problems are defined, debated or even resolved (Maratea & Monahan, Social Problems in Popular Culture. Bristol: Polity Press, 2016), this chapter evaluates the contribution of fictional television to the demarginalisation of the male victim of sexual violence. The research adopts a case study design and offers an ethnographic content analysis of ABC’s American Crime. It highlights the blaming and stigmatisation of the male rape victim, the shortcomings of the dominant feminist framing of sexual victimisation as well as the failure of the criminal justice system to effectively handle male rape cases. The author concludes that ‘socially aware’ TV shows like American Crime could serve as a form of ‘edutainment’: they have the strong potential to push back against dominant male rape myths and offer a better insight into the victims’ experiences, getting audiences much more emotionally involved than pertinent factual sources of information

Long-term outcomes in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease patients: exploring the effects of inhalatory devices and their influence on the outcome

Valeria Fadda, Dario Maratea Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences, University of Florence, Sesto Fiorentino, FI, Italy Purpose: Numerous systematic reviews have examined the outcomes in patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease managed with different therapeutic strategies. However, no such studies have specifically focused on the effect of inhalation devices. Methods: A standard PubMed search was carried out in which we identified all randomized placebo-controlled trials conducted in patients with moderate-to-severe or severe chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. The clinical end points were exacerbations rate, incidence of pneumonia, and mortality. Meta-regression was employed to assess the effect of the device. For the incidence of exacerbations, an equivalence analysis was also carried out. Results: A total of 37 studies were analyzed. Four different devices were used across these trials (Respimat&reg;, HandiHaler&reg;, Diskus, and Turbuhaler&reg;). Our meta-regression analysis failed to show any significant difference between devices with regard to exacerbation rate. Equivalence was shown for some comparisons (HandiHaler&reg; vs Respimat&reg;), but not for others. In analyzing mortality, Respimat&reg; was shown to worsen this end point in comparison with Turbuhaler&reg; and HandiHaler&reg;. Moreover, Turbuhaler&reg; showed a protective effect over Diskus in the incidence of pneumonia. Conclusion: The results of our analysis represent the first attempt to explore the effect of the type of device on long-term outcomes. One important limitation was that most drugs were associated with one particular device, and so the effects of drugs and devices could not be reliably differentiated from one another. Keywords: COPD, inhalation device, moderate-severe, meta-analysis, equivalenc