A biological survey of the Rappahannock River, Virginia

Also part of series: Special report from the Virginia Fisheries Laboratory ; no.6.Also referred to as the Rappahannock River Survey

Targeting different types of human meningioma and glioma cells using a novel adenoviral vector expressing GFP-TRAIL fusion protein from hTERT promoter

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Objective</p> <p>The objective of this study was to evaluate the anti-tumor effects of Ad/gTRAIL (an adenoviral vector in which expression of GFP and TRAIL is driven by a human telomerase reverse transcriptase promoter, hTERT) on malignant meningiomas and gliomas.</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Gliomas and meningiomas are the two most common types of human brain tumors. Currently there is no effective cure for recurrent malignant meningiomas or for gliomas. Ad/gTRAIL has been shown to be effective in killing selected lung, colon and breast cancer cells, but there have been no studies reporting its antitumor effects on malignant meningiomas. Therefore, we tested the antitumor effect of Ad/gTRAIL for the first time in human malignant meningioma and glioma cell lines, and in intracranial M6 and U87 xenografts.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>Materials and Methods: Human malignant meningioma and glioma cells were infected with adenoviruses, Ad/gTRAIL and Ad/CMV-GFP. Cell viability was determined by proliferation assay. FACS analysis and quantification of TRAIL were used to measure apoptosis in these cells. We injected Ad/gTRAIL viruses in intracranial M6 and U87 xenografts, and measured the brain tumor volume, quantified apoptosis by TUNEL assay in the brain tumor tissue.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Our studies demonstrate that in vitro/in vivo treatment with Ad/gTRAIL virus resulted in significant increase of TRAIL activity, and elicited a greater tumor cell apoptosis in malignant brain tumor cells as compared to treatment with the control, Ad/CMV-GFP virus without TRAIL activity.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>We showed for the first time that adenovirus Ad/gTRAIL had significant antitumor effects against high grade malignant meningiomas as well as gliomas. Although more work needs to be done, our data suggests that Ad/gTRAIL has the potential to be useful as a tool against malignant brain tumors.</p

A leaky umbrella has little value: evidence clearly indicates the serotonin system is implicated in depression.

A recent “umbrella” review examined various biomarkers relating to the serotonin system, and concluded there was no consistent evidence implicating serotonin in the pathophysiology of depression. We present reasons for why this conclusion is overstated, including methodological weaknesses in the review process, selective reporting of data, over-simplification, and errors in the interpretation of neuropsychopharmacological findings. We use the examples of tryptophan depletion and serotonergic molecular imaging, the two research areas most relevant to the investigation of serotonin, to illustrate this

PsyCog:A computerised mini battery for assessing cognition in psychosis

Despite the functional impact of cognitive deficit in people with psychosis, objective cognitive assessment is not typically part of routine clinical care. This is partly due to the length of traditional assessments and the need for a highly trained administrator. Brief, automated computerised assessments could help to address this issue. We present data from an evaluation of PsyCog, a computerised, non-verbal, mini battery of cognitive tests. Healthy Control (HC) ( N = 135), Clinical High Risk (CHR) ( N = 233), and First Episode Psychosis (FEP) ( N = 301) participants from a multi-centre prospective study were assessed at baseline, 6 months, and 12 months. PsyCog was used to assess cognitive performance at baseline and at up to two follow-up timepoints. Mean total testing time was 35.95 min (SD = 2.87). Relative to HCs, effect sizes of performance impairments were medium to large in FEP patients (composite score G = 1.21, subtest range = 0.52-0.88) and small to medium in CHR patients (composite score G = 0.59, subtest range = 0.18-0.49). Site effects were minimal, and test-retest reliability of the PsyCog composite was good (ICC = 0.82-0.89), though some practice effects and differences in data completion between groups were found. The present implementation of PsyCog shows it to be a useful tool for assessing cognitive function in people with psychosis. Computerised cognitive assessments have the potential to facilitate the evaluation of cognition in psychosis in both research and in clinical care, though caution should still be taken in terms of implementation and study design. </p

A leaky umbrella has little value:evidence clearly indicates the serotonin system is implicated in depression

A recent “umbrella” review examined various biomarkers relating to the serotonin system, and concluded there was no consistent evidence implicating serotonin in the pathophysiology of depression. We present reasons for why this conclusion is overstated, including methodological weaknesses in the review process, selective reporting of data, over-simplification, and errors in the interpretation of neuropsychopharmacological findings. We use the examples of tryptophan depletion and serotonergic molecular imaging, the two research areas most relevant to the investigation of serotonin, to illustrate this

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

The distribution and properties of cold dust in NGC 6334

NGC 6334 is a galactic star-forming region in Scorpius, heavily obscured by intervening dust. The region consists of several major sites of star formation known previously from far-infrared (IR) and radio-wavelength observations. We present images of NGC 6334 obtained at wavelengths of 850 and 450 μm with the Submillimeter Common-User Bolometric Array at the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope. These data highlight the distribution of dense cold dust, a particularly striking feature of which is a narrow ridge of emission passing between most of the star-forming centers. We use a clump-finding technique to quantify the distribution of dust emission throughout the region, and we obtain estimates of the sizes, masses, and temperatures of the clump ensemble under simple assumptions. Clump masses range from a minimum detectable of about 1 M ⊙, up to almost 3000 M ⊙. We find in particular that the ridge feature is characterized by a relatively narrow range of clump parameters as compared with the rest of NGC 6334, and we obtain a clump mass spectral index that lies between N(M) ∝ M–1.5 and M–1.0 for the high-mass clumps. The total mass of dust emitting at submillimeter wavelengths is about 16700 M ⊙ for an assumed temperature of 25 K; a significant fraction of this mass is contained within the ridge feature. These data are compared with recently published observations of NGC 6334 obtained at 1.2 mm wavelength using a direct-detection scanning technique, and with images obtained by the GLIMPSE-II and Mid-course Space Experiment missions at wavelengths from 3.3 to 21 μm in the near IR (NIR). The most massive compact submillimeter-wavelength regions in the north are invisible at these shorter wavelengths, and the NIR and mid-IR emission generally have little correspondence with the cool dust distribution. In this paper we use these data sets and supplementary millimeter-wavelength spectral line observations to investigate the star-forming sites in NGC 6334 and to speculate on the significance of the ridge of material seen in the submillimeter images