Unheard voices: practice based arts research and the PID landscape

A breakout session at Repository Fringe in Edinburgh in 2018 began the discussion on capturing practice-based arts research in repositories in the UK and discussed the fact that many repository systems don’t adequately reflect what this research looks like. At a similar time the UK focussed Practice Research Advisory Group – a researcher led community – was having discussions about how to ensure this research is discoverable and preserved for the long term. Awareness and experiences captured by these communities led Jisc to hold an event in March 2019 on Capturing Practice Research: improving visibility and searchability. What had been a UK focussed discussion was then taken to an international audience with a panel discussion session at Open Repositories in 2019 in Hamburg. These discussions have identified that the persistent identifier landscape isn’t really an even playing field for this research which doesn’t tend to look like other, more traditional forms of research. This session aimed to bring together interested people from all over the world to talk about PIDs in practice-based arts research. It started with a brief case study on the experience at the University of Westminster, based in London in the UK, who engaged with their practice-based arts research community (and supplier Haplo) to develop their new open source repository software to identify what this research looks like and how the repository could better reflect it. We then highlighted how various Persistent Identifiers don’t quite fit the practice-research landscape – or where they could do, how and where practitioners require more specific guidance that addresses practice research. Without this, the many benefits of the PID graph/landscape are not available to the practice-based research community. The specific examples we covered included: ORCID iDs, DOIs, RAID and the CRediT taxonomy

Practice made Practical. Reducing the OTHER of non-text

The academy has become increasingly expert at the creation and description of STEM textual articles and data along with building platforms for their discovery, access and inquiry. However, for disciplines where outputs are not typically textual in nature, such as architecture, practice research, etc. there are still many challenges in the way these outputs and related resources are described. We propose that working with existing expert communities, such as repositories that have built taxonomies to address these outputs, we can build the vocabularies of the wider global infrastructure - the persistent identifiers and metadata that underpin scholarly information networks - so that the work types are richer, more descriptive, allowing better discoverability, and bringing a future where all aspects of research are equally valued

CCR5 inhibition in critical COVID-19 patients decreases inflammatory cytokines, increases CD8 T-cells, and decreases SARS-CoV2 RNA in plasma by day 14

OBJECTIVE: Infection with severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) is now a global pandemic. Emerging results indicate a dysregulated immune response. Given the role of CCR5 in immune cell migration and inflammation, we investigated the impact of CCR5 blockade via the CCR5-specific antibody leronlimab on clinical, immunological, and virological parameters in severe COVID-19 patients. METHODS: In March 2020, 10 terminally ill, critical COVID-19 patients received two doses of leronlimab via individual emergency use indication. We analyzed changes in clinical presentation, immune cell populations, inflammation, as well as SARS-CoV-2 plasma viremia before and 14 days after treatment. RESULTS: Over the 14-day study period, six patients survived, two were extubated, and one discharged. We observed complete CCR5 receptor occupancy in all donors by day 7. Compared with the baseline, we observed a concomitant statistically significant reduction in plasma IL-6, restoration of the CD4/CD8 ratio, and resolution of SARS-CoV2 plasma viremia (pVL). Furthermore, the increase in the CD8 percentage was inversely correlated with the reduction in pVL (r = -0.77, p = 0.0013). CONCLUSIONS: Our study design precludes clinical efficacy inferences but the results implicate CCR5 as a therapeutic target for COVID-19 and they form the basis for ongoing randomized clinical trials

Harnessing the potential of multiomics studies for precision medicine in infectious disease

The field of infectious diseases currently takes a reactive approach and treats infections as they present in patients. Although certain populations are known to be at greater risk of developing infection (eg, immunocompromised), we lack a systems approach to define the true risk of future infection for a patient. Guided by impressive gains in omics technologies, future strategies to infectious diseases should take a precision approach to infection through identification of patients at intermediate and high-risk of infection and deploy targeted preventative measures (ie, prophylaxis). The advances of high-throughput immune profiling by multiomics approaches (ie, transcriptomics, epigenomics, metabolomics, proteomics) hold the promise to identify patients at increased risk of infection and enable risk-stratifying approaches to be applied in the clinic. Integration of patient-specific data using machine learning improves the effectiveness of prediction, providing the necessary technologies needed to propel the field of infectious diseases medicine into the era of personalized medicine

Birth Cohort Differences in Features of Antisocial Alcoholism among Men and Women

Background: This study examines the relations between birth cohort, gender, and family history of alcohol problems on alcohol dependence, and on the endorsement of alcohol abuse/dependence symptoms related to antisocial behavior. Methods: Men (n = 1365) and women (n = 625) were recruited from the community, hospitals, and other treatment sites and were given a structured diagnostic interview. Data were analyzed by using logistic regression. Results: Age of first regular alcohol use was lower in more recent birth cohorts for both men and women, with those born in the most recent cohort reporting earliest regular use. The decline across cohort was more dramatic in women than in men. For those participants with a diagnosis of alcohol dependence, being born in a more recent cohort was associated with increased risk of dependence onset before age 25. Among those participants with onset of alcohol dependence before age 25 (nmen = 400; nwomen = 51), being born in a more recent cohort was associated with increased risk of fights while drinking, police involvement, and drunk driving trouble as well as with increased risk for a diagnosis of abuse or dependence on another drug. Conclusions: These results suggest that the prevalence of antisocial alcoholism may be increasing for both men and women. These data exemplify how societal change may affect expression of underlying vulnerability for traits thought to be genetically influenced

Visualisation of plastid degradation in sperm cells of wheat pollen

Like most angiosperms, wheat (Triticum aestivum) shows maternal inheritance of plastids. It is thought that this takes place by cytoplasmic stripping at fertilisation rather than the absence of plastids in sperm cells. To determine the fate of plastids during sperm cell development, plastid-targeted green fluorescent protein was used to visualise these organelles in nuclear transgenic wheat lines. Fewer than thirty small 1–2-μm plastids were visible in early uninucleate pollen cells. These dramatically increased to several hundred larger (4 μm) plastids during pollen maturation and went through distinct morphological changes. Only small plastids were visible in generative cells (n = 25) and young sperm cells (n = 9). In mature sperm cells, these green fluorescent protein (GFP)-tagged plastids were absent. This is consistent with maternal inheritance of plastids resulting from their degradation in mature sperm cells in wheat