To establish whether there are differences in performance between 757 (Lloyd Maunders) birds and the Maurice Millard 257 those currently used within the Sheepdrove system

Sheepdrove Organic Farm wanted to know whether the performance of the Lloyd Maunders (757) birds would differ from that of their current breed the Maurice Millard (257) and whether chicks sourced from an organic parent flock would perform differently to those from a conventional parent flock. An experiment was undertaken using two different sources of day old chicks, 1000 day old Maurice Millard (257) and 1000 day old Lloyd Maunders (757). These chicks were then put through the Sheepdrove (SOF) organic production system and 30 random birds were weighed every week until depletion, at 11 weeks

Why aren’t health professionals telling us we’re fat? The role of health services in the prevention of overweight and obesity

A major risk factor for many chronic diseases is being obese. In Australia, rates are increasing across all age and socioeconomic groups. The causes of obesity are a complex combination of biological, environmental and individual factors. Consequently, responses to obesity need to be multifactorial and tailored to local circumstances. The health system has a key role to play in obesity prevention. This is not a simple matter of injecting more resources, writing a new policy or introducing changes to the organisational structure. Changing health service practice needs to also take into account the impact of each settings professional, cultural and organisational factors and the way these interact and feedback to each other

Toward a user-oriented analytical approach to learning design

The London Pedagogy Planner (LPP) is a prototype for a collaborative online planning and design tool that supports lecturers in developing, analysing and sharing learning designs. The tool is based on a developing model of the components involved in learning design, and the critical relationships between them. As a decision tool, it makes the pedagogical design explicit as an output from the process, capturing it for testing, redesign, reuse and adaptation by the originator, or by others. The aim is to test the extent to which we can engage lecturers in reflecting on learning design, and make them part of the educational community that discovers how best to use Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL). This paper describes the development of LPP, presents pedagogical benefits of visual representations of learning designs, and proposes an analytical approach to learning design based on these visual representations. The analytical approach is illustrated based on an initial evaluation with the lecturers

Towards a user oriented analytical approach to learning design

The London Pedagogy Planner (LPP) is a prototype for a collaborative online planning and design tool that supports lecturers in developing, analysing and sharing learning designs. The tool is based on a developing model of the components involved in learning design and the critical relationships between them. As a decision tool it makes the pedagogical design explicit as an output from the process, capturing it for testing, redesign, reuse and adaptation by the originator, or by others. The aim is to test the extent to which we can engage lecturers in reflecting on learning design, and make them part of the educational community that discovers how best to use technology‐enhanced learning. This paper describes the development of LPP, presents pedagogical benefits of visual representations of learning designs and proposes an analytical approach to learning design based on these visual representations. The analytical approach is illustrated based on an initial evaluation with a small group of lecturers from two partner institutions

Obesity prevention and the role of hospital and community-based health services: A scoping review

Background: Control of obesity is an important priority to reduce the burden of chronic disease. Clinical guidelines focus on the role of primary healthcare in obesity prevention. The purpose of this scoping review is to examine what the published literature indicates about the role of hospital and community based health services in adult obesity prevention in order to map the evidence and identify gaps in existing research. Methods: Databases were searched for articles published in English between 2006 and 2016 and screened against inclusion and exclusion criteria. Further papers were highlighted through a manual search of the reference lists. Included papers evaluated interventions aimed at preventing overweight and obesity in adults that were implemented within and/or by hospital and community health services; were an empirical description of obesity prevention within a health setting or reported health staff perceptions of obesity and obesity prevention. Results: The evidence supports screening for obesity of all healthcare patients, combined with referral to appropriate intervention services but indicates that health professionals do not typically adopt this practice. As well as practical issues such as time and resourcing, implementation is impacted by health professionals’ views about the causes of obesity and doubts about the benefits of the health sector intervening once someone is already obese. As well as lacking confidence or knowledge about how to integrate prevention into clinical care, health professional judgements about who might benefit from prevention and negative views about effectiveness of prevention hinder the implementation of practice guidelines. This is compounded by an often prevailing view that preventing obesity is a matter of personal responsibility and choice. Conclusions: This review highlights that whilst a population health approach is important to address the complexity of obesity, it is important that the remit of health services is extended beyond medical treatment to incorporate obesity prevention through screening and referral. Further research into the role of health services in obesity prevention should take a systems approach to examine how health service structures, policy and practice interrelationships, and service delivery boundaries, processes and perspectives impact on changing models of care

Phylogenetic relationships of the Wolbachia of nematodes and arthropods

Wolbachia are well known as bacterial symbionts of arthropods, where they are reproductive parasites, but have also been described from nematode hosts, where the symbiotic interaction has features of mutualism. The majority of arthropod Wolbachia belong to clades A and B, while nematode Wolbachia mostly belong to clades C and D, but these relationships have been based on analysis of a small number of genes. To investigate the evolution and relationships of Wolbachia symbionts we have sequenced over 70 kb of the genome of wOvo, a Wolbachia from the human-parasitic nematode Onchocerca volvulus, and compared the genes identified to orthologues in other sequenced Wolbachia genomes. In comparisons of conserved local synteny, we find that wBm, from the nematode Brugia malayi, and wMel, from Drosophila melanogaster, are more similar to each other than either is to wOvo. Phylogenetic analysis of the protein-coding and ribosomal RNA genes on the sequenced fragments supports reciprocal monophyly of nematode and arthropod Wolbachia. The nematode Wolbachia did not arise from within the A clade of arthropod Wolbachia, and the root of the Wolbachia clade lies between the nematode and arthropod symbionts. Using the wOvo sequence, we identified a lateral transfer event whereby segments of the Wolbachia genome were inserted into the Onchocerca nuclear genome. This event predated the separation of the human parasite O. volvulus from its cattle-parasitic sister species, O. ochengi. The long association between filarial nematodes and Wolbachia symbionts may permit more frequent genetic exchange between their genomes

Characterisation of Chinese Hamster Ovary (CHO) cells at the single cell level

Biopharmaceuticals are a class of biological macromolecules that include antibodies and antibody derivatives, generally produced from cultured mammalian cells line via secretion directly into the media. Manufacturing requires the generation of Chinese hamster ovary (CHO) clonal cell lines capable of expressing the biopharmaceutical product at commercially relevant quantities with desirable product quality. The isolation of cell clones based on random single cell deposition via fluorescence activated cell sorting (FACS) provides a heterogeneous panel of expressers. We hypothesize that the application of FACS to provide an additional sorting step based on cell characteristics that correlate with productivity, product quality or cell growth attributes could lead to the isolation of higher producing cell lines with enhanced product quality attributes. A panel of 20 cell lines expressing a model recombinant monoclonal antibody were characterised in terms of growth, productivity, and intracellular recombinant protein and mRNA amounts. Assays were also developed to investigate cell attributes and organelle content using the ImageStream instrument, an imaging flow cytometer, which enables the investigation of cellular characteristics that correlate with cell productivity at the single cell level. Characterisation revealed the cell lines exhibited a range of values for productivity, growth, and intracellular (IC) antibody mRNA and protein expression, ideal for further ImageStream characterisation. Western blot and qRT-PCR analysis demonstrated that final titre correlated with both IC heavy chain (HC) protein and mRNA amounts (Pearson Correlation Coefficient (R) = 0.70 and R = 0.80, respectively). To assess productivity at the single cell level, assays multiplexing IC HC protein and mRNA with organelles, such as mitochondria, endoplasmic reticulum and Golgi apparatus, were therefore developed. ImageStream quantification of HC mRNA and protein amounts also showed correlations between titre and IC HC protein and mRNA (R = 0.84 and R = 0.79, respectively), confirming results from western blots and qRT-PCR analysis. A cell attribute that correlates with specific productivity has been found, and current work is investigating whether this cell attribute could be used during cell sorting for the isolation of more productive clones. Future experiments will also look at cell attributes that could lead to improved product quality. The developed assays are expected to allow a greater understanding of the intracellular mechanisms underlying productivity and product quality in CHO cells. Moreover, outcomes from this study have the potential to not only integrate into the cell line development clonal selection process, shortening timelines and reducing cost and resource requirements, but also inform host cell engineering projects with the potential for the development of an improved CHO host