Reciprocal regulation of protein synthesis and carbon metabolism for thylakoid membrane biogenesis

Metabolic control of gene expression coordinates the levels of specific gene products to meet cellular demand for their activities. This control can be exerted by metabolites acting as regulatory signals and/or a class of metabolic enzymes with dual functions as regulators of gene expression. However, little is known about how metabolic signals affect the balance between enzymatic and regulatory roles of these dual functional proteins. We previously described the RNA binding activity of a 63 kDa chloroplast protein from Chlamydomonas reinhardtii, which has been implicated in expression of the psbA mRNA, encoding the D1 protein of photosystem II. Here, we identify this factor as dihydrolipoamide acetyltransferase (DLA2), a subunit of the chloroplast pyruvate dehydrogenase complex (cpPDC), which is known to provide acetyl-CoA for fatty acid synthesis. Analyses of RNAi lines revealed that DLA2 is involved in the synthesis of both D1 and acetyl-CoA. Gel filtration analyses demonstrated an RNP complex containing DLA2 and the chloroplast psbA mRNA specifically in cells metabolizing acetate. An intrinsic RNA binding activity of DLA2 was confirmed by in vitro RNA binding assays. Results of fluorescence microscopy and subcellular fractionation experiments support a role of DLA2 in acetate-dependent localization of the psbA mRNA to a translation zone within the chloroplast. Reciprocally, the activity of the cpPDC was specifically affected by binding of psbA mRNA. Beyond that, in silico analysis and in vitro RNA binding studies using recombinant proteins support the possibility that RNA binding is an ancient feature of dihydrolipoamide acetyltransferases. Our results suggest a regulatory function of DLA2 in response to growth on reduced carbon energy sources. This raises the intriguing possibility that this regulation functions to coordinate the synthesis of lipids and proteins for the biogenesis of photosynthetic membranes

Effect of an interprofessional care concept on the hospitalization of nursing home residents : study protocol for a cluster-randomized controlled trial

Background: The rising number of nursing home (NH) residents and their increasingly complex treatment needs pose a challenge to the German health care system. In Germany, there is no specialized geriatric medical care for NH residents. Nursing staff and general practitioners (GPs) in particular have to compensate for the additional demand, which is compounded by organizational and structural hurdles. As a result, avoidable emergency calls and hospital admissions occur. In the SaarPHIR project (Saarländische PflegeHeimversorgung Integriert Regelhaft), a complex intervention focusing on a medical care concept was developed in a participatory practice-based approach involving NH representatives and GPs. The complex intervention addresses the collaboration between nurses and GPs and aims to help restructure and optimize the existing daily care routine. It is expected to improve the medical care of geriatric patients in NHs and reduce stressful, costly hospital admissions. The intervention was pilot-tested during the first 12 months of the project. In the present study, its effectiveness, cost-effectiveness, and safety will be evaluated. Methods: The study is a cluster-randomized controlled trial, comparing an intervention group with a control group. The intervention includes a concept of interprofessional collaboration, in which GPs group into regional cooperating teams. Teams are encouraged to cooperate more closely with NH staff and to provide on-call schedules, pre-weekend visits, joint team meetings, joint documentation, and improved medication safety. At least 32 NHs in Saarland, Germany (with at least 50 residents each) will be included and monitored for 12 months. The primary endpoint is hospitalization. Secondary endpoints are quality of life, quality of care, and medication safety. The control group receives treatment as usual. Process evaluation and health economic evaluation accompany the study. The data set contains claims data from German statutory health insurance companies as well as primary data. Analysis will be conducted using a generalized linear mixed model. Conclusion: A reduction in hospital admissions of NH residents and relevant changes in secondary endpoints are expected. In turn, these will have a positive impact on the economic assessment

Coping strategies and perceiving stress among athletes during different waves of the COVID-19 Pandemic—Data from Poland, Romania, and Slovakia

Coronavirus disease (COVID-19), an infectious disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, has affected numerous aspects of human functioning. Social contacts, work, education, travel, and sports have drastically changed during the lockdown periods. The pandemic restrictions have severely limited professional athletes’ ability to train and participate in competitions. For many who rely on sports as their main source of income, this represents a source of intense stress. To assess the dynamics of perceived stress as well as coping strategies during different waves of the COVID-19 pandemic, we carried out a longitudinal study using the Perception of Stress Questionnaire and the Brief COPE on a sample of 2020 professional athletes in Poland, Romania, and Slovakia. The results revealed that in all three countries, the highest intrapsychic stress levels were reported during the fourth wave (all, p < 0.01) and the highest external stress levels were reported before the pandemic (p < 0.05). To analyze the data, analyses of variance were carried out using Tukey’s post hoc test and η2 for effect size. Further, emotional tension was the highest among Polish and Slovak athletes in the fourth wave, while the highest among Romanian athletes was in the pre-pandemic period. The coping strategies used by the athletes in the fourth wave were more dysfunctional than during the first wave (independent t test and Cohen’s d were used). The dynamics of the coping strategies—emotion focused and problem focused—were also discussed among Polish, Romanian, and Slovak athletes. Coaches and sports psychologists can modify the athletes’ perceived stress while simultaneously promoting effective coping strategies.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Evaluation of Work Mode and Its Importance for Home–Work and Work–Home Relationships: The Role of Resilience, Coping with Stress, and Passion for Work

Copyright: © 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).The COVID-19 pandemic necessitated and facilitated the introduction of telework in organizations. This has also impacted the workers’ relationship between work and private life. The aim of the current study was to examine the links between resilience and mode of work (stationary vs. remote) and the work–home and home–work relationships, and whether they are mediated by passion for work and strategies of coping with stress. The study was carried out on a sample of 1251 participants from Great Britain, India, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, Poland, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, and Vietnam. The following measures were used: The Survey Work–Home Interaction, The Brief Resilience Coping Scale, The Passion Scale, and the Brief COPE. Results showed that the more stationary the mode of work, the lower the intensity of the negative influence of personal life on work. Resilience was revealed to have a positive effect on worker functioning. The study also showed a relationship between education and gender and passion for work. Finally, the importance of furthering the knowledge on the home–work and work–home relationships among teleworkers is discussed.publishedVersio

The large-scale evolution of neodymium isotopic composition in the global modern and Holocene ocean revealed from seawater and archive data

Neodymium isotopic compositions (143Nd/144Nd or εNd) have been used as a tracer of water masses and lithogenic inputs to the ocean. To further evaluate the faithfulness of this tracer, we have updated a global seawater εNd database and combined it with hydrography parameters (temperature, salinity, nutrients and oxygen concentrations), carbon isotopic ratio and radiocarbon of dissolved inorganic carbon. Archive εNd data are also compiled for leachates, foraminiferal tests, deep-sea corals and fish teeth/debris from the Holocene period (< 10,000 years). At water depths ≥ 1500 m, property-property plots show clear correlations between seawater εNd and the other variables, suggesting that large-scale water mass mixing is a primary control of deepwater εNd distribution. At ≥ 200 m, basin-scale seawater T-S-εNd diagrams demonstrate the isotopic evolution of different water masses. Seawater and archive εNd values are compared using property-property plots and T-S-εNd diagrams. Archive values generally agree with corresponding seawater values although they tend to be at the upper limit in the Pacific. Both positive and negative offsets exist in the northern North Atlantic. Applying multiple regression analysis to deep (≥ 1500 m) seawater data, we established empirical equations that predict the main, large-scale, deepwater εNd trends from hydrography parameters. Large offsets from the predicted values are interpreted as a sign of significant local/regional influence. Dominant continental influence on seawater and archive εNd is observed mainly within 1000 km from the continents. Generally, seawater and archive εNd values form gradual latitudinal trend in the Atlantic and Pacific at depths ≥ 600 m, consistent with the idea that Nd isotopes help distinguish between northern/southern sourced water contributions at intermediate and deep water depths

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

Physical Forces and Collective Cell Migration in Development and Disease

Collective cell migration is a key driver of tissue remodeling during development, wound healing, and cancer invasion. However, the mechanisms cells employ to move cohesively and the influence of the physical microenvironment on collective behavior have not been fully elucidated. Using two different engineered three-dimensional (3D) culture models, we show that cells require mechanical sensing to migrate collectively and that extrinsic physical forces in their microenvironment can influence the migratory phenotype. We conclude that physical forces and biomechanics play a vital role in collective migration, both in development and disease contexts. To study the physical mechanisms of collective migration in mammary gland branching morphogenesis, we used 3D engineered tissues embedded in collagen, a fibrous extracellular matrix (ECM) protein found in the natural cellular microenvironment. We show directly and quantitatively that collective migration occurs via a dynamic pulling mechanism, with pericellular matrix alignment preceding translocation. Tensile forces increase at the invasive front of cohorts, serving a physical role and a regulatory one by conditioning the cells and matrix for further extension. These forces elicit mechanosensitive signaling within the leading edge and align the ECM, creating microtracks critical for migration. Cell movements are highly correlated and in phase with ECM deformations. Migrating cohorts use spatially localized, long-range forces and consequent matrix alignment to navigate the ECM. We also determined how an extrinsic physical force in the microenvironment of solid tumors, elevated interstitial fluid pressure (IFP), influences collective cancer invasion. Elevated IFP is a characteristic feature of solid tumors; IFP rises steeply beyond the tumor periphery and plateaus at values as high as 50 mm Hg above a normal value of 0 mm Hg, resulting in outward fluid flow from the tumor core towards the periphery. We used a 3D engineered model of a human breast tumor to probe the effects of IFP on collective invasion. We found that IFP influences the motility and invasive behavior of cancer cells by regulating the expression of genes associated with migratory behavior (epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT) genes). The expression levels of these markers are both necessary and sufficient to drive invasive behavior in response to IFP

Interstitial fluid pressure regulates collective invasion in engineered human breast tumors via Snail, vimentin, and E-cadherin

Many solid tumors exhibit elevated interstitial fluid pressure (IFP). This elevated pressure within the core of the tumor results in outward flow of interstitial fluid to the tumor periphery. We previously found that the directionality of IFP gradients modulates collective invasion from the surface of patterned three-dimensional (3D) aggregates of MDA-MB-231 human breast cancer cells. Here, we used this 3D engineered tumor model to investigate the molecular mechanisms underlying IFP-induced changes in invasive phenotype. We found that IFP alters the expression of genes associated with epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT). Specifically, the levels of Snail, vimentin, and E-cadherin were increased under pressure conditions that promoted collective invasion. These changes in gene expression were sufficient to direct collective invasion in response to IFP. Furthermore, we found that IFP modulates the motility and persistence of individual cells within the aggregates, which are also influenced by the expression levels of EMT markers. Together, these data provide insight into the molecular mechanisms that guide collective invasion from primary tumors in response to IFP

Resilience and subjectively experienced stress among paramedics prior to and during the COVID-19 pandemic

Introduction: Paramedics play a vital role in the healthcare system by providing professional support in situations of direct threat to patient health and life. They experience numerous difficulties during their work, which result in occupational stress. During the COVID-19 pandemic, their work has become even more demanding. The aim of the current study was to examine the role of resilience in the subjective experience of stress among paramedics during the COVID-19 pandemic. Materials and methods: The study was carried out in two phases, in October-November 2019 (N = 75) and in May-June 2020 (N = 84), using the Sense of Stress Questionnaire (Skala Poczucia Stresu) and the Resilience Scale (Skala Pomiaru Prężności). Results: Paramedics exhibited higher intrapsychic stress before the COVID-19 pandemic. Tolerance of failure and treating life as a challenge were higher during the pandemic, in contrast to optimism and the ability to mobilize in difficult situations. Paramedics who were in contact with patients with COVID-19 experienced higher stress. Perseverance and determination, openness to new experiences and sense of humor, as well as competences and tolerance of negative emotions were revealed to play a key part in mitigating subjectively experienced stress. Conclusion: Paramedics’ subjectively experienced stress was lower during the COVID-19 pandemic. Paramedics who were in direct contact with patients with COVID-19 experienced higher stress. They had sufficient psychological resources, in the form of resilience (perseverance and determination, openness to new experiences, sense of humor, and competences and tolerance of negative emotions), which allowed them to cope with the situation of the COVID-19 pandemic