Amino Acids Rather than Glucose Account for the Majority of Cell Mass in Proliferating Mammalian Cells

Cells must duplicate their mass in order to proliferate. Glucose and glutamine are the major nutrients consumed by proliferating mammalian cells, but the extent to which these and other nutrients contribute to cell mass is unknown. We quantified the fraction of cell mass derived from different nutrients and found that the majority of carbon mass in cells is derived from other amino acids, which are consumed at much lower rates than glucose and glutamine. While glucose carbon has diverse fates, glutamine contributes most to protein, suggesting that glutamine's ability to replenish tricarboxylic acid cycle intermediates (anaplerosis) is primarily used for amino acid biosynthesis. These findings demonstrate that rates of nutrient consumption are indirectly associated with mass accumulation and suggest that high rates of glucose and glutamine consumption support rapid cell proliferation beyond providing carbon for biosynthesis.National Institutes of Health (U.S.) (Grant U54CA143874

Galaxies undergoing ram-pressure stripping: the influence of the bulge on morphology and star formation rate

We investigate the influence of stellar bulges on the star formation and morphology of disc galaxies that suffer from ram pressure. Several tree-SPH (smoothed particle hydrodynamics) simulations have been carried out to study the dependence of the star formation rate on the mass and size of a stellar bulge. In addition, different strengths of ram pressure and different alignments of the disc with respect to the intra-cluster medium (ICM) are applied. As claimed in previous works, when ram pressure is acting on a galaxy, the star formation rate (SFR) is enhanced and rises up to four times with increasing ICM density compared to galaxies that evolve in isolation. However, a bulge suppresses the SFR when the same ram pressure is applied. Consequently, fewer new stars are formed because the SFR can be lowered by up to 2 M_sun/yr. Furthermore, the denser the surrounding gas, the more inter-stellar medium (ISM) is stripped. While at an ICM density of 10^-28 g/cm^3 about 30% of the ISM is stripped, the galaxy is almost completely (more than 90%) stripped when an ICM density of 10^-27 g/cm^3 is applied. But again, a bulge prevents the stripping of the ISM and reduces the amount being stripped by up to 10%. Thereby, fewer stars are formed in the wake if the galaxy contains a bulge. The dependence of the SFR on the disc tilt angle is not very pronounced. Hereby a slight trend of decreasing star formation with increasing inclination angle can be determined. Furthermore, with increasing disc tilt angles, less gas is stripped and therefore fewer stars are formed in the wake. Reducing the disc gas mass fraction results in a lower SFR when the galaxies evolve in vacuum. On the other hand, the enhancement of the SFR in case of acting ram pressure is less pronounced with increasing gas mass fraction. Moreover, the fractional amount of stripped gas does not depend on the gas mass fraction.Comment: 11 pages, 18 figure

Talk Like an Electrician: Student Dialogue Mimicking Behavior in an Intelligent Tutoring System

Abstract. Students entering a new field must learn to speak the specialized language of that field. Previous research using automated measures of word overlap has found that students who modify their language to align more closely to a tutor's language show larger overall learning gains. We present an alternative approach that assesses syntactic as well as lexical alignment in a corpus of human-computer tutorial dialogue. We found distinctive patterns differentiating high and low achieving students. Our high achievers were most likely to mimic their own earlier statements and rarely made mistakes when mimicking the tutor. Low achievers were less likely to reuse their own successful sentence structures, and were more likely to make mistakes when trying to mimic the tutor. We argue that certain types of mimicking should be encouraged in tutorial dialogue systems, an important future research direction

The Evolution of a Female Genital Trait Widely Distributed in the Lepidoptera: Comparative Evidence for an Effect of Sexual Coevolution

Sexual coevolution is considered responsible for the evolution of many male genital traits, but its effect on female genital morphology is poorly understood. In many lepidopterans, females become temporarily unreceptive after mating and the length of this refractory period is inversely related to the amount of spermatophore remaining in their genital tracts. Sperm competition can select for males that delay female remating by transferring spermatophores with thick spermatophore envelopes that take more time to be broken. These envelopes could select for signa, sclerotized sharp structures located within the female genital tract, that are used for breaking spermatophores. Thus, this hypothesis predicts that thick spermatophore envelopes and signa evolve in polyandrous species, and that these adaptations are lost when monandry evolves subsequently. Here we test the expected associations between female mating pattern and presence/absence of signa, and review the scant information available on the thickness of spermatophore envelopes.We made a literature review and found information on female mating pattern (monandry/polyandry), presence/absence of signa and phylogenetic position for 37 taxa. We built a phylogenetic supertree for these taxa, mapped both traits on it, and tested for the predicted association by using Pagel's test for correlated evolution. We found that, as predicted by our hypothesis, monandry evolved eight times and in five of them signa were lost; preliminary evidence suggests that at least in two of the three exceptions males imposed monandry on females by means of specially thick spermatophore envelopes. Previously published data on six genera of Papilionidae is in agreement with the predicted associations between mating pattern and the characteristics of spermatophore envelopes and signa.Our results support the hypothesis that signa are a product of sexually antagonistic coevolution with spermatophore envelopes

A systematic review of the effect of retention methods in population-based cohort studies

Background: Longitudinal studies are of aetiological and public health relevance but can be undermined by attrition. The aim of this paper was to identify effective retention strategies to increase participation in population-based cohort studies. Methods: Systematic review of the literature to identify prospective population-based cohort studies with health outcomes in which retention strategies had been evaluated. Results: Twenty-eight studies published up to January 2011 were included. Eleven of which were randomized controlled trials of retention strategies (RCT). Fifty-seven percent of the studies were postal, 21% in-person, 14% telephone and 7% had mixed data collection methods. A total of 45 different retention strategies were used, categorised as 1) incentives, 2) reminder methods, repeat visits or repeat questionnaires, alternative modes of data collection or 3) other methods. Incentives were associated with an increase in retention rates, which improved with greater incentive value. Whether cash was the most effective incentive was not clear from studies that compared cash and gifts of similar value. The average increase in retention rate was 12% for reminder letters, 5% for reminder calls and 12% for repeat questionnaires. Ten studies used alternative data collection methods, mainly as a last resort. All postal studies offered telephone interviews to non-responders, which increased retention rates by 3%. Studies that used face-to-face interviews increased their retention rates by 24% by offering alternative locations and modes of data collection. Conclusions: Incentives boosted retention rates in prospective cohort studies. Other methods appeared to have a beneficial effect but there was a general lack of a systematic approach to their evaluation

Erratum to: Methods for evaluating medical tests and biomarkers

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1186/s41512-016-0001-y.]

The Physics of the B Factories

This work is on the Physics of the B Factories. Part A of this book contains a brief description of the SLAC and KEK B Factories as well as their detectors, BaBar and Belle, and data taking related issues. Part B discusses tools and methods used by the experiments in order to obtain results. The results themselves can be found in Part C