1,104 research outputs found
Climate of the nation 2014 - Australian attitudes on climate change: are Australians climate dinosaurs?
Synopsis: Are Australians climate dinosaurs? Climate of the Nation 2014, benchmarking Australian attitudes to climate change, finds that political leaders risk being stuck in the past as public attitudes on climate change and its solutions are on the rebound.
In mid-2014, more Australians think that climate change is occurring and are concerned about impacts, present and future. There is a rebound in desire to see the nation lead on finding solutions and a strong expectation of government to address the climate challenge.
Opposition to carbon pricing has continued to decline and there is a decline in the minority supporting repeal. For the first time more support carbon pricing than oppose it, even though there is lingering confusion around it
Service Work Isn\u27t Just for Undergrads
Connor Romenesko \u2715 and his father Tim Romenesko tell SNC Parents about the JVC (Jesuit Volunteer Corps) in Spring 2016
Bubble Cloud Characteristics and Ablation Efficiency in Dual-Frequency Intrinsic Threshold Histotripsy
Histotripsy is a non-thermal focused ultrasound ablation method that destroys
tissue through the generation and activity of acoustic cavitation. Intrinsic
threshold histotripsy generates bubble clouds when the dominant negative
pressure phase of a single-cycle pulse exceeds an intrinsic threshold of ~25-30
MPa. The ablation efficiency is dependent upon the size and density of bubbles
within the bubble cloud. This work investigates the effects of dual-frequency
pulsing schemes on the bubble cloud behavior and ablation efficiency in
intrinsic threshold histotripsy. A modular histotripsy transducer applied
dual-frequency histotripsy pulses to tissue phantoms with a 1:1 pressure ratio
from 500 kHz and 3 MHz frequency elements and varying the 3 MHz pulse arrival
relative to the arrival of the 500 kHz pulse (-100 ns, 0 ns, and +100 ns).
High-speed optical imaging captured cavitation effects to characterize bubble
cloud and individual bubble dynamics. Lesion formation and ablation efficiency
were also investigated in red blood cell (RBC) phantoms. Results showed that
the single bubble and bubble cloud size for dual-frequency cases were
intermediate to published results for the component single frequencies of 500
kHz and 3 MHz. Bubble cloud size and dynamics were also shown to be altered by
the arrival time of the 3 MHz pulse relative to the 500 kHz pulse, with more
uniform cloud expansion and collapse observed for early (-100 ns) arrival.
Finally, RBC phantom experiments showed that dual-frequency exposures were
capable of generating precise lesions with smaller areas and higher ablation
efficiencies than previously published results for 500 kHz or 3 MHz. Overall,
results demonstrate dual-frequency histotripsy's ability to modulate bubble
cloud size and dynamics can be leveraged to produce precise lesions at higher
ablation efficiencies than previously observed for single-frequency pulsing.Comment: 22 pages, 10 figures, 2 table
Evaluation of methods for detecting human reads in microbial sequencing datasets
Sequencing data from host-associated microbes can often be contaminated by the body of the investigator or research subject. Human DNA is typically removed from microbial reads either by subtractive alignment (dropping all reads that map to the human genome) or by using a read classification tool to predict those of human origin, and then discarding them. To inform best practice guidelines, we benchmarked eight alignment-based and two classification-based methods of human read detection using simulated data from 10 clinically prevalent bacteria and three viruses, into which contaminating human reads had been added. While the majority of methods successfully detected >99ā% of the human reads, they were distinguishable by variance. The most precise methods, with negligible variance, were Bowtie2 and SNAP, both of which misidentified few, if any, bacterial reads (and no viral reads) as human. While correctly detecting a similar number of human reads, methods based on taxonomic classification, such as Kraken2 and Centrifuge, could misclassify bacterial reads as human, although the extent of this was species-specific. Among the most sensitive methods of human read detection was BWA, although this also made the greatest number of false positive classifications. Across all methods, the set of human reads not identified as such, although often representing 300ābp) bacterial reads, the highest performing approaches were classification-based, using Kraken2 or Centrifuge. For shorter (c. 150ābp) bacterial reads, combining multiple methods of human read detection maximized the recovery of human reads from contaminated short read datasets without being compromised by false positives. A particularly high-performance approach with shorter bacterial reads was a two-stage classification using Bowtie2 followed by SNAP. Using this approach, we re-examined 11ā577 publicly archived bacterial read sets for hitherto undetected human contamination. We were able to extract a sufficient number of reads to call known human SNPs, including those with clinical significance, in 6ā% of the samples. These results show that phenotypically distinct human sequence is detectable in publicly archived microbial read datasets
Interplay of cis and trans mechanisms driving transcription factor binding and gene expression evolution
Noncoding regulatory variants play a central role in the genetics of human diseases and in evolution. Here we measure allele-specific transcription factor binding occupancy of three liver-specific transcription factors between crosses of two inbred mouse strains to elucidate the regulatory mechanisms underlying transcription factor binding variations in mammals. Our results highlight the pre-eminence of cis-acting variants on transcription factor occupancy divergence. Transcription factor binding differences linked to cis-acting variants generally exhibit additive inheritance, while those linked to trans-acting variants are most often dominantly inherited. Cis-acting variants lead to local coordination of transcription factor occupancies that decay with distance; distal coordination is also observed and may be modulated by long-range chromatin contacts. Our results reveal the regulatory mechanisms that interplay to drive transcription factor occupancy, chromatin state, and gene expression in complex mammalian cell states.We thank the CRUKāCI Genomics, BRU, and Bioinformatics Cores for technical assistance and the EMBL-EBI systems team for management of computational resources. This research was supported by the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (E.S.W., D.T., J.C.M., P.F.), Cancer Research UK (B.M.S., T.F.R., F.C., C.F., A.R., D.T.O.), the BOLD ITN (B.M.S.), Darwin Fellowship (A.K.), the Wellcome Trust (WT202878/B/16/Z, WT108749/Z/15/Z) (P.F.), (WT202878/A/16/Z) (D.T.O), (WT095606) (A.C.F.-S) and (WT098051) (P.F., D.T.O.), EMBO Long-term (ALTF1518-2012) and Advanced Fellowships (aALTF1672-2014) (E.S.W.), and by the European Research Council (award 615584) and EMBO Young Investigator Programme (D.T.O.)
A Systematic Review of Patientsā Values, Preferences, and Expectations for the Treatment of Metastatic Prostate Cancer
Peer reviewedPublisher PD
Activation of Liver X Receptors and Peroxisome Proliferator-Activated Receptors by Lipid Extracts of Brown Seaweeds:A Potential Application in Alzheimerās Disease?
The nuclear liver X receptors (LXRĪ±/Ī²) and peroxisome proliferator-activated receptors (PPARĪ±/Ī³) are involved in the regulation of multiple biological processes, including lipid metabolism and inflammation. The activation of these receptors has been found to have neuroprotective effects, making them interesting therapeutic targets for neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer's Disease (AD). The Asian brown seaweed Sargassum fusiforme contains both LXR-activating (oxy)phytosterols and PPAR-activating fatty acids. We have previously shown that dietary supplementation with lipid extracts of Sargassum fusiforme prevents disease progression in a mouse model of AD, without inducing adverse effects associated with synthetic pan-LXR agonists. We now determined the LXRĪ±/Ī²- and PPARĪ±/Ī³-activating capacity of lipid extracts of six European brown seaweed species ( Alaria esculenta, Ascophyllum nodosum, Fucus vesiculosus, Himanthalia elongata, Saccharina latissima, and Sargassum muticum) and the Asian seaweed Sargassum fusiforme using a dual luciferase reporter assay. We analyzed the sterol and fatty acid profiles of the extracts by GC-MS and UPLC MS/MS, respectively, and determined their effects on the expression of LXR and PPAR target genes in several cell lines using quantitative PCR. All extracts were found to activate LXRs, with the Himanthalia elongata extract showing the most pronounced efficacy, comparable to Sargassum fusiforme, for LXR activation and transcriptional regulation of LXR-target genes. Extracts of Alaria esculenta, Fucus vesiculosus, and Saccharina latissima showed the highest capacity to activate PPARĪ±, while extracts of Alaria esculenta, Ascophyllum nodosum, Fucus vesiculosus, and Sargassum muticum showed the highest capacity to activate PPARĪ³, comparable to Sargassum fusiforme extract. In CCF-STTG1 astrocytoma cells, all extracts induced expression of cholesterol efflux genes ( ABCG1, ABCA1, and APOE) and suppressed expression of cholesterol and fatty acid synthesis genes ( DHCR7, DHCR24, HMGCR and SREBF2, and SREBF1, ACACA, SCD1 and FASN, respectively). Our data show that lipophilic fractions of European brown seaweeds activate LXRs and PPARs and thereby modulate lipid metabolism. These results support the potential of brown seaweeds in the prevention and/or treatment of neurodegenerative diseases and possibly cardiometabolic and inflammatory diseases via concurrent activation of LXRs and PPARs. </p
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