Malnutrition in community-dwelling older people: lessons learnt using a new procedure

This article reports the implementation of a new procedure for screening and treatment of malnutrition in a community NHS trust in England. The barriers and facilitators to implementation were assessed with staff from Integrated Community and Older People's Mental Health teams. Data from interviews and surveys were collected at baseline, 2 months after initial training and 16 months after initial training as well as following deployment of a nutrition lead to embed new developments for nutritional care. The adoption of the procedure made screening and treatment of malnutrition simpler and more likely to be actioned. The benefit of a nutrition lead and local nutrition champions to support and empower staff (avoiding reliance on training alone) was shown to drive change for nutritional care across the community. Prioritisation and commitment of leadership at the organisational level are needed to embed and sustain malnutrition screening and treatment in routine practice

Poor competitiveness of Bradyrhizobium in pigeon pea root colonisation in Indian soils

Background Pigeon pea, a legume crop native to India, is the primary source of protein for more than a billion people in developing countries. The plant can form symbioses with N2-fixing bacteria, however reports of poor crop nodulation in agricultural soils abound. We report here study of the microbiota associated with pigeon pea, with a special focus on the symbiont population in different soils and vegetative and non-vegetative plant growth. Results Location with respect to the plant roots was determined to be the main factor controlling the microbiota followed by developmental stage and soil type. Plant genotype plays only a minor role. Pigeon pea roots have a reduced microbial diversity compared to the surrounding soil and select for Proteobacteria and especially for Rhizobium spp. during vegetative growth. While Bradyrhizobium, a native symbiont of pigeon pea, can be found associating with roots, its presence is dependent on plant variety and soil conditions. A combination of metagenomic survey, strain isolation and co-inoculation with nodule forming Bradyrhizobium spp. and non-N2 fixing Rhizobium spp. demonstrated that the latter is a much more successful coloniser of pigeon pea roots. Conclusions Poor nodulation of pigeon pea in Indian soils may be caused by a poor Bradyrhizobium competitiveness against non-nodulating root colonisers such as Rhizobium. Hence, inoculant strain selection of symbionts for pigeon pea should not only be based on their nitrogen fixation potential but more importantly on their competitiveness in agricultural soils

‘Engage the World’: examining conflicts of engagement in public museums

Public engagement has become a central theme in the mission statements of many cultural institutions, and in scholarly research into museums and heritage. Engagement has emerged as the go-to-it-word for generating, improving or repairing relations between museums and society at large. But engagement is frequently an unexamined term that might embed assumptions and ignore power relationships. This article describes and examines the implications of conflicting and misleading uses of ‘engagement’ in relation to institutional dealings with contested questions about culture and heritage. It considers the development of an exhibition on the Dead Sea Scrolls by the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto in 2009 within the new institutional goal to ‘Engage the World’. The chapter analyses the motivations, processes and decisions deployed by management and staff to ‘Engage the World’, and the degree to which the museum was able to re-think its strategies of public engagement, especially in relation to subjects,issues and publics that were more controversial in nature

Novel visual analytics approach for chromosome territory analysis

This document presents a new and improved, more intuitive version of a novel method for visually representing the location of objects relative to each other in 3D. The motivation and inspiration for developing this new method came from the necessity for objective chromosome territory (CT) adjacency analysis. The earlier version, Distance Profile Chart (DPC), used octants for 3D orientation. This approach did not provide the best 3D space coverage since space was divided into just eight cones and was not intuitive with regard to orientation in 3D. However, the version presented in this article, called DPC12, allows users to achieve better space coverage during conification since space is now divided into twelve cones. DPC12 is faster than DPC and allows for a more precise determination of the location of objects in 3D. In this article a short introduction about the conification idea is presented. Then we explain how DPC12 is designed and created. After that, we show DPC12 on an instructional dataset to make it easier to understand and demonstrate how they appear and how to read them. Finally, using DPC12 we present an example of an adjacency analysis (AA) using the model of Chromosome Territories (CTs) distribution in the rice nucleus

Evaluation of T1/T2 ratios in a pilot study as a potential biomarker of biopsy: proven benign and malignant breast lesions in correlation with histopathological disease stage

Aim: Early breast cancer detection is important for intervention and prognosis. Advances in treatment and outcome require diagnostic tools with highly positive predictive value. Purpose: To study the potential role of quantitative MRI (qMRI) using T1/T2 ratios to differentiate benign from malignant breast lesions. Methods: A cross-sectional study of 69 women with 69 known or suspicious breast lesions were scanned with mixed-turbo spin echo pulse sequence. Patients were grouped according to histopathological assessment of disease stage: untreated malignant tumor, treated malignancy and benign disease. Results & Discussion: Elevated T1/T2 means were observed for biopsy-proven malignant lesions and for malignant lesions treated prior to qMRI with chemotherapy and/or radiation, as compared with benign lesions. The qMRI-obtained T1/T2 ratios correlated with histopathology. Analysis revealed correlation between elevated T1/T2 ratio and disease stage. This could provide valuable complementary information on tissue properties as an additional diagnostic tool