Serving children: the impact of poverty on children's experiences of services

This study arose from the identification of a gap in knowledge and corresponding need for the development of a better contemporary understanding of children's experiences of poverty. Focusing on children aged 10 - 14 years, the study aimed to provide a perspective on the lives of children and young people affected by poverty in Scotland through comparing the experiences of children living in poverty with those more economically advantaged

Comparison of Colorimetric Assays to Use for the Investigation of the Mitogenic Activity of vFGF in Cell Cultures

Fibroblast growth factors (FGFs) are part of a large family of polypeptide growth factors that play a large role in the development and regulation of organisms using intracrine, paracrine, and endocrine cell signaling mechanisms. FGFs are known to be found in both vertebrate and invertebrate organisms. Most recently they have also been identified in viruses, such as baculoviruses. A sequence analysis of the baculovirus genomes has found that they encode for a viral fibroblast growth factor homolog (vfgf) early on in their stage of infection (Katsuma et al. 2006). Although there have been studies from other labs that have revealed a great deal about vFGF function, to date, nothing has been published on the potential mitogenic activity of vFGFs. Dr. Finnerty and earlier research students have obtained promising results, showing vFGFs from two baculoviruses to be mitogenic, but these results needed to be reproduced and replicated in multiple cell lines to have sufficient data for publication. To test the effects of vFGFs on cell mitogenic activity, the best method to assess cell viability and cell proliferation needed to be used, which is colorimetric assays. My research focused on finding the most accurate in-vitro colorimetric assay that measures cell proliferation with insect SF9 cells and mammalian NIH/3T3 cells. Such assays included the Resazurin assay, the Crystal Violet assay, and the CCK-8 assay. To accurately measure cell proliferation, I used a multi-well plate reader that measured the dyes\u27 absorbance at specific wavelengths varying from 450nm to 590nm, depending on the reagent. From the data collected, I created a variety of standard curve graphs and produced figures that compared each reagent\u27s sensitivity. The slopes of the Resazurin assay graphs all show a trend of starting positive with the smaller seeding densities and then turning negative with the larger densities, which is not ideal for future experiments. The CCK-8 assay graphs all show a trend of positive slopes with both the small and large seeding densities for each cell line, while the crystal violet assay graphs showed similar trends as Resazurin. I used 96-well plates to have various replicates of each cell concentration and compared the confidence interval ranges for each assay. The assay with the lowest confidence intervals throughout all the graphs was CCK-8. The last component I used to choose the best in-vitro colorimetric assay was the correlation coefficients in each graph. Out of all three reagents, CCK-8 had the best coefficients in the standard curve graphs, with values above 0.9. Therefore, the CCK-8 assay was found to be the best in-vitro colorimetric assay to measure cell proliferation with both SF9 and NIH/3T3 cells. The CCK-8 standard curve graphs I created for each cell line will also help as a template to measure the mitogenic activity of cells after adding vFGF for future experiments

Establishing Optimal Seeding Density and Ideal Starvation Conditions of Sf9 and NIH/3T3 Cell Lines

Fibroblast Growth Factors (FGFs) are a family of structurally related polypeptide cytokines. 22 FGF genes (FGF1-14, FGF16-23) are found in the human genome. FGFs have various known intracrine, paracrine, and endocrine functions and are essential for the development and wound repair in organisms through these mechanisms. The role of FGFs in viruses has become an area of piqued interest in the field of pathology as several virus families have genomes that encode one or more growth factor homologues. It has been suggested that a virally encoded ortholog of FGF (vFGF) identified in the viral families of Baculoviridae and Iridoviridae is involved in the movement of these viruses across the basal lamina in the midgut of insect hosts to shift from primary infection to systemic infection (Means and Passarelli 2010). It was found that the Baculoviridae encodes a viral fibroblast homolog (vfgf) expressed as an early gene in the beginning stages of viral infection (Katsuma et al. 2006). Despite the evidence of the involvement of vFGF in cell migration, there is no published research on its role in cell proliferation, even though many FGFs are known to be mitogens. The purpose of our research is to produce recombinant FGF from two baculoviruses, AcMNPV and CfMNPV, and test their effect on cell proliferation of multiple cell lines. A part of this process includes finding the optimal seeding densities and optimal starvation periods of each cell line used. The optimal seeding density was found by seeding 96-well plates of SF9 and NIH/3T3 cells at various ranges of seeding densities correlated to their growth curves. The data was then analyzed using CCK-8 and crystal violet proliferation assays to observe where cells appeared to begin to plateau, indicating that they were overgrown. We found the optimal minimal seeding densities of SF9 cells to be about 50,000 cells/well, and about 4,000-4,500 cells/well for NIH/3T3 cells. We then took 96-well plates seeded at 3,000, 5,000, and 7,000 cells/well and treated them with media containing a range of 0-10% and 0-2% newborn calf serum to observe which concentration of serum allowed for cells to remain viable while being starved. It was found that serum containing 1% newborn calf serum allowed cells to remain the most viable during starvation at a seeding density of around 5,000 cells/well. This data will be used to set up plates of SF9 and NIH/3T3 cells to be starved and then treated with various concentrations of vFGF to observe the effects on cell proliferation

BME children subject to a child protection plan or who are looked after

BME children subject to a child protection plan or who are looked after (2006-2010)

Large-scale UK audit of blood transfusion requirements and anaemia in patients receiving cytotoxic chemotherapy

Cancer patients receiving cytotoxic chemotherapy often become anaemic and may require blood transfusions. A large-scale audit of patients with a variety of solid tumours receiving chemotherapy at 28 specialist centers throughout the UK was undertaken to quantify the problem. Data were available from 2719 patients receiving 3206 courses of cytotoxic chemotherapy for tumours of the breast (878), ovary (856), lung (772) or testis (213). Their mean age was 55 years (range 16–87). Overall, 33% of patients required at least one blood transfusion but the proportion varied from 19% for breast cancer to 43% for lung. Sixteen per cent of patients required more than one transfusion (7% for breast, 22% in lung). The mean proportion of patients with Hb < 11 g dl−1rose over the course of chemotherapy from 17% before the first cycle, to 38% by the sixth, despite transfusion in 33% of patients. Of the patients receiving transfusions, 25% required an inpatient admission and overnight stay. The most common symptoms reported at the time of transfusion were lethargy, tiredness and breathlessness. Further research is needed to evaluate the role of blood transfusions in patients receiving cytotoxic chemotherapy. © 2000 Cancer Research Campaig

Collaborative Deep Learning for Recommender Systems

Collaborative filtering (CF) is a successful approach commonly used by many recommender systems. Conventional CF-based methods use the ratings given to items by users as the sole source of information for learning to make recommendation. However, the ratings are often very sparse in many applications, causing CF-based methods to degrade significantly in their recommendation performance. To address this sparsity problem, auxiliary information such as item content information may be utilized. Collaborative topic regression (CTR) is an appealing recent method taking this approach which tightly couples the two components that learn from two different sources of information. Nevertheless, the latent representation learned by CTR may not be very effective when the auxiliary information is very sparse. To address this problem, we generalize recent advances in deep learning from i.i.d. input to non-i.i.d. (CF-based) input and propose in this paper a hierarchical Bayesian model called collaborative deep learning (CDL), which jointly performs deep representation learning for the content information and collaborative filtering for the ratings (feedback) matrix. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets from different domains show that CDL can significantly advance the state of the art

Evolutionary Multi-Objective Design of SARS-CoV-2 Protease Inhibitor Candidates

Computational drug design based on artificial intelligence is an emerging research area. At the time of writing this paper, the world suffers from an outbreak of the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2. A promising way to stop the virus replication is via protease inhibition. We propose an evolutionary multi-objective algorithm (EMOA) to design potential protease inhibitors for SARS-CoV-2's main protease. Based on the SELFIES representation the EMOA maximizes the binding of candidate ligands to the protein using the docking tool QuickVina 2, while at the same time taking into account further objectives like drug-likeliness or the fulfillment of filter constraints. The experimental part analyzes the evolutionary process and discusses the inhibitor candidates.Comment: 15 pages, 7 figures, submitted to PPSN 202

Which effective viscosity?

Magmas undergoing shear are prime examples of flows that involve the transport of solids and gases by a separate (silicate melt) carrier phase. Such flows are called multiphase, and have attracted much attention due to their important range of engineering applications. Where the volume fraction of the dispersed phase (crystals) is large, the influence of particles on the fluid motion becomes significant and must be taken into account in any explanation of the bulk behaviour of the mixture. For congested magma deforming well in excess of the dilute limit (particle concentrations >40% by volume), sudden changes in the effective or relative viscosity can be expected. The picture is complicated further by the fact that the melt phase is temperature- and shear-rate-dependent. In the absence of a constitutive law for the flow of congested magma under an applied force, it is far from clear which of the many hundreds of empirical formulae devised to predict the rheology of suspensions as the particle fraction increases with time are best suited. Some of the more commonly used expressions in geology and engineering are reviewed with an aim to home in on those variables key to an improved understanding of magma rheology. These include a temperature, compositional and shear-rate dependency of viscosity of the melt phase with the shear-rate dependency of the crystal (particle) packing arrangement. Building on previous formulations, a new expression for the effective (relative) viscosity of magma is proposed that gives users the option to define a packing fraction range as a function of shear stress. Comparison is drawn between processes (segregation, clustering, jamming), common in industrial slurries, and structures seen preserved in igneous rocks. An equivalence is made such that congested magma, viewed in purely mechanical terms as a high-temperature slurry, is an inherently non-equilibrium material where flow at large Péclet numbers may result in shear thinning and spontaneous development of layering

Recent Advances in Understanding the Structure and Properties of Amorphous Oxide Semiconductors

Amorphous oxide semiconductors (AOSs)--ternary or quaternary oxides of post-transition metals such as In-Sn-O, Zn-Sn-O, or In-Ga-Zn-O–have been known for a decade and have attracted a great deal of attention as they possess several technological advantages, including low-temperature large-area deposition, mechanical flexibility, smooth surfaces, and high carrier mobility that is an order of magnitude larger than that of amorphous silicon (a-Si:H). Compared to their crystalline counterparts, the structure of AOSs is extremely sensitive to deposition conditions, stoichiometry, and composition, giving rise to a wide range of tunable optical and electrical properties. The large parameter space and the resulting complex deposition--structure--property relationships in AOSs make the currently available theoretical and experimental research data rather scattered and the design of new materials difficult. In this work, the key properties of several In-based AOSs are studied as a function of cooling rates, oxygen stoichiometry, cation composition, or lattice strain. Based on a thorough comparison of the results of ab initio modeling, comprehensive structural analysis, accurate property calculations, and systematic experimental measurements, a four-dimensional parameter space for AOSs is derived, serving as a solid foundation for property optimization in known AOSs and for design of next-generation transparent amorphous semiconductors