Putting the Patient Back in Patient Care: Health Decision-Making from the Patient’s Perspective

This research explored health decision-making processes among people recently diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. Our analysis suggested that diagnosis with type 2 was followed by a period of intense emotional and cognitive disequilibrium. Subsequently, the informants were observed to proceed to health decision-making which was affected by three separate and interrelated factors: knowledge, self-efficacy, and purpose. Knowledge included cognitive or factual components and emotional elements. Knowledge influenced the degree of upset or disequilibrium the patient experienced, and affected a second category, agency: the informants’ confidence in their ability to enact lifestyle changes. The third factor, purpose, summarized the personal and deeply held reasons people gave as they made decisions concerning their health, eating and exercising. We propose this model, grounded in informant stories, as a heuristic, to guide further inquiry. From these stories, the patient is seen as more active and the interrelated influences of knowledge, agency, and purpose, synergistically interact to explain changes in health behaviors

Variation in the flowering time orthologs BrFLC and BrSOC1 in a natural population of Brassica rapa.

Understanding the genetic basis of natural phenotypic variation is of great importance, particularly since selection can act on this variation to cause evolution. We examined expression and allelic variation in candidate flowering time loci in Brassica rapa plants derived from a natural population and showing a broad range in the timing of first flowering. The loci of interest were orthologs of the Arabidopsis genes FLC and SOC1 (BrFLC and BrSOC1, respectively), which in Arabidopsis play a central role in the flowering time regulatory network, with FLC repressing and SOC1 promoting flowering. In B. rapa, there are four copies of FLC and three of SOC1. Plants were grown in controlled conditions in the lab. Comparisons were made between plants that flowered the earliest and latest, with the difference in average flowering time between these groups ∼30 days. As expected, we found that total expression of BrSOC1 paralogs was significantly greater in early than in late flowering plants. Paralog-specific primers showed that expression was greater in early flowering plants in the BrSOC1 paralogs Br004928, Br00393 and Br009324, although the difference was not significant in Br009324. Thus expression of at least 2 of the 3 BrSOC1 orthologs is consistent with their predicted role in flowering time in this natural population. Sequences of the promoter regions of the BrSOC1 orthologs were variable, but there was no association between allelic variation at these loci and flowering time variation. For the BrFLC orthologs, expression varied over time, but did not differ between the early and late flowering plants. The coding regions, promoter regions and introns of these genes were generally invariant. Thus the BrFLC orthologs do not appear to influence flowering time in this population. Overall, the results suggest that even for a trait like flowering time that is controlled by a very well described genetic regulatory network, understanding the underlying genetic basis of natural variation in such a quantitative trait is challenging

Impact of prawn farming effluent on coral reef water nutrients and microorganisms

© The Author(s), 2017. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in Aquaculture Environment Interactions 9 (2017): 331-346, doi:10.3354/aei00238.Tropical coral reefs are characterized by low-nutrient waters that support oligotrophic picoplankton over a productive benthic ecosystem. Nutrient-rich effluent released from aquaculture facilities into coral reef environments may potentially upset the balance of these ecosystems by altering picoplankton dynamics. In this study, we examined how effluent from a prawn (Litopenaeus vannamei) farming facility in Al Lith, Saudi Arabia, impacted the inorganic nutrients and prokaryotic picoplankton community in the waters overlying coral reefs in the Red Sea. Across 24 sites, ranging 0-21 km from the effluent point source, we measured nutrient concentrations, quantified microbial cell abundances, and sequenced bacterial and archaeal small subunit ribosomal RNA (SSU rRNA) genes to examine picoplankton phylogenetic diversity and community composition. Our results demonstrated that sites nearest to the outfall had increased concentrations of phosphate and ammonium and elevated abundances of non-pigmented picoplankton (generally heterotrophic bacteria). Shifts in the composition of the picoplankton community were observed with increasing distance from the effluent canal outfall. Waters within 500 m of the outfall harbored the most distinct picoplanktonic community and contained putative pathogens within the genus Francisella and order Rickettsiales. While our study suggests that at the time of sampling, the Al Lith aquaculture facility exhibited relatively minor influences on inorganic nutrients and microbial communities, studying the longer-term impacts of the aquaculture effluent on the organisms within the reef will be necessary in order to understand the full extent of the facility’s impact on the reef ecosystem.This research was supported by a Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) Ocean Life Institute postdoctoral scholar fellowship to A.A., the Semester at WHOI Program supporting C.B., and Award No. USA 00002 to K.H. made by King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST)

Microbial and nutrient dynamics in mangrove, reef, and seagrass waters over tidal and diurnal time scales

© The Author(s), 2020. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in Becker, C. C., Weber, L., Suca, J. J., Llopiz, J. K., Mooney, T. A., & Apprill, A. Microbial and nutrient dynamics in mangrove, reef, and seagrass waters over tidal and diurnal time scales. Aquatic Microbial Ecology, 85, (2020): 101-119, https://doi.org/10.3354/ame01944.In coral reefs and adjacent seagrass meadow and mangrove environments, short temporal scales (i.e. tidal, diurnal) may have important influences on ecosystem processes and community structure, but these scales are rarely investigated. This study examines how tidal and diurnal forcings influence pelagic microorganisms and nutrient dynamics in 3 important and adjacent coastal biomes: mangroves, coral reefs, and seagrass meadows. We sampled for microbial (Bacteria and Archaea) community composition, cell abundances and environmental parameters at 9 coastal sites on St. John, US Virgin Islands that spanned 4 km in distance (4 coral reefs, 2 seagrass meadows and 3 mangrove locations within 2 larger bays). Eight samplings occurred over a 48 h period, capturing day and night microbial dynamics over 2 tidal cycles. The seagrass and reef biomes exhibited relatively consistent environmental conditions and microbial community structure but were dominated by shifts in picocyanobacterial abundances that were most likely attributed to diel dynamics. In contrast, mangrove ecosystems exhibited substantial daily shifts in environmental parameters, heterotrophic cell abundances and microbial community structure that were consistent with the tidal cycle. Differential abundance analysis of mangrove-associated microorganisms revealed enrichment of pelagic oligotrophic taxa during high tide and enrichment of putative sediment-associated microbes during low tide. Our study underpins the importance of tidal and diurnal time scales in structuring coastal microbial and nutrient dynamics, with diel and tidal cycles contributing to a highly dynamic microbial environment in mangroves, and time of day likely contributing to microbial dynamics in seagrass and reef biomes.This research was supported by NSF awards OCE-1536782 to T.A.M., J.K.L., and A.A. and OCE-1736288 to A.A., NOAA Cooperative Institutes award NA19O AR 4320074 to A.A. and E. Kujawinski and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Endowed Fund for Innovative Research to A.A

Partial melting of ordinary chondrites: Lost City (H) and St. Severin (LL)

Eucrites and diogenites are examples of asteroidal basalts and orthopyroxenites, respectively. As they are found intermingled in howardites, which are inferred to be regolith breccias, eucrites and diogenites are thought to be genetically related. But the details of this relationship and of their individual origins remain controversial. Work by Jurewicz et al. showed that 1170-1180 C partial melts of the (anhydrous) Murchison (CM) chondrite have major element compositions extremely similar to primitive eucrites, such as Sioux County. However, the MnO contents of these melts were about half that of Sioux County, a problem for the simple partial melting model. In addition, partial melting of Murchison could not produce diogenites, because residual pyroxenes in the Murchison experiments were too Fe- and Ca-rich and were minor phases at all but the lowest temperatures. A parent magma for diogenites needs an expanded low-calcium pyroxene field. In their partial melting study of an L6 chondrite, Kushiro and Mysen found that ordinary chondrites did have an expanded low-Ca pyroxene field over that of CV chondrites (i.e., Allende), probably because ordinary chondrites have lower Mg/Si ratios. This study expands that of both Kushiro and Mysen and Jurewicz et al. to the Lost City (H) and St. Severin (LL) chondrites at temperatures ranging from 1170 to 1325 C, at an fO2 of one log unit below the iron-wuestite buffer (IW-1)

Cassava harvesting and processing : proceedings ...

Meeting: Workshop on Cassava Harvesting and Processing Technology, 24-28 Apr. 1978, Cali, COReport of a workshop on cassava harvesting and food processing - discusses feed production, drying food technology, effects of chip size and shape; starch extraction, use of cassava flour in food preparation; cassava fermentation for fuel alcohol production. List of participants

Fine particle pH and the partitioning of nitric acid during winter in the northeastern United States

Particle pH is a critical but poorly constrained quantity that affects many aerosol processes and properties, including aerosol composition, concentrations, and toxicity. We assess PM1 pH as a function of geographical location and altitude, focusing on the northeastern U.S., based on aircraft measurements from the Wintertime Investigation of Transport, Emissions, and Reactivity campaign (1 February to 15 March 2015). Particle pH and water were predicted with the ISORROPIA-II thermodynamic model and validated by comparing predicted to observed partitioning of inorganic nitrate between the gas and particle phases. Good agreement was found for relative humidity (RH) above 40%; at lower RH observed particle nitrate was higher than predicted, possibly due to organic-inorganic phase separations or nitrate measurement uncertainties associated with low concentrations (nitrate \u3c 1 µg m−3). Including refractory ions in the pH calculations did not improve model predictions, suggesting they were externally mixed with PM1 sulfate, nitrate, and ammonium. Sample line volatilization artifacts were found to be minimal. Overall, particle pH for altitudes up to 5000 m ranged between −0.51 and 1.9 (10th and 90th percentiles) with a study mean of 0.77 ± 0.96, similar to those reported for the southeastern U.S. and eastern Mediterranean. This expansive aircraft data set is used to investigate causes in variability in pH and pH-dependent aerosol components, such as PM1 nitrate, over a wide range of temperatures (−21 to 19°C), RH (20 to 95%), inorganic gas, and particle concentrations and also provides further evidence that particles with low pH are ubiquitous