Continuing the conversation about public health ethics: education for public health professionals in Europe

An important related question is why we should teach public health ethics. Fundamentally, we must teach public health ethics because ethical practice creates and maintains public trust and public health cannot function without public trust. To serve the public—whether through controlling an outbreak of an infectious disease, preparing for or responding to public health emergencies, or reducing the impact of non-communicable diseases—communities and individuals must trust our decisions and actions. This trust grows in large part from past successes, transparent and participatory decision making, and ethical management of the inevitable moral tensions that arise in our work.S

Persistent Cell-Autonomous Circadian Oscillations in Fibroblasts Revealed by Six-Week Single-Cell Imaging of PER2::LUC Bioluminescence

Biological oscillators naturally exhibit stochastic fluctuations in period and amplitude due to the random nature of molecular reactions. Accurately measuring the precision of noisy oscillators and the heterogeneity in period and strength of rhythmicity across a population of cells requires single-cell recordings of sufficient length to fully represent the variability of oscillations. We found persistent, independent circadian oscillations of clock gene expression in 6-week-long bioluminescence recordings of 80 primary fibroblast cells dissociated from PER2::LUC mice and kept in vitro for 6 months. Due to the stochastic nature of rhythmicity, the proportion of cells appearing rhythmic increases with the length of interval examined, with 100% of cells found to be rhythmic when using 3-week windows. Mean period and amplitude are remarkably stable throughout the 6-week recordings, with precision improving over time. For individual cells, precision of period and amplitude are correlated with cell size and rhythm amplitude, but not with period, and period exhibits much less cycle-to-cycle variability (CV 7.3%) than does amplitude (CV 37%). The time series are long enough to distinguish stochastic fluctuations within each cell from differences among cells, and we conclude that the cells do exhibit significant heterogeneity in period and strength of rhythmicity, which we measure using a novel statistical metric. Furthermore, stochastic modeling suggests that these single-cell clocks operate near a Hopf bifurcation, such that intrinsic noise enhances the oscillations by minimizing period variability and sustaining amplitude

Survival of Lactobacillus sakei during heating, drying and storage in the dried state when growth has occurred in the presence of sucrose or monosodium glutamate

Spray-dried cells of Lactobacillus sakei CTC 494 survived ca. 60% longer in the spray dried state when cells were grown in the presence of 20 g sucrose l)1 or 12.5 g monosodium glutamate l)1. No significant differences were observed in viability during storage in the freeze dried state with the addition of these compounds to the growth medium, nor in survival during a heat treatment (55ºC). Both sucrose and glutamate in the growth medium suppressed intracellular accumulation of total amino acids and changed the overall pattern of the individual amino acids. Glutamate in the growth medium enhanced intracellular glutamate by ca. 38

The potential role of thioredoxin 1 and CD30 systems as multiple pathway targets and biomarkers in tumor therapy

Our progress in understanding pathological disease mechanisms has led to the identification of biomarkers that have had a considerable impact on clinical practice. It is hoped that the move from generalized to stratified approaches, with the grouping of patients into clinical/therapeutic subgroups according to specific biomarkers, will lead to increasingly more effective clinical treatments in the near future. This success depends on the identification of biomarkers that reflect disease evolution and can be used to predict disease state and therapy response, or represent themselves a target for treatment. Biomarkers can be identified by studying relationships between serum, tissue, or tumor microenvironment parameters and clinical or therapeutic parameters at onset and during the progression of the disease, using systems biology. Given that multiple pathways, such as those responsible for redox and immune regulation, are deregulated or altered in tumors, the future of tumor therapy could lie in the simultaneous targeting of these pathways using extracellular and intracellular targets and biomarkers. With this aim in mind, we evaluated the role of thioredoxin 1, a key redox regulator, and CD30, a cell membrane receptor, in immune regulation. Our results lead us to suggest that the combined use of these biomarkers provides more detailed information concerning the multiple pathways affected in disease and hence the possibility of more effective treatment

Mediation and the Best Interests of the Child from the Child Law Perspective

What is the best interests of the child in family mediation and is mediation in the best interests of the child? In this article, I use child law and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child combined with mediation theory to discuss these questions. Both mediation and the best interests of the child are open for multiple interpretations. Using facilitative and evaluative mediation theory and the legal concept ‘the best interests of the child’, I explore and compare the understandings of these concepts as they apply to family mediation. This includes a discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of facilitative as well as evaluative mediation orientations in terms of protecting the best interests of the child. Finnish court-connected family mediation is a combination of both mediation orientations, and the mediator is obliged to secure the best interests of the child. From a theoretical point of view, this seems to be a challenging combination.Peer reviewe

Polarimetry of binary systems: polars, magnetic CVs, XRBs

Polarimetry provides key physical information on the properties of interacting binary systems, sometimes difficult to obtain by any other type of observation. Indeed, radiation processes such as scattering by free electrons in the hot plasma above accretion discs, cyclotron emission by mildly relativistic electrons in the accretion shocks on the surface of highly magnetic white dwarfs and the optically thin synchrotron emission from jets can be observed. In this review, I will illustrate how optical/near-infrared polarimetry allows one to estimate magnetic field strengths and map the accretion zones in magnetic Cataclysmic Variables as well as determine the location and nature of jets and ejection events in X-ray binaries.Comment: 26 pages, 16 figures; to be published in Astrophysics and Space Science Library 460, Astronomical Polarisation from the Infrared to Gamma Rays, Editors: Mignani, R., Shearer, A., S{\l}owikowska, A., Zane,

Gene expression profiling of primary cultures of ovarian epithelial cells identifies novel molecular classifiers of ovarian cancer

In order to elucidate the biological variance between normal ovarian surface epithelial (NOSE) and epithelial ovarian cancer (EOC) cells, and to build a molecular classifier to discover new markers distinguishing these cells, we analysed gene expression patterns of 65 primary cultures of these tissues by oligonucleotide microarray. Unsupervised clustering highlights three subgroups of tumours: low malignant potential tumours, invasive solid tumours and tumour cells derived from ascites. We selected 18 genes with expression profiles that enable the distinction of NOSE from these three groups of EOC with 92% accuracy. Validation using an independent published data set derived from tissues or primary cultures confirmed a high accuracy (87–96%). The distinctive expression pattern of a subset of genes was validated by quantitative reverse transcription–PCR. An ovarian-specific tissue array representing tissues from NOSE and EOC samples of various subtypes and grades was used to further assess the protein expression patterns of two differentially expressed genes (Msln and BMP-2) by immunohistochemistry. This study highlights the relevance of using primary cultures of epithelial ovarian cells as a model system for gene profiling studies and demonstrates that the statistical analysis of gene expression profiling is a useful approach for selecting novel molecular tumour markers

Immunohistochemical analysis of oxidative stress and DNA repair proteins in normal mammary and breast cancer tissues

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>During the course of normal cellular metabolism, oxygen is consumed and reactive oxygen species (ROS) are produced. If not effectively dissipated, ROS can accumulate and damage resident proteins, lipids, and DNA. Enzymes involved in redox regulation and DNA repair dissipate ROS and repair the resulting damage in order to preserve a functional cellular environment. Because increased ROS accumulation and/or unrepaired DNA damage can lead to initiation and progression of cancer and we had identified a number of oxidative stress and DNA repair proteins that influence estrogen responsiveness of MCF-7 breast cancer cells, it seemed possible that these proteins might be differentially expressed in normal mammary tissue, benign hyperplasia (BH), ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS) and invasive breast cancer (IBC).</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>Immunohistochemistry was used to examine the expression of a number of oxidative stress proteins, DNA repair proteins, and damage markers in 60 human mammary tissues which were classified as BH, DCIS or IBC. The relative mean intensity was determined for each tissue section and ANOVA was used to detect statistical differences in the relative expression of BH, DCIS and IBC compared to normal mammary tissue.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>We found that a number of these proteins were overexpressed and that the cellular localization was altered in human breast cancer tissue.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Our studies suggest that oxidative stress and DNA repair proteins not only protect normal cells from the damaging effects of ROS, but may also promote survival of mammary tumor cells.</p