History in today\u27s business school

Members of the American Assembly of Collegiate Schools of Business were surveyed to determine to what extent the history of various business school subjects (accounting, economics, management, etc.) was a part of today\u27s curricula. Findings indicated widespread teaching of history and the feeling that more should be done. However, the findings also indicate that much of the current teaching is not being done in separate courses by professional historians or even those interested in history. Implications for curricula development are discussed

Accounting history in today\u27s business schools

Slocum and Sriram\u27s [2001] study of teaching accounting history found a decline from 1985-1997 in the number of courses with historical content at the doctoral and undergraduate level. Is this development a singular event for accounting or an example of what is happening in other business disciplines? Our study presents the results of a longitudinal and cross-disciplinary survey of members of AACSB International to determine the current state of the teaching of history in business schools. We find a similar decline in other business disciplines and offer suggestions about the relevance of history and steps that might be taken to encourage its study

The Effect of Ionic Dissolution Products of Ca-Sr-Na-Zn-Si Bioactive Glass on in Vitro Cytocompatibility

Many commercial bone grafts cannot regenerate healthy bone in place of diseased bone. Bioactive glasses have received much attention in this regard due to the ability of their ionic dissolution products to promote cell proliferation, cell differentiation and activate gene expression. Through the incorporation of certain ions, bioactive glasses can become therapeutic for specific pathological situations. Calcium-strontium-sodium-zinc-silicate glass bone grafts have been shown to release therapeutic levels of zinc and strontium, however the in vitro compatibility of these materials is yet to be reported. In this study, the in vitro cytocompatibility of three different calcium-strontium-sodium-zinc-silicate glasses was examined as a function of their ion release profiles, using Novabone® bioglass as a commercial comparison. Experimental compositions were shown to release Si4+ ranging from 1 to 81 ppm over 30 days; comparable or enhanced release in comparison to Novabone. The maximum Ca2+ release detected for experimental compositions was 9.1 ppm, below that reported to stimulate osteoblasts. Sr2+ release was within known therapeutic ranges, and Zn2+ release ranged from 0.5 to 1.4 ppm, below reported cytotoxic levels. All examined glass compositions show equivalent or enhanced in vitro compatibility in comparison to Novabone. Cells exposed to BT112 ionic products showed enhanced cell viabilities indicating cell proliferation was induced. The ion release profiles suggest this effect was due to a synergistic interaction between certain combinations and concentrations of ions. Overall, results indicate that the calcium-strontium-sodium-zinc-silicate glass compositions show equivalent or even enhanced in vitro compatibility compared to Novabone®. © 2010 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC

Bioimage informatics: a new category in Bioinformatics

The last two decades have witnessed great advances in biological tissue labeling and automated microscopic imaging that, in turn, have revolutionized how biologists visualize molecular, sub-cellular, cellular, and super-cellular structures and study their respective functions. Tremendous volumes of multi-dimensional bioimaging data are now being generated in almost every branch of biology. How to interpret such image datasets in a quantitative, objective, automatic and efficient way has become a major challenge in current computational biology. Bioimage informatics methods have begun to turn image data into useful biological knowledge (Peng, 2008; Swedlow, et al., 2009; Shamir, et al., 2010; Danuser, 2011). The essential methods of bioimage informatics involve largescale bioimage generation, visualization, analysis and management. Bioimage informatics also encompasses both hypothesis- and datadriven exploratory approaches, with an emphasis on how to generat

RAPTOR observations of delayed explosive activity in the high-redshift gamma-ray burst GRB 060206

The RAPid Telescopes for Optical Response (RAPTOR) system at Los Alamos National Laboratory observed GRB 060206 starting 48.1 minutes after gamma-ray emission triggered the Burst Alert Telescope (BAT) on-board the Swift satellite. The afterglow light curve measured by RAPTOR shows a spectacular re-brightening by ~1 mag about 1 h after the trigger and peaks at R ~ 16.4 mag. Shortly after the onset of the explosive re-brightening the OT doubled its flux on a time-scale of about 4 minutes. The total R-band fluence received from GRB 060206 during this episode is 2.3e-9 erg/cm2. In the rest frame of the burst (z = 4.045) this yields an isotropic equivalent energy release of ~0.7e50 erg in just a narrow UV band 130 +/- 22 nm. We discuss the implications of RAPTOR observations for untriggered searches for fast optical transients and studies of GRB environments at high redshift.Comment: Submitted to ApJ Letter

BioVDB: biological vector database for high-throughput gene expression meta-analysis

High-throughput sequencing has created an exponential increase in the amount of gene expression data, much of which is freely, publicly available in repositories such as NCBI's Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO). Querying this data for patterns such as similarity and distance, however, becomes increasingly challenging as the total amount of data increases. Furthermore, vectorization of the data is commonly required in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (AI/ML) approaches. We present BioVDB, a vector database for storage and analysis of gene expression data, which enhances the potential for integrating biological studies with AI/ML tools. We used a previously developed approach called Automatic Label Extraction (ALE) to extract sample labels from metadata, including age, sex, and tissue/cell-line. BioVDB stores 438,562 samples from eight microarray GEO platforms. We show that it allows for efficient querying of data using similarity search, which can also be useful for identifying and inferring missing labels of samples, and for rapid similarity analysis

Systematic classification of non-coding RNAs by epigenomic similarity

BACKGROUND: Even though only 1.5% of the human genome is translated into proteins, recent reports indicate that most of it is transcribed into non-coding RNAs (ncRNAs), which are becoming the subject of increased scientific interest. We hypothesized that examining how different classes of ncRNAs co-localized with annotated epigenomic elements could help understand the functions, regulatory mechanisms, and relationships among ncRNA families. RESULTS: We examined 15 different ncRNA classes for statistically significant genomic co-localizations with cell type-specific chromatin segmentation states, transcription factor binding sites (TFBSs), and histone modification marks using GenomeRunner (http://www.genomerunner.org). P-values were obtained using a Chi-square test and corrected for multiple testing using the Benjamini-Hochberg procedure. We clustered and visualized the ncRNA classes by the strength of their statistical enrichments and depletions. We found piwi-interacting RNAs (piRNAs) to be depleted in regions containing activating histone modification marks, such as H3K4 mono-, di- and trimethylation, H3K27 acetylation, as well as certain TFBSs. piRNAs were further depleted in active promoters, weak transcription, and transcription elongation regions, and enriched in repressed and heterochromatic regions. Conversely, transfer RNAs (tRNAs) were depleted in heterochromatin regions and strongly enriched in regions containing activating H3K4 di- and trimethylation marks, H2az histone variant, and a variety of TFBSs. Interestingly, regions containing CTCF insulator protein binding sites were associated with tRNAs. tRNAs were also enriched in the active, weak and poised promoters and, surprisingly, in regions with repetitive/copy number variations. CONCLUSIONS: Searching for statistically significant associations between ncRNA classes and epigenomic elements permits detection of potential functional and/or regulatory relationships among ncRNA classes, and suggests cell type-specific biological roles of ncRNAs

A scalable machine-learning approach to recognize chemical names within large text databases

MOTIVATION: The use or study of chemical compounds permeates almost every scientific field and in each of them, the amount of textual information is growing rapidly. There is a need to accurately identify chemical names within text for a number of informatics efforts such as database curation, report summarization, tagging of named entities and keywords, or the development/curation of reference databases. RESULTS: A first-order Markov Model (MM) was evaluated for its ability to distinguish chemical names from words, yielding ~93% recall in recognizing chemical terms and ~99% precision in rejecting non-chemical terms on smaller test sets. However, because total false-positive events increase with the number of words analyzed, the scalability of name recognition was measured by processing 13.1 million MEDLINE records. The method yielded precision ranges from 54.7% to 100%, depending upon the cutoff score used, averaging 82.7% for approximately 1.05 million putative chemical terms extracted. Extracted chemical terms were analyzed to estimate the number of spelling variants per term, which correlated with the total number of times the chemical name appeared in MEDLINE. This variability in term construction was found to affect both information retrieval and term mapping when using PubMed and Ovid

Para-cresol production by Clostridium difficile affects microbial diversity and membrane integrity of Gram-negative bacteria

Clostridium difficile is a Gram-positive spore-forming anaerobe and a major cause of antibiotic-associated diarrhoea. Disruption of the commensal microbiota, such as through treatment with broad-spectrum antibiotics, is a critical precursor for colonisation by C. difficile and subsequent disease. Furthermore, failure of the gut microbiota to recover colonisation resistance can result in recurrence of infection. An unusual characteristic of C. difficile among gut bacteria is its ability to produce the bacteriostatic compound para-cresol (p-cresol) through fermentation of tyrosine. Here, we demonstrate that the ability of C. difficile to produce p-cresol in vitro provides a competitive advantage over gut bacteria including Escherichia coli, Klebsiella oxytoca and Bacteroides thetaiotaomicron. Metabolic profiling of competitive co-cultures revealed that acetate, alanine, butyrate, isobutyrate, p-cresol and p-hydroxyphenylacetate were the main metabolites responsible for differentiating the parent strain C. difficile (630Δerm) from a defined mutant deficient in p-cresol production. Moreover, we show that the p-cresol mutant displays a fitness defect in a mouse relapse model of C. difficile infection (CDI). Analysis of the microbiome from this mouse model of CDI demonstrates that colonisation by the p-cresol mutant results in a distinctly altered intestinal microbiota, and metabolic profile, with a greater representation of Gammaproteobacteria, including the Pseudomonales and Enterobacteriales. We demonstrate that Gammaproteobacteria are susceptible to exogenous p-cresol in vitro and that there is a clear divide between bacterial Phyla and their susceptibility to p-cresol. In general, Gram-negative species were relatively sensitive to p-cresol, whereas Gram-positive species were more tolerant. This study demonstrates that production of p-cresol by C. difficile has an effect on the viability of intestinal bacteria as well as the major metabolites produced in vitro. These observations are upheld in a mouse model of CDI, in which p-cresol production affects the biodiversity of gut microbiota and faecal metabolite profiles, suggesting that p-cresol production contributes to C. difficile survival and pathogenesis.Peer reviewedFinal Published versio