What Roles Do Chinese Health Sciences Libraries Play in Their Nation\u27s Cigarette Smoking Public Health Crisis?

Objectives: Cigarette smoking remains a major cause of death in China. Are health sciences libraries in China currently providing awareness, advocacy, or research support for the societal benefits of smoking reduction? Methods: Following institutional review board approval, Library contacts for Chinese schools of medicine, public health, and pharmacy were identified. A bilingual online survey was constructed to obtain respondents’ demographic detail and answers to questions about library resources and services that constitute academic awareness, advocacy, curriculum, or research support about tobacco and smoking. Results: 43% of reporting librarians work on a smoke-free campus. 100% of all reporting libraries work in smoke-free libraries, though 6% of the reporting libraries offer a smoking room for staff. All reporting libraries contain printed material on the dangers of smoking. Student requests for materials or acquisition recommendations are infrequent. More than 60% of the librarians report medical residents occasionally ask for tobacco-related literature. Nearly 60% of librarians reported faculty occasionally ask for materials about smoking. More than 60% of instructors were reported to occasionally ask for database searches about cigarettes or tobacco. 33% of librarians reported creating a collection guide about smoking. 15% of reporting libraries hosted a traveling exhibit on smoking. Conclusion: Some Chinese health sciences libraries are providing public health information and collaborating with faculty and students to support the reduction of smoking and tobacco use. Anecdotal statements collected from survey participants confirms their awareness of the educational and advocacy roles librarians play in their country\u27s smoking crisis

Selective miRNA disruption in T reg cells leads to uncontrolled autoimmunity

A new regulatory T (T reg) cell–specific, FoxP3-GFP-hCre bacterial artificial chromosome transgenic mouse was crossed to a conditional Dicer knockout (KO) mouse strain to analyze the role of microRNAs (miRNAs) in the development and function of T reg cells. Although thymic T reg cells developed normally in this setting, the cells showed evidence of altered differentiation and dysfunction in the periphery. Dicer-deficient T reg lineage cells failed to remain stable, as a subset of cells down-regulated the T reg cell–specific transcription factor FoxP3, whereas the majority expressed altered levels of multiple genes and proteins (including Neuropilin 1, glucocorticoid-induced tumor necrosis factor receptor, and cytotoxic T lymphocyte antigen 4) associated with the T reg cell fingerprint. In fact, a significant percentage of the T reg lineage cells took on a T helper cell memory phenotype including increased levels of CD127, interleukin 4, and interferon γ. Importantly, Dicer-deficient T reg cells lost suppression activity in vivo; the mice rapidly developed fatal systemic autoimmune disease resembling the FoxP3 KO phenotype. These results support a central role for miRNAs in maintaining the stability of differentiated T reg cell function in vivo and homeostasis of the adaptive immune system

Preventing Discriminatory Decision-making in Evolving Data Streams

Bias in machine learning has rightly received significant attention over the last decade. However, most fair machine learning (fair-ML) work to address bias in decision-making systems has focused solely on the offline setting. Despite the wide prevalence of online systems in the real world, work on identifying and correcting bias in the online setting is severely lacking. The unique challenges of the online environment make addressing bias more difficult than in the offline setting. First, Streaming Machine Learning (SML) algorithms must deal with the constantly evolving real-time data stream. Second, they need to adapt to changing data distributions (concept drift) to make accurate predictions on new incoming data. Adding fairness constraints to this already complicated task is not straightforward. In this work, we focus on the challenges of achieving fairness in biased data streams while accounting for the presence of concept drift, accessing one sample at a time. We present Fair Sampling over Stream ($FS^2$), a novel fair rebalancing approach capable of being integrated with SML classification algorithms. Furthermore, we devise the first unified performance-fairness metric, Fairness Bonded Utility (FBU), to evaluate and compare the trade-off between performance and fairness of different bias mitigation methods efficiently. FBU simplifies the comparison of fairness-performance trade-offs of multiple techniques through one unified and intuitive evaluation, allowing model designers to easily choose a technique. Overall, extensive evaluations show our measures surpass those of other fair online techniques previously reported in the literature

Beauvericin counteracted multi-drug resistant Candida albicans by blocking ABC transporters

AbstractMulti-drug resistance of pathogenic microorganisms is becoming a serious threat, particularly to immunocompromised populations. The high mortality of systematic fungal infections necessitates novel antifungal drugs and therapies. Unfortunately, with traditional drug discovery approaches, only echinocandins was approved by FDA as a new class of antifungals in the past two decades. Drug efflux is one of the major contributors to multi-drug resistance, the modulator of drug efflux pumps is considered as one of the keys to conquer multi-drug resistance. In this study, we combined structure-based virtual screening and whole-cell based mechanism study, identified a natural product, beauvericin (BEA) as a drug efflux pump modulator, which can reverse the multi-drug resistant phenotype of Candida albicans by specifically blocking the ATP-binding cassette (ABC) transporters; meantime, BEA alone has fungicidal activity in vitro by elevating intracellular calcium and reactive oxygen species (ROS). It was further demonstrated by histopathological study that BEA synergizes with a sub-therapeutic dose of ketoconazole (KTC) and could cure the murine model of disseminated candidiasis. Toxicity evaluation of BEA, including acute toxicity test, Ames test, and hERG (human ether-à-go-go-related gene) test promised that BEA can be harnessed for treatment of candidiasis, especially the candidiasis caused by ABC overexpressed multi-drug resistant C. albicans

MicroRNA 10a Marks Regulatory T Cells

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are crucial for regulatory T cell (Treg) stability and function. We report that microRNA-10a (miR-10a) is expressed in Tregs but not in other T cells including individual thymocyte subsets. Expression profiling in inbred mouse strains demonstrated that non-obese diabetic (NOD) mice with a genetic susceptibility for autoimmune diabetes have lower Treg-specific miR-10a expression than C57BL/6J autoimmune resistant mice. Inhibition of miR-10a expression in vitro leads to reduced FoxP3 expression levels and miR-10a expression is lower in unstable “exFoxP3” T cells. Unstable in vitro TGF-ß-induced, iTregs do not express miR-10a unless cultured in the presence of retinoic acid (RA) which has been associated with increased stability of iTreg, suggesting that miR-10a might play a role in stabilizing Treg. However, genetic ablation of miR-10a neither affected the number and phenotype of natural Treg nor the capacity of conventional T cells to induce FoxP3 in response to TGFβ, RA, or a combination of the two. Thus, miR-10a is selectively expressed in Treg but inhibition by antagomiRs or genetic ablation resulted in discordant effects on FoxP3