Prediction of peptide and protein propensity for amyloid formation

Understanding which peptides and proteins have the potential to undergo amyloid formation and what driving forces are responsible for amyloid-like fiber formation and stabilization remains limited. This is mainly because proteins that can undergo structural changes, which lead to amyloid formation, are quite diverse and share no obvious sequence or structural homology, despite the structural similarity found in the fibrils. To address these issues, a novel approach based on recursive feature selection and feed-forward neural networks was undertaken to identify key features highly correlated with the self-assembly problem. This approach allowed the identification of seven physicochemical and biochemical properties of the amino acids highly associated with the self-assembly of peptides and proteins into amyloid-like fibrils (normalized frequency of β-sheet, normalized frequency of β-sheet from LG, weights for β-sheet at the window position of 1, isoelectric point, atom-based hydrophobic moment, helix termination parameter at position j+1 and ΔGº values for peptides extrapolated in 0 M urea). Moreover, these features enabled the development of a new predictor (available at http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/appnn/index.html) capable of accurately and reliably predicting the amyloidogenic propensity from the polypeptide sequence alone with a prediction accuracy of 84.9 % against an external validation dataset of sequences with experimental in vitro, evidence of amyloid formation

Predicting Text Readability with Personal Pronouns

Part 5: Perceptual IntelligenceInternational audienceWhile the classic Readability Formula exploits word and sentence length, we aim to test whether Personal Pronouns (PPs) can be used to predict text readability with similar accuracy or not. Out of this motivation, we first calculated readability score of randomly selected texts of nine genres from the British National Corpus (BNC). Then we used Multiple Linear Regression (MLR) to determine the degree to which readability could be explained by any of the 38 individual or combinational subsets of various PPs in their orthographical forms (including I, me, we, us, you, he, him, she, her (the Objective Case), it, they and them). Results show that (1) subsets of plural PPs can be more predicative than those of singular ones; (2) subsets of Objective forms can make better predictions than those of Subjective ones; (3) both the subsets of first- and third-person PPs show stronger predictive power than those of second-person PPs; (4) adding the article the to the subsets could only improve the prediction slightly. Reevaluation with resampled texts from BNC verify the practicality of using PPs as an alternative approach to predict text readability

Disease-specific training in Parkinson's disease for care assistants: a comparison of interactive and self-study methods

Objective: To compare two approaches to providing training to care assistants in Parkinson’s disease. Design: Pragmatic parallel arm controlled trial. Setting: Training either by an interactive training day at a local medical education establishment or self study. Subjects: Care assistants recruited from local health and social care providers Interventions: The content of both interventions was similar, covering causes, symptoms, diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease, multidisciplinary management, mobility, communication, swallowing, and involving 5 hours of study time. Main measures: Knowledge about Parkinson’s (assessed by true/false quizzes and identifying ‘four facts’ about Parkinson’s) immediately post training and six weeks later; views on training methods of care assistants and employers/managers. Results: Thirty-seven employers nominated 100 care staff who were allocated to interactive training (49) and self study (51). Training completion rates (retained to six-week follow-up) were lower for self study (42.1% vs. 83.7% training day). There were no significant differences between groups on quiz or ‘four facts’ scores at baseline or six-week follow-up. Immediately post training, the self-study group (with access to written materials) had significantly higher quiz scores than the training day group (no access to materials at test). Within-group comparisons showed improvements post training. Although interactive training may be preferred, obtaining release from duties can be problematic. Conclusions: Both approaches have similar effects on knowledge of care assistants without prior specific training. Providing a variety of approaches will cater for all preferences. The findings may be generalizable to training the care workforce for other specific roles