Children’s Compliance With Wrist-Worn Accelerometry Within a Cluster-Randomized Controlled Trial: Findings From the Healthy Lifestyles Programme

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Human Kinetics via the DOI in this recordPurpose: To assess children’s compliance with wrist worn accelerometry during a randomised control trial and to examine whether compliance differed by allocated condition or gender. Method: 886 children within the Healthy Lifestyles Programme (HeLP) trial were randomly allocated to wear a GENEActiv accelerometer at baseline and 18 month follow up. Compliance with minimum wear time criteria (≥10 hours for 3 week, 1 weekend day) was obtained for both time points. Chi- squared tests were used to determine associations between compliance, group allocation and gender. Results: At baseline, 851 children had useable data, 830 (97.5%) met the minimum wear time criteria, 631 (74.1%) had data for 7 days at 24 hours/day. At follow up, 789 children had useable data, 745 (94.4%) met the minimum wear time criteria, 528 (67%) children had complete data. Compliance did not differ by gender (baseline; X2 = 1.66, p = 0.2, follow up; X2 = 0.76, p = 0.4) or by group at follow up (X2 = 2.35, p = 0.13). Conclusion: The use of wrist worn accelerometers and robust trial procedures resulted in high compliance at two time points regardless of group allocation, demonstrating the feasibility of usingprecise physical activity monitors to measure intervention effectiveness.This research was supported by a grant PHR project 10/3010/01 from the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Public health research programme. In addition, this research was supported and funded by the NIHR Collaboration for Leadership in Applied Health Research and Care South West Peninsula (PenCLAHRC)

From the Cover: Assignment of an Essential Role for the Neurospora Frequency Gene in Circadian Entrainment to Temperature Cycles

Circadian systems include slave oscillators and central pacemakers, and the cores of eukaryotic circadian clocks described to date are composed of transcription and translation feedback loops (TTFLs). In the model system Neurospora, normal circadian rhythmicity requires a TTFL in which a White Collar complex (WCC) activates expression of the frequency (frq) gene, and the FRQ protein feeds back to attenuate that activation. To further test the centrality of this TTFL to the circadian mechanism in Neurospora, we used low-amplitude temperature cycles to compare WT and frq-null strains under conditions in which a banding rhythm was elicited. WT cultures were entrained to these temperature cycles. Unlike those normal strains, however, frq-null mutants did not truly entrain to the same cycles. Their peaks and troughs always occurred in the cold and warm periods, respectively, strongly suggesting that the rhythm in Neurospora lacking frq function simply is driven by the temperature cycles. Previous reports suggested that a FRQ-less oscillator (FLO) could be entrained to temperature cycles, rather than being driven, and speculated that the FLO was the underlying circadian-rhythm generator. These inferences appear to derive from the use of a phase reference point affected by both the changing waveform and the phase of the oscillation. Examination of several other phase markers as well as results of additional experimental tests indicate that the FLO is, at best, a slave oscillator to the TTFL, which underlies circadian rhythm generation in Neurospora

Implementing universal multi-qubit quantum logic gates in three and four-spin systems at room temperature

In this paper, we present the experimental realization of multi-qubit gates $$ in macroscopic ensemble of three-qubit and four-qubit molecules. Instead of depending heavily on the two-bit universal gate, which served as the basic quantum operation in quantum computing, we use pulses of well-defined frequency and length that simultaneously apply to all qubits in a quantum register. It appears that this method is experimentally convenient when this procedure is extended to more qubits on some quantum computation, and it can also be used in other physical systems.Comment: 5 Pages, 2 Figure

Rapid and damage-free outgassing of implanted helium from amorphous silicon oxycarbide

Damage caused by implanted helium (He) is a major concern for material performance in future nuclear reactors. We use a combination of experiments and modeling to demonstrate that amorphous silicon oxycarbide (SiOC) is immune to He-induced damage. By contrast with other solids, where implanted He becomes immobilized in nanometer-scale precipitates, He in SiOC remains in solution and outgasses from the material via atomic-scale diffusion without damaging its free surfaces. Furthermore, the behavior of He in SiOC is not sensitive to the exact concentration of carbon and hydrogen in this material, indicating that the composition of SiOC may be tuned to optimize other properties without compromising resistance to implanted He

Species-level functional profiling of metagenomes and metatranscriptomes.

Functional profiles of microbial communities are typically generated using comprehensive metagenomic or metatranscriptomic sequence read searches, which are time-consuming, prone to spurious mapping, and often limited to community-level quantification. We developed HUMAnN2, a tiered search strategy that enables fast, accurate, and species-resolved functional profiling of host-associated and environmental communities. HUMAnN2 identifies a community's known species, aligns reads to their pangenomes, performs translated search on unclassified reads, and finally quantifies gene families and pathways. Relative to pure translated search, HUMAnN2 is faster and produces more accurate gene family profiles. We applied HUMAnN2 to study clinal variation in marine metabolism, ecological contribution patterns among human microbiome pathways, variation in species' genomic versus transcriptional contributions, and strain profiling. Further, we introduce 'contributional diversity' to explain patterns of ecological assembly across different microbial community types

The health informatics cohort enhancement project (HICE): using routinely collected primary care data to identify people with a lifetime diagnosis of psychotic disorder

Background: We have previously demonstrated that routinely collected primary care data can be used to identify potential participants for trials in depression [1]. Here we demonstrate how patients with psychotic disorders can be identified from primary care records for potential inclusion in a cohort study. We discuss the strengths and limitations of this approach; assess its potential value and report challenges encountered. Methods: We designed an algorithm with which we searched for patients with a lifetime diagnosis of psychotic disorders within the Secure Anonymised Information Linkage (SAIL) database of routinely collected health data. The algorithm was validated against the "gold standard" of a well established operational criteria checklist for psychotic and affective illness (OPCRIT). Case notes of 100 patients from a community mental health team (CMHT) in Swansea were studied of whom 80 had matched GP records. Results: The algorithm had favourable test characteristics, with a very good ability to detect patients with psychotic disorders (sensitivity > 0.7) and an excellent ability not to falsely identify patients with psychotic disorders (specificity > 0.9). Conclusions: With certain limitations our algorithm can be used to search the general practice data and reliably identify patients with psychotic disorders. This may be useful in identifying candidates for potential inclusion in cohort studies

Gamma-Ray Bursts in Circumstellar Shells: A Possible Explanation for Flares

It is now generally accepted that long-duration gamma ray bursts (GRBs) are due to the collapse of massive rotating stars. The precise collapse process itself, however, is not yet fully understood. Strong winds, outbursts, and intense ionizing UV radiation from single stars or strongly interacting binaries are expected to destroy the molecular cloud cores that give birth to them and create highly complex circumburst environments for the explosion. Such environments might imprint features on GRB light curves that uniquely identify the nature of the progenitor and its collapse. We have performed numerical simulations of realistic environments for a variety of long-duration GRB progenitors with ZEUS-MP, and have developed an analytical method for calculating GRB light curves in these profiles. Though a full, three-dimensional, relativistic magnetohydrodynamical computational model is required to precisely describe the light curve from a GRB in complex environments, our method can provide a qualitative understanding of these phenomena. We find that, in the context of the standard afterglow model, massive shells around GRBs produce strong signatures in their light curves, and that this can distinguish them from those occurring in uniform media or steady winds. These features can constrain the mass of the shell and the properties of the wind before and after the ejection. Moreover, the interaction of the GRB with the circumburst shell is seen to produce features that are consistent with observed X-ray flares that are often attributed to delayed energy injection by the central engine. Our algorithm for computing light curves is also applicable to GRBs in a variety of environments such as those in high-redshift cosmological halos or protogalaxies, both of which will soon be targets of future surveys such as JANUS or Lobster.Comment: 12 pages, 5 figures, Accepted by Ap

Transcriptomic analysis of the poultry red mite, Dermanyssus gallinae, across all stages of the lifecycle

Acknowledgements Thanks go to the Centre for Genomic Research (CGR) at the University of Liverpool performing the TruSeq RNA-seq analysis and to our local layer farmers for their continued support and provision of mite material. Funding The authors gratefully acknowledge funding for this project from BBRSC (grant reference BB/J01513X/1), Zoetis and Akita Co. Ltd. and The British Egg Marketing Board Trust.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Incorporation of oxygen into the succinate co-product of iron(II) and 2-oxoglutarate dependent oxygenases from bacteria, plants and humans.

The ferrous iron and 2-oxoglutarate (2OG) dependent oxygenases catalyse two electron oxidation reactions by coupling the oxidation of substrate to the oxidative decarboxylation of 2OG, giving succinate and carbon dioxide coproducts. The evidence available on the level of incorporation of one atom from dioxygen into succinate is inconclusive. Here, we demonstrate that five members of the 2OG oxygenase family, AlkB from&nbsp;Escherichia coli, anthocyanidin synthase and flavonol synthase from&nbsp;Arabidopsis thaliana, and prolyl hydroxylase domain enzyme 2 and factor inhibiting hypoxia-inducible factor-1 from&nbsp;Homo sapiens&nbsp;all incorporate a single oxygen atom, almost exclusively derived from dioxygen, into the succinate co-product.<br /

Low-Luminosity Gamma-Ray Bursts as a Distinct GRB Population:A Firmer Case from Multiple Criteria Constraints

The intriguing observations of Swift/BAT X-ray flash XRF 060218 and the BATSE-BeppoSAX gamma-ray burst GRB 980425, both with much lower luminosity and redshift compared to other observed bursts, naturally lead to the question of how these low-luminosity (LL) bursts are related to high-luminosity (HL) bursts. Incorporating the constraints from both the flux-limited samples observed with CGRO/BATSE and Swift/BAT and the redshift-known GRB sample, we investigate the luminosity function for both LL- and HL-GRBs through simulations. Our multiple criteria, including the log N - log P distributions from the flux-limited GRB sample, the redshift and luminosity distributions of the redshift-known sample, and the detection ratio of HL- and LL- GRBs with Swift/BAT, provide a set of stringent constraints to the luminosity function. Assuming that the GRB rate follows the star formation rate, our simulations show that a simple power law or a broken power law model of luminosity function fail to reproduce the observations, and a new component is required. This component can be modeled with a broken power, which is characterized by a sharp increase of the burst number at around L < 10^47 erg s^-1}. The lack of detection of moderate-luminosity GRBs at redshift ~0.3 indicates that this feature is not due to observational biases. The inferred local rate, rho_0, of LL-GRBs from our model is ~ 200 Gpc^-3 yr^-1 at ~ 10^47 erg s^-1, much larger than that of HL-GRBs. These results imply that LL-GRBs could be a separate GRB population from HL-GRBs. The recent discovery of a local X-ray transient 080109/SN 2008D would strengthen our conclusion, if the observed non-thermal emission has a similar origin as the prompt emission of most GRBs and XRFs.Comment: 22 pages, 9 figures, 3 tables; MNRAS, in press; Updated analysis and figure