Chancellors and Change: Conversations About the Campus Climate

UNO’s Chancellor’s Commission for the Status of Women (CCSW) has been at the forefront of inclusion of all genders since the 1970’s. Recently, CCSW has extensively re-evaluated UNO’s campus climate and has submitted an action plan to the Chancellor to improve the status of women students, faculty, and staff. This presentation will focus on CCSW’s renewed and energetic efforts in the last several years to make UNO more gender-inclusive in our physical spaces, work environments, leadership roles, and campus policies

The role of MYH and microsatellite instability in the development of sporadic colorectal cancer

Biallelic germline mutations in MYH are associated with colorectal neoplasms, which develop through a pathway involving somatic inactivation of APC. In this study, we investigated the incidence of the common MYH mutations in an Australian cohort of sporadic colorectal cancers, the clinicopathological features of MYH cancers, and determined whether inactivation of mismatch repair and base excision repair (BER) were mutually exclusive. The MYH gene was sequenced from lymphocyte DNA of 872 colorectal cancer patients and 478 controls. Two compound heterozygotes were identified in the cancer population and all three cancers from these individuals displayed a prominent infiltration of intraepithelial lymphocytes. In total, 11 heterozygotes were found in the cancer group and five in the control group. One tumour from an individual with biallelic germline mutation of MYH also demonstrated microsatellite instability (MSI) as a result of biallelic hypermethylation of the MLH1 promoter. Although MYH-associated cancers are rare in a sporadic colorectal population, this study shows that these tumours can develop through either a chromosomal or MSI pathway. Tumours arising in the setting of BER or mismatch repair deficiency may share a biological characteristic, which promotes lymphocytic infiltration

Numerical model development to predict the behaviour of infant/neonate crash dummy restrained inside of an incubator under deceleration

In this paper, advanced finite element (FE) methods are developed to investigate the effect of deceleration on the crash dummy test complied with British Standard Engineering (BS EN 1789). These techniques, which are related to material modelling, joints and contacts, offer an advanced numerical model representing an infant incubator with all complex boundary conditions and design contents. It is shown that the response of an infant incubator is a function of the ratchet straps, the tension on the belts, the belt type and the distance of the belts from the edges of the incubator, which can significantly affect the experienced acceleration, by the infant. The validation process is performed against experimental studies and various case parameters such as crash dummy mass and negative acceleration impulse are discussed in detail. The developed numerical model is capable to predict the behaviour of the crash dummy and the incubator in terms of acceleration, trajectory and kinematics by less than 8% error

Global Methylation in Exposure Biology and Translational Medical Science

Background: Many groups are actively investigating how the epigenetic state relates to environmental exposures and development of disease, including cancer. There are myriad choices for capturing and measuring the epigenetic state of a tissue, ranging from assessing the total methyl-CpG content to array-based platforms that simultaneously probe hundreds of thousands of CpG loci. There is an emerging literature that uses CpG methylation at repetitive sequences, including LINE-1 (long interspersed nuclear element-1) elements, to capture the epigenomic state

Newborn screening for Pompe disease in Illinois: Experience with 684,290 infants

Statewide newborn screening for Pompe disease began in Illinois in 2015. As of 30 September 2019, a total of 684,290 infants had been screened and 395 infants (0.06%) were screen positive. A total of 29 cases of Pompe disease were identified (3 infantile, 26 late-onset). While many of the remainder were found to have normal alpha-glucosidase activity on the follow-up testing (234 of 395), other findings included 62 carriers, 39 infants with pseudodeficiency, and eight infants who could not be given a definitive diagnosis due to inconclusive follow-up testing

Generation of a large volume of clinically relevant nanometre-sized ultra-high-molecular-weight polyethylene wear particles for cell culture studies.

It has recently been shown that the wear of ultra-high-molecular-weight polyethylene in hip and knee prostheses leads to the generation of nanometre-sized particles, in addition to micron-sized particles. The biological activity of nanometre-sized ultra-high-molecular-weight polyethylene wear particles has not, however, previously been studied due to difficulties in generating sufficient volumes of nanometre-sized ultra-high-molecular-weight polyethylene wear particles suitable for cell culture studies. In this study, wear simulation methods were investigated to generate a large volume of endotoxin-free clinically relevant nanometre-sized ultra-high-molecular-weight polyethylene wear particles. Both single-station and six-station multidirectional pin-on-plate wear simulators were used to generate ultra-high-molecular-weight polyethylene wear particles under sterile and non-sterile conditions. Microbial contamination and endotoxin levels in the lubricants were determined. The results indicated that microbial contamination was absent and endotoxin levels were low and within acceptable limits for the pharmaceutical industry, when a six-station pin-on-plate wear simulator was used to generate ultra-high-molecular-weight polyethylene wear particles in a non-sterile environment. Different pore-sized polycarbonate filters were investigated to isolate nanometre-sized ultra-high-molecular-weight polyethylene wear particles from the wear test lubricants. The use of the filter sequence of 10, 1, 0.1, 0.1 and 0.015 µm pore sizes allowed successful isolation of ultra-high-molecular-weight polyethylene wear particles with a size range of < 100 nm, which was suitable for cell culture studies