Ears of the Armadillo: Global Health Research and Neglected Diseases in Texas

Neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) have\ud been recently identified as significant public\ud health problems in Texas and elsewhere in\ud the American South. A one-day forum on the\ud landscape of research and development and\ud the hidden burden of NTDs in Texas\ud explored the next steps to coordinate advocacy,\ud public health, and research into a\ud cogent health policy framework for the\ud American NTDs. It also highlighted how\ud U.S.-funded global health research can serve\ud to combat these health disparities in the\ud United States, in addition to benefiting\ud communities abroad

The role of peer communication in the socialization of adolescents' pain experiences: a qualitative investigation.

BACKGROUND: Recurrent pain is a common complaint among adolescents. Children learn to resolve or cope with pain largely through family dynamics, particularly maternal influences. By adolescence, young people possess an array of pain behaviors, the culmination of multiple opportunities for modeling and reinforcement of attitudes and beliefs about pain. Adolescence is a time of increased autonomy characterized by, among other complex factors, significant increases in peer influence. Although peers are influential in health-risk behavior, little is known how peers impact adolescents' pain experience. The present study explored the role of peers in adolescents' attitudes toward pain, pain behaviors and over-the-counter analgesics. METHODS: Sixty-minute focus groups were conducted with a sample 24 junior high school students from Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada (11 male: mean age = 13.45 years, range = 12-15 years; 13 female: mean age = 13.31 years, range = 12-15 years). Participants were randomly assigned to one of five same-gender focus groups designed to explore a wide breadth and depth of information. Sessions were run until theoretical data saturation. Textual data, from transcribed audiotapes, were analyzed with the constant comparative method. RESULTS: Peer influences were apparent in how adolescents communicate about pain and how those communications effect pain expression. Overt pain responses to injury were primarily contextual and depended on perceived threats to peer-time and pain severity. Adolescents were intolerant of peers' pain behaviors when the cause was perceived as not severe. These attitudes impacted how adolescents responded to their own pain; males were careful not to express embarrassing pain in front of peers, females felt no restrictions on pain talk or pain expression. Evidence for peer influence on attitudes toward OTC analgesics was apparent in perceptions of over-use and ease of access. Findings are discussed within the context of social information-processing and gender role expectations. CONCLUSION: Little research has addressed how young people experience pain within the context of the psychosocial influences that dominate during adolescence. The findings provide some insight into the role of peer influences via verbal and non-verbal communication, in adolescents' pain experience. This exploratory study is a necessary first step in understanding the socialization of adolescents' pain experiences

The effect of resource limitation on the temperature-dependence of mosquito population fitness

Laboratory-derived temperature dependencies of life history traits are increasingly being used to make mechanistic predictions for how climatic warming will affect vector-borne disease dynamics, partially by affecting abundance dynamics of the vector population. These temperature-trait relationships are typically estimated from juvenile populations reared on optimal resource supply, even though natural populations of vectors are expected to experience variation in resource supply, including intermittent resource limitation. Using laboratory experiments on the mosquito Aedes aegypti, a principal arbovirus vector, combined with stage-structured population modelling, we show that low-resource supply in the juvenile life stages significantly depresses the vector’s maximal population growth rate across the entire temperature range (22–32°C) and causes it to peak at a lower temperature than at high-resource supply. This effect is primarily driven by an increase in juvenile mortality and development time, combined with a decrease in adult size with temperature at low-resource supply. Our study suggests that most projections of temperature-dependent vector abundance and disease transmission are likely to be biased because they are based on traits measured under optimal resource supply. Our results provide compelling evidence for future studies to consider resource supply when predicting the effects of climate and habitat change on vector-borne disease transmission, disease vectors and other arthropods

Identifying Hallmark Symptoms of Developmental Prosopagnosia for Non-Experts

Developmental prosopagnosia (DP) is characterised by a severe and relatively selective deficit in face recognition, in the absence of neurological injury. Because public and professional awareness of DP is low, many adults and children are not identified for formal testing. This may partly result from the lack of appropriate screening tools that can be used by non-experts in either professional or personal settings. To address this issue, the current study sought to (a) explore when DP can first be detected in oneself and another, and (b) identify a list of the condition’s everyday behavioural manifestations. Questionnaires and interviews were administered to large samples of adult DPs, their unaffected significant others, and parents of children with the condition; and data were analysed using inductive content analysis. It was found that DPs have limited insight into their difficulties, with most only achieving realisation in adulthood. Nevertheless, the DPs’ reflections on their childhood experiences, together with the parental responses, revealed specific indicators that can potentially be used to spot the condition in early childhood. These everyday hallmark symptoms may aid the detection of individuals who would benefit from objective testing, in oneself (in adults) or another person (for both adults and children)

Tissue resolved, gene structure refined equine transcriptome.

BackgroundTranscriptome interpretation relies on a good-quality reference transcriptome for accurate quantification of gene expression as well as functional analysis of genetic variants. The current annotation of the horse genome lacks the specificity and sensitivity necessary to assess gene expression especially at the isoform level, and suffers from insufficient annotation of untranslated regions (UTR) usage. We built an annotation pipeline for horse and used it to integrate 1.9 billion reads from multiple RNA-seq data sets into a new refined transcriptome.ResultsThis equine transcriptome integrates eight different tissues from 59 individuals and improves gene structure and isoform resolution, while providing considerable tissue-specific information. We utilized four levels of transcript filtration in our pipeline, aimed at producing several transcriptome versions that are suitable for different downstream analyses. Our most refined transcriptome includes 36,876 genes and 76,125 isoforms, with 6474 candidate transcriptional loci novel to the equine transcriptome.ConclusionsWe have employed a variety of descriptive statistics and figures that demonstrate the quality and content of the transcriptome. The equine transcriptomes that are provided by this pipeline show the best tissue-specific resolution of any equine transcriptome to date and are flexible for several downstream analyses. We encourage the integration of further equine transcriptomes with our annotation pipeline to continue and improve the equine transcriptome

Modelling Oscillator synchronisation during vertebrate axis segmentation

he somitogenesis clock regulates the periodicity with which somites form in the posterior pre-somitic mesoderm. Whilst cell heterogeneity results in noisy oscillation rates amongst constituent cells, synchrony within the population is maintained as oscillators are entrained via juxtracine signalling mechanisms. Here we consider a population of phase-coupled oscillators and investigate how biologically motivated perturbations to the entrained state can perturb synchrony within the population. We find that the ratio of mitosis length to clock period can influence levels of desynchronisation. Moreover, we observe that random cell movement, and hence change of local neighbourhoods, increases synchronisation

The Relationship Between Mucosal Microbiota, Colitis, and Systemic Inflammation in Chronic Granulomatous Disorder

PURPOSE: Chronic granulomatous disorder (CGD) is a primary immunodeficiency which is frequently complicated by inflammatory colitis and is associated with systemic inflammation. Herein, we aimed to investigate the role of the microbiome in the pathogenesis of colitis and systemic inflammation. METHODS: We performed 16S rDNA sequencing on mucosal biopsy samples from each segment of 10 CGD patients’ colons and conducted compositional and functional pathway prediction analyses. RESULTS: The microbiota in samples from colitis patients demonstrated reduced taxonomic alpha-diversity compared to unaffected patients, even in apparently normal bowel segments. Functional pathway richness was similar between the colitic and non-colitic mucosa, although metabolic pathways involved in butyrate biosynthesis or utilization were enriched in patients with colitis and correlated positively with fecal calprotectin levels. One patient with very severe colitis was dominated by Enterococcus spp., while among other patients Bacteroides spp. abundance correlated with colitis severity measured by fecal calprotectin and an endoscopic severity score. In contrast, Blautia abundance is associated with low severity scores and mucosal health. Several taxa and functional pathways correlated with concentrations of inflammatory cytokines in blood but not with colitis severity. Notably, dividing patients into “high” and “low” systemic inflammation groups demonstrated clearer separation than on the basis of colitis status in beta-diversity analyses. CONCLUSION: The microbiome is abnormal in CGD-associated colitis and altered functional characteristics probably contribute to pathogenesis. Furthermore, the relationship between the mucosal microbiome and systemic inflammation, independent of colitis status, implies that the microbiome in CGD can influence the inflammatory phenotype of the condition

The effect of cognitive effort on the sense of agency

While we are performing a demanding cognitive task, not only do we have a sense of cognitive effort, we are also subjectively aware that we are initiating, executing and controlling our thoughts and actions (i.e., sense of agency). Previous studies have shown that cognitive effort can be both detrimental and facilitative for the experienced sense of agency. We hypothesized that the reason for these contradictory findings might lie in the use of differential time windows in which cognitive effort operates. The current study therefore examined the effect of cognitive effort exerted on the current trial, on the previous trial or across a block of trials on sense of agency, using implicit (Experiment 1) and explicit (Experiment 2) measures of sense of agency. We showed that the exertion of more cognitive control on current trials led to a higher explicit sense of agency. This surprising result was contrasted to previous studies to establish potential reasons for this surprising finding and to formulate recommendations for future studies

Intensive management in grasslands causes diffuse water pollution at the farm scale

Arable land use is generally assumed to be the largest contributor to agricultural diffuse pollution. This study adds to the growing evidence that conventional temperate intensively managed lowland grasslands contribute significantly to soil erosion and diffuse pollution rates. This is the first grassland study to monitor hydrological characteristics and multiple pollutant fluxes (suspended sediment [SS] and the macronutrients: total oxidized nitrogen-N [TONN], total phosphorus [TP], and total carbon [TC]) at high temporal resolution (monitoring up to every 15 min) over 1 yr. Monitoring was conducted across three fields (6.5-7.5 ha) on the North Wyke Farm Platform, UK. The estimated annual erosion rates (up to 527.4 kg ha-1), TP losses (up to 0.9 kg ha-1), and TC losses (up to 179 kg ha-1) were similar to or exceeded the losses reported for other grassland, mixed land-use, and arable sites. Annual yields of TONN (up to 3 kg ha-1) were less than arable land-use fluxes and earlier grassland N studies, an important result as the study site is situated within a Nitrate Vulnerable Zone. The high-resolution monitoring allowed detailed "system's functioning" understanding of hydrological processes, mobilization- transport pathways of individual pollutants, and the changes of the relative importance of diffuse pollutants through flow conditions and time. Suspended sediment and TP concentrations frequently exceeded water quality guidelines recommended by the European Freshwater Fisheries Directive (25 mg L-1) and the European Water Framework Directive (0.04 mg soluble reactive P L-1), suggesting that intensively managed grasslands pose a significant threat to receiving surface waters. Such sediment and nutrient losses from intensively managed grasslands should be acknowledged in land management guidelines and advice for future compliance with surface water quality standards.NERC-Case PhD awardUK Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Counci