Signalling C-Type Lectins in Antimicrobial Immunity

Funding: This work was funded by the Wellcome Trust, Medical Research Council and the University of Aberdeen. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

C-type lectins in immunity : recent developments

Acknowledgements We thank the Wellcome Trust (Grant No. 102705) and Wellcome Trust Strategic Award in Medical Mycology and Fungal Immunology (Grant No. 97377) for funding. We apologise to our many colleagues whose recent work we were unable to cite due to space constraints.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Pattern recognition receptors in antifungal immunity

We thank the Wellcome Trust for funding this study.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Phonographic neighbors, not orthographic neighbors, determine word naming latencies

The orthographic neighborhood size (N) of a word—the number of words that can be formed from that word by replacing one letter with another in its place—has been found to have facilitatory effects in word naming. The orthographic neighborhood hypothesis attributes this facilitation to interactive effects. A phonographic neighborhood hypothesis, in contrast, attributes the effect to lexical print-sound conversion. According to the phonographic neighborhood hypothesis, phonographic neighbors (words differing in one letter and one phoneme, e.g., stove and stone) should facilitate naming, and other orthographic neighbors (e.g., stove and shove) should not. The predictions of these two hypotheses are tested. Unique facilitatory phonographic N effects were found in four sets of word naming mega-study data, along with an absence of facilitatory orthographic N effects. These results implicate print-sound conversion—based on consistent phonology—in neighborhood effects rather than word-letter feedback

Trimming Surface Sugars Protects Histoplasma from Immune Attack

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS G.D.B. thanks the Wellcome Trust and MRC (United Kingdom) for funding.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

How Fungi Have Shaped Our Understanding of Mammalian Immunology

Research into the interaction of fungi with the host has provided significant contributions to mammalian immunology. Here, I briefly review the most notable of these contributions, starting from the time of Metchnikoff, and highlight their impact on our understanding of immunity

Modeling age-related differences in immediate memory using SIMPLE

In the SIMPLE model (Scale Invariant Memory and Perceptual Learning), performance on memory tasks is determined by the locations of items in multidimensional space, and better performance is associated with having fewer close neighbors. Unlike most previous simulations with SIMPLE, the ones reported here used measured, rather than assumed, dimensional values. The data to be modeled come from an experiment in which younger and older adults recalled lists of acoustically confusable and nonconfusable items. A multidimensional scaling solution based on the memory confusions was obtained. SIMPLE accounted for the overall difference in performance both between the two age groups and, within each age group, the overall difference between acoustically confusable and nonconfusable items in terms of the MDS coordinates. Moreover, the model accounted for the serial position functions and error gradients. Finally, the generality of the model’s account was examined by fitting data from an already published study. The data and the modeling support the hypothesis that older adults’ memory may be worse, in part, because of altered representations due to age-related auditory perceptual deficits

Modeling lexical decision : the form of frequency and diversity effects

What is the root cause of word frequency effects on lexical decision times? W. S. Murray and K. I. Forster (2004) argued that such effects are linear in rank frequency, consistent with a serial search model of lexical access. In this article, the authors (a) describe a method of testing models of such effects that takes into account the possibility of parametric overfitting; (b) illustrate the effect of corpus choice on estimates of rank frequency; (c) give derivations of nine functional forms as predictions of models of lexical decision; (d) detail the assessment of these models and the rank model against existing data regarding the functional form of frequency effects; and (e) report further assessments using contextual diversity, a factor confounded with word frequency. The relationship between the occurrence distribution of words and lexical decision latencies to those words does not appear compatible with the rank hypothesis, undermining the case for serial search models of lexical access. Three transformations of contextual diversity based on extensions of instance models do, however, remain as plausible explanations of the effect

Methods of testing and diagnosing model error : dual and single route cascaded models of reading aloud

Models of visual word recognition have been assessed by both factorial and regression approaches. Factorial approaches tend to provide a relatively weak test of models, and regression approaches give little indication of the sources of models’ mispredictions, especially when parameters are not optimal. A new alternative method, involving regression on model error, combines these two approaches with parameter optimization. The method is illustrated with respect to the dual route cascaded model of reading aloud. In contrast to previous investigations, this method provides clear evidence that there are parameter-independent problems with the model, and identifies two specific sources of misprediction made by model

Metabolism impacts upon Candida immunogenicity and pathogenicity at multiple levels

Copyright © 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.. All rights reserved. Open Access funded by Wellcome TrustNon peer reviewedPublisher PD