Utilising storytelling to reveal the untold stories of breast cancer

Breast cancer is the most commonly diagnosed female cancer in the UK(1). A 3 part workshop in August 2022 invited ≥ 20 patient participants to recount their narratives of breast cancer using storytelling. The goal of this event was to create a safe environment in which patients’ perceptions of their cancer journey could be shared and documented

Dysregulation of endothelial cell connexin-43 localisation in response to doxorubicin

Introduction: Anthracyclines, such as doxorubicin, remain an important class of chemotherapeutic agent however their efficacy in treating cancer is limited by a cumulative dose-dependent cardiotoxicity. Whilst most studies have focused on cardiomyocyte impairment, circulating doxorubicin has been shown to impact human microvascular responses to doxorubicin in coronary vessels.1 Studies show increased endothelial cell permeability resulting in increased paracellular permeability due to damage to the integrity of cell-cell junctions.2 Strategies to maintain vessel integrity and prevent endothelial cell dysregulation could represent a novel therapeutic opportunity to limit the toxic effects of doxorubicin. The aim of this project was to assess the impact of doxorubicin upon endothelial gap junction proteins, in particular connexin-43 (Cx43)

On synthetic instrument response functions of time-correlated single-photon counting based fluorescence lifetime imaging analysis

Time-correlated single-photon counting (TCSPC) has been the gold standard for fluorescence lifetime imaging (FLIM) techniques due to its high signal-to-noize ratio and high temporal resolution. The sensor system's temporal instrument response function (IRF) should be considered in the deconvolution procedure to extract the real fluorescence decay to compensate for the distortion on measured decays contributed by the system imperfections. However, to measure the instrument response function is not trivial, and the measurement setup is different from measuring the real fluorescence. On the other hand, automatic synthetic IRFs can be directly derived from the recorded decay profiles and provide appropriate accuracy. This paper proposed and examined a synthetic IRF strategy. Compared with traditional automatic synthetic IRFs, the new proposed automatic synthetic IRF shows a broader dynamic range and better accuracy. To evaluate its performance, we examined simulated data using nonlinear least square deconvolution based on both the Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm and the Laguerre expansion method for bi-exponential fluorescence decays. Furthermore, experimental FLIM data of cells were also analyzed using the proposed synthetic IRF. The results from both the simulated data and experimental FLIM data show that the proposed synthetic IRF has a better performance compared to traditional synthetic IRFs. Our work provides a faster and precise method to obtain IRF, which may find various FLIM-based applications. We also reported in which conditions a measured or a synthesized IRF can be applied

Sustainable Impact by Design

2021 is the year of COP26, (the 26th Conference of the Parties who signed an agreement to work to prevent climate change back in 1994). To mark this, the University of Strathclyde offered funds to staff that would let them talk to people about their research and how it can limit climate change. The STEM Equals Summer Scheme won funding, and so ten Strathclyde staff members were able to work with diverse young people in Ayr and Girvan over five days of STEM1 activities. This book shows some of the activities we did together, and some of the learning about their planet and sustainability that went on. As you will see in its pages, everyone involved, staff and participants alike, had a lot of fun. We also found out many new things about ourselves, our colleagues, about STEM and about our environment

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Proteinase-activated receptors (PARs)

Proteinase-activated receptors (PARs) are a unique family of G-protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) that are activated in response to serine proteinases. There are four PAR family members; PAR-1 through to PAR-4. PAR-1 and PAR-3 respond to thrombin, PAR-2 responds to trypsin, whilst PAR-4 is sensitive to both thrombin- and trypsin-related proteinases