Investigating stress response across integrated biological systems

The impact that a stressor has on a living system, whether it is on a cellular, organ, or even a whole organism level, can affect the overall health of the system. Monitoring the biochemical response resulting from a stressful experience offers insight into the numerous potential outcomes ranging on the spectrum of survival and death. Accessing this information not only provides a heightened understanding of the biochemical adaptions that occur, but also allows for the development of prediction models (to assess prospective influences of the stressor) or potential therapeutic treatments (to alleviate adverse effects) using measurable, quantifiable, and comparable metrics. It is, however, a continuing effort to decipher the results as these detected responses can be complex, and furthermore extremely context specific. Biochemical patterns can be biased by the many discrepancies in the types, degrees, and frequencies of stressors, time points at which the responses are measured, the biological matrix that is assessed, and even the selected cohort of targets. The work of this dissertation observed intracellular (i.e. protein expression, phosphorylation modifications), extracellular (i.e. cytokine), and hormonal (cortisol, ACTH) responses, following exposures to a variety of physical, social, and environmental stressors. A series of statistical treatments, including network centrality parameter analyses, were implemented to dissect these complex datasets. The findings suggested that the changes in the measured biochemical responses - triggered by certain stressors - could be distinguished among different degrees of experienced stress, as well as different time points of measurement. The overarching objective of this research and of all future related research is to bring insight into the complex biological response system and demonstrate how particular stressors can prompt discrete trends. Overall, there appears to be potential value in monitoring biochemical alterations to describe the stress response

Repeated-reading-based instructional strategy and vocabulary acquisition: A case study of a heritage speaker of Chinese

Repeated reading, a procedure involving repetition of the same text, has received copious attention from first language reading research providing highly converging evidence of its potency for reading fluency, accuracy, and comprehension. In contrast, second language research on repeated reading has been scarce. The very few studies extant have, nevertheless, shown similar, albeit inconclusive, findings. The present study was an attempt to foray into a hitherto uncharted area in both first and second language research, by investigating vocabulary gains from implementing a set of repeated-reading-based pedagogical and learning procedures. Using one heritage speaker of Chinese as its subject, the study administered 20 sessions of assisted repeated reading over three weeks. Results indicated both intentional and incidental vocabulary gains that would not otherwise have been possible through conventional reading or vocabulary instruction

Integrating Food Policy with Growing Health and Wellness Concerns: An Analytical Literature Review of the Issues Affecting Government, Industry, and Civil Society

Over the past few years, there has been growing global interest in the link between food and health. This paper provides a review of some of the recent literature describing these linkages. The first section provides an overview of findings that link the consumption of fruits and vegetables, meat, eggs, whole-grains, alcohol, sugar, dairy, fish, pulses, soy, and nuts to coronary heart disease, cancer, stroke, and diabetes. The authors then summarize various international and domestic non-government organizations' views about these issues. The third section centres on the food industry and its responses to growing health concerns. The fourth section is an overview of public policy relating to food and health, including the use of food policy to change consumption behaviour and address obesity. This section also includes a discussion of the relevance of policies designed to discourage smoking to the current debate on obesity. The Conclusion highlights ways in which Canadian food policy can be adapted in order to better promote health and wellness.Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety, Health Economics and Policy, Agribusiness,

Comparison of Vaginal Misoprostol and Oral Misoprostol for promoting Cervical Ripening and Inducing labor

Background: Labor induction is the stimulation of the uterus to contract before labor begins to have a vaginal birth through the use of medications. Labor induction in the later stages of pregnancy is used to prevent complications when the mother or baby is at risk. Medications such as misoprostol (Cytotec) are used in inductions for cervical ripening to allow smoother dilation. Ripening the cervix is a method used to help soften and thin out the cervix to facilitate childbirth. The benefit of using misoprostol is that it can be administered several routes including oral, vaginal, sublingual and buccal. Induction of labor is a life-saving intervention that can reduce adverse outcomes. Purpose: This systematic literature review aims to determine the most effective route of administration of misoprostol to successfully induce labor in term pregnant women. Methods: The PRISMA flow diagram was followed to obtain results. A literature search was conducted using resources including PubMed and EBSCO Information Services as well as specific internet searches. Filters were applied to limit retrievals to only randomized control trials, controlled clinical trials, and experimental studies. Other inclusion criteria were the administration of oral misoprostol, vaginal misoprostol, buccal misoprostol, or sublingual misoprostol, a non-scarred uterus, gestational weeks ≥ 37, English language, and healthcare data from the year 2017 to present. The Johns Hopkins Evidence-Based Practice Model was used for an appraisal process to select twenty articles to be used in our review. Preliminary results suggest the vaginal route is more effective than oral misoprostol in performing successful labor inductions in the shortest amount of time. Results: Final results will be presented at the symposiu

Generating and protecting against adversarial attacks for deep speech-based emotion recognition models

A paper in ICASSP 202

T Oligo-Primed Polymerase Chain Reaction (TOP-PCR): A Robust Method for the Amplification of Minute DNA Fragments in Body Fluids.

Body fluid DNA sequencing is a powerful noninvasive approach for the diagnosis of genetic defects, infectious agents and diseases. The success relies on the quantity and quality of the DNA samples. However, numerous clinical samples are either at low quantity or of poor quality due to various reasons. To overcome these problems, we have developed T oligo-primed polymerase chain reaction (TOP-PCR) for full-length nonselective amplification of minute quantity of DNA fragments. TOP-PCR adopts homogeneous "half adaptor" (HA), generated by annealing P oligo (carrying a phosphate group at the 5' end) and T oligo (carrying a T-tail at the 3' end), for efficient ligation to target DNA and subsequent PCR amplification primed by the T oligo alone. Using DNA samples from body fluids, we demonstrate that TOP-PCR recovers minute DNA fragments and maintains the DNA size profile, while enhancing the major molecular populations. Our results also showed that TOP-PCR is a superior method for detecting apoptosis and outperforms the method adopted by Illumina for DNA amplification