Teaching and Learning Amidst Difference and Diversity

This paper considered classroom management strategies for working with diverse, multicultural groups of students in higher education settings

The Iowa Homemaker vol.40, no.1

As Others See Us, Tom Emmerson, Beth Lambeth and Sue Guernsey, page 6 China Cues for Smart Shoppers, Doris Post, page 8 Reflections of You, Sylvia Noid, page 9 Campus Tours, Inc., Patty Anderson, page 10 Child Development Experts Study “Multiple Mother” Effects, Carol Calhoon, page 11 Behind the TV Camera, Carolynn DeLay, page 12 Gray Meals, One Subject of Food Technology, Mary Ellen Muckenhirn, page 14 Coed Chooses Spring Fashion’s Fancy, Laveda Jansonius, page 17 Expand Your World, Marty Keeney, page 18 RAIN, Diane Houser, page 21 What’s Going On?, Carol Shellenbarger, page 2

Protecting Human and Animal Health: The Road from Animal Models to New Approach Methods

Animals and animal models have been invaluable for our current understanding of human and animal biology, including physiology, pharmacology, biochemistry, and disease pathology. However, there are increasing concerns with continued use of animals in basic biomedical, pharmacological, and regulatory research to provide safety assessments for drugs and chemicals. There are concerns that animals do not provide sufficient information on toxicity and/or efficacy to protect the target population, so scientists are utilizing the principles of replacement, reduction, and refinement (the 3Rs) and increasing the development and application of new approach methods (NAMs). NAMs are any technology, methodology, approach, or assay used to understand the effects and mechanisms of drugs or chemicals, with specific focus on applying the 3Rs. Although progress has been made in several areas with NAMs, complete replacement of animal models with NAMs is not yet attainable. The road to NAMs requires additional development, increased use, and, for regulatory decision making, usually formal validation. Moreover, it is likely that replacement of animal models with NAMs will require multiple assays to ensure sufficient biologic coverage. The purpose of this manuscript is to provide a balanced view of the current state of the use of animal models and NAMs as approaches to development, safety, efficacy, and toxicity testing of drugs and chemicals. Animals do not provide all needed information nor do NAMs, but each can elucidate key pieces of the puzzle of human and animal biology and contribute to the goal of protecting human and animal health. SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT: Data from traditional animal studies have predominantly been used to inform human health safety and efficacy. Although it is unlikely that all animal studies will be able to be replaced, with the continued advancement in new approach methods (NAMs), it is possible that sometime in the future, NAMs will likely be an important component by which the discovery, efficacy, and toxicity testing of drugs and chemicals is conducted and regulatory decisions are made

Developmental Neurotoxicity Study of Dietary Bisphenol A in Sprague-Dawley Rats

This study was conducted to determine the potential of bisphenol A (BPA) to induce functional and/or morphological effects to the nervous system of F1 offspring from dietary exposure during gestation and lactation according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency guidelines for the study of developmental neurotoxicity. BPA was offered to female Sprague-Dawley Crl:CD (SD) rats (24 per dose group) and their litters at dietary concentrations of 0 (control), 0.15, 1.5, 75, 750, and 2250 ppm daily from gestation day 0 through lactation day 21. F1 offspring were evaluated using the following tests: detailed clinical observations (postnatal days [PNDs] 4, 11, 21, 35, 45, and 60), auditory startle (PNDs 20 and 60), motor activity (PNDs 13, 17, 21, and 61), learning and memory using the Biel water maze (PNDs 22 and 62), and brain and nervous system neuropathology and brain morphometry (PNDs 21 and 72). For F1 offspring, there were no treatment-related neurobehavioral effects, nor was there evidence of neuropathology or effects on brain morphometry. Based on maternal and offspring body weight reductions, the no-observed-adverse-effect level (NOAEL) for systemic toxicity was 75 ppm (5.85 and 13.1 mg/kg/day during gestation and lactation, respectively), with no treatment-related effects at lower doses or nonmonotonic dose responses observed for any parameter. There was no evidence that BPA is a developmental neurotoxicant in rats, and the NOAEL for developmental neurotoxicity was 2250 ppm, the highest dose tested (164 and 410 mg/kg/day during gestation and lactation, respectively)

Antigenic Variation in Plasmodium falciparum Malaria Involves a Highly Structured Switching Pattern

Many pathogenic bacteria, fungi, and protozoa achieve chronic infection through an immune evasion strategy known as antigenic variation. In the human malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum, this involves transcriptional switching among members of the var gene family, causing parasites with different antigenic and phenotypic characteristics to appear at different times within a population. Here we use a genome-wide approach to explore this process in vitro within a set of cloned parasite populations. Our analyses reveal a non-random, highly structured switch pathway where an initially dominant transcript switches via a set of switch-intermediates either to a new dominant transcript, or back to the original. We show that this specific pathway can arise through an evolutionary conflict in which the pathogen has to optimise between safeguarding its limited antigenic repertoire and remaining capable of establishing infections in non-naïve individuals. Our results thus demonstrate a crucial role for structured switching during the early phases of infections and provide a unifying theory of antigenic variation in P. falciparum malaria as a balanced process of parasite-intrinsic switching and immune-mediated selection

Leaving the Minors : The Green Party of Aotearoa New Zealand and the 2011 General Election

The Green Party of Aotearoa New Zealand has emerged as a successful environmentally focused party with a solid base. The 2011 General Election represented a high-point for the party, distancing it from the other minor parties. This article explores examples of factors affecting the success of Green parties, and examines the strategy of the New Zealand Green Party prior to the 2011 election. The findings indicate that the party has developed stable support through the development of a consistent policy base and pragmatic approach to its role in parliament. This has allowed the Greens to establish a position following the 2011 election as the third party in New Zealand politics

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

Development of a rat myometrial cell culture system to study hormonal and toxicant effects on gap junctional communication.

Disorders of gestational length result in increased perinatal mortality and morbidity yet mechanisms regulating labor onset and toxicant effects on this process are not clear. Gap junctions (GJs), which are intercellular channels allowing diffusion of small molecules and ions between adjacent cells, increase in the myometrium immediately prior to labor onset. GJs are believed to function in parturition by providing a low-resistance pathway for signal propagation, producing synchronized uterine contractions. This research established an in vitro rat uterine smooth muscle cell system for investigating gap junctional communication (GJC). If functional GJs are critical for parturition, then hormones and reproductive toxicants known to alter labor onset or progression may do so by modulating myometrial GJC. Initially, rat myometrial cells were isolated from pregnant, midgestation (RMC-P cells) Sprague-Dawley rats. These cells had stable GJC levels under a variety of culture conditions. In these cells, 2-methoxyethanol (2-ME), a reproductive toxicant in rodents in vivo, decreased GJC through a mechanism which may involve increased membrane fluidity. Pretreatment of RMC-P cells with cholesterol, a membrane stabilizing agent, alleviated the changes seen with 2-ME alone. Although the mechanism of GJC inhibition was interesting, it is unlikely to be the sole mechanism whereby 2-ME alters labor onset, because effective doses of 2-ME in vitro were higher than those altering gestational length in vivo. To more closely mimic the in vivo situation, myometrial cell cultures (RMC-I) were obtained from immature Sprague-Dawley rats that maintained estrogen receptors (ERs) in vitro. These RMC-I cells responded as predicted to in vitro progesterone treatment by decreasing ERs; however, progesterone treatment produced only limited, although statistically significant, inhibition of GJC. Additional experiments showed that arachidonic acid, prostaglandin (PG) E\sb2, and PGF\sb{2\alpha} were all inhibitory to GJC in RMC-I cell cultures. Although differing in some ways from the in vivo situation, in vitro test systems described in this work lend themselves to more carefully controlled studies of mechanisms regulating GJ function in the myometrium.Ph.D.ToxicologyUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/103641/1/9332130.pdfDescription of 9332130.pdf : Restricted to UM users only