Many individuals experience traumatic and stressful events, but very few develop post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Research focused on people with PTSD and trauma-exposed healthy controls has examined how learning and memory processes may be associated with PTSD symptoms. While there is a growing literature focused on factors associated with PTSD development, fewer studies investigate relationships between stressful event exposure and learning and memory processes in healthy individuals. We aimed to study relationships between stressful event exposure, PTSD symptoms, and neural activity underlying performance during a fear extinction recall task.
Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome-Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), the strain of coronavirus that has caused the COVID-19 pandemic, emerged from Wuhan, China, in December 2019. The pandemic has raised significant social, psychological and economic concerns in addition to direct medical issues. The novelty of the virus presents unprecedented challenges for healthcare systems around the world to identify effective drugs for prevention and treatment. Currently, there are no proven vaccines or therapeutic agents against the virus. While current therapies include supportive care such as the use of supplemental oxygen and mechanical ventilatory support, a pressing demand for effective treatment of COVID-19 still exists.
Infections may spread indirectly when an infected person touches an object (i.e., fomite) leaving behind a pathogen that is picked up by the next person to touch that object. Fitness centers offer a unique opportunity for investigating fomite transmission of pathogenic bacteria, because these facilities are used by persons with varying levels of personal hygiene routinely sharing equipment via frequent and direct surface-to-skin contact. Previous studies of this phenomenon have investigated too few species, and/or failed to differentiate pathogenic or antibiotic resistant bacteria from non-pathogenic or antibiotic susceptible bacteria. The aims of this study were to survey fitness equipment for the presence of World Health Organization (WHO) priority pathogens and to test the hypothesis that fitness equipment are hosts to an abundance of pathogenic and antibiotic resistant bacteria.
This paper demonstrates the impact of Co Flow Jets (CFJ) on airfoil performance. CFJ airfoils are an active airfoil performance enhancing method which uses injection and suction on the airfoil leeward side. Our research shows that better lift augmentation, higher stall angle and drag reduction is achieved when the injection point of the jet is located close to the point of maximum thickness. This method provides superior performance compared to passive augmenting methods and can be integrated with unified jet-based lift and thrust systems. We analyzed CFJ airfoils based on NACA 2414 by varying location of injection slots on the airfoil.
Popular elections may be conducted using a wide variety of algorithms, each of which aims to produce a winner reflective, in some way, of the general consensus of the voters. Despite the common objective, electoral algorithms may produce a different winner given the same underlying set of voters and voter preferences. In this study, we characterize the likelihood that two common electoral algorithms, the Plurality algorithm and the Instant-Runoff Voting (IRV) algorithm, produce concordant winners as a function of the underlying dispersion of voter preferences.
Weight loss failure is driven by dietary lapses, i.e., instances of non-adherence to a dietary prescription. Lapses can occur when an individual eats a larger portion than intended, a type of food intended to be avoided, or food at an unintended time. It is important to identify determinants of dietary lapses to tailor weight loss treatment. Higher implicit preference for high-calorie, hedonic food may be a predictor of each of these lapse types. The aim of the study was to examine if baseline implicit preference for high-calorie food is positively associated with large portion, unintended food, and unintended time dietary lapses.
Prostate cancer is the second most prevalent cancer in men and one of the leading causes of mortality globally. Therefore, clinical prostate cancer therapy requires better prognosis and treatment methods. Research on proteomics has enhanced the understanding of the processes underlying tumorigenesis, cancer cell migration, and metastasis. Considering that proteins are the drivers of most cellular responses and the targets for drug delivery, a methodical analysis of the proteome alterations taking place during the initiation and development of prostate cancer might lead to scientific breakthroughs. This review is a systematic literature search to retrieve primary research articles related to prostate cancer proteomics disease mechanisms and aims to discuss and compare current proteomics methods in both the clinical and research context.
Fetal alcohol exposure (FAE) in humans may lead to a lifetime of developmental deficits ranging from mild to severe. These defects are largely dependent on timing and consistency of alcohol exposure. The majority of FAE experiments examine moderate to heavy alcohol exposure, while fewer studies examine responses to lower levels of alcohol consumption on development. Here, we tested the effects of relatively mild ethanol exposure on development, behavior, and hormone levels in Northern Leopard Frog (Lithobates pipiens) tadpoles.
Cancer is a leading cause of high mortality rates around the world. Many scientists have explored anticancer peptides (ACPs), which are peptides with anti-tumor activity that can be safer than conventional drugs due to high activity coupled with high selectivity and delivery control. However, current in vitro methods of discovery are both time-consuming and expensive. This study aims to use modern machine learning tools to discover new ACP candidates.
Huanglongbing (HLB) is the most severe citrus disease in the world, caused by the phloem-restricted bacteria Candidatus Liberibacter asiaticus. It has decimated the previously $9 billion citrus industry in Florida, reducing turnover to $3.28 billion as of 2018. Treatment must reach phloem to be effective, which is extremely challenging. This work reports the design, fabrication, and testing of an innovative, minimally invasive mechanical delivery system that can transport therapeutics to HLB-affected trees. We demonstrate direct delivery to phloem using a 3D-printed microneedle array affixed onto a mechanical applicator to realize the microneedle array applicator system (µNAAS)
The anchoring effect is the phenomenon by which prior exposure to a value affects future estimates by “anchoring” individuals’ estimates to the originally presented value. In our study we wanted to explore how a time delay and variation in processing depth might impact the magnitude of the anchoring effect in the context of interpreting data on glacial melting rates. The experiment resulted in a significant anchoring effect, but no significant differences across conditions of delay or processing depth. We believe our study continues the work of past applied anchoring research, asking important questions regarding the influence of falsified data, and how the magnitude of anchoring might differ between groups with different established social beliefs.
How living organisms adapt to a changing world is a fundamental question of biology. Whereas natural selection makes organisms adapted to their environment by changing the genetic make-up of populations across generations, individual organisms adapt to changes in their immediate environment by altering how their genetic material is used and regulated. Plants make studying this process easy, as all their biology changes in accordance with the seasons. The mainstay of such research has involved measuring which genes are being turned on and off in different environmental contexts and relating their functions to survival, but genes can not only change their expression to meet environmental challenges but also diversify their products by a process called alternative splicing. Here we reanalyse the largest existing gene expression dataset for the well-studied plant Arabidopsis to give one of the most comprehensive descriptions of how alternative splicing changes across seasons.
This paper focuses on minimal risk strategies for tournament-style No-Limit Texas Hold’em. We write linear programs which provide a set of requirements for a conservative player to follow so that a favorable outcome is obtained. We also model strategies by constructing stack functions, which map a strategy to its expected outcome. We prove various properties of stack functions, which provide evidence in support of the conjecture that the minimal risk strategy corresponds to the line segment connecting (0,yo) to (n,A), where yo is the initial number of chips a player has in the tournament, and A is the desired amount of chips a player has at the end of the tournament.
Parkinson’s disease is the second most common neurodegenerative disorder, affecting nearly 1 million people in the US and is predicted to keep increasing. Parkinson’s disease is difficult to diagnose due to the similarity with other diseases that share the parkinsonian symptoms, thus increasing the probabilities of misdiagnosis. Therefore, it is relevant to develop diagnostic tools that are quantitatively based and monitoring tools that will improve the patient’s quality of life. Computer-based assessment systems have shown to be successful in this field through diverse approaches that can be classified in two main categories: sensor-based and computer vision-based systems. In this article a comprehensive review is performed to analyze the different approaches taken; moreover, their challenges and future perspectives are discussed.
Metabolic engineers use technology and ways of thinking from traditional science and engineering disciplines as well as the emergent field of synthetic biology to genetically manipulate cellular metabolic pathways for applications in medicine, energy, the environment, and more. Two important challenges to successful metabolic engineering are how to optimize the metabolic output and how to make products that are toxic to cells. Our research addressed these challenges with the development of a new strategy for the selection of optimal genotypes for enzyme production and the use of microfluidic droplets for cell-free protein synthesis. We focused on a prototype metabolic reaction by which caffeine demethylase converts caffeine into theophylline, and used a ribozyme-riboswitch that cleaves itself upon binding theophylline as the basis for selection of genetic regulatory elements that most efficiently produce caffeine demethylase.
The gastrocnemius muscle is the main muscle in the calf that flexes the foot and knee, and partially generates force during a jump. A muscle’s contractile force can be influenced by many factors including muscle thickness, the angle between the muscle body and the muscle fibers (pennation angle), and the length of the muscle fibers. During contraction, the fascicles shorten and rotate to greater pennation angles to generate force for movement. While much is known about the behavior and force generation of individual muscles, it’s less clear how the orientation of the muscle in relation to other bones and muscles affects the generation of force during contraction. Therefore, the focus of this experiment was to determine the orientation, or angle, of the gastrocnemius that would generate the greatest contractile force when stimulated. Four different orientations of the frog gastrocnemius were used to determine which generated the greatest contractile force. In this experiment, we assessed the contractile force generated across leg configurations that would occur during a jump. The muscle was stimulated with an electrode and force from muscle contraction was measured using a force transducer. The results from the overall model showed no significant differences in contractile force among the positions tested (p = 0.071). Using this information can help us understand how frogs generate such great contractile forces. This would be beneficial to understanding the mechanisms underlying jumping in this species, as well as inform future research about contractile force and kinematics that occur during jumping in other species.
Cystic Fibrosis (CF) is a genetic disease that affects the thickness of digestive fluids, mucus, and sweat, which often leads to obstructions in body organs ducts. The most common CF mutation is the removal of amino acid phenylalanine at position 508 (deltaF508) on the CFTR gene. On CFTR, there are variants of uncertain significance (VUS) as well as classified variations that may cause similarly negative effects. The missense point variations Q493P, W496R, G500D, and Y515C were VUS when this research project began. The aim of this study was to classify them as harmful, neutral, or beneficial. These variations are non-conservative, meaning that there is a change in the biochemical properties between substituted and original amino acids. A drastic change in the biochemical properties might be detrimental to protein folding and functionality. The variants were assessed through the “sequence-to-structure-to-function” workflow developed by the Prokop lab. Data gathered from several databases were used to determine the variants’ impact on CFTR function by comparing them to all known variants as of October 2019.
