Background: With the increasing use of health apps and ongoing concerns regarding their safety, effectiveness, and data privacy, numerous health app quality assessment frameworks have emerged. However, assessment initiatives experience difficulties scaling, and there is currently no comprehensive, consistent, internationally recognized assessment framework. Therefore, health apps often need to undergo several quality evaluations to enter different markets, leading to duplication of work.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFConservation havens free of invasive predators are increasingly relied upon for fauna conservation, although havened populations can lose anti-predator traits, likely making them less suitable for life 'beyond the fence'. Sustaining low levels of mammalian predator pressure inside havens may prevent the loss of anti-predator traits from havened populations. We opportunistically compared behavioural and morphological anti-predator traits between four woylie () populations- one haven isolated from all mammalian predators, one haven containing a native mammalian predator (chuditch; ), and their respective non-havened counterparts (each containing both chuditch and invasive predators).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjectives: We tested a previously developed clinical prediction tool-a nomogram consisting of four patient measures (lower patient-expected benefit, lower patient-reported knee function, greater knee varus angle and severe medial knee radiological degeneration) that were related to poor response to non-surgical management of knee osteoarthritis. This study sought to prospectively evaluate the predictive validity of this nomogram to identify patients most likely to respond poorly to non-surgical management of knee osteoarthritis.
Design: Multisite prospective longitudinal study.
Disease and parasitism cause major welfare, environmental and economic concerns for global aquaculture. In this review, we examine the status and potential of technologies that exploit genetic variation in host resistance to tackle this problem. We argue that there is an urgent need to improve understanding of the genetic mechanisms involved, leading to the development of tools that can be applied to boost host resistance and reduce the disease burden.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPests often evolve resistance to pest controls used in agriculture and aquaculture. The rate of pest adaptation is influenced by the type of control, the selective pressure it imposes, and the gene flow between farms. By understanding how these factors influence evolution at the metapopulation level, pest management strategies that prevent resistance from evolving can be developed.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFRheumatoid arthritis (RA) is a systemic autoimmune and inflammatory disease. Plasma biomarkers are critical for understanding disease mechanisms, treatment effects, and diagnosis. Mass spectrometry-based proteomics is a powerful tool for unbiased biomarker discovery.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Theory predicts that the level of escalation in animal contests is associated with the value of the contested resource. This fundamental prediction has been empirically confirmed by studies of dyadic contests but has not been tested experimentally in the collective context of group-living animals. Here, we used the Australian meat ant Iridomyrmex purpureus as a model and employed a novel field experimental manipulation of the value of food that removes the potentially confounding effects of nutritional status of the competing individual workers.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Mammals, globally, are facing population declines. Protecting and breeding threatened populations inside predator-free havens and translocating them back to the wild is commonly viewed as a solution. These approaches can expose predator-naïve animals to predators they have never encountered and as a result, many conservation projects have failed due to the predation of individuals that lacked appropriate anti-predator responses.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe efficient delivery of lysosomes is essential for many cell functions, such as the degradation of unwanted intracellular components by autophagy and the killing and digestion of extracellular microbes within phagosomes. Using the amoeba , we find that cells lacking Katnip (Katanin interacting protein) have a general defect in lysosomal delivery and although they make autophagosomes and phagosomes correctly, cells are then unable to digest them. Katnip is largely unstudied yet highly conserved across evolution.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMammal declines across northern Australia are one of the major biodiversity loss events occurring globally. There has been no regional assessment of the implications of these species declines for genomic diversity. To address this, we conducted a species-wide assessment of genomic diversity in the northern quoll (Dasyurus hallucatus), an Endangered marsupial carnivore.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPietraszewski provides a compelling case that representations of certain interaction-types are the "cognitive primitives" that allow all tokens of to be represented within the mind. Here, I argue that the folk concept GROUP encodes shared intentions and goals as more central than these interaction-types, and that providing a computational theory of social groups will be more difficult than Pietraszewski envisages.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFGene drives that skew sex ratios offer a new management tool to suppress or eradicate pest populations. Early models and empirical work suggest that these suppression drives can completely eradicate well-mixed populations, but models that incorporate stochasticity and space (i.e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe global spread of multidrug-resistant infections urgently calls for the identification of novel drug targets. We solved the electron cryo-microscopy structure of the FF-adenosine 5'-triphosphate (ATP) synthase from in three distinct conformational states. The nucleotide-converting F subcomplex reveals a specific self-inhibition mechanism, which supports a unidirectional ratchet mechanism to avoid wasteful ATP consumption.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFA puzzling feature of paradigmatic cases of dehumanization is that the perpetrators often attribute uniquely human traits to their victims. This has become known as the "paradox of dehumanization." I address the paradox by arguing that the perpetrators think about their victims as human in one sense, while denying that they are human in another sense.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: This is a prospective cohort study of partial breast reconstruction (PBR) with a lateral chest wall perforator flap (LCWPF) to facilitate breast conservation surgery (BCS) for women undergoing surgery for breast cancer. The study was undertaken to study the clinical and cancer outcomes.
Methods: Patients diagnosed with ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS) or breast cancer who consented to undergo BCS with PBR with LCWPF were included in the study.
The evolution of pest resistance to management strategies is a major challenge for farmed systems. Mitigating the effects of pest adaptation requires identifying the selective pressures imposed by these strategies. In Atlantic salmon () aquaculture, barriers are used to prevent salmon louse () larvae (copepodids) from entering salmon cages.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMembrane proteins account for a quarter of cellular proteins, and most are synthesised at the endoplasmic reticulum (ER). Insertion and folding of polypeptides in the membrane environment is prone to error, necessitating diverse quality control systems. Recent discoveries have demonstrated how forces act on the nascent chain during insertion, and revealed new translocon components and accessories that facilitate the correct biogenesis of substrates.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe arrival of novel predators can trigger trophic cascades driven by shifts in prey numbers. Predators also elicit behavioral change in prey populations, via phenotypic plasticity and/or rapid evolution, and such changes may also contribute to trophic cascades. Here, we document rapid demographic and behavioral changes in populations of a prey species (grassland melomys Melomys burtoni, a granivorous rodent) following the introduction of a novel marsupial predator (northern quoll Dasyurus hallucatus).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCultural adaptation is one means by which conservationists may help populations adapt to threats. A learned behavior may protect an individual from a threat, and the behavior can be transmitted horizontally (within generations) and vertically (between generations), rapidly conferring population-level protection. Although possible in theory, it remains unclear whether such manipulations work in a conservation setting; what conditions are required for them to work; and how they might affect the evolutionary process.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Non-surgical multidisciplinary management is often the first pathway of care for patients with chronic low back pain (LBP). This study explores if patient characteristics recorded at the initial service examination have an association with a poor response to this pathway of care in an advanced practice physiotherapist-led tertiary service.
Methods: Two hundred and forty nine patients undergoing non-surgical multidisciplinary management for their LBP across 8 tertiary public hospitals in Queensland, Australia participated in this prospective longitudinal study.
Protein synthesis is an energetically costly, complex and risky process. Aberrant protein biogenesis can result in cellular toxicity and disease, with membrane-embedded proteins being particularly challenging for the cell. In order to protect the cell from consequences of defects in membrane proteins, quality control systems act to maintain protein homeostasis.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjectives: To explore patient characteristics recorded at the initial consultation associated with a poor response to non-surgical multidisciplinary management of knee osteoarthritis (KOA) in tertiary care.
Design: Prospective multisite longitudinal study.
Setting: Advanced practice physiotherapist-led multidisciplinary orthopaedic service within eight tertiary hospitals.
The evolution of pesticide resistance has driven renewed interest in non-chemical pest controls in agriculture. Spatial manipulations (physical barriers and fallowing, for example) can be an effective method of prevention, but these too might impose selection and cause rapid adaptation in pests. In salmon aquaculture, various non-chemical approaches have emerged to combat parasitic salmon lice (Lepeophtheirus salmonis) - a major pest with clear signs of evolved chemical resistance.
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