Wellness incentives in the workplace: cost savings through cost shifting to unhealthy workers.

The Affordable Care Act encourages workplace wellness programs, chiefly by promoting programs that reward employees for changing health-related behavior or improving measurable health outcomes. Recognizing the risk that unhealthy employees might be punished rather than helped by such programs, the act also forbids health-based discrimination. We reviewed results of randomized controlled trials and identified challenges for workplace wellness programs to function as the act intends.

Design of functional ferritin-like proteins with hydrophobic cavities.

Ferritin four-helix bundle subunits self-assemble to create a stable multimer with a large central hydrophilic cavity where metal ions bind. To explore the versatility of this reaction vessel, computational design was used to generate cavities with increasingly apolar surface areas inside a dodecameric ferritin-like protein, Dps. Cavity mutants, in which as many as 120 surface accessible hydrophilic residues were replaced with hydrophobic amino acids, were shown to still assemble properly using size-exclusion chromatography and dynamic light scattering measurements.