PSCD Domains of Pleuralin-1 from the Diatom Cylindrotheca fusiformis: NMR Structures and Interactions with Other Biosilica-Associated Proteins.

Diatoms are eukaryotic unicellular algae characterized by silica cell walls and associated with three unique protein families, the pleuralins, frustulins, and silaffins. The NMR structure of the PSCD4 domain of pleuralin-1 from Cylindrotheca fusiformis contains only three short helical elements and is stabilized by five unique disulfide bridges. PSCD4 contains two binding sites for Ca(2+) ions with millimolar affinity.

Midlife Risk Factors for Impaired Physical and Cognitive Functioning at Older Ages: A Cohort Study.

Background: Previous studies examined midlife risk factors separately for old-age impaired physical and cognitive functioning. We determined the overlap of risk factors for both domains of functioning within the same setting.

Methods: Biological and behavioral risk factors at age 50 years and cognitive and physical functioning were assessed 18 (SD = 5) years later in the Whitehall II study (N = 6,316).

Development of a novel walkability index for London, United Kingdom: cross-sectional application to the Whitehall II Study.

Background: Physical activity is essential for health; walking is the easiest way to incorporate activity into everyday life. Previous studies report positive associations between neighbourhood walkability and walking but most focused on cities in North America and Australasia. Urban form with respect to street connectivity, residential density and land use mix-common components of walkability indices-differs in European cities.

Social factors and cardiovascular morbidity.

Recent progress in population health at aggregate level, measured by life expectancy, has been accompanied by lack of progress in reducing the difference in health prospects between groups defined by social status. Cardiovascular disease is an important contributor to this undesirable situation. The stepwise gradient of higher risk with lower status is accounted for partly by social gradients in health behaviors.

On distributed wavefront reconstruction for large-scale adaptive optics systems.

The distributed-spline-based aberration reconstruction (D-SABRE) method is proposed for distributed wavefront reconstruction with applications to large-scale adaptive optics systems. D-SABRE decomposes the wavefront sensor domain into any number of partitions and solves a local wavefront reconstruction problem on each partition using multivariate splines. D-SABRE accuracy is within 1% of a global approach with a speedup that scales quadratically with the number of partitions.

Dietary pattern, inflammation and cognitive decline: The Whitehall II prospective cohort study.

Background & Aims: Low-grade inflammation appears to play an etiological role in cognitive decline. However the association between an inflammatory dietary pattern and cognitive decline has not been investigated. We aimed to investigate dietary patterns associated with inflammation and whether such diet is associated with cognitive decline.

Comparison of food and nutrient intakes between cohorts of the HAPIEE and Whitehall II studies.

Background: Differences in dietary habits have been suggested as an important reason for the large health gap between Eastern and Western European populations. Few studies have compared individual-level nutritional data directly between the two regions. This study addresses this hypothesis by comparing food, drink and nutrient intakes in four large population samples.

Mediterranean diet score and total and cardiovascular mortality in Eastern Europe: the HAPIEE study.

Purpose: Mediterranean-type dietary pattern has been associated with lower risk of cardiovascular (CVD) and other chronic diseases, primarily in Southern European populations. We examined whether Mediterranean diet score (MDS) is associated with total, CVD, coronary heart disease (CHD) and stroke mortality in a prospective cohort study in three Eastern European populations.

Methods: A total of 19,333 male and female participants of the Health Alcohol and Psychosocial factors in Eastern Europe (HAPIEE) study in the Czech Republic, Poland and the Russian Federation were included in the analysis.

Inline radiofrequency pre-coagulation simplifies single-incision laparoscopic minor liver resection.

Background: Single-incision laparoscopy (SIL) has been developed to reduce surgical trauma, whereas technical difficulties in bleeding control limit the broad acceptance for hepatectomy. A novel minimized invasive strategy combining inline radiofrequency pre-coagulation and transumbilical SIL is presented herein.

Methods: A cohort of 21 selected patients underwent transumbilical SIL hepatectomies (segmentectomies II-VI) utilizing inline radiofrequency pre-coagulation for hepatic transection (Habib 4X).

Insight into the Supramolecular Architecture of Intact Diatom Biosilica from DNP-Supported Solid-State NMR Spectroscopy.

Diatom biosilica is an inorganic/organic hybrid with interesting properties. The molecular architecture of the organic material at the atomic and nanometer scale has so far remained unknown, in particular for intact biosilica. A DNP-supported ssNMR approach assisted by microscopy, MS, and MD simulations was applied to study the structural organization of intact biosilica.

Associations of sitting behaviours with all-cause mortality over a 16-year follow-up: the Whitehall II study.

Background: Sitting behaviours have been linked with increased risk of all-cause mortality independent of moderate to vigorous physical activity (MVPA). Previous studies have tended to examine single indicators of sitting or all sitting behaviours combined. This study aims to enhance the evidence base by examining the type-specific prospective associations of four different sitting behaviours as well as total sitting with the risk of all-cause mortality.

Biological Chitin-MOF Composites with Hierarchical Pore Systems for Air-Filtration Applications.

Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) are promising materials for gas-separation and air-filtration applications. However, for these applications, MOF crystallites need to be incorporated in robust and manageable support materials. We used chitin-based networks from a marine sponge as a non-toxic, biodegradable, and low-weight support material for MOF deposition.

Underweight as a risk factor for respiratory death in the Whitehall cohort study: exploring reverse causality using a 45-year follow-up.

Underweight adults have higher rates of respiratory death than the normal weight but it is unclear whether this association is causal or reflects illness-induced weight loss (reverse causality). Evidence from a 45-year follow-up of underweight participants for respiratory mortality in the Whitehall study (N=18 823; 2139 respiratory deaths) suggests that excess risk among the underweight is attributable to reverse causality. The age-adjusted and smoking-adjusted risk was 1.

Cooperative target mRNA destabilization and translation inhibition by miR-58 microRNA family in C. elegans.

In animals, microRNAs frequently form families with related sequences. The functional relevance of miRNA families and the relative contribution of family members to target repression have remained, however, largely unexplored. Here, we used the Caenorhabditis elegans miR-58 miRNA family, composed primarily of the four highly abundant members miR-58.

Association of Cardiometabolic Multimorbidity With Mortality.

Importance: The prevalence of cardiometabolic multimorbidity is increasing.

Objective: To estimate reductions in life expectancy associated with cardiometabolic multimorbidity.

Design, Setting, And Participants: Age- and sex-adjusted mortality rates and hazard ratios (HRs) were calculated using individual participant data from the Emerging Risk Factors Collaboration (689,300 participants; 91 cohorts; years of baseline surveys: 1960-2007; latest mortality follow-up: April 2013; 128,843 deaths).

Structural and functional measures of social relationships and quality of life among older adults: does chronic disease status matter?

Purpose: To evaluate the relative importance of structural and functional social relationships for quality of life (QoL) and the extent to which diagnosed chronic disease modifies these associations.

Methods: Multivariate linear regression was used to investigate time-lagged associations between structural and functional measures of social relationships and QoL assessed 5 years apart by CASP-19, in 5925 Whitehall II participants (mean age 61, SD 6.0).

Adiposity, obesity, and arterial aging: longitudinal study of aortic stiffness in the Whitehall II cohort.

We sought to determine whether adiposity in later midlife is an independent predictor of accelerated stiffening of the aorta. Whitehall II study participants (3789 men; 1383 women) underwent carotid-femoral applanation tonometry at the mean age of 66 and again 4 years later. General adiposity by body mass index, central adiposity by waist circumference and waist:hip ratio, and fat mass percent by body impedance were assessed 5 years before and at baseline.

A wild bootstrap approach for the selection of biomarkers in early diagnostic trials.

Background: In early diagnostic trials, particularly in biomarker studies, the aim is often to select diagnostic tests among several methods. In case of metric, discrete, or even ordered categorical data, the area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve (denoted by AUC) is an appropriate overall accuracy measure for the selection, because the AUC is independent of cut-off points.

Methods: For selection of biomarkers the individual AUC's are compared with a pre-defined threshold.

Can nutrient profiling help to identify foods which diet variety should be encouraged? Results from the Whitehall II cohort.

Higher variety of recommended foods, identified arbitrarily based on dietary guidelines, has been associated with better health status. Nutrient profiling is designed to identify objectively, based on nutrient content, healthier foods whose consumption should be encouraged. The objective was to assess the prospective associations between total food variety (food variety score, FVS) and variety from selected recommended and non-recommended foods (RFV and NRFV, respectively) and risk of chronic disease and mortality.

Tinned fruit consumption and mortality in three prospective cohorts.

Dietary recommendations to promote health include fresh, frozen and tinned fruit, but few studies have examined the health benefits of tinned fruit. We therefore studied the association between tinned fruit consumption and mortality. We followed up participants from three prospective cohorts in the United Kingdom: 22,421 participants from the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition (EPIC)-Norfolk cohort (1993-2012), 52,625 participants from the EPIC-Oxford cohort (1993-2012), and 7440 participants from the Whitehall II cohort (1991-2012), all reporting no history of heart attack, stroke, or cancer when entering these studies.

Programmed evolution for optimization of orthogonal metabolic output in bacteria.

Current use of microbes for metabolic engineering suffers from loss of metabolic output due to natural selection. Rather than combat the evolution of bacterial populations, we chose to embrace what makes biological engineering unique among engineering fields - evolving materials. We harnessed bacteria to compute solutions to the biological problem of metabolic pathway optimization.

Comparison of clinical vignettes and standardized patients as measures of physiotherapists' activity and work recommendations in patients with non-specific low back pain.

Objective: To validate clinical vignettes as a measure of physiotherapists' activity and work recommendations given to patients with non-specific low back pain.

Design: Validation study comparing two methods for measuring aspects of health providers' clinical management: Clinical vignettes and unannounced visits of standardized patients (the gold standard).

Setting: Outpatient physiotherapy clinics.

(1)H-(13)C-(29)Si triple resonance and REDOR solid-state NMR-A tool to study interactions between biosilica and organic molecules in diatom cell walls.

Triple resonance solid-state NMR experiments using the spin combination (1)H-(13)C-(29)Si are still rarely found in the literature. This is due to the low natural abundance of the two heteronuclei. Such experiments are, however, increasingly important to study hybrid materials such as biosilica and others.