Objectives: This study aimed to generate new qualitative insights to understand the rehabilitation needs of people living with a confirmed or presumed diagnosis of ischaemia with no obstructive coronary arteries (INOCA), explore which aspects of current cardiovascular prevention and rehabilitation programmes could meet the needs of people with INOCA and where adjustments (if any) may be appropriate.
Design: Semistructured qualitative interview study.
Participants: Interviews were undertaken (n=17; 88% female, age range 31-69 years) with people with a confirmed or presumed diagnosis of INOCA.
Diterpenoid natural products serve critical functions in plant development and ecological adaptation and many diterpenoids have economic value as bioproducts. The family of class II diterpene synthases catalyzes the committed reactions in diterpenoid biosynthesis, converting a common geranylgeranyl diphosphate precursor into different bicyclic prenyl diphosphate scaffolds. Enzymatic rearrangement and modification of these precursors generate the diversity of bioactive diterpenoids.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn an era of growing environmental, socioeconomic, and market uncertainties, understanding the adaptive strategies of smallholder farmers is paramount for sustainable agricultural productivity and environmental management efforts. We adopted a mixed-methods approach to investigate the adaptive strategies of smallholders in Northwest Cambodia. Our methodology included downscaled climate projections to project future climate conditions and scenarios, household surveys to collect detailed demographic and socioeconomic data, crop monitoring and record-keeping to gather data on productivity and profitability, and semi-structured interviews to obtain qualitative insights on constraints and adaptation.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFRemote delivery of cardiovascular rehabilitation (CR) has been vital during the COVID pandemic when restrictions have been placed on face-to- face services. In the future, CR services are likely to offer alternatives to centre- based CR, including digital options. However, little is known about the digital access and confidence of CR service users, or their CR delivery preferences.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDiverse networks of specialized metabolites promote plant fitness by mediating beneficial and antagonistic environmental interactions. In maize (Zea mays), constitutive and dynamically formed cocktails of terpenoids, benzoxazinoids, oxylipins, and phenylpropanoids contribute to plant defense and ecological adaptation. Recent research has highlighted the multifunctional nature of many specialized metabolites, serving not only as elaborate chemical defenses that safeguard against biotic and abiotic stress but also as regulators in adaptive developmental processes and microbiome interactions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe introduction of AlphaFold 2 has spurred a revolution in modelling the structure of proteins and their interactions, enabling a huge range of applications in protein modelling and design. Here we describe our AlphaFold 3 model with a substantially updated diffusion-based architecture that is capable of predicting the joint structure of complexes including proteins, nucleic acids, small molecules, ions and modified residues. The new AlphaFold model demonstrates substantially improved accuracy over many previous specialized tools: far greater accuracy for protein-ligand interactions compared with state-of-the-art docking tools, much higher accuracy for protein-nucleic acid interactions compared with nucleic-acid-specific predictors and substantially higher antibody-antigen prediction accuracy compared with AlphaFold-Multimer v.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFTo maintain patient flow during the COVID-19 pandemic, rapid and accurate decisions for the safe triage of geriatrics patients was essential as turnaround times for laboratory testing was ineffective at supporting rapid clinical decision-making for transfer of care. Thus, to mitigate and inform these clinical decisions, a quality improvement collaborative project with the geriatrics and virology department was conducted at the Frailty Assessment Unit (FAU) at Aberdeen Royal Infirmary. The goal was to facilitate patient triage during transfer of care with the introduction of Point of Care testing (POCT).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe world's forests store large amounts of carbon (C), and growing forests can reduce atmospheric CO by storing C in their biomass. This has provided the impetus for world-wide tree planting initiatives to offset fossil-fuel emissions. However, forests interact with their environment in complex and multifaceted ways that must be considered for a balanced assessment of the value of planting trees.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Cardiovascular disease is the most common cause of death globally. Traditionally, centre-based cardiac rehabilitation programmes are offered to individuals after cardiac events to aid recovery and prevent further cardiac illness. Home-based and technology-supported cardiac rehabilitation programmes have been introduced in an attempt to widen access and participation, especially during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjective: The purpose of this British Association for Cardiovascular Prevention and Rehabilitation (BACPR) research priority setting project (PSP) was to identify a top 10 list of priority research questions for cardiovascular prevention and rehabilitation (CVPR).
Methods: The PSP was facilitated by the BACPR clinical study group (CSG), which integrates as part of the British Heart Foundation Clinical Research Collaborative. Following a literature review to identify unanswered research questions, modified Delphi methods were used to engage CVPR-informed expert stakeholders, patients, partners and conference delegates in ranking the relevance of research questions during three rounds of an anonymous e-survey.
Background: Fluid injection pressure measurement is promoted as a marker of needle tip position that discriminates between tissue layers. However, clinical ultrasound has insufficient resolution to identify the exact position of the needle tip. Our primary objective was to use 40 MHz ultrasound in anesthetized pigs in order to precisely locate the tip of the needle and measure opening injection pressure in muscle, at epineurium and in subepineurium.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAims: Alternative models of cardiac rehabilitation (CR) are required to improve CR access and uptake. Rehabilitation EnAblement in CHronic Heart Failure (REACH-HF) is a comprehensive home-based rehabilitation and self-management programme, facilitated by trained health professionals, for people with heart failure (HF) and their caregivers. REACH-HF was shown to be clinically effective and cost-effective in a multi-centre randomized trial.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBiochar amendments add persistent organic carbon to soil and can stabilize rhizodeposits and existing soil organic carbon (SOC), but effects of biochar on subsoil carbon stocks have been overlooked. We quantified changes in soil inorganic carbon (SIC) and SOC to 2 m depth 10 years after biochar application to calcareous soil. The total soil carbon (i.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSci Bull (Beijing)
March 2022
In Australia, the proportion of forest area that burns in a typical fire season is less than for other vegetation types. However, the 2019-2020 austral spring-summer was an exception, with over four times the previous maximum area burnt in southeast Australian temperate forests. Temperate forest fires have extensive socio-economic, human health, greenhouse gas emissions, and biodiversity impacts due to high fire intensities.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe soil carbon (C) saturation concept suggests an upper limit to the storage of soil organic carbon (SOC). It is set by the mechanisms that protect soil organic matter from mineralization. Biochar has the capacity to protect new C, including rhizodeposits and microbial necromass.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe chemotherapy resistance of esophageal adenocarcinomas (EACs) is underpinned by cancer cell extrinsic mechanisms of the tumor microenvironment (TME). We demonstrate that, by targeting the tumor-promoting functions of the predominant TME cell type, cancer-associated fibroblasts (CAFs) with phosphodiesterase type 5 inhibitors (PDE5i), we can enhance the efficacy of standard-of-care chemotherapy. In ex vivo conditions, PDE5i prevent the transdifferentiation of normal fibroblasts to CAF and abolish the tumor-promoting function of established EAC CAFs.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe AlphaFold Protein Structure Database (AlphaFold DB, https://alphafold.ebi.ac.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIncreasingly countries are seeking to reduce emission of greenhouse gases from the agricultural industries, and livestock production in particular, as part of their climate change management. While many reviews update progress in mitigation research, a quantitative assessment of the efficacy and performance-consequences of nutritional strategies to mitigate enteric methane (CH) emissions from ruminants has been lacking. A meta-analysis was conducted based on 108 refereed papers from recent animal studies (2000-2020) to report effects on CH production, CH yield and CH emission intensity from 8 dietary interventions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFReforestation is identified as one of the key nature-based solutions to deliver carbon dioxide removal, which will be required to achieve the net zero ambition of the Paris Agreement. However, the potential for sequestration through reforestation is uncertain because climate change is expected to affect the drivers of forest growth. This study used the process-based 3-PG model to investigate the effects of climate change on development of above-ground biomass (AGB), as an indicator of forest growth, in regenerating native forests in southeast Australia.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe describe the operation and improvement of AlphaFold, the system that was entered by the team AlphaFold2 to the "human" category in the 14th Critical Assessment of Protein Structure Prediction (CASP14). The AlphaFold system entered in CASP14 is entirely different to the one entered in CASP13. It used a novel end-to-end deep neural network trained to produce protein structures from amino acid sequence, multiple sequence alignments, and homologous proteins.
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