The impact of human pulmonary tuberculosis (TB) on the bioenergetic metabolism of circulating immune cells remains elusive, as does the resolution of these effects with TB treatment. In this study, the rates of oxidative phosphorylation (OXPHOS) and glycolysis in circulating lymphocytes and monocytes of patients with drug-susceptible TB at diagnosis, 2 months, and 6 months during treatment, and 12 months after diagnosis were investigated using extracellular flux analysis. At diagnosis, the bioenergetic parameters of both blood lymphocytes and monocytes of TB patients were severely impaired in comparison to non-TB and non-HIV-infected controls.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNeurons throughout the brain modulate their firing rate lawfully in response to sensory input. Theories of neural computation posit that these modulations reflect the outcome of a constrained optimization in which neurons aim to robustly and efficiently represent sensory information. Our understanding of how this optimization varies across different areas in the brain, however, is still in its infancy.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: Zoonoses are a health concern for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in Australia that face elevated risk of disease related to the environment and animals. Internationally, One Health is encouraged to effectively manage zoonoses by taking integrated approaches involving animal, human, and environmental health sectors to improve health outcomes. However, Australia's health systems manage zoonotic diseases in animals and people separately which does not support a One Health approach.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFLong-term data are required to quantify the impacts of historic industrial pollution and subsequent remedial action on the nearshore benthic community in the St. Lawrence River Area of Concern at Cornwall, Ontario. Specifically, high-quality temporal records are needed to understand changes in benthic invertebrate assemblages in response to multiple possible drivers including industrial pollution, environmental heterogeneity, and climate warming.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFInt J Environ Res Public Health
July 2023
Many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities face barriers in accessing animal healthcare and are exposed to disproportionate environmental health exposures leading to increased risk of disease. A One Health approach has been promoted to address public health risks and improve human, animal, and environmental health outcomes in communities. We undertook a pilot One Health study in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities in Queensland collecting animal, human, and environmental health data from 82 households.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNeurons throughout the brain modulate their firing rate lawfully in response to changes in sensory input. Theories of neural computation posit that these modulations reflect the outcome of a constrained optimization: neurons aim to efficiently and robustly represent sensory information under resource limitations. Our understanding of how this optimization varies across the brain, however, is still in its infancy.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPLOS Glob Public Health
October 2022
With limited access to animal health services, and high disease burdens among domesticated animals, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities in Australia face higher risk of disease including zoonoses. However, we lack understanding of the contribution of often preventable zoonoses to the health of these communities, which would enable us to enhance public health strategies and improve health outcomes. We conducted a scoping review to identify the current state of evidence on zoonoses in the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander population.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNatural images are typically broadband, whereas detectors in early visual processing are selective for narrow ranges of spatial frequency. White noise patterns are widely used in laboratory settings to investigate how responses are derived from Fourier components in the image. Here, we report disparity vergence responses (DVRs) to white noise stimuli in human subjects and compare these with responses to white noise patterns filtered with bandpass filters and notch filters and to sinusoidal gratings.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFOcular following eye movements have provided insights into how the visual system of humans and monkeys processes motion. Recently, it has been shown that they also reliably reveal stereoanomalies, and, thus, might have clinical applications. Their translation from research to clinical setting has however been hindered by their small size, which makes them difficult to record, and by a lack of data about their properties in sizable populations.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDirection selective neurons in macaque primary visual cortex are narrowly tuned for orientation, and are thus afflicted by the aperture problem. At the next stage of motion processing, in the middle temporal (MT) area, some cells appear to solve this problem, responding to the pattern motion direction of plaids. Models have been proposed to account for this computation, but they do not replicate the diversity of responses observed in MT.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFRecent concerns have arisen in Australia regarding detections of the exotic bacterium Ehrlichia canis which has resulted in ehrlichiosis outbreaks. In Australia, it is spread by the tropical brown dog tick Rhipicephalus linnaei, formerly Rhipicephalus sanguineus sensu lato tropical lineage. Previously, the tick has been recorded in South Australia in the Coober Pedy and the Oodnadatta areas.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAim: In adults, the onset of vasovagal syncope is often unexplained. We wished to explore if moderate weight loss triggers the onset of vasovagal syncope (VVS).
Methods: A retrospective case-control study comparing demographic characteristic, syncope symptoms, and tilt-table results of patients who had recently lost weight (n=57), with randomly selected weight-stable patients (n=73), and controls, patients without syncope (n=24).
Statistical models are increasingly being used to understand the complexity of stimulus selectivity in primary visual cortex (V1) in the context of complex time-varying stimuli, replacing averaging responses to simple parametric stimuli. Although such models often can more accurately reflect the computations performed by V1 neurons in more natural visual environments, they do not by themselves provide insight into V1 neural selectivity to basic stimulus features such as receptive field size, spatial frequency tuning, and phase invariance. Here, we present a battery of analyses that can be directly applied to encoding models to link complex encoding models to more interpretable aspects of stimulus selectivity.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCell division must be coordinated with DNA repair, which is strictly regulated in response to different drugs and environmental stresses in bacteria. However, the mechanisms by which mycobacteria orchestrate these two processes remain largely uncharacterized. Here, we report a regulatory loop between two essential mycobacterial regulators, McdR (Rv1830) and WhiB2, in coordinating the processes of cell division and DNA repair.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFInt J Environ Res Public Health
October 2021
Indigenous populations around the world face disproportionately high rates of disease related to the environment and animals. One Health is a concept that has been used effectively to understand and address these health risks. One Health refers to the relationships and interdependencies between animal, human, and environmental health and is an emerging research field that aligns with indigenous views of health.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAdv Sci (Weinh)
October 2021
Three-dimensional (3D) micro-and nanostructures have played an important role in topological photonics, microfluidics, acoustic, and mechanical engineering. Incorporating biomimetic geometries into the design of metastructures has created low-density metamaterials with extraordinary physical and photonic properties. However, the use of surface-based biomimetic geometries restricts the freedom to tune the relative density, mechanical strength, and topological phase.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFHigh attrition rates in tuberculosis (TB) drug development have been largely attributed to safety, which is likely due to the use of endpoint assays measuring cell viability to detect drug cytotoxicity. In drug development for cancer, metabolic, and neurological disorders and for antibiotics, cytotoxicity is increasingly being assessed using extracellular flux (XF) analysis, which measures cellular bioenergetic metabolism in real time. Here, we adopt the XF platform to investigate the cytotoxicity of drugs currently used in TB treatment on the bioenergetic metabolism of HepG2 cells, THP-1 macrophages, and human monocyte-derived macrophages (hMDMs).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNeuronal and psychophysical responses to a visual stimulus are known to depend on the preceding history of visual stimulation, but the effect of stimulation history on reflexive eye movements has received less attention. Here, we quantify these effects using short-latency ocular following responses (OFRs), a valuable tool for studying early motion processing. We recorded, in human subjects, the horizontal OFRs induced by drifting vertical 1D pink noise.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFLong-term, large-scale perspectives are necessary for understanding climate variability and its effects on ecosystems and cultures. Tree ring records of the Medieval Climate Anomaly (MCA) and Little Ice Age (LIA) have documented major hydroclimatic variability during the last millennium in the American West, but fewer continuous, high-resolution hydroclimate records of the MCA-LIA period are available for eastern North America, particularly during the transition from the MCA to the LIA (ca. A.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFOptical machine learning has emerged as an important research area that, by leveraging the advantages inherent to optical signals, such as parallelism and high speed, paves the way for a future where optical hardware can process data at the speed of light. In this work, we present such optical devices for data processing in the form of single-layer nanoscale holographic perceptrons trained to perform optical inference tasks. We experimentally show the functionality of these passive optical devices in the example of decryptors trained to perform optical inference of single or whole classes of keys through symmetric and asymmetric decryption.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe St. Lawrence River at Cornwall, Ontario, Canada, received substantial inputs of mercury from local, shoreline-based industries through much of the 20th century. Although emission controls were implemented in the late 20th century to reduce the influx of mercury and other metals entering the river, legacy contamination of riverine sediments continues to be a concern.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFFront Cell Infect Microbiol
June 2021
Tuberculosis (TB) was responsible for more deaths in 2019 than any other infectious agent. This epidemic is exacerbated by the ongoing development of multi-drug resistance and HIV co-infection. Recent studies have therefore focused on identifying host-directed therapies (HDTs) that can be used in combination with anti-mycobacterial drugs to shorten the duration of TB treatment and improve TB outcomes.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis study evaluated a community-driven animal health and management program in the remote community of Wadeye, Northern Territory. This evaluation used a pre-post design to assess changes in animal and human health outcomes over a 12-month period of program implementation, from June 2018 to June 2019. The evaluation assessed the program by comparing animal health outcomes before versus one year after program implementation and comparing human health outcomes before versus during the first 12 months of the program.
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