The effect of online chronic disease personas on activation: within-subjects and between-groups analyses.

Background: Although self-management of chronic disease is important, engaging patients and increasing activation for self-care using online tools has proven difficult. Designing more tailored interventions through the application of condition-specific personas may be a way to increase engagement and patient activation. Personas are developed from extensive interviews with patients about their shared values and assumptions about their health.

Calcium measurement in living filamentous fungi expressing codon-optimized aequorin.

Calcium signalling is little understood in filamentous fungi largely because easy and routine methods for calcium measurement in living hyphae have previously been unavailable. We have developed the recombinant aequorin method for this purpose. High levels of aequorin expression were obtained in Neurospora crassa, Aspergillus niger and Aspergillus awamori by codon optimization of the aequorin gene.

Analysis of the role of the gene bipA, encoding the major endoplasmic reticulum chaperone protein in the secretion of homologous and heterologous proteins in black Aspergilli.

The function of the endoplasmic-reticulum-localized chaperone binding protein (BiP) in relation to protein secretion in filamentous fungi was studied. It was shown that the overproduction of several homologous and heterologous recombinant proteins by Aspergillus strains induces the expression of bipA, the BiP-encoding gene from Aspergillus niger and Aspergillus awamori. As this result could imply that BiP plays a role in protein overproduction, the effect of modulation of bipA gene expression on protein secretion was studied in several recombinant strains expressing glucoamylase (glaA) fusion genes.

An expression system based on the promoter region of the Aspergillus awamori 1,4-beta-endoxylanase A gene.

A new, highly inducible fungal promoter derived from the Aspergillus awamori 1,4-beta-endoxylanase A (exlA) gene is described. Induction analysis, carried out with the wild-type strain in shake flasks, showed that exlA expression in regulated at the transcriptional level. Using a beta-glucuronidase (uidA) reporter strategy, D-xylose was shown to be an efficient inducer of the exlA promoter, whereas sucrose or maltodextrin were not.