Actuation-Mediated Compression of a Mechanoresponsive Hydrogel by Soft Robotics to Control Release of Therapeutic Proteins.

Therapeutic proteins, the fastest growing class of pharmaceuticals, are subject to rapid proteolytic degradation in vivo, rendering them inactive. Sophisticated drug delivery systems that maintain protein stability, prolong therapeutic effects, and reduce administration frequency are urgently required. Herein, a mechanoresponsive hydrogel is developed contained within a soft robotic drug delivery (SRDD) device.

Metabolic Trade-Offs Can Reverse the Resource-Diversity Relationship.

AbstractFor species that partition resources, the classic expectation is that increasing resource diversity allows for increased species diversity. On the other hand, for neutral species, such as those competing equally for a single resource, diversity reflects a balance between the rate of introduction of novelty (e.g.

Moving beyond the mean: an analysis of faecal corticosterone metabolites shows substantial variability both within and across white-tailed deer populations.

Glucocorticoid (GC) levels have significant impacts on the health and behaviour of wildlife populations and are involved in many essential body functions including circadian rhythm, stress physiology and metabolism. However, studies of GCs in wildlife often focus on estimating mean hormone levels in populations, or a subset of a population, rather than on assessing the entire distribution of hormone levels within populations. Additionally, explorations of population GC data are limited due to the tradeoff between the number of individuals included in studies and the amount of data per individual that can be collected.

A Standardized Pipeline for Assembly and Annotation of African Swine Fever Virus Genome.

Obtaining a complete good-quality sequence and annotation for the long double-stranded DNA genome of the African swine fever virus (ASFV) from next-generation sequencing (NGS) technology has proven difficult, despite the increasing availability of reference genome sequences and the increasing affordability of NGS. A gap analysis conducted by the global African swine fever research alliance (GARA) partners identified that a standardized, automatic pipeline for NGS analysis was urgently needed, particularly for new outbreak strains. Whilst there are several diagnostic and research labs worldwide that collect isolates of the ASFV from outbreaks, many do not have the capability to analyze, annotate, and format NGS data from outbreaks for submission to NCBI, and some publicly available ASFV genomes have missing or incorrect annotations.

NK cell line modified to express a potent, DR5 specific variant of TRAIL, show enhanced cytotoxicity in ovarian cancer models.

Objective: Ovarian cancer is a lethal gynaecological malignancy with unsatisfactory 5 year survival rates of 30-50 %. Cell immunotherapy is a promising new cancer treatment where immune cells, such as Natural Killer (NK) cells, are administered to enable the patient to fight cancer through direct cytotoxicity. NK cells orchestrate an adaptive immune response by enabling the release of tumour antigens.