Publications by authors named "Joe Mellor"

Article Synopsis
  • The text reviews clinical evidence on systemic factors that could help improve diabetic retinal disease (DRD) staging systems, focusing on predicting the onset, progression, and treatment responses of the disease.
  • Key findings indicate that longer diabetes duration, higher HbA1c levels, and male sex are linked to increased DRD risk, while blood pressure is also a significant factor in both incidence and progression.
  • Despite some associations, multivariate models showed that retinal measures are better predictors of DRD progression than systemic factors, and comprehensive studies validating the prognostic value of treatments are still needed.
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Minors have difficulty adhering to the strict management regimen required whilst on renal dialysis for chronic renal failure. This leads to ethical tensions as healthcare professionals (HCPs) and parents try, in the minor's best interests, to ensure s/he adheres. All 11 dialysis nurses working in a large, regional paediatric dialysis unit were interviewed about their perceptions and management of non-adherence and the ethical issues this raised for them.

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Fourier transform-infrared (FT-IR) chemical imaging in transmission mode has traditionally been performed on expensive mid-IR transparent windows such as barium/calcium fluoride, which are more fragile than glass, making preparation in the histopathology laboratories more cumbersome. A solution is presented here by using cheap glass substrates for the FT-IR chemical imaging, which has a high-wavenumber transmission window allowing measurement of the C-H, N-H, and O-H stretches occurring at ca. 2500-3800 cm(-1).

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With the integration of the KEGG and Predictome databases as well as two search engines for coexpressed genes/proteins using data sets obtained from the Stanford Microarray Database (SMD) and Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) database, VisANT 3.0 supports exploratory pathway analysis, which includes multi-scale visualization of multiple pathways, editing and annotating pathways using a KEGG compatible visual notation and visualization of expression data in the context of pathways. Expression levels are represented either by color intensity or by nodes with an embedded expression profile.

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The detailed structure of molecular networks, including their dependence on conditions and time, are now routinely assayed by various experimental techniques. Visualization is a vital aid in integrating and interpreting such data. We describe emerging approaches for representing and visualizing systems data and for achieving semantic zooming, or changes in information density concordant with scale.

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Thermodynamic favorability of transcription factor (TF) binding to DNA is a significant factor in the control of gene expression. Theoretical and in vitro measures link the relative equilibrium energy of a particular DNA binding protein to the sequence variation among binding sites in a genome. Extending this principle, we investigate whether biological variation in expression levels of active proteins leads to regulation of different sets of genes, based on inferred affinities of sites upstream of those genes.

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A systematic curation of the literature on Saccharomyces cerevisiae has yielded a comprehensive collection of experimentally observed interactions. This new resource augments current views of the topological structure of yeast's physical and genetic networks, but also reveals that existing studies cover only a fraction of the cell.

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VisANT is a web-based software framework for visualizing and analyzing many types of networks of biological interactions and associations. Networks are a useful computational tool for representing many types of biological data, such as biomolecular interactions, cellular pathways and functional modules. Given user-defined sets of interactions or groupings between genes or proteins, VisANT provides: (i) a visual interface for combining and annotating network data, (ii) supporting function and annotation data for different genomes from the Gene Ontology and KEGG databases and (iii) the statistical and analytical tools needed for extracting topological properties of the user-defined networks.

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