Sialic acid on avian erythrocytes.

Understanding variation in physiological traits across taxa is a central question in evolutionary biology that has wide-ranging implications in biomedicine, disease ecology, and environmental protection. Sialic acid (Sia), and in particular, 5-N-acetylneuraminic acid (Neu5Ac), is chemically bound to galactose and the underlying glycan via α2-3 or α2-6 glycosidic linkage (i.e.

The Biosurveillance Analytics Resource Directory (BARD): Facilitating the Use of Epidemiological Models for Infectious Disease Surveillance.

Epidemiological modeling for infectious disease is important for disease management and its routine implementation needs to be facilitated through better description of models in an operational context. A standardized model characterization process that allows selection or making manual comparisons of available models and their results is currently lacking. A key need is a universal framework to facilitate model description and understanding of its features.

Selecting essential information for biosurveillance--a multi-criteria decision analysis.

The National Strategy for Biosurveillance defines biosurveillance as "the process of gathering, integrating, interpreting, and communicating essential information related to all-hazards threats or disease activity affecting human, animal, or plant health to achieve early detection and warning, contribute to overall situational awareness of the health aspects of an incident, and to enable better decision-making at all levels." However, the strategy does not specify how "essential information" is to be identified and integrated into the current biosurveillance enterprise, or what the metrics qualify information as being "essential". The question of data stream identification and selection requires a structured methodology that can systematically evaluate the tradeoffs between the many criteria that need to be taken in account.

Advancing a framework to enable characterization and evaluation of data streams useful for biosurveillance.

In recent years, biosurveillance has become the buzzword under which a diverse set of ideas and activities regarding detecting and mitigating biological threats are incorporated depending on context and perspective. Increasingly, biosurveillance practice has become global and interdisciplinary, requiring information and resources across public health, One Health, and biothreat domains. Even within the scope of infectious disease surveillance, multiple systems, data sources, and tools are used with varying and often unknown effectiveness.

Immunophenotyping of chicken peripheral blood lymphocyte subpopulations: individual variability and repeatability.

T-cell lymphocyte populations can be delineated into subsets based on expression of cell surface proteins that can be measured in peripheral blood by monoclonal antibodies and flow cytometry percentages of the lymphocyte subpopulations. In order to accurately assess immunocompetence in birds, natural variability in both avian immune function and the methodology must be understood. Our objectives were to (1) further develop flow cytometry for estimating subpopulations of lymphocytes in peripheral blood from poultry, (2) estimate repeatability and variability in the methodology with respect to poultry in a free-range and environmentally diverse situation, and (3) estimate the best antibody and cell marker combination for estimating lymphocyte subpopulations.

Proteomic analysis of beryllium-induced genotoxicity in an Escherichia coli mutant model system.

Beryllium is the second lightest metal, has a high melting point and high strength-to-weight ratio, and is chemically stable. These unique chemical characteristics make beryllium metal an ideal choice as a component material for a wide variety of applications in aerospace, defense, nuclear weapons, and industry. However, inhalation of beryllium dust or fumes induces significant health effects, including chronic beryllium disease and lung cancer.

Structural studies on the hairpins at the 3' untranslated region of an anthrax toxin gene.

Three proteins, namely, protective antigen (PA), edema factor (EF), and lethal factor (LF), encoded by the pX01 plasmid of Bacillus anthracis play a major role in the pathogenesis of target host cells. PA combines with EF and LF to form bipartite PA-EF and PA-LF toxins and facilitates intracellular delivery of EF and LF both of which cause cytotoxicity to the host. Since the level of PA is crucial to pathogenesis by anthrax toxins, it is important to understand how the host environment regulates the expression of the PA (or pagA) gene by utilizing the 5' and 3' untranslated regions (UTR).