A roadmap for the conservation of freshwater mussels in Europe.

Europe has a long history of human pressure on freshwater ecosystems. As pressure continues to grow and new threats emerge, there is an urgent need for conservation of freshwater biodiversity and its ecosystem services. However, whilst some taxonomic groups, mainly vertebrates, have received a disproportionate amount of attention and funds, other groups remain largely off the public and scientific radar.

The role of anthropogenic habitats in freshwater mussel conservation.

Anthropogenic freshwater habitats may provide undervalued prospects for long-term conservation as part of species conservation planning. This fundamental, but overlooked, issue requires attention considering the pace that humans have been altering natural freshwater ecosystems and the accelerated levels of biodiversity decline in recent decades. We compiled 709 records of freshwater mussels (Bivalvia, Unionida) inhabiting a broad variety of anthropogenic habitat types (from small ponds to large reservoirs and canals) and reviewed their importance as refuges for this faunal group.

Preparing a deployed role 3 medical treatment facility for COVID-19 in Afghanistan.

The Craig Joint Theater Hospital at Bagram Airfield is the coalition role 3 facility for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization-led Operation RESOLUTE SUPPORT in northern Afghanistan. The onset of the global COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020 presented the challenges of limiting viral transmission, disease force protection, specific protection of healthcare workers and management of patients with COVID-19, all while continuing to provide high-quality care for battlefield trauma. The estimated COVID-19 threat led to the introduction of enhanced force protection measures across the Combined Joint Operations Area-Afghanistan.

The UK defence anaesthesia experience with the Zambia Anaesthesia Development Programme.

For 18 months UK military anaesthetic trainees have been travelling to Zambia for a 3-month fellowship under the auspices of the Zambia Anaesthesia Development Programme. In this article we will discuss the history, current state and future intent of the fellowship in order to better inform the anaesthetic cadre and wider UK Defence Medical Services.

Response of the mollusc communities to environmental factors along an anthropogenic salinity gradient.

Anthropogenic salinisation of freshwater ecosystems is frequent across the world. The scale of this phenomenon remains unrecognised, and therefore, monitoring and management of such ecosystems is very important. We conducted a study on the mollusc communities in inland anthropogenic ponds covering a large gradient of salinity located in an area of underground coal mining activity.

Human recombinant RNASET2: A potential anti-cancer drug.

The roles of cell motility and angiogenetic processes in metastatic spread and tumor aggressiveness are well established and must be simultaneously targeted to maximize antitumor drug potency. This work evaluated the antitumorigenic capacities of human recombinant RNASET2 (hrRNASET2), a homologue of the Aspergillus niger T2RNase ACTIBIND, which has been shown to display both antitumorigenic and antiangiogenic activities. hrRNASET2 disrupted intracellular actin filament and actin-rich extracellular extrusion organization in both CT29 colon cancer and A375SM melanoma cells and induced a significant dose-dependent inhibition of A375SM cell migration.

The Importance of the Mining Subsidence Reservoirs Located Along the Trans-Regional Highway in the Conservation of the Biodiversity of Freshwater Molluscs in Industrial Areas (Upper Silesia, Poland).

The objectives of the survey were to analyse the structure of the mollusc communities in the mining subsidence reservoirs that were created as a result of land subsidence over exploited hard coal seams and to determine the most predictive environmental factors that influence the distribution of mollusc species. The reservoirs are located in urbanised and industrialised areas along the Trans-Regional Highway, which has a high volume of vehicular traffic. They all have the same sources of supply but differ in the physical and chemical parameters of the water.

Contingency: the likely spectrum of injuries based upon a review of three recent undeveloped theatres of operations--CORPORATE, TELIC 1 and HERRICK 4.

Contingency operations are by their nature unpredictable and high-risk, with undeveloped logistical support, and medical provision is no exception. Can the contingency experiences of the last three decades help to predict the type of casualties that may be seen in future contingency operations? By reviewing published casualty statistics available from Operations CORPORATE, TELIC 1 and HERRICK 4 it can be demonstrated, unsurprisingly, that gunshot wounds and blast injuries dominate battle injuries, but that disease non-battle injuries also constitute a significant draw on medical provision, particularly gastrointestinal illness in hot environments. Planning for medical support for future contingency operations should anticipate this.

Evaluation and cross-comparison of lexical entities of biological interest (LexEBI).

Motivation: Biomedical entities, their identifiers and names, are essential in the representation of biomedical facts and knowledge. In the same way, the complete set of biomedical and chemical terms, i.e.

Evaluating gold standard corpora against gene/protein tagging solutions and lexical resources.

Motivation: The identification of protein and gene names (PGNs) from the scientific literature requires semantic resources: Terminological and lexical resources deliver the term candidates into PGN tagging solutions and the gold standard corpora (GSC) train them to identify term parameters and contextual features. Ideally all three resources, i.e.

Monitoring named entity recognition: the League Table.

Background: Named entity recognition (NER) is an essential step in automatic text processing pipelines. A number of solutions have been presented and evaluated against gold standard corpora (GSC). The benchmarking against GSCs is crucial, but left to the individual researcher.

Harmonization of gene/protein annotations: towards a gold standard MEDLINE.

Motivation: The recognition of named entities (NER) is an elementary task in biomedical text mining. A number of NER solutions have been proposed in recent years, taking advantage of available annotated corpora, terminological resources and machine-learning techniques. Currently, the best performing solutions combine the outputs from selected annotation solutions measured against a single corpus.

Assessment of NER solutions against the first and second CALBC Silver Standard Corpus.

Background: Competitions in text mining have been used to measure the performance of automatic text processing solutions against a manually annotated gold standard corpus (GSC). The preparation of the GSC is time-consuming and costly and the final corpus consists at the most of a few thousand documents annotated with a limited set of semantic groups. To overcome these shortcomings, the CALBC project partners (PPs) have produced a large-scale annotated biomedical corpus with four different semantic groups through the harmonisation of annotations from automatic text mining solutions, the first version of the Silver Standard Corpus (SSC-I).

UKPMC: a full text article resource for the life sciences.

UK PubMed Central (UKPMC) is a full-text article database that extends the functionality of the original PubMed Central (PMC) repository. The UKPMC project was launched as the first 'mirror' site to PMC, which in analogy to the International Nucleotide Sequence Database Collaboration, aims to provide international preservation of the open and free-access biomedical literature. UKPMC (http://ukpmc.

Natural language processing in aid of FlyBase curators.

Background: Despite increasing interest in applying Natural Language Processing (NLP) to biomedical text, whether this technology can facilitate tasks such as database curation remains unclear.

Results: PaperBrowser is the first NLP-powered interface that was developed under a user-centered approach to improve the way in which FlyBase curators navigate an article. In this paper, we first discuss how observing curators at work informed the design and evaluation of PaperBrowser.

Integrating natural language processing with FlyBase curation.

Applying Natural Language Processing techniques to biomedical text as a potential aid to curation has become the focus of intensive research. However, developing integrated systems which address the curators' real-world needs has been studied less rigorously. This paper addresses this question and presents generic tools developed to assist FlyBase curators.

Bootstrapping the recognition and anaphoric linking of named entities in Drosophila articles.

This paper demonstrates how Drosophila gene name recognition and anaphoric linking of gene names and their products can be achieved using existing information in FlyBase and the Sequence Ontology. Extending an extant approach to gene name recognition we achieved a F-score of 0.8559, and we report a preliminary experiment using a baseline anaphora resolution algorithm.

Levels of substance P and IgE decapeptide in nasal polyp fluid and matching sera: a preliminary study.

Sixteen unselected patients with nasal polyps had the levels of substance P and IgE decapeptide measured by ELISA in the oedema fluids and their matched sera. All 16 samples had low levels of substance P in their sera and had high level of substance P in eight samples of nasal polyp oedema. There was a considerable variation in the values of IgE decapeptide found in the sera but 14 polyp oedema fluids had high levels of IgE decapeptide.

Aggregation of the Fc epsilon RI in mast cells induces the synthesis of Fos-interacting protein and increases its DNA binding-activity: the dependence on protein kinase C-beta.

The ability of c-Fos to dimerize with various proteins creates transcription complexes which can exert their regulatory function on a variety of genes. One of the transcription factors that binds to c-Fos is the newly discovered Fos-interacting protein (FIP). In this report we present evidence for the regulation of the synthesis of FIP by a physiological stimulus.

The impact of missile warfare on self-reported sleep quality. Part 1.

During the 1991 Gulf War, we investigated the effect of missile attacks through two telephone surveys of a large sample of an urban population that evaluated self-reported sleep quality, stress, fear, depressed mood, fatigue and power of concentration. We surveyed 1,045 people during the Gulf War itself, and we interviewed them again (excluding the chronic insomniacs) 30 days after the war. During the war, 51% of the subjects claimed to be suffering from disturbed sleep.

Molecules, management and medical outcomes: an international review.

The first major joint conference between the Royal College of Physicians of London and the American College of Physicians was held at the Royal College of Physicians on 7-8 June 1993. The large enthusiastic audience from the UK and the USA demonstrated the cordiality which exists between the two colleges. The objective of the conference was to further an exchange of ideas about the influence of science and technology upon current and future medical practice.

Regulation of AP-1 expression and activity in antigen-stimulated mast cells: the role played by protein kinase C and the possible involvement of Fos interacting protein.

We have recently observed that protein kinase C (PKC) was involved in the regulation of the accumulation of mRNAs of the AP-1 components in cultured Abelson-transformed murine fetal-liver-derived mast cells stimulated by exocytotic stimuli. Here we analyzed the probable regulatory effect of PKC on the synthesis and DNA-binding activity of AP-1 complexes in immunologic stimulated mast cells. In this study we used the interleukin-3--dependent murine fetal-liver--derived mast cells that were not transformed by the Abelson oncogene.

Emotional experiences during the three trimesters of pregnancy.

This study examined the emotional changes that occur during the trimesters of pregnancy. Two hundred eighty-two women were asked, one day after giving birth, to indicate at what frequency they had experienced various symptoms during each trimester of pregnancy and to fill out the Repression-Sensitization scale (Byrne, Barry, & Nelson, 1963). Results showed that while women's feelings during the first trimester are characterized by symptoms related to physiological changes (e.

Serum modulates mast cell responses to IgE antigen stimulation.

Serum induces the expression of the fos and jun gene families, which encode the transcription factor AP-1. Since we previously found that activation of mast cells by IgE-antigen (Ag) induces the mRNA accumulation of c-fos, c-jun, junB and junD proto-oncogenes, we were prompted to investigate whether serum could affect such accumulation in these cells. In addition, we investigated whether serum could modulate inhibition of DNA synthesis in immunologically stimulated mast cells.