Publications by authors named "McCulloch A"

In this study we examined the activation of the non-canonical NFκB signalling pathway in endothelial cells. In HUVECs, LIGHT stimulated a delayed induction of serine 866/870 p100 phosphorylation linked to p52 NFκB formation. Surprisingly, the canonical ligand, IL-1β, stimulated a rapid phosphorylation or p100 which was not associated with p52 formation.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Objective: Exercise plays a crucial role in maintaining and improving human health. However, the precise molecular mechanisms that govern the body's response to exercise or/compared to periods of inactivity remain elusive. Current evidence appears to suggest that exercise exerts a seemingly dual influence on macrophage polarization states, inducing both pro-immune response M1 activation and cell-repair-focused M2 activation.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • Patients with dyssynchronous heart failure (DHF) experience uneven heart muscle work due to conduction problems, but cardiac resynchronization therapy (CRT) can improve this synchrony, leading to better health outcomes and quality of life.
  • Researchers used advanced computational models to analyze heart function in eight patients with heart failure and left bundle branch block (LBBB) before and after CRT, finding that the therapy enhanced overall myocardial work efficiency.
  • The study revealed that the most significant reverse remodeling—improvement of heart structure—occurred in patients who initially had the greatest disparity in regional heart work, with effective CRT linked to increased function in specific areas of the heart rather than a reduction in overall work unevenness.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • There is a big mental health problem for kids and teens in the UK, and many of them wait until they are in crisis before getting help.
  • Young people feel there isn't enough support available before they get really upset, and police are getting more calls about mental health issues among youth.
  • A new study is being done to improve how the police and mental health services work together to help young people in crisis, but there are still not enough resources for proper support.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

We present the NetSci program-an open-source scientific software package designed for estimating mutual information (MI) between data sets using GPU acceleration and a k-nearest-neighbor algorithm. This approach significantly enhances calculation speed, achieving improvements of several orders of magnitude over traditional CPU-based methods, with data set size limits dictated only by available hardware. To validate NetSci, we accurately compute MI for an analytically verifiable two-dimensional Gaussian distribution and replicate the generalized correlation (GC) analysis previously conducted on the B1 domain of protein G.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Mechanical thrombectomy devices have potential to injure the vessel during treatment of acute ischemic stroke. The goal of the current work was to tailor in vitro endothelialized silicone models for stent retriever assessment and to evaluate endothelial injury following treatment by various stent retriever designs and sizes. Clinically-relevant neurovascular geometries were first modeled out of silicone, then sterilized, coated with fibronectin, placed in bioreactors, seeded with human endothelial cells, and cultivated under flow.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Insufficient energy intake to meet energy expenditure demands of physical activity can result in systemic neuroendocrine and metabolic abnormalities in activity-dependent anorexia and relative energy deficiency in sport (REDs). REDs affects >40% of athletes, yet the lack of underlying molecular changes has been a hurdle to have a better understanding of REDs and its treatment. To assess the molecular changes in response to energy deficiency, we implemented the "exercise-for-food" paradigm, in which food reward size is determined by wheel-running activity.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • Arrhythmogenic right ventricular cardiomyopathy (ARVC) is a serious genetic heart condition linked to dangerous heart rhythms, primarily caused by mutations in the PKP2 gene, with no current effective treatments available.
  • Researchers developed a mouse model with a specific PKP2 mutation that mimics ARVC symptoms, leading to sudden death at a young age.
  • Treatment with AAV-PKP2 gene therapy in these mice significantly restored normal PKP2 levels, preventing heart damage and improving survival rates, suggesting a potential new therapy for ARVC related to PKP2 mutations, especially those affecting RNA splicing.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

2'-deoxy-ATP (dATP) improves cardiac function by increasing the rate of crossbridge cycling and Ca[Formula: see text] transient decay. However, the mechanisms of these effects and how therapeutic responses to dATP are achieved when dATP is only a small fraction of the total ATP pool remain poorly understood. Here, we used a multiscale computational modeling approach to analyze the mechanisms by which dATP improves ventricular function.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

In patients with dyssynchronous heart failure (DHF), cardiac conduction abnormalities cause the regional distribution of myocardial work to be non-homogeneous. Cardiac resynchronization therapy (CRT) using an implantable, programmed biventricular pacemaker/defibrillator, can improve the synchrony of contraction between the right and left ventricles in DHF, resulting in reduced morbidity and mortality and increased quality of life. Since regional work depends on wall stress, which cannot be measured in patients, we used computational methods to investigate regional work distributions and their changes after CRT.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Exercise-induced muscle adaptations vary based on exercise modality and intensity. We constructed a signalling network model from 87 published studies of human or rodent skeletal muscle cell responses to endurance or resistance exercise in vivo or simulated exercise in vitro. The network comprises 259 signalling interactions between 120 nodes, representing eight membrane receptors and eight canonical signalling pathways regulating 14 transcriptional regulators, 28 target genes and 12 exercise-induced phenotypes.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Introduction: Artificial intelligence (AI) ECG arrhythmia mapping provides arrhythmia source localization using 12-lead ECG data; whether this information impacts procedural efficiency is unknown. We performed a retrospective, case-control study to evaluate the hypothesis that AI ECG mapping may reduce time to ablation, procedural duration, and fluoroscopy.

Materials And Methods: Cases in which system output was used were retrospectively enrolled according to IRB-approved protocols at each site.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • A new extension to the 'Cobiveco' biventricular coordinate system has been introduced to improve anatomical registration of heart ventricles by including complex regions like outflow tracts and valve annuli.
  • The proposed CobivecoX system employs a unique algorithm to identify intervalvular bridges and assign specific coordinates for precise local positioning in these areas.
  • Validation of this method was conducted using curated three-dimensional models from cardiac MRI, ensuring that universal cardiac coordinates can be effectively applied to diverse ventricular shapes relevant to both normal hearts and those with congenital conditions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Purpose: The standard-of-care for locally advanced rectal cancer is radiotherapy-based neoadjuvant therapy followed by surgical resection. This article reviews the evidence of molecular changes at the transcriptome level induced through radiotherapy in rectal cancer.

Methods: The PubMed search "(radiation OR radiotherapy) cancer (transcriptome OR "gene expression") rectal" was used.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Objective: To explore community pharmacy consumers' knowledge and attitudes of mental illness, support services, and community pharmacists' role in supporting people living with mental illness (PLMI).

Methods: This survey was conducted in 15 community pharmacies between June and September 2019. Participants were aged 18 years or older without prior or ongoing history of mental illness and/or with close family members with mental illness.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

To identify how cardiomyocyte mechanosensitive signaling pathways are regulated by anisotropic stretch, micropatterned mouse neonatal cardiomyocytes were stretched primarily longitudinally or transversely to the myofiber axis. Four hours of static, longitudinal stretch induced differential expression of 557 genes, compared with 30 induced by transverse stretch, measured using RNA-seq. A logic-based ordinary differential equation model of the cardiac myocyte mechanosignaling network, extended to include the transcriptional regulation and expression of 784 genes, correctly predicted measured expression changes due to anisotropic stretch with 69% accuracy.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

An immunosuppressive microenvironment causes poor tumor T cell infiltration and is associated with reduced patient overall survival in colorectal cancer. How to improve treatment responses in these tumors is still a challenge. Using an integrated screening approach to identify cancer-specific vulnerabilities, we identified complement receptor C5aR1 as a druggable target, which when inhibited improved radiotherapy, even in tumors displaying immunosuppressive features and poor CD8+ T cell infiltration.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: Producing animal protein while reducing the animal's impact on the environment, e.g., through improved feed efficiency and lowered methane emissions, has gained interest in recent years.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

2'-Deoxy-ATP (dATP), a naturally occurring near analog of ATP, is a well-documented myosin activator that has been shown to increase contractile force, improve pump function, and enhance lusitropy in the heart. Calcium transients in cardiomyocytes with elevated levels of dATP show faster calcium decay compared with cardiomyocytes with basal levels of dATP, but the mechanisms behind this are unknown. Here, we design and utilize a multiscale computational modeling framework to test the hypothesis that dATP acts on the sarcoendoplasmic reticulum calcium-ATPase (SERCA) pump to accelerate calcium re-uptake into the sarcoplasmic reticulum during cardiac relaxation.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: Rumen microbes break down complex dietary carbohydrates into energy sources for the host and are increasingly shown to be a key aspect of animal performance. Host genotypes can be combined with microbial DNA sequencing to predict performance traits or traits related to environmental impact, such as enteric methane emissions. Metagenome profiles were generated from 3139 rumen samples, collected from 1200 dual purpose ewes, using restriction enzyme-reduced representation sequencing (RE-RRS).

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Purpose: Neurothrombectomy catheters can disrupt or injure the vessel wall. This potential injury is often studied in animal or cadaver models, but prior work suggests that endothelialized silicone models may be an option for early in vitro assessment. The purpose of this work was to create a complex, clinically-relevant endothelialized neurovascular silicone model, and to determine the utility of the model for evaluating vessel injury due to catheter simulated use.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The current study proposes an efficient strategy for exploiting the statistical power of cardiac atlases to investigate whether clinically significant variations in ventricular shape are sufficient to explain corresponding differences in ventricular wall motion directly, or if they are indirect markers of altered myocardial mechanical properties. This study was conducted in a cohort of patients with repaired tetralogy of Fallot (rTOF) that face long-term right ventricular (RV) and/or left ventricular (LV) dysfunction as a consequence of adverse remodeling. Features of biventricular end-diastolic (ED) shape associated with RV apical dilation, LV dilation, RV basal bulging, and LV conicity correlated with components of systolic wall motion (SWM) that contribute most to differences in global systolic function.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF