Effects of infant massage on infant attachment security in a randomized controlled trial.

Benefits of attachment security have been demonstrated in multiple realms of development, and an extensive body of research has identified some of the antecedents associated with the development of secure attachments. While previous research has indicated that infant massage may support the development of mothers' attachment to their babies, no published research exists that investigated infants' attachment security after mothers learn infant massage strokes. This study tested the impact of an infant massage intervention on mothers' massage frequency and attachment security in infants.

Low-dimensional criticality embedded in high-dimensional awake brain dynamics.

Whether cortical neurons operate in a strongly or weakly correlated dynamical regime determines fundamental information processing capabilities and has fueled decades of debate. We offer a resolution of this debate; we show that two important dynamical regimes, typically considered incompatible, can coexist in the same local cortical circuit by separating them into two different subspaces. In awake mouse motor cortex, we find a low-dimensional subspace with large fluctuations consistent with criticality-a dynamical regime with moderate correlations and multi-scale information capacity and transmission.

Care burden and support needs of caregivers of infants and children with CHDs and dysphagia.

Dysphagia is common in children with CHDs, resulting in multiple stressors for their caregivers including having a child with a serious medical condition and coping with their child's feeding needs. However, relatively little is known about caregivers' perceptions and experiences of the burden of care and support needs for their child with a CHD and dysphagia in low-middle income contexts. This qualitative study investigated the burden of care and support needs identified by parents of children with CHDs and dysphagia in a single centre in South Africa.

Can critical care transport be safely reduced in children intubated during emergency management of status epilepticus in the United Kingdom: a national audit with case-control analysis.

Objective: This study describes the baseline clinical characteristics, predictors of successful extubation at referring hospitals and short-term outcomes of children intubated for status epilepticus and referred to United Kingdom (UK) paediatric critical care transport teams (PCCTs).

Design: Multicentre audit with case-control analysis, conducted between 1 September 2018 and 1 September 2020.

Setting: This study involved 10 UK PCCTs.

Low dimensional criticality embedded in high dimensional awake brain dynamics.

Whether cortical neurons operate in a strongly or weakly correlated dynamical regime determines fundamental information processing capabilities and has fueled decades of debate. Here we offer a resolution of this debate; we show that two important dynamical regimes, typically considered incompatible, can coexist in the same local cortical circuit by separating them into two different subspaces. In awake mouse motor cortex, we find a low-dimensional subspace with large fluctuations consistent with criticality - a dynamical regime with moderate correlations and multi-scale information capacity and transmission.

Scale-free behavioral dynamics directly linked with scale-free cortical dynamics.

Naturally occurring body movements and collective neural activity both exhibit complex dynamics, often with scale-free, fractal spatiotemporal structure. Scale-free dynamics of both brain and behavior are important because each is associated with functional benefits to the organism. Despite their similarities, scale-free brain activity and scale-free behavior have been studied separately, without a unified explanation.

Potential Protective Function of Aβ Monomer on Tauopathies.

While soluble forms of amyloid-β (Aβ) and Tau work together to drive healthy neurons into a disease state, how their interaction may control the prion-like propagation and neurotoxicity of Tau is not fully understood. The cross-linking via disulfide bond formation is crucial for Tau oligomers to obtain stable conformers and spread between cells. This work thus focuses on how Aβ regulates this critical process.

Silencing RNAs expressed from W-linked "retrocopies" target that gene during female sex determination in .

The Lepidoptera are an insect order of cultural, economic, and environmental importance, representing ∼10% of all described living species. Yet, for all but one of these species (silkmoth, ), the molecular genetics of how sexual fate is determined remains unknown. We investigated this in the diamondback moth (), a globally important, highly invasive, and economically damaging pest of cruciferous crops.

Environmentally responsive reproduction: neuroendocrine signalling and the evolution of eusociality.

Eusociality is a rare but successful life-history strategy that is defined by the reproductive division of labour. In eusocial species, most females forgo their own reproduction to support that of a dominant female or queen. In many eusocial insects, worker reproduction is inhibited via dominance hierarchies or by pheromones produced by the queen and her brood.

Prevalence of Feeding and Swallowing Disorders in Congenital Heart Disease: A Scoping Review.

Feeding and swallowing difficulties are commonly reported as comorbidities in infants and children with congenital heart disease. These difficulties have negative health consequences for the child and impact the quality of life of both the child and caregivers. This scoping review presents an integrated summary of the published literature on the prevalence of feeding and swallowing difficulties in congenital heart disease.

Engineered expression of the invertebrate-specific scorpion toxin AaHIT reduces adult longevity and female fecundity in the diamondback moth Plutella xylostella.

Background: Previous genetic pest management (GPM) systems in diamondback moth (DBM) have relied on expressing lethal proteins ('effectors') that are 'cell-autonomous', that is, they do not leave the cell in which they are expressed. To increase the flexibility of future GPM systems in DBM, we aimed to assess the use of a non-cell-autonomous, invertebrate-specific, neurotoxic effector - the scorpion toxin AaHIT. This AaHIT effector was designed to be secreted by expressing cells, potentially leading to effects on distant cells, specifically neuromuscular junctions.

Preferred crystallographic orientation of cellulose in plant primary cell walls.

Cellulose, the most abundant biopolymer on earth, is a versatile, energy rich material found in the cell walls of plants, bacteria, algae, and tunicates. It is well established that cellulose is crystalline, although the orientational order of cellulose crystallites normal to the plane of the cell wall has not been characterized. A preferred orientational alignment of cellulose crystals could be an important determinant of the mechanical properties of the cell wall and of cellulose-cellulose and cellulose-matrix interactions.

Expanding the CRISPR Toolbox in Culicine Mosquitoes: Validation of Pol III Promoters.

CRISPR-Cas9-based "gene drive" technologies have been proposed as a novel and effective means of controlling human diseases vectored by mosquitoes. However, more complex designs than those demonstrated to date-and an expanded molecular toolbox with which to build them-will be required to overcome the issues of resistance formation/evolution and drive spatial/temporal limitation. Foreseeing this need, we assessed the sgRNA transcriptional activities of 33 phylogenetically diverse insect Polymerase III promoters using three disease-relevant Culicine mosquito cell lines (, , and ).

Optimized plant compound with potent anti-biofilm activity across gram-negative species.

Many human diseases, including cystic fibrosis lung infections, are caused or exacerbated by bacterial biofilms. Specialized modes of motility, including swarming and twitching, allow gram-negative bacteria to spread across surfaces and form biofilms. Compounds that inhibit these motilities could slow the spread of biofilms, thereby allowing antibiotics to work better.

Identification and characterization of a Masculinizer homologue in the diamondback moth, Plutella xylostella.

Recently, a novel sex-determination system was identified in the silkworm (Bombyx mori) in which a piwi-interacting RNA (piRNA) encoded on the female-specific W chromosome silences a Z-linked gene (Masculinizer) that would otherwise initiate male sex-determination and dosage compensation. Masculinizer provides various opportunities for developing improved genetic pest management tools. A pest lepidopteran in which a genetic pest management system has been developed, but which would benefit greatly from such improved designs, is the diamondback moth, Plutella xylostella.

Distinct differences in the nanoscale behaviors of the twist-bend liquid crystal phase of a flexible linear trimer and homologous dimer.

We synthesized the liquid crystal dimer and trimer members of a series of flexible linear oligomers and characterized their microscopic and nanoscopic properties using resonant soft X-ray scattering and a number of other experimental techniques. On the microscopic scale, the twist-bend phases of the dimer and trimer appear essentially identical. However, while the liquid crystal dimer exhibits a temperature-dependent variation of its twist-bend helical pitch varying from 100 to 170 Å on heating, the trimer exhibits an essentially temperature-independent pitch of 66 Å, significantly shorter than those reported for other twist-bend forming materials in the literature.

Indication of a twist-grain-boundary-twist-bend phase of flexible core bent-shape chiral dimers.

The effect of the molecular chirality of chiral additives on the nanostructure of the twist-bend nematic (NTB) liquid crystal phase with ambidextrous chirality and nanoscale pitch due to spontaneous symmetry breaking is studied. It is found that the ambidextrous nanoscale pitch of the NTB phase increases by 50% due to 3% chiral additive, and the chiral transfer among the biphenyl groups disappears in the NTB* phase. Most significantly, a twist-grain boundary (TGB) type phase is found at c > 1.

Delayed cord clamping with stabilisation at all preterm births - feasibility and efficacy of a low cost technique.

Objectives: Meta-analysis data suggests that Delayed cord clamping (DCC) in preterm infants is associated with a 32% reduction in mortality. Reported rates of this intervention are low, particularly for caesarean deliveries. Perceived difficulties providing respiratory support and thermal care during DCC may be barriers to implementation of this intervention.

The role of juvenile hormone in regulating reproductive physiology and dominance in ants.

Unequal reproductive output among members of the same sex (reproductive skew) is a common phenomenon in a wide range of communally breeding animals. In such species, reproductive dominance is often acquired during antagonistic interactions between group members that establish a reproductive hierarchy in which only a few individuals reproduce. Rank-specific syndromes of behavioural and physiological traits characterize such hierarchies, but how antagonistic behavioural interactions translate into stable rank-specific syndromes remains poorly understood.

Recent advances in threshold-dependent gene drives for mosquitoes.

Mosquito-borne diseases, such as malaria, dengue and chikungunya, cause morbidity and mortality around the world. Recent advances in gene drives have produced control methods that could theoretically modify all populations of a disease vector, from a single release, making whole species less able to transmit pathogens. This ability has caused both excitement, at the prospect of global eradication of mosquito-borne diseases, and concern around safeguards.

Bifidenone: Structure-Activity Relationship and Advanced Preclinical Candidate.

Bifidenone is a novel natural tubulin polymerization inhibitor that exhibits antiproliferative activity against a range of human cancer cell lines, making it an attractive candidate for development. A synthetic route was previously developed to alleviate supply constraints arising from its isolation in microgram quantities from a Gabonese tree. Using that previously published route, we present here 42 analogues that were synthesized to examine the structure-activity relationship of bifidenone derivatives.

Isolation and Identification of the Novel Tubulin Polymerization Inhibitor Bifidenone.

The pursuit of structurally novel compounds has led to the isolation of a series of neolignans (2-6), for which the structures have been determined from microgram quantities using microcryoprobe NMR technology. Compounds 2-6 provided some unexpectedly clear structure-activity relationship data, with compound 2 demonstrating significantly more potency in the in vitro cytotoxicity assay than the other analogues. Further screening found that compound 2 induces apoptosis with activation of caspase 3/7.

The effects of disturbance threat on leaf-cutting ant colonies: a laboratory study.

The flexibility of organisms to respond plastically to their environment is fundamental to their fitness and evolutionary success. Social insects provide some of the most impressive examples of plasticity, with individuals exhibiting behavioral and sometimes morphological adaptations for their specific roles in the colony, such as large soldiers for nest defense. However, with the exception of the honey bee model organism, there has been little investigation of the nature and effects of environmental stimuli thought to instigate alternative phenotypes in social insects.