Mental health is positively associated with biodiversity in Canadian cities.

Cities concentrate problems that affect human well-being and biodiversity. Exploring the link between mental health and biodiversity can inform more holistic public health and urban planning. Here we examined associations between bird and tree species diversity estimates from eBird community science datasets and national forest inventories with self-rated mental health metrics from the Canadian Community Health Survey.

Plasmodium RNA triphosphatase validation as antimalarial target.

Target-based approaches have traditionally been used in the search for new anti-infective molecules. Target selection process, a critical step in Drug Discovery, identifies targets that are essential to establish or maintain the infection, tractable to be susceptible for inhibition, selective towards their human ortholog and amenable for large scale purification and high throughput screening. The work presented herein validates the Plasmodium falciparum mRNA 5' triphosphatase (PfPRT1), the first enzymatic step to cap parasite nuclear mRNAs, as a candidate target for the development of new antimalarial compounds.

Thermodynamic limitations on brain oxygen metabolism: physiological implications.

Recent thermodynamic modelling indicates that maintaining the brain tissue ratio of O to CO (abbreviated tissue O /CO ) is critical for preserving the entropy increase available from oxidative metabolism of glucose, with a fall of that available entropy leading to a reduction of the phosphorylation potential and impairment of brain energy metabolism. This provides a novel perspective for understanding physiological responses under different conditions in terms of preserving tissue O /CO . To enable estimation of tissue O /CO in the human brain, a detailed mathematical model of O and CO transport was developed, and applied to reported physiological responses to different challenges, asking: how well is tissue O /CO preserved? Reported experimental results for increased neural activity, hypercapnia and hypoxia due to high altitude are consistent with preserving tissue O /CO .

Metabolic energetics underlying attractors in neural models.

Neural population modeling, including the role of neural attractors, is a promising tool for understanding many aspects of brain function. We propose a modeling framework to connect the abstract variables used in modeling to recent cellular-level estimates of the bioenergetic costs of different aspects of neural activity, measured in ATP consumed per second per neuron. Based on recent work, an empirical reference for brain ATP use for the awake resting brain was estimated as ∼2 × 10 ATP/s-neuron across several mammalian species.