Education of the public health workforce and the Sustainable Development Goals: An analysis of existing competency sets.

Objectives: This paper describes a project designed to quantify the extent to which existing competency frameworks used for educating the public health workforce contribute to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) directly relevant to public health.

Study Design: This was a qualitative study involving a content and thematic analysis and mapping of nine available public health competency sets against the World Federation of Public Health Association's Global Charter for the Public's Health and the SDGs.

Methods: First, the SDG targets directly relevant to public health were selected, then mapped against the elements of the Global Charter to illustrate their alignment with aspects of public health practice.

A dual lethal system to enhance containment of recombinant micro-organisms.

Active containment systems based on the controlled expression of a lethal gene are designed to increase containment of recombinant micro-organisms used for environmental applications. A major drawback in containment is the existence of mutations that generate surviving cells that cease to respond to the toxic effect of the lethal function. In this work the authors have developed for the first time a strategy to reduce the problem of mutations and increase the efficiency of containment based on the combination of two lethal functions acting on different cellular targets of major concern in containment, DNA and RNA, and whose expression is under control of different regulatory signals.

A gene containment strategy based on a restriction-modification system.

Engineering barriers to the spread of specific genes are of great interest both to increase the predictability of recombinant microorganisms used for environmental applications and to study the role of gene transfer in the adaptation of microbial communities to changing environments. We report here a new gene containment circuit based on a toxin-antidote pair that targets the cell DNA, i.e.

Construction of plasmid vectors bearing a NotI-expression cassette based on the lac promoter.

We have constructed two plasmid vectors for cloning and expression of DNA fragments controlled by the lac promoter as a NotI-expression cassette. Whereas plasmid pSJ33 allows mobilization of the expression cassette into a wide variety of Gram-negative bacteria by RP4-mediated conjugation, the low-copy-number plasmid pSJP18Not facilitates cloning and expression in Escherichia coli when high gene dosage may be detrimental. In addition to their suitable cloning features (e.

Eukaryotic selenocysteine incorporation follows a nonprocessive mechanism that competes with translational termination.

The synthesis of eukaryotic selenoproteins involves the recoding of an internal UGA codon as a site for selenocysteine incorporation. This recoding event is directed by a selenocysteine insertion sequence in the 3'-untranslated region. Because UGA also functions as a signal for peptidyl-tRNA hydrolysis, we have investigated how the rates of translational termination and selenocysteine incorporation relate to cis-acting elements in the mRNA as well as to trans-acting factors in the cytoplasm.