Publications by authors named "Siobhan M O'Sullivan"

Article Synopsis
  • The COVID-19 pandemic forced educational systems worldwide to quickly switch to e-learning, leaving faculty, staff, and students unprepared for the challenges this posed.
  • As we move beyond the pandemic, there's a push to evaluate this transition and create best practices to handle potential future disruptions in education.
  • The commentary highlights challenges faced in this rapid shift, focusing on teaching methods, technical issues, student reactions, and curriculum evaluations in the context of the College of Medicine at Khalifa University in the UAE.
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The authors recount the challenges they overcame to deliver lecture content and assessments while engaging students at their newly established medical school. Faculty must multitask in new and added ways to achieve the same goal in e-learning platforms. Online course delivery introduces additional barriers to engaging students, atypical of face-to-face sessions.

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National nutrition surveys have shown that over half of all adults in Ireland, the United Kingdom (UK), and the United States of America (USA) have low vitamin K intakes. Thus, dietary strategies to improve vitamin K intakes are needed, and vitamin K biofortification of food may be one food-based approach. The primary aim of our study was to establish whether increasing the vitamin K content of hen feed can increase the vitamin K content of eggs, and the secondary aims were to examine the effects on hen performance parameters, as well as egg and eggshell quality parameters.

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Background: Red meat and meat products can contribute meaningfully to the mean daily intake of vitamin D. Beef and lamb can contain vitamin D and 25-hydroxyvitamin D [25(OH)D] but also potentially vitamin D and 25-hydroxyvitamin D [25(OH)D], all of which contribute to meat's vitamin D activity.

Objectives: We aimed to measure the vitamin D, vitamin D, 25(OH)D, and 25(OH)D content of Irish beef and lamb.

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Gamma(2)-melanocyte-stimulating hormone (γ2MSH) is a peptide hormone released by the pituitary gland which is thought to act directly on the renal inner medulla to promote increased sodium excretion into urine (natriuresis). The aim of this study was to determine if a stable analog, [Nle(3), D-Phe(6)]-γ2MSH (NDP-γ2MSH), of the native peptide regulated the activity, expression and cellular localization of epithelial sodium channel (ENaC) in a murine inner medullary collecting duct (mIMCD-3) cell line. Our results indicate that expression of the γ2MSH receptor, melanocortin receptor 3 receptor (MC3R), is up-regulated by culturing the cells in media with an increased osmolality (∼400mOsm/kg).

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2, 3, 5, 6-Tetrachloro-1, 4-benzoquinone (TCBQ) is a metabolite of pentachlorophenol known to react with cysteines of glutathione transferases (GSTs). TCBQ treatment of rat kidney rGSTA1-2 and rGSTA1-1 abolishes 70-80% conjugation of glutathione (GSH) to 1-chloro-2, 4-dinitrobenzene and results in strongly correlated quenching of intrinsic fluorescence of Trp-20 (R>0.96).

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Despite advances in the understanding of the pathophysiology of asthma and the availability of effective treatment, the World Health Organization estimates that asthma accounts for 1 in every 250 deaths worldwide. Viruses are associated with half of all asthma exacerbations. The immune response to viral infection may enhance preexisting airway inflammation via the release of chemokines and cytokines and local recruitment of inflammatory cells.

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Most fungal glutathione transferases (GSTs) do not fit easily into any of the previously characterised classes by immunological, sequence or catalytic criteria. In contrast to the paucity of studies on GSTs cloned or isolated from fungal sources, a screen of databases revealed 67 GST-like sequences from 21 fungal species. Comparison by multiple sequence alignment generated a dendrogram revealing five clusters of GST-like proteins designated clusters 1, 2, EFIBgamma, Ure2p and MAK16, the last three of which have previously been related to the GST superfamily.

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