While academics increasingly point to the value of engaged scholarship, we describe a more extreme form which we label as "deep partnering"-a long-term, holistic, and dynamic collaboration between academics and practitioners to achieve shared goals. Deep partnering involves interdependent and evolving interactions between academics and practitioners over an extended time period. While such relationships enable generative impact on important issues, these relationships remain challenging as academics spend time in the practitioners' complex worlds, surfacing paradoxes due to the partners' conflicting roles, time horizons, and goals, as well as uncertainty in the partnership's evolution.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFProc Natl Acad Sci U S A
January 2025
The bacterial type 6 secretion system (T6SS) is a toxin-injecting nanoweapon that mediates competition in plant- and animal-associated microbial communities. Bacteria can evolve de novo resistance against T6SS attacks, but resistance is far from universal in natural communities, suggesting key features of T6SS weaponry may act to limit its evolution. Here, we combine ecoevolutionary modeling and experimental evolution to examine how toxin type and multiplicity in attackers shape resistance evolution in susceptible competitors.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFRacial microaggressions and cultural ruptures have a significant impact on mental health care for Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) communities. This article reviews the application of the multicultural counseling orientation framework in psychiatry to address these challenges and improve therapeutic outcomes. The authors outline strategies to integrate cultural humility into psychiatric practice, with an emphasis on self-reflection, feedback, and the recognition of microaggressions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMicrobial source tracking (MST) is a critical tool for identifying sources of human and animal fecal pollution in aquatic environments. To enhance human fecal pollution tracking, this study evaluated the performance characteristics of pBI143, a cryptic plasmid recently identified for potential MST applications. Nucleic acid samples from ten animal species were screened for pBI143, revealing its presence in a small number of pigs, cows, dogs, cats, and flying fox fecal samples.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFRationale: Mutations in the leucine-rich repeat kinase 2 (LRRK2) gene play an important role in Parkinson's disease (PD) pathogenesis, and downregulation of LRRK2 has become a promising therapy for PD. Here, we developed a synthetic biology strategy for the self-assembly and delivery of small interfering RNAs (siRNAs) of LRRK2 into the substantia nigra via small extracellular vesicles (sEVs) using a genetic circuit (in the form of naked DNA plasmid) to attenuate PD-like phenotypes in mouse model.
Methods: We generated the genetic circuit encoding both a neuron-targeting rabies virus glycoprotein (RVG) tag and a LRRK2 siRNA under the control of a cytomegalovirus (CMV) promoter, and assessed its therapeutic effects using LRRK2 mouse models of PD.