Evidence for a single, ancient origin of a genus-wide alternative life history strategy.

Understanding the evolutionary origins and factors maintaining alternative life history strategies (ALHS) within species is a major goal of evolutionary research. While alternative alleles causing discrete ALHS are expected to purge or fix over time, one-third of the ~90 species of butterflies are polymorphic for a female-limited ALHS called Alba. Whether Alba arose once, evolved in parallel, or has been exchanged among taxa is currently unknown.

Improving the quality of healthcare: a cross-sectional study of the features of successful clinical networks.

Objectives: Networks of clinical experts are being established internationally to help embed evidence based care in health systems. There is emerging evidence that these clinical networks can drive quality improvement programs, but the features that distinguish successful networks are largely unknown. We examined the factors that make clinical networks effective at improving quality of care and facilitating system-wide changes.

Selection of epitopes from self-antigens for eliciting Th2 or Th1 activity in the treatment of autoimmune disease or cancer.

Vaccines have been valuable tools in the prevention of infectious diseases, and the rapid development of new vectors against constantly mutating foreign antigens in viruses such as influenza has become a regular, seasonal exercise. Harnessing the immune response against self-antigens is not necessarily analogous or as achievable by iterative processes, and since the desired outcome includes leaving the targeted organism intact, requires some precision engineering. In vaccine-based treatment of autoimmunity and cancer, the proper selection of antigens and generation of the desired antigen-specific therapeutic immunity has been challenging.

Feasibility Study: Colombian Caribbean Folk Dances to Increase Physical Fitness and Health-Related Quality of Life in Older Women.

The objectives of the study were to describe the feasibility of an intervention in older women based on folk dances of the Colombian Caribbean region, and to analyze the effects of the intervention on physical fitness and health-related quality of life (HRQoL). A pilot study was conducted in a sample of 27 participants, 15 in the intervention group (IG) and 12 in the comparison group (CG). Caribbean Colombian dance rhythms were introduced as an intervention that lasted 12 weeks.

Th1 epitope selection for clinically effective cancer vaccines.

New cancer immunotherapies mark progress in our understanding of tumor biology and harnessing the immune system's management of self. However, protein- and peptide-based vaccines are not yet consistently efficacious. Recent work uncovers principles governing the genesis of T helper type-restrictive immunity to self-antigens elicited by vaccine epitopes, enabling vaccines to skew the balance from tolerogenic Type II (Th2) to inflammatory Type I (Th1) T cells, and invigorating this cancer immunotherapeutic approach.