21,782 results match your criteria: "University of Massachusetts Amherst[Affiliation]"

Hydrogen exchange mass spectrometry (HXMS) is a powerful tool to understand protein folding pathways and energetics. However, HXMS experiments to date have used exchange conditions termed EX1 or EX2 which limit the information that can be gained compared to the more general EXX exchange regime. If EXX behavior could be understood and analyzed, a single HXMS timecourse on an intact protein could fully map its folding landscape without requiring denaturation.

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Detection of DNA in Deer Keds: Massachusetts, USA.

Insects

January 2025

Laboratory of Medical Zoology, Department of Microbiology, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA 01003, USA.

Deer keds ( spp. and ) are hematophagous ectoparasites that primarily infest white-tailed deer () and other cervids in the United States. The distribution of deer keds in the northeastern United States and the pathogens they harbor remains relatively unexplored.

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Fungal infections represent a significant global health challenge. is a particularly widespread pathogen, with both molecular and biofilm-based mechanisms making it resistant to or tolerant of available antifungal drugs. This study reports a combination therapy, active against , utilizing terbinafine and essential oils incorporated into a gelatin-based nanoemulsion system (T-GNE).

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Background/objectives: Static upright tasks, including standing unsupported (SU), eyes closed (SEC), feet together (SFT), tandem (TS), and single limb (SLS), are routinely examined in children and are included in many norm-referenced measures. Existing normative values for these standing tasks may not apply to contemporary children and have not been established across wide age ranges. The primary purpose of this study was to investigate developmental trajectories of and relationships between four static standing positions (SPs [SU, SFT, TS, SLS]) in children aged 2 through 13 years who are developing typically.

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Pesticide residues on fruits pose a global food safety concern, emphasizing the need for effective and practical removal strategies to ensure safe consumption. This study investigates the efficacy of household ingredients (corn starch, all-purpose flour, rice flour and baking soda) and four commercial fresh produce wash products in eliminating a model pesticide thiabendazole with and without a model non-ionic surfactant Alligare 90 from postharvest fruits. Surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) was employed for the rapid, in situ quantification of residue removal on apple surfaces.

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Gut microbiomes are largely unchanged when exposed to their amphibian host's latitudinally variable upper thermal limit.

Comp Biochem Physiol A Mol Integr Physiol

January 2025

University of Connecticut, Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, 75 North Eagleville Road, Storrs, CT 06269, United States of America.

Climate change will increase the frequency and severity of temperature extremes. Links between host thermal physiology and their gut microbiota suggest that organisms' responses to future climates may be mediated by their microbiomes, raising the question of how the thermal environment influences the microbiome itself. Vertebrate gut microbiomes influence the physiological plasticity of their hosts via effects on immunity, metabolism, and nutrient uptake.

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Background: Postural instability is common in people with Parkinson's Disease (PwPD), increasing their risk of injurious falls. Evidence suggests a sensory reweighting deficit in PwPD, along with compensatory muscle co-contraction in response to postural challenges. During balance tasks requiring sensory reweighting, older adults exhibit elevated postural sway and muscle co-contraction, as well as longer perceptual delays, compared to young adults.

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Background: Obesity, classified by body mass index (BMI), is associated with higher postmenopausal breast cancer (BCa) risk. Yet, the associations between abdominal visceral (VAT) and subcutaneous adipose tissue (SAT) with BCa are unclear.

Methods: We assessed BCa associations with abdominal VAT and SAT in a prospective cohort of postmenopausal women without a history of cancer and with 27 years follow-up (N = 9950), during which all new cancers were adjudicated.

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Updates to HIV transmission rate estimates along the HIV care continuum in the United States, 2019.

J Acquir Immune Defic Syndr

January 2025

Division of HIV Prevention, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Atlanta, GA, US at the time this research was undertaken. Current affiliation: Manhattan Associates, Atlanta GA.

Background: In 2019, there were an estimated 1.2 million persons with HIV (PWH) and 35,100 new infections in the United States. The HIV care continuum has a large influence on transmission dynamics.

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Introduction: Although the etiology of depression is incredibly complex, the narrative that it is caused by a simple "chemical imbalance" persists in lay settings. We sought to understand where people are exposed to this explanation (i.e.

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A beginner's guide to eye tracking for psycholinguistic studies of reading.

Behav Res Methods

January 2025

Department of Linguistics, University of Massachusetts, 650 North Pleasant Street, Amherst, MA, 01003, USA.

Eye tracking has been a popular methodology used to study the visual, cognitive, and linguistic processes underlying word recognition and sentence parsing during reading for several decades. However, the successful use of eye tracking requires researchers to make deliberate choices about how they apply this technique, and there is wide variability across labs and fields with respect to which choices are "standard." We aim to provide an easy-to-reference guideline that can help new researchers with their entrée into eye-tracking-while-reading research.

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Purpose: Bangladesh has experienced a rapid epidemiological transition from communicable to non-communicable diseases (NCDs) in recent decades. There is, however, limited evidence about multidimensional determinants of NCDs in this population. The BangladEsh Longitudinal Investigation of Emerging Vascular and nonvascular Events (BELIEVE) study is a household-based prospective cohort study established to investigate biological, behavioural, environmental and broader determinants of NCDs.

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Objective: The goal of this study was to assess the additive value of considering type 2 diabetes (T2D) polygenic risk score (PRS) in addition to family history for T2D prediction.

Research Design And Methods: Data were obtained from the All of Us (AoU) research database. First-degree T2D family history was self-reported on the personal family history health questionnaire.

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To push upper boundaries of thermal conductivity in polymer composites, understanding of thermal transport mechanisms is crucial. Despite extensive simulations, systematic experimental investigation on thermal transport in polymer composites is limited. To better understand thermal transport processes, we design polymer composites with perfect fillers (graphite) and defective fillers (graphite oxide), using polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) as a matrix model.

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The Influence of Migration Timing and Local Conditions on Reproductive Timing in Arctic-Breeding Birds.

Ecol Evol

January 2025

Wildlife Research Division Environment and Climate Change Canada Ottawa Ontario Canada.

For birds breeding in the Arctic, nest success is affected by the timing of nest initiation, which is partially determined by local conditions such as snow cover. However, conditions during the non-breeding season can carry over to affect the timing of breeding. We used tracking and breeding data from 248 individuals of 8 species and subspecies of Arctic-breeding shorebirds to estimate how the timing of nest initiation is related to local conditions like snowmelt phenology versus prior conditions, measured by the timing and speed of migration.

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Structural and functional analysis of the Nipah virus polymerase complex.

Cell

January 2025

Department of Microbiology, Blavatnik Institute, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA; Department of Medicine, Division of Infectious Diseases, Brigham & Women's Hospital, Boston, MA, USA; Center for Integrated Solutions in Infectious Diseases, Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, Cambridge, MA, USA; Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Boston, MA, USA. Electronic address:

Nipah virus (NiV) is a bat-borne, zoonotic RNA virus that is highly pathogenic in humans. The NiV polymerase, which mediates viral genome replication and mRNA transcription, is a promising drug target. We determined the cryoelectron microscopy (cryo-EM) structure of the NiV polymerase complex, comprising the large protein (L) and phosphoprotein (P), and performed structural, biophysical, and in-depth functional analyses of the NiV polymerase.

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Complementing the oft-studied construct of isolation, research has increasingly focused on existential isolation (EI), or the subjective feeling of separateness in one's experience. In the clinical realm, several studies have demonstrated that higher EI is associated with more severe mental health problems at a single cross-section of time. Moreover, one study showed that higher pretreatment EI predicted worse psychotherapy outcomes.

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The innate immune system is tightly regulated by a complex network of chemical signals triggered by pathogens, cellular damage, and environmental stimuli. While it is well-established that changes in the extracellular environment can significantly influence the immune response to pathogens and damage-associated molecules, there remains a limited understanding of how changes in environmental stimuli specifically impact the activation of the NLRP3 inflammasome, a key component of innate immunity. Here, we demonstrated how shear stress can act as Signal 2 in the NLRP3 inflammasome activation pathway by treating LPS-primed immortalized bone marrow-derived macrophages (iBMDMs) with several physiologically relevant magnitudes of shear stress to induce inflammasome activation.

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Objectives: Certain group-living mammals-including many primates-exhibit affiliative relationships between sexes that persist past copulation. Relationships between females and males in baboons (Papio sp.) are particularly well-characterized.

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Introduction: Enteric pathogens are a leading causes of diarrheal deaths in low-and middle-income countries. The Exposure Assessment of Infections in Rural Ethiopia (EXCAM) project, aims to identify potential sources of bacteria in the genus and, more generally, fecal contamination of infants during the first 1.5 years of life using as indicator.

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Splenic infarction with infectious mononucleosis (IM) caused by Epstein-Barr Virus (EBV) has been reported as a rare complication of IM. The monospot test, often used to diagnose EBV-related IM, may produce false-negative results, especially in atypical presentations or early stages of infection. This report describes the case of a monospot-negative patient who developed splenic infarction as a complication of IM.

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Opportunities in Bottlebrush Block Copolymers for Advanced Materials.

ACS Nano

January 2025

Conte Center for Polymer Research, Polymer Science and Engineering, University of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst, Massachusetts 01003, United States.

Bottlebrush block copolymers (BBCPs) are a unique class of materials that contain a backbone with densely grafted and chemically distinct polymeric side chains. The nonlinear architecture of BBCPs provides numerous degrees of freedom in their preparation, including control over key parameters such as grafting density, side chain length, block arrangement, and overall molecular weight. This uniquely branched structure provides BBCPs with several important distinctions from their linear counterparts, including sterically induced side chain and backbone conformations, rapid and large self-assembled nanostructures, and reduced or eliminated entanglement effects (assuming sufficient grafting density and that the molecular weight of the side chains is below their respective entanglement molecular weight).

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Currently commercial colorimetric paper lateral flow immunoassays exhibit insufficient limit of detection (LOD) and limited clinical sensitivity toward the detection of SARS-CoV-2 antigens, which causes a high false negative rate. To mitigate this issue, a new plasmon-enhanced fluorescence probe was developed for paper lateral flow strips (PLFSs). The probe is made of a sandwich-structured Ag-core@silica@dye@silica-shell nanoparticle in which fluorescent dyes are sandwiched between the plasmonic Ag core and the silica outer shell, and the separation distance between the Ag core and the dye molecules is controlled by the silica space layer.

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Delamination of chick cephalic neural crest cells requires an MMP14-dependent downregulation of Cadherin-6B.

Differentiation

January 2025

Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology Department (MCD), Centre de Biologie Integrative (CBI), University of Toulouse, CNRS, UPS, 31062, Toulouse, France. Electronic address:

Matrix Metalloproteinases (MMPs) are known for their role in matrix remodeling via their catalytic activities in the extracellular space. Interestingly, these enzymes can also play less expected roles in cell survival, polarity and motility via other substrates (e.g.

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As consumer awareness grows regarding the environmental and health impacts of animal-based products, plant-based alternatives are gaining popularity in developed countries. Plant-based proteins, like soy protein isolate (SPI), are valued for their sustainability and ability to complement animal proteins. SPI is commonly used in plant-based yogurts due to its high-quality protein, strong gelling capacity, and support for lactic acid bacteria (LAB) growth.

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