Cross-linking of cellular proteins by tissue transglutaminase during necrotic cell death:a mechanism for maintaining tissue integrity

Tissue transglutaminase (tTG) is a Ca2+-dependent enzyme which cross-links proteins via e(g-glutamyl)lysine bridges. There is increasing evidence that tTG is involved in wound repair and tissue stabilization, as well as in physiological mechanisms leading to cell death. To investigate the role of this enzyme in tissue wounding leading to loss of Ca2+ homoeostasis, we initially used a model involving electroporation to reproduce cell wounding under controlled conditions. Two cell models were used whereby tTG expression is regulated either by antisense silencing in ECV 304 cells or by using transfected Swiss 3T3 cells in which tTG expression is under the control of the tet regulatory system. Using these cells, loss of Ca2+ homoeostasis following electroporation led to a tTG-dependent formation of highly cross-linked proteinaceous shells from intracellular proteins. Formation of these structures is dependent on elevated intracellular Ca2+, but it is independent of intracellular proteases and is near maximal after only 20min post-wounding. Using labelled primary amines as an indicator of tTG activity within these 'wounded cells', we demonstrate that tTG modifies a wide range of proteins that are present in both the perinuclear and intranuclear spaces. The demonstration of entrapped DNA within these shell structures, which showed limited fragmentation, provides evidence that the high degree of transglutaminase cross-linking results in the prevention of DNA release, which may serve to dampen any subsequent inflammatory response. Comparable observations were shown when monolayers of cells were mechanically wounded by scratching. In this second model of cell wounding, redistribution of tTG activity to the extracellular matrix was also demonstrated, an effect which may serve to stabilize tissues post-trauma, and thus contribute to the maintenance of tissue integrity.

Mechanism for cross-linking polychloroprene with ethylene thiourea and zinc oxide

An investigation into the mechanism by which ethylene thiourea (ETU) cross-links polychloroprene (CR) in combination with zinc oxide (ZnO) was undertaken. This was achieved through an examination of the mechanisms of crosslinking CR with ETU and ZnO separately and in unison. Spectroscopic and physical characterization techniques were employed to probe the cross-linking mechanisms of CRusing other standard rubber accelerators and model compounds with analogous structures and functionalities to ETU. These investigations have resulted in the proposal of a new mechanism by which ETU and ZnO can synergistically cross-link CR, in addition to providing new evidence to support concomitant mechanisms already published for cross-linking CR.

A quiz-based game for addressing growing population issues:linking learning mechanics to the GROWTH serious game

This paper discusses the integration of quiz mechanism into digital game-based learning platform addressing environmental and social issues caused by population growth. 50 participants' learning outcomes were compared before and after the session. Semi-structured interview was used to gather participants' viewpoints regarding of issues presented in the game. Phenomenography was used as a methodology for data collection and analysis. Preliminary outcomes have shown that the current game implementation and quiz mechanism can be used to: (1) promote learning and awareness on environmental and social issues and (2) sustain players' attention and engagements.

Linking design and manufacturing domains via web-based and enterprise integration technologies

The manufacturing industry faces many challenges such as reducing time-to-market and cutting costs. In order to meet these increasing demands, effective methods are need to support the early product development stages by bridging the gap of communicating early design ideas and the evaluation of manufacturing performance. This paper introduces methods of linking design and manufacturing domains using disparate technologies. The combined technologies include knowledge management supporting for product lifecycle management systems, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, aggregate process planning systems, workflow management and data exchange formats. A case study has been used to demonstrate the use of these technologies, illustrated by adding manufacturing knowledge to generate alternative early process plan which are in turn used by an ERP system to obtain and optimise a rough-cut capacity plan. Copyright © 2010 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.

Modelling and linking transformations in EPCIS governing supply chain business processes

Supply chains comprise of complex processes spanning across multiple trading partners. The various operations involved generate large number of events that need to be integrated in order to enable internal and external traceability. Further, provenance of artifacts and agents involved in the supply chain operations is now a key traceability requirement. In this paper we propose a Semantic web/Linked data powered framework for the event based representation and analysis of supply chain activities governed by the EPCIS specification. We specifically show how a new EPCIS event type called "Transformation Event" can be semantically annotated using EEM - The EPCIS Event Model to generate linked data, that can be exploited for internal event based traceability in supply chains involving transformation of products. For integrating provenance with traceability, we propose a mapping from EEM to PROV-O. We exemplify our approach on an abstraction of the production processes that are part of the wine supply chain.

Essential features of serious games design in higher education:linking learning attributes to game mechanics

This paper consolidates evidence and material from a range of specialist and disciplinary fields to provide an evidence-based review and synthesis on the design and use of serious games in higher education. Search terms identified 165 papers reporting conceptual and empirical evidence on how learning attributes and game mechanics may be planned, designed and implemented by university teachers interested in using games, which are integrated into lesson plans and orchestrated as part of a learning sequence at any scale. The findings outline the potential of classifying the links between learning attributes and game mechanics as a means to scaffold teachers’ understanding of how to perpetuate learning in optimal ways while enhancing the in-game learning experience. The findings of this paper provide a foundation for describing methods, frames and discourse around experiences of design and use of serious games, linked to methodological limitations and recommendations for further research in this area.

Linking herbivory and pollination: Costs and selection implications in Centrosema virginianum Bentham (Fabaceae: Papilionoideae)

This research first evaluated levels and type of herbivory experienced by Centrosema virginianum plants in their native habitat and how florivory affected the pollinator activity. I found that populations of C. virginianum in two pine rockland habitat fragments experienced higher herbivory levels (15% and 22%) compared with plants in the protected study site (8.6%). I found that bees (Hymenoptera) pollinated butterfly pea. Furthermore, I found that florivores had a negative effect in the pollinators visitation rates and therefore in the seed set of the population. ^ I then conducted a study using a greenhouse population of C. virginianum. I applied artificial herbivory treatments: control, mild herbivory and severe herbivory. Flower size, pollen produced, ovules produced and seeds produced were negatively affected by herbivory. I did not find difference in nectar volume and quality by flowers among treatments. Surprisingly, severely damaged plants produced flowers with larger pollen than those from mildly damaged and undamaged plants. Results showed that plants tolerated mild and severe herbivory with 6% and 17% reduction of total fitness components, respectively. However, the investment of resources was not equisexual. ^ A comparison in the ability of siring seeds between large and small pollen was necessary to establish the biological consequence of size in pollen performance. I found that fruits produced an average of 18.7 ± 1.52 and 17.7 ± 1.50 from large and small pollen fertilization respectively. These findings supported a pollen number-size trade-off in plants under severe herbivory treatments. As far as I know, this result has not previously been reported. ^ Lastly, I tested how herbivory influenced seed abortion patterns in plants, examining how resources are allocated on different regions within fruits under artificial herbivory treatments. I found that self-fertilized fruits had greater seed abortion rates than cross-fertilized fruits. The proportion of seeds aborted was lower in the middle regions of the fruits in cross-fertilized fruits, producing more vigorous progeny. Self-fertilized fruits did not show patterns of seedling vigor. I also found that early abortion was higher closer to the peduncular end of the fruits. Position of seeds within fruits could be important in the seed dispersion mechanism characteristic of this species. ^

Linking Ecology and Economics for Ecosystem Management

This article outlines an approach, based on ecosystem services, for assessing the trade-offs inherent in managing humans embedded in ecological systems. Evaluating these trade-offs requires an understanding of the biophysical magnitudes of the changes in ecosystem services that result from human actions, and of the impact of these changes on human welfare. We summarize the state of the art of ecosystem services-based management and the information needs for applying it. Three case studies of Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) sites--coastal, urban, and agricultural-- illustrate the usefulness, information needs, quantification possibilities, and methods for this approach. One example of the application of this approach, with rigorously established service changes and valuations taken from the literature, is used to illustrate the potential for full economic valuation of several agricultural landscape management options, including managing for water quality, biodiversity, and crop productivity.

Market-Driven Hotel Brands: Linking Market Orientation, Innovation, and Performance

"Market orientation" is a term popularized by marketing practitioners to indicate the extent to which a firm is market driven. This presumed linkage between market orientation and profitability has caught the attention of scholars, but, surprisingly, only two prior studies have reported a positive association between the two. Given the special relevance to the hotel industry of being market driven, we believe this industry provides the ideal setting for demonstrating the link between market orientation and performance. This research examines this linkage in the hotel industry. The results of our study suggest that market orientation is positively and significantly related to innovation, subjective performance, and objective performance. This result yields a number of useful ideas about how to harness the power of the marketing concept.

An examination of psychological meaningfulness, safety, and availability as the underlying mechanisms linking job features and personal characteristics to work engagement

The present study tested a nomological net of work engagement that was derived from its extant research. Two of the main work engagement models that have been presented and empirically tested in the literature, the JD-R model and Kahn's model, were integrated to test the effects that job features and personal characteristics can have on work engagement through the psychological conditions of meaningfulness, safety, and availability. In this study, safety refers to psychological perceptions of safety and not workplace safety behaviors. The job features that were tested in this model included person-job fit, autonomy, co-worker relations, supervisor support, procedural justice, and interactional justice, while the personal characteristics consisted of self-consciousness, self-efficacy, extraversion, and neuroticism. Thirty-four hypotheses and a conceptual model were tested in order to establish the viability of this nomological net of work engagement in which it was expected that meaningfulness would mediate the relationships between job features and work engagement, safety would mediate the relationships that job features and personal characteristics have with work engagement, and availability (physical, emotional, and cognitive resources) would mediate the relationships that personal characteristics have with work engagement. Furthermore, analyses were run in order to determine the factor structure of work engagement, assess whether or not it exhibits differential validity from organizational commitment and job satisfaction, and confirm that it is positively related to the outcome variable of organizational citizenship behavior (OCB). The final sample consisted of 500 workers from an online labor market who responded to a questionnaire composed of measures of all constructs included in this study. Findings show that work engagement is best represented as a three-factor construct, composed of vigor, dedication and absorption. Furthermore, support was found for the distinction of work engagement from the related constructs of organizational commitment and job satisfaction. With regard to the proposed model, meaningfulness proved to be the strongest predictor of work engagement. Results show that it partially mediates the relationships that all job features have with work engagement. Safety proved to be a partial mediator of the relationships that autonomy, co-worker relations, supervisor support, procedural justice, interactional justice, and self-efficacy have with work engagement, and fully mediate the relationship between neuroticism and work engagement. Findings also show that availability partially mediates the positive relationships that extraversion and self-efficacy have with work engagement, and fully mediates the negative relationship that neuroticism has with work engagement. Finally, a positive relationship was found between work engagement and OCB. Research and organizational implications are discussed.

Linking Old Librarianship to New: Aligning 5-Steps of The Innovator's DNA in Creating Thematic Discovery Systems for the Everglades

This poster presentation from the May 2015 Florida Library Association Conference, along with the Everglades Explorer discovery portal at http://ee.fiu.edu, demonstrates how traditional bibliographic and curatorial principles can be applied to: 1) selection, cross-walking and aggregation of metadata linking end-users to wide-spread digital resources from multiple silos; 2) harvesting of select PDFs, HTML and media for web archiving and access; 3) selection of CMS domains, sub-domains and folders for targeted searching using an API. Choosing content for this discovery portal is comparable to past scholarly practice of creating and publishing subject bibliographies, except metadata and data are housed in relational databases. This new and yet traditional capacity coincides with: Growth of bibliographic utilities (MarcEdit); Evolution of open-source discovery systems (eXtensible Catalog); Development of target-capable web crawling and archiving systems (Archive-it); and specialized search APIs (Google). At the same time, historical and technical changes – specifically the increasing fluidity and re-purposing of syndicated metadata – make this possible. It equally stems from the expansion of freely accessible digitized legacy and born-digital resources. Innovation principles helped frame the process by which the thematic Everglades discovery portal was created at Florida International University. The path -- to providing for more effective searching and co-location of digital scientific, educational and historical material related to the Everglades -- is contextualized through five concepts found within Dyer and Christensen’s “The Innovator’s DNA: Mastering the five skills of disruptive innovators (2011). The project also aligns with Ranganathan’s Laws of Library Science, especially the 4th Law -- to "save the time of the user.”

Linking labour force participation, education, labour wages and household consumption in developing countries:push and pull effects in self-employment - evidence from Nigeria

The contribution of this thesis is in understanding the origins in developing countries of differences in labour wage and household consumption vis-à-vis educational abilities (and by extension employment statuses). This thesis adds to the labour market literature in developing countries by investigating the nature of employment and its consequences for labour wage and household consumption in a developing country. It utilizes multinomial probit, blinder-oaxaca, Heckman and quantile regressions to examine one human capital indicator: educational attainment; and two welfare proxies: labour wage and household consumption, in a developing country, Nigeria. It finds that, empirically, the self-employed are a heterogeneous group of individuals made up of a few highly educated individuals, and a significant majority of ‘not so educated’ individuals who mostly earn less than paid workers. It also finds that a significant number of employers enjoy labour wage premiums; and having a higher proportion of employers in the household has a positive relationship with household consumption. The thesis furthermore discovers an upper educational threshold for women employers not found for men. Interestingly, the thesis also finds that there is indeed an ordering of labour wages into low-income self-employment (which seems to be found mainly in “own account” self-employment), medium-income paid employment, and high-income self-employment (which seems to be found mainly among employers), and that this corresponds to a similar ordering of low human capital, medium human capital and high human capital among labour market participants, as expressed through educational attainments. These show that as a whole, employers can largely be classed as experiencing pulled self-employment, as they appear to be advantaged in all three criteria (educational attainments, labour wage and household consumption). A minority of self-employed “own account” workers (specifically those at the upper end of the income distribution who are well educated), can also be classed as experiencing pulled self-employment. The rest of the significant majority of self-employed “own account” workers in this study can be classed as experiencing pushed self-employment in terms of the indicators used.

From theory-inspired to theory-based interventions : A protocol for developing and testing a methodology for linking behaviour change techniques to theoretical mechanisms of action

This research is funded by UK Medical Research Council grant number MR/L011115/1

From Theory-Inspired to Theory-Based Interventions : A Protocol for Developing and Testing a Methodology for Linking Behaviour Change Techniques to Theoretical Mechanisms of Action

This research is funded by UK Medical Research Council grant number MR/L011115/1. We would like to thank the 105 experts in behaviour change who have committed their time and offered their expertise for study 2 of this research. We are also very grateful to all those who sent us peer-reviewed behaviour change intervention descriptions for study 1. Finally, we would like thank Dr. Emma Beard and Dr. Dan Dediu for their statistical input and to all the researchers, particularly Holly Walton, who have assisted in the coding of papers for study 1.

Subcentric linking systems

20 pages