Summary The global pandemic of physical inactivity requires a multisectoral, multidisciplinary public-health response. Scaling up interventions that are capable of increasing levels of physical ...activity in populations across the varying cultural, geographic, social, and economic contexts worldwide is challenging, but feasible. In this paper, we review the factors that could help to achieve this. We use a mixed-methods approach to comprehensively examine these factors, drawing on the best available evidence from both evidence-to-practice and practice-to-evidence methods. Policies to support active living across society are needed, particularly outside the health-care sector, as demonstrated by some of the successful examples of scale up identified in this paper. Researchers, research funders, and practitioners and policymakers in culture, education, health, leisure, planning, and transport, and civil society as a whole, all have a role. We should embrace the challenge of taking action to a higher level, aligning physical activity and health objectives with broader social, environmental, and sustainable development goals.
Plants exposed to mildly elevated temperatures display morphological and developmental changes collectively termed thermomorphogenesis. This adaptative process has several undesirable consequences ...for food production, including yield reduction and increased vulnerability to pathogens. Understanding thermomorphogenesis is, thus, critical for understanding how plants will respond to conditions of increasingly warmer temperature, such as those caused by climate change. Recently, major advances in that direction have been made, and it has become apparent that plants resort to a broad range of molecules and molecular mechanisms to perceive and respond to increases in environmental temperature. However, most effort has been focused on regulation of transcription and protein abundance and activity, with an important gap encompassing nearly all processes involving RNA (i.e. post-transcriptional regulation). Here, current knowledge of thermomorphogenesis involving transcriptional, post-transcriptional, and post-translational regulation is summarized, focusing on opportunities and challenges in understanding post-transcriptional regulation-a fertile field for exciting new discoveries.
Light olefins are mainly produced by naphtha steam cracking, which is among the more energy intensive processes in the petrochemical industry. To save energy, some alternatives have been proposed to ...partially replace or combine with cryogenic distillation the conventional technology to separate olefins and paraffins. Within this aim, facilitated transport membranes, mainly with Ag+ cations as selective carriers, have received great attention owing to the high selectivity and permeance provided. However, to be used industrially, the undesirable instability associated with the Ag+ cation should be considered. Poisonous agents and polymer membrane materials are sources of Ag+ deactivation. In recent years, great achievements on the separation performance have been reported, but the current challenge is to maintain the selectivity in long-term separation processes. This work presents a critical analysis of the potential causes of Ag+ deactivation and points out some alternatives that have been proposed to overcome the hurdle. This review highlights and critically analyses some perspectives of the ongoing development and application of facilitated transport membranes.
Summary Significant global health challenges are being confronted in the 21st century, prompting calls to rethink approaches to disease prevention. A key part of the solution is city planning that ...reduces non-communicable diseases and road trauma while also managing rapid urbanisation. This Series of papers considers the health impacts of city planning through transport mode choices. In this, the first paper, we identify eight integrated regional and local interventions that, when combined, encourage walking, cycling, and public transport use, while reducing private motor vehicle use. These interventions are destination accessibility, equitable distribution of employment across cities, managing demand by reducing the availability and increasing the cost of parking, designing pedestrian-friendly and cycling-friendly movement networks, achieving optimum levels of residential density, reducing distance to public transport, and enhancing the desirability of active travel modes (eg, creating safe attractive neighbourhoods and safe, affordable, and convenient public transport). Together, these interventions will create healthier and more sustainable compact cities that reduce the environmental, social, and behavioural risk factors that affect lifestyle choices, levels of traffic, environmental pollution, noise, and crime. The health sector, including health ministers, must lead in advocating for integrated multisector city planning that prioritises health, sustainability, and liveability outcomes, particularly in rapidly changing low-income and middle-income countries. We recommend establishing a set of indicators to benchmark and monitor progress towards achievement of more compact cities that promote health and reduce health inequities.
Summary Background Physical inactivity is a global pandemic responsible for over 5 million deaths annually through its effects on multiple non-communicable diseases. We aimed to document how ...objectively measured attributes of the urban environment are related to objectively measured physical activity, in an international sample of adults. Methods We based our analyses on the International Physical activity and Environment Network (IPEN) adult study, which was a coordinated, international, cross-sectional study. Participants were sampled from neighbourhoods with varied levels of walkability and socioeconomic status. The present analyses of data from the IPEN adult study included 6822 adults aged 18–66 years from 14 cities in ten countries on five continents. Indicators of walkability, public transport access, and park access were assessed in 1·0 km and 0·5 km street network buffers around each participant's residential address with geographic information systems. Mean daily minutes of moderate-to-vigorous-intensity physical activity were measured with 4–7 days of accelerometer monitoring. Associations between environmental attributes and physical activity were estimated using generalised additive mixed models with gamma variance and logarithmic link functions. Results Four of six environmental attributes were significantly, positively, and linearly related to physical activity in the single variable models: net residential density (expb 1·006 95% CI 1·003–1·009; p=0·001), intersection density (1·069 1·011–1·130; p=0·019), public transport density (1·037 1·018–1·056; p=0·0007), and number of parks (1·146 1·033–1·272; p=0·010). Mixed land use and distance to nearest public transport point were not related to physical activity. The difference in physical activity between participants living in the most and least activity-friendly neighbourhoods ranged from 68 min/week to 89 min/week, which represents 45–59% of the 150 min/week recommended by guidelines. Interpretation Design of urban environments has the potential to contribute substantially to physical activity. Similarity of findings across cities suggests the promise of engaging urban planning, transportation, and parks sectors in efforts to reduce the health burden of the global physical inactivity pandemic. Funding Funding for coordination of the IPEN adult study, including the present analysis, was provided by the National Cancer Institute of National Institutes of Health (CA127296) with studies in each country funded by different sources.
Physical inactivity is an important contributor to non-communicable diseases in countries of high income, and increasingly so in those of low and middle income. Understanding why people are ...physically active or inactive contributes to evidence-based planning of public health interventions, because effective programmes will target factors known to cause inactivity. Research into correlates (factors associated with activity) or determinants (those with a causal relationship) has burgeoned in the past two decades, but has mostly focused on individual-level factors in high-income countries. It has shown that age, sex, health status, self-efficacy, and motivation are associated with physical activity. Ecological models take a broad view of health behaviour causation, with the social and physical environment included as contributors to physical inactivity, particularly those outside the health sector, such as urban planning, transportation systems, and parks and trails. New areas of determinants research have identified genetic factors contributing to the propensity to be physically active, and evolutionary factors and obesity that might predispose to inactivity, and have explored the longitudinal tracking of physical activity throughout life. An understanding of correlates and determinants, especially in countries of low and middle income, could reduce the effect of future epidemics of inactivity and contribute to effective global prevention of non-communicable diseases.
Many of the known solutions to the physical inactivity pandemic operate across sectors relevant to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
The authors examined the contribution of ...physical activity promotion strategies toward achieving the SDGs through a conceptual linkage exercise, a scoping review, and an agent-based model.
Possible benefits of physical activity promotion were identified for 15 of the 17 SDGs, with more robust evidence supporting benefits for SDGs 3 (good health and well-being), 9 (industry, innovation, and infrastructure), 11 (sustainable cities and communities), 13 (climate action), and 16 (peace, justice, and strong institutions). Current evidence supports prioritizing at-scale physical activity-promoting transport and urban design strategies and community-based programs. Expected physical activity gains are greater for low-and middle-income countries. In high-income countries with high car dependency, physical activity promotion strategies may help reduce air pollution and traffic-related deaths, but shifts toward more active forms of travel and recreation, and climate change mitigation, may require complementary policies that disincentivize driving.
The authors call for a synergistic approach to physical activity promotion and SDG achievement, involving multiple sectors beyond health around their goals and values, using physical activity promotion as a lever for a healthier planet.
Inorganic orthophosphate (Pi) is an essential nutrient for plant growth, and its availability strongly impacts crop yield. PHOSPHATE1 (PHO1) transfers Pi from root to shoot via Pi export into root ...xylem vessels. In this work, we demonstrate that an upstream open reading frame (uORF) present in the 5' untranslated region of the Arabidopsis (
)
inhibits its translation and influences Pi homeostasis. The presence of the uORF strongly inhibited the translation of a
5'UTR-luciferase construct in protoplasts. A point mutation removing the
uORF (ΔuORF) in transgenic Arabidopsis resulted in increased association of its mRNA with polysomes and led to higher PHO1 protein levels, independent of Pi availability. Interestingly, deletion of the uORF led to higher shoot Pi content and was associated with improved shoot growth under low external Pi supply and no deleterious effects under Pi-sufficient conditions. We further show that natural accessions lacking the
uORF exhibit higher PHO1 protein levels and shoot Pi content. Increased shoot Pi content was linked to the absence of the
uORF in a population of F2 segregants. We identified the
uORF in genomes of crops such as rice (
), maize (
), barley (
), and wheat (
), and we verified the inhibitory effect of the rice
uORF on translation in protoplasts. Our work suggests that regulation of PHO1 expression via its uORF might be a genetic resource useful-both in natural populations and in the context of genome editing-toward improving plant growth under Pi-deficient conditions.
Abstract Objective There is evidence linking the built environment (BE) with physical activity (PA), but few studies have been conducted in Latin America (LA). State-of-the-art methods and protocols ...have been designed in and applied in high-income countries (HIC). In this paper, we identify key challenges and potential solutions to conducting high-quality PA and BE research in LA. Methods The experience of implementing the IPEN data collection protocol (IPEN: International Physical Activity Environment Network) in Curitiba, Brazil; Bogotá, Colombia; and Cuernavaca, Mexico (2010–2011); is described to identify challenges for conducting PA and BE research in LA. Results Five challenges were identified: lack of academic capacity (implemented solutions (IS): building a strong international collaborative network); limited data availability, access and quality (IS: partnering with influential local institutions, and crafting creative solutions to use the best-available data); socio-political, socio-cultural and socio-economic context (IS: in-person recruitment and data collection, alternative incentives); safety (IS: strict rules for data collection procedures, and specific measures to increase trust); and appropriateness of instruments and measures (IS: survey adaptation, use of standardized additional survey components, and employing a context-based approach to understanding the relationship between PA and the BE). Advantages of conducting PA and BE research in LA were also identified. Conclusions Conducting high-quality PA and BE research in LA is challenging but feasible. Networks of institutions and researchers from both HIC and LMIC play a key role. The lessons learned from the IPEN LA study may be applicable to other LMIC.
PDF
