Telomeres are nucleoprotein structures at eukaryotic chromosome termini. Their stability is preserved by a six-protein complex named shelterin. Among these, TRF1 binds telomere duplex and assists DNA ...replication with mechanisms only partly clarified. Here we found that poly (ADP-ribose) polymerase 1 (PARP1) interacts and covalently PARylates TRF1 in S-phase modifying its DNA affinity. Therefore, genetic and pharmacological inhibition of PARP1 impairs the dynamic association of TRF1 and the bromodeoxyuridine incorporation at replicating telomeres. Inhibition of PARP1 also affects the recruitment of WRN and BLM helicases in TRF1 containing complexes during S-phase, triggering replication-dependent DNA-damage and telomere fragility. This work unveils an unprecedented role for PARP1 as a "surveillant" of telomere replication, which orchestrates protein dynamics at proceeding replication fork.
Patient safety education is required in medical, nursing, and pharmacy training, and interprofessional education offers an ideal format for teaching the core concepts of patient safety. This training ...activity was developed to fulfill interprofessional education core competencies for communication and teamwork and was nested within a required patient safety course taught at a medical school. However, the activity can easily be adapted as a stand-alone offering that can be included in a preclinical doctoring course, offered as an elective, or hosted at a college of nursing or pharmacy. Our goal was to prepare learners for the clinical environment by providing a context for patient safety, communication, and teamwork.
Students participate in a 1.5-hour large-group activity that explores a case from the perspectives of each discipline. Faculty from all three disciplines sequentially present and debrief the case using focused questions to guide students' reflections and interactions between team members.
We have presented this activity for 4 consecutive years. Students complete a questionnaire with retrospective pre-post ratings of their perspectives on the activity and its impact on their awareness of disciplinary roles and responsibilities, communication errors, and strategies for addressing interdisciplinary conflicts. Results show statistically significant increases in the items of interest.
This interprofessional education offering is effective in terms of increasing awareness and knowledge among members of three health care disciplines, improving awareness of potential kinds of communication errors, and helping students consider the role of interdisciplinary interactions.
The science of patient safety demonstrates that good communication is essential for effective interprofessional collaboration.
We created a low-stakes, formative assessment with which medical ...students, pharmacy students, and nursing students could practice several of the Interprofessional Education Collaborative competencies. We aimed to enable students to practice collaborative care, respect for other disciplines, and shared accountability. Senior students from medicine, nursing, and pharmacy worked in teams to disclose a medical error to a standardized patient. The activity began with an icebreaker exercise wherein students learned about each other. Next, each team planned a strategy for error disclosure and collaboratively disclosed the error. Standardized patients evaluated the team's performance. Subsequently, students regrouped for a debriefing. The participating institutions administered a survey to their students.
In total, 1,151 students participated: 464 fourth-year students from the University of Houston College of Pharmacy, 450 third- and fourth-year students from Baylor College of Medicine, and 237 fourth-year students from Texas Woman's University Nelda C. Stark College of Nursing, all in Houston, Texas. Postsession survey data showed that students thought they achieved the relevant competencies. Students' understanding of the perspectives of the other two disciplines improved. Students found the simulation encounter and debriefing effective in helping them consider the contributions of other disciplines to patient care.
This interprofessional standardized patient activity enabled collaborative problem solving. The debriefing discussion broadened students' understanding of the expertise of the other disciplines and promoted shared accountability. Students found this activity engaging and effective.
A secondary analysis of data from 1,039 Latino adolescents who participated in a study of a sex education program was conducted to examine the impact of comfortable communication about sex on ...intended and actual sexual behavior. Results indicate that Latino adolescents have a broad communicative network, including friends, dating partners, and extended family members, with whom they talk about sex. Regression analyses suggest comfortable sexual communication is predictive of less likelihood of being sexually active, older at first intercourse, and increased intentions to delay intercourse.
To achieve high-quality, patient-centered care, teaching programs across health professions must prepare their learners to work in effective teams. We created a simulation activity to formatively ...assess interprofessional objectives in graduating medical, nursing, and pharmacy students. This simulation also gave learners an opportunity to practice clinical airway resuscitation skills.
The simulation featured a decompensating adult asthmatic with a chief complaint of shortness of breath and a final diagnosis of severe asthma exacerbation and respiratory failure. Students completed a prebrief to formulate a plan and then interacted with a mannequin. Faculty led a debriefing and completed assessments of the team's performance. The students completed a questionnaire assessing their own and the team's performance.
Four sessions were held over a 2-year period. A total of 91 graduating students participated in the activity: 33 from Baylor College of Medicine, 26 from University of Houston College of Pharmacy, and 28 from Texas Woman's University Nelda C. Stark College of Nursing. Postsession questionnaire data demonstrated very good overall team performance and good individual performance. Student comments demonstrated an understanding of the importance of teamwork and thoughtful reflection on their own areas for improvement. All students rated the activity as valuable and effective. Multirater assessments of the students found that most met three of the four objectives.
This activity allows for real-time formative assessment with a focus on roles, communication, and managing difficult situations. The debriefing demonstrates the students' understanding of interprofessional goals in providing effective patient-centered care.
The high anisotropy of polymer-based fibres confers them high tensile strength, but also makes them more vulnerable against non-uniform mechanical loads. This is even more important for Kevlar® ...fibres, which are made up of individual fibrils containing crystalline domains at different orientations. In this work, crystals of poly(p-phenylene terephthalamide), or PPTA, are subject to shear strain and their response simulated in atomic detail. For shear deformations involving movements orthogonal to the chains' axis, an originally defect-free crystal fully recovers its native contacts and original shear strength after repeated failures. Full recovery of crystalline contacts proceeds over tens of nanoseconds, demonstrating the importance of sampling realistic strain rates. For shear deformations involving movements parallel to the chains' axis, the crystal accumulates an increasing number of defects that lower its shear strength. Although the same types of intermolecular forces make up the response of a PPTA crystal to each shear mode, the relative contributions of these modes in a specific type of applied load will affect profoundly how Kevlar® fibrils and fibres fail under shear. The shear stress-strain profiles here computed will ultimately benefit the development of quantitative mechanical models of Kevlar® as well as new polyamide materials.
Recent pT-integrated cross-section measurements of the ground-state charm mesons and baryons, D0, D+, D+s, Λ+c, and Ξ0c, are used to evaluate the charm fragmentation fractions and production cross ...section per unit of rapidity at midrapidity (|y|<0.5), in pp collisions at √s=5.02 TeV at the LHC. The latter is dσc¯c/dy||y|<0.5=1165±44(stat)+134−101(syst) μb. These measurements were obtained for the first time in hadronic collisions at the LHC, including the charm baryon states, recently measured by ALICE at midrapidity. The charm fragmentation fractions differ significantly from the values measured in e+e− and ep collisions, providing evidence of the dependence of the parton-to-hadron fragmentation fractions on the collision system, indicating that the assumption of their universality is not supported by the measured cross sections. An increase of a factor of about 3.3 for the fragmentation fraction for the Λ+c with a significance of 5σ between the values obtained in pp collisions and those obtained in e+e− (ep) collisions is reported. The fragmentation fraction for the Ξ0c was obtained for the first time in any collision system. The measured fragmentation fractions were used to update the c¯c cross sections per unit of rapidity at |y|<0.5 at √s=2.76 and 7 TeV, which are about 40% higher than the previously published results. The data were compared with perturbative-QCD calculations and lie at the upper edge of the theoretical bands.
In particle collider experiments, elementary particle interactions with large momentum transfer produce quarks and gluons (known as partons) whose evolution is governed by the strong force, as ...described by the theory of quantum chromodynamics (QCD)
. These partons subsequently emit further partons in a process that can be described as a parton shower
, which culminates in the formation of detectable hadrons. Studying the pattern of the parton shower is one of the key experimental tools for testing QCD. This pattern is expected to depend on the mass of the initiating parton, through a phenomenon known as the dead-cone effect, which predicts a suppression of the gluon spectrum emitted by a heavy quark of mass m
and energy E, within a cone of angular size m
/E around the emitter
. Previously, a direct observation of the dead-cone effect in QCD had not been possible, owing to the challenge of reconstructing the cascading quarks and gluons from the experimentally accessible hadrons. We report the direct observation of the QCD dead cone by using new iterative declustering techniques
to reconstruct the parton shower of charm quarks. This result confirms a fundamental feature of QCD. Furthermore, the measurement of a dead-cone angle constitutes a direct experimental observation of the non-zero mass of the charm quark, which is a fundamental constant in the standard model of particle physics.
Background: Interprofessional education (IPE) has become increasingly important among healthcare professionals. The purpose of this study was to assess the impact of IPE experiences on pharmacy ...students’ perceived level of comfort with and level of reliability regarding other healthcare professionals. Methods and Findings: A survey of third- and fourth-year pharmacy students (N = 190) was analyzed using descriptive statistics and bivariate analyses to address the study objectives. Students experienced a significant increase in their level of comfort with questioning other professions after IPE (pre IPE: 5.45 ± 2.24 and post IPE: 7.22 ± 1.62, p<0.01) and being questioned by other professions (pre IPE: 5.39 ± 2.24 and post IPE: 7.04 ± 1.68, p<0.01). Students also experienced a significant increase in the perceived reliability and accuracy of information from nurses after IPE (pre IPE: 5.91 ± 1.82 and post IPE: 6.41 ± 1.62, p = 0.01). Conclusions: Pharmacy students who experienced any IPE perceived themselves as more comfortable with questioning and being questioned by other healthcare professionals than students without IPE. Additional research is needed to more clearly define the benefits of IPE and how it should be designed.
The first measurement of the cross section for coherent J/ψ photoproduction as a function of |t|, the square of the momentum transferred between the incoming and outgoing target nucleus, is ...presented. The data were measured with the ALICE detector in ultra-peripheral Pb–Pb collisions at a centre-of-mass energy per nucleon pair sNN=5.02TeV with the J/ψ produced in the central rapidity region |y|<0.8, which corresponds to the small Bjorken-x range (0.3−1.4)×10−3.
The measured |t|-dependence is not described by computations based only on the Pb nuclear form factor, while the photonuclear cross section is better reproduced by models including shadowing according to the leading-twist approximation, or gluon-saturation effects from the impact-parameter dependent Balitsky–Kovchegov equation. These new results are therefore a valid tool to constrain the relevant model parameters and to investigate the transverse gluonic structure at very low Bjorken-x.