Diet plays a substantial role in the etiology, progression, and treatment of chronic disease and is best considered as a multifaceted set of modifiable input variables with pleiotropic effects on a variety of biological pathways spanning multiple organ systems. This brief review discusses key issues related to the design and conduct of diet interventions in rodent models of metabolic disease and their implications for interpreting experiments. We also make specific recommendations to improve rodent diet studies to help better understand the role of diet on metabolic physiology and thereby improve our understanding of metabolic disease.

The continuous monitoring of proteins is a current challenge in medical diagnostics. A new electrochemical approach aiming to address this has been described. The method uses antibodies as a recognition element to achieve the real-time measurement of proteins in saliva in the mouth.

This article advocates the concept of race trouble as a way of synthesizing variation in racial discourse, and as a way of studying how social interaction and institutional life continue to be organized by conceptions of 'race' and 'racism'. Our analysis of an online discussion at a South African University about the defensibility of a characterization of (black) student protesters as 'savages' revealed a number of familiar strategies: participants avoided explicit racism, denied racism, and denied racism on behalf of others. However, the aim of this analysis was not to identify the 'real' racism, but to show how race and racism were used in the interaction to develop perspectives on transformation in the institution, to produce social division in the University, and to create ambivalently racialized and racializing subject positions. We demonstrate how, especially through uses of deracialized discourse, participants' actions were observably shaped by the potential ways in which others could hear 'race' and 'racism'. Race trouble thus became manifest through racial suggestion, allusion, innuendo, and implication. We conclude with a call to social psychologists to study the ways in which meanings of 'race' and 'racism' are forged and contested in relation to each other.

RT-PCR and northern blots have long been used to study RNA isoforms usage for single genes. Recent advancements in long-read sequencing have yielded unprecedented information about the usage and abundance of these RNA isoforms. However, visualization of long-read sequencing data remains challenging due to the high information density. To alleviate these issues, we have developed NanoBlot, an open-source R-package that generates northern blot and RT-PCR-like images from long-read sequencing data. NanoBlot requires aligned, positionally sorted and indexed BAM files. Plotting is based around ggplot2 and is easily customizable. Advantages of NanoBlot include a robust system for designing probes to visualize isoforms including excluding reads based on the presence or absence of a specified region, an elegant solution to representing isoforms with continuous variations in length, and the ability to overlay multiple genes in the same plot using different colors. We present examples of nanoblots compared to actual northern blot data. In addition to traditional gel-like images, the NanoBlot package can also output other visualizations such as violin plots and 3-RACE-like plots focused on 3-end isoforms visualization. The use of the NanoBlot package should provide a simple answer to some of the challenges of visualizing long-read RNA-sequencing data.

Background

The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)/Charles R. Drew University Medical Education Program was developed to train physicians for practice in underserved areas. The UCLA/Drew Medical Education Program students receive basic science instruction at UCLA and complete their required clinical rotations in South Los Angeles, an impoverished urban community. We have previously shown that, in comparison to their UCLA counterparts, students in the Drew program had greater odds of maintaining their commitment to medically disadvantaged populations over the course of medical education.

Objective

To examine the independent association of graduation from the UCLA/Drew program with subsequent choice of physician practice location. We hypothesized that participation in the UCLA/Drew program predicts future practice in medically disadvantaged areas, controlling for student demographics such as race/ethnicity and gender, indicators of socioeconomic status, and specialty choice.

Design

Retrospective cohort study.

Participants

Graduates (1,071) of the UCLA School of Medicine and the UCLA/Drew Medical Education Program from 1985-1995, practicing in California in 2003 based on the address listed in the American Medical Association (AMA) Physician Masterfile.

Measurements

Physician address was geocoded to a California Medical Service Study Area (MSSA). A medically disadvantaged community was defined as meeting any one of the following criteria: (a) federally designated HPSA or MUA; (b) rural area; (c) high minority area; or (d) high poverty area.

Results

Fifty-three percent of UCLA/Drew graduates are located in medically disadvantaged areas, in contrast to 26.1% of UCLA graduates. In multivariate analyses, underrepresented minority race/ethnicity (OR: 1.57; 95% CI: 1.10-2.25) and participation in the Drew program (OR: 2.47; 95% CI: 1.59-3.83) were independent predictors of future practice in disadvantaged areas.

Conclusions

Physicians who graduated from the UCLA/Drew Medical Education Program have higher odds of practicing in underserved areas than those who completed the traditional UCLA curriculum, even after controlling for other factors such as race/ethnicity. The association between participation in the UCLA/Drew Medical Education Program and physician practice location suggests that medical education programs may reinforce student goals to practice in disadvantaged communities.

The field of nanophotonics is finding myriad applications in telecommunications and information technology, microscopy, lighting, and sensing. There is general interest in highly confined and nanoscale optical modes for a number of these applications, with a particular interest in structures that confine electromagnetic fields and energy in volumes smaller than the free space wavelength. Plasmonics, the utilization of coupled photon- plasmon waves in systems with free electrons, in micro- and nanoscale geometric structures has attracted significant recent attention for these purposes. In this dissertation we explore surface plasmon-polariton (SPP) fields, on nanostructured metal-dielectric boundaries, at frequencies in the near-infrared portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. To couple to these SPP modes from free-space propagating light, arrays of nanoholes etched in metal films are employed. We then utilize a variety of experimental techniques that investigate the physics of SPPs in space, time, and frequency. Various physical phenomena, including enhanced transmission effects and resonantly excited and propagating surface electromagnetic modes, are observed, studied, and explained. We begin by discussing the basics of SPP excitation and modal propagation properties and present an analytical investigation of gain assisted propagation. We next investigate the spatial and spectral frequency dependent transmission through nanohole arrays. We present novel experimental and analytic results of polarization dependent Fano-type lineshape profiles present in enhanced transmission due to SPP excitation. We further present a method for excitation and direct imaging of SPPs from nanohole arrays and demonstrate coupling to a variety of modes with different in-plane propagating wavevector components. This method is extended to incorporate ultrashort laser pulse excitation and enables space-time imaging of ultrashort SPP fields, both in spatial amplitude and phase, with femtosecond time scale resolution. We ultimately describes the application of this work to the making of a highly parallelized sensor to measure chemical reactions at a surface by generating spatially resolved, reaction dependent, spatial and spectral frequency information