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1.
M. Elizabeth Barnes E. Margaret Evans Ashley Hazel Sara E. Brownell Randolph M. Nesse 《Evolution》2017,10(1):7
Background
How acceptance of evolution relates to understanding of evolution remains controversial despite decades of research. It even remains unclear whether cultural/attitudinal factors or cognitive factors have a greater impact on student ability to learn evolutionary biology. This study examined the influence of cultural/attitudinal factors (religiosity, acceptance of evolution, and parents’ attitudes towards evolution) and cognitive factors (teleological reasoning and prior understanding of natural selection) on students’ learning of natural selection over a semester-long undergraduate course in evolutionary medicine.Method
Pre-post course surveys measured cognitive factors, including teleological reasoning and prior understanding of natural selection, and also cultural/attitudinal factors, including acceptance of evolution, parent attitudes towards evolution, and religiosity. We analyzed how these measures influenced increased understanding of natural selection over the semester.Results
After controlling for other related variables, parent attitude towards evolution and religiosity predicted students’ acceptance of evolution, but did not predict students’ learning gains of natural selection over the semester. Conversely, lower levels of teleological reasoning predicted learning gains in understanding natural selection over the course, but did not predict students’ acceptance of evolution.Conclusions
Acceptance of evolution did not predict students’ ability to learn natural selection over a semester in an evolutionary medicine course. However, teleological reasoning did impact students’ ability to learn natural selection.2.
Background
Faculty perception of student knowledge and acceptance of subject matter affects the choice of what to teach and how to teach it. Accurate assessment of student acceptance of evolution, then, is relevant to how the subject should be taught. To explore the accuracy of such assessment, we compared how community college instructors of life sciences courses perceive students’ attitudes towards evolution with those students’ actual attitudes towards evolution.Results
The research had two components: (1) a survey of students of several biology classes at a community college about their acceptance of evolutionary theory and (2) interviews with the biology faculty teaching those classes about their perceptions of their students’ attitudes towards evolution. Results of the study indicate relatively high levels of acceptance of evolution among community college students at this West Coast institution. We also found that community college instructors of life sciences courses varied in accuracy of their perceptions of their students’ attitudes towards evolution–but not systematically. Although one professor assessed each class quite accurately, the other two professors frequently underestimated the acceptance of evolution among their students.Conclusions
Errors in perception seemed independent of whether the class was composed of majors, nonmajors, or a combination. Clearly, in our sample there is much idiosyncrasy regarding community college instructor accuracy concerning student opinions about evolution.3.
Katie F. Manwaring Jamie L. Jensen Richard A. Gill Richard R. Sudweeks Randall S. Davies Seth M. Bybee 《Evolution》2018,11(1):2
Background
Acceptance of evolutionary theory varies widely and is often associated with religious background. Some have suggested there exists an additional relationship between scientific reasoning ability and the acceptance of evolutionary theory. In this study, we used structural equation modeling to test whether scientific reasoning ability predicts religiosity, acceptance of creationist views, or acceptance of evolution. We administered internet-based surveys to 724 individuals nationwide who self-describe as being religious and built a structural-equation model to test predictive abilities.Results
We found that while religiosity positively predicts the acceptance of creationist views and negatively predicts the acceptance of evolution, scientific reasoning ability does not predict religiosity, acceptance of creationist views, or acceptance of evolutionary theory.Conclusions
With a lack of any relationship between scientific reasoning ability and acceptance, an approach to evolution education that focuses on appealing to scientific reasoning may prove fruitless in changing student attitudes toward evolution; alternative teaching approaches regarding evolution are warranted.4.
Background
The work is part of a wider research project wherein we are trying to further explore the conceptual ecology of evolutionary theory of present and prospective teachers in Greece.Methods
Quantitative and qualitative research was applied. In the former a questionnaire was answered by 318 secondary school teachers who teach biology. We further interviewed eight of the teachers by means of semi structured interviews and analyzed the interviews using the QSR nVivo program.Results
Acceptance of evolution levels was found moderate both in the total cohort and among science teachers; on the one hand, this was correlated with the prevalence of low level of knowledge and understanding due to lack of previous instruction; on the other hand, their type of religiosity was not a serious obstacle to accepting evolution, since it was correlated with a high degree of thinking dispositions.Conclusions
The results are in agreement with our previous findings that the type of religiosity is crucial for the acceptance or rejection of evolution, particularly when it does not prevent someone from being “open-minded”. At the same time, the fact that geologists who teach science showed the highest level of acceptance of evolution, indicates, when paired with other evidence, that the geological data are the most convincing evidence to help students and teachers to make a first step in their multistep route towards accepting and understanding the theory of evolution.5.
Background
Medication non-adherence is often a predominant problem in the management of hypertension and other chronic conditions. In explaining health behaviours, social determinants like spirituality and religiosity are increasingly identified to impact health and treatment. Although a number of researchers have found spirituality and religiosity to be primary resources among persons dealing with chronic disability and illness, studies relating this specifically to medication adherence have been limited.Methods
Our study sought to examine the interrelationship between spirituality/ religiosity and medication adherence among 400 hypertensive patients 18 years old and above. Spiritual Perspective Scale, Duke Religion Index, and the Morisky Medication Adherence Scale were used to determine spirituality, religiosity and medication adherence respectively.Results
The majority (93.25%) of patients poorly adhered to their medications. While high spiritual and religious beliefs formed core components of the lifestyles of patients, spirituality (p?=?0.018) and not religiosity (p?=?0.474) related directly with medication non-adherence. Likewise, after controlling for demography and other medical co-morbidities, patients with high spirituality were 2.68 times more likely to be poorly adherent than patients who place lower emphasis on the association between spirituality and health.Conclusion
Our study suggests that while spirituality/ religiosity was dominant among hypertensive patients, these spiritual attachments of patients with a supreme being potentially increased their trust in the expectation of divine healing instead of adhering adequately with their anti-hypertensive medications.6.
Michael Archer Alistair G. B. Poore Alexis M. Horn Hayley Bates Stephen Bonser Matthew Hunt Jonathan Russell Nikkita P. Archer Dylan J. Bye E. James Kehoe 《Evolution》2018,11(1):12
Background
For the past 32 years, we have polled first-year biology students annually at the University of New South Wales concerning their views about evolution and creationism. The purposes of the research were to identify the level of commitment among incoming students to creationist beliefs that could interfere with their receptivity to evolutionary science and to assess in retrospect whether these creationist beliefs were changing over time.Results
The results have demonstrated a downward shift over time from 60% of the class in 1986 believing a god had something to do with the origin of humans, to 29% in 2017. Conversely, the percentage of students convinced that a god had nothing to do with the origin of humans rose from 25% in 1986 to 62% in 2017. The creationist belief that a god created the world de novo within the last 10,000 years declined from 10% in 1986 to 3.6% in 2017. The decline in the Australian students’ commitment to religious views about divine creation, especially creationism, considerably exceeded the corresponding beliefs among American students and their general public, where belief in creationism while slowly declining appears to have remained in the 40% range, four times that seen in our Australian survey.Conclusions
The very low and declining levels of commitment to the creationist view that god created humans de novo suggests this view is unlikely to be a significant obstruction to accepting the scientific evidence for evolution. The results of the survey of UNSW students correlate with changes documented in the census of the general Australian public suggesting that our survey results of first-year biology students reflect overall changes in the Australian community as a whole.7.
Background
Previous research has identified numerous factors to explain why students have difficulty learning about evolution. Some of these factors include a student’s background (including their religion and major of study), the type of evolution instruction, and the inclusion of the nature of science (NOS) instruction. Sparse but more recent work has investigated the impact of a religious-scientist role model to help dampen perceptions of conflict between evolutionary science and worldview. We had two research goals: (1) to identify which of these factors influence students’ learning of evolution in post-secondary education; and (2) to describe the relationships among incoming biology students’ creationist reasoning, knowledge of evolution, and perceived conflict between evolution and their worldview.Results
The single factor linked with the reduction in both creationist reasoning and in students’ perceived conflict between evolution and their worldview through a semester was the presence of a role model. Likewise, knowledge and perceived relevance of evolution increased in sections with a role model instructor and with evidence-based evolution instruction. Otherwise, tested factors (the type of evolution instruction, inclusion of NOS, biology-major/nonmajor, GPA, or religiosity) were not shown to be associated with these three constructs. We found that in the first week of the semester students with higher knowledge of evolution had lower creationist reasoning and lower perceived conflict.Conclusions
The single factor that collectively reduced erroneous beliefs, increased scientific knowledge, and minimized perceived conflict was the presence of a religious-scientist role model. Previous work has suggested a role model could positively impact students’ learning of evolution, yet this is the first quasi-experimental evidence supporting the importance of the course instructor as the role model in students’ learning of evolution. These findings are especially relevant to institutions with a greater proportion of religious students who could benefit from modeling to help foster their learning of evolution.8.
Background
Despite decades of education reform efforts, the percent of the general US population accepting biological evolution as the explanation for the diversity of life has remained relatively unchanged over the past 35 years. Previous work has shown the importance of both educational and non-educational (sociodemographic and psychological) factors on acceptance of evolution, but has often looked at such factors in isolation. Our study is among the first attempts to model quantitatively how the unique influences of evolutionary content knowledge, religiosity, epistemological sophistication, and an understanding of the nature of science collectively predict an individual’s acceptance or rejection of evolution.Results
Our study population had a high acceptance of evolution, with an average score of 77.17 (95% C.I. ± 1.483) on the Measure of Acceptance of the Theory of Evolution (MATE) instrument. Our combined general linear model showed that, of the variables in our model, an understanding of the nature of science explained the greatest amount of variation in acceptance of evolution. This was followed in amount of variance explained by a measure of religiosity, openness to experience, religious denomination, number of biology courses previously taken, and knowledge of evolutionary biology terms.Conclusions
Understanding of the nature of science was the single most important factor associated with acceptance of evolution in our study and explained at least four times more variation than measures of evolutionary knowledge. This suggests that educational efforts to impact evolutionary acceptance should focus on increasing an understanding of the nature of science (which may be expected to have additional benefits towards generalized science denial). Additionally, our measure of epistemological sophistication had a unique, significant impact on acceptance of evolution. Both epistemological sophistication and an understanding of the nature of science are factors that might change throughout a liberal arts education, independent of the effect of direct evolutionary instruction.9.
Objective
This study examined the differences of psychological strains between Chinese and American college students and discussed how strains may influence individuals’ suicidal ideation and depression.Participants/methods
A total of 539 college students (298 from China and 241 from the U.S.) were recruited in March 2016 to complete the survey study. Multiple linear regressions were used in data analysis.Results
Students in America had higher scores on depression and stress than students in China, while students in China rated higher on suicidal ideation than students in America. In contrast of students in America facing more coping strains, students in China were confronting more value strains in their life.Conclusion
The cross-cultural variations in the effect of psychological strains have been substantiated in current study, indicating that understanding the psychological strains in different cultural contexts is necessary for the early intervention and prevention in college aged populations.10.
End-to-end automated microfluidic platform for synthetic biology: from design to functional analysis
Background
Synthetic biology aims to engineer biological systems for desired behaviors. The construction of these systems can be complex, often requiring genetic reprogramming, extensive de novo DNA synthesis, and functional screening.Results
Herein, we present a programmable, multipurpose microfluidic platform and associated software and apply the platform to major steps of the synthetic biology research cycle: design, construction, testing, and analysis. We show the platform’s capabilities for multiple automated DNA assembly methods, including a new method for Isothermal Hierarchical DNA Construction, and for Escherichia coli and Saccharomyces cerevisiae transformation. The platform enables the automated control of cellular growth, gene expression induction, and proteogenic and metabolic output analysis.Conclusions
Taken together, we demonstrate the microfluidic platform’s potential to provide end-to-end solutions for synthetic biology research, from design to functional analysis.11.
Rachel A. Spicer Christoph Steinbeck 《Metabolomics : Official journal of the Metabolomic Society》2018,14(1):16
Introduction
Data sharing is being increasingly required by journals and has been heralded as a solution to the ‘replication crisis’.Objectives
(i) Review data sharing policies of journals publishing the most metabolomics papers associated with open data and (ii) compare these journals’ policies to those that publish the most metabolomics papers.Methods
A PubMed search was used to identify metabolomics papers. Metabolomics data repositories were manually searched for linked publications.Results
Journals that support data sharing are not necessarily those with the most papers associated to open metabolomics data.Conclusion
Further efforts are required to improve data sharing in metabolomics.12.
Antonio Rosato Leonardo Tenori Marta Cascante Pedro Ramon De Atauri Carulla Vitor A. P. Martins dos Santos Edoardo Saccenti 《Metabolomics : Official journal of the Metabolomic Society》2018,14(4):37
Introduction
Metabolomics is a well-established tool in systems biology, especially in the top–down approach. Metabolomics experiments often results in discovery studies that provide intriguing biological hypotheses but rarely offer mechanistic explanation of such findings. In this light, the interpretation of metabolomics data can be boosted by deploying systems biology approaches.Objectives
This review aims to provide an overview of systems biology approaches that are relevant to metabolomics and to discuss some successful applications of these methods.Methods
We review the most recent applications of systems biology tools in the field of metabolomics, such as network inference and analysis, metabolic modelling and pathways analysis.Results
We offer an ample overview of systems biology tools that can be applied to address metabolomics problems. The characteristics and application results of these tools are discussed also in a comparative manner.Conclusions
Systems biology-enhanced analysis of metabolomics data can provide insights into the molecular mechanisms originating the observed metabolic profiles and enhance the scientific impact of metabolomics studies.13.
Background
Evolutionary trees illustrate relationships among taxa. Interpreting these relationships requires developing a set of “tree-thinking” skills that are typically included in introductory college biology courses. One of these skills is determining relationships among taxa using the most recent common ancestor, yet many students instead use one or more alternate strategies to determine relationships. Several alternate strategies have been well documented and these include using superficial similarity, proximity at the tips of a tree, or the fewest intervening nodes in the tree to group taxa.Results
We administered interviews (n = 16) and pencil-and-paper questionnaires (n = 205), and constructed a valid and reliable assessment that measured how well students determined relationships among taxa on an evolutionary tree. Our questions asked students to consider a focal taxon and identify which of two additional taxa is most closely related to it. We paired the use of most recent common ancestor with one of three alternative strategies (i.e., similarity, proximity, or node-counting) to explicitly test students’ understanding of the relationships among the taxa on each tree.Conclusions
Our assessment enables us to identify students who are effectively distracted by an alternative strategy, those who use the most recent common ancestor inconsistently, or who are guessing in order to determine relationships among taxa. Our 18-question tool (see Additional file 1) can be used for formative assessment of student understanding of how to interpret relationships on evolutionary trees. Because our assessment tests for the same skill throughout, students who answer incorrectly, even once, likely have an incomplete understanding of how to determine relationships on evolutionary trees and should receive follow-up instruction.14.
Daria V. Dibrova Kirill A. Konovalov Vadim V. Perekhvatov Konstantin V. Skulachev Armen Y. Mulkidjanian 《Biology direct》2017,12(1):29
Background
The Clusters of Orthologous Groups (COGs) of proteins systematize evolutionary related proteins into specific groups with similar functions. However, the available databases do not provide means to assess the extent of similarity between the COGs.Aim
We intended to provide a method for identification and visualization of evolutionary relationships between the COGs, as well as a respective web server.Results
Here we introduce the COGcollator, a web tool for identification of evolutionarily related COGs and their further analysis. We demonstrate the utility of this tool by identifying the COGs that contain distant homologs of (i) the catalytic subunit of bacterial rotary membrane ATP synthases and (ii) the DNA/RNA helicases of the superfamily 1.Reviewers
This article was reviewed by Drs. Igor N. Berezovsky, Igor Zhulin and Yuri Wolf.15.
Background
One of the recent challenges of computational biology is development of new algorithms, tools and software to facilitate predictive modeling of big data generated by high-throughput technologies in biomedical research.Results
To meet these demands we developed PROPER - a package for visual evaluation of ranking classifiers for biological big data mining studies in the MATLAB environment.Conclusion
PROPER is an efficient tool for optimization and comparison of ranking classifiers, providing over 20 different two- and three-dimensional performance curves.16.
Antonella Del-Corso Mario Cappiello Roberta Moschini Francesco Balestri Umberto Mura 《Metabolomics : Official journal of the Metabolomic Society》2018,14(1):2
Introduction
While the evolutionary adaptation of enzymes to their own substrates is a well assessed and rationalized field, how molecules have been originally selected in order to initiate and assemble convenient metabolic pathways is a fascinating, but still debated argument.Objectives
Aim of the present study is to give a rationale for the preferential selection of specific molecules to generate metabolic pathways.Methods
The comparison of structural features of molecules, through an inductive methodological approach, offer a reading key to cautiously propose a determining factor for their metabolic recruitment.Results
Starting with some commonplaces occurring in the structural representation of relevant carbohydrates, such as glucose, fructose and ribose, arguments are presented in associating stable structural determinants of these molecules and their peculiar occurrence in metabolic pathways.Conclusions
Among other possible factors, the reliability of the structural asset of a molecule may be relevant or its selection among structurally and, a priori, functionally similar molecules.17.
N. Cesbron A.-L. Royer Y. Guitton A. Sydor B. Le Bizec G. Dervilly-Pinel 《Metabolomics : Official journal of the Metabolomic Society》2017,13(8):99
Introduction
Collecting feces is easy. It offers direct outcome to endogenous and microbial metabolites.Objectives
In a context of lack of consensus about fecal sample preparation, especially in animal species, we developed a robust protocol allowing untargeted LC-HRMS fingerprinting.Methods
The conditions of extraction (quantity, preparation, solvents, dilutions) were investigated in bovine feces.Results
A rapid and simple protocol involving feces extraction with methanol (1/3, M/V) followed by centrifugation and a step filtration (10 kDa) was developed.Conclusion
The workflow generated repeatable and informative fingerprints for robust metabolome characterization.18.
Background
Comprehensive explanations of behavioral adaptations rarely invoke all levels famously admonished by Niko Tinbergen. The role of developmental processes and plasticity, in particular, has often been neglected. In this paper, we combine ecological, physiological and developmental perspectives in developing a hypothesis to account for the evolution of ‘the lemur syndrome’, a combination of reduced sexual dimorphism, even adult sex ratios, female dominance and mild genital masculinization characterizing group-living species in two families of Malagasy primates.Results
We review the different components of the lemur syndrome and compare it with similar adaptations reported for other mammals. We find support for the assertion that the lemur syndrome represents a unique set of integrated behavioral, demographic and morphological traits. We combine existing hypotheses about underlying adaptive function and proximate causation by adding a potential developmental mechanism linking maternal stress and filial masculinization, and outline an evolutionary scenario for its canalization.Conclusions
We propose a new hypothesis linking ecological, physiological, developmental and evolutionary processes to adumbrate a comprehensive explanation for the evolution of the lemur syndrome, whose assumptions and predictions can guide diverse future research on lemurs. This hypothesis should also encourage students of other behavioral phenomena to consider the potential role of developmental plasticity in evolutionary innovation.19.
20.