Using a nursing protocol to assure equitable delivery of cancer-related prevention services.

A nurse-administered, protocol-driven model (NP) for preventive services delivery was compared with a traditional physician reminder (PR) model with nursing back-up among 473 patients attending Internal Medicine and Family Medicine clinics. A total of 240 patients were randomized to the NP group and 233 to the PR group. Demographic characteristics including gender [71% female (NP) and 71% female (PR)], race (78% and 75% African American, respectively) and age (numbers of persons aged 18-54, 55-64 and 65+ years) were similar in each group. In the NP group 244/244 screening tests for breast, cervical and colon cancers and alcohol abuse were initiated or completed by nurses, while in the PR group 110/215 (51%) were initiated or completed by physicians. The NP group received 552/552 counseling services from nurses for tobacco, alcohol, nutrition, exercise and prostate screening, while in the PR group, physicians delivered 10% of the needed services (56/560). Aside from counseling for prostate cancer screening, which was 100% in both the NP and PR groups, all other between-group differences for each service were significant at the level of p<0.001. Results show the feasibility of a nursing protocol for initiating equitable cancer prevention services in a primary care setting.     

Maple phylogeny and biogeography inferred from phylogenomic data

Acer (the maple genus) is one of the diverse tree genera in the Northern Hemisphere with about 152 species, most of which are in eastern Asia. There are roughly a dozen species in Europe/western Asia and a dozen in North America. Several phylogenetic studies of Acer have been conducted since 1998, but none have provided a satisfactory resolution for basal relationships among sections of Acer. Here we report the first well‐resolved phylogeny of Acer based on DNA sequences of over 500 nuclear loci generated using the anchored hybrid enrichment method and explore the implications of the robust phylogeny for Acer systematics and biogeography. Our phylogenetic results support the most recent taxonomic treatment of Acer by de Jong with some modifications; section Pentaphylla may be expanded to include section Trifoliata, and A. yangbiense may be included in section Lithocarpa. Sections Spicata, Negundo, Arguta, and Palmata form a clade sister to the rest of the genus where sections Glabra and Parviflora comprise the first clade followed by section Macrantha, sections Ginnala, Lithocarpa, Indivisa, sections Platanoidea and Macrophylla, section Rubra, section Acer, and section Pentaphylla. Monotypic sections Glabra and Macrophylla in North America are sister to the Japanese section Parviflora and Eurasian section Platanoidea, respectively. Ancestral area inferences using statistical dispersal and vicariance analysis (S‐DIVA) and dispersal and extinction cladogenesis (DEC) methods suggest that Asia might be the most likely ancestral area of Acer as proposed by Wolfe and Tanai and molecular dating using Bayesian evolutionary analysis by sampling trees (BEAST) indicate that section diversifications of Acer might have completed largely in the late Eocene and the intercontinental disjunctions of Acer between eastern Asia and eastern North America formed mostly in the Miocene.     

Single cell studies of the cell cycle and some models

Analysis of growth and division often involves measurements made on cell populations, which tend to average data. The value of single cell analysis needs to be appreciated, and models based on findings from single cells should be taken into greater consideration in our understanding of the way in which cell size and division are co-ordinated. Examples are given of some single cell analyses in mammalian cells, yeast and other microorganisms. There is also a short discussion on how far the results are in accord with simple models.     

The importance of proper model assumption in bayesian phylogenetics

We studied the importance of proper model assumption in the context of Bayesian phylogenetics by examining >5,000 Bayesian analyses and six nested models of nucleotide substitution. Model misspecification can strongly bias bipartition posterior probability estimates. These biases were most pronounced when rate heterogeneity was ignored. The type of bias seen at a particular bipartition appeared to be strongly influenced by the lengths of the branches surrounding that bipartition. In the Felsenstein zone, posterior probability estimates of bipartitions were biased when the assumed model was underparameterized but were unbiased when the assumed model was overparameterized. For the inverse Felsenstein zone, however, both underparameterization and overparameterization led to biased bipartition posterior probabilities, although the bias caused by overparameterization was less pronounced and disappeared with increased sequence length. Model parameter estimates were also affected by model misspecification. Underparameterization caused a bias in some parameter estimates, such as branch lengths and the gamma shape parameter, whereas overparameterization caused a decrease in the precision of some parameter estimates. We caution researchers to assure that the most appropriate model is assumed by employing both a priori model choice methods and a posteriori model adequacy tests.     

Nonsense-mediated decay of glutathione peroxidase 1 mRNA in the cytoplasm depends on intron position

mRNA for glutathione peroxidase 1 (GPx1) is subject to cytoplasmic nonsense-mediated decay (NMD) when the UGA selenocysteine (Sec) codon is recognized as nonsense. Here, we demonstrate by moving the sole intron of the GPx1 gene that either the Sec codon or a TAA codon in its place elicits NMD when located >/=59 bp but not 相似文献