A healthy nation: strengthening child health research in the UK.

Despite a general acknowledgment that research in children is necessary and ethical, the evidence base for child-specific treatments is still sparse. We investigated children's biomedical and health services research in the UK in relation to training, infrastructure and activity, research evidence, and visibility. We show that excellent opportunities for career researchers exist through a competitive, national integrated academic training programme, but that the number of academic paediatricians has decreased by 18% between 2000 and 2011, falling from 11·3% to 5·9% of the consultant workforce. The potential for rapid delivery of studies in children through the National Health Service (NHS) is not being realised: clinical trainees are poorly equipped with core research skills; most newly appointed consultant paediatricians have little or no research experience; less than 5% of contracted consultant time supports research; less than 2·5% of the 2 million children seen in the NHS every year are recruited to studies; and ten of the 20 UK children's hospitals do not have a clinical research facility. Support through National Institute for Health Research networks is good for studies into drugs, but inconsistent for non-drug research; less than 5% of registered studies involve children and only one children's biomedical research centre has been allocated funding from 2012. Of the UK annual public and charitable biomedical research expenditure of roughly £2·2 billion, about 5% is directed at child health research. The scant evidence base is impeding the development of clinical guidance and policy-less than 20% of the outputs of the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence are applicable to children. Paediatric representation on major research boards is weak. Parent and young people's advocacy is fragmented, and their views are insufficiently heeded by regulatory bodies. The strong UK Government commitment to biomedical research has not been translated fully to research for children. The power of research in children to turn the tide of the growing burden of non-communicable, chronic, adult diseases that have their origins in early life, to benefit the health of an ageing population and future generations, and to reduce health-care costs is inadequately recognised. On the basis of our findings, we make several recommendations to improve early-years research, including the formation of multidisciplinary, cross-institutional groups of clinical and non-clinical child health researchers and their access to diagnostic and laboratory facilities suitable for children; a unified Children's Research Network for drug studies and non-drug studies; regulatory assessment of research that is proportionate and based on consistent national criteria; an expansion of research posts; support for parents' and young people's advocacy; collaboration between children's research charities; improved research training for paediatric trainees; and closer integration of child health research with core NHS activities.

Effect of heat and pressure processing on DNA fragmentation and implications for the detection of meat using a real-time polymerase chain reaction.

The design of real-time polymerase chain reaction (PCR) assays for the detection of meat in processed products has focused on using small amplicons, often to the detriment of specificity. However, the relationship between amplification rates and the amplicon size for processed meat products has yet to be determined. To investigate this relationship, real-time PCR assays were designed to give a series of amplicons of increasing size. These assays were then used to assess amplification rates, in relation to amplicon size, in processed meat matrices. Although the most sensitive assays were those that used the smallest amplicons, amplification was still observed using amplicons of 351 base pairs for highly processed samples. It was found, therefore, that although in general, amplicons should be as small as possible, larger amplicons give efficient amplification and that small amplicons should not be chosen if they compromise assay specificity.

Truncation of oligonucleotide primers confers specificity on real-time polymerase chain reaction assays for food authentication.

The advent of real-time polymerase chain reaction has revolutionized the field of molecular biology, but the design and optimization of these assays has been largely overlooked in the literature. This dearth of information is probably in response to the provision of assay design software and robust guidelines issued by the leading manufacturer. However, many applications require highly specific assays with no cross-amplification of non-target DNA and it has been found that the software and guidelines, whilst producing assays of great sensitivity, do not necessarily produce specific assays. Two complementary strategies were used to confer specificity on a real-time assay, first by placing the 3' end of the primers on a point of sequence heterogeneity and, second, by truncating the primers at the 5' end to lower the calculated melting temperature. Using these strategies in concert, a specific assay for a conserved region of the mitochondrial cytochrome b gene was developed that can be used for the unambiguous detection of the target species in a meat mixture. This approach can be used for any real-time polymerase chain reaction assay to increase assay selectivity and specificity.

Rapid detection of chicken and turkey in heated meat products using the polymerase chain reaction followed by amplicon visualisation with vistra green.

A rapid and highly specific assay suitable for the routine detection of turkey and chicken in processed meat products has been developed. Based on PCR amplification of species-specific amplicons with rapid visualisation using vistra green, the assay may be completed within 5 h of receipt of sample. DNA was isolated from meat samples by the use of Wizard DNA isolation technology and followed by DNA amplification in the polymerase chain reaction using species specific primers, chicken forward (CF), chicken reverse (CR), turkey forward (TF) and turkey reverse (TR): the production of an amplicon was detected after the end of the PCR in less than 5 min using vistra green and a fluorescence plate reader. The presence of fluorescence denoted the presence of the target species in the sample.

SirA orthologs affect both motility and virulence.

The sirA gene of Salmonella enterica serovar Typhimurium encodes a two-component response regulator of the FixJ family that has a positive regulatory influence on the expression of type III secretion genes involved with epithelial cell invasion and the elicitation of bovine gastroenteritis. SirA orthologs in Pseudomonas, Vibrio, and Erwinia control the expression of distinct virulence genes in these genera, but an evolutionarily conserved target of SirA regulation has never been identified. In this study we tested the hypothesis that sirA may be an ancient member of the flagellar regulon. We examined the effect of a sirA mutation on transcriptional fusions to flagellar promoters (flhD, fliE, fliF, flgA, flgB, fliC, fliD, motA, and fliA) while using fusions to the virulence gene sopB as a positive control. SirA had only small regulatory effects on all fusions in liquid medium (less than fivefold). However, in various types of motility agar plates, sirA was able to activate a sopB fusion by up to 63-fold while repressing flagellar fusions by values exceeding 100-fold. Mutations in the sirA orthologs of Escherichia coli, Vibrio cholerae, Pseudomonas fluorescens, and Pseudomonas aeruginosa result in defects in either motility or motility gene regulation, suggesting that control of flagellar regulons may be an evolutionarily conserved function of sirA orthologs. The implications for our understanding of virulence gene regulation in the gamma Proteobacteria are discussed.