Postmortem mitochondria function in longissimus lumborum of Angus and Brahman steers.

Mitochondria function and integrity may impact postmortem metabolism and meat quality development. Adaptations in heat tolerant Brahman may persist to limit cellular stress postmortem. Our objective was to evaluate glycolysis, pH decline, and mitochondria function in longissimus lumborum (LL) from Angus and Brahman steers (N = 28) early postmortem (1 to 6 h) and after rigor (24 h). We evaluated metabolites of anaerobic glycolysis, ATP, pH, and temperature, and determined mitochondria oxygen consumption rate (OCR) in permeabilized fibers. The main effects of breed (b) and time (t) and the interaction were tested. Brahman LL contained greater ATP during the first 6 h postmortem; Brahman also tended to exhibit a slower pH decline (b × t, P = 0.07) and more rapid temperature decline (b × t, P < 0.001), but metabolites of anaerobic glycolysis were not different. Mitochondria in Brahman and Angus LL were well-coupled and respired at 1 h postmortem. However, outer membrane integrity became increasingly compromised postmortem (t, P < 0.001). Brahman tended to exhibit greater electron transport system capacity (b, P < 0.1) and had greater capacity for oxidative phosphorylation (complex I and II substrates) at 6 h compared with Angus (P < 0.001). In totality, greater ATP, slower pH decline, and enhanced mitochondria capacity indicate that Brahman possess mitochondrial properties or cellular adaptations that help protect the cell during energy stress postmortem. Slower pH and more rapid temperature decline in LL from Brahman may also help preserve mitochondria function postmortem.

Spanish-Speaking Mothers' Experiences of School-Based Speech Therapy.

PURPOSE: Spanish-speaking families are a growing population that speech-language pathologists must be prepared to work with. To provide culturally responsive intervention, speech-language pathologists (SLPs) must understand the perspectives of Spanish-speaking caregivers when providing intervention. These values and experiences may differ from those of monolingual, mainstream culture. Understanding the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on these experiences is also important. In this qualitative study, we explore the experiences of Spanish-speaking mothers whose children have received school-based speech-language intervention and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. METHOD: We interviewed five Spanish-speaking mothers who were identified as having bilingual children who had or were currently receiving speech therapy, all through the public school system. The mothers participated in a semistructured interview to share their experiences with their children receiving intervention. We analyzed the transcripts through interpretative phenomenological analysis to identify salient themes among participants. All research team members reviewed and agreed upon themes to ensure credibility. RESULTS: The findings revealed six group experiential themes: (a) lack of services and frustration with and barriers to accessing services, (b) greater improvements in English compared with Spanish, (c) bilingual speech therapy has positive effects on children and Spanish-speaking mothers, (d) family involvement in speech therapy is highly important, (e) family stress related to speech difficulties, and (f) pandemic negatively impacted children's socialization and learning. DISCUSSION: The results are discussed in the context of equity. Through understanding the experiences of Spanish-speaking mothers, SLPs can work to ensure service levels comparable with those of monolingual children and support bilingual acquisition.

Do ticks exhibit repeatable individual behaviors?

Diseases caused by ticks are often addressed as a traditional epidemiological mathematical puzzle, i.e., how many identical infected vectors, how many uniform potential hosts, and a dependable rate of transmission, etc. Although often useful at the population level, at the individual level disease transmission occurs when one tick bites one person. Just as we assign agency to people in their outdoor behavior and use of prophylactics against arthropods, perhaps we should also see ticks as individual actors? Are all ticks automatons that just quest and attach, or do they exhibit repeatable individual behaviors that affect transmission? We wanted to determine whether Dermacentor andersoni and D. variabilis adult ticks exhibited repeatable behaviors in four experiments. The experiments focused on left/right movement, attraction to CO2, photophilic tendencies, and avoidance of a repellant. We hypothesized that over two seasons we would find repeatable behavior patterns. In 2021, but not 2022, we found that within an experiment, individuals exhibited repeatable behaviors between trials and between experiments, i.e., if an animal showed repeatable 'adventurous' behavior in one experiment, this predicted adventurous behavior in a separate experiment. This strong evidence of predictable trait-like behavior was present in 2021 but was absent when we repeated the same experiments, with the same collection site, in 2022. This illustrates the importance of multiyear experimentation when testing for repeatable individual behaviors. Incidental to the study, we also observed that a major heat wave in 2021 altered the tick species composition (toward a more dry-adapted population) at our study site.

Extended amygdala circuits are differentially activated by context fear conditioning in male and female rats.

As the incidence of anxiety disorders is more prevalent in females, comparing the neural underpinnings of anxiety in males and females is imperative. The bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BNST) contributes to long-lasting, anxiety-like states including the expression of context fear conditioning. Currently, there is conflicting evidence as to which nuclei of the BNST contribute to these behaviors. The anterolateral portion of the BNST (BNST-AL) located dorsal to the anterior commissure and lateral to the stria terminalis sends robust projections to the central nucleus of the amygdala (CE). Here we asked whether the BNST-AL is active during the expression of context fear conditioning in both male and female rats. At the cellular level, the expression of context fear produced upregulation of the immediate-early gene ARC in the BNST-AL as well as an upregulation of ARC specifically in neurons projecting to the CE, as labeled by the retrograde tracer Fluorogold infused into the CE. However, this pattern of ARC expression was observed in male rats only. Excitotoxic lesions of the BNST reduced context fear expression in both sexes, suggesting that a different set of BNST subnuclei may be recruited by the expression of fear and anxiety-like behaviors in females. Overall, our data highlight the involvement of the BNST-AL in fear expression in males, and suggest that subnuclei of the BNST may be functionally different in male and female rats.

Integrated bio-entity network: a system for biological knowledge discovery.

A significant part of our biological knowledge is centered on relationships between biological entities (bio-entities) such as proteins, genes, small molecules, pathways, gene ontology (GO) terms and diseases. Accumulated at an increasing speed, the information on bio-entity relationships is archived in different forms at scattered places. Most of such information is buried in scientific literature as unstructured text. Organizing heterogeneous information in a structured form not only facilitates study of biological systems using integrative approaches, but also allows discovery of new knowledge in an automatic and systematic way. In this study, we performed a large scale integration of bio-entity relationship information from both databases containing manually annotated, structured information and automatic information extraction of unstructured text in scientific literature. The relationship information we integrated in this study includes protein-protein interactions, protein/gene regulations, protein-small molecule interactions, protein-GO relationships, protein-pathway relationships, and pathway-disease relationships. The relationship information is organized in a graph data structure, named integrated bio-entity network (IBN), where the vertices are the bio-entities and edges represent their relationships. Under this framework, graph theoretic algorithms can be designed to perform various knowledge discovery tasks. We designed breadth-first search with pruning (BFSP) and most probable path (MPP) algorithms to automatically generate hypotheses--the indirect relationships with high probabilities in the network. We show that IBN can be used to generate plausible hypotheses, which not only help to better understand the complex interactions in biological systems, but also provide guidance for experimental designs.