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Graduate Engagement Leads for Open Research at the University of York
No full textThis poster will provide insight into a variety of exciting culture change activities undertaken by our Graduate Engagement Leads for Open Research.
Last year the Library-based Open Research team recruited three postgraduate researchers to promote engagement within each of our academic faculties (Arts and Humanities, Sciences, and Social Sciences). This was made possible through an allocation of Research England Enhancing Research Culture funding, and supports the University’s strategic commitments towards developing an open research community of practice across all our disciplines.
The objectives our Engagement Leads have been working towards include:
Proactive collaboration with Library colleagues, members of our University Strategy and Operations Groups, research staff and students at all levels;
Coordinating actions, refining guiding principles and driving engagement amongst our burgeoning Open Research Advocates network;
Developing accessible and thought-provoking open research in practice case studies to use for education and advocacy;
Addressing requirements for skills training in individual departments and schools based on the results of a University-wide survey;
Publishing and promoting a new Open Research newsletter, launching an Instagram account and exploring how we can use other communication channels to get our messages across;
Planning a series of coordinated events and celebratory initiatives including our Open Research Awards scheme at the end of the academic year.
This talk will address each of these in turn, identifying achievements made and challenges encountered over the course of the year. We will use this opportunity to provide personal perspectives from our Engagement Leads on their open research journeys and the work they have been involved with so far.
We hope this will be a useful poster for attendees, offering recommendations for anyone who may be interested in pursuing similar culture change initiatives at their own institutions
A Promotional Toolkit for Open Research
No full textCommunicating the values and benefits of Open Research can be extremely resource intensive for small teams, especially when seeking to undertake it systematically. This project, led by Edinburgh Open Research and the UKRI Future Leaders Fellows project, with the support of Liverpool John Moore and the University of Bradford\u27s Library Teams seeks to streamline this process by producing a toolkit composed of a training and guidance hub along with a resource library
Automated segmentation pipeline for segmentation and characterising metabolic dysregulation in cancer cachexia
Get PDFCancer cachexia disrupts metabolic homeostasis across various organs. Positron Emission Tomography (PET) is valuable for investigating cachexia in preclinical models and patients[1]. However, manually segmenting multiple organs is laborious and hinders quantitative analysis of whole-body PET. This study establishes an automated pipeline for segmenting and characterizing organs in preclinical PET/MRI.
Acute metabolic changes were induced in non-tumour bearing mice through three approaches: a single dose of Growth Differentiation Factor-15 (GDF-15; n=3 treated, control), daily dexamethasone for 24 days (n=4 treated, control), and 20 hour fasting (n=2 fasted, n=2 fed).
[18F]flurodeoxy-glucose PET was used to image whole-body glucose utilisation. To overcome manual segmentation limitations, an automated multi-organ segmentation method was developed for preclinical MRI using nnU-net, an artificial intelligence architecture[2,3]. The nnU-net was trained on 18 preclinical MRI scans with 21 manual tissue annotations. Evaluation on 8 additional mice revealed high accuracy (Dice Coefficients: 0.72-0.91 for 17 tissues). Adipose tissues had lower accuracy but retained good specificity. Due to low accuracy, pancreas segmentation was excluded. All mice used for training and testing the nnU-net were imaged with the same protocol, sourced from the described datasets, with additional scans from different time points.
After segmenting the scans, we measured mean Standardized Uptake Values (quantitative measure of metabolic activity) for each tissue. Significant differences (p<0.05) were observed following the various interventions (GDF-15, dexamethasone, fasting) compared to control. Network analysis provided insights into potential inter-organ interactions, while Linear Discriminant Analysis successfully distinguished between each metabolic state.
This study presents a novel method for automated segmentation and analysis within preclinical PET/MRI. This method significantly improves efficiency and provides new analysis of total-body metabolic phenotypes. We are currently applying this approach to explore metabolic changes associated with cancer cachexia, aiming to improve our understanding of systemic metabolic dysregulation in both preclinical models and clinical settings.
Please click on the \u27PDF\u27 for the full abstract
Comparing total-body metabolic PET imaging signatures of lung cancer cachexia to other wasting conditions
Get PDFCancer cachexia (CC) is a debilitating wasting condition. While anorexia and muscle wasting are features of cachexia, CC is a distinct and poorly understood metabolic syndrome1. We harnessed preclinical models of lung cancer to study how glucose uptake changes during CC and performed comparative analyses with anorexia and muscle wasting.
Lung K-rasG12D/+;Lkb1-/-(KL) mice suffering CC were imaged using [18F]fluorodeoxyglucose (FDG) PET at 15-19% weight loss alongside K-ras wild-type (WT) non-tumour bearing controls. Mice were injected with 12-18MBq of FDG, imaging 80-100 minutes post injection with the Mediso nanoScan® PET/MRI 1T.
In non-tumour bearing male animals, we modelled anorexia, muscle wasting, and circulation of cachexia factor GDF15 as follows, respectively: fasted overnight for 20 hr, treated with dexamethasone 21-phosphate (dexa) (2mg/kg, i.p. daily, 21 days) and single injection of recombinant human GDF15 hormone (0.1 mg/kg s.c.).
FDG ex vivo biodistribution showed increased uptake in myocardium (p<0.05), brain and liver (both p<0.01) of KL cachexic animals with no significant change in FDG blood pool.
Like cachexic KL animals, FDG uptake in fasted animals increased in brain (p<0.0001), perhaps due to increased FDG blood pool. FDG uptake in skeletal muscles and brown adipose tissue decreased (both p<0.05) in fasted state suggesting lower muscle activity and decreased thermogenesis respectively. Dexa-induced muscle atrophy also resulted in decreased FDG uptake in gastrocnemius/soleus muscles (SUVmean 0.63 vehicle vs. 0.45 dexa, p<0.05) but no changes in skeletal muscle FDG uptake were noted in cachexic animals. In contrast to KL animals, GDF15 injection resulted in decreased FDG uptake in myocardium (p<0.05).
Overall, the cachexic FDG signature showed differences to other wasting conditions in this mouse model, suggesting different underlying mechanisms.
Total-body PET can reveal diverse metabolic wasting states. We aim to elucidate mechanisms of metabolic changes in cachexia to allow metabolic subtyping and personalised treatment options.
Please click on the \u27PDF\u27 for the full abstract
Defending Climate Action in Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS): An Analysis of Fair and Equitable Treatment (FET) and the Right to Regulate in the Age of the Energy Transition
Get PDFThe urgent global challenge of climate change necessitates a reevaluation of the interaction between climate action and international investment law, particularly within the context of Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS). Focusing on Fair and Equitable Treatment (FET), this article delves into the tension between foreign investor protection and the pursuit of measures aimed at mitigating climate change. By delving into the nuances of FET’s components – legitimate expectations, transparency, and arbitrary treatment – this article scrutinises the potential for creating a ‘safe harbour’ for defending climate action and the inadvertent chilling effect on regulation. The article furthermore analyses the ‘right to regulate’ as a pivotal tool for defending climate action in ISDS. Through thorough analysis of this right, the article explores its potential to counterbalance foreign investor protection and the right of the state to take measures to mitigate climate change. The article finally addresses the issues surrounding the modernisation of International Investment Agreements (IIAs) to align them with the imperatives of climate action. Through these explorations, the paper offers insights into recalibrating the ISDS regime to ensure a balanced and equitable approach to defending climate action in the age of the energy transition. 
“Wha would ha’e thoucht it, Stockings would ha’e boucht it?”: Clocks in the Nineteenth-Century Scottish Public Imagination.
Get PDFScottish history, Folklore, Ethnology, Horology, Women’s History, Stockings, Popular Culture, Scottish poetry, Material Culture, Archaeology, Bannockburn, Longcase clocks, Material Culture, Narratology, Local studies, St Ninian’s, Tim
Challenging Patriarchal Representations: Women\u27s Metafictional Writing
No full textIn line with Friedman and Fuchs’s understanding of women’s experimental writing, I argue that through the means of metafiction, which subverts the established notions of realism and stresses the constructedness of reality, authors like Acker and Sapphire create room and possibility for women’s radical opposition against established norms of literary patriarchal structures as well as voice a call for their liberation. These works are rooted in the ideas of agency; through the experimental and metafictional form, they assert the writer’s freedom and thus give power to the marginalised feminine.
Gendering Empire: A Historiographical Exploration
No full textIn her landmark work in feminist theory The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir argues how gender is a totalising, transformative social experience. In this essay, I will argue that this total construction of power and identity finds resonance the colonial project. As alluded to in Franz Fanon’s vision of decolonisation, colonialism wholly moulds and creates individuals. The link is established in using gender as a category of historical analysis for empires, where the principal analytical prism is a Foucauldian dispersion of power, in which power emanates through knowledge-fields, discourse and social relations rather than through simple, unmasked, top-down imposition. Two strands emerge: the genealogy of power and the reproduction of power. The former traces how gender has contributed to moulding, naturalising and essentialising colonial hierarchies, while the latter addresses how historical writing itself illuminates or occludes narratives, agencies and subjectivities, in turn creating new meanings. However, gender as a category of historical analysis is useful for historians of empire, contingent upon the adoption of an intersectional approach that does not posit gender as primary to other axes of oppression. Furthermore, the consciousness of its inessentiality – particularly that of the binary – is necessary to avoid perpetuating Eurocentrism and its specific demarcation of the concepts of gender and race.
Hydrolases & Lipases in GtoPdb v.2024.4
Get PDFListed in this section are hydrolases not accumulated in other parts of the Concise Guide, such as monoacylglycerol lipase and acetylcholinesterase. Pancreatic lipase is the predominant mechanism of fat digestion in the alimentary system; its inhibition is associated with decreased fat absorption. CES1 is present at lower levels in the gut than CES2 (P23141), but predominates in the liver, where it is responsible for the hydrolysis of many aliphatic, aromatic and steroid esters. Hormone-sensitive lipase is also a relatively non-selective esterase associated with steroid ester hydrolysis and triglyceride metabolism, particularly in adipose tissue. Endothelial lipase is secreted from endothelial cells and regulates circulating cholesterol in high density lipoproteins
Volunteer Bands and Local Identity in Caithness at the Time of the Second Reform Act
Get PDFCaithness lay outside the national railway network in 1868, but as this article demonstrates, used the band music of its local volunteer military units, embedded within a wider contemporary British context of imperial music-making, as a means to express and shape local political identities. The second Reform Act of 1867, enacted in Scotland by the Representation of the People (Scotland) Act 1868, prompted wider reimagining about what it meant to be a citizen of Scotland and Britain. Regular references to civic bands in contemporary newspapers and carefully posed photographs in local archives provide evidence for the popularity of Silver and Brass bands connected with the Caithness Volunteer movement. As they marched around towns, villages and countryside, especially around the time of the national elections and local by-elections of 1868-9, their music created powerfully affective soundscapes that connected traditional local identities with the modern British fiscal-military state, helping people to imagine their place as citizens in a period of widening political engagement. The county’s band music provides a microhistory that allows exploration of contrasts between rural and civic patterns of political behaviour in this period