1,720,956 research outputs found
Antimicrobial and Nanocarrier Properties of Carbon Dots (CDs) Synthesized from Different Materials
No full textMultidrug resistance (MDR) in pathogens is a serious public health issue. In this prospect, the use of carbon dots as an antimicrobial agent is promising as they lead to nonspecific and random oxidative damages to the biomolecules such as proteins, lipids, and nucleic acids. Moreover, CDs are excellent candidates for gene delivery owing to their unique features like a facile synthesis, ease of functionalization, non-toxicity, and greater biocompatibility. The efficient way of introducing exogenous DNA into bacterial cells is fundamental in many microbiology and molecular activities such as cloning, mutant generation, DNA library construction. Heat shock and electroporation are two major techniques of gene delivery in bacterial cells, however, both techniques are time and resource-consuming. Thus, to develop efficient, easy, less time-consuming, and safe gene delivery methods, we used carbon dots as a non-viral method of gene delivery. In this study, we synthesized four carbon dots: amine-coated carbon dots (NH2-FCDs), carboxylate carbon dots (COOH-FCDs), carbon dots from L-arginine, and glucose (N-CDs), and carbon dots using citric acid and polyethyleneimine (PEI). We studied their antimicrobial effects in six different bacteria viz E. coli, Pectobacterium carotovorum, Agrobacterium tumefaciens, Agrobacterium rhizogenes, Pseudomonas syringae, and Salmonella enterica.Further, we studied the plasmid/gene delivery efficiency of carbon dots inside Escherichia coli, Pectobacterium carotovorum, and Salmonella enterica. We incubated CDs, cells, and plasmids carrying red fluorescent protein (RFP) as a reporter gene and ampicillin resistance gene as selectable markers. We used the agar well diffusion method for the antimicrobial study and calculated the inhibition zones in each bacterium. Transformed colonies were counted using ImageJ software and data were analyzed using R-software. Our findings showed that amine-coated carbon dots (NH2-FCDs) showed the highest inhibition in bacteria whereas carbon dots prepared from citric acid and polyethyleneimine (PEI) were non-inhibitory to the cells. Salmonella and E. coli were more resistant against CDs compared to Agrobacterium, Pseudomonas, and Pectobacterium. Different incubation times were also required for complete inhibition of bacteria according to the source of carbon dots. Similarly, our study demonstrated that among all these CDs, only carboxylate carbon dots (COOH-FCDs) were able to deliver plasmid DNA into E. coli cells
Exploring Barriers and Consequences Related to Nurses Reporting Child Abuse
Get PDFBackground: Child abuse is a pervasive and serious problem in the United States. Over 3 million children are the victims of some kind of physical assault by adults. Due to their prolonged contact with children and opportunity to report, nurses should be trained to accurately assess, identify, and manage cases of child abuse. The purpose of this study was to examine student’s experiences with Child Protective Services, and explore their confidence and attitudes related to identifying and reporting child abuse. Factors associated with non-reporting were identified.
Methodology: This was an exploratory, descriptive study. Students enrolled in the online Nursing Research course, NUR 3165, were asked to participate. Forty-four RN to BSN and Concurrent students completed the 27 questions survey on Qualtrics. It included demographic questions, questions regarding the participant’s beliefs about child abuse, The Child Abuse Reporting, Attitude and Experience Survey, and two vignettes. Survey data was analyzed using descriptive statistics.
Results: There were total of 44 (6 males and 38 females) students who completed the survey; most of them were between the age of 20-24. Fourteen were RN to BSN students who have practiced nursing for more than a year and 30 were concurrent nursing students who are still working on their ASN degree. The results showed that nursing students had positive experiences with CPS and indicated that they had confidence in identifying child abuse. However, students felt that they have not received adequate professional education in this field. Many reported never receiving training regarding child abuse and 84.1% indicated never reporting a suspected case to CPS. When presented with vignettes describing scenarios related to abuse, participants were not able to positively identify cases of abuse versus cases that were ambiguous.
Discussion: Nurses are mandatory child abuse reporters in Florida. Many nursing students indicated that they have never reported suspected cases of child abuse to CPS and some of the reasons for this could be the lack of experience, and proper training and education on child abuse. Regardless of the reason, nursing students should be given adequate education to improve their confidence and attitude in identification and reporting of child abuse cases. Nursing schools could focus on including more hands on activity such as case studies and simulation to improve knowledge. Employers could try to utilize protocols to help identify child abuse
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist
No full textWe have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
Author-wise bibliometric analysis based on entropy.
No full textAuthor-wise bibliometric analysis based on entropy.</p
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