New From Bentham Science: ‘Coronaviruses’

Bentham Science is happy to announce an important new journal, Coronaviruses. It will focus specifically on the latest research on the various coronavirus strains, recent COVID-19 outbreak, and the emerging methods employed to treat coronavirus infections and prevent future outbreaks.

During these difficult times, it is more important than ever to support the scientists working around the clock to understand, treat, and prevent coronavirus outbreaks. Every day, new discoveries are made in different corners of the world. Virologists, epidemiologists, microbiologists, immunologists, doctors, and many other scientists and medical professionals are still learning about this virus. They are trying to determine just how the coronavirus spreads, how it mutates between different hosts, and what symptoms it causes. These scientists are also working to discover effective treatments and to potentially develop a vaccine that could help prevent a future outbreak.

Bentham Science knows that having access to cutting-edge, up-to-date information on coronavirus is essential to people around the world. Scientific research is informing government policies and responses to the outbreak around the world, and it is important to make those decisions with the most accurate information available. With that in mind, every article in the first issue of the journal will be published as open access, meaning it will be free to download for the first three months after its publication.

Coronaviruses will publish original research articles, letters, reviews/mini-reviews, and guest-edited thematic issues on all aspects of coronaviruses, including (but not limited to) their origins, types, transmission, pathogenesis, epidemiological, demographic, clinical, and genomic characteristics. The journal will also cover case reports and studies on outbreak of coronaviruses, their symptoms, related diseases, prevention, treatment regimens, and development of new drugs.

We are proud to name Dr. Di Liu as the Editor-in-Chief of the new Coronaviruses journal. Dr. Di Liu is a Principal Investigator at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a world-renowned institution on virus research doing work at the heart of the current outbreak. His research focuses are microbial genomic and meta-genomic analyses and bioinformatics analyses on pathogenic microbes.

The Honorary Editors of the journal are Dr. Ferid Murad, a Nobel prize winning physician and pharmacologist, and Professor Atta-Ur-Rahman, FRS, an award-winning chemist from Karachi University.

This new journal will be essential reading for virologists, epidemiologists, microbiologists, healthcare workers, and scientists of all kinds interested in the latest information about coronaviridae.

For more information about Bentham Science, please visit their website.

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Science Alert | Scientists Have Found a Way to Preserve Vaccines Without Refrigeration For Months

 

 

Vaccines are only as good as the people they treat and absolutely no good if they are spoiled by heat along the way.

It’s a challenge so great that in some remote parts of the world, this precious medicine has to be transported by camels carrying solar-powered mini refrigerators on their backs. Other populations never get them at all.

The need or an uninterrupted, refrigerated trail of vaccines is known as the “cold chain“, and in most cases requires consistent storage between 2–8 °C, all the way from production to dispersal; otherwise, it could lay waste to the entire process.

“You can spend all kinds of money developing a vaccine, but if it is deactivated by high temperature an hour before you can give it to someone, it doesn’t matter,” says Ali Ashkar, a pathologist who specialises in immunology at McMaster University in Canada.

There are few technical immunisation issues more important, and Ashkar and his colleagues now think they have invented a potential solution, one that could allow vaccines to go unrefrigerated for weeks at a time in warm and remote areas.

While other tactics have focused on reengineering the vaccines or modifying their vectors, this new method is based on the simple addition of sugar.

In this case, however, the viruses are mixed and then dried into a sugary film, created from a combination of two FDA-approved food preservatives, called pullulan and trehalose.

 

Suspended in this solution, the vaccines can be transported without the need for constant cooling. To reactive them, local clinicians need only add water before administering them to patients, as fresh as if they came from a fridge. To read out more, please visit: https://bit.ly/2WlhtsQ

New Issue :: Current Drug Metabolism (Volume: 19, Issue: 8)

 

Current Drug Metabolism aims to cover all the latest and outstanding developments in drug metabolism and disposition. The journal serves as an international forum for the publication of timely reviews and guest edited issues in drug metabolism. Current Drug Metabolism is an essential journal for academic, clinical, government and pharmaceutical scientists who wish to be kept informed and up-to-date with the latest and most important developments.

 

 

Articles from the journal Current Drug Metabolism Volume 19, Issue 8:

• Safety Limits of Antidepressant Use Plus Combinations: Focus on Cardiovascular Function
• The Relationship Between Lithium and Cancer Proliferation: A Case-Based Review of the Literature
• Glycogen Synthase Kinase-3β as a Putative Therapeutic Target for Bipolar Disorder
• Current Therapeutic Approaches for Targeting Inflammation in Depression and Cardiovascular Disease
• We are not Alone in Our Body: Insights into the Involvement of Microbiota in the Etiopathogenesis and Pharmacology of Mental Illness
• Application of Medicinal Plants as a Source for Therapeutic Agents Against Streptococcus pyogenes Infections
• Topical Discoveries on Multi-Target Approach to Manage Alzheimer’s Disease
• Structure Activity Relationship of Venom Toxins Targeting Potassium Channels

For details on the articles, please visit this link ::  https://bit.ly/2n5VF0d

 

 

Good bacterium’ prevents colic symptoms in newborns

Newborns who take drops containing a beneficial bacterium cry less than babies not given the supplement, researchers report January 13 inJAMA Pediatrics.

The cause of excessive crying — or colic – is not well understood, but scientists suspect that the microbial mix in infants’ intestines is involved.  Researchers at the University of Bari Aldo Moro in Italy teamed with other scientists across Italy to randomly assign 589 newborns to get either a placebo or a probiotic supplement. The supplement contained live Lactobacillus reuteri, a microbe shown previously to improve intestinal function. Parents delivered the drops and kept detailed diaries of infant health for three months.

Newborns getting the microbe were less apt to develop colic symptoms. They cried for an average of 38 minutes per day; infants getting placebo cried for 71 minutes. The microbe-treated babies also spit up less often. These improvements meant fewer doctor visits and trips to emergency departments for the infants. Parents whose babies got the microbes lost only about half a day of work during the study, compared with nearly three days for parents of infants getting a placebo.

[Source: sciencenews.org]

Twitter Scholars: How Science Goes Viral

Scientists are beginning to use social media to measure the impact of their work — but they’re still in the process of figuring out what online popularity means.

In times past, counting up scholarly citations– i.e. how often other academics were using your work for their own research – was one of the only ways to know how widely read and appreciated a piece of research had been.

But today, a number of journals publish more modern alternative metrics, or altmetrics, such as how many times articles have been tweeted, shared on Facebook, downloaded, or written up in news reports. And institutions and scientists can track responses to their work using services offered by new nonprofits and companies.

“TWITTER GIVES YOU CONNECTIONS BEYOND THE IVORY TOWER THAT YOU DON’T NORMALLY HAVE”

But what does it mean to have a paper go viral on social media? And what’s more important: tweet-ability or the traditional citation from the scientific community?

A study analyzing Twitter links to biomedical articles, which was published last month in the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, indicates that popularity on Twitter is probably not a reliable measure of scholarly esteem. Twitter mentions show a low correlation with citations, so a tweetable paper isn’t necessarily a well respected one.

“It’s one of the largest studies that looked at the connection between scientific articles and their [mentions] on social media,” said Emily Darling, a David H Smith Conservation Research Fellow at the University of North Carolina who studies both coral reefs and how scholars use Twitter. “It was interesting that there’s no connection to scholarly impact.”

“I was surprised that the correlation was so low,” said Euan Adie, cofounder ofAltmetric, a London-based company that tracks Internet response to scholarly works. The study reinforces a point Adie and his Altmetrics colleagues often make: high levels of online engagement do not necessarily say anything about an article’s scholarly quality.

Lead author Stefanie Haustein, a researcher at the University of Montreal, and colleagues used data from Altmetric to track tweets of links to papers published between 2010 and 2012. The study encompassed 1.4 million studies indexed on PubMed, a site that catalogs biomedical articles, and Web of Science, a site that tracks scholarly citations. Haustein’s team found that less than 10 percent of these articles were ever tweeted at all. They used only papers published in 2011 to check correlations between tweets and citations.

“Social media was never meant to replace traditional statistics like journal impact factors or article citations,” Darling writes in an article published last week on The Conversation that responds to Haustein’s study. Rather,  “Twitter gives you connections beyond the ivory tower that you don’t normally have,” she said. As a conservationist, for instance, she hopes to spread her research to policymakers and resource managers, so they can take actions based on it. And she wants to inform the public.

But Haustein says that more work is needed to distinguish between the various reasons an article is tweeted—whether to spread important information or for fun. For instance, Altmetric last week released a list of the top 100 papers that received the most online attention in 2013, including tweets, Facebook posts, news stories, blog posts, and more.

Some papers were clearly shared because they were of vital interest to the public. A study related to the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan topped the list. It was an open-access paper that chronicled the levels of radioactive cesium found in freshwater fish around Japan, and it was tweeted largely by members of the public, with the highest representation in Japan.

[Courtesy of: http://www.theconnectivist.com/2013/12/twitter-scholars-how-science-goes-viral/