THE DESIGN AND ANALYSIS OF EXPERIMENTS. By Oscar Kempthorne. New York, John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 1952. 631 pp. $8.50. This book by a teacher of statistics (as well as a consultant for \"experimenters\") is a comprehensive study of the philosophical background for the statistical design of experiment. It is necessary to have some facility with algebraic notation and manipulation to be able to use the volume intelligently. The problems are presented from the theoretical point of view, without such practical examples as would be helpful for those not acquainted with mathematics. The mathematical justification for the techniques is given. As a somewhat advanced treatment of the design and analysis of experiments, this volume will be interesting and helpful for many who approach statistics theoretically as well as practically. With emphasis on the \"why,\" and with description given broadly, the author relates the subject matter to the general theory of statistics and to the general problem of experimental inference. MARGARET J. ROBERTSON

The Design and Analysis of Experiments

Microbiota Modulate Behavioral and Physiological Abnormalities Associated with Neurodevelopmental Disorders

Historically, natural products have been used since ancient times and in folklore for the treatment of many diseases and illnesses. Classical natural product chemistry methodologies enabled a vast array of bioactive secondary metabolites from terrestrial and marine sources to be discovered. Many of these natural products have gone on to become current drug candidates. This brief review aims to highlight historically significant bioactive marine and terrestrial natural products, their use in folklore and dereplication techniques to rapidly facilitate their discovery. Furthermore a discussion of how natural product chemistry has resulted in the identification of many drug candidates; the application of advanced hyphenated spectroscopic techniques to aid in their discovery, the future of natural product chemistry and finally adopting metabolomic profiling and dereplication approaches for the comprehensive study of natural product extracts will be discussed.

https://minerva-access.unimelb.edu.au/bitstream/handle/11343/265172/PMC3901206.pdf

A historical overview of natural products in drug discovery.

A safe and effective rotavirus vaccine is urgently needed, particularly in developing countries. Critical to vaccine development and implementation is a knowledge base concerning the epidemiology of rotavirus G and P serotypes/genotypes throughout the world. The temporal and geographical distribution of human rotavirus G and P types was reviewed by analysing a total of 45571 strains collected globally from 124 studies reported from 52 countries on five continents published between 1989 and 2004. Four common G types (G1, G2, G3 and G4) in conjunction with P[8] or P[4] represented over 88% of the strains analysed worldwide. In addition, serotype G9 viruses associated with P[8] or P[6] were shown to have emerged as the fourth globally important G type with the relative frequency of 4.1%. When the global G and/or P type distributions were divided into five continents/subcontinents, several characteristic features emerged. For example, the P[8]G1 represented over 70% of rotavirus infections in North America, Europe and Australia, but only about 30% of the infections in South America and Asia, and 23% in Africa. In addition, in Africa (i) the relative frequency of G8 was as high as that of the globally common G3 or G4, (ii) P[6] represented almost one-third of all P types identified and (iii) 27% of the infections were associated with rotavirus strains bearing unusual combinations such as P[6]G8 or P[4]G8. Furthermore, in South America, uncommon G5 virus appeared to increase its epidemiological importance among children with diarrhea. Such findings have (i) confirmed the importance of continued active rotavirus strain surveillance in a variety of geographical settings and (ii) provided important considerations for the development and implementation of an effective rotavirus vaccine (e.g. a geographical P-G type adjustment in the formulation of next generation multivalent vaccines).

Global distribution of rotavirus serotypes/genotypes and its implication for the development and implementation of an effective rotavirus vaccine.

The perpetually increasing rate at which viral full-genome sequences are being determined is creating a pressing demand for computational tools that will aid the objective classification of these genome sequences. Taxonomic classification approaches that are based on pairwise genetic identity measures are potentially highly automatable and are progressively gaining favour with the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses (ICTV). There are, however, various issues with the calculation of such measures that could potentially undermine the accuracy and consistency with which they can be applied to virus classification. Firstly, pairwise sequence identities computed based on multiple sequence alignments rather than on multiple independent pairwise alignments can lead to the deflation of identity scores with increasing dataset sizes. Also, when gap-characters need to be introduced during sequence alignments to account for insertions and deletions, methodological variations in the way that these characters are introduced and handled during pairwise genetic identity calculations can cause high degrees of inconsistency in the way that different methods classify the same sets of sequences. Here we present Sequence Demarcation Tool (SDT), a free user-friendly computer program that aims to provide a robust and highly reproducible means of objectively using pairwise genetic identity calculations to classify any set of nucleotide or amino acid sequences. SDT can produce publication quality pairwise identity plots and colour-coded distance matrices to further aid the classification of sequences according to ICTV approved taxonomic demarcation criteria. Besides a graphical interface version of the program for Windows computers, command-line versions of the program are available for a variety of different operating systems (including a parallel version for cluster computing platforms).

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0108277&type=printable

SDT: A Virus Classification Tool Based on Pairwise Sequence Alignment and Identity Calculation

Use of non-radioactive probes for VP4 typing of human rotaviruses

Chemotaxonomic applications of flavonoids

Removal of contaminating bacteria from computers by disinfection and hand sanitation.

Polymerase chain reaction (PCR) can be used in the identification of bacterial pathogens in dairy products, as well as in the genotyping of bacterial microbiota. Conventional PCR has been used in dairy microbiology to amplify specific genetic targets to identify pathogens including Listeria monocytogenes, Salmonella enterica, Staphylococcus aureus, Escherichia coli 0157:H7, and has been found to be a more sensitive and rapid technique compared to culture-based methods. Furthermore, PCR-based fingerprinting methods have been increasingly investigated as a more rapid tool than the current gold standard, pulse-field gel electrophoresis (PFGE), for genotyping foodborne pathogens and microbiota. In this paper, two case studies are also described that illustrate how one such technique, enterobacterial repetitive intergenic consensus (ERIC)-PCR has been used to determine the genetic diversity of E. coli isolated from contaminated dairy products.

Applications of polymerase chain reaction in the dairy industry

Natural compounds from plants are known to provide a source of anthelmintic molecules. In previous studies, we have shown that plant extracts from the plant Picria fel-terrae Lour. and particular fractions thereof have activity against the free-living nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, causing quite pronounced stress responses in this nematode. We have also shown that a fraction, designated Pf-fraction 5, derived from this plant has a substantial adverse effect on this worm; however, nothing is known about the molecular processes affected in the worm. In the present study, we explored this aspect. Key biological processes linked to upregulated genes (n = 214) included ‘response to endoplasmic reticulum stress’ and ‘lipid metabolism’, and processes representing downregulated genes (n = 357) included ‘DNA-conformation change’ and ‘cellular lipid metabolism’. Exposure of C. elegans to Pf-fraction 5 induces significant changes in the transcriptome. Gene ontology analysis suggests that Pf-fraction 5 induces endoplasmic reticulum and mitochondrial stress, and the changes in gene expression are either a direct or indirect consequence of this. Further work is required to assess specific responses to sub-fractions of Pf-fraction 5 in time-course experiments in C. elegans, to define the chemical(s) with potent anthelmintic properties, to attempt to unravel their mode(s) of action and to assess their selectivity against nematodes.

/pdf/transcriptional-alterations-in-caenorhabditis-elegans-2cw6ei3u0l.pdf

Enzo A. Palombo

Papers

Use of non-radioactive probes for VP4 typing of human rotaviruses

Chemotaxonomic applications of flavonoids

Removal of contaminating bacteria from computers by disinfection and hand sanitation.

Applications of polymerase chain reaction in the dairy industry

Transcriptional alterations in Caenorhabditis elegans following exposure to an anthelmintic fraction of the plant Picria fel-terrae Lour.