University of Akron

About: University of Akron is a education organization based out in Akron, Ohio, United States. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Polymer & Polymerization. The organization has 17401 authors who have published 29127 publications receiving 702386 citations. The organization is also known as: The University of Akron.

Trauma, PTSD, and resilience: a review of the literature.

Abstract: Based on the available literature, this review article investigates the issue of resilience in relation to trauma and posttraumatic stress disorder. Resilient coping to extreme stress and trauma is a multifaceted phenomena characterized as a complex repertoire of behavioral tendencies. An integrative Person x Situation model is developed based on the literature that specifies the nature of interactions among five classes of variables: (a) personality, (b) affect regulation, (c) coping, (d) ego defenses, and (e) the utilization and mobilization of protective factors and resources to aid coping.

The Technology Acceptance Model: A Meta-Analysis of Empirical Findings

Abstract: The technology acceptance model proposes that perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness predict the acceptance of information technology. Since its inception, the model has been tested with various applications in tens of studies and has become the most widely applied model of user acceptance and usage. Nevertheless, the reported findings on the model are mixed in terms of statistical significance, direction, and magnitude. In this study, we conducted a meta-analysis based on 26 selected empirical studies in order to synthesize the empirical evidence. The results suggest that both the correlation between usefulness and acceptance, and that between usefulness and ease of use are somewhat strong. However, the relationship between ease of use and acceptance is weak, and its significance does not pass the fail-safe test.

The deepest divergences in land plants inferred from phylogenomic evidence.

Abstract: Phylogenetic relationships among the four major lineages of land plants (liverworts, mosses, hornworts, and vascular plants) remain vigorously contested; their resolution is essential to our understanding of the origin and early evolution of land plants. We analyzed three different complementary data sets: a multigene supermatrix, a genomic structural character matrix, and a chloroplast genome sequence matrix, using maximum likelihood, maximum parsimony, and compatibility methods. Analyses of all three data sets strongly supported liverworts as the sister to all other land plants, and analyses of the multigene and chloroplast genome matrices provided moderate to strong support for hornworts as the sister to vascular plants. These results highlight the important roles of liverworts and hornworts in two major events of plant evolution: the water-to-land transition and the change from a haploid gametophyte generation-dominant life cycle in bryophytes to a diploid sporophyte generation-dominant life cycle in vascular plants. This study also demonstrates the importance of using a multifaceted approach to resolve difficult nodes in the tree of life. In particular, it is shown here that densely sampled taxon trees built with multiple genes provide an indispensable test of taxon-sparse trees inferred from genome sequences.

Antibiotic Resistance Is Prevalent in an Isolated Cave Microbiome

Abstract: Antibiotic resistance is a global challenge that impacts all pharmaceutically used antibiotics. The origin of the genes associated with this resistance is of significant importance to our understanding of the evolution and dissemination of antibiotic resistance in pathogens. A growing body of evidence implicates environmental organisms as reservoirs of these resistance genes; however, the role of anthropogenic use of antibiotics in the emergence of these genes is controversial. We report a screen of a sample of the culturable microbiome of Lechuguilla Cave, New Mexico, in a region of the cave that has been isolated for over 4 million years. We report that, like surface microbes, these bacteria were highly resistant to antibiotics; some strains were resistant to 14 different commercially available antibiotics. Resistance was detected to a wide range of structurally different antibiotics including daptomycin, an antibiotic of last resort in the treatment of drug resistant Gram-positive pathogens. Enzyme-mediated mechanisms of resistance were also discovered for natural and semi-synthetic macrolide antibiotics via glycosylation and through a kinase-mediated phosphorylation mechanism. Sequencing of the genome of one of the resistant bacteria identified a macrolide kinase encoding gene and characterization of its product revealed it to be related to a known family of kinases circulating in modern drug resistant pathogens. The implications of this study are significant to our understanding of the prevalence of resistance, even in microbiomes isolated from human use of antibiotics. This supports a growing understanding that antibiotic resistance is natural, ancient, and hard wired in the microbial pangenome.