University of South Australia

About: University of South Australia is a education organization based out in Adelaide, South Australia, Australia. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Poison control. The organization has 10086 authors who have published 32587 publications receiving 913683 citations. The organization is also known as: The University of South Australia & UniSA.

Genome-wide Association Study in 79,366 European-ancestry Individuals Informs the Genetic Architecture of 25-Hydroxyvitamin D Levels

Abstract: Vitamin D is a steroid hormone precursor that is associated with a range of human traits and diseases. Previous GWAS of serum 25-hydroxyvitamin D concentrations have identified four genome-wide significant loci (GC, NADSYN1/DHCR7, CYP2R1, CYP24A1). In this study, we expand the previous SUNLIGHT Consortium GWAS discovery sample size from 16,125 to 79,366 (all European descent). This larger GWAS yields two additional loci harboring genome-wide significant variants (P = 4.7×10−9 at rs8018720 in SEC23A, and P = 1.9×10−14 at rs10745742 in AMDHD1). The overall estimate of heritability of 25-hydroxyvitamin D serum concentrations attributable to GWAS common SNPs is 7.5%, with statistically significant loci explaining 38% of this total. Further investigation identifies signal enrichment in immune and hematopoietic tissues, and clustering with autoimmune diseases in cell-type-specific analysis. Larger studies are required to identify additional common SNPs, and to explore the role of rare or structural variants and gene–gene interactions in the heritability of circulating 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels.

Mini-Me: An Adaptive Avatar for Mixed Reality Remote Collaboration

Abstract: We present Mini-Me, an adaptive avatar for enhancing Mixed Reality (MR) remote collaboration between a local Augmented Reality (AR) user and a remote Virtual Reality (VR) user. The Mini-Me avatar represents the VR user's gaze direction and body gestures while it transforms in size and orientation to stay within the AR user's field of view. A user study was conducted to evaluate Mini-Me in two collaborative scenarios: an asymmetric remote expert in VR assisting a local worker in AR, and a symmetric collaboration in urban planning. We found that the presence of the Mini-Me significantly improved Social Presence and the overall experience of MR collaboration.

A facile approach to chemically modified graphene and its polymer nanocomposites

Abstract: A scalable approach for the mass production of chemically modified graphene has yet to be developed, which holds the key to the large-scale production of stable graphene colloids for optical electronics energy conversion and storage materials, catalysis, sensors, composite, etc. Here a facile approach to fabricating covalently modified graphene and its polymer nanocomposites is presented. The method involves: i)employing a common furnace, rather than a furnace installed with a quartz tube and operated in inert gas as required in previous studies, to treat a commercial graphite interrelation compound with thermal shocking and ultrasonication and fabricate graphene platelets (GnPs) with a thickness of 2.51+-0.39nm that contain only 7 at% oxygen; ii)grafting these GnPs with commercial, long-chain surfactant which is able to create molecular entanglement with polymer matrixes by taking advantage of the reactions between the epoxide groups of the platelets and the end amine groups of the surfactant to produce chemically modified graphehe platelets (m-GnPs); and iii)solution-mixing m-GnPs with a commonly used polymer to fabricate nanocomposites. These m-GnPs are well dispered in a polymer with imrpoved mechanical properties and a low percolation threshold of electrical conductivity at 0.25col%. This novel approach could lead to the future scalable production of graphehe and its nanocomposites.