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Biomolecular structure-function relationships and their regulation are foundational concepts seen in a wide variety of community-determined educational standards across STEM disciplines. These concepts can be difficult for students to grasp as they require the application of foundational principles of chemistry and physics in a biological context. Active learning has been shown to effectively promote learning through student engagement; thus, we sought to develop an authentic data focused exercise to reinforce these concepts while also promoting scientific process and visual literacy skills. This worksheet guides students as they use publicly available data from the Protein Data Bank (PDB) and open access biomolecular visualization tools, to examine different types of ligands (e.g. agonist vs antagonist), the molecular basis of receptor-ligand interactions, the impact they have on receptor conformation and ultimate activity. To date, this lesson has been implemented in two courses (3rd-year pharmacology and toxicology, and biochemistry), though its flexibility makes it ideal for adaptation to a wide variety of courses and teaching approaches. Post-activity surveys conducted in both courses revealed students had a positive perception of this way of learning, felt that it allowed them to better meet the learning objective of their respective courses than lecture alone, and develop transferable skills that would be useful in their future careers. Next steps for this project will include an assessment of the learning gains associated with the implementation of this activity and the development of the activity into a complete molecular case study centered on cannabis use and its pharmacological impacts. This study is exempt from ethics submission under Article 2.4 of the TCPS2.

This study took place in Habana, Cuba over approximately 1 year, wherein the researcher collaborated with Reggaeton artists. While scholarship in multimodality has explored its potentials for literacy pedagogy, developing new literacies, and expanding identity possibilities, less research has focused on the creation of the spaces, tools, and resources required for composing multimodal products and on the liberatory dimensions of multimodality. This study highlights the backstories of these production processes, including the innovative use(s) of spaces and tools, the resources leveraged in order to construct and distribute multimodal media, and the ways artists made meaning together. The findings elucidate the ways the artists leveraged their ingenuity, collaboratively developed digital literacy practices, and produced multimodal texts to create new possibilities.

This qualitative, 8-month study analyzed first-grade children’s playful responses to literature in the classroom context. The broad purpose of this research was to investigate the ways that children construct meaning as they respond to literature through play as a form of reader response. The findings presented in this paper highlight the ways the children interpreted and reflected upon body image and ideals of beauty and the ways in which they enacted/performed gender and gender roles as they responded to literature through play. These findings suggest that, as critical readers of texts, children demonstrate great depth in their explorations and analyses of gender and beauty through their responsive play, that the potential for play as a form of reader response is immense, and that the intersection of responsive play and young children’s critical literacies requires further investigation, in and out of the classroom setting.

Cholangiocarcinoma (CCA), or cancer of bile duct epithelial cells, is a very aggressive malignancy characterized by early lymphangiogenesis in the tumor microenvironment (TME) and lymph node (LN) metastasis which correlate with adverse patient outcome. However, the specific roles of lymphatic endothelial cells (LECs) that promote LN metastasis remains unexplored. Here we aimed to identify the dynamic molecular crosstalk between LECs and CCA cells that activate tumor-promoting pathways and enhances lymphangiogenic mechanisms. Our studies show that inflamed LECs produced high levels of chemokine CXCL5 that signals through its receptor CXCR2 on CCA cells. The CXCR2-CXCL5 signaling axis in turn activates EMT (epithelial-mesenchymal transition) inducing MMP (matrix metalloproteinase) genes such as GLI, PTCHD, and MMP2 in CCA cells that promote CCA migration and invasion. Further, rate of mitochondrial respiration and glycolysis of CCA cells was significantly upregulated by inflamed LECs and CXCL5 activation, indicating metabolic reprogramming. CXCL5 also induced lactate production, glucose uptake, and mitoROS. CXCL5 also induced LEC tube formation and increased metabolic gene expression in LECs. In vivo studies using CCA orthotopic models confirmed several of these mechanisms. Our data points to a key finding that LECs upregulate critical tumor-promoting pathways in CCA via CXCR2-CXCL5 axis, which further augments CCA metastasis.

The authors identify as Black psychologists in the field of psycho-oncology who provide care to a diverse patient population with cancer. In their account, they share their experiences as clinician...

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a neurodegenerative illness and has a common onset between the ages of 55 and 65 years. There is progressive development of both motor and non-motor symptoms, greatly affecting one’s overall quality of life. While there is no cure, various treatments have been developed to help manage the symptoms of PD. Management of PD is a growing field and targets new treatment methods, as well as improvements to old ones. Pharmacological, surgical, and therapeutic treatments have allowed physicians to treat not only the main motor symptoms of PD, but target patient-specific problems as they arise. This review discusses both the established and new possibilities for PD treatment that can provide patient-specific care and mitigate side effects for common treatments.

HEAT, an instructional program emphasizing a nontraditional hands-on approach to algebraic instruction for urban, predominantly African American middle schoolers, provides a space to explore teachers’ beliefs about urban students’ mathematical abilities and motivation and addresses how teacher perceptions can intersect with instruction, learning, and the construction of students’ mathematical identities. Using a multiple case study design, we analyzed six urban middle school mathematics teachers’ written reflections and interview responses. Findings suggest that teachers’ instructional behaviors, along with their perceptions and expectations of urban, African American middle schoolers’ mathematical abilities and motivation, interact with students’ beliefs and work habits in ways that can promote and support students’ positive mathematical identity construction. Thus, HEAT personified thriving learning subcultures and supportive mathematical communities of practice that are far too atypical in urban middle schools.

Prior to leaving middle school, students are expected to be able to solve linear equations with one unknown using multiple modes of representation, including pictorial models. Although solving thes...

This eight-month study, conducted in a first-grade classroom in the southwestern United States, analyzed young children's playful responses to literature. It focuses on framing a theory that underpins play as a form of reader response, which I term ‘responsive play’. It further aims to answer the overarching research question and the sub-question: What are the affordances of play for responding to text in a first-grade classroom? What are the sociocultural resources that children use to respond to and make meaning with text? Findings suggest that the children in this study created a space for learning and understanding, through their responsive play, that allowed them to think through, demonstrate, and share their experiential knowledge, their funds of knowledge, and their intertextual knowledge – as sociocultural resources – and to connect these to their literacy learning as they cooperatively transacted with and responded to various books. These findings suggest that children's play, language, and literacy are complementary, that children's responsive play should be encouraged in the classroom setting, and that children's experiences and funds of knowledge should be valued as additive to the academic learning context. Implications of this study include that responsive play can be viewed as a generative source of academic learning and that the notion of reader response, in research and practice, can be reconceived to include responsive play.

Grafting of acrylic monomers onto the renewable feedstock starch via free radical polymerizations has been investigated for many years. Many potential applications have been studied, such as superabsorbents, flocculants, thickening agents and so forth. It is expected that size and spacing of the grafts have a large influence on the performance of such polymers. Yet, information upon the structure-property relationships is only scarcely found in literature. Moreover, there is no clear overview of how reaction variables can be used to influence the grafted structure. In this review, an assessment has been made of the relation between the architecture of the grafts and potential applications. Then, from a selection of relevant literature data it is demonstrated that reaction variables such as the relative concentrations of initiator and monomer, have a large impact on the average size and spacing of the grafts. The emergence of controlled radical polymerizations, like Atom Transfer Radical Polymerization (ATRP) and Reversible Addition-Fragmentation chain Transfer (RAFT), is discussed, both the current status and future prospects. These methods are promising in the future of starch grafting, especially for systems where homopolymer formation may be a problem. Nevertheless, higher costs and other related issues make these advanced methods more suitable in high added-value products.

In this study we investigated the relationship between urban eighth grade students’ Hands-On Exposure to Algebraic Thinking (HEAT) competition performance and their subsequent performance on standardized measures of mathematics achievement (ACT Composite Score, ACT Math Scores, and Louisiana Algebra End of Course Exams). It was found that the pictorial portion of the project was a relatively consistent predictor of participants’ high school academic performance. That is, as participants’ HEAT pictorial competition scores increased, so did their ACT composite, ACT math scores, and Algebra End of Course Exam Scores. Findings from the HEAT Project may contribute to conversations centered on ways to expose urban students to creative, social, hands-on pedagogy in non-evaluative contexts in order to position students for both immediate and long-term mathematics success without sacrificing intellectual rigor.