Project description:Small proteins, here defined as proteins of 50 amino acids or fewer in the absence of processing, have traditionally been overlooked due to challenges in their annotation and biochemical detection. In the past several years, however, increasing numbers of small proteins have been identified either through the realization that mutations in intergenic regions are actually within unannotated small protein genes or through the discovery that some small, regulatory RNAs encode small proteins. These insights, together with comparative sequence analysis, indicate that tens if not hundreds of small proteins are synthesized in a given organism. This review summarizes what has been learned about the functions of several of these bacterial small proteins, most of which act at the membrane, illustrating the astonishing range of processes in which these small proteins act and suggesting several general conclusions. Important questions for future studies of these overlooked proteins are also discussed.
Project description:Physicians' beliefs and attitudes about COVID-19 are important to ascertain because of their central role in providing care to patients during the pandemic. Identifying topics and sentiments discussed by physicians and other healthcare workers can lead to identification of gaps relating to theCOVID-19 pandemic response within the healthcare system. To better understand physicians' perspectives on the COVID-19 response, we extracted Twitter data from a specific user group that allows physicians to stay anonymous while expressing their perspectives about the COVID-19 pandemic. All tweets were in English. We measured most frequent bigrams and trigrams, compared sentiment analysis methods, and compared our findings to a larger Twitter dataset containing general COVID-19 related discourse. We found significant differences between the two datasets for specific topical phrases. No statistically significant difference was found in sentiments between the two datasets, and both trended slightly more positive than negative. Upon comparison to manual sentiment analysis, it was determined that these sentiment analysis methods should be improved to accurately capture sentiments of anonymous physician data. Anonymous physician social media data is a unique source of information that provides important insights into COVID-19 perspectives.
Project description:The purpose of this article is to demonstrate how the Social Impact in Social Media (SISM, hereinafter) methodology applied in psychological research provides evidence for the visibility of the social impact of the research. This article helps researchers become aware of whether and how their improvements are capturing the interest of citizens and how citizens are applying such evidence and obtaining better outcomes, in this case, in relation to well-being. In addition, citizens can access the latest evidence on social media and act as channels of communication between science and social or personal networks and, in doing so, they can improve the living conditions of others. This methodology is also useful for agencies that support researchers in psychology with financial assistance, which can use it to evaluate the social impact of the funds that they invest in research. In this article, the 10 studies on well-being were selected for analysis using the following criteria: their research results led to demonstrable improvement in well-being, and these improvements are presented on social media. We applied the social impact coverage ratio to identify the percentage of the social impact shared in social media in relation to the total amount of social media data collected. Finally, examples of quantitative and qualitative evidence of the social impact of the research on well-being are presented.
Project description:PurposeTo quantify social media use of professional sports team physicians on popular platforms and analyze differences between users and nonusers.MethodsTeam physicians for professional sports teams in the National Football League, National Hockey League, Major League Baseball, and National Basketball Association were identified and characterized based on training background, practice setting, and geographic location. Rates of social media presence on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and ResearchGate were determined. Differences between social media users and nonusers were analyzed.ResultsIn total, 505 professional team physicians were identified across 4 major professional sports; 64.6% of physicians were orthopaedic surgeons. Of 505 physicians, 65.7% had a social media presence. More specifically, 21.8% had a professional Facebook page, 22.6% a professional Twitter page, 52.1% a LinkedIn profile, 21.4% a ResearchGate profile, and 9.1% an Instagram account. Fellowship-trained physicians (P = .008) had greater odds of having a social media presence.ConclusionsNearly two-thirds of professional team physicians have a social media presence, most commonly LinkedIn. Fellowship training is a significant predictor of sports medicine physician social media presence. Sports league affiliation, training background, practice setting, and geographic location are unrelated to social media presence.Level of evidenceIV, cross-sectional study.
Project description:Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) encodes for only a fraction of the proteins that are encoded within the nucleus, and therefore has typically been regarded as a lesser player in cancer biology and metastasis. Accumulating evidence, however, supports an increased role for mtDNA impacting tumor progression and metastatic susceptibility. Unfortunately, due to this delay, there is a dearth of data defining the relative contributions of specific mtDNA polymorphisms (SNP), which leads to an inability to effectively use these polymorphisms to guide and enhance therapeutic strategies and diagnosis. In addition, evidence also suggests that differences in mtDNA impact not only the cancer cells but also the cells within the surrounding tumor microenvironment, suggesting a broad encompassing role for mtDNA polymorphisms in regulating the disease progression. mtDNA may have profound implications in the regulation of cancer biology and metastasis. However, there are still great lengths to go to understand fully its contributions. Thus, herein, we discuss the recent advances in our understanding of mtDNA in cancer and metastasis, providing a framework for future functional validation and discovery.
Project description:INTRODUCTION:The rising popularity of social media, since their inception around 20 years ago, has been echoed in the growth of health-related research using data derived from them. This has created a demand for literature reviews to synthesise this emerging evidence base and inform future activities. Existing reviews tend to be narrow in scope, with limited consideration of the different types of data, analytical methods and ethical issues involved. There has also been a tendency for research to be siloed within different academic communities (eg, computer science, public health), hindering knowledge translation. To address these limitations, we will undertake a comprehensive scoping review, to systematically capture the broad corpus of published, health-related research based on social media data. Here, we present the review protocol and the pilot analyses used to inform it. METHODS:A version of Arksey and O'Malley's five-stage scoping review framework will be followed: (1) identifying the research question; (2) identifying the relevant literature; (3) selecting the studies; (4) charting the data and (5) collating, summarising and reporting the results. To inform the search strategy, we developed an inclusive list of keyword combinations related to social media, health and relevant methodologies. The frequency and variability of terms were charted over time and cross referenced with significant events, such as the advent of Twitter. Five leading health, informatics, business and cross-disciplinary databases will be searched: PubMed, Scopus, Association of Computer Machinery, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and Applied Social Sciences Index and Abstracts, alongside the Google search engine. There will be no restriction by date. ETHICS AND DISSEMINATION:The review focuses on published research in the public domain therefore no ethics approval is required. The completed review will be submitted for publication to a peer-reviewed, interdisciplinary open access journal, and conferences on public health and digital research.
Project description:The social impact of research has usually been analysed through the scientific outcomes produced under the auspices of the research. The growth of scholarly content in social media and the use of altmetrics by researchers to track their work facilitate the advancement in evaluating the impact of research. However, there is a gap in the identification of evidence of the social impact in terms of what citizens are sharing on their social media platforms. This article applies a social impact in social media methodology (SISM) to identify quantitative and qualitative evidence of the potential or real social impact of research shared on social media, specifically on Twitter and Facebook. We define the social impact coverage ratio (SICOR) to identify the percentage of tweets and Facebook posts providing information about potential or actual social impact in relation to the total amount of social media data found related to specific research projects. We selected 10 projects in different fields of knowledge to calculate the SICOR, and the results indicate that 0.43% of the tweets and Facebook posts collected provide linkages with information about social impact. However, our analysis indicates that some projects have a high percentage (4.98%) and others have no evidence of social impact shared in social media. Examples of quantitative and qualitative evidence of social impact are provided to illustrate these results. A general finding is that novel evidences of social impact of research can be found in social media, becoming relevant platforms for scientists to spread quantitative and qualitative evidence of social impact in social media to capture the interest of citizens. Thus, social media users are showed to be intermediaries making visible and assessing evidence of social impact.
Project description:BackgroundSocial media holds exciting promise for advancing mental health research recruitment, however, the extent and efficacy to which these platforms are currently in use are underexplored.ObjectiveA systematic review was conducted to characterize the current use and efficacy of social media in recruiting participants for mental health research.MethodA literature review was performed using MEDLINE, EMBASE, and PsychINFO. Only non-duplicative manuscripts written in the English language and published between 1/1/2004-3/31/2019 were selected for further screening. Data extracted included study type and design, participant inclusion criteria, social media platform, advertising strategy, final recruited sample size, recruitment location, year, monetary incentives, comparison to other recruitment methods if performed, and final cost per participant.ResultsA total of 176 unique studies that used social media for mental health research recruitment were reviewed. The majority of studies were cross-sectional (62.5%) in design and recruited adults. Facebook was overwhelmingly the recruitment platform of choice (92.6%), with the use of paid advertisements being the predominant strategy (60.8%). Of the reviewed studies, substance abuse (43.8%) and mood disorders (15.3%) were the primary subjects of investigation. In 68.3% of studies, social media recruitment performed as well as or better than traditional recruitment methods in the number and cost of final enrolled participants. The majority of studies used Facebook for recruitment at a median cost per final recruited study participant of $19.47. In 55.6% of the studies, social media recruitment was the more cost-effective recruitment method when compared to traditional methods (e.g., referrals, mailing).ConclusionSocial media appears to be an effective and economical recruitment tool for mental health research. The platform raises methodological and privacy concerns not covered in current research regulations that warrant additional consideration.
Project description:Using social media for health promotion is an innovative and emerging approach but remains relatively unexplored in cancer screening. Uptake of colorectal cancer (CRC) screening remains low and standard methods of reaching out are expensive with limited impact. The objective of this study is to conduct a cluster randomized controlled trial (RCT) to test the effectiveness of social media messages for CRC screening on screening intention (primary outcome). The results of this trial will be of interest to Cancer Care Ontario and are likely to be taken up by other screening programs looking for innovative and novel ways to increase screening participation. The study results will be easily translatable identifying the most compelling CRC screening messages while the approach can easily be translated to other cancer disease sites with screening programs.
Project description:BackgroundAs social media are increasingly used worldwide, more and more scientists are relying on them for their health-related projects. However, social media features, methodologies, and ethical issues are unclear so far because, to our knowledge, there has been no overview of this relatively young field of research.ObjectiveThis scoping review aimed to provide an evidence map of the different uses of social media for health research purposes, their fields of application, and their analysis methods.MethodsWe followed the scoping review methodologies developed by Arksey and O'Malley and the Joanna Briggs Institute. After developing search strategies based on keywords (eg, social media, health research), comprehensive searches were conducted in the PubMed/MEDLINE and Web of Science databases. We limited the search strategies to documents written in English and published between January 1, 2005, and April 9, 2020. After removing duplicates, articles were screened at the title and abstract level and at the full text level by two independent reviewers. One reviewer extracted data, which were descriptively analyzed to map the available evidence.ResultsAfter screening 1237 titles and abstracts and 407 full texts, 268 unique papers were included, dating from 2009 to 2020 with an average annual growth rate of 32.71% for the 2009-2019 period. Studies mainly came from the Americas (173/268, 64.6%, including 151 from the United States). Articles used machine learning or data mining techniques (60/268) to analyze the data, discussed opportunities and limitations of the use of social media for research (59/268), assessed the feasibility of recruitment strategies (45/268), or discussed ethical issues (16/268). Communicable (eg, influenza, 40/268) and then chronic (eg, cancer, 24/268) diseases were the two main areas of interest.ConclusionsSince their early days, social media have been recognized as resources with high potential for health research purposes, yet the field is still suffering from strong heterogeneity in the methodologies used, which prevents the research from being compared and generalized. For the field to be fully recognized as a valid, complementary approach to more traditional health research study designs, there is now a need for more guidance by types of applications of social media for health research, both from a methodological and an ethical perspective.International registered report identifier (irrid)RR2-10.1136/bmjopen-2020-040671.