OBJECTIVES/SPECIFIC AIMS: Objectives and goals of this study will be to: (1) compare fecal microbiota and fecal organic acids in irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) patients and controls and (2) investigate the association between colonic transit and fecal microbiota in IBS patients and controls. METHODS/STUDY POPULATION: We propose an investigation of fecal organic acids, colonic transit and fecal microbiota in 36 IBS patients and 18 healthy controls. The target population will be adults ages 18–65 years meeting Rome IV criteria for IBS (both diarrhea- and constipation-predominant, IBS-D and IBS-C) and asymptomatic controls. Exclusion criteria are: (a) history of microscopic colitis, inflammatory bowel disease, celiac disease, visceral cancer, chronic infectious disease, immunodeficiency, uncontrolled thyroid disease, liver disease, or elevated AST/ALT>2.0× the upper limit of normal, (b) prior radiation therapy of the abdomen or abdominal surgeries with the exception of appendectomy or cholecystectomy >6 months before study initiation, (c) ingestion of prescription, over the counter, or herbal medications affecting gastrointestinal transit or study interpretation within 6 months of study initiation for controls or within 2 days before study initiation for IBS patients, (d) pregnant females, (e) antibiotic usage within 3 months before study participation, (f) prebiotic or probiotic usage within the 2 weeks before study initiation, (g) tobacco users. Primary outcomes will be fecal bile acid excretion and profile, short-chain fatty acid excretion and profile, colonic transit, and fecal microbiota. Secondary outcomes will be stool characteristics based on responses to validated bowel diaries. Stool samples will be collected from participants during the last 2 days of a 4-day 100 g fat diet and split into 3 samples for fecal microbiota, SCFA, and bile acid analysis and frozen. Frozen aliquots will be shipped to the Metabolite Profiling Facility at Purdue University and the Mayo Clinic Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathology for SCFA and bile acid measurements, respectively. Analysis of fecal microbiota will be performed in the research laboratory of Dr David Nelson in collaboration with bioinformatics expertise affiliated with the Nelson lab. Colonic transit time will be measured with the previously validated method using radio-opaque markers. Generalized linear models will be used as the analysis framework for comparing study endpoints among groups. RESULTS/ANTICIPATED RESULTS: This study seeks to examine the innovative concept that specific microbial signatures are associated with increased fecal excretion of organic acids to provide unique insights on a potential mechanistic link between altered intraluminal organic acids and fecal microbiota. DISCUSSION/SIGNIFICANCE OF IMPACT: Results may lead to development of targets for novel therapies and diagnostic biomarkers for IBS, emphasizing the role of the fecal metabolome.

Accurate crop varietal identification is the backbone of any high-quality assessment of outcomes and impacts. Sweetpotato (Ipomoea batatas) varieties have important nutritional differences, and there is a strong interest to identify nutritionally superior varieties for dissemination. In agricultural household surveys, such information is often collected based on the farmer's self-report. In this article, we present the results of a data capture experiment on sweet potato varietal identification in southern Ethiopia. Three household-based methods of identifying varietal adoption are tested against the benchmark of DNA fingerprinting: (A) Elicitation from farmers with basic questions for the most widely planted variety; (B) Farmer elicitation on five sweet potato phenotypic attributes by showing a visual-aid protocol; and (C) Enumerator recording observations on five sweet potato phenotypic attributes using a visual-aid protocol and visiting the field. In total, 20% of farmers identified a variety as improved when in fact it was local and 19% identified a variety as local when it was in fact improved. The variety names given by farmers delivered inconsistent and inaccurate varietal identities. Visual-aid protocols employed in methods B and C were better than those in method A, but greatly underestimated the adoption estimates given by the DNA fingerprinting method. Our results suggest that estimating the adoption of improved varieties with methods based on farmer self-reports is questionable and point towards a wider use of DNA fingerprinting in adoption and impact assessments.

Parkinson's disease (PD), the most common neurodegenerative movement disorder, has traditionally been considered a “classic” basal ganglia disease, as the most obvious pathology is seen in the dopaminergic cells in the substantia nigra pars compacta. Nevertheless recent discoveries in anatomical connections linking the basal ganglia and the cerebellum have led to a re-examination of the role of the cerebellum in the pathophysiology of PD. This review summarizes the role of the cerebellum in explaining many curious features of PD: the significant variation in disease progression between individuals; why severity of dopaminergic deficit correlates with many features of PD such as bradykinesia, but not tremor; and why PD subjects with a tremor-predominant presentation tend to have a more benign prognosis. It is clear that the cerebellum participates in compensatory mechanisms associated with the disease and must be considered an essential contributor to the overall pathophysiology of PD.

Four pedons on each of four drift sheets in the Lake Wellman area of the Darwin Mountains were sampled for chemical and microbial analyses. The four drifts, Hatherton, Britannia, Danum, and Isca, ranged from early Holocene (10 ka) to mid-Quaternary (c. 900 ka). The soil properties of weathering stage, salt stage, and depths of staining, visible salts, ghosts, and coherence increase with drift age. The landforms contain primarily high-centred polygons with windblown snow in the troughs. The soils are dominantly complexes of Typic Haplorthels and Typic Haploturbels. The soils were dry and alkaline with low levels of organic carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus. Electrical conductivity was high accompanied by high levels of water soluble anions and cations (especially calcium and sulphate in older soils). Soil microbial biomass, measured as phospholipid fatty acids, and numbers of culturable heterotrophic microbes, were low, with highest levels detected in less developed soils from the Hatherton drift. The microbial community structure of the Hatherton soil also differed from that of the Britannia, Danum and Isca soils. Ordination revealed the soil microbial community structure was influenced by soil development and organic carbon.

Proton radiography using laser-driven sources has been developed as a diagnostic since the beginning of the decade, and applied successfully to a range of experimental situations. Multi-MeV protons driven from thin foils via the Target Normal Sheath Acceleration mechanism, offer, under optimal conditions, the possibility of probing laser-plasma interactions, and detecting electric and magnetic fields as well as plasma density gradients with ~ps temporal resolution and ~ 5–10 µm spatial resolution. In view of these advantages, the use of proton radiography as a diagnostic in experiments of relevance to Inertial Confinement Fusion is currently considered in the main fusion laboratories. This paper will discuss recent advances in the application of laser-driven radiography to experiments of relevance to Inertial Confinement Fusion. In particular we will discuss radiography of hohlraum and gasbag targets following the interaction of intense ns pulses. These experiments were carried out at the HELEN laser facility at AWE (UK), and proved the suitability of this diagnostic for studying, with unprecedented detail, laser-plasma interaction mechanisms of high relevance to Inertial Confinement Fusion. Non-linear solitary structures of relevance to space physics, namely phase space electron holes, have also been highlighted by the measurements. These measurements are discussed and compared to existing models.

Lexical semantic classes of verbs play an important role in structuring complex predicate information in a lexicon, thereby avoiding redundancy and enabling generalizations across semantically similar verbs with respect to their usage. Such classes, however, require many person-years of expert effort to create manually, and methods are needed for automatically assigning verbs to appropriate classes. In this work, we develop and evaluate a feature space to support the automatic assignment of verbs into a well-known lexical semantic classification that is frequently used in natural language processing. The feature space is general – applicable to any class distinctions within the target classification; broad – tapping into a variety of semantic features of the classes; and inexpensive – requiring no more than a POS tagger and chunker. We perform experiments using support vector machines (SVMs) with the proposed feature space, demonstrating a reduction in error rate ranging from 48% to 88% over a chance baseline accuracy, across classification tasks of varying difficulty. In particular, we attain performance comparable to or better than that of feature sets manually selected for the particular tasks. Our results show that the approach is generally applicable, and reduces the need for resource-intensive linguistic analysis for each new classification task. We also perform a wide range of experiments to determine the most informative features in the feature space, finding that simple, easily extractable features suffice for good verb classification performance.

A 3-yr study was conducted in Wheatland County, Alberta to determine if agronomic practices of growers influenced the occurrence of herbicide resistance in wild oat. Wild oat seeds were collected in 33 fields in 1997 and in 31 fields in each of 1998 and 1999 (one field per grower). Seedlings were screened for resistance to two acetyl-CoA carboxylase (ACCase) inhibitors, imazamethabenz, an acetolactate synthase (ALS) inhibitor, and triallate, a thiocarbamate herbicide. A questionnaire on herbicide resistance awareness and management practices was completed by each grower. Both ACCase and ALS inhibitor resistance in wild oat were linked to a lack of crop rotation diversity. In addition, ALS inhibitor–resistant wild oat was associated with conservation-tillage systems and recent use of herbicides with that mode of action. Results of this study suggest that timely tillage and inclusion of fall-seeded and perennial forage crops in rotations will effectively slow the selection of resistance in this grass species.

Nineteenth century negatives and positives in the collections of the National Museums of Scotland (NMS) and the National Galleries of Scotland (NGS) were analysed non-destructively to identify the techniques used in their manufacture. Modern positive and negative images prepared using known nineteenth century processes were also analysed for comparison. Air-path energy dispersive x-ray fluorescence analysis and controlled pressure scanning electron microscopy with energy dispersive microanalysis enabled the images to be divided into groups based on the levels of bromine, iodine and silver, and the likely processes used inferred. An early group of positives were probably sensitised with either silver chloride or silver bromide and fixed with potassium bromide. However, most positives were probably sensitised with silver chloride and fixed with sodium thiosulphate. Most negatives were probably sensitized with silver iodide and fixed with potassium bromide (predominant), sodium thiosulphate or potassium iodide. Cobalt and arsenic are present due to the use of smalt in the production of white paper. Copper and zinc are attributed to incorporation of fragments of brass buttons left on the rags used in paper production, observed as small blue spots. The presence of iron, sometimes visible as orange spots, may be from rust off the paper making machines.