Monthly Archives: July 2018

An interview with BMC Biomedical Engineering Section Editor, Prof Alan Lefor

It’s been over a month since BMC Biomedical Engineering opened for submissions and while we prepare for our content launch, we proudly present an interview with the Section Editor for the ‘medical technologies, robotics and rehabilitation engineering’ section, Prof Alan Lefor. In this interview Prof Alan Lefor, discusses the motivation behind launching BMC Biomedical Engineering, his vision for the journal and some tips for our authors.

Medicine Open Access Publishing

Balancing expectation and reality: intervention fidelity, trauma, and women with histories of incarceration

Prison cell

New research in BMC Women’s Health highlights the importance of fidelity on health interventions and the difficulties in achieving this in prison settings and with vulnerable groups such as women who have history of incarceration. Here, the authors of the paper share some of these difficulties, the specific skills required of health educators in these settings and their involvement in the SHE project.

Health

Chronic sleep deprivation could be an important driver of depression in young women

depressed woman sitting in the dark bedroom

Recently published research in BMC Public Health finds an association between cumulative sleep deprivation and higher depression scores in young women but not in men, adding new evidence on the role of sleep deprivation in depression risk among young people and the influence of gender. Here to tell us about their findings and how their research took a different approach to previous studies are two of the authors, Annalijn I. Conklin and Christopher G. Richardson.

Health
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Deep genetic divergence among Bale monkeys in continuous forest and forest fragments

Fig 3 Bale monkey at Kokosa forest fragment (FF) Photo_Addisu Mekonnen

A new study, published in BMC Evolutionary Biology, investigates the population genetic structure and evolutionary history of the threatened, bamboo-eating Bale monkeys inhabiting the continuous forest of the Bale Mountains and fragmented forests of the Sidamo Highlands in southern Ethiopia. Surprisingly the authors find deep genetic differentiation between the two populations. Here, lead author, Dr. Addisu Mekonnen, tells us about the research and what it means for the conservation of this rare species.

Biology

Phenotypic plasticity in a pandemic lineage of the Irish potato famine pathogen

all-natural-1866415_1920

In a paper recently published in BMC Evolutionary Biology, an international team of scientists describes how evasion of host immunity by a clonal variant of the potato blight pathogen Phytophthora infestans is associated with variation in gene expression without any apparent underlying genetic changes. We asked the senior authors of the study, Vivianne G.A.A. Vleeshouwers, Hannele Lindqvist-Kreuze and Sophien Kamoun, to tells us about their work.

Biology