Common elements: An innovative methodology for identifying effective interventions in early childhood education
Evidence-based education programmes, like many clinical interventions, are multi-faceted and can be expensive to implement. In this talk I will describe an alternative: distilling the common elements across many evidence-based programmes. Published programme manuals are selected through systematic review, then extensively coded and cross-referenced. Finally, the common elements that emerge are shared with practitioners as part of a ‘library’ of practices (rather than a holistic programme manual). Although the common elements methodology has been used in the prevention and intervention sciences, this project reflects the first attempt at applying this approach to early childhood education. I will describe the common elements methods and preliminary findings from our Nuffield-funded project, in collaboration with the Early Intervention Foundation. I will discuss the challenges and opportunities we have encountered, alongside our strategies for sharing evidence with practitioners in a digestible way.
Towards a More Authentic Vision of the (multi)Coding Potential of RNA
Ten of thousands of open reading frames (ORFs) are hidden within transcripts. They have eluded annotations because they are either small or within unsuspected locations. These are named alternative ORFs (altORFs) or small ORFs and have recently been highlighted by innovative proteogenomic approaches, such as our OpenProt resource, revealing their existence and implications in biological functions. Due to the absence of altORFs from annotations, pathogenic mutations within these are being ignored. I will discuss our latest progress on the re-analysis of large-scale proteomics datasets to improve our knowledge of proteomic diversity, and the functional characterization of a second protein coded by the FUS gene. Finally, I will explain the need to map the coding potential of the transcriptome using artificial intelligence rather than with conventional annotations that do not capture the full translational activity of ribosomes.
A novel hypothesis on the role of olfactory bulb granule cells
The role of granule cells in olfactory processing is surrounded by several enigmatic observations, such as the existence of reciprocal spines and the mechanisms for GABA release from them, the missing evidence for functional reciprocal connectivity, and the apparently low inhibitory drive of granule cells, both with respect to recurrent and lateral inhibition. Here, I summarize recent results with regard to GABA release, leading to a novel hypothesis on granule cell function that has the potential to resolve most of these enigmas. I predict that granule cells provide dynamically switched lateral inhibition between coactive glomerular columns and thus possibly a means of olfactory combinatorial coding.