Editorial Developing a culture of research in the POGS through the POGS Unified Research Agenda and its flagship research projects / Philippine Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology

@#It has been recognized that, to help ensure research caters to the needs of society, a research agenda must be set.[1–3] When a health research agenda is set, it will help prioritize the implementation of health researches that will in turn help improve society’s public health system. This way, evidence is provided to help guide policy decisions on health development.[1,4] Such was the context by which the National Unified Health Research Agenda (NUHRA) was created and has evolved in its three editions. In NUHRA 2017–2022, six themes of priority research were identified. These included responsive health systems, research to enhance and extend healthy lives, holistic approaches to health and wellness, health resiliency, global competitiveness and innovation in health, and research in equity and health.

Tensile Ge microstructures for lasing fabricated by means of a silicon complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor process.

In this work we study, using experiments and theoretical modeling, the mechanical and optical properties of tensile strained Ge microstructures directly fabricated in a state-of-the art complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor fabrication line, using fully qualified materials and methods. We show that these microstructures can be used as active lasing materials in mm-long Fabry-Perot cavities, taking advantage of strain-enhanced direct band gap recombination. The results of our study can be realistically applied to the fabrication of a prototype platform for monolithic integration of near infrared laser sources for silicon photonics.

Sensorimotor adaptation to feedback perturbations of vowel acoustics and its relation to perception.

The role of auditory feedback in speech motor control was explored in three related experiments. Experiment 1 investigated auditory sensorimotor adaptation: the process by which speakers alter their speech production to compensate for perturbations of auditory feedback. When the first formant frequency (F1) was shifted in the feedback heard by subjects as they produced vowels in consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) words, the subjects' vowels demonstrated compensatory formant shifts that were maintained when auditory feedback was subsequently masked by noise-evidence of adaptation. Experiment 2 investigated auditory discrimination of synthetic vowel stimuli differing in F1 frequency, using the same subjects. Those with more acute F1 discrimination had compensated more to F1 perturbation. Experiment 3 consisted of simulations with the directions into velocities of articulators model of speech motor planning, which showed that the model can account for key aspects of compensation. In the model, movement goals for vowels are regions in auditory space; perturbation of auditory feedback invokes auditory feedback control mechanisms that correct for the perturbation, which in turn causes updating of feedforward commands to incorporate these corrections. The relation between speaker acuity and amount of compensation to auditory perturbation is mediated by the size of speakers' auditory goal regions, with more acute speakers having smaller goal regions.

Recombinant aequorin and green fluorescent protein as valuable tools in the study of cell signalling.

Luminous proteins include primary light producers, such as aequorin, and secondary photoproteins that in some organisms red-shift light emission for better penetration in space. When expressed in heterologous systems, both types of proteins may act as versatile reporters capable of monitoring phenomena as diverse as calcium homoeostasis, protein sorting, gene expression, and so on. The Ca(2+)-sensitive photoprotein aequorin was targeted to defined intracellular locations (organelles, such as mitochondria, endoplasmic reticulum, sarcoplasmic reticulum, Golgi apparatus and nucleus, and cytoplasmic regions, such as the bulk cytosol and the subplasmalemmal rim), and was used to analyse Ca(2+) homoeostasis at the subcellular level. We will discuss this application, reviewing its advantages and disadvantages and the experimental procedure. The applications of green fluorescent protein (GFP) are even broader. Indeed, the ability to molecularly engineer and recombinantly express a strongly fluorescent probe has provided a powerful tool for investigating a wide variety of biological events in live cells (e.g. tracking of endogenous proteins, labelling of intracellular structures, analysing promoter activity etc.). More recently, the demonstration that, using appropriate mutants and/or fusion proteins, GFP fluorescence can become sensitive to physiological parameters or activities (ion concentration, protease activity, etc.) has further expanded its applications and made GFP the favourite probe of cell biologists. We will here present two applications in the field of cell signalling, i.e. the use of GFP chimaeras for studying the recruitment of protein kinase C isoforms and the activity of intracellular proteases.

Sorting of phaseolin to the vacuole is saturable and requires a short C-terminal peptide.

Phaseolin, one of the major legume proteins for human nutrition, is a trimeric glycoprotein of the 7S class that accumulates in the protein storage vacuoles of common bean. Phaseolin is cotranslationally introduced into the lumen of the endoplasmic reticulum; from there, it is transported through the Golgi complex to the storage vacuoles. Phaseolin is also transported to the vacuole in vegetative tissues of transgenic plants. By transient and permanent expression in tobacco leaf cells, we show here that vacuolar sorting of phaseolin is saturable and that saturation leads to Golgi-mediated secretion from the cell. A mutated phaseolin, in which the four C-terminal residues (Ala, Phe, Val, and Tyr) were deleted, efficiently formed trimers but was secreted entirely outside of the cells in transgenic tobacco leaves, indicating that the deleted sequence contains information necessary for interactions with the saturable vacuolar sorting machinery. In the apoplast, the secreted phaseolin remained intact; this is similar to what occurs to wild-type phaseolin in bean storage vacuoles, whereas in vegetative vacuoles of transgenic plants, the storage protein is fragmented.

The gene coding for the mustard trypsin inhibitor-2 is discontinuous and wound-inducible.

The gene coding for the mustard trypsin inhibitor-2 has been isolated from a genomic library and characterized. Comparison of genomic and cDNA sequences indicates that the gene is interrupted by an intron of 193 bp. The eukaryotic peculiar regulatory sequences have been detected in the 5' flanking region of the gene. In addition, a decanucleotide has been detected that is highly similar to the proposed G-box and to the ABRE motifs required for the gene expression induced by methyl jasmonate and abscissic acid. Northern blot analysis demonstrates that the gene is expressed in immature seeds as well as in wounded leaves.