Experiences of Health-Care Professionals Who Served the Migrant Workers During the COVID-19 Pandemic in Singapore and Its Impact on Morale: A Brief Report.

OBJECTIVE: Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has caused psychological distress among health-care professionals (HCP) worldwide, suggesting that morale could also be affected. This warrants further investigation as HCPs' morale directly impacts delivery of quality care and work productivity. This study aims to explore the experiences of HCPs who served migrant workers in a local COVID-19 hotspot in Singapore and the impact on their morale. METHODS: Eleven volunteer HCPs from a regional hospital in Singapore who served migrant workers in a local COVID-19 hotspot were recruited. Semi-structured face-to-face interviews were conducted, and recordings were transcribed verbatim. Transcripts were analyzed using thematic analysis. Morale of HCPs was evaluated based on responses. RESULTS: Four main themes emerged: motivators, challenges, support, and leadership. Motivators or factors that drove HCPs to serve include varying personal reasons and a sense of duty to do good. Challenges faced by HCPs include a language barrier, keeping up with rapidly changing workflows, fear of contagion, and coping with emotions. Support and leadership were revealed to have boosted HCPs' morale. CONCLUSIONS: Peer and social support and effective leadership have potential protective effects on HCPs' morale against negative experiences faced during the COVID-19 pandemic.

PubSearch and PubFetch: a simple management system for semiautomated retrieval and annotation of biological information from the literature.

For most systems in biology, a large body of literature exists that describes the complexity of the system based on experimental results. Manual review of this literature to extract targeted information into biological databases is difficult and time consuming. To address this problem, we developed PubSearch and PubFetch, which store literature, keyword, and gene information in a relational database, index the literature with keywords and gene names, and provide a Web user interface for annotating the genes from experimental data found in the associated literature. A set of protocols is provided in this unit for installing, populating, running, and using PubSearch and PubFetch. In addition, we provide support protocols for performing controlled vocabulary annotations. Intended users of PubSearch and PubFetch are database curators and biology researchers interested in tracking the literature and capturing information about genes of interest in a more effective way than with conventional spreadsheets and lab notebooks.

TransMiner: mining transitive associations among biological objects from text.

Associations among biological objects such as genes, proteins, and drugs can be discovered automatically from the scientific literature. TransMiner is a system for finding associations among objects by mining the Medline database of the scientific literature. The direct associations among the objects are discovered based on the principle of co-occurrence in the form of an association graph. The principle of transitive closure is applied to the association graph to find potential transitive associations. The potential transitive associations that are indeed direct are discovered by iterative retrieval and mining of the Medline documents. Those associations that are not found explicitly in the entire Medline database are transitive associations and are the candidates for hypothesis generation. The transitive associations were ranked based on the sum of weight of terms that co-occur with both the objects. The direct and transitive associations are visualized using a graph visualization applet. TransMiner was tested by finding associations among 56 breast cancer genes and among 24 objects in the calpain signal transduction pathway. TransMiner was also used to rediscover associations between magnesium and migraine.

Integrative genomics: in silico coupling of rat physiology and complex traits with mouse and human data.

Integration of the large variety of genome maps from several organisms provides the mechanism by which physiological knowledge obtained in model systems such as the rat can be projected onto the human genome to further the research on human disease. The release of the rat genome sequence provides new information for studies using the rat model and is a key reference against which existing and new rat physiological results can be aligned. Previously, we described comparative maps of the rat, mouse, and human based on EST sequence comparisons combined with radiation hybrid maps. Here, we use new data and introduce the Integrated Genomics Environment, an extensive database of curated and integrated maps, markers, and physiological results. These results are integrated by using VCMapview, a java-based map integration and visualization tool. This unique environment allows researchers to relate results from cytogenetic, genetic, and radiation hybrid studies to the genome sequence and compare regions of interest between human, mouse, and rat. Integrating rat physiology with mouse genetics and clinical results from human by using the respective genomes provides a novel route to capitalize on comparative genomics and the strengths of model organism biology.