Access to human, animal, and environmental journals is still limited for the One Health community.

OBJECTIVE: "One Health" is an interdisciplinary approach to evaluating and managing the health and well-being of humans, animals, and the environments they share that relies on knowledge from the domains of human health, animal health, and the environmental sciences. The authors' objective was to evaluate the extent of open access (OA) to journal articles in a sample of literature from these domains. We hypothesized that OA to articles in human health or environmental journals was greater than access to animal health literature. METHODS: A One Health seminar series provided fifteen topics. One librarian translated each topic into a search strategy and searched four databases for articles from 2011 to 2012. Two independent investigators assigned each article to human health, the environment, animal health, all, other, or combined categories. Article and journal-level OA were determined. Each journal was also assigned a subject category and its indexing evaluated. RESULTS: Searches retrieved 2,651 unique articles from 1,138 journals; 1,919 (72%) articles came from 406 journals that contributed more than 1 article. Seventy-seven (7%) journals dealt with all 3 One Health domains; the remaining journals represented human health 487 (43%), environment 172 (15%), animal health 141 (12%), and other/combined categories 261 (23%). The proportion of OA journals in animal health (40%) differed significantly from journals categorized as human (28%), environment (28%), and more than 1 category (29%). The proportion of OA for articles by subject categories ranged from 25%-34%; only the difference between human (34%) and environment (25%) was significant. CONCLUSIONS: OA to human health literature is more comparable to animal health than hypothesized. Environmental journals had less OA than anticipated.

Molecular crowders and cosolutes promote folding cooperativity of RNA under physiological ionic conditions.

Folding mechanisms of functional RNAs under idealized in vitro conditions of dilute solution and high ionic strength have been well studied. Comparatively little is known, however, about mechanisms for folding of RNA in vivo where Mg(2+) ion concentrations are low, K(+) concentrations are modest, and concentrations of macromolecular crowders and low-molecular-weight cosolutes are high. Herein, we apply a combination of biophysical and structure mapping techniques to tRNA to elucidate thermodynamic and functional principles that govern RNA folding under in vivo-like conditions. We show by thermal denaturation and SHAPE studies that tRNA folding cooperativity increases in physiologically low concentrations of Mg(2+) (0.5-2 mM) and K(+) (140 mM) if the solution is supplemented with physiological amounts (∼ 20%) of a water-soluble neutral macromolecular crowding agent such as PEG or dextran. Low-molecular-weight cosolutes show varying effects on tRNA folding cooperativity, increasing or decreasing it based on the identity of the cosolute. For those additives that increase folding cooperativity, the gain is manifested in sharpened two-state-like folding transitions for full-length tRNA over its secondary structural elements. Temperature-dependent SHAPE experiments in the absence and presence of crowders and cosolutes reveal extent of cooperative folding of tRNA on a nucleotide basis and are consistent with the melting studies. Mechanistically, crowding agents appear to promote cooperativity by stabilizing tertiary structure, while those low molecular cosolutes that promote cooperativity stabilize tertiary structure and/or destabilize secondary structure. Cooperative folding of functional RNA under physiological-like conditions parallels the behavior of many proteins and has implications for cellular RNA folding kinetics and evolution.