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Variation in food resources can result in dramatic fluctuations in the body condition of animals dependent on those resources. Decreases in body mass can disrupt patterns of energy allocation and impose stress, thereby altering immune function. In this study we investigated links between changes in body mass of captive cane toads (Rhinella marina), their circulating white blood cell populations, and their performance in immune assays. Captive toads that lost weight over a 3-month period had increased levels of monocytes and heterophils and reduced levels of eosinophils. Basophil and lymphocyte levels were unrelated to changes in mass. Because individuals that lost mass had higher heterophil levels but stable lymphocyte levels, the ratio of these cell types was also higher, partially consistent with a stress response. Phagocytic ability of whole blood was higher in toads that lost mass, due to increased circulating levels of phagocytic cells. Other measures of immune performance were unrelated to mass change. These results highlight the challenges faced by invasive species as they expand their range into novel environments which may impose substantial seasonal changes in food availability that were not present in the native range. Individuals facing energy restrictions may shift their immune function towards more economical and general avenues of combating pathogens.

The furious pace of global urbanisation has serious impacts on the long-term sustainability and health of the local communities in which we live. The debate about relationships between population size, environmental management and human well-being must now encompass the fundamental concept of sustainability (Rees, 1992; WCED, 1990; McMichael, 2002; Hancock, 1996). Increasingly, the local municipal level is the most influential setting in which to change our relationship with the environment (Chu, 1994; Chu et al., 2000). In the 1980s, the World Health Organisation (WHO) met this global challenge by advocating healthy public policy and laying foundations for its global Healthy Cities Movement. Significant support developed in the early nineties for participatory health planning action in local government: over 2000 cities world-wide developed municipal public health plans (MPH Plans). The Healthy Cities Movement through regional networks of cities and towns encouraged government partnerships with non-government agencies and industry, to anticipate and mitigate urbanisation’s negative impacts. In Queensland eighteen local governments have developed and implemented MPH Plans using a seven-step process (Chapman and Davey, 1997; WHO (1997b) to improve local planning for health and address the social determinants of health through agency collaboration. There is however limited understanding and evidence of the success factors for the effective implementation of MPH Plans. Studies of the evaluation of Municipal Public Health Planning (MPHP) approaches have focused predominately on the evaluation of the process of planning, without conducting comprehensive evaluation of its implementation. The organisational barriers that contribute to ineffective health-planning implementation have not been well researched and documented. Here lies the gap in the research: MPHP requires thorough qualitative assessment, not only of the planning process, but also the implementation impacts. This research explores the achievements, barriers and success factors associated with MPHP implementation in local government organisations by developing a process and impact evaluation framework and applying it to two MPHP projects in Queensland: one, local planning in an expanding tourist city of over 400,000 people; the second, a regional approach involving two provincial cities with a combined population of 100,000 residents. The research examines the degree of collaboration resulting from health planning and assesses if the aims of the MPH Plans have been met. MPHP is both a health promotion tool and a strategic business planning process applied in local communities: this research seeks to understand more about organisational strategic management issues that act as barriers to planning or impact on the success of planning outcomes. This study design uses qualitative methods with a triangulation approach to analyse and understand the complexities of MPH Plan implementation. Grounded theory provides a methodology for interpreting meanings and discovering themes from the comprehensive process and impact evaluation consisting of preliminary cases studies, key informant interviews, using specific process and impact indicator questions and an analysis of MPHP models compared to other CPHP models and legislative frameworks. The impacts of the intervention are discussed and relate to the implementation effects of MPHP on individuals and organisations including council, government and non-government agencies and on the community. Achievements and barriers associated with MPHP are identified and discussed. Three main factors emerged. Firstly, MPHP had significantly increased the degree of intersectoral collaboration between the agency project partners, with particular success in clarifying the role of agencies in the management and delivery of public health services. The principles of successful partnerships need to be further articulated in local government settings to successfully implement MPHP. Secondly, positive political and organisational support was found to be a critical factor in the success of the planning implementation. Thirdly, and most importantly, the aims of the MPHP had not been substantially met due to a lack of financial and human resources. The study concluded that, although MPHP has strengths and weaknesses compared to other CPHP models, its features most suit local government. Success factors recommended for effective MPHP include formalising collaboration and partnerships and improved agency organisational governance in planning; building individual and organisational capacity to strengthen strategic planning; integrating the many layers of regulatory planning in local government and other agencies; sustaining planning structures and processes through regulation and commitment to investment in implementation stages of MPHP. The study’s major recommendation is that, for MPHP local government should facilitate a three-dimensional platform approach: healthy governance – long-term vision, recognising the many layers of planning, supported by state legislation and local industry and with awareness of legislative planning frameworks; a platform mechanism – sustaining agency networking, hosting the stakeholder forum, supporting the advisory committee, enhancing communication; and strategy implementation – in the context of an improved understanding of organisational behaviour, local government and agencies must action priority strategies, formalising agency partners responsibility, articulating desired outcomes, monitoring progress and evaluation. This recommended Platform Approach to MPHP provides an effective model for managing and implementing future MPH Plans, allocating resources three ways: to build people’s capacity to engage in planning mechanisms, to build organisational capacity to manage planning outcomes and to build more effective Healthy Cities planning approaches. The MPHP evaluation framework developed in this thesis could be used to evaluate other MPHP projects in local governments both in Australia and internationally.

A major issue with all flow batteries is the control of the imbalance between the two half-cell electrolytes that arises as a result of the differential transfer of ions across the membrane and the inevitable gassing side reactions that can occur during charging. While a number of methods are available to rebalance electrolyte state of charge and restore capacity, reliable methods are needed to monitor the state-of-charge of each individual half-cell solution in order to determine the appropriate action to be taken by the battery control system. In this study different methods of state-of-charge monitoring have been considered for application in the All-Vanadium Redox Flow Battery (VRB). Half-cell potentials and electrolyte conductivities were calibrated as a function of state-of-charge and evaluated for state-of-charge monitoring of individual half-cell electrolytes for the purpose of capacity restoration and control. An empirical model based on experimental conductivity data has been shown to provide accurate predictions, with an average error of 0.77%, of the conductivity of the positive half-cell electrolyte as a potential state-of-charge detection tool. Separate monitoring of the two half-cell electrolyte potentials has also been used to determine the state-of-charge of each half-cell solution in order to detect system imbalance. This was used in small laboratory cell tests to determine necessary actions to restore capacity by either remixing the two solutions, or by using chemical rebalancing methods, depending on the cause of the solution imbalance. European Chemical Bulletin, Vol 1, No 12 (2012): European Chemical Bulletin

{"references": ["Adam, David. 2020. \"Special Report: The Simulations Driving the World's Response to COVID-19.\" Nature 580 (7803): 316\u201318. doi.org/10.1038/d41586-020-01003-6.", "Akhmerov, Anton, Maria Cruz, Niels Drost, Cees Hof, Tomas Knapen, Mateusz Kuzak, Carlos Martinez-Ortiz, Yasemin Turkyilmaz-van der Velden, and Ben van Werkhoven. 2019. \"Raising the Profile of Research Software,\" August. https://doi.org/10.5281/ZENODO.3378572.", "Barton, C. Michael, Marina Alberti, Daniel Ames, Jo-An Atkinson, Jerad Bales, Edmund 5 Burke, Min Chen, et al. 2020. \"Call for Transparency of COVID-19 Models.\" Edited by Jennifer Sills. Science 368 (6490): 482.2-483. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abb8637.", "Carmack, John. n.d. \"'The Imperial College Epidemic Simulation Code That I Helped a Little on Is Now Public:' / Twitter.\" Twitter. Accessed May 6, 2020. https://twitter.com/id_aa_carmack/status/1254872368763277313.", "Carver, Jeffrey C., Sandra Gesing, Daniel S. Katz, Karthik Ram, and Nicholas Weber. 2018. \"Conceptualization of a US Research Software Sustainability Institute (URSSI).\" Computing in Science & Engineering 20 (3): 4\u20139. https://doi.org/10.1109/MCSE.2018.03221924.", "Cl\u00e9ment-Fontaine, M\u00e9lanie, Roberto Di Cosmo, Bastien Guerry, Patrick MOREAU, and Fran\u00e7ois Pellegrini. 2019. \"Encouraging a Wider Usage of Software Derived from Research.\" Research Report. https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-02545142.", "Jim\u00e9nez, Rafael C., Mateusz Kuzak, Monther Alhamdoosh, Michelle Barker, B\u00e9r\u00e9nice Batut, Mikael Borg, Salvador Capella-Gutierrez, et al. 2017. \"Four Simple Recommendations to Encourage Best Practices in Research Software.\" F1000Research 6 (June): 876. https://doi.org/10.12688/f1000research.11407.1.", "Krylov, Anna, Theresa L. Windus, Taylor Barnes, Eliseo Marin-Rimoldi, Jessica A. Nash, Benjamin Pritchard, Daniel G. A. Smith, et al. 2018. \"Perspective: Computational Chemistry Software and Its Advancement as Illustrated through Three Grand Challenge Cases for Molecular Science.\" The Journal of Chemical Physics 149 (18): 180901. https://doi.org/10.1063/1.5052551.", "NSF. 2017. \"Software Infrastructure for Sustained Innovation (SSE, SSI, S2I2): Software Elements, Frameworks and Institute Conceptualizations.\" 2017. https://www.nsf.gov/publications/pub_summ.jsp?ods_key=nsf17526.", "Research Data Alliance. 2020. \"RDA COVID-19 Guidelines and Recommendations.\" RDA. April 23, 2020. https://www.rd-alliance.org/group/rda-covid19-rda-covid19- omics-rda-covid19-epidemiology-rda-covid19-clinical-rda-covid19-0.", "Research Data Alliance. 2020. \"FAIR4RS WG.\" April 28, 2020. https://www.rd-alliance.org/groups/fair- 4-research-software-fair4rs-wg.", "Sheehan, Jeremy. 2016. \"Increasing Access to the Results of Federally Funded Science.\" Whitehouse.Gov. February 22, 2016. https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2016/02/22/increasing-accessresults- federally-funded-science.", "Smith, Arfon M., Daniel S. Katz, Kyle E. Niemeyer, and FORCE11 Software Citation Working Group. 2016. \"Software Citation Principles.\" PeerJ Computer Science 2: e86. https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj-cs.86.", "The HEP Software Foundation, Johannes Albrecht, Antonio Augusto Alves, Guilherme Amadio, Giuseppe Andronico, Nguyen Anh-Ky, Laurent Aphecetche, et al. 2019. \"A Roadmap for HEP Software and Computing R&D for the 2020s.\" Computing and Software for Big Science 3 (1): 7. doi.org/10.1007/s41781-018-0018-8.", "Wilkins-Diehr, Nancy, Michael Zentner, Marlon Pierce, Maytal Dahan, Katherine Lawrence, Linda Hayden, and Nayiri Mullinix. 2018. \"The Science Gateways Community Institute at Two Years.\" In Proceedings of the Practice and Experience on Advanced Research Computing, 1\u20138. Pittsburgh PA USA: ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/3219104.3219142."]} The Research Software Alliance (ReSA) welcomes this opportunity to inform approaches for ensuring broad public access to the peer-reviewed scholarly publications, data, and code that result from federally-funded scientific research. This submission focuses on how improving the recognition and value of research software can increase the access to unclassified published research, digital scientific data, and code supported by the US Government. ReSA is the international organization representing the research software community. ReSA’s vision is that research software be recognized and valued as a fundamental and vital component of research worldwide.

Climate change and climate-sensitive disasters pose significant risks to human health. As climate change continues to intensify, the frequency and severity of various climatesensitive hazards is expected to increase. Increasing climate-sensitive hazards such as floods, typhoons and outbreaks of climate-sensitive diseases, present pertinent and growing risks that impact health. These rising health risks from climate change and climate-sensitive disasters are fast becoming a critical concern for global health. To address these risks, there is increasing need for health actors to engage in Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) and Climate Change Adaptation (CCA). DRR and CCA work towards common aims of reducing health impacts of climate change and climate-sensitive disasters. A large body of research recommends linking DRR and CCA to ensure coherent, effective, and efficient responses to current and future risks. Much remains to be gained from strengthening joint DRR and CCA action, and effectively linking the two approaches. Linking these approaches in health is particularly pertinent as health is a vital end-point of disasters and climate change, and important cross cutting issue in DRR and CCA. Currently there is a significant knowledge gap surrounding how DRR and CCA can be linked in health. There is limited published research empirically examining how these approaches can be linked in real-world contexts. Furthermore, linking DRR and CCA in health has been identified as a key challenge in managing health risks in resource-constrained countries, such as the Philippines. Therefore, this research empirically investigated how DRR and CCA can be linked in health in the Philippines. This research applied qualitative methods through a Case Study of the Philippines. Data collection methods used include: observations; policy analysis; 33 national, 13 regional and 10 local key informant interviews; and a national expert workshop. To supplement the Case Study seven global informant interviews were conducted. To understand how DRR and CCA could be linked in health, the research first investigated the overarching priorities and gaps for these approaches in the Philippines. Strengthening community implementation was the priority for DRR in health. Comparatively, strengthening the national programme was the priority for CCA in health. Identified gaps in DRR in health included inter- and intra-sectoral collaboration, and little involvement of the whole health sector in reducing disaster risk. Key gaps within CCA in health included limited governance and national leadership, and limited research to advocate for and inform CCA in health. These differing priorities present potential challenges for linking DRR and CCA in health. Additional challenges for linking these approaches highlighted in the Case Study included: the differing different status of implementation, and limited collaboration and coordination between DRR and CCA in health. Resilience was explored as a conceptual synergy for strengthening joint DRR and CCA action in health. The concept represents a possible uniting goal for the two approaches. However, stakeholders noted significant challenges in using resilience as the basis for a shared framework. To strengthen DRR and CCA links in health, resilience needs greater clarity, a shared operational definition among stakeholders and measurable indicators. Technical and operational synergies were identified as areas for linking DRR and CCA in health. These were categorised into no-regrets and climate-sensitive links. No-regrets links referred to those with net benefits for improving health, and reducing both disaster and climate change risks. These were particularly recognised as linked DRR and CCA by stakeholders at the local level. Climate-sensitive links represent specific activities which would require engagement of both DRR and CCA stakeholders; and explicit inclusion of both climate change and disaster risk data, as well as both DRR and CCA expertise. Finally, to enhance DRR and CCA links in health key recommendations from this research include: (1) strengthen no-regrets options as a starting point for linked DRR and CCA in health; (2) develop guidelines and a formal mechanism for linking; (3) prioritise local-level linkages; and (4) strengthen the empirical evidence base of how DRR and CCA in health can be linked. This research has contributed to the understanding of how DRR and CCA in health can be linked through examination of a country-level example. It provides concrete examples of application of, and challenges with, DRR and CCA links in health. Further, it lays the groundwork for future research and action towards linking these approaches.

To respond to calls for energy conservation and carbon reduction, many universities have proposed targets and strategies to achieve a carbon-neutral campus. However, those strategies overlook the special occupancy conditions in higher education campuses. To help those campuses better achieve carbon neutrality, this study investigated the impacts on energy use patterns of spaces with various occupancy conditions from static and dynamic dimensions, with the goal of proposing an integrated approach to campus planning, building design, facility management and policy setting. This study selected 122 buildings at Griffith University in subtropical Australia and collected their weekly energy use and occupancy conditions data. First, an “area-energy use” multiple linear regression (MLR) model was built to link energy use and space use to understand the relation between them. Next, this study analysed the data regarding occupancy conditions and compared the data from two different academic calendars—semester and trimester systems—to address its role in regulating the occupancy conditions of campus buildings and consequently their energy consumption. Third, the energy use characteristics during the COVID-19 academic year (February 17, 2020, to February 21, 2021) and a normal academic year (February 18, 2019, to February 16, 2020) were compared using a t-test and an MLR model to speculate the occupancy conditions under COVID-19. Finally, the results of the Griffith University study by the energy use data were compared to other university campuses worldwide. The results showed that wet laboratories used significant amounts of energy and that the health discipline was the most energy-intensive of all other disciplines due to their high wet laboratory use. Also, when a change was made from a semester to trimester academic calendar, campus energy consumption was reduced by 213,090 kWh per year (an approximate 5% reduction). The energy consumption of teaching-dedicated spaces decreased by 505,521 kWh per year (an approximate 3% reduction), and that of research spaces increased by 153,893 kWh per year (an approximate 2% increase). It was inferred that the shift to a more flexible calendar system decreased the teaching space energy consumption, such that the savings could be spent on increased research activities. During the COVID-19 academic year, 9,646,933 kWh of energy (or approximately 24.88 kWh/m2 of energy use intensity (EUI)) was saved, which accounted for 16% of the total energy use in the academic year. However, during COVID-19, some researchers stayed on campus for their work. The situation of other universities implied the same conclusion: research spaces have a higher EUI and still operate under COVID-19 conditions. Based on the results of this study, this thesis makes suggestions on campus planning, building design, facility management, policy and investment decisions that reduce carbon emissions and conserve energy. This study is the first to incorporate the complex occupancy conditions of the higher educational sector into energy-saving and carbon-reducing strategies. This strategy can not only guide current carbon emission reduction policies but also predict carbon emissions by future higher educational campuses.

Climate-sensitive infectious diseases such as hand-foot-mouth disease (HFMD) are expected to increase with the changing climate, leading to a greater burden on population health. The extent to which the changes in climate can or will affect population health varies across regions, depending on specific climate characteristics and variability, and on the specific socio-economic and health infrastructure of each region. Hence, local regional-specific climate change adaptation measures needed to be based on an understanding of the health impacts at the regional level. This is particularly relevant when dealing with the hand-foot-mouth disease (HFMD). HFMD, caused by a group of enteroviruses, mainly EV71 and CVA16, is an emerging and increasingly wide spread climate-sensitive infectious disease. It has become endemic over recent decades in many countries, especially in the Western Pacific Region including China, Japan, Singapore and Vietnam. Millions of children suffer from this disease every year, and in severe cases, it is fatal. Research has focused on clinical diagnosis, testing, and treatment in order to reduce mortality. Few studies have investigated prevention and control of HFMD. Recent studies have begun to examine the relationship between HFMD and climate factors such as temperature, humidity, and rainfall. These studies also report that there are regional variations associated with differences in socio-economic characteristics, geographic and climate zones. Thus, regional research is needed to better understand the specific climate-HFMD associations, especially in the “high-risk” regions vulnerable to climate change such as the Mekong Delta Region (MDR) in southern Vietnam. The MDR has been a focus of climate change research over the past decade. While studies have identified many climate change related issues such as increases in temperature and number of hot days, sea level rises and floods. However, only a few have examined the impacts of climate change on human health and none on prevention and control measures or climate change adaptation. In fact, health is not even included by Vietnam’s national climate change adaptation plan. Thus, research into climate change-sensitive infectious diseases such as the HFMD to demonstrate its increasing spread and adverse impacts and provide evidence-based recommendations for prevention and control is urgently needed. This study aimed to examine the influence of climate, socio-economic, and health-related factors on the distribution of HFMD, and to suggest strategies to improve HFMD prevention and control with a focus on the MDR. It used mixed methods to explore the status of HFMD in the MDR, investigated the multiple factors influencing it, its high-risk locations, and current methods to prevent and control it. It used quantitative methods, consisting of temporal analysis (time-series analysis) and spatial and space-time analysis, to examine the climate factors influencing HFMD, and to detect high-risk clusters of it in time and space. This was followed by the use of spatial autoregressive models to determine the potential influences of ten socio-economic and health-related factors on its distributions across all provinces of the MDR. Qualitative methods, including extensive literature and document reviews and in-depth interviews with 17 health staff at both provincial and national level, were used to understand their perspectives on the current situation of HFMD, existing prevention and control measures, and the support required by health staff in order to improve prevention and control, especially in the context of climate change. The study examined the associations between three climate factors, temperature, humidity, and rainfall, and the incidence of HFMD in the MDR for both daily and weekly analyses. The finding demonstrated statistically significant associations, especially for temperature and humidity. Specifically, a one-degree increase in temperature was associated with a 1.7% (95%CI, 0.1-3.3%) increase of HFMD at lag 0 day, and a one-percent increase in humidity was associated with a 0.3% (95%CI, 0.1-0.5%) increase in HFMD at lag 3 day. Furthermore, the strength of temperature-HFMD associations and humidity-HFMD associations both increase with week lags. Consequently, following increases in temperature projected for the MDR as a result of the changing climate, the number of HFMD cases is expected to increase in the region. Regarding spatial distribution of HFMD, this study identified four provinces with relatively higher risks: Long An, Dong Thap, Vinh Long, and Ben Tre provinces. They all share borders in the north of the MDR. Quantitative analysis also revealed high-risk time-space clusters, implying that for the high-risk time of year in the high-risk provinces, more attention should be paid to HFMD prevention and control. This study also found that two out of the ten socio-economic and health-related factors examined had strong modifying effects on the distribution of HFMD across the 13 provinces: the percentage of children under one year old having full vaccination (-7.13%; 95%CI, -12.9 - -1.33%) and the percentage of houses with access to safe water (-3.69%; 95%CI, -7.11- -0.27%). Further analysis of the modification effects of these two factors on climate-HFMD associations found different levels of association between the groups with higher/lower immunisation or higher/lower access to safe water. These findings provide evidence that socio-economic and health-related factors influence the incidence of HFMD. This suggests that future studies should focus on a comprehensive analysis of such factors in order to develop predictive models of HFMD. Through qualitative methods, this research has gained a better understanding of the current situation of HFMD and its prevention and control from the perspective of health staff at both the provincial and national levels, including their existing difficulties in implementing and sustaining prevention and control measures in their communities. The key challenges that health staff face include issues related to health risk communication with community members, the frequent overloading in hospitals in particular times and locations, the change in seasonal patterns of common infectious diseases, the lack of knowledge and awareness of climate change and its potential impacts on health in the region, and the weak collaboration between the health sector and the environmental sector in general. The key recommendation of this study are (1) the national climate change adaptation plan should include health sectors and strategies to reduce adverse climate change impacts on health, (2) the prevention and control plan of HFMD should focus more strongly on the identified high-risk areas and set up surveillance and information sharing across provinces (3) health authority should establish inter-provinces collaboration and health notification system to promptly notify other provinces of outbreak in order to prevent potential spread of HFMD , and (4) health staff should be provided with more information about how climate change affects health to enable them to develop more effective communication with community members and develop better plan for HFMD prevention and control. This study contributes to the scientific evidence base of the associations between HFMD and climate, and socio-economic factors with a focus on the MDR. It also presents the perspectives of health staff dealing with HFMD and their support needs in order to improve prevention and control. The study itself has already helped to raise health staff awareness of the potential impacts of climate change on health, in particular, infectious disease. The methods used in this study can be applied by other regions dealing with infectious diseases to provide convincing evidence of the relationship between climate change and health. Future studies should focus on translating research evidence into policies and practices to prevent and control HFMD tailored to address local/regional conditions, and to integrate health into climate change adaptation activities in Vietnam.

A study was planned to investigate the effects of different doses of ethanol on body organs of Japanese quails. A total of 120 quails were randomly divided into five groups, A, B, C, D and E. Quails of groups A, B, C and D were given ethanol at concentrations of 2, 4, 8 and 16%, respectively in drinking water for four weeks, while birds of group E served as untreated control. The results at the end of 4th week revealed a significant effect on relative weight of heart, kidney and lungs in most treated groups. The increase in heart and lung weight was significant (P<0.05) in quail given 4% and higher ethanol, of kidney given 2 to 8% ethanol, while statistically no effect was observed on relative weight of liver. The relative weight of the proventriculus and the intestine at 4th week also showed statistically no difference compared to control group. However, the weight of the gizzard at 4th week increased significantly (P0.05) in groups given 8 to 16% ethanol and the increase was 42% in these groups compared with control group. The lymphoid organs at the end of 4th week revealed significant difference in weight of the bursa of Fabricius in quails given 16% ethanol and of the thymus in quails given 4 to 16% ethanol. Statistically, no difference was observed in spleen weight of treated groups compared to control group. The gross and light microscopic examination failed to reveal significant changes in these organs with routine methods of examination. Ethanol showed a significant effect on feed conversion ratio which was poor in ethanol treated groups; at the end of 4th week, it varied from 232 to 442% in groups given 8 and 16% ethanol, respectively. These data suggest that ethanol has significant effects on relative weight of heart, kidney, lungs, thymus, and on feed conversion ratio in the Japanese quails.

Biological wastewater treatment is based on the use of microorganisms capable of intense metabolic activity that results in the removal of a large proportion of organic and inorganic contaminants. Given copious amounts of energy-dense organic molecules such as lipids accumulated by the microbial biomass, chemical energy may be directly harnessed from this for biofuel production. Here, lipid accumulating organism (LAO)-enriched microbial communities were studied using a molecular eco-systems biology approach. This involved the development of necessary methodologies including a new comprehensive biomolecular extraction method, yielding high-quality DNA, RNA, proteins and metabolites, as well as bioinformatic approaches for integrating and analysing the derived high-throughput genomic, transcriptomic, proteomic and metabolomic data. At the inception of the project, a full-scale wastewater treatment plant (WWTP) system with a strong presence of LAOs especially during winter months, i.e. the Schifflange WWTP (Esch-sur-Alzette, Luxembourg), was identified and selected for further study. 16S rRNA amplicon sequencing highlighted the presence of ubiquitous lipid accumulating bacteria closely related to Candidatus Microthrix parvicella which increase in abundance from autumn to winter over other highly abundant community members belonging to Alkanindiges spp. and Acinetobacter spp. In order to elucidate compositional, genetic and functional differences between autumn and winter LAO communities, a comparative integrative omic analysis was carried out on rationally selected autumn and winter LAO community samples. The results from metabolomic/lipidomic analyses between intra- and extracellular compartments support previous models of uptake of unprocessed long chain fatty acids (LCFAs) from the wastewater environment and their storage as triacyglycerols within LAOs. Furthermore, a tailored computational framework for the integration of multi-omic datasets into reconstructed community-wide metabolic networks and models was developed. The resulting networks provide overviews of functional capacity of the sampled LAO communities by incorporating gene copy numbers, transcript levels and protein frequency across the two studied environmental conditions. The identification of genes overexpressed, strongly associated with a specific season and/or possessing a high clustering coefficient suggests the existence of keystone genes, analogous to keystone species in species interaction networks. Examples of such keystone genes in the context of the LAO communities include genes coding for proteins involved in nitrogen and glycerolipid metabolism. The existence of such keystone genes opens up exciting possibilities for prediction and control strategies of microbial communities at the dawn of the field of Eco-Systems Biology.

In this paper the unified Bond Graph model of the left ventricle ejection phase is presented, simulated and validated. The integro-differential and ordinary differential equations obtained from the bond graph models are simulated using ODE45 (Ordinary Differential Equation Solver) on MATLAB and Simulink. The results, thus, obtained are compared with CVS (Cardiovascular System) physiological data present in Simbiosys (a software for simulating biological systems) and also with the CVS Wiggers diagram of heart cycle. As the cardiac activity is a multi domain process that includes mechanical, hydraulic, chemical and electrical events; therefore, for modeling such systems a unified modeling approach is needed. In this paper the unified Bond Graph model of the left ventricle ejection phase is proposed. The Bond Graph conventionalism approach is a graphical method principally powerful to portray multi-energy systems, as it is formulated on the portrayal of power exchanges. The model takes into account a simplified description of the left ventricle which is close to the medical investigation promoting the apperception and the dialogue between engineers and physiologists.