The anterior neuroectoderm (ANE) in many deuterostome embryos (echinoderms, hemichordates, urochordates, cephalochordates, and vertebrates) is progressively restricted along the anterior–posterior axis to a domain around the anterior pole. In the sea urchin embryo, three integrated Wnt signaling branches (Wnt/β-catenin, Wnt/JNK, and Wnt/PKC) govern this progressive restriction process, which begins around the 32- to 60-cell stage and terminates by the early gastrula stage. We previously have established that several secreted Wnt modulators of the Dickkopf and secreted Frizzled-related protein families (Dkk1, Dkk3, and sFRP-1/5) are expressed within the ANE and play important roles in modulating the Wnt signaling network during this process. In this study, we use morpholino and dominant-negative interference approaches to characterize the function of a novel Frizzled-related protein, secreted Frizzled-related protein 1 (sFRP-1), during ANE restriction. sFRP-1 appears to be related to a secreted Wnt modulator, sFRP3/4, that is essential to block Wnt signaling and establish the ANE in vertebrates. Here, we show that the sea urchin sFRP3/4 orthologue is not expressed during ANE restriction in the sea urchin embryo. Instead, our results indicate that ubiquitously expressed maternal sFRP-1 and Fzl1/2/7 signaling act together as early as the 32- to 60-cell stage to antagonize the ANE restriction mechanism mediated by Wnt/β-catenin and Wnt/JNK signaling. Then, starting from the blastula stage, Fzl5/8 signaling activates zygotic sFRP-1 within the ANE territory, where it works with the secreted Wnt antagonist Dkk1 (also activated by Fzl5/8 signaling) to antagonize Wnt1/Wnt8–Fzl5/8–JNK signaling in a negative feedback mechanism that defines the outer ANE territory boundary. Together, these data indicate that maternal and zygotic sFRP-1 protects the ANE territory by antagonizing the Wnt1/Wnt8–Fzl5/8–JNK signaling pathway throughout ANE restriction, providing precise spatiotemporal control of the mechanism responsible for the establishment of the ANE territory around the anterior pole of the sea urchin embryo.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (10.1186/s13227-017-0089-3) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Purpose Drawing on the taxonomy of patient empowerment and a sense of community (SoC), the purpose of this paper is to analyze the factors that impact the intention of the individual to continue using online social health support community for their chronic disease management. Design/methodology/approach A survey design was used to collect the data from multiple online social health support groups related to chronic disease management. The survey yielded a total of 246 usable responses. Findings The primary findings from this study indicate that the informational support – not the nurturant support such as emotional, network, and esteem support – are the major types of support people are seeking from an online social health support community. This research also found that patient empowerment and SoC would positively impact their intention to continue using the online health community. Research limitations/implications This study utilized a survey design method may limit precision and realism. Also, there is the self-selection bias as the respondents self-selected themselves to take the survey. Practical implications The findings can help the community managers or webmasters to design strategies for the promotion and diffusion of online social health group among patient of chronic disease. Those strategies should focus on patient’s empowerment through action facilitating and social support and through creating a SoC. Originality/value An innovative research model integrates patient empowerment and a SoC to study patient’s chronic disease management through online social health groups to fill the existing research gap.

The Open University's repository of research publications and other research outputs Using citation-context to reduce topic drifting on pure citation-based recommendation Conference or Workshop Item How to cite: Khadka, Anita and Knoth, Petr (2018). Using citation-context to reduce topic drifting on pure citation-based recommendation. In: RecSys '18: Proceedings of the 12th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems, ACM Press pp. 362-366. For guidance on citations see FAQs.

With the continuous growth of scientific literature, discovering relevant academic papers for a researcher has become a challenging task, especially when looking for the latest, most recent papers. In this case, traditional collaborative filtering systems are ineffective, since they are unable to recommend items not previously seen, rated or cited. In this paper, we explore the potential of exploiting citation knowledge to provide a given user with relevant suggestions about recent scientific publications. A novel hybrid recommendation method that encapsulates such citation knowledge is proposed. Experimental results show improvements over baseline methods, evidencing benefits of using citation knowledge to recommend recently published papers in a personalised way. Moreover, as a result of our work, we also provide a unique dataset that, differently to previous corpora, contains detailed paper citation information.

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