In a community-based study of 301 subjects from 61 nuclear families, two

Assessment of habitual physical activity in epidemiologic and health education studies has been difficult. A seven-day physical activity recall interview was developed and administered in a community health survey, a randomized clinical trial, and two worksite health promotion programs during 1979-1982. These studies were conducted in several populations in California, Texas, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey. Energy expenditure estimates from the physical activity recall conformed to expected age- and sex-specific values in the cross-sectional community survey. Estimates of energy expenditure were also congruent with other questions on physical activity and job classification. In a randomized, one-year exercise trial, the physical activity recall detected increases in energy expenditure in the treated group and was positively associated with miles run during training (p less than 0.05). Changes in energy expenditure were associated with changes in maximal oxygen uptake (VO2max (r = 0.33, p less than 0.05) and body fatness (r = -0.50, p less than 0.01) at six months, and in high density lipoprotein-cholesterol (r = 0.31, p less than 0.05) and triglyceride (r = -0.41, p less than 0.01) at one year. The physical activity recall detected significant (p less than 0.01) increases in energy expenditure in treatment groups in two worksite health promotion projects. These data suggest that the physical activity recall provides useful estimates of habitual physical activity for research in epidemiologic and health education studies.

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Communities where people perceive poor access to medical care have higher rates of hospitalization for chronic diseases. Improving access to care is more likely than changing patients' propensity to seek health care or eliminating variation in physician practice style to reduce hospitalization rates for chronic conditions.

Black and Hispanic physicians have a unique and important role in caring for poor, black, and Hispanic patients in California. Dismantling affirmative-action programs as is currently proposed, may threaten health care for both poor people and members of minority groups.

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Summary: We introduce GO-Elite, a flexible and powerful pathway analysis tool for a wide array of species, identifiers (IDs), pathways, ontologies and gene sets. In addition to the Gene Ontology (GO), GO-Elite allows the user to perform over-representation analysis on any structured ontology annotations, pathway database or biological IDs (e.g. gene, protein or metabolite). GO-Elite exploits the structured nature of biological ontologies to report a minimal set of non-overlapping terms. The results can be visualized on WikiPathways or as networks. Built-in support is provided for over 60 species and 50 ID systems, covering gene, disease and phenotype ontologies, multiple pathway databases, biomarkers, and transcription factor and microRNA targets. GO-Elite is available as a web interface, GenMAPP-CS plugin and as a cross-platform application.Availability: http://www.genmapp.org/go_eliteContact: nsalomonis@gladstone.ucsf.eduSupplementary Information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

Gene regulatory networks direct the progressive determination of cell fate during embryogenesis, but how they control cell behavior during morphogenesis remains largely elusive. Cell sorting, microarrays, and targeted molecular manipulations were used to analyze cardiac cell migration in the ascidian Ciona intestinalis. The heart network regulates genes involved in most cellular activities required for migration, including adhesion, cell polarity, and membrane protrusions. We demonstrated that fibroblast growth factor signaling and the forkhead transcription factor FoxF directly upregulate the small guanosine triphosphatase RhoDF, which synergizes with Cdc42 to contribute to the protrusive activity of migrating cells. Moreover, RhoDF induces membrane protrusions independently of other cellular activities required for migration. We propose that transcription regulation of specific effector genes determines the coordinated deployment of discrete cellular modules underlying migration.