This paper provides a critical review of the main issues regarding the scientific principles underlying environmental monitoring of marine aquaculture operations and makes recommendations relevant to the implementation of best practice for the management of aquaculture in Europe. Given that a variety of cultured species and approaches are adopted in Europe, it is not possible, or indeed desirable, to devise prescriptive guidelines. Instead, this paper reviews how science informs monitoring and provides a framework for the development of a monitoring strategy of marine aquaculture operations that is flexible enough to be applicable to a variety of locations, species and situations. Traditionally environmental monitoring has concentrated on a few key physical and chemical variables and organisms. The trend now, however, is towards whole‐system environmental assessment (e.g. CEC 2000; Osparcom 1998), including considerations of the assimilative capacity of specific systems and their ability to absorb and dilute perturbations. Against this background this paper addresses the following specific objectives: • review of the rationale and scientific principles underlying current environmental monitoring with specific reference to marine aquaculture; • evaluation of the links between monitoring and regulatory criteria, specifically consideration of environmental quality objectives and environmental quality standards, and the role of environmental impact assessment; • assessment of the role of codes of best conduct and practice, and environmental management systems in the management of aquaculture operations. The paper concludes by proposing a set of recommendations which will contribute towards the sustainable management of aquaculture operations, through the implementation of a more focused approach to environmental monitoring.
Classical mathematical models of tumor growth have shaped our understanding of cancer and have broad practical implications for treatment scheduling and dosage. However, even the simplest text-book models have been barely validated in real world-data of human patients. In this study, we fitted a range of differential equation models to tumor volume measurements of patients undergoing chemo-therapy or cancer immunotherapy for solid tumors. We used a large dataset of 1472 patients with three or more measurements per target lesion, of which 652 patients had six or more data points. We show that the early treatment response shows only moderate correlation with the final treatment re-sponse, demonstrating the need for nuanced models. We then perform a head-to-head comparison of six classical models which are widely used in the field: the Exponential, Logistic, Classic Bertalanffy, General Bertalanffy, Classic Gompertz and General Gompertz model. Several models provide a good fit to tumor volume measurements, with the Gompertz model providing the best balance between goodness of fit and number of parameters. Similarly, when fitting to early treatment data, the general Bertalanffy and Gompertz models yield the lowest mean absolute error to forecasted data, indicating that these models could potentially be effective at predicting treatment outcome. In summary, we pro-vide a quantitative benchmark for classical textbook models and state-of-the art models of human tumor growth. We publicly release an anonymized version of our original data, providing the first benchmark set of human tumor growth data for evaluation of mathematical models.
This paper describes the approach to developing transition pathways for a low carbon electricity system in the UK, being pursued in a major new interdisciplinary research project. The project aims (a) to learn from past transitions to help explore future transitions and what might enable or avoid them; (b) to design and evaluate transition pathways towards alternative sociotechnical energy systems and infrastructures for a low carbon future; and (c) to understand and, where appropriate, model the changing roles, influences and opportunities of large and small 'actors' in the dynamics of transitions. The paper describes the approach, which builds on the work of Dutch researchers on transitions and transition management using a multilevel framework of niches, sociotechnical regime and landscape, as well as on other parts of the innovation systems literature. It also describes its application to several outline transition pathways to a low carbon energy system in the UK. The pathways embrace both the evolution of the physical and institutional infrastructure changes and the roles of both large actors, e.g. multinational energy supply and distribution companies, national governments, major investors, and small actors, e.g. households, innovators and entrepreneurs.
During the past two decades an overwhelming amount of knowledge has been acquired on the molecular genetics of human cancer. It is now evident that cancer is essentially a genetic disease, arising from inherited and/or somatically acquired mutations at different genetic loci, and that tumourigenesis is a multistep process. Gene mapping studies of inherited cancer syndromes have resulted in the identification of many genes implicated in the initiation of tumours. Importantly, alterations of the same genes were also found to play a role in the development of common, non-familial tumours. The genes involved belong to distinct functional classes, and include proto-oncogenes and tumour suppressor genes, which are regulators of cellular growth and proliferation, cell adhesion and programmed cell death. Another class of cancer susceptibility genes consists of DNA repair genes, which are involved in maintaining genomic stability. In unravelling the genetic basis of cancer, the localization and identification of genes involved in tumourigenesis can be considered as the 'easy' part; determination of the normal physiological function of these genes and their precise role in tumourigenesis has proved to be much more difficult. In this review, we highlight some of the major breakthroughs in the field of cancer genetics, and discuss recent insights in the putative role of proto-oncogenes, tumour suppressor genes and DNA repair genes in the initiation and progression of cancer. Also, we point to some of the challenges to be faced in the coming years.
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