IS INSOMNIA A DISORDER OF AROUSAL? Prevalence of Insomnia Insomnia is the most common sleep disorder. Its prevalence varies according to the definition. One-fourth to one-third of the general population reports complaints of difficulty with falling and/or staying asleep whereas ten percent seek medical help for insomnia. Insomnia occurs more frequently with increasing age, in women, in patients...

TGF-beta signaling in the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans plays multiple roles in the development of the animal. The Sma/Mab pathway controls body size, male tail sensory ray identity and spicule formation. Three Smad genes, sma-2, sma-3 and sma-4, are all required for signal transduction, suggesting that the functional complex could be a heterotrimer. Because the C termini of Smads play import...

Smooth muscle alpha-actin (SMA) is a marker for the contractile, non-proliferative phenotype of adult smooth muscle cells (SMCs). Upon arterial injury, expression of SMA and other structural proteins decreases and SMCs acquire a pro-migratory and proliferative phenotype. To what extent SMA regulates migration and proliferation of SMCs is unclear and putative signaling pathways involved remain t...

In C. elegans, a TGFbeta-related signaling pathway regulates body size. Loss of function of the signaling ligand (dbl-1), receptors (daf-4 and sma-6) or Smads (sma-2, sma-3 and sma-4) results in viable, but smaller animals because of a reduction in postembryonic growth. We have investigated the tissue specificity of this pathway in body size regulation. We show that different tissues are reduce...

Social media analytics (SMA) is a rapidly emerging capability that provides organisations with the ability to analyse and interpret large amounts of online content to determine the attitudes and behaviours of people. The adoption and impact of SMA by businesses is still largely unexplored. In this paper we develop a framework, based on organisational motivation theory and the resourcebased view...

Spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) presents severe muscle weakness with limited motor neuron (MN) loss at an early stage, suggesting potential functional alterations in MNs that contribute to SMA symptom presentation. Using SMA induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), we found that SMA MNs displayed hyperexcitability with increased membrane input resistance, hyperpolarized threshold, and larger actio...