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Data on the prevalence and distribution of ticks and tick-borne diseases in Belize are lacking. Ticks (n = 564) collected from dogs, horses, and vegetation in two villages in Stann Creek District in southeastern Belize in 2018, were molecularly identified and screened for tick-borne nonviral human pathogens. The identity of 417 ticks was molecularly confirmed by DNA barcoding as Rhipicephalus sanguineus (Latreille) (66.43%), Amblyomma ovale Koch (15.59%), Dermacentor nitens Neumann (11.51%), Amblyomma sp. ADB0528 (3.6%), and the remainder being small records (2.87%) of Amblyomma coelebs Neumann, Amblyomma imitator Kohls, Amblyomma tapirellum Dunn, Amblyomma auricularium Conil, and Amblyomma maculatum Koch. Individual tick extracts were screened for the presence of Rickettsia spp., Babesia spp., Babesia microti, Borrelia spp., Ehrlichia spp., and Anaplasma spp. using available conventional polymerase chain reaction (PCR) assays. Rickettsia parkeri strain Atlantic Rainforest was identified in five specimens of A. ovale, and one other unidentified tick, all collected from dogs. Another unidentified tick-also collected from a dog-tested positive for an undefined but previously detected Ehrlichia sp. With the exception of D. nitens, all eight other tick species identified in this study were collected on dogs, suggesting that dogs could be usefully employed as sentinel animals for tick surveillance in Belize., (© The Author(s) 2022. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Entomological Society of America.)

Night terrors, also known as sleep terrors, are an early childhood parasomnia characterized by screams or cries, behavioral manifestations of extreme fear, difficulty waking and inconsolability upon awakening. The mechanism causing night terrors is unknown, and a consistently successful treatment has yet to be documented. Here, we argue that cultural practices have moved us away from an ultimate solution: cosleeping. Cosleeping is the norm for closely related primates and for humans in non-Western cultures. In recent years, however, cosleeping has been discouraged by the Western medical community. From an evolutionary perspective, cosleeping provides health and safety benefits for developing children. We discuss night terrors, and immediate and long-term health features, with respect to cosleeping, room-sharing and solitary sleeping. We suggest that cosleeping with children (≥1-year-old) may prevent night terrors and that, under certain circumstances, cosleeping with infants (≤11-months-old) is preferable to room-sharing, and both are preferable to solitary sleeping.

De novo biocatalysts with non-natural functionality are accessible by computational enzyme design. The catalytic activities obtained for the initial designs are usually low, but can be optimized significantly by directed evolution. Nevertheless, rate accelerations approaching the level of natural enzymes can only be achieved over many rounds of tedious and time-consuming laboratory evolution. In this work, we show that microfluidic-based screening using fluorescence-activated droplet sorting (FADS) is ideally suited for efficient optimization of designed enzymes with low starting activity, essentially straight out of the computer. We chose the designed retro-aldolase RA95.0, which had been previously evolved by conventional microtiter plate screening, as an example and reoptimized it using the microfluidic-based assay. Our results show that FADS is sufficiently sensitive to detect enzyme activities as low as kcat/Km = 0.5 M(-1)s(-1) The ultra-high throughput of this system makes screening of large mutant libraries possible in which clusters of up to five residues are randomized simultaneously. Thus, combinations of beneficial mutations can be identified directly, leading to large jumps in catalytic activity of up to 80-fold within a single round of evolution. By exploring several evolutionary trajectories in parallel, we identify alternative active site arrangements that exhibit comparably enhanced efficiency but opposite enantioselectivity., (© The Author 2016. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com.)