Congratulations to our HDA Publication Award winners for 2024

This award recognises and promotes research publications of our PhD students, early career researcher (ECR) and mid career researcher (MCR) members. Each awardee receives $500 for their winning publication.

MCR category – Dr Jack Darby, Research Fellow, Early Origins of Adult Health Research Group, UniSA: Clinical and Health Sciences, University of South Australia.

Acute-on-chronic: using magnetic resonance imaging to disentangle the haemodynamic responses to acute and chronic fetal hypoxaemia.

Jack R. T. Darby, Brahmdeep S. Saini, Stacey L. Holman, Sarah J. Hammond, Sunthara Rajan Perumal, Christopher K. Macgowan, Mike Seed and Janna L. Morrison

Frontiers in Medicine

https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/medicine/articles/10.3389/fmed.2024.1340012/full

The fetal haemodynamic response to acute episodes of hypoxaemia are well characterised. However, how these responses change when the hypoxaemia becomes more chronic in nature such as that associated with fetal growth restriction (FGR), is less well understood. Herein, we utilised a combination of clinically relevant MRI techniques to comprehensively characterize and differentiate the haemodynamic responses occurring during acute and chronic periods of fetal hypoxaemia.

ECR category – Dr Lauren Lines, Senior Lecturer in Nursing, Postgraduate Course Coordinator (Nursing), College of Nursing and Health Sciences, Flinders University.

Interprofessional Education in Child Protection for Preservice Health and Allied Health Professionals: A Scoping Review

Lauren Elizabeth Lines, Tracy Alexis Kakyo, Helen McLaren, Megan Cooper, Nina Sivertsen, Alison Hutton, Lana Zannettino, Rebecca Starrs , Donna Hartz , Shannon Brown , and Julian Grant

Trauma, Violence & Abuse

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/15248380231221279

Health and allied health professionals are uniquely positioned to collaborate in prevention, early intervention and responses to child maltreatment. Effective collaboration requires comprehensive interprofessional education (IPE), and inadequate collaboration across sectors and professions continually contributes to poor outcomes for children. Little is known about what interprofessional preparation health and allied health professionals receive before initial qualification (preservice) that equips them for interprofessional collaboration and provision of culturally safe care in child protection.

PhD category – Rudrarup Bhattacharjee, Post-Doctoral Researcher, Adelaide Centre for Epigenetics (ACE), South Australian immunoGENomics Cancer Institute (SAiGENCI), Faculty of Health and Medical Science, University of Adelaide.

Compromised transcription-mRNA export factor THOC2 causes R-loop accumulation, DNA damage and adverse neurodevelopment

Rudrarup Bhattacharjee, Lachlan A. Jolly, Mark A. Corbett, Ing Chee Wee, Sushma R. Rao, Alison E. Gardner, Tarin Ritchie, Eline J. H. van Hugte, Ummi Ciptasari, Sandra Piltz, Jacqueline E. Noll, Nazzmer Nazri, Clare L. van Eyk, Melissa White, Dani Fornarino, Cathryn Poulton, Gareth Baynam, Lyndsey E. Collins-Praino, Marten F. Snel1, Nael Nadif Kasri, Kim M. Hemsley, Paul Q. Thomas, Raman Kumar & Jozef Gecz

Nature Communications

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-45121-5

Human neurodevelopment is a highly orchestrated and complex process. The identification of naturally occurring gene variants leading to neurodevelopmental disorders (NDD) highlights the involvement of over 2300 different genes and a myriad of cellular, molecular, and developmental mechanisms, only a few of which are being successfully targeted with precision therapies. Many essential biological processes are compromised by such NDD gene variants and often knockout of these genes cause embryonic lethality. One such example is variants in the X-chromosome gene THOC2 that cause NDDs with clinically heterogeneous presentations, now we call THOC2 syndrome. THOC2, a highly constrained gene, encodes the largest subunit of the THO subcomplex in the highly-conserved Transcription-Export (TREX) complex. The TREX complex is essential for transcription, mRNA processing and export, preventing DNA damage, and maintaining ESC self-renewal, pluripotency and differentiation during embryogenesis.