Brooksnissen3328

05. Asymmetry was noted in anteroposterior and mediolateral amplitudes of the stroke, index of coordination, duration of the recovery phase, each of the underwater phases and in the hand speed during the downseep phase, regardless of the level of skill or impairment. The disabled swimmers also showed asymmetry in the vertical amplitude of the stroke as well as in the insweep and upsweep speed. The reasons for these asymmetries may be the preference for unilateral breathing, force imbalance between pairs of homologous muscles and motor control deficit. The training with stereotypic movements may explain the similarity of asymmetries among the different groups of swimmers.Reproducibility of results is essential for a well-designed and conducted experiment. Several reasons may originate failure in reproducing data, such as selective reporting, low statistical power, or poor analysis. In this study, we used PEG6000 samples from different distributors and tested their capability inducing spheroid formation upon surface coating. MALDI-MS, NMR, FTIR, and Triple SEC analysis of the different PEG60000s showed nearly identical physicochemical properties different, with only minor differences in mass and hydrodynamic radius, and AFM analysis showed no significant differences in the surface coatings obtained with the available PEG6000s. Despite these similarities, just one showed a highly reproducible formation of spheroids with different cell lines, such as HT-29, HeLa, Caco2, and PANC-1. Using the peculiar PEG6000 sample and a reference PEG6000 chosen amongst the others as control, we tested the effect of the cell/PEG interaction by incubating cells in the PEG solution prior to cell plating. These experiments indicate that the spheroid formation is due to direct interaction of the polymer with the cells rather than by interaction of cells with the coated surfaces. The experiments point out that for biological entities, such as cells or tissues, even very small differences in impurities or minimal variations in the starting product can have a very strong impact on the reproducibility of data.BACKGROUND Schizophrenia is linked with abnormal brain neurodevelopment, on which IGF-2 (insulin-like growth factor-2) has a great impact. The purpose of this study was to assess the levels of serum IGF-2 and its binding proteins IGFBP-3 and IGFBP-7 in schizophrenia patients and the associations of these proteins with schizophrenia psychopathology and cognitive deficits. METHODS Thirty-two schizophrenia patients and 30 healthy controls were recruited. The PANSS and a neurocognitive test battery were used to assess schizophrenic symptomatology and cognition, respectively. Serum IGF-2, IGFBP-3 and IGFBP-7 levels were determined using ELISA. RESULTS The schizophrenia patients had a much lower content of serum IGF-2, IGFBP-3 and IGFBP-7 than controls. For the patients, IGF-2 levels were negatively correlated with the PANSS negative scores and positively associated with working memory, attention, and executive function. The correlations between IGF-2 and the PANSS negative scores, working memory or executive function were still significant after controlling for age, sex, education level, BMI, illness history and age of onset. No significant associations of IGFBP-3 or IGFBP-7 with the PANSS scores and cognitive function were observed in the patients. CONCLUSIONS Our study demonstrates that serum IGF-2 was significantly correlated with negative and cognitive symptoms in patients with schizophrenia, suggesting that altered IGF-2 signaling may be implicated in the psychopathology and cognitive deficits in schizophrenia.[This corrects the article DOI 10.1371/journal.pgen.1008372.].The use of comparative genomics for functional, evolutionary, and epidemiological studies requires methods to classify gene families in terms of occurrence in a given species. These methods usually lack multivariate statistical models to infer the partitions and the optimal number of classes and don't account for genome organization. We introduce a graph structure to model pangenomes in which nodes represent gene families and edges represent genomic neighborhood. Our method, named PPanGGOLiN, partitions nodes using an Expectation-Maximization algorithm based on multivariate Bernoulli Mixture Model coupled with a Markov Random Field. This approach takes into account the topology of the graph and the presence/absence of genes in pangenomes to classify gene families into persistent, cloud, and one or several shell partitions. By analyzing the partitioned pangenome graphs of isolate genomes from 439 species and metagenome-assembled genomes from 78 species, we demonstrate that our method is effective in estimating the persistent genome. Interestingly, it shows that the shell genome is a key element to understand genome dynamics, presumably because it reflects how genes present at intermediate frequencies drive adaptation of species, and its proportion in genomes is independent of genome size. The graph-based approach proposed by PPanGGOLiN is useful to depict the overall genomic diversity of thousands of strains in a compact structure and provides an effective basis for very large scale comparative genomics. The software is freely available at https//github.com/labgem/PPanGGOLiN.BACKGROUND Drought has many known deleterious impacts on human health, but little is known about the relationship between drought and intimate partner violence (IPV). We aimed to evaluate this relationship and to assess effect heterogeneity between population subgroups among women in 19 sub-Saharan African countries. METHODS AND FINDINGS We used data from 19 Demographic and Health Surveys from 2011 to 2018 including 83,990 partnered women aged 15-49 years. Deviations in rainfall in the year before the survey date were measured relative to the 29 previous years using Climate Hazards Group InfraRed Precipitation with Station data, with recent drought classified as ordinal categorical variable (severe ≤10th percentile; mild/moderate >10th percentile to ≤30th percentile; none >30th percentile). We considered 4 IPV-related outcomes reporting a controlling partner (a risk factor for IPV) and experiencing emotional violence, physical violence, or sexual violence in the 12 months prior to survey. Logistic regression was associated with measures of IPV towards women, with larger positive associations among adolescent girls and unemployed women. There was heterogeneity in these associations across countries. Weather shocks may exacerbate vulnerabilities among women in sub-Saharan Africa. Future work should further evaluate potential mechanisms driving these relationships.Environmental DNA (eDNA) metabarcoding is an increasingly popular method for rapid biodiversity assessment. As with any ecological survey, false negatives can arise during sampling and, if unaccounted for, lead to biased results and potentially misdiagnosed environmental assessments. We developed a multi-scale, multi-species occupancy model for the analysis of community biodiversity data resulting from eDNA metabarcoding; this model accounts for imperfect detection and additional sources of environmental and experimental variation. We present methods for model assessment and model comparison and demonstrate how these tools improve the inferential power of eDNA metabarcoding data using a case study in a coastal, marine environment. Using occupancy models to account for factors often overlooked in the analysis of eDNA metabarcoding data will dramatically improve ecological inference, sampling design, and methodologies, empowering practitioners with an approach to wield the high-resolution biodiversity data of next-generation sequencing platforms.Endocytosis is regulated in response to changing environmental conditions to adjust plasma membrane (PM) protein composition for optimal cell growth. Protein networks involved in cargo capture and sorting, membrane sculpting and deformation, and vesicle scission have been well-characterized, but less is known about the networks that sense extracellular cues and relay signals to trigger endocytosis of specific cargo. Hal4 and Hal5 are yeast Snf1-related kinases that were previously reported to regulate nutrient transporter stability by an unknown mechanism. Here we demonstrate that loss of Hal4 and Hal5 activates endocytosis of many different kinds of PM proteins, including Art1-mediated and Art1-independent endocytic events. Acute inhibition of Hal5 in the absence of Hal4 triggers rapid endocytosis, suggesting that Hal kinases function in a nutrient-sensing relay upstream of the endocytic response. Interestingly, Hal5 localizes to the PM, but shifts away from the cell surface in response to stimulation with specific nutrients. We propose that Hal5 functions as a nutrient-responsive regulator of PM protein stability, antagonizing endocytosis and promoting stability of endocytic cargos at the PM in nutrient-limiting conditions.The rise in carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae (CRE) infections has created a global health emergency, underlining the critical need to develop faster diagnostics to treat swiftly and correctly. Although rapid pathogen-identification (ID) tests are being developed, gold-standard antibiotic susceptibility testing (AST) remains unacceptably slow (1-2 d), and innovative approaches for rapid phenotypic ASTs for CREs are urgently needed. Motivated by this need, in this manuscript we tested the hypothesis that upon treatment with β-lactam antibiotics, susceptible Enterobacteriaceae isolates would become sufficiently permeabilized, making some of their DNA accessible to added polymerase and primers. Further, we hypothesized that this accessible DNA would be detectable directly by isothermal amplification methods that do not fully lyse bacterial cells. We build on these results to develop the polymerase-accessibility AST (pol-aAST), a new phenotypic approach for β-lactams, the major antibiotic class for gram-negative infections. We test isolates of the 3 causative pathogens of CRE infections using ceftriaxone (CRO), ertapenem (ETP), and meropenem (MEM) and demonstrate agreement with gold-standard AST. Importantly, pol-aAST correctly categorized resistant isolates that are undetectable by current genotypic methods (negative for β-lactamase genes or lacking predictive genotypes). We also test contrived and clinical urine samples. We show that the pol-aAST can be performed in 30 min sample-to-answer using contrived urine samples and has the potential to be performed directly on clinical urine specimens.Rapid antibiotic susceptibility testing (AST) for Neisseria gonorrhoeae (Ng) is critically needed to counter widespread antibiotic resistance. Detection of nucleic acids in genotypic AST can be rapid, but it has not been successful for β-lactams (the largest antibiotic class used to treat Ng). Rapid phenotypic AST for Ng is challenged by the pathogen's slow doubling time and the lack of methods to quickly quantify the pathogen's response to β-lactams. Here, we asked two questions (1) Is it possible to use nucleic acid quantification to measure the β-lactam susceptibility phenotype of Ng very rapidly, using antibiotic-exposure times much shorter than the 1- to 2-h doubling time of Ng? (2) Would such short-term antibiotic exposures predict the antibiotic resistance profile of Ng measured by plate growth assays over multiple days? To answer these questions, we devised an innovative approach for performing a rapid phenotypic AST that measures DNA accessibility to exogenous nucleases after exposure to β-lactams (termed nuclease-accessibility AST [nuc-aAST]).