Notes

Metagenomic Next-Generation Sequencing for Pulmonary Infection Diagnosis: Respiratory Biopsy versus Bronchoalveolar Lavage Water.
Further, misregulated secretions of islet secretory products that arise from defective intercellular islet communication are implicated in diabetes. Intercellular communication within the islet environment comprises multiple mechanisms, including electrical synapses from gap junctional coupling, paracrine interactions among neighboring cells, and direct cell-to-cell contacts in the form of juxtacrine signaling. In this article, we describe the various mechanisms that contribute to proper islet function for each islet cell type and how intercellular islet communications are coordinated among the same and different islet cell types. © 2021 American Physiological Society. Compr Physiol 112191-2225, 2021.Regulation of the ability of a neurotransmitter [our focus serotonin, norepinephrine, dopamine, acetylcholine, glycine, and gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA)] to reach its receptor targets is regulated in part by controlling the access the neurotransmitter has to receptors. Transporters, located at both the cellular plasma membrane and in subcellular vesicles, carry a myriad of responsibilities that include enabling neurotransmitter release and controlling uptake of neurotransmitter back into a cell or vesicle. Driven largely by electrochemical gradients, these transporters move neurotransmitters. The regulation of the transporters themselves through changes in expression and/or posttranslational modification allows for fine-tuning of this system. Transporters have been best recognized as targets for psychoactive stimulants and remain a mainstay target of primarily central nervous system (CNS) acting drugs for treatment of debilitating diseases such as depression and anxiety. Studies reveal, however, that transporters are found and functional in tissues outside the CNS (gastrointestinal and cardiovascular tissues, for example). The importance of neurotransmitter transporters is underscored with discoveries that dysfunction of transporters can cause life-changing disease. This article provides a high-level review of major classes of both plasma membrane transporters and vesicular transporters. © 2021 American Physiological Society. Compr Physiol 112279-2295, 2021.Continuous physiological measurements collected in field settings are essential to understand baseline, free-ranging physiology, physiological range and variability, and the physiological responses of organisms to disturbances. This article presents a current summary of the available technologies to continuously measure the direct physiological parameters in the field at high-resolution/instantaneous timescales from freely behaving animals. There is a particular focus on advantages versus disadvantages of available methods as well as emerging technologies "on the horizon" that may have been validated in captive or laboratory-based scenarios but have yet to be applied in the wild. Systems to record physiological variables from free-ranging animals are reviewed, including radio (VHF/UFH) telemetry, acoustic telemetry, and dataloggers. Physiological parameters that have been continuously measured in the field are addressed in seven sections including heart rate and electrocardiography (ECG); electromyography (EMG); electroencephalography (EEG); body temperature; respiratory, blood, and muscle oxygen; gastric pH and motility; and blood pressure and flow. The primary focal sections are heart rate and temperature as these can be, and have been, extensively studied in free-ranging organisms. Predicted aspects of future innovation in physiological monitoring are also discussed. The article concludes with an overview of best practices and points to consider regarding experimental designs, cautions, and effects on animals. © 2021 American Physiological Society. Compr Physiol 111979-2015, 2021.We introduce a statistical procedure that integrates datasets from multiple biomedical studies to predict patients' survival, based on individual clinical and genomic profiles. The proposed procedure accounts for potential differences in the relation between predictors and outcomes across studies, due to distinct patient populations, treatments and technologies to measure outcomes and biomarkers. These differences are modeled explicitly with study-specific parameters. We use hierarchical regularization to shrink the study-specific parameters towards each other and to borrow information across studies. The estimation of the study-specific parameters utilizes a similarity matrix, which summarizes differences and similarities of the relations between covariates and outcomes across studies. We illustrate the method in a simulation study and using a collection of gene expression datasets in ovarian cancer. We show that the proposed model increases the accuracy of survival predictions compared to alternative meta-analytic methods.
Size-corrected tooth crown measurements were used to estimate phenetic affinities among Homo naledi (~335-236 ka) and 11 other Plio-Pleistocene and recent species. To assess further their efficacy, and identify dental evolutionary trends, the data were then quantitatively coded for phylogenetic analyses. Results from both methods contribute additional characterization of H. naledi relative to other hominins.

After division by their geometric mean, scaled mesiodistal and buccolingual dimensions were used in tooth size apportionment analysis to compare H. naledi with Australopithecus africanus, A. afarensis, Paranthropus robustus, P. boisei, H. habilis, H. ergaster, H. erectus, H. heidelbergensis, H. neanderthalensis, H. sapiens, and Pan troglodytes. These data produce equivalently scaled samples unaffected by interspecific size differences. The data were then gap-weighted for Bayesian inference.

Congruence in interspecific relationships is evident between methods, and with many inferred from earlier systnships. Together, the findings support recent study suggesting H. naledi originated long before the geological date of the Dinaledi Chamber, from which the specimens under study were recovered.Human biomonitoring involves measuring the accumulation of contaminants in biological specimens (such as blood or urine) to assess individuals' exposure to environmental contamination. AC220 Due to the expensive cost of a single assay, the method of pooling has become increasingly common in environmental studies. The implementation of pooling starts by physically mixing specimens into pools, and then measures pooled specimens for the concentration of contaminants. An important task is to reconstruct individual-level statistical characteristics based on pooled measurements. In this article, we propose to use the varying-coefficient regression model for individual-level biomonitoring and provide methods to estimate the varying coefficients based on different types of pooled data. Asymptotic properties of the estimators are presented. We illustrate our methodology via simulation and with application to pooled biomonitoring of a brominated flame retardant provided by the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES).
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