A bibliometric analysis and visualization of literature on non-fasting lipid research from 2012 to 2022

BackgroundNon-fasting lipid assessment can help predict cardiovascular disease risks and is linked to multiple diseases, particularly diabetes. The significance of non-fasting lipid levels in routine screening and postprandial lipid tests for potential dyslipidemia has not been conclusively determined. Various new lipid-lowering strategies have been developed to improve non-fasting dyslipidemia. Therefore, analysis of scientific outputs over the past decade is essential to reveal trends, hotspots, and frontier areas for future research in this field.MethodsThe Science Citation Index Expanded in the Web of Science Core Collection database was searched for publications related to non-fasting lipid research from 2012 to 2022. The regional distributions, authors, disciplines, journals, references, and keywords of the studies were analyzed using the bibliometric software VOSviewer and CiteSpace.ResultsA total of 4160 articles and reviews that met the inclusion criteria were included in this study. The output trend was established to be stable and the number of citation indices has been persistently increasing. A total of 104 countries/regions, 4668 organizations, and 20782 authors were involved in this research area. In terms of country, the United States had the largest number of publications (979). The University of Copenhagen was the most productive institution, publishing 148 papers. Professor Børge G Nordestgaard has made the most significant contribution to this field. Nutrients was the most productive journal while the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition was the highest co-cited journal. Analysis of co-cited references indicated that lipid-lowering strategies, statin therapy, high-fat meals, insulin resistance, physical exercise, and fructose were hotspots. Analysis of co-cited keywords revealed that apolipoprotein B, especially apolipoprotein B48, is becoming a key research focus. The keywords “gut microbiota” and “meal timing” were the most extensively studied.ConclusionThe causal relationship between non-fasting dyslipidemia and diseases is currently being explored and the standards for non-fasting or postprandial lipid assessment are continuously being updated. Among the hotspots, lipid-lowering strategies are a potential research direction. Apolipoprotein B48, gut microbiota, and chrononutrition are the research frontiers. This initial bibliometric analysis of non-fasting lipids will enable researchers to monitor swift transformations and recognize novel concepts for upcoming research

Novel PAX9 compound heterozygous variants in a Chinese family with non-syndromic oligodontia and genotype-phenotype analysis of PAX9 variants

Studies have reported that >91.9% of non-syndromic tooth agenesis cases are caused by seven pathogenic genes. Objective: To report novel heterozygous PAX9 variants in a Chinese family with non-syndromic oligodontia and summarize the reported genotype-phenotype relationship of PAX9 variants. Methodology: We recruited 28 patients with non-syndromic oligodontia who were admitted to the Hospital of Stomatology Hebei Medical University (China) from 2018 to 2021. Peripheral blood was collected from the probands and their core family members for whole-exome sequencing (WES) and variants were verified by Sanger sequencing. Bioinformatics tools were used to predict the pathogenicity of the variants. SWISS-MODEL homology modeling was used to analyze the three-dimensional structural changes of variant proteins. We also analyzed the genotype-phenotype relationships of PAX9 variants. Results: We identified novel compound heterozygous PAX9 variants (reference sequence NM_001372076.1) in a Chinese family with non-syndromic oligodontia: a new missense variant c.1010C>A (p.T337K) in exon 4 and a new frameshift variant c.330_331insGT (p.D113Afs*9) in exon 2, which was identified as the pathogenic variant in this family. This discovery expands the known variant spectrum of PAX9; then, we summarized the phenotypes of non-syndromic oligodontia with PAX9 variants. Conclusion: We found that PAX9 variants commonly lead to loss of the second molars

SeamlessM4T-Massively Multilingual & Multimodal Machine Translation

What does it take to create the Babel Fish, a tool that can help individuals translate speech between any two languages? While recent breakthroughs in text-based models have pushed machine translation coverage beyond 200 languages, unified speech-to-speech translation models have yet to achieve similar strides. More specifically, conventional speech-to-speech translation systems rely on cascaded systems that perform translation progressively, putting high-performing unified systems out of reach. To address these gaps, we introduce SeamlessM4T, a single model that supports speech-to-speech translation, speech-to-text translation, text-to-speech translation, text-to-text translation, and automatic speech recognition for up to 100 languages. To build this, we used 1 million hours of open speech audio data to learn self-supervised speech representations with w2v-BERT 2.0. Subsequently, we created a multimodal corpus of automatically aligned speech translations. Filtered and combined with human-labeled and pseudo-labeled data, we developed the first multilingual system capable of translating from and into English for both speech and text. On FLEURS, SeamlessM4T sets a new standard for translations into multiple target languages, achieving an improvement of 20% BLEU over the previous SOTA in direct speech-to-text translation. Compared to strong cascaded models, SeamlessM4T improves the quality of into-English translation by 1.3 BLEU points in speech-to-text and by 2.6 ASR-BLEU points in speech-to-speech. Tested for robustness, our system performs better against background noises and speaker variations in speech-to-text tasks compared to the current SOTA model. Critically, we evaluated SeamlessM4T on gender bias and added toxicity to assess translation safety. Finally, all contributions in this work are open-sourced and accessible at https://github.com/facebookresearch/seamless_communicatio

Robust estimation of bacterial cell count from optical density

Optical density (OD) is widely used to estimate the density of cells in liquid culture, but cannot be compared between instruments without a standardized calibration protocol and is challenging to relate to actual cell count. We address this with an interlaboratory study comparing three simple, low-cost, and highly accessible OD calibration protocols across 244 laboratories, applied to eight strains of constitutive GFP-expressing E. coli. Based on our results, we recommend calibrating OD to estimated cell count using serial dilution of silica microspheres, which produces highly precise calibration (95.5% of residuals <1.2-fold), is easily assessed for quality control, also assesses instrument effective linear range, and can be combined with fluorescence calibration to obtain units of Molecules of Equivalent Fluorescein (MEFL) per cell, allowing direct comparison and data fusion with flow cytometry measurements: in our study, fluorescence per cell measurements showed only a 1.07-fold mean difference between plate reader and flow cytometry data

Review on 4D printing of polymer and its reversibility

Developments in multi-material polymer printing have kickstarted the advancements in 4D printing of polymers. Currently, there are many different methods to produce shape memory polymers via 3D printing techniques. However, most of them are one-way shape memory, which means that they cannot be used reversibly. The new direction of development in 4D printing is achieving reversibility. This review will present the different 3D printing techniques used to produce one-way shape memory polymers (SMPs) and reversible SMPs.NRF (Natl Research Foundation, S’pore)Published versio

Two-way 4D printing : a review on the reversibility of 3D-printed shape memory materials

The rapid development of additive manufacturing and advances in shape memory materials have fueled the progress of four-dimensional (4D) printing. With the right external stimulus, the need for human interaction, sensors, and batteries will be eliminated, and by using additive manufacturing, more complex devices and parts can be produced. With the current understanding of shape memory mechanisms and with improved design for additive manufacturing, reversibility in 4D printing has recently been proven to be feasible. Conventional one-way 4D printing requires human interaction in the programming (or shape-setting) phase, but reversible 4D printing, or two-way 4D printing, will fully eliminate the need for human interference, as the programming stage is replaced with another stimulus. This allows reversible 4D printed parts to be fully dependent on external stimuli; parts can also be potentially reused after every recovery, or even used in continuous cycles—an aspect that carries industrial appeal. This paper presents a review on the mechanisms of shape memory materials that have led to 4D printing, current findings regarding 4D printing in alloys and polymers, and their respective limitations. The reversibility of shape memory materials and their feasibility to be fabricated using three-dimensional (3D) printing are summarized and critically analyzed. For reversible 4D printing, the methods of 3D printing, mechanisms used for actuation, and strategies to achieve reversibility are also highlighted. Finally, prospective future research directions in reversible 4D printing are suggested.NRF (Natl Research Foundation, S’pore)Published versio

Preliminary investigation of the reversible 4D printing of a dual-layer component

The rapid development of additive manufacturing and advances in shape memory materials have fueled the progress of four-dimensional (4D) printing. With increasing improvements in design, reversible 4D printing—or two-way 4D printing—has been proven to be feasible. This technology will fully eliminate the need for human interference, as the programming is completely driven by external stimuli, which allows 4D-printed parts to be actuated in multiple cycles. This study proposes a new reversible 4D printing actuation method. The swelling of an elastomer and heat are used in the programming stage, and heat is used in the recovery stage. The main focus of this study is on the self-actuated programming step. To attain control over the bending, a simple predictive model has been developed to study the degree of curvature. The parameters, temperature, and elastomer thickness have also been studied in order to gain a better understanding of how well the model predicts the curvature. This understanding of the curvature will provide a great degree of control over the reversible 4D-printed structure.NRF (Natl Research Foundation, S’pore)Published versio

Effects of Dietary Betaine on Growth Performance, Digestive Function, Carcass Traits, and Meat Quality in Indigenous Yellow-Feathered Broilers under Long-Term Heat Stress

Heat stress has a profound effect on poultry health and productivity. The present study evaluated whether feeding betaine could ameliorate long-term heat stress-induced impairment of productive performance in indigenous yellow-feathered broilers. A total of 240 five-week-old male broilers were randomly allocated to five treatments with six replicates of eight broilers each. The five treatments included a thermoneutral zone control group (TN, fed basal diet), a heat stress control group (HS, fed basal diet), and an HS control group supplemented 500, 1000, 2000 mg/kg betaine, respectively. The TN group was raised at 26 ± 1 °C during the whole study, HS groups exposed to 32 ± 1 °C for 8 h/day from 9:00 am to 17:00 pm. The results showed that heat stress decreased the body weight gain (BWG) and feed intake of broilers during 1–5, 6–10, and 1–10 weeks (p < 0.05). Dietary betaine tended to improve the BWG and feed intake of broilers under 5 weeks of heat stress (linear, p < 0.10), and betaine supplementation linearly increased the BWG and feed intake during 6–10 and 1–10 weeks (p < 0.05). Additionally, nitrogen retention was reduced by 5 weeks and 10 weeks of heat stress (p < 0.05), whereas dietary betaine could improve nitrogen retention in heat stressed broilers after both 5 and 10 weeks of heat stress (linear, p < 0.05). Moreover, this study observed that the trypsin activity of jejunum was decreased by 5 weeks of heat stress (p < 0.05), whereas betaine supplementation had quadratic effects on trypsin activity of jejunum in heat stressed broilers (p < 0.05). Furthermore, 10 weeks of heat stress induced a reduction of villus height of the duodenum and jejunum (p < 0.05), and decreased the villus height to crypt depth ratio of the jejunum (p < 0.05). Supplementation with betaine ameliorated the adverse effects of heat stress on these parameters (p < 0.05). Compared with the TN group, 10 weeks of heat stress reduced carcass and breast yield (p < 0.05) and betaine supplementation improved carcass and breast yield of heat stressed broilers (linear, p < 0.05). In conclusion, dietary supplementation of betaine could reduce the detrimental effects of long-term heat stress on growth performance, digestive function, and carcass traits in indigenous yellow-feathered broilers

Contactless reversible 4D-printing for 3D-to-3D shape morphing

4D printing provides a means to create dynamic structures for self-actuating devices fabricated by additive manufacturing techniques. Most existing 4D printing processes are only capable of one-way shape morphing using a single mechanism for stimulation. In the limited successful reversible 4D-printing studies, most only demonstrate 2D-to-3D shape morphing. This study introduces a contactless shape setting mechanism to empower reversible 4D printing using a combination of stimuli. The forward shape programming is realised by asymmetric swelling with heated ethanol, and the shape recovery is accomplished by dry heating. The shape morphing can be predicted using a simulation model. Several designs are 4D-printed to achieve different forms of morphing to obtain 3D-to-3D shape morphing. The entire shape morphing cycle could be completed within as short as 3 min. The capability of 3D-to-3D shape morphing and reversibility of our 4D-printing process promise great potential for different applications such as biomimetics and soft robotics