Body mass index and blood pressure in a semi-urban community in Ota, Nigeria

This study was designed to establish the relationship between body mass index (BMI) and blood pressure (BP) in an increasingly industrialised town in Nigeria due to the rising prevalence of hypertension in non-industrialised countries. Factors associated with BMI and BP levels were determined in three hundred adult male and female subjects in Ota community of Ogun State, Nigeria. The levels of the overweight among the male and female subjects were 53.03 % and 47.37 % respectively. The levels of hypertensive male and female subjects were 40.91 % and 35.34 % respectively. The overweight and underweight among the hypertensive male were 54.29 % and 0 % respectively; while the overweight and underweight among the hypertensive female were 42.86 % and 28.57 % respectively. Hypertension among the overweight, and hypotension among the underweight, are major health concern in Ota that requires intensive medical care

Genomic Standards Consortium projects

© The Author(s), 2014. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in Standards in Genomic Sciences 9 (2014): 599-601, doi:10.4056/sigs.5559680.The Genomic Standards Consortium (GSC) is an open-membership community working towards the development, implementation and harmonization of standards in the field of genomics. The mission of the GSC is to improve digital descriptions of genomes, metagenomes and gene marker sequences. The GSC started in late 2005 with the defined task of establishing what is now termed the “Minimum Information about any Sequence” (MIxS) standard [1,2]. As an outgrowth of the activities surrounding the creation and implementation of the MixS standard there are now 18 projects within the GSC [3]. These efforts cover an ever widening range of standardization activities. Given the growth of projects and to promote transparency, participation and adoption the GSC has developed a “GSC Project Description Template”. A complete set of GSC Project Descriptions and the template are available on the GSC website. The GSC has an open policy of participation and continues to welcome new efforts. Any projects that facilitate the standard descriptions and exchange of data are potential candidates for inclusion under the GSC umbrella. Areas that expand the scope of the GSC are encouraged. Through these collective activities we hope to help foster the growth of the ‘bioinformatics standards’ community. For more information on the GSC and its range of projects, please see http://gensc.org/

American Gut: an Open Platform for Citizen Science Microbiome Research

McDonald D, Hyde E, Debelius JW, et al. American Gut: an Open Platform for Citizen Science Microbiome Research. mSystems. 2018;3(3):e00031-18

A communal catalogue reveals Earth's multiscale microbial diversity

Our growing awareness of the microbial world's importance and diversity contrasts starkly with our limited understanding of its fundamental structure. Despite recent advances in DNA sequencing, a lack of standardized protocols and common analytical frameworks impedes comparisons among studies, hindering the development of global inferences about microbial life on Earth. Here we present a meta-analysis of microbial community samples collected by hundreds of researchers for the Earth Microbiome Project. Coordinated protocols and new analytical methods, particularly the use of exact sequences instead of clustered operational taxonomic units, enable bacterial and archaeal ribosomal RNA gene sequences to be followed across multiple studies and allow us to explore patterns of diversity at an unprecedented scale. The result is both a reference database giving global context to DNA sequence data and a framework for incorporating data from future studies, fostering increasingly complete characterization of Earth's microbial diversity.Peer reviewe

A communal catalogue reveals Earth’s multiscale microbial diversity

Our growing awareness of the microbial world’s importance and diversity contrasts starkly with our limited understanding of its fundamental structure. Despite recent advances in DNA sequencing, a lack of standardized protocols and common analytical frameworks impedes comparisons among studies, hindering the development of global inferences about microbial life on Earth. Here we present a meta-analysis of microbial community samples collected by hundreds of researchers for the Earth Microbiome Project. Coordinated protocols and new analytical methods, particularly the use of exact sequences instead of clustered operational taxonomic units, enable bacterial and archaeal ribosomal RNA gene sequences to be followed across multiple studies and allow us to explore patterns of diversity at an unprecedented scale. The result is both a reference database giving global context to DNA sequence data and a framework for incorporating data from future studies, fostering increasingly complete characterization of Earth’s microbial diversity

Shared heritability and functional enrichment across six solid cancers

Correction: Nature Communications 10 (2019): art. 4386 DOI: 10.1038/s41467-019-12095-8Quantifying the genetic correlation between cancers can provide important insights into the mechanisms driving cancer etiology. Using genome-wide association study summary statistics across six cancer types based on a total of 296,215 cases and 301,319 controls of European ancestry, here we estimate the pair-wise genetic correlations between breast, colorectal, head/neck, lung, ovary and prostate cancer, and between cancers and 38 other diseases. We observed statistically significant genetic correlations between lung and head/neck cancer (r(g) = 0.57, p = 4.6 x 10(-8)), breast and ovarian cancer (r(g) = 0.24, p = 7 x 10(-5)), breast and lung cancer (r(g) = 0.18, p = 1.5 x 10(-6)) and breast and colorectal cancer (r(g) = 0.15, p = 1.1 x 10(-4)). We also found that multiple cancers are genetically correlated with non-cancer traits including smoking, psychiatric diseases and metabolic characteristics. Functional enrichment analysis revealed a significant excess contribution of conserved and regulatory regions to cancer heritability. Our comprehensive analysis of cross-cancer heritability suggests that solid tumors arising across tissues share in part a common germline genetic basis.Peer reviewe

Shared heritability and functional enrichment across six solid cancers

Quantifying the genetic correlation between cancers can provide important insights into the mechanisms driving cancer etiology. Using genome-wide association study summary statistics across six cancer types based on a total of 296,215 cases and 301,319 controls of European ancestry, here we estimate the pair-wise genetic correlations between breast, colorectal, head/neck, lung, ovary and prostate cancer, and between cancers and 38 other diseases. We observed statistically significant genetic correlations between lung and head/neck cancer (r(g) = 0.57, p = 4.6 x 10(-8)), breast and ovarian cancer (r(g) = 0.24, p = 7 x 10(-5)), breast and lung cancer (r(g) = 0.18, p = 1.5 x 10(-6)) and breast and colorectal cancer (r(g) = 0.15, p = 1.1 x 10(-4)). We also found that multiple cancers are genetically correlated with non-cancer traits including smoking, psychiatric diseases and metabolic characteristics. Functional enrichment analysis revealed a significant excess contribution of conserved and regulatory regions to cancer heritability. Our comprehensive analysis of cross-cancer heritability suggests that solid tumors arising across tissues share in part a common germline genetic basis

Accurate estimation of fungal diversity and abundance through improved lineage-specific primers optimized for Illumina amplicon sequencing

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