The socioeconomic landscape of the exposome during pregnancy

Background: While socioeconomic position (SEP) is consistently related to pregnancy and birth outcome dis-parities, relevant biological mechanisms are manifold, thus necessitating more comprehensive characterization of SEP-exposome associations during pregnancy. Objectives: We implemented an exposomic approach to systematically characterize the socioeconomic landscape of prenatal exposures in a setting where social segregation was less distinct in a hypotheses-generating manner. Methods: We described the correlation structure of 134 prenatal exogenous and endogenous sources (e.g., micronutrients, hormones, immunomodulatory metabolites, environmental pollutants) collected in a diverse, population-representative, urban, high-income longitudinal mother-offspring cohort (N = 1341; 2009-2011). We examined the associations between maternal, paternal, household, and areal level SEP indicators and 134 ex-posures using multiple regressions adjusted for precision variables, as well as potential effect measure modifi-cation by ethnicity and nativity. Finally, we generated summary SEP indices using Multiple Correspondence Analysis to further explore possible curved relationships. Results: Individual and household SEP were associated with anthropometric/adiposity measures, folate, omega-3 fatty acids, insulin-like growth factor-II, fasting glucose, and neopterin, an inflammatory marker. We observed paternal education was more strongly and consistently related to maternal exposures than maternal education. This was most apparent amongst couples discordant on education. Analyses revealed additional non-linear as-sociations between areal composite SEP and particulate matter. Environmental contaminants (e.g., per-and polyfluoroalkyl substances) and micronutrients (e.g., folate and copper) showed opposing associations by ethnicity and nativity, respectively. Discussion: SEP-exposome relationships are complex, non-linear, and context specific. Our findings reinforce the potential role of paternal contributions and context-specific modifiers of associations, such as between ethnicity and maternal diet-related exposures. Despite weak presumed areal clustering of individual exposures in our context, our approach reinforces subtle non-linearities in areal-level exposures.Peer reviewe

Influence of Fe–N–C morphologies on the oxygen reduction reaction in acidic and alkaline media

The development of nonnoble metal oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) catalysts for fuel cells has been motivated by the high cost and limited supply of noble metals, as well as the desire to improve the performance and durability of this type of energy conversion device. In this study, nonnoble Fe–N–C catalyst was synthesized using a zeolitic imidazole framework (ZIF-8), poly (aniline), and 10,10′-dibromo-9,9′-bianthry as precursors to produce Fe–N–C with hollow sphere (HS), amorphous bulky structure (B), and sheet-like thin sheet (N) structure. The Fe–N–C catalyst was analysed in terms of their shape, crystal structure, pore characteristics, and elemental composition. Among all the Fe–N–C catalysts, Fe–N–C_HS had the highest total surface area, followed by Fe–N–C_B and Fe–N–C_N. To evaluate their ORR catalytic activity, a half-cell electrochemical experiment with.1 M KOH and.1 M HClO 4 as the alkaline and acidic electrolytes was conducted. This study revealed that Fe–N–C_HS exhibited the highest onset potential but the Fe–N–C_B has the highest limiting current density in alkaline medium; meanwhile, in acidic media, Fe–N–C_HS shows the best ORR performance with the highest onset potential and limiting current. This highly porous Fe–N–C_HS catalyst also demonstrated active site activation and excellent stability compared with the other samples as well as commercial Pt/C in acidic electrolyte, which suggests its potential for application in proton exchange membrane fuel cells (PEMFCs)

Validity and Reliability of a Food Frequency Questionnaire (FFQ) to Assess Dietary Intake of Preschool Children

As there are few food frequency questionnaires (FFQ) to assess the dietary intake of preschool children, this study examined the validity and reliability of an FFQ for this purpose. A total of 210 preschoolers aged 4 to 6 years participated in the validation study, while a subsample of 66 participants joined the reliability study. The FFQ is modified from the ToyBox-study and South East Asian Nutrition Surveys (SEANUTS), and comprised 108 food items from 13 food groups. A three-day estimated dietary record (3DR) was used as reference and reliability was assessed through a second administration of the FFQ (FFQ2), four weeks after the first administration (FFQ1). For the validation study, Spearman’s correlation coefficients showed moderate to high correlations (p < 0.001) between FFQ and 3DR. Cross-classification of quartile analysis showed moderate agreement between the two methods. As for reliability, Spearman’s correlation coefficients showed moderate to high correlations (p < 0.001) between FFQ1 and FFQ2. Cronbach’s alpha values (0.708 to 0.824) and intraclass correlation coefficients (0.710 to 0.826) showed good agreement between repeated FFQs. The results suggest that the FFQ has acceptable validity and good reliability. Hence, the FFQ can be used to assess preschool children’s food intake

Mechanism-Based Screen Establishes Signalling Framework for DNA Damage-Associated G1 Checkpoint Response

DNA damage activates checkpoint controls which block progression of cells through the division cycle. Several different checkpoints exist that control transit at different positions in the cell cycle. A role for checkpoint activation in providing resistance of cells to genotoxic anticancer therapy, including chemotherapy and ionizing radiation, is widely recognized. Although the core molecular functions that execute different damage activated checkpoints are known, the signals that control checkpoint activation are far from understood. We used a kinome-spanning RNA interference screen to delineate signalling required for radiation-mediated retinoblastoma protein activation, the recognized executor of G1 checkpoint control. Our results corroborate the involvement of the p53 tumour suppressor (TP53) and its downstream targets p21CIP1/WAF1 but infer lack of involvement of canonical double strand break (DSB) recognition known for its role in activating TP53 in damaged cells. Instead our results predict signalling involving the known TP53 phosphorylating kinase PRPK/TP53RK and the JNK/p38MAPK activating kinase STK4/MST1, both hitherto unrecognised for their contribution to DNA damage G1 checkpoint signalling. Our results further predict a network topology whereby induction of p21CIP1/WAF1 is required but not sufficient to elicit checkpoint activation. Our experiments document a role of the kinases identified in radiation protection proposing their pharmacological inhibition as a potential strategy to increase radiation sensitivity in proliferating cancer cells

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Retrospective evaluation of whole exome and genome mutation calls in 746 cancer samples

Funder: NCI U24CA211006Abstract: The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) and International Cancer Genome Consortium (ICGC) curated consensus somatic mutation calls using whole exome sequencing (WES) and whole genome sequencing (WGS), respectively. Here, as part of the ICGC/TCGA Pan-Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes (PCAWG) Consortium, which aggregated whole genome sequencing data from 2,658 cancers across 38 tumour types, we compare WES and WGS side-by-side from 746 TCGA samples, finding that ~80% of mutations overlap in covered exonic regions. We estimate that low variant allele fraction (VAF < 15%) and clonal heterogeneity contribute up to 68% of private WGS mutations and 71% of private WES mutations. We observe that ~30% of private WGS mutations trace to mutations identified by a single variant caller in WES consensus efforts. WGS captures both ~50% more variation in exonic regions and un-observed mutations in loci with variable GC-content. Together, our analysis highlights technological divergences between two reproducible somatic variant detection efforts

Sharity outreach programme : a promotional effect to inculate pro-social values amongst pre-school children in Singapore.

This project is on a five-day pilot programme, termed 'Sharity Week', held from February 9, 2004 to February 13, 2004 in a PCF pre-school centre.Bachelor of Communication Studie

Han 한

The process and reflection of making the short film Han.Bachelor of Fine Art

Increased Dengue Transmissions in Singapore Attributable to SARS-CoV-2 Social Distancing Measures

10.1093/infdis/jiaa619JOURNAL OF INFECTIOUS DISEASES2233399-40