Weekly and Holiday-Related Patterns of Panic Attacks in Panic Disorder: A Population-Based Study

Background: While chronobiological studies have reported seasonal variation in panic attacks (PA) episodes, information on the timing of PA by week-days may enable better understanding of the triggers of PA episodes and thereby provide pointers for suitable interventional approaches to minimize PA attacks. This study investigated weekly variation in potential PA admissions including associations with holidays using a population-based longitudinal, administrative claims-based dataset in an Asian population. Methods: This study used ambulatory care data from the ‘‘Longitudinal Health Insurance Database 2000. We identified 993 patients with panic disorder (PD), and they had 4228 emergency room (ER) admissions for potential PA in a 3-year period between 1 January 2009 and 31 December 2011. One-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) was used to examine associations between the potential PA admissions and holidays/weekend days/work-days of the week. Results: The daily mean number of potential PA admissions was 3.96 (standard deviation 2.05). One-way ANOVA showed significant differences in potential PA admissions by holiday and day of the week (p,0.001). Daily frequencies showed a trough on Wednesday-Thursday, followed by a sharp increase on Saturday and a peak on Sunday. Potential PA admissions were higher than the daily mean for the sample patients by 29.4% and 22.1%, respectively on Sundays and holidays. Furthermore, the weekly variations were similar for females and males, although females always had higher potential PA admissions on both weekdays and holidays than the males. Conclusions: We found that potential PA admissions among persons with PD varied systematically by day of the week, with a significant peak on weekends and holidays

Phylogeography of the endangered orchids Cypripedium japonicum and Cypripedium formosanum in East Asia: Deep divergence at infra- and interspecific levels

To date, little is known about the past evolutionary trajectories of rare and endangered orchids native to mainland China, Japan, and Korea (the CJK region). In this study, we focus on two endangered orchids, Cypripedium japonicum (present in the three countries) and C. formosanum (endemic to Taiwan), to understand the divergence/speciation models that would have been operating in this group, including genetic diversity, geographic structure, and colonization pathways across the region. Using a combination of five cpDNA regions, we reconstructed phylogenetic trees and investigated the genetic diversity/structure of 20 populations. Ecological niche modeling was used to gain insight into the paleodistribution and dispersal corridors at the Last Glacial Maximum and to survey climatic niche differences. Populations from mainland China + Korea, Japan, and Taiwan formed three distinct monophyletic lineages and were placed into separate genetic clusters, agreeing with geographic barriers and species boundaries. Populations of C. japonicum in mainland China harbored the highest diversity, suggesting the presence of multiple glacial refugia. The Korean populations would have originated from either western/central or eastern China, probably using a dispersal corridor across the East China Sea shelf. The divergence of C. formosanum is proposed under an allopatric speciation model, also highly influenced by a climate niche shift. In the context of previous studies, a deep divergence in cpDNA sequences between Chinese + Korean and Japanese populations of C. japonicum may be taken as an example of the speciation events of the CJK flora since the late Neogene that have led to its current species richness.This study was supported by the Biodiversity Survey, Observation and Assessment Program of the Ministry of Ecology and Environment of China to HZT and by Basic Science Program through the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF-2017R1A2B4012215) to MGC, and funded by the Ministry of Science and ICT of the Republic of Korea (NRF-2020R1I1A3074635) to MYC.INTRODUCTION MATERIALS AND METHODS Study species Population sampling DNA extraction cpDNA-PCR optimum primer selection cpDNA sequence alignment and assembly Haplotype distribution, phylogenetic analyses, and genetic diversity Genetic differentiation and structure Mismatch distribution analysis, neutrality detection, and demographic history ENM and population connectivity Niche comparisons in E-space RESULTS Haplotype distribution and phylogeny Genetic diversity Genetic differentiation and structure Mismatch distribution analysis, neutrality detection, and demographic history ENM and population connectivity Niche comparisons in E-space DISCUSSION Deep genetic and climatic divergence of Cypripedium sect. Flabellinervia in the CJK region: taxonomic considerations Haplotype and nucleotide diversity in Cypripedium sect. Flabellinervia: inference of glacial refugia and demographic history Origin of Korean populations of Cypripedium japonicum Origin of Cypripedium formosanum CONCLUSIONS AUTHOR CONTRIBUTIONS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Appendix 1: The cpDNA sequence information of Cypripedium sect. Flabellinervia deposited in the GenBank databas

A Semi-automatic Approach to Identifying and Unifying Ambiguously Encoded Arabic-Based Characters

In this study, we outline a potential problem in normalising texts that are based on a modified version of the Arabic alphabet. One of the main resources available for processing resource-scarce languages is raw text collected from the Internet. Many less-resourced languages, such as Kurdish, Farsi, Urdu, Pashtu, etc., use a modified version of the Arabic writing system. Many characters in harvested data from the Internet may have exactly the same form but encoded with different Unicode values (ambiguous characters). The existence of ambiguous characters in words leads to word duplication, thus it is important to identify and unify ambiguous characters during the normalisation stage. Here, we demonstrate cases related to ambiguous Kurdish and Farsi characters and propose a semi-automatic approach to identifying and unifying them

Tet oncogene family member 2 gene alterations in childhood acute myeloid leukemia

Background/PurposeMutations in the tet oncogene family member 2 gene (TET2) are frequently found in adult patients with acute myeloid leukemia (AML). Reports of TET2 mutations in children are limited. We assessed the prevalence of TET2 mutations in Taiwanese children with AML and analyzed their prognosis.MethodsBetween 1997 and 2010, a total of 69 consecutive children with AML were enrolled at the National Taiwan University Hospital. The analysis for TET2 mutations was performed using direct sequencing. Clinical characteristics and overall survival (OS) were compared between patients with and without TET2 alterations.ResultsIntronic and missense mutations were identified. No nonsense or frameshift mutations were observed. Two putative disease-causing missense mutations (S609C and A1865G) were identified in one patient. We estimated the prevalence of TET2 mutations in the current patient population to be 1.4%. The most common polymorphism was I1762V (45%), followed by V218M (12%), P29R (6%), and F868L (6%). Patients with polymorphism I1762V had an increased 10-year survival rate compared with patients without I1762V (48.4% vs. 25.7%, p = 0.049) by Chi-square test; OS was not different when examined using the Kaplan–Meier method (p = 0.104).ConclusionThe prevalence of TET2 mutations in children with AML compared with adults with AML was lower and less complex. Patient prognosis associated with TET2 mutations in children requires further investigation

3D-Printed Artificial Microfish

Hydrogel microfish featuring biomimetic structures, locomotive capabilities, and functionalized nanoparticles are engineered using a rapid 3D printing platform: microscale continuous ­optical printing (μCOP). The 3D-printed ­microfish exhibit chemically powered and magnetically guided propulsion, as well as highly efficient detoxification capabilities that highlight the technical versatility of this platform for engineering advanced functional microswimmers for diverse biomedical applications

DeepSF: deep convolutional neural network for mapping protein sequences to folds

Motivation Protein fold recognition is an important problem in structural bioinformatics. Almost all traditional fold recognition methods use sequence (homology) comparison to indirectly predict the fold of a tar get protein based on the fold of a template protein with known structure, which cannot explain the relationship between sequence and fold. Only a few methods had been developed to classify protein sequences into a small number of folds due to methodological limitations, which are not generally useful in practice. Results We develop a deep 1D-convolution neural network (DeepSF) to directly classify any protein se quence into one of 1195 known folds, which is useful for both fold recognition and the study of se quence-structure relationship. Different from traditional sequence alignment (comparison) based methods, our method automatically extracts fold-related features from a protein sequence of any length and map it to the fold space. We train and test our method on the datasets curated from SCOP1.75, yielding a classification accuracy of 80.4%. On the independent testing dataset curated from SCOP2.06, the classification accuracy is 77.0%. We compare our method with a top profile profile alignment method - HHSearch on hard template-based and template-free modeling targets of CASP9-12 in terms of fold recognition accuracy. The accuracy of our method is 14.5%-29.1% higher than HHSearch on template-free modeling targets and 4.5%-16.7% higher on hard template-based modeling targets for top 1, 5, and 10 predicted folds. The hidden features extracted from sequence by our method is robust against sequence mutation, insertion, deletion and truncation, and can be used for other protein pattern recognition problems such as protein clustering, comparison and ranking.Comment: 28 pages, 13 figure