When You Come to a Fork in the Road, Take It (15th Annual Health Sciences Lively Lunch)

In this year’s sponsored but no holds barred lunch, participants had the opportunity to contemplate examples of proactive approaches answering the question posed by the 2015 conference theme, “Where Do We Go From Here?” This year’s lunch theme was inspired by a saying of Lawrence Peter “Yogi” Berra (May 12, 1925–September 22, 2015): “When You Come to a Fork in the Road, Take It.” Researchers increasingly must meet various data management requirements and mandates, while educators are challenged by changing trends in providing curricular content. What choices do these challenges provide to libraries and librarians? In the best case scenarios, they utilize approaches espoused in Yogi Berra’s advice—they follow paths (opportunities) that present themselves, and become partners

Building new twenty-first century medical school libraries from the ground up: challenges, experiences, and lessons learned

The twenty-first century library at a newly opened medical school often differs from those at traditional medical schools. One obvious difference is that the new medical school library tends to be a born-digital library, meaning that the library collection is almost exclusively digital. However, the unique issues related to building a library at a new medical school are not limited to online collections. A unique start-up culture is prevalent, of which newly appointed directors and other library and medical school leaders need to be aware. This special paper provides an overview of best practices experienced in building new medical school libraries from the ground up. The focus is on the key areas faced in a start-up environment, such as budgeting for online collections, space planning, staffing, medical informatics instruction, and library-specific accreditation issues for both allopathic and osteopathic institutions

Blood Pressure Loci Identified with a Gene-Centric Array

Raised blood pressure (BP) is a major risk factor for cardiovascular disease. Previous studies have identified 47 distinct genetic variants robustly associated with BP, but collectively these explain only a few percent of the heritability for BP phenotypes. To find additional BP loci, we used a bespoke gene-centric array to genotype an independent discovery sample of 25,118 individuals that combined hypertensive case-control and general population samples. We followed up four SNPs associated with BP at our p < 8.56 × 10−7 study-specific significance threshold and six suggestively associated SNPs in a further 59,349 individuals. We identified and replicated a SNP at LSP1/TNNT3, a SNP at MTHFR-NPPB independent (r2 = 0.33) of previous reports, and replicated SNPs at AGT and ATP2B1 reported previously. An analysis of combined discovery and follow-up data identified SNPs significantly associated with BP at p < 8.56 × 10−7 at four further loci (NPR3, HFE, NOS3, and SOX6). The high number of discoveries made with modest genotyping effort can be attributed to using a large-scale yet targeted genotyping array and to the development of a weighting scheme that maximized power when meta-analyzing results from samples ascertained with extreme phenotypes, in combination with results from nonascertained or population samples. Chromatin immunoprecipitation and transcript expression data highlight potential gene regulatory mechanisms at the MTHFR and NOS3 loci. These results provide candidates for further study to help dissect mechanisms affecting BP and highlight the utility of studying SNPs and samples that are independent of those studied previously even when the sample size is smaller than that in previous studies