Politicians, Pundits, and Platform Migration: A Comparison of Political Polarization on Parler and Twitter

Parler, a self-proclaimed free speech social media platform founded in 2018, attracted a large influx of new members in 2020 as the result of a highly visible platform migration campaign. Parler usage was linked to the planning of the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the United States Capitol building, leading to a shutdown of the Parler platform. Parler, which is now back online, offers an important lens through which to examine the broader attempts at platform migration in response to changing content moderation and platform governance policies and their impact on political polarization. We begin by examining the network connections between US Congressional Representatives on both Twitter and Parler. We find that Parler has a homogenous population of users, consisting of a single isolated group, where polarization seems irrelevant, while Twitter demonstrates two clearly polarized groups. We compare how politicians and political pundits use Parler differently. Finally, we examine the evolution of Parler including comparing Parler’s own policies before and after the shutdown and reflecting on the future of platforms like Parler and similar platform migration experiments

Automatic categorization of diverse experimental information in the bioscience literature

Background: Curation of information from bioscience literature into biological knowledge databases is a crucial way of capturing experimental information in a computable form. During the biocuration process, a critical first step is to identify from all published literature the papers that contain results for a specific data type the curator is interested in annotating. This step normally requires curators to manually examine many papers to ascertain which few contain information of interest and thus, is usually time consuming. We developed an automatic method for identifying papers containing these curation data types among a large pool of published scientific papers based on the machine learning method Support Vector Machine (SVM). This classification system is completely automatic and can be readily applied to diverse experimental data types. It has been in use in production for automatic categorization of 10 different experimental datatypes in the biocuration process at WormBase for the past two years and it is in the process of being adopted in the biocuration process at FlyBase and the Saccharomyces Genome Database (SGD). We anticipate that this method can be readily adopted by various databases in the biocuration community and thereby greatly reducing time spent on an otherwise laborious and demanding task. We also developed a simple, readily automated procedure to utilize training papers of similar data types from different bodies of literature such as C. elegans and D. melanogaster to identify papers with any of these data types for a single database. This approach has great significance because for some data types, especially those of low occurrence, a single corpus often does not have enough training papers to achieve satisfactory performance. Results: We successfully tested the method on ten data types from WormBase, fifteen data types from FlyBase and three data types from Mouse Genomics Informatics (MGI). It is being used in the curation work flow at WormBase for automatic association of newly published papers with ten data types including RNAi, antibody, phenotype, gene regulation, mutant allele sequence, gene expression, gene product interaction, overexpression phenotype, gene interaction, and gene structure correction. Conclusions: Our methods are applicable to a variety of data types with training set containing several hundreds to a few thousand documents. It is completely automatic and, thus can be readily incorporated to different workflow at different literature-based databases. We believe that the work presented here can contribute greatly to the tremendous task of automating the important yet labor-intensive biocuration effort

Inhibitory Input from the Lateral Hypothalamus to the Ventral Tegmental Area Disinhibits Dopamine Neurons and Promotes Behavioral Activation

Projections from the lateral hypothalamus (LH) to the ventral tegmental area (VTA), containing both GABAergic and glutamatergic components, encode conditioned responses and control compulsive reward-seeking behavior. GABAergic neurons in the LH have been shown to mediate appetitive and feeding-related behaviors. Here we show that the GABAergic component of the LH-VTA pathway supports positive reinforcement and place preference, while the glutamatergic component mediates place avoidance. In addition, our results indicate that photoactivation of these projections modulates other behaviors, such as social interaction and perseverant investigation of a novel object. We provide evidence that photostimulation of the GABAergic LH-VTA component, but not the glutamatergic component, increases dopamine (DA) release in the nucleus accumbens (NAc) via inhibition of local VTA GABAergic neurons. Our study clarifies how GABAergic LH inputs to the VTA can contribute to generalized behavioral activation across multiple contexts, consistent with a role in increasing motivational salience.National Institute of Mental Health (U.S.) (Grant R01-MH102441-01

Decoding Neural Circuits that Control Compulsive Sucrose Seeking

SummaryThe lateral hypothalamic (LH) projection to the ventral tegmental area (VTA) has been linked to reward processing, but the computations within the LH-VTA loop that give rise to specific aspects of behavior have been difficult to isolate. We show that LH-VTA neurons encode the learned action of seeking a reward, independent of reward availability. In contrast, LH neurons downstream of VTA encode reward-predictive cues and unexpected reward omission. We show that inhibiting the LH-VTA pathway reduces “compulsive” sucrose seeking but not food consumption in hungry mice. We reveal that the LH sends excitatory and inhibitory input onto VTA dopamine (DA) and GABA neurons, and that the GABAergic projection drives feeding-related behavior. Our study overlays information about the type, function, and connectivity of LH neurons and identifies a neural circuit that selectively controls compulsive sugar consumption, without preventing feeding necessary for survival, providing a potential target for therapeutic interventions for compulsive-overeating disorder

Annotation of the Drosophila melanogaster euchromatic genome: a systematic review

BACKGROUND: The recent completion of the Drosophila melanogaster genomic sequence to high quality and the availability of a greatly expanded set of Drosophila cDNA sequences, aligning to 78% of the predicted euchromatic genes, afforded FlyBase the opportunity to significantly improve genomic annotations. We made the annotation process more rigorous by inspecting each gene visually, utilizing a comprehensive set of curation rules, requiring traceable evidence for each gene model, and comparing each predicted peptide to SWISS-PROT and TrEMBL sequences. RESULTS: Although the number of predicted protein-coding genes in Drosophila remains essentially unchanged, the revised annotation significantly improves gene models, resulting in structural changes to 85% of the transcripts and 45% of the predicted proteins. We annotated transposable elements and non-protein-coding RNAs as new features, and extended the annotation of untranslated (UTR) sequences and alternative transcripts to include more than 70% and 20% of genes, respectively. Finally, cDNA sequence provided evidence for dicistronic transcripts, neighboring genes with overlapping UTRs on the same DNA sequence strand, alternatively spliced genes that encode distinct, non-overlapping peptides, and numerous nested genes. CONCLUSIONS: Identification of so many unusual gene models not only suggests that some mechanisms for gene regulation are more prevalent than previously believed, but also underscores the complex challenges of eukaryotic gene prediction. At present, experimental data and human curation remain essential to generate high-quality genome annotations

A large scale hearing loss screen reveals an extensive unexplored genetic landscape for auditory dysfunction

The developmental and physiological complexity of the auditory system is likely reflected in the underlying set of genes involved in auditory function. In humans, over 150 non-syndromic loci have been identified, and there are more than 400 human genetic syndromes with a hearing loss component. Over 100 non-syndromic hearing loss genes have been identified in mouse and human, but we remain ignorant of the full extent of the genetic landscape involved in auditory dysfunction. As part of the International Mouse Phenotyping Consortium, we undertook a hearing loss screen in a cohort of 3006 mouse knockout strains. In total, we identify 67 candidate hearing loss genes. We detect known hearing loss genes, but the vast majority, 52, of the candidate genes were novel. Our analysis reveals a large and unexplored genetic landscape involved with auditory function

Surgical Standards for Management of the Axilla in Breast Cancer Clinical Trials with Pathological Complete Response Endpoint.

Advances in the surgical management of the axilla in patients treated with neoadjuvant chemotherapy, especially those with node positive disease at diagnosis, have led to changes in practice and more judicious use of axillary lymph node dissection that may minimize morbidity from surgery. However, there is still significant confusion about how to optimally manage the axilla, resulting in variation among practices. From the viewpoint of drug development, assessment of response to neoadjuvant chemotherapy remains paramount and appropriate assessment of residual disease-the primary endpoint of many drug therapy trials in the neoadjuvant setting-is critical. Therefore decreasing the variability, especially in a multicenter clinical trial setting, and establishing a minimum standard to ensure consistency in clinical trial data, without mandating axillary lymph node dissection, for all patients is necessary. The key elements which include proper staging and identification of nodal involvement at diagnosis, and appropriately targeted management of the axilla at the time of surgical resection are presented. The following protocols have been adopted as standard procedure by the I-SPY2 trial for management of axilla in patients with node positive disease, and present a framework for prospective clinical trials and practice

Erratum: Author Correction: Surgical Standards for Management of the Axilla in Breast Cancer Clinical Trials with Pathological Complete Response Endpoint.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1038/s41523-018-0074-6.]