Historical Perspectives: Unsilencing Suffering: Promoting Maternal Mental Health in Neonatal Intensive Care Units

Mothers of infants in the NICU suffer higher rates of psychological distress, anxiety, and depression compared with the general population. Often, their mental health concerns remain underidentified and undertreated, which can have deleterious effects on the offspring, both in short-term outcomes while in the NICU as well as long-term neurodevelopmental and behavioral outcomes. In this review, we present an overview of existing empirical evidence about how maternal mental health affects the health of infants, special considerations regarding the mental health needs of NICU mothers, and the findings about existing and developing interventions to address mental health concerns in this vulnerable population

Assessment of the response of pollinator abundance to environmental pressures using structured expert elicitation

Policy-makers often need to rely on experts with disparate fields of expertise when making policy choices in complex, multi-faceted, dynamic environments such as those dealing with ecosystem services. For policy-makers wishing to make evidence-based decisions which will best support pollinator abundance and pollination services, one of the problems faced is how to access the information and evidence they need, and how to combine it to formulate and evaluate candidate policies. This is even more complex when multiple factors provide influence in combination. The pressures affecting the survival and pollination capabilities of honey bees (Apis mellifera), wild bees, and other pollinators are well documented, but incomplete. In order to estimate the potential effectiveness of various candidate policy choices, there is an urgent need to quantify the effect of various combinations of factors on the pollination ecosystem service. Using high-quality experimental evidence is the most robust approach, but key aspects of the system may not be amenable to experimentation or may be prohibitive based on cost, time and effort. In such cases, it is possible to obtain the required evidence by using structured expert elicitation, a method for quantitatively characterizing the state of knowledge about an uncertain quantity. Here we report and discuss the outputs of the novel use of a structured expert elicitation, designed to quantify the probability of good pollinator abundance given a variety of weather, disease, and habitat scenarios

Extended Analysis of HIV Infection in Cisgender Men and Transgender Women Who Have Sex with Men Receiving Injectable Cabotegravir for HIV Prevention: HPTN 083

HPTN 083 demonstrated that injectable cabotegravir (CAB) was superior to oral tenofovir disoproxil fumarate-emtricitabine (TDF-FTC) for HIV prevention in cisgender men and transgender women who have sex with men. We previously analyzed 58 infections in the blinded phase of HPTN 083 (16 in the CAB arm and 42 in the TDF-FTC arm). This report describes 52 additional infections that occurred up to 1 year after study unblinding (18 in the CAB arm and 34 in the TDF-FTC arm). Retrospective testing included HIV testing, viral load testing, quantification of study drug concentrations, and drug resistance testing. The new CAB arm infections included 7 with CAB administration within 6 months of the first HIV-positive visit (2 with on-time injections, 3 with ≥1 delayed injection, and 2 who restarted CAB) and 11 with no recent CAB administration. Three cases had integrase strand transfer inhibitor (INSTI) resistance (2 with on-time injections and 1 who restarted CAB). Among 34 CAB infections analyzed to date, diagnosis delays and INSTI resistance were significantly more common in infections with CAB administration within 6 months of the first HIV-positive visit. This report further characterizes HIV infections in persons receiving CAB preexposure prophylaxis and helps define the impact of CAB on the detection of infection and the emergence of INSTI resistance

Gene content evolution in the arthropods

Arthropods comprise the largest and most diverse phylum on Earth and play vital roles in nearly every ecosystem. Their diversity stems in part from variations on a conserved body plan, resulting from and recorded in adaptive changes in the genome. Dissection of the genomic record of sequence change enables broad questions regarding genome evolution to be addressed, even across hyper-diverse taxa within arthropods. Using 76 whole genome sequences representing 21 orders spanning more than 500 million years of arthropod evolution, we document changes in gene and protein domain content and provide temporal and phylogenetic context for interpreting these innovations. We identify many novel gene families that arose early in the evolution of arthropods and during the diversification of insects into modern orders. We reveal unexpected variation in patterns of DNA methylation across arthropods and examples of gene family and protein domain evolution coincident with the appearance of notable phenotypic and physiological adaptations such as flight, metamorphosis, sociality, and chemoperception. These analyses demonstrate how large-scale comparative genomics can provide broad new insights into the genotype to phenotype map and generate testable hypotheses about the evolution of animal diversity

The state of the Martian climate

60°N was +2.0°C, relative to the 1981–2010 average value (Fig. 5.1). This marks a new high for the record. The average annual surface air temperature (SAT) anomaly for 2016 for land stations north of starting in 1900, and is a significant increase over the previous highest value of +1.2°C, which was observed in 2007, 2011, and 2015. Average global annual temperatures also showed record values in 2015 and 2016. Currently, the Arctic is warming at more than twice the rate of lower latitudes

A Novel Extracellular Hsp90 Mediated Co-Receptor Function for LRP1 Regulates EphA2 Dependent Glioblastoma Cell Invasion

Extracellular Hsp90 protein (eHsp90) potentiates cancer cell motility and invasion through a poorly understood mechanism involving ligand mediated function with its cognate receptor LRP1. Glioblastoma multiforme (GBM) represents one of the most aggressive and lethal brain cancers. The receptor tyrosine kinase EphA2 is overexpressed in the majority of GBM specimens and is a critical mediator of GBM invasiveness through its AKT dependent activation of EphA2 at S897 (P-EphA2(S897)). We explored whether eHsp90 may confer invasive properties to GBM via regulation of EphA2 mediated signaling.We find that eHsp90 signaling is essential for sustaining AKT activation, P-EphA2(S897), lamellipodia formation, and concomitant GBM cell motility and invasion. Furthermore, eHsp90 promotes the recruitment of LRP1 to EphA2 in an AKT dependent manner. A finding supported by biochemical methodology and the dual expression of LRP1 and P-EphA2(S897) in primary and recurrent GBM tumor specimens. Moreover, hypoxia mediated facilitation of GBM motility and invasion is dependent upon eHsp90-LRP1 signaling. Hypoxia dramatically elevated surface expression of both eHsp90 and LRP1, concomitant with eHsp90 dependent activation of src, AKT, and EphA2.We herein demonstrate a novel crosstalk mechanism involving eHsp90-LRP1 dependent regulation of EphA2 function. We highlight a dual role for eHsp90 in transducing signaling via LRP1, and in facilitating LRP1 co-receptor function for EphA2. Taken together, our results demonstrate activation of the eHsp90-LRP1 signaling axis as an obligate step in the initiation and maintenance of AKT signaling and EphA2 activation, thereby implicating this pathway as an integral component contributing to the aggressive nature of GBM

Undisclosed Antiretroviral Drug Use in a Multinational Clinical Trial (HIV Prevention Trials Network 052)

The HIV Prevention Trials Network 052 study enrolled serodiscordant couples. Index participants infected with human immunodeficiency virus reported no prior antiretroviral (ARV) treatment at enrollment. ARV drug testing was performed retrospectively using enrollment samples from a subset of index participants. ARV drugs were detected in 45 of 96 participants (46.9%) with an undetectable viral load, 2 of 48 (4.2%) with a low viral load, and 1 of 65 (1.5%) with a high viral load (P < .0001); they were also detected in follow-up samples from participants who were not receiving study-administered treatment. ARV drug testing may be useful in addition to self-report of ARV drug use in some clinical trial settings

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

ENIGMA and global neuroscience: A decade of large-scale studies of the brain in health and disease across more than 40 countries

This review summarizes the last decade of work by the ENIGMA (Enhancing NeuroImaging Genetics through Meta Analysis) Consortium, a global alliance of over 1400 scientists across 43 countries, studying the human brain in health and disease. Building on large-scale genetic studies that discovered the first robustly replicated genetic loci associated with brain metrics, ENIGMA has diversified into over 50 working groups (WGs), pooling worldwide data and expertise to answer fundamental questions in neuroscience, psychiatry, neurology, and genetics. Most ENIGMA WGs focus on specific psychiatric and neurological conditions, other WGs study normal variation due to sex and gender differences, or development and aging; still other WGs develop methodological pipelines and tools to facilitate harmonized analyses of "big data" (i.e., genetic and epigenetic data, multimodal MRI, and electroencephalography data). These international efforts have yielded the largest neuroimaging studies to date in schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, major depressive disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, substance use disorders, obsessive-compulsive disorder, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, autism spectrum disorders, epilepsy, and 22q11.2 deletion syndrome. More recent ENIGMA WGs have formed to study anxiety disorders, suicidal thoughts and behavior, sleep and insomnia, eating disorders, irritability, brain injury, antisocial personality and conduct disorder, and dissociative identity disorder. Here, we summarize the first decade of ENIGMA's activities and ongoing projects, and describe the successes and challenges encountered along the way. We highlight the advantages of collaborative large-scale coordinated data analyses for testing reproducibility and robustness of findings, offering the opportunity to identify brain systems involved in clinical syndromes across diverse samples and associated genetic, environmental, demographic, cognitive, and psychosocial factors

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