Profiling molecular and behavioral circadian rhythms in the non-symbiotic sea anemone Nematostella vectensis

© The Author(s), 2015. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in Scientific Reports 5 (2015): 11418, doi:10.1038/srep11418.Endogenous circadian clocks are poorly understood within early-diverging animal lineages. We have characterized circadian behavioral patterns and identified potential components of the circadian clock in the starlet sea anemone, Nematostella vectensis: a model cnidarian which lacks algal symbionts. Using automatic video tracking we showed that Nematostella exhibits rhythmic circadian locomotor activity, which is persistent in constant dark, shifted or disrupted by external dark/light cues and maintained the same rate at two different temperatures. This activity was inhibited by a casein kinase 1δ/ε inhibitor, suggesting a role for CK1 homologue(s) in Nematostella clock. Using high-throughput sequencing we profiled Nematostella transcriptomes over 48 hours under a light-dark cycle. We identified 180 Nematostella diurnally-oscillated transcripts and compared them with previously established databases of adult and larvae of the symbiotic coral Acropora millepora, revealing both shared homologues and unique rhythmic genes. Taken together, this study further establishes Nematostella as a non-symbiotic model organism to study circadian rhythms and increases our understanding about the fundamental elements of circadian regulation and their evolution within the Metazoa.This work was supported by the Israel-US Binational Science Foundation to OL and AMT (Award 2011187). Additional support was provided by the WHOI Early Career Scientist Award to AMT

The Complexity of Social Coordination

Coordination is a challenging everyday task; just think of the last time you organized a party or a meeting involving several people. As a growing part of our social and professional life goes online, an opportunity for an improved coordination process arises. Recently, Gupta et al. proposed entangled queries as a declarative abstraction for data-driven coordination, where the difficulty of the coordination task is shifted from the user to the database. Unfortunately, evaluating entangled queries is very hard, and thus previous work considered only a restricted class of queries that satisfy safety (the coordination partners are fixed) and uniqueness (all queries need to be satisfied). In this paper we significantly extend the class of feasible entangled queries beyond uniqueness and safety. First, we show that we can simply drop uniqueness and still efficiently evaluate a set of safe entangled queries. Second, we show that as long as all users coordinate on the same set of attributes, we can give an efficient algorithm for coordination even if the set of queries does not satisfy safety. In an experimental evaluation we show that our algorithms are feasible for a wide spectrum of coordination scenarios.Comment: VLDB201

Work addiction: An organizational behavior as well as an addictive behavior? : Commentary on: Ten myths about work addiction (Griffiths et al., 2018)

In their critical review, Griffiths et al. (2018) discussed 10 myths in the study of work addiction, and addressed the need to conceptualize and investigate this area of research more carefully. In this commentary, we expand their arguments, suggesting that indeed some of the popular myths have solid evidence-based results in the organizational literature. Yet, some of the arguments are only indirectly related to previous organizational findings. Therefore, we emphasize the need to resolve the ambiguities of work addiction, as well as to develop a comprehensive and interdisciplinary understanding of the well-known phenomenon of addictive work behavior

Predicting Affect Classification in Mental Status Examination Using Machine Learning Face Action Recognition System: A Pilot Study in Schizophrenia Patients

Classifying patients’ affect is a pivotal part of the mental status examination. However, this common practice is often widely inconsistent between raters. Recent advances in the field of Facial Action Recognition (FAR) have enabled the development of tools that can act to identify facial expressions from videos. In this study, we aimed to explore the potential of using machine learning techniques on FAR features extracted from videotaped semi-structured psychiatric interviews of 25 male schizophrenia inpatients (mean age 41.2 years, STD = 11.4). Five senior psychiatrists rated patients’ affect based on the videos. Then, a novel computer vision algorithm and a machine learning method were used to predict affect classification based on each psychiatrist affect rating. The algorithm is shown to have a significant predictive power for each of the human raters. We also found that the eyes facial area contributed the most to the psychiatrists’ evaluation of the patients’ affect. This study serves as a proof-of-concept for the potential of using the machine learning FAR system as a clinician-supporting tool, in an attempt to improve the consistency and reliability of mental status examination

Analysis of common and rare VPS13C variants in late-onset Parkinson disease

Objective We aimed to study the role of coding VPS13C variants in a large cohort of patients with lateonset Parkinson disease (PD) (LOPD). Methods VPS13C and its untranslated regions were sequenced using targeted next-generation sequencing in 1,567 patients with PD and 1,667 controls from 3 cohorts. Association tests of rare potential homozygous and compound heterozygous variants and burden tests for rare heterozygous variants were performed. Common variants were analyzed using logistic regression adjusted for age and sex in each of the cohorts, followed by a meta-analysis. Results No biallelic carriers of rare VPS13C variants were found among patients, and 2 carriers of compound heterozygous variants were found in 2 controls. There was no statistically significant burden of rare (minor allele frequency [MAF] <1%) or very rare (MAF <0.1%) coding VPS13C variants in PD. A VPS13C haplotype including the p.R153H-p.I398I-p.I1132V-p.Q2376Q variants was nominally associated with a reduced risk for PD (meta-analysis of the tagging SNP p.I1132V [odds ratio = 0.48, 95% confidence interval = 0.28–0.82, p = 0.0052]). This haplotype was not in linkage disequilibrium with the known genome-wide association study top hit. Conclusions Our results do not support a role for rare heterozygous or biallelic VPS13C variants in LOPD. Additional genetic replication and functional studies are needed to examine the role of the haplotype identified here associated with reduced risk for PD

Routine Laboratory Results and Thirty Day and One-Year Mortality Risk Following Hospitalization with Acute Decompensated Heart Failure

INTRODUCTION: Several blood tests are performed uniformly in patients hospitalized with acute decompensated heart failure and are predictive of the outcomes: complete blood count, electrolytes, renal function, glucose, albumin and uric acid. We sought to evaluate the relationship between routine admission laboratory tests results, patient characteristics and 30-day and one-year mortality of patients admitted for decompensated heart failure and to construct a simple mortality prediction tool. METHODS: A retrospective population based study. Data from seven tertiary hospitals on all admissions with a principal diagnosis of heart failure during the years 2002-2005 throughout Israel were captured. RESULTS: 8,246 patients were included in the study cohort. Thirty day mortality rate was 8.5% (701 patients) and one-year mortality rate was 28.7% (2,365 patients). Addition of five routine laboratory tests results (albumin, sodium, blood urea, uric acid and WBC) to a set of clinical and demographic characteristics improved c-statistics from 0.76 to 0.81 for 30-days and from 0.72 to 0.76 for one-year mortality prediction (both p-values <0.0001). Three dichotomized abnormal laboratory results with highest odds ratio for one-year mortality (hypoalbuminaemia, hyponatremia and elevated blood urea) were used to construct a simple prediction score, capable of discriminating from 1.1% to 21.4% in 30-day and from 11.6% to 55.6% in one-year mortality rates between patients with a score of 0 (1,477 patients) vs. score of 3 (544 patients). DISCUSSION: A small set of abnormal routine laboratory results upon admission can risk-stratify and independently predict 30-day and one-year mortality in patients hospitalized with acute decompensated heart failure