Rocker jaw: Global context for a Polynesian characteristic

Our goal is to describe the global distribution of the ‘rocker jaw’ variant in human populations. Rocker jaw refers to mandibles that lack the antegonial notch, making them unstable on a flat surface. Data were collected by C.G. Turner II on 9207 individuals from Asia, Europe, the Pacific, and the Americas, and by J.D. Irish on 3526 individuals from North and South Africa. With a focus on Polynesia, where the trait is most common, frequencies are presented for subdivisions of Oceania, Australasia, Eurasia, the Americas, and Africa. While the rocker jaw is a Polynesian characteristic, the trait is found throughout the world. Within major geographic regions, there are interesting contrasts, e.g. (1) the similarity of Jomon and Ainu and their difference from modern Japanese; (2) Aleuts and Northwest Coast Indians are similar and both are distinct from the Inuit and other Native Americans; and (3) North and Sub-Saharan Africans show a regional difference that parallels genetic and dental distinctions. Skeletons in South America that exhibit the rocker jaw have been interpreted as Polynesian voyagers who ventured to the west coast of South America. The rarity of rocker jaw in South American natives supports this view. The rocker jaw can be attributed to the unique basicranium morphology and large upper facial height of Polynesians, which highlights the integrated growth of a functional module (i.e., mastication) of the craniofacial complex. The unusually high frequency of the trait in Polynesians is a product of both function and founder effect/genetic drift

RosettaAntibody: antibody variable region homology modeling server

The RosettaAntibody server (http://antibody.graylab.jhu.edu) predicts the structure of an antibody variable region given the amino-acid sequences of the respective light and heavy chains. In an initial stage, the server identifies and displays the most sequence homologous template structures for the light and heavy framework regions and each of the complementarity determining region (CDR) loops. Subsequently, the most homologous templates are assembled into a side-chain optimized crude model, and the server returns a picture and coordinate file. For users requesting a high-resolution model, the server executes the full RosettaAntibody protocol which additionally models the hyper-variable CDR H3 loop. The high-resolution protocol also relieves steric clashes by optimizing the CDR backbone torsion angles and by simultaneously perturbing the relative orientation of the light and heavy chains. RosettaAntibody generates 2000 independent structures, and the server returns pictures, coordinate files, and detailed scoring information for the 10 top-scoring models. The 10 models enable users to use rational judgment in choosing the best model or to use the set as an ensemble for further studies such as docking. The high-resolution models generated by RosettaAntibody have been used for the successful prediction of antibody–antigen complex structures

Probing host pathogen cross-talk by transcriptional profiling of both Mycobacterium tuberculosis and infected human dendritic cells and macrophages

This study provides the proof of principle that probing the host and the microbe transcriptomes simultaneously is a valuable means to accessing unique information on host pathogen interactions. Our results also underline the extraordinary plasticity of host cell and pathogen responses to infection, and provide a solid framework to further understand the complex mechanisms involved in immunity to M. tuberculosis and in mycobacterial adaptation to different intracellular environments

Identification of Novel Predictor Classifiers for Inflammatory Bowel Disease by Gene Expression Profiling

BACKGROUND: Improvement of patient quality of life is the ultimate goal of biomedical research, particularly when dealing with complex, chronic and debilitating conditions such as inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). This is largely dependent on receiving an accurate and rapid diagnose, an effective treatment and in the prediction and prevention of side effects and complications. The low sensitivity and specificity of current markers burden their general use in the clinical practice. New biomarkers with accurate predictive ability are needed to achieve a personalized approach that take the inter-individual differences into consideration. METHODS: We performed a high throughput approach using microarray gene expression profiling of colon pinch biopsies from IBD patients to identify predictive transcriptional signatures associated with intestinal inflammation, differential diagnosis (Crohn's disease or ulcerative colitis), response to glucocorticoids (resistance and dependence) or prognosis (need for surgery). Class prediction was performed with self-validating Prophet software package. RESULTS: Transcriptional profiling divided patients in two subgroups that associated with degree of inflammation. Class predictors were identified with predictive accuracy ranging from 67 to 100%. The expression accuracy was confirmed by real time-PCR quantification. Functional analysis of the predictor genes showed that they play a role in immune responses to bacteria (PTN, OLFM4 and LILRA2), autophagy and endocytocis processes (ATG16L1, DNAJC6, VPS26B, RABGEF1, ITSN1 and TMEM127) and glucocorticoid receptor degradation (STS and MMD2). CONCLUSIONS: We conclude that using analytical algorithms for class prediction discovery can be useful to uncover gene expression profiles and identify classifier genes with potential stratification utility of IBD patients, a major step towards personalized therapy

Detecting natural disasters, damage, and incidents in the wild

Responding to natural disasters, such as earthquakes, floods, and wildfires, is a laborious task performed by on-the-ground emergency responders and analysts. Social media has emerged as a low-latency data source to quickly understand disaster situations. While most studies on social media are limited to text, images offer more information for understanding disaster and incident scenes. However, no large-scale image datasets for incident detection exists. In this work, we present the Incidents Dataset, which contains 446,684 images annotated by humans that cover 43 incidents across a variety of scenes. We employ a baseline classification model that mitigates false-positive errors and we perform image filtering experiments on millions of social media images from Flickr and Twitter. Through these experiments, we show how the Incidents Dataset can be used to detect images with incidents in the wild. Code, data, and models are available online at http://incidentsdataset.csail.mit.edu.Comment: ECCV 202

Cancer incidence patterns by region and socioeconomic deprivation in teenagers and young adults in England

Data on 35 291 individuals with cancer, aged 13–24 years, in England from 1979 to 2001 were analysed by region and socio-economic deprivation of census ward of residence, as measured by the Townsend deprivation index. The incidence of leukaemia, lymphoma, central nervous system tumours, soft tissue sarcomas, gonadal germ cell tumours, melanoma and carcinomas varied by region (P<0.01, all groups) but bone tumour incidence did not. Lymphomas, central nervous system tumours and gonadal germ cell tumours all had higher incidence in less deprived census wards (P<0.01), while chronic myeloid leukaemia and carcinoma of the cervix had higher incidence in more deprived wards (P<0.01). In the least deprived wards, melanoma incidence was nearly twice that in the most deprived, but this trend varied between regions (P<0.001). These cancer incidence patterns differ from those seen in both children and older adults and have implications for aetiology and prevention

The Role of Individual Variables, Organizational Variables and Moral Intensity Dimensions in Libyan Management Accountants’ Ethical Decision Making

This study investigates the association of a broad set of variables with the ethical decision making of management accountants in Libya. Adopting a cross-sectional methodology, a questionnaire including four different ethical scenarios was used to gather data from 229 participants. For each scenario, ethical decision making was examined in terms of the recognition, judgment and intention stages of Rest’s model. A significant relationship was found between ethical recognition and ethical judgment and also between ethical judgment and ethical intention, but ethical recognition did not significantly predict ethical intention—thus providing support for Rest’s model. Organizational variables, age and educational level yielded few significant results. The lack of significance for codes of ethics might reflect their relative lack of development in Libya, in which case Libyan companies should pay attention to their content and how they are supported, especially in the light of the under-development of the accounting profession in Libya. Few significant results were also found for gender, but where they were found, males showed more ethical characteristics than females. This unusual result reinforces the dangers of gender stereotyping in business. Personal moral philosophy and moral intensity dimensions were generally found to be significant predictors of the three stages of ethical decision making studied. One implication of this is to give more attention to ethics in accounting education, making the connections between accounting practice and (in Libya) Islam. Overall, this study not only adds to the available empirical evidence on factors affecting ethical decision making, notably examining three stages of Rest’s model, but also offers rare insights into the ethical views of practising management accountants and provides a benchmark for future studies of ethical decision making in Muslim majority countries and other parts of the developing world

Childhood solid tumours in relation to infections in the community in Cumbria during pregnancy and around thetime of birth

In a retrospective cohort study of all 99 976 live births in Cumbria, 1975–1992, we investigated whether higher levels of community infections during the mother's pregnancy and in early life were risk factors for solid tumours (brain/spinal and other tumours), diagnosed 1975–1993 under age 15 years. Logistic regression was used to relate risk to incidence of community infections in three prenatal and two postnatal quarters. There was an increased risk of brain/spinal tumours among children exposed around or soon after birth to higher levels of community infections, in particular measles (OR for trend=2.1, 95%CI : 1.3–3.6, P=0.008) and influenza (OR for exposure=3.3, 95%CI : 1.5–7.4, P=0.005). There was some evidence of an association between exposure to infections around and soon after birth and risk of other tumours, but this may have been a chance finding. The findings are consistent with other recent epidemiological studies suggesting brain tumours may be associated with perinatal exposure to infections

Breastfeeding and risk of childhood CNS tumours

We investigated infant feeding habits in relation to risk of childhood central nervous system tumours among 633 cases in the UK Childhood Cancer Study (UKCCS). No significant effect of breastfeeding was detected overall (odds ratio 1.01, confidence interval: 0.85–1.21) nor in any morphological subgroup. Similarly, no effect for the duration of breastfeeding or any other feeding practices was observed