Age at first birth in women is genetically associated with increased risk of schizophrenia

Prof. Paunio on PGC:n jäsenPrevious studies have shown an increased risk for mental health problems in children born to both younger and older parents compared to children of average-aged parents. We previously used a novel design to reveal a latent mechanism of genetic association between schizophrenia and age at first birth in women (AFB). Here, we use independent data from the UK Biobank (N = 38,892) to replicate the finding of an association between predicted genetic risk of schizophrenia and AFB in women, and to estimate the genetic correlation between schizophrenia and AFB in women stratified into younger and older groups. We find evidence for an association between predicted genetic risk of schizophrenia and AFB in women (P-value = 1.12E-05), and we show genetic heterogeneity between younger and older AFB groups (P-value = 3.45E-03). The genetic correlation between schizophrenia and AFB in the younger AFB group is -0.16 (SE = 0.04) while that between schizophrenia and AFB in the older AFB group is 0.14 (SE = 0.08). Our results suggest that early, and perhaps also late, age at first birth in women is associated with increased genetic risk for schizophrenia in the UK Biobank sample. These findings contribute new insights into factors contributing to the complex bio-social risk architecture underpinning the association between parental age and offspring mental health.Peer reviewe

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Use of short-term culture for identification of Mycobacterium avium subsp. paratuberculosis in tissue from Crohn's disease patients

ObjectiveTo investigate the role of Mycobacterium avium subsp. paratuberculosis (MAP) in Crohn's disease (CD), using short-term mycobacterial culture media.MethodsSixty-three tissue specimens from 27 CD patients and 36 controls were processed and inoculated into a modified 7H9 broth base medium and incubated at 37°C and 5% CO2 for up to 1 year. Acid-fast staining, determination of mycobactin dependency, PCR analysis using two IS900-derived oligonucleotides and hybridization with an internal probe were performed.ResultsMAP was present in six of seven (86%) surgically resected tissue samples and in four of 20 (20%) biopsies, with an overall 37% from CD patients, as compared to two of 36 (5.6%) of control specimens. The presence of MAP in Mycobacterial Growth Indicator Tube (MGIT) cultures was detected within 10–12 weeks for surgically resected tissue and after 40 weeks for biopsy specimens, with no MAP growth detected in 12B* Bactec cultures.ConclusionsBecause MAP was present in 86% of resected tissue compared to 20% of biopsy specimens from CD patients, we speculate that MAP resides in the submucosal layer closer to the active part of the ulcer rather than on the surface of the mucosal cells. Thus, surgically resected tissue cultured in MGIT medium is a favorable protocol for rapid cultivation of MAP and for investigating its role in CD pathogenesis. The data support the mycobacterial role in CD pathogenesis

A novel harbor seal whiskers optimization algorithm

A novel optimization algorithm, namely Harbor Seal Whiskers Optimization Algorithm (HSWOA) is proposed in this work. Harbor seals use their whiskers to find underwater disturbances which are in the form of oscillating spheres and track prey even though they lack lateral-line systems. HSWOA mimics the high-level sensing that seal whiskers possess. As such, HSWOA has an excellent exploration capability for the search space and a high exploitation capacity for exploiting the all-optimum solutions to reach the most optimum solution. To validate these abilities, the proposed HSWOA utilizes two sets of test functions: 33 benchmark functions and five IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation (CEC2019) benchmark functions. The results of HSWOA are compared with ten well-established optimization algorithms. The comparison results show that HSWOA offers superior performance indices to reach an optimum solution while requiring less control variables. The results also show that HSWOA is more efficient regarding computational demand and resolution accuracy. Finally, the HSWOA is employed to track Maximum Power Point (MPP) of Photovoltaic (PV) array with partial shading conditions (PSCs) for two case studies. The results show that HSWOA extracts maximum power in minimum tracking time and high average power capturing capability compared to other optimization techniques