Creative Approach to Evaluating: The Tri-Fold Display Example

One benefit in working for Extension is the educator\u27s ability to be creative. However, creativity and evaluation typically are not two words an Extension educator uses in the same sentence. This article highlights one creative evaluation strategy used at a youth wildlife camp. The evaluation strategy utilizes a tri-fold display allowing participants the ability to showcase what they learned. From their showcase, the Extension educator can use simple evaluation techniques to determine the most significant item learned. An extra bonus is that these participants use these tri-folds in communities to tell others about their experiences building critical life skills

Expression quantitative trait locus fine mapping of the 17q12–21 asthma locus in African American children: a genetic association and gene expression study

Background: African ancestry is associated with a higher prevalence and greater severity of asthma than European ancestries, yet genetic studies of the most common locus associated with childhood-onset asthma, 17q12–21, in African Americans have been inconclusive. The aim of this study was to leverage both the phenotyping of the Children's Respiratory and Environmental Workgroup (CREW) birth cohort consortium, and the reduced linkage disequilibrium in African Americans, to fine map the 17q12–21 locus. Methods: We first did a genetic association study and meta-analysis using 17q12–21 tag single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) for childhood-onset asthma in 1613 European American and 870 African American children from the CREW consortium. Nine tag SNPs were selected based on linkage disequilibrium patterns at 17q12–21 and their association with asthma, considering the effect allele under an additive model (0, 1, or 2 effect alleles). Results were meta-analysed with publicly available summary data from the EVE consortium (on 4303 European American and 3034 African American individuals) for seven of the nine SNPs of interest. Subsequently, we tested for expression quantitative trait loci (eQTLs) among the SNPs associated with childhood-onset asthma and the expression of 17q12–21 genes in resting peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) from 85 African American CREW children and in upper airway epithelial cells from 246 African American CREW children; and in lower airway epithelial cells from 44 European American and 72 African American adults from a case-control study of asthma genetic risk in Chicago (IL, USA). Findings: 17q12–21 SNPs were broadly associated with asthma in European Americans. Only two SNPs (rs2305480 in gasdermin-B [GSDMB] and rs8076131 in ORMDL sphingolipid biosynthesis regulator 3 [ORMDL3]) were associated with asthma in African Americans, at a Bonferroni-corrected threshold of p<0·0055 (for rs2305480_G, odds ratio [OR] 1·36 [95% CI 1·12–1·65], p=0·0014; and for rs8076131_A, OR 1·37 [1·13–1·67], p=0·0010). In upper airway epithelial cells from African American children, genotype at rs2305480 was the most significant eQTL for GSDMB (eQTL effect size [β] 1·35 [95% CI 1·25–1·46], p<0·0001), and to a lesser extent showed an eQTL effect for post-GPI attachment to proteins phospholipase 3 (β 1·15 [1·08–1·22], p<0·0001). No SNPs were eQTLs for ORMDL3. By contrast, in PBMCs, the five core SNPs were associated only with expression of GSDMB and ORMDL3. Genotype at rs12936231 (in zona pellucida binding protein 2) showed the strongest associations across both genes (for GSDMB, eQTLβ 1·24 [1·15–1·32], p<0·0001; and for ORMDL3 (β 1·19 [1·12–1·24], p<0·0001). The eQTL effects of rs2305480 on GSDMB expression were replicated in lower airway cells from African American adults (β 1·29 [1·15–1·44], p<0·0001). Interpretation: Our study suggests that SNPs regulating GSDMB expression in airway epithelial cells have a major role in childhood-onset asthma, whereas SNPs regulating the expression levels of 17q12–21 genes in resting blood cells are not central to asthma risk. Our genetic and gene expression data in African Americans and European Americans indicated GSDMB to be the leading candidate gene at this important asthma locus.6 month embargo; published: 01 May 2020This item from the UA Faculty Publications collection is made available by the University of Arizona with support from the University of Arizona Libraries. If you have questions, please contact us at [email protected]

Teaching Bioeconomics

Bioeconomics is a relatively young field that uses an expanded microeconomics to examine animal behavior, human behavior, and animal and human social institutions. A voluminous literature is rapidly accumulating. There are as yet no standard textbooks, but there are several excellent books and/or articles that can be used in combination with videos and other aids to make a course that students will enjoy and that teachers can use to advance the frontiers of scholarship in economics and biology. Copyright Springer 2005altruism, conflict, cooperation, evolution, game theory, institutions, rationality,

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Placing changes in the microbiome in the context of the American Gut. We accumulated samples over sequencing runs to demonstrate the structural consistency in the data. We demonstrate that while the ICU dataset (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27602409) falls within the American Gut samples, they do not fall close to most samples at any of the body sites. We then highlight samples from the United Kingdom, Australia, the United States and other countries to show that nationality does not overcome the variation in body site. We then highlight the utility of the American Gut in meta-analysis by reproducing results from (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20668239) and (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23861384), using the AGP dataset as the context for dynamic microbiome changes instead of the HMP dataset. We show rapid, complete recovery of C. diff patients following fecal material transplantation and also contextualized the change in an infant gut over time until it settles into an adult state. This demonstrates the power of the American Gut dataset, both as a cohesive study and as a context for other investigations

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The SEPP (Mirarab et al Pac Symp Biocomput 2012) fragment insertion tree used for phylogenetic analyses

American Gut Project fecal sOTU counts table

The Deblur sOTU counts table for the fecal samples used in the American Gut Project manuscript. The samples were trimmed to a common read length of 125nt, and processed by Deblur (Amir et al mSystems 2017). Blooms were removed (Amir et al mSystems 2017) and any sample with fewer than 1250 sequences was omitted. This table is not rarefied,

Unweighted UniFrac distances

The unweighted UniFrac distance (Lozupone and Knight AEM 2005) matrix of the 9511 fecal samples used in the American Gut paper. UniFrac was computed using Striped UniFrac (https://github.com/biocore/unifrac). Prior to execution of UniFrac, Deblur (Amir et al mSystems 2017) was run on the samples, all bloom sOTUs were removed (Amir et al mSystems 2017), and samples were rarefied to a depth of 1250 reads (Weiss et al Microbiome 2017). For the phylogeny, fragments were inserted using SEPP (Mirarab et al Pac Symp Biocomput 2012) into the Greengenes 13_5 99% OTU tree (McDonald et al ISME 2012)

American Gut Project fecal sOTU relative abundance table

The Deblur sOTU relative abundance table for the fecal samples used in the American Gut Project manuscript. The samples were trimmed to a common read length of 125nt, and processed by Deblur (Amir et al mSystems 2017). Blooms were removed (Amir et al mSystems 2017) and any sample with fewer than 1250 sequences was omitted. This table is not rarefied, and is normalized to 1