Movement of Red Snapper, Lutjanus campechanus, in the North Central Gulf of Mexico: Potential Effects of Hurricanes

Site fidelity and movement of red snapper, Lutjanus campechanus, were estimated from a tagging study conducted off the coast of Alabama from March 1995 to January 1997. Red snapper were caught using rod and reel over nine artificial reef sites, with three reefs each located at 21-m, 27-m, and 32-m depths. During the study, 1,604 fish were tagged, and 174 recaptures were made of 167 individuals. On 4 October 1995, the eye of Hurricane Opal passed within 40 km of the artificial reef sites. When recaptures were stratified according to whether or not they were at liberty during Opal, storm effect was the most significant factor in predicting the likelihood of movement and magnitude of movement by tagged red snapper. Eighty percent of recaptured red snapper that were not at liberty during Opal were recaptured at their site of release. Fish that were at liberty during Opal, however, had a significantly higher likelihood of movement away from their site of release (P \u3c 0.001). These fish also moved significantly further than those that were not at liberty during Opal (P \u3c 0.001). Fish that were at liberty during Opal moved a mean distance (± SE) of 32.6 km (± 6.81), compared to a mean distance (± SE) of 2.5 km (± 1.10) for fish that were tagged and recaptured before Opal, and a mean distance (± SE) of 1.7 km (± 0.43) for fish that were tagged and recaptured after Opal. Heretofore, it has generally been accepted that adult red snapper demonstrate strong site fidelity and genetic homogeneity in the stock was hypothesized to result from larval drift or due to historic mixing on longer time scales. This study documents movement of adult red snapper on spatial scales that would facilitate stock mixing and implicates large-scale climatic events, such as hurricanes, as important factors in stock mixing dynamics

Gulf-Wide Decreases in the Size of Large Coastal Sharks Documented by Generations of Fishermen

Large sharks are top predators in most coastal and marine ecosystems throughout the world, and evidence of their reduced prominence in marine ecosystems has been a serious concern for fisheries and ecosystem management. Unfortunately, quantitative data to document the extent, timing, and consequences of changes in shark populations are scarce, thwarting examination of long-term (decadal, century) trends, and reconstructions based on incomplete data sets have been the subject of debate. Absence of quantitative descriptors of past ecological conditions is a generic problem facing many fields of science but is particularly troublesome for fisheries scientists who must develop specific targets for restoration. We were able to use quantitative measurements of shark sizes collected annually and independently of any scientific survey by thousands of recreational fishermen over the last century to document decreases in the size of large sharks from the northern Gulf of Mexico. Based on records from fishing rodeos in three U.S. coastal states, the size (weight or length) of large sharks captured by fishermen decreased by 50–70% during the 20 years after the 1980s. The pattern is largely driven by reductions in the occurrence and sizes of Tiger Sharks Galeocerdo cuvier and Bull Sharks Carcharhinus leucas and to a lesser extent Hammerheads Sphyrna spp. This decrease occurred despite increasing fishing effort and advances in technology, but it is coincident with the capitalization of the U.S. commercial shark long-line fishery in the GOM

Associations between neuropsychiatric symptoms and ADRD serum biomarkers in Mexican American and non-Hispanic white adults with mild cognitive impairment

Background: Mild cognitive impairment (MCI) is a heterogenous diagnostic category with trajectories ranging from reversion to unimpaired cognition to progression to dementia. Neuropsychiatric symptoms such as depression and irritability are common and influence quality of life of patients and caregivers. The role of neuropsychiatric symptoms on disease biology, presentation, and course remains poorly understood. The goal of this study was to evaluate the associations between neuropsychiatric symptoms and serum ADRD biomarkers in Mexican American and non-Hispanic white participants diagnosed with MCI. Method: Participants from the Texas Alzheimer’s Research and Care Consortium underwent a blood draw and clinical evaluation, including psychopathological and cognitive assessments. Diagnoses of MCI were adjudicated in consensus reviews. The presence and severity of neuropsychiatric symptoms were assessed by informant report using the Neuropsychiatric Inventory (NPI). Serum levels of total tau, neurofilament light (NfL), and glial fibrillary acidic protein (GFAP) were assessed using Simoa HD-X Analyzer. Associations between NPI total score and individual items with serum biomarker levels were assessed using linear regression adjusted for age and sex. Result: A total of 425 participants (mean age: 71 ± 9 years, 62% female, 74% Mexican American) had a diagnosis of MCI and serum ADRD biomarkers (Table 1). Total NPI score was not associated with total tau (ß=0.002, p=0.609), NfL (ß=0.001, p=0.658), or GFAP (ß=0.001, p=0.777). However, endorsement of appetite changes was associated with higher NfL (ß=0.077, p=0.006) and GFAP (ß=0.088, p=0.002) levels. Stratified analyses indicated associations of appetite changes with serum NfL (ß=0.108, p=0.002) and GFAP (ß=0.095, p=0.003) in Mexican Americans, but not in non-Hispanic whites (NfL: ß=0.022, p=0.633, GFAP: ß=0.102, p=0.066).There were no other significant associations between individual items on the NPI with serum biomarkers (p\u3e0.05, Bonferroni adjustment p±0.003). Conclusion: Within Mexican American adults with MCI, changes in appetite were associated with higher serum NFL and GFAP levels. As elevations in circulating NfL and GFAP levels are associated with ADRD pathology and accelerated disease progression, appetite changes, a non-invasive and easily discernible behavioral phenotype, may predict higher likelihood of worsening cognitive course. Future longitudinal studies will be necessary to confirm predictive utility of appetite changes for disease progression

Data Mining Approaches to Diffuse Large B–Cell Lymphoma Gene Expression Data Interpretation

This paper presents a comprehensive study of gene expression patterns originating from a diffuse large B–cell lymphoma (DLBCL) database. It focuses on the implementation of feature selection and classification techniques. Thus, it firstly tackles the identification of relevant genes for the prediction of DLBCL types. It also allows the determination of key biomarkers to differentiate two subtypes of DLBCL samples: Activated B–Like and Germinal Centre B–Like DLBCL. Decision trees provide knowledge–based models to predict types and subtypes of DLBCL. This research suggests that the data may be insufficient to accurately predict DLBCL types or even detect functionally relevant genes. However, these methods represent reliable and understandable tools to start thinking about possible interesting non–linear interdependencies

Bayesian hierarchical clustering for studying cancer gene expression data with unknown statistics

Clustering analysis is an important tool in studying gene expression data. The Bayesian hierarchical clustering (BHC) algorithm can automatically infer the number of clusters and uses Bayesian model selection to improve clustering quality. In this paper, we present an extension of the BHC algorithm. Our Gaussian BHC (GBHC) algorithm represents data as a mixture of Gaussian distributions. It uses normal-gamma distribution as a conjugate prior on the mean and precision of each of the Gaussian components. We tested GBHC over 11 cancer and 3 synthetic datasets. The results on cancer datasets show that in sample clustering, GBHC on average produces a clustering partition that is more concordant with the ground truth than those obtained from other commonly used algorithms. Furthermore, GBHC frequently infers the number of clusters that is often close to the ground truth. In gene clustering, GBHC also produces a clustering partition that is more biologically plausible than several other state-of-the-art methods. This suggests GBHC as an alternative tool for studying gene expression data. The implementation of GBHC is available at https://sites. google.com/site/gaussianbhc

Point-of-care Xpert® MTB/RIF for smear-negative tuberculosis suspects at a primary care clinic in South Africa

To assess the clinical utility and cost of point-of-care Xpert® MTB/RIF for the diagnosis of smear-negative tuberculosis (TB)

S5S^5: Probing the Milky Way and Magellanic Clouds potentials with the 6-D map of the Orphan-Chenab stream

We present a 6-D map of the Orphan-Chenab (OC) stream by combining the data from 5 years of Southern Stellar Stream Spectroscopic Survey $S^5$ observations with Gaia EDR3 data. We reconstruct the proper motion, radial velocity, distance and on-sky track of stream stars with spline models and extract the stellar density along the stream. The stream has a total luminosity of $M_V=-8.2$ and an average metallicity of $[Fe/H]=-1.9$, similar to classical MW satellites like Draco. The stream shows drastic changes in its physical width varying from 200 pc to 1 kpc, a constant line of sight velocity dispersion of 5 km/s, but an increase in the velocity dispersion along the stream near pericenter to $\sim$ 10 km/s. Despite the large apparent variation in the stellar number density along the stream, the flow rate of stars along the stream is remarkably constant. We model the 6-D stream track by a Lagrange-point stripping method with a flexible MW potential in the presence of a moving extended LMC potential. This allows us to constrain the mass profile of the MW within the distance range 15.6 < r < 55.5 kpc, with the best measured enclosed mass of $(2.85\pm 0.1)\times10^{11}\,M_\odot$ within 32.4 kpc. With the OC stream's closest approach distance to the LMC of $\sim 21$ kpc, our stream measurements are highly sensitive to the LMC mass profile with the most precise measurement of the LMC's enclosed mass being at 32.8 kpc with $M=(7.02\pm 0.9)\times10^{10}\, {M}_\odot$. We confidently detect that the LMC DM halo extends to at least 53 kpc. The fitting of the OC stream allows us to constrain the past LMC trajectory and the degree of dynamical friction it experienced. We demonstrate that the stars on the OC stream show large energy and angular momentum spreads caused by the LMC perturbation and revealing the limitations of orbital invariants for substructure identification in the MW halo.Comment: submitted to MNRAS; comments welcome; data released with the paper is available on Zenodo https://zenodo.org/record/722265

Pain and temperature processing in dementia: a clinical and neuroanatomical analysis

Symptoms suggesting altered processing of pain and temperature have been described in dementia diseases and may contribute importantly to clinical phenotypes, particularly in the frontotemporal lobar degeneration spectrum, but the basis for these symptoms has not been characterized in detail. Here we analysed pain and temperature symptoms using a semi-structured caregiver questionnaire recording altered behavioural responsiveness to pain or temperature for a cohort of patients with frontotemporal lobar degeneration (n = 58, 25 female, aged 52–84 years, representing the major clinical syndromes and representative pathogenic mutations in the C9orf72 and MAPT genes) and a comparison cohort of patients with amnestic Alzheimer’s disease (n = 20, eight female, aged 53–74 years). Neuroanatomical associations were assessed using blinded visual rating and voxel-based morphometry of patients’ brain magnetic resonance images. Certain syndromic signatures were identified: pain and temperature symptoms were particularly prevalent in behavioural variant frontotemporal dementia (71% of cases) and semantic dementia (65% of cases) and in association with C9orf72 mutations (6/6 cases), but also developed in Alzheimer’s disease (45% of cases) and progressive non-fluent aphasia (25% of cases). While altered temperature responsiveness was more common than altered pain responsiveness across syndromes, blunted responsiveness to pain and temperature was particularly associated with behavioural variant frontotemporal dementia (40% of symptomatic cases) and heightened responsiveness with semantic dementia (73% of symptomatic cases) and Alzheimer’s disease (78% of symptomatic cases). In the voxel-based morphometry analysis of the frontotemporal lobar degeneration cohort, pain and temperature symptoms were associated with grey matter loss in a right-lateralized network including insula (P < 0.05 corrected for multiple voxel-wise comparisons within the prespecified anatomical region of interest) and anterior temporal cortex (P < 0.001 uncorrected over whole brain) previously implicated in processing homeostatic signals. Pain and temperature symptoms accompanying C9orf72 mutations were specifically associated with posterior thalamic atrophy (P < 0.05 corrected for multiple voxel-wise comparisons within the prespecified anatomical region of interest). Together the findings suggest candidate cognitive and neuroanatomical bases for these salient but under-appreciated phenotypic features of the dementias, with wider implications for the homeostatic pathophysiology and clinical management of neurodegenerative diseases

Broken into Pieces::ATLAS and Aliqa Uma as One Single Stream

We present the first spectroscopic measurements of the ATLAS and Aliqa Uma streams from the Southern Stellar Stream Spectroscopic Survey ($S^5$), in combination with the photometric data from the Dark Energy Survey and astrometric data from $Gaia$. From the coherence of spectroscopic members in radial velocity and proper motion, we find out that these two systems are extremely likely to be one stream with discontinuity in morphology and density on the sky (the "kink" feature). We refer to this entire stream as the ATLAS-Aliqa Uma stream, or the AAU stream. We perform a comprehensive exploration of the effect of baryonic substructures and find that only an encounter with the Sagittarius dwarf $\sim 0.5$ Gyr ago can create a feature similar to the observed "kink". In addition, we also identify two gaps in the ATLAS component associated with the broadening in the stream width (the "broadening" feature). These gaps have likely been created by small mass perturbers, such as dark matter halos, as the AAU stream is the most distant cold stream known with severe variations in both the stream surface density and the stream track on the sky. With the stream track, stream distance and kinematic information, we determine the orbit of the AAU stream and find that it has been affected by the Large Magellanic Cloud, resulting in a misalignment between the proper motion and stream track. Together with the Orphan-Chenab Stream, AAU is the second stream pair that has been found to be a single stream separated into two segments by external perturbation.Comment: 33 pages, 22 figures (including 1 movie), 3 tables. Accepted for publication in Ap