Genotype–phenotype correlations in individuals with pathogenic RERE variants

Heterozygous variants in the arginine-glutamic acid dipeptide repeats gene (RERE) have been shown to cause neurodevelopmental disorder with or without anomalies of the brain, eye, or heart (NEDBEH). Here, we report nine individuals with NEDBEH who carry partial deletions or deleterious sequence variants in RERE. These variants were found to be de novo in all cases in which parental samples were available. An analysis of data from individuals with NEDBEH suggests that point mutations affecting the Atrophin-1 domain of RERE are associated with an increased risk of structural eye defects, congenital heart defects, renal anomalies, and sensorineural hearing loss when compared with loss-of-function variants that are likely to lead to haploinsufficiency. A high percentage of RERE pathogenic variants affect a histidine-rich region in the Atrophin-1 domain. We have also identified a recurrent two-amino-acid duplication in this region that is associated with the development of a CHARGE syndrome-like phenotype. We conclude that mutations affecting RERE result in a spectrum of clinical phenotypes. Genotype–phenotype correlations exist and can be used to guide medical decision making. Consideration should also be given to screening for RERE variants in individuals who fulfill diagnostic criteria for CHARGE syndrome but do not carry pathogenic variants in CHD7

Genotype–phenotype correlations in individuals with pathogenic RERE variants

Heterozygous variants in the arginine‐glutamic acid dipeptide repeats gene (RERE) have been shown to cause neurodevelopmental disorder with or without anomalies of the brain, eye, or heart (NEDBEH). Here, we report nine individuals with NEDBEH who carry partial deletions or deleterious sequence variants in RERE. These variants were found to be de novo in all cases in which parental samples were available. An analysis of data from individuals with NEDBEH suggests that point mutations affecting the Atrophin‐1 domain of RERE are associated with an increased risk of structural eye defects, congenital heart defects, renal anomalies, and sensorineural hearing loss when compared with loss‐of‐function variants that are likely to lead to haploinsufficiency. A high percentage of RERE pathogenic variants affect a histidine‐rich region in the Atrophin‐1 domain. We have also identified a recurrent two‐amino‐acid duplication in this region that is associated with the development of a CHARGE syndrome‐like phenotype. We conclude that mutations affecting RERE result in a spectrum of clinical phenotypes. Genotype–phenotype correlations exist and can be used to guide medical decision making. Consideration should also be given to screening for RERE variants in individuals who fulfill diagnostic criteria for CHARGE syndrome but do not carry pathogenic variants in CHD7.We describe nine unrelated individuals who carry partial deletions or putatively deleterious sequence variants in RERE. An analysis of clinical and molecular data from individuals with mutations affecting RERE suggests the existence of novel genotype‐phenotype correlations and demonstrates that a high percentage of RERE pathogenic variants affect a histidine‐rich region in the Atrophin‐1 domain. We have also identified a recurrent two‐amino‐acid duplication in this region that is associated with the development of a CHARGE syndrome‐like phenotype.Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/143789/1/humu23400_am.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/143789/2/humu23400.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/143789/3/humu23400-sup-0001-SuppMat.pd

Scene construction impairments in Alzheimer's disease – A unique role for the posterior cingulate cortex

Episodic memory dysfunction represents one of the most prominent and characteristic clinical features of patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD), attributable to the degeneration of medial temporal and posterior parietal regions of the brain. Recent studies have demonstrated marked impairments in the ability to envisage personally relevant events in the future in AD. It remains unclear, however, whether AD patients can imagine fictitious scenes free from temporal constraints, a process that is proposed to rely fundamentally upon the integrity of the hippocampus. The objective of the present study was to investigate the capacity for atemporal scene construction, and its associated neural substrates, in AD. Fourteen AD patients were tested on the scene construction task and their performance was contrasted with 14 age- and education-matched healthy older Control participants. Scene construction performance was strikingly compromised in the AD group, with significant impairments evident for provision of contextual details, spatial coherence, and the overall richness of the imagined experience. Voxel-based morphometry analyses based on structural MRI revealed significant associations between scene construction capacity and atrophy in posterior parietal and lateral temporal brain structures in AD. In contrast, scene construction performance in Controls was related to integrity of frontal, parietal, and medial temporal structures, including the parahippocampal gyrus and posterior hippocampus. The posterior cingulate cortex (PCC) emerged as the common region implicated for scene construction performance across participant groups. Our study highlights the importance of regions specialised for spatial and contextual processing for the construction of atemporal scenes. Damage to these regions in AD compromises the ability to construct novel scenes, leading to the recapitulation of content from previously experienced events

The self-reference effect in dementia: Differential involvement of cortical midline structures in Alzheimer’s disease and behavioural-variant frontotemporal dementia

Encoding information in reference to the self enhances subsequent memory for the source of this information. In healthy adults, self-referential processing has been proposed to be mediated by the cortical midline structures (CMS), with functional differentiation between anterior-ventral, anterior-dorsal and posterior regions. While both Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and behavioural-variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD) patients show source memory impairment, it remains unclear whether they show a typical memory advantage for self-referenced materials. We also sought to identify the neural correlates of this so-called ‘self-reference effect’ (SRE) in these patient groups. The SRE paradigm was tested in AD (n=16) and bvFTD (n=22) patients and age-matched healthy controls (n=17). In this task, participants studied pictures of common objects paired with one of two background scenes (sources) under self-reference or other-reference encoding instructions, followed by an item and source recognition memory test. Voxel-based morphometry was used to investigate correlations between SRE measures and regions of grey matter atrophy in the CMS. The behavioural results indicated that self-referential encoding did not ameliorate the significant source memory impairments in AD and bvFTD patients. Furthermore, the reduced benefit of self-referential relative to other-referential encoding was not related to general episodic memory deficits. Our imaging findings revealed that reductions in the SRE were associated with atrophy in the anterior-dorsal CMS across both patient groups, with additional involvement of the posterior CMS in AD and anterior-ventral CMS in bvFTD. These findings suggest that although the SRE is comparably reduced in AD and bvFTD, this arises due to impairments in different subcomponents of self-referential processing

TRY plant trait database – enhanced coverage and open access

Plant traits - the morphological, anatomical, physiological, biochemical and phenological characteristics of plants - determine how plants respond to environmental factors, affect other trophic levels, and influence ecosystem properties and their benefits and detriments to people. Plant trait data thus represent the basis for a vast area of research spanning from evolutionary biology, community and functional ecology, to biodiversity conservation, ecosystem and landscape management, restoration, biogeography and earth system modelling. Since its foundation in 2007, the TRY database of plant traits has grown continuously. It now provides unprecedented data coverage under an open access data policy and is the main plant trait database used by the research community worldwide. Increasingly, the TRY database also supports new frontiers of trait‐based plant research, including the identification of data gaps and the subsequent mobilization or measurement of new data. To support this development, in this article we evaluate the extent of the trait data compiled in TRY and analyse emerging patterns of data coverage and representativeness. Best species coverage is achieved for categorical traits - almost complete coverage for ‘plant growth form’. However, most traits relevant for ecology and vegetation modelling are characterized by continuous intraspecific variation and trait–environmental relationships. These traits have to be measured on individual plants in their respective environment. Despite unprecedented data coverage, we observe a humbling lack of completeness and representativeness of these continuous traits in many aspects. We, therefore, conclude that reducing data gaps and biases in the TRY database remains a key challenge and requires a coordinated approach to data mobilization and trait measurements. This can only be achieved in collaboration with other initiatives

Manipulating cocrystal size and morphology using a combination of temperature cycling and additives

A cooling crystallization of benzoic acid and isonicotinamide in ethanol yields the 1:1 cocrystal with an extreme needle-like morphology with an initial mean aspect ratio of ∼10 and a size of ∼64 μm. We demonstrate that the use of suspension temperature cycling in combination with tailor-made additives alleviates such extreme needle-like morphologies and increases the average particle size of this cocrystal material. Temperature cycling of the cocrystal suspensions in ethanol alone reduces the mean aspect ratio from 10 to 3.3 while it increases the average crystal size from 64 to 450 μm. The further addition of low concentrations of benzamide or nicotinamide suppresses the growth rate at the tip of the needle even more, resulting in a more favorable equant morphology. An iterative mechanism in which additives are incorporated in the lattice structure and released during the temperature increase in each cycle is proposed. Thus, the incorporation of an additive at the normally fast growing and potential needle tips and its release during the temperature increase part of the cycle effectively makes an additive action catalytic. The simultaneous use of temperature cycling and tailor-made additives offers a new and effective approach for the elimination of unsatisfactory needle-like crystal morphologies and a small crystal size during the production of a pharmaceutical cocrystal material.This publication has emanated from research supported in part by a research grant from Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) and is co-founded under the European Regional Development Fund under Grant Number 12/RC/2275. FC thanks the Crystallize COST Action CM1402 for travel funding of the Short-Term Scientific Mission (STSM). FC gratefully acknowledges the hospitality that he enjoyed as a Visiting researcher during his STSM at the EPSRC Centre for Innovative Manufacturing in Continuous Manufacturing and Crystallisation (CMAC) at the University of Strathclyde. JtH, SJU and VS would like to thank EPSRC Centre for Innovative Manufacturing in Continuous Manufacturing and Crystallisation (Grant Ref EP/K503289/1) for funding this work. The authors would like to acknowledge that part of this work was carried out in the CMAC National Facility supported by UKRPIF (UK Research Partnership Fund) award from the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) (Grant Ref HH13054).2021-11-2

Manipulating cocrystal size and morphology using a combination of temperature cycling and additives

A cooling crystallization of benzoic acid and isonicotinamide in ethanol yields the 1:1 cocrystal with an extreme needle-like morphology with an initial mean aspect ratio of ∼10 and a size of ∼64 μm. We demonstrate that the use of suspension temperature cycling in combination with tailor-made additives alleviates such extreme needle-like morphologies and increases the average particle size of this cocrystal material. Temperature cycling of the cocrystal suspensions in ethanol alone reduces the mean aspect ratio from 10 to 3.3 while it increases the average crystal size from 64 to 450 μm. The further addition of low concentrations of benzamide or nicotinamide suppresses the growth rate at the tip of the needle even more, resulting in a more favorable equant morphology. An iterative mechanism in which additives are incorporated in the lattice structure and released during the temperature increase in each cycle is proposed. Thus, the incorporation of an additive at the normally fast growing and potential needle tips and its release during the temperature increase part of the cycle effectively makes an additive action catalytic. The simultaneous use of temperature cycling and tailor-made additives offers a new and effective approach for the elimination of unsatisfactory needle-like crystal morphologies and a small crystal size during the production of a pharmaceutical cocrystal material.This publication has emanated from research supported in part by a research grant from Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) and is co-founded under the European Regional Development Fund under Grant Number 12/RC/2275. FC thanks the Crystallize COST Action CM1402 for travel funding of the Short-Term Scientific Mission (STSM). FC gratefully acknowledges the hospitality that he enjoyed as a Visiting researcher during his STSM at the EPSRC Centre for Innovative Manufacturing in Continuous Manufacturing and Crystallisation (CMAC) at the University of Strathclyde. JtH, SJU and VS would like to thank EPSRC Centre for Innovative Manufacturing in Continuous Manufacturing and Crystallisation (Grant Ref EP/K503289/1) for funding this work. The authors would like to acknowledge that part of this work was carried out in the CMAC National Facility supported by UKRPIF (UK Research Partnership Fund) award from the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) (Grant Ref HH13054).peer-reviewed2021-11-2

Black bear functional resource selection relative to intraspecific competition and human risk

The spatial scales at which animals make behavioral trade-offs is assumed to relate to the scales at which factors most limiting resources and increasing mortality risk occur. We used global positioning system collar locations of 29 reproductive-age female black bears (Ursus americanus Pallas, 1780) in three states to assess resource selection relative to bear population-specific density, an index of vegetation productivity, riparian corridors, or two road classes of and within home ranges during spring-summer 2009â 2013. Female resource selection was best explained by functional responses to vegetation productivity across nearly all populations and spatial scales, which appeared to be influenced by variation in bear density (i.e., intraspecific competition). Behavioral trade-offs were greatest at the landscape scale, but except for vegetation productivity, were consistent for populations across spatial scales. Females across populations selected locations nearer to tertiary roads, but females in Michigan and Mississippi selected main roads and avoided riparian corridors, while females in Missouri did the opposite, suggesting population-level trade-offs between resource (e.g., food) acquisition and mortality risks (e.g., vehicle collisions). Our study emphasizes that female bear population-level resource selection can be influenced by multiple spatially-dependent factors, and that scale-dependent functional behavior should be identified for management of bears across their range.The accepted manuscript in pdf format is listed with the files at the bottom of this page. The presentation of the authors' names and (or) special characters in the title of the manuscript may differ slightly between what is listed on this page and what is listed in the pdf file of the accepted manuscript; that in the pdf file of the accepted manuscript is what was submitted by the author

Developing, optimizing, and evaluating patient infographics for diagnosing cardiac amyloidosis

Objective: Advancements in diagnostics and treatment options for cardiac amyloidosis have improved patient outcomes, yet few patient education materials exist to help patients understand the disease and diagnosis process. We sought to develop and evaluate a set of plain language, patient-centered infographics describing the condition and common diagnostic tests. Methods: Using health literacy best practices, we developed 7 infographics which were further revised based on multilevel stakeholder feedback. To evaluate the materials, we recruited 100 patients from healthcare settings in Chicago, IL; participants completed a web-assisted interview during which they were randomized 1:1 to first view either our infographics or a standard material. Participants completed a knowledge assessment on their assigned material and subsequently reported impressions of both materials. Results: No differences were found between study arms in knowledge. The infographics took significantly less time to read and were more highly rated by participants in terms of appearance and understandability. Over two-thirds of participants preferred the infographics to the standard. Conclusions: The infographics created may improve the learning process about a complex condition and diagnosis process unknown to most adults. Innovation: These infographics are the first of their kind for cardiac amyloidosis and were created using health literacy best practices