Linkage analysis and association analysis in the presence of linkage using age at onset of COGA alcoholism data

Complex disease mapping usually involves a combination of linkage and association techniques. Linkage analysis can scan the entire genome in a few hundred tests. Association tests may involve an even greater number of tests. However, association tests can localize the susceptibility genes more accurately. Using a recently developed combined linkage and association strategy, we analyzed a subset of the Collaborative Study on the Genetics of Alcoholism (COGA) data for the Genetic Analysis Workshop 14 (GAW14). In this analysis, we first employed linkage analysis based on frailty models that take into account age of onset information to establish which regions along the chromosome are likely to harbor disease susceptibility genes for alcohol dependence. Second, we used an association analysis by exploiting linkage disequilibrium to narrow down the peak regions. We also compare the methods with mean identity-by-descent tests and transmission/disequilibrium tests that do not use age of onset information

A genome-wide tree- and forest-based association analysis of comorbidity of alcoholism and smoking

Genetic mechanisms underlying alcoholism are complex. Understanding the etiology of alcohol dependence and its comorbid conditions such as smoking is important because of the significant health concerns. In this report, we describe a method based on classification trees and deterministic forests for association studies to perform a genome-wide joint association analysis of alcoholism and smoking. This approach is used to analyze the single-nucleotide polymorphism data from the Collaborative Study on the Genetics of Alcoholism in the Genetic Analysis Workshop 14. Our analysis reaffirmed the importance of sex difference in alcoholism. Our analysis also identified genes that were reported in other studies of alcoholism and identified new genes or single-nucleotide polymorphisms that can be useful candidates for future studies

Multivariate linkage analysis using the electrophysiological phenotypes in the COGA alcoholism data

Multivariate linkage analysis using several correlated traits may provide greater statistical power to detect susceptibility genes in loci whose effects are too small to be detected in univariate analysis. In this analysis, we apply a new approach and perform a linkage analysis of several electrophysiological phenotypes of the Collaborative Study on the Genetics of Alcoholism data of the Genetic Analysis Workshop 14. Our approach is based on a variance-component model to map candidate genes using repeated or longitudinal measurements. It can take into account covariate effects and time-dependent genetic effects in general pedigree data. We compare our results with the ones obtained by SOLAR using single measurement data. Our multivariate linkage analysis found linkage evidence on two regions on chromosome 4: around marker GABRB1 at 51.4 cM and marker FABP2 at 116.8 cM (unadjusted p-value = 0.00006)

Intelligent Grimm -- Open-ended Visual Storytelling via Latent Diffusion Models

Generative models have recently exhibited exceptional capabilities in text-to-image generation, but still struggle to generate image sequences coherently. In this work, we focus on a novel, yet challenging task of generating a coherent image sequence based on a given storyline, denoted as open-ended visual storytelling. We make the following three contributions: (i) to fulfill the task of visual storytelling, we propose a learning-based auto-regressive image generation model, termed as StoryGen, with a novel vision-language context module, that enables to generate the current frame by conditioning on the corresponding text prompt and preceding image-caption pairs; (ii) to address the data shortage of visual storytelling, we collect paired image-text sequences by sourcing from online videos and open-source E-books, establishing processing pipeline for constructing a large-scale dataset with diverse characters, storylines, and artistic styles, named StorySalon; (iii) Quantitative experiments and human evaluations have validated the superiority of our StoryGen, where we show StoryGen can generalize to unseen characters without any optimization, and generate image sequences with coherent content and consistent character. Code, dataset, and models are available at https://haoningwu3639.github.io/StoryGen_Webpage/Comment: Accepted by CVPR 2024. Project Page: https://haoningwu3639.github.io/StoryGen_Webpage

Study of Peeling of Single Crystal Silicon by Intense Pulsed Ion Beam

The surface peeling process induced by intense pulsed ion beam (IPIB) irradiation was studied. Single crystal silicon specimens were treated by IPIB with accelerating voltage of 350 kV current density of 130 A/cm2. It is observed that under smaller numbers of IPIB shots, the surface may undergo obvious melting and evaporation..

Neurologic Abnormalities in Workers of a 1-Bromopropane Factory

We reported recently that 1-bromopropane (1-BP; n-propylbromide, CAS Registry no. 106-94-5), an alternative to ozone-depleting solvents, is neurotoxic and exhibits reproductive toxicity in rats. The four most recent case reports suggested possible neurotoxicity of 1-BP in workers. The aim of the present study was to establish the neurologic effects of 1-BP in workers and examine the relationship with exposure levels. We surveyed 27 female workers in a 1-BP production factory and compared 23 of them with 23 age-matched workers in a beer factory as controls. The workers were interviewed and examined by neurologic, electrophysiologic, hematologic, biochemical, neurobehavioral, and postural sway tests. 1-BP exposure levels were estimated with passive samplers. Tests with a tuning fork showed diminished vibration sensation of the foot in 15 workers exposed to 1-BP but in none of the controls. 1-BP factory workers showed significantly longer distal latency in the tibial nerve than did the controls but no significant changes in motor nerve conduction velocity. Workers also displayed lower values in sensory nerve conduction velocity in the sural nerve, backward recalled digits, Benton visual memory test scores, pursuit aiming test scores, and five items of the Profile of Mood States (POMS) test (tension, depression, anxiety, fatigue, and confusion) compared with controls matched for age and education. Workers hired after May 1999, who were exposed to 1-BP only (workers hired before 1999 could have also been exposed to 2-BP), showed similar changes in vibration sense, distal latency, Benton test scores, and depression and fatigue in the POMS test. Time-weighted average exposure levels in the workers were 0.34–49.19 ppm. Exposure to 1-BP could adversely affect peripheral nerves or/and the central nervous system