Project description:Precision medicine, which recognizes and upholds the uniqueness of each individual patient and the importance of discerning these inter-individual differences on a molecular scale in order to provide truly personalized medical care, is a revolutionary approach that relies on the discovery of clinically-relevant biomarkers derived from the massive amounts of data generated by epigenomic, genomic, transcriptomic, proteomic, microbiomic, and metabolomic studies, collectively known as multi-omics. If harnessed and mined appropriately with the help of ever-evolving computational and analytic methods, the collective data from omics studies has the potential to accelerate delivery of targeted medical treatment that maximizes benefit, minimizes harm, and eliminates the "fortune-telling" inextricably linked to the prevailing trial-and-error approach. For a disease such as dermatomyositis (DM), which is characterized by remarkable phenotypic heterogeneity and varying degrees of multi-organ involvement, an individualized approach that incorporates big data derived from multi-omics studies with the results of currently available serologic, histopathologic, radiologic, and electrophysiologic tests, and, most importantly, with clinical findings obtained from a thorough history and physical examination, has immense diagnostic, therapeutic, and prognostic value. In this review, we discuss omics-based research studies in DM and describe their practical applications and promising roles in guiding clinical decisions and optimizing patient outcomes.
Project description:In collective motor situations, creativity and empathy are central and strongly connected to cognitive and affective processes. Indeed, in the environment of high social uncertainty of games and sports, empathy would allow the player to anticipate motor behaviors in order to promote creative decision-making, i.e., to destabilize his opponents. On this basis, this study pursues two objectives. The first is to propose indicators to question the links between sociomotor empathy and motor creativity in an ecological situation. The second is to investigate the potential influence of the internal logic of two very different collective games (handball and Sitting ball) on the type of links that are woven between empathy and creativity. Two groups of students were recruited (n = 22 and 23) and participated in each of the games mentioned. The games were video recorded. The praxical communications made by each player were recorded and sorted by two trained observers. The results revealed major differences between the two studied collective games. In handball, there was a correlation between instrumental empathy (valuing cognitive aspects) and indicators of motor creativity (p < 0.05). The more creative the players are (quantity, diversity and quality of performance), the more they manage to accurately anticipate the behavior of other players. In Sitting Ball, there was no correlation between creativity indicators and instrumental empathy. On the other hand, it is noticed that instrumental empathy was correlated with socio-affective empathy (p < 0.001). To make their motor decisions, the players do not rely exclusively on the decoding of behaviors but significantly mobilize the feelings that they ascribe to the other co-participants. The results of this work invite reflection on the diversity of playful reading grids to be offered to students in order to develop their motor adaptability.
Project description:The two-spotted spider mite is a worldwide phytophagous pest displaying a peculiar dispersal. At high density, when plants are exhausted, individuals gather at the plant apex to form a collective silk-ball. This structure can be dispersed by wind or phoresy. Individuals initiating the ball are enclosed in the centre and have a high risk to die. For the first time, the ultimate and proximate mechanisms leading to this group dispersal are examined. To explore if a particular mite genotype was involved in the ball formation, plants were infested with individuals of different genetic background. After the silk-ball formation, the mites in the ball and those remaining on the plant were collected and genotyped. The balls were harvested after 4h and 24h to determine the role of timing between the formation and dispersal on the mortality of mites. Mites do not segregate according to their degree of relatedness, stage, or sex. Mites parallel humans using public transportation: they climb up in the ball whatever their genetic background. Silk-balls composed of unrelated individuals may help avoiding inbreeding when colonizing a new plant. Our results also emphasize the importance of an adequate timing for efficient dispersal between the time spent between ball formation and dispersal.
Project description:Collective migration is a key feature of the social amoebae Dictyostelium discoideum, where the binding of chemoattractants leads to the production and secretion of additional chemoattractant and the relay of the signal to neighboring cells. This then guides cells to migrate collectively in a head-to-tail fashion. We used mutants that were defective in signal relay to elucidate which quantitative metrics of cell migration are most strongly affected by signal relay and collective motion. We show that neither signal relay nor collective motion markedly impact the speed of cell migration. Cells maintained a preferred overall direction of motion for several minutes with similar persistence, regardless of whether or not they were attracted to moving neighbors, moving collectively in contact with their neighbors, or simply following a fixed exogenous signal. We quantitatively establish that signal relay not only increases the number of cells that respond to a chemotactic signal, but most remarkably, also transmits information about the location of the source accurately over large distances, independently of the strength of the exogenous signal. We envision that signal relay has a similar key role in the migration of a variety of chemotaxing mammalian cells that can relay chemoattractant signals.
Project description:The physical environment occupied by group-living animals can profoundly affect their cooperative social interactions and therefore their collective behavior and success. These effects can be especially apparent in human-modified habitats, which often harbor substantial variation in the physical environments available within them. For nest-building animal societies, this influence of the physical environment on collective behavior can be mediated by the construction of nests-nests could either buffer animal behavior from changes in the physical environment or facilitate shifts in behavior through changes in nest structure. We test these alternative hypotheses by examining the differences in collective prey-attacking behavior and colony persistence between fence-dwelling and tree-dwelling colonies of Stegodyphus dumicola social spiders. Fences and trees represent substantially different physical environments: fences are 2-dimensional and relatively homogenous environments, whereas tree branches are 3-dimensional and relatively heterogeneous. We found that fence-dwelling colonies attack prey more quickly and with more attackers than tree-dwelling colonies in both field and controlled settings. Moreover, in the field, fence-dwelling colonies captured more prey, were more likely to persist, and had a greater number of individuals remaining at the end of the experiment than tree-dwelling colonies. Intriguingly, we also observed a greater propensity for colony fragmentation in tree-dwelling colonies than fence-dwelling colonies. Our results demonstrate that the physical environment is an important influence on the collective behavior and persistence of colonies of social spiders, and suggest multiple possible proximate and ultimate mechanisms-including variation in web complexity, dispersal behavior, and bet-hedging-by which this influence may be realized.
Project description:The island nucleation in the context of heterogeneous thin film growth is often complicated by the growth kinetics involved in the subsequent thermodynamics. We show how the evolution of sputtered Zn island nucleation on Si(111) by magnetron sputtering in a large area can be completely understood as a model system by combining reflective second harmonic generation (RSHG), a 2D pole figure with synchrotron X-ray diffraction. Zn dots are then oxidized on the surfaces when exposed to the atmosphere as Zn/ZnO dots. Derived from the RSHG patterns of Zn dots at different growth times, the Zn dots grow following a unique transition from kinetic to thermodynamic control. Under kinetic-favoring growth, tiny Zn dots prefer arranging themselves with a tilted c-axis to the Si(111) substrate toward any of the sixfold in-plane Si<110> directions. Upon growth, the Zn dots subsequently evolve themselves to a metastable state with a smaller tilting angle toward selective <110> directions. As the Zn dots grow over a critical size, they become most thermodynamically stable with the c-axis vertical to the Si(111) substrate. For a system with large lattice mismatch, small volume dots take kinetic pathways with insignificant deviations in energy barriers.
Project description:Transcript profiles of Postia placenta grown on media containing ball-milled aspen or ball-milled pine as the sole carbon source were analyzed. Array design was based on the DoE's Joint Genome Institute's gene models for P. placenta version 1. The research goal is to identtify genes essential for cellulose depolymerization.
Project description:Optimism bias is the tendency to believe desirable events are more likely to happen than undesirable ones. People often display optimistic biases for themselves (personal optimism), but also for members of groups they like or identify with (social optimism). However, the neural bases of and connections between these two concepts are poorly understood. The present study hence used both questionnaires and a social optimism task performed during magnetic resonance imaging to investigate how network connectivity associates with personal and social optimism biases. Using sparse canonical correlation analysis, we found that a behavioral dimension that included both in-group optimism bias and personal optimism bias was positively associated with a dimension of network connectivity. This dimension comprised two networks with positive weights (dorsal precuneus-related default mode network and dorsal sensorimotor network), and three with negative weights (including parts of the salience and central executive networks). Our findings indicate that connectivity in networks adjacent to the temporoparietal junction favors propagation of both personal and social optimism biases. Meanwhile, low connectivity in more frontal networks associated with more complex cognition may also further such propagation.
Project description:Collective behavior emerges from interactions among group members who often vary in their behavior. The presence of just one or a few keystone individuals, such as leaders or tutors, may have a large effect on collective outcomes. These individuals can catalyze behavioral changes in other group members, thus altering group composition and collective behavior. The influence of keystone individuals on group function may lead to trade-offs between ecological situations, because the behavioral composition they facilitate may be suitable in one situation but not another. We use computer simulations to examine various mechanisms that allow keystone individuals to exert their influence on group members. We further discuss a trade-off between two potentially conflicting collective outcomes, cooperative prey attack and disease dynamics. Our simulations match empirical data from a social spider system and produce testable predictions for the causes and consequences of the influence of keystone individuals on group composition and collective outcomes. We find that a group's behavioral composition can be impacted by the keystone individual through changes to interaction patterns or behavioral persistence over time. Group behavioral composition and the mechanisms that drive the distribution of phenotypes influence collective outcomes and lead to trade-offs between disease dynamics and cooperative prey attack.