scrips

Cnidarians (corals, sea anemones, and jellyfish) produce toxins that play central roles in key ecological processes, including predation, defense, and competition, being the oldest extant venomous animal lineage. Cnidaria small cysteine-rich proteins (SCRiPs) were the first family of neurotoxins detected in stony corals, one of the ocean's most crucial foundation species. Yet, their molecular evolution remains poorly understood. Moreover, the lack of a clear classification system has hindered the establishment of an accurate and phylogenetically informed nomenclature...

OBJECTIVE: To compare the effect of immediate care at birth in skin-to-skin contact (SSC) or under a radiant warmer on cardiorespiratory stability at 60 minutes of age in moderate-to-late preterm neonates. METHODS: In this open-label, parallel-group, randomized controlled trial, neonates born at 330/7 to 366/7 weeks of gestation by vaginal delivery and breathing or crying were randomized to receive care at birth in SSC (n = 50) or under a radiant warmer (n = 50)...

Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) matching programs at farmers' markets have been shown to increase access to fresh fruits and vegetables (FV) as well as improve food security among participants. Implementing SNAP matching programs in an efficient way is vital for sustainability and increasing access to fresh FV for SNAP participants. The Fresh Bucks SNAP matching program in Marion County, Indiana transitioned from using wooden tokens as incentive scrips to checks. This innovative approach streamlined administrative processes and reduced the wait time for vendors to be reimbursed...

Currently, there are many publicly available Next Generation Sequencing tools developed for variant annotation and classification. However, as modern sequencing technology produces more and more sequencing data, a more efficient analysis program is desired, especially for variant analysis. In this study, we updated SNPAAMapper, a variant annotation pipeline by converting perl codes to python for generating annotation output with an improved computational efficiency and updated information for broader applicability...

Single-cell ATAC-seq (scATAC-seq) has proven to be a state-of-art approach to investigating gene regulation at the single-cell level. However, existing methods cannot precisely uncover cell-type-specific binding of transcription regulators (TRs) and construct gene regulation networks (GRNs) in single-cell. ChIP-seq has been widely used to profile TR binding sites in the past decades. Here, we developed SCRIP, an integrative method to infer single-cell TR activity and targets based on the integration of scATAC-seq and a large-scale TR ChIP-seq reference...

Scleractinian corals are crucially important to the health of some of the world's most biodiverse, productive, and economically important marine habitats. Despite this importance, analysis of coral peptidomes is still in its infancy. Here we show that the tentacle extract from the stony coral Heliofungia actiniformis is rich in peptides with diverse and novel structures. We have characterized the sequences and three-dimensional structures of four new peptides, three of which have no known homologues. We show that a 2 kDa peptide, Hact-2, promotes significant cell proliferation on human cells and speculate this peptide may be involved in the remarkable regenerative capacity of corals...

Carbenes, including N-heterocyclic carbene (NHC) ligands are used ex-ten-sively to stabilize open-shell tran-si-tion me-tal com-plex-es and or-ganic ra-dicals.  Yet, it remains un-known, which carbene sta-bi-li-zes a ra-dical well and, thus, how to design radical-sta-bi-li-zing C-do-nor ligands.  With the large va-riety of C-donor li-gands ex-peri-men-tal-ly in-ves-ti-gated and their el-ec-tron-ic pro-perties established, we report he-re-in their radical-sta-bi-li-zing effect.  We show that radical sta-bi-li-za-tion can be un-der-stood by a captodative frontier orbital de-scrip-tion in-vol-ving π-do-na-tion to- and π-donation from the carbenes...

A diblock copolymer (P(VBTAC/NaSS)17 - b -PAPTAC50 ; P(VS)17 A50 ) composed of amphoteric random copolymer, poly(vinylbenzyl trimethylammonium chloride- co -sodium p -styrensunfonate) (P(VBTAC/NaSS); P(VS)) and cationic poly(3-(acrylamidopropyl) trimethylammonium chloride) (PAPTAC; A) block, and poly(acrylic acid) (PAAc49 ) were prepared via a reversible addition-fragmentation chain transfer radical polymerization. Scrips V, S, and A represent VBTAC, NaSS, and PAPTAC blocks, respectively. Water-soluble polyion complex (PIC) vesicles were formed by mixing P(VS)17 A50 and PAAc49 in water under basic conditions through electrostatic interactions between the cationic PAPTAC block and PAAc49 with the deprotonated pendant carboxylate anions...

Chest-to-chest (CC) skin-to-skin contact (SSC) is a widely used method of SSC to prevent low birth weight (LBW) and/or premature babies with the risk of hypothermia. However, very recently, a study has also shown that the chest-to-back (CB) SSC is also useful for such a purpose. It is also evident that CC SSC enhances the cardiorespiratory performance of LBW and/or premature babies from the risk of cold stress. However, whether babies kept in CB SSC have the risk of clinically relevant decreases of oxygen saturation or critical changes of the baby heart rate comparing the two SSC methods has been studied hardly...

MOTIVATION: Recent advancements in single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) have enabled time-efficient transcriptome profiling in individual cells. To optimize sequencing protocols and develop reliable analysis methods for various application scenarios, solid simulation methods for scRNA-seq data are required. However, due to the noisy nature of scRNA-seq data, currently available simulation methods cannot sufficiently capture and simulate important properties of real data, especially the biological variation...

In the past two decades, most states in the United States have added authorization for pharmacists to administer some vaccinations. Expansions of this authority have also come with prescription requirements or other regulatory burdens. The objective of this study was to evaluate the impact of these expansions on influenza immunization rates in adults age 65 and over. A panel data, differences-in-differences regression framework to control for state-level unobserved confounders and shocks at the national level was used on a combination of a dataset of state-level statute and regulatory changes and influenza immunization data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System...

BACKGROUND: Health care delivery in Australia is experiencing challenges with services struggling to keep up with the increasing demands of an aging population, rising levels of chronic disease and limited funding for care. Where adjunct models of health care such as the Nurse Practitioner (NP) have the potential to address this gap, in Australia, they remain an underutilised service. Clarifying the nature of the consumers 'willingness' to be seen by NPs warrants further investigation...

We describe a novel approach to estimating the predictability of utterances given extralinguistic context in psycholinguistic research. Predictability effects on language production and comprehension are widely attested, but so far predictability has mostly been manipulated through local linguistic context, which is captured with n-gram language models. However, this method does not allow to investigate predictability effects driven by extralinguistic context. Modeling effects of extralinguistic context is particularly relevant to discourse-initial expressions, which can be predictable even if they lack linguistic context at all...

BACKGROUND: The severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) causes COVID-19 disease. There are concerns regarding limited testing capacity and the exclusion of cases from unproven screening criteria. Knowing COVID-19 risks can inform testing. This study derived and assessed a model to predict risk of SARS-CoV-2 in community-based people. METHODS: All people presenting to a community-based COVID-19 screening center answered questions regarding symptoms, possible exposure, travel, and occupation...

Despite the ecological significance of the mutualistic relationship between Symbiodiniaceae and reef-building corals, the molecular interactions during establishment of this relationship are not well understood. This is particularly true of the transcriptional changes that occur in the symbiont. In the current study, a dual RNA-seq approach was employed to better understand transcriptional changes on both sides of the coral - symbiont interaction during the colonisation of Acropora tenuis by a compatible Symbiodiniaceae strain (Cladocopium goreaui; ITS2 type C1)...

A general trend observed in animal skeletomes -the proteins occluded in animal skeletons- is the co-presence of taxonomically widespread and lineage-specific proteins that actively regulate the biomineralization process. Among cnidarians, the skeletomes of scleractinian corals have been shown to follow this trend. However, distributions and phylogenetic analyses of biomineralization-related genes are often based on only a few species, with other anthozoan calcifiers such as octocorals (soft-corals), not being fully considered...

Insufficient epigenetic reprogramming is incompatible with normal development of embryos produced by somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT), but treatment with histone deacetylases inhibitors (HDACi) enhance development of SCNT embryos. However, the mechanisms underpinning HDACi benefits in SCNT embryos remain largely uncharacterized. We hypothesized that, in addition to enhancing reprogramming, HDACi treatment may promote expression of genes not required for early development of SCNT embryos. To test this hypothesis, RNA synthesis was inhibited by treating bovine SCNT embryos with 5,6-Dichlorobenzimidazole 1-β-D-ribofuranoside (DBR), which were concomitantly treated or not with Scriptaid (Scrip; an HDACi)...

BACKGROUND: Preterm infants generally spend weeks in the neonatal intensive care unit where light intensity can fluctuate as well as be high, leading to physiological instability and increased motor activity in these infants. To date, 2 lighting control methods have been studied: cycled lighting and continuous near darkness. The most appropriate method of lighting is still unknown due to ambivalent results from the studies that have assessed these 2 interventions. OBJECTIVE: To compare the effects of cycled lighting versus continuous near darkness on physiological stability and motor activity level in preterm infants born between 28 and 32 weeks of gestation...

BACKGROUND: Mother-infant separation post birth is common. In standard hospital care, newborn infants are held wrapped or dressed in their mother's arms, placed in open cribs or under radiant warmers. Skin-to-skin contact (SSC) begins ideally at birth and should last continually until the end of the first breastfeeding. SSC involves placing the dried, naked baby prone on the mother's bare chest, often covered with a warm blanket. According to mammalian neuroscience, the intimate contact inherent in this place (habitat) evokes neuro-behaviors ensuring fulfillment of basic biological needs...

Cell permeabilization followed by exposure to cytoplasmic extracts of oocytes has been proposed as an alternative to transduction of transcription factors for inducing pluripotency in cultured somatic cells. The main goal in this study was to investigate the effect of treating porcine fibroblast cells with cytoplasmic extracts of GV-stage oocyte (OEx) followed by inhibition of histone deacetylases with Scriptaid (Scrip) on the formation of stem cell-like colonies and expression of genes encoding pluripotency and chromatin-modifying enzymes...