A systematic framework for selecting gene-condition pairs for inclusion in newborn sequencing panels: Early Check implementation.

Purpose: Research is underway worldwide to investigate the feasibility, acceptability, and utility of sequencing-based newborn screening. Different methods have been used to select gene-condition pairs for screening, leading to highly inconsistent gene lists across studies.

Methods: Early Check developed and utilized actionability-based frameworks for evaluating gene-condition pairs for inclusion in newborn panels (panel 1-high actionability, panel 2-possible actionability).

Designing a Perioperative Mind-Body Intervention for Peripheral Vascular Interventions.

Background: Peripheral vascular interventions (PVIs) performed under procedural sedation and analgesia (PSA) can be associated with anxiety and poor compliance with patient instructions during surgery. Mind-body interventions (MBIs) such as meditation have demonstrated the potential to decrease perioperative anxiety, though this area is understudied, and no tailored interventions have been developed for the vascular surgical patient population.

Objectives: We aimed to design a perioperative MBI that specifically targeted vascular surgical patients undergoing PVIs under PSA.

Facilitating accessible, rapid, and appropriate processing of ancient metagenomic data with AMDirT.

Background: Access to sample-level metadata is important when selecting public metagenomic sequencing datasets for reuse in new biological analyses. The Standards, Precautions, and Advances in Ancient Metagenomics community (SPAAM, https://spaam-community.org) has previously published AncientMetagenomeDir, a collection of curated and standardised sample metadata tables for metagenomic and microbial genome datasets generated from ancient samples.

Variety is the spice of life: nongenetic variation in life histories influences population growth and evolvability.

Individual vital rates, such as mortality and birth rates, are key determinants of lifetime reproductive success, and variability in these rates shapes population dynamics. Previous studies have found that this vital rate heterogeneity can influence demographic properties, including population growth rates. However, the explicit effects of the variation within and the covariance between vital rates that can also vary throughout the lifespan on population growth remain unknown.