Cell-type-directed design of synthetic enhancers.

Transcriptional enhancers act as docking stations for combinations of transcription factors and thereby regulate spatiotemporal activation of their target genes. It has been a long-standing goal in the field to decode the regulatory logic of an enhancer and to understand the details of how spatiotemporal gene expression is encoded in an enhancer sequence. Here we show that deep learning models, can be used to efficiently design synthetic, cell-type-specific enhancers, starting from random sequences, and that this optimization process allows detailed tracing of enhancer features at single-nucleotide resolution.

Urea and creatinine levels in saliva of patients with and without periodontitis.

Despite the fact that saliva contains measurable concentrations of urea and creatinine, it is not widely used in clinical nephrology. One of the reasons is the high inter- and intra-individual variability in the salivary markers of kidney function. We hypothesized that gingival bleeding in patients with periodontitis could contribute to this variability by increasing the concentration of salivary urea or creatinine.