Analysis of survey on menstrual disorder among teenagers using Gaussian copula model with graphical lasso prior.

A high prevalence of menstrual disturbance has been reported among teenage girls, and research shows that there are delays in diagnosis of endometriosis among young girls. Using data from the Menstrual Disorder of Teenagers Survey (administered in 2005 and 2016), we propose a Gaussian copula model with graphical lasso prior to identify cohort differences in menstrual characteristics and to predict endometriosis. The model includes random effects to account for clustering by school, and we use the extended rank likelihood copula model to handle variables of mixed-type.

Modeling ecological drivers in marine viral communities using comparative metagenomics and network analyses.

Long-standing questions in marine viral ecology are centered on understanding how viral assemblages change along gradients in space and time. However, investigating these fundamental ecological questions has been challenging due to incomplete representation of naturally occurring viral diversity in single gene- or morphology-based studies and an inability to identify up to 90% of reads in viral metagenomes (viromes). Although protein clustering techniques provide a significant advance by helping organize this unknown metagenomic sequence space, they typically use only ∼75% of the data and rely on assembly methods not yet tuned for naturally occurring sequence variation.

The use of metformin is associated with decreased lumbar radiculopathy pain.

Lumbar radiculopathy pain represents a major public health problem, with few effective long-term treatments. Preclinical neuropathic and postsurgical pain studies implicate the kinase adenosine monophosphate activated kinase (AMPK) as a potential pharmacological target for the treatment of chronic pain conditions. Metformin, which acts via AMPK, is a safe and clinically available drug used in the treatment of diabetes.

A unifying approach for food webs, phylogeny, social networks, and statistics.

A food web consists of nodes, each consisting of one or more species. The role of each node as predator or prey determines the trophic relations that weave the web. Much effort in trophic food web research is given to understand the connectivity structure, or the nature and degree of dependence among nodes.