Publications by authors named "Baugh L"

Insulin/IGF signaling (IIS) regulates developmental and metabolic plasticity. Conditional regulation of insulin-like peptide expression and secretion promotes different phenotypes in different environments. However, IIS can also be regulated by other, less-understood mechanisms.

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Background: It is known that being the adult child of a parent with an alcohol use disorder (ACoA) can confer a wide variety of increased health and psychological risks, including higher rates of anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms. Additionally, ACoAs are at greater risk of developing alcohol/substance use disorders (AUDs/SUDs) than individuals from families without a history of AUDs.

Methods: ACoA individuals with risky hazardous alcohol use ( = 14) and those not engaged in hazardous use ( = 14) were compared to a group of healthy controls.

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Neurostimulation/neurorecording are tools to study, diagnose, and treat neurological/psychiatric conditions. Both techniques depend on volume conduction between scalp and excitable brain tissue. Here, we examine how neurostimulation with transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) is affected by hydration status, a physiological variable that can influence the volume of fluid spaces/cells, excitability, and cellular/global brain functioning.

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Insulin/IGF signaling (IIS) regulates developmental and metabolic plasticity. Conditional regulation of insulin-like peptide expression and secretion promotes different phenotypes in different environments. However, IIS can also be regulated by other, less-understood mechanisms.

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Background: There are >14,500 structurally diverse per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS). Despite knowledge that these "forever chemicals" are in 99% of humans, mechanisms of toxicity and adverse health effects are incompletely known. Furthermore, the contribution of genetic variation to PFAS susceptibility and health consequences is unknown.

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Article Synopsis
  • The study explores the lesser-known role of the cerebellum in PTSD by analyzing cerebellar volume differences in a large sample of 4,215 adults, with 1,642 diagnosed with PTSD and 2,573 as healthy controls.
  • Using advanced deep-learning techniques, researchers assessed the total cerebellum volume and 28 subregions, revealing significant reductions in both gray and white matter in individuals with PTSD, especially in specific posterior lobe and vermis areas.
  • The results suggest that changes in cerebellar structure are linked to cognitive and emotional dysfunctions in PTSD, highlighting the cerebellum's importance beyond its traditional role in motor control.
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Article Synopsis
  • * Researchers utilized various MRI data types to identify brain features that can distinguish PTSD from controls, revealing that classification accuracy decreases significantly when using multi-site data compared to single-site studies.
  • * The denoising variational autoencoder (DVAE) model showed improved generalization on new datasets, indicating its potential for better classification of PTSD, although overall performance still remained only slightly above chance levels.
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Background: The human endometrium undergoes recurring cycles of growth, differentiation, and breakdown in response to sex hormones. Dysregulation of epithelial-stromal communication during hormone-mediated signaling may be linked to myriad gynecological disorders for which treatments remain inadequate. Here, we describe a completely defined, synthetic extracellular matrix that enables co-culture of human endometrial epithelial and stromal cells in a manner that captures healthy and disease states across a simulated menstrual cycle.

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The advanced use of complex tools is considered a primary characteristic of human evolution and technological advancement. However, questions remain regarding whether humans possess unique underlying brain networks that support advanced tool-using abilities. Specifically, previous studies have demonstrated the presence of a structurally and functionally unique region in the left anterior supramarginal gyrus (aSMG), that is consistently active during tool use action observation.

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Covalent organic frameworks (COFs) are emerging crystalline porous polymers, showing great potential for applications but lacking gas-triggered flexibility. Atropisomerism was experimentally discovered in 1922 but has rarely been found in crystals with infinite framework structures. Here we report atropisomerism in COF single crystals.

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Methods for assessing the loss of hand function post-stroke examine limited aspects of motor performance and are not sensitive to subtle changes that can cause deficits in everyday object manipulation tasks. Efficiently lifting an object entails a prediction of required forces based on intrinsic features of the object (sensorimotor integration), short-term updates in the forces required to lift objects that are poorly predicted (sensorimotor memory), as well as the ability to modulate distal fingertip forces, which are not measured by existing assessment tools used in clinics for both diagnostic and rehabilitative purposes. The presented research examined these three components of skilled object manipulation in 60 chronic, unilateral middle cerebral artery stroke participants.

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Carbon capture is one of the essential low-carbon technologies required to achieve societal climate goals at the lowest cost. Covalent organic frameworks (COFs) are promising adsorbents for CO capture because of their well-defined porosity, large surface area, and high stability. Current COF-based CO capture is mainly based on a physisorption mechanism, exhibiting smooth and reversible sorption isotherms.

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Two-dimensional covalent organic frameworks (2D COFs) have been widely viewed as rigid porous materials with smooth and reversible gas sorption isotherms. In the present study, we report an unusual hysteresis step in the CO adsorption isotherm of a 2D COF, TAPB-OMeTA. powder X-ray diffraction (PXRD) measurements, computational modeling, and Pawley refinement indicate that TAPB-OMeTA experiences slight interlayer shifting during the CO adsorption process, resulting in a new structure that is similar but not identical to the AA stacking structure, namely, a quasi-AA stacking structure.

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Nutrient availability governs growth and quiescence, and many animals arrest development when starved. Using C. elegans L1 arrest as a model, we show that gene expression changes deep into starvation.

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Many Americans are adult children of an alcoholic parent (ACoA), which can confer an increased risk of trauma and hazardous alcohol use, as well as heritable and environmental genetic influence. Psychological health and related neural activity can be influenced by inflammation responses, but it is not clear how these factors interact regarding risk or resilience to hazardous alcohol use. The goals of this study were to better understand the relationships between current alcohol use and inflammation, how these are modified by single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) and/or epigenetic modifications of inflammation-associated genes; and how these alter neural reactivity to emotionally-salient stimuli.

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Results of neuroimaging datasets aggregated from multiple sites may be biased by site-specific profiles in participants' demographic and clinical characteristics, as well as MRI acquisition protocols and scanning platforms. We compared the impact of four different harmonization methods on results obtained from analyses of cortical thickness data: (1) linear mixed-effects model (LME) that models site-specific random intercepts (LME), (2) LME that models both site-specific random intercepts and age-related random slopes (LME), (3) ComBat, and (4) ComBat with a generalized additive model (ComBat-GAM). Our test case for comparing harmonization methods was cortical thickness data aggregated from 29 sites, which included 1,340 cases with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) (6.

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Article Synopsis
  • Starvation resistance plays a crucial role in health and survival, but its genetic factors were not fully understood until now.
  • The researchers used a synthetic-population sequencing method to assess starvation resistance among 100 distinct wild strains, identifying genetic differences that influence how well these strains withstand starvation.
  • They pinpointed three key genetic regions linked to starvation resistance and confirmed the effects of various genes, suggesting a role for certain insulin/EGF receptor family genes in modifying the body’s response to starvation.
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Mutations in the well-known tumor suppressor PTEN are observed in many cancers. PTEN is a dual-specificity phosphatase that harbors lipid and protein-phosphatase activities. The Caenorhabditis elegans PTEN ortholog is daf-18, which has pleiotropic effects on dauer formation, aging, starvation resistance, and development.

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Borrelia recurrentis is the causative agent of louse-borne relapsing fever and the only species transmitted by an insect rather than a tick vector. While bed bugs (Cimex lectularius L.) are not established vectors of any human pathogens, a recent study reported that they may be competent vectors of B.

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The publication of the Caenorhabditis briggsae reference genome in 2003 enabled the first comparative genomics studies between C. elegans and C. briggsae, shedding light on the evolution of genome content and structure in the Caenorhabditis genus.

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Background: Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is accompanied by disrupted cortical neuroanatomy. We investigated alteration in covariance of structural networks associated with PTSD in regions that demonstrate the case-control differences in cortical thickness (CT) and surface area (SA).

Methods: Neuroimaging and clinical data were aggregated from 29 research sites in >1300 PTSD cases and >2000 trauma-exposed control subjects (ages 6.

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Resolving single-crystal structures of two-dimensional covalent organic frameworks (2D COFs) is a great challenge, hindered in part by limited strategies for growing high-quality crystals. A better understanding of the growth mechanism facilitates development of methods to grow high-quality 2D COF single crystals. Here, we take a different perspective to explore the 2D COF growth process by tracing growth intermediates.

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Mitochondria are central players in host immunometabolism as they function not only as metabolic hubs but also as signaling platforms regulating innate immunity. Environmental exposures to mitochondrial toxicants occur widely and are increasingly frequent. Exposures to these mitotoxicants may pose a serious threat to organismal health and the onset of diseases by disrupting immunometabolic pathways.

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Objective: The development of precision therapeutics for systemic sclerosis (SSc) has been hindered by the lack of models that accurately mimic the disease in vitro. This study was undertaken to design and test a self-assembled skin equivalent (saSE) system that recapitulates the cross-talk between macrophages and fibroblasts in cutaneous fibrosis.

Methods: SSc-derived dermal fibroblasts (SScDFs) and normal dermal fibroblasts (NDFs) were cultured with CD14+ monocytes from SSc patients or healthy controls to allow de novo stroma formation.

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Covalent organic frameworks (COFs) have found wide applications due to their crystalline structures. However, it is still challenging to quantify crystalline phases in a COF sample. This is because COFs, especially 2D ones, are usually obtained as mixtures of polycrystalline powders.

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