Ontology-Based Data Collection for a Hybrid Outbreak Detection Method Using Social Media.

Given the persistent global challenge presented by rapidly spreading diseases, as evidenced notably by the widespread impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on both human health and economies worldwide, the necessity of developing effective infectious disease prediction models has become of utmost importance. In this context, the utilization of online social media platforms as valuable tools in healthcare settings has gained prominence, offering direct avenues for disseminating critical health information to the public in a timely and accessible manner. Propelled by the ubiquitous accessibility of the internet through computers and mobile devices, these platforms promise to revolutionize traditional detection methods, providing more immediate and reliable epidemiological insights.

Analysis of nanomaterial biocoronas in biological and environmental surroundings.

A biomolecular coating, or biocorona, forms on the surface of engineered nanomaterials (ENMs) immediately as they enter biological or environmental systems, defining their biological and environmental identity and influencing their fate and performance. This biomolecular layer includes proteins (the protein corona) and other biomolecules, such as nucleic acids and metabolites. To ensure a meaningful and reproducible analysis of the ENMs-associated biocorona, it is essential to streamline procedures for its preparation, separation, identification and characterization, so that studies in different labs can be easily compared, and the information collected can be used to predict the composition, dynamics and properties of biocoronas acquired by other ENMs.

Ancient chicken remains reveal the origins of virulence in Marek's disease virus.

The pronounced growth in livestock populations since the 1950s has altered the epidemiological and evolutionary trajectory of their associated pathogens. For example, Marek's disease virus (MDV), which causes lymphoid tumors in chickens, has experienced a marked increase in virulence over the past century. Today, MDV infections kill >90% of unvaccinated birds, and controlling it costs more than US$1 billion annually.

Daphnia as a model organism to probe biological responses to nanomaterials-from individual to population effects via adverse outcome pathways.

The importance of the cladoceran as a model organism for ecotoxicity testing has been well-established since the 1980s. have been increasingly used in standardised testing of chemicals as they are well characterised and show sensitivity to pollutants, making them an essential indicator species for environmental stress. The mapping of the genomes of in 2012 and in 2017 further consolidated their utility for ecotoxicity testing, including demonstrating the responsiveness of the genome to environmental stressors.

Next-Generation Hydrogels as Biomaterials for Biomedical Applications: Exploring the Role of Curcumin.

Since the first report on the pharmacological activity of curcumin in 1949, enormous amounts of research have reported diverse activities for this natural polyphenol found in the dietary spice turmeric. However, curcumin has not yet been used for human application as an approved drug. The clinical translation of curcumin has been hampered due to its low solubility and bioavailability.

Antibiotic use during the first 6 months of COVID-19 pandemic in Iran: A large-scale multi-centre study.

What Is Known And Objective: Although antibiotics are ineffective against viral infections, epidemiological studies have revealed that the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in the overuse of antibiotics and disruption of antimicrobial stewardship programmes. We investigated the pattern of antibiotic use during the first 6 months of the COVID-19 pandemic in Iran.

Methods: A multi-centre retrospective study was designed to investigate the use of 16 broad-spectrum antibiotics in 12 medical centres.

Microleakage of five separated nickel-titanium rotary file systems in the apical portion of the root canal.

Background: The aim of this study was to evaluate the rate of apical microleakage following the fracture of five types of nickel-titanium rotary file systems (ProTaper Universal, Mtwo, RaCe, Revo-s, HeroShaper) in the apical one-third of the canal.

Materials And Methods: In this laboratory experiment, 49 mandibular premolars were collected and randomly divided into seven groups. Root canal treatment was performed by five different rotary file systems with different cross-sections.

Exceptional ancient DNA preservation and fibre remains of a Sasanian saltmine sheep mummy in Chehrābād, Iran.

Mummified remains have long attracted interest as a potential source of ancient DNA. However, mummification is a rare process that requires an anhydrous environment to rapidly dehydrate and preserve tissue before complete decomposition occurs. We present the whole-genome sequences (3.

The functional organization of excitatory synaptic input to place cells.

Hippocampal place cells contribute to mammalian spatial navigation and memory formation. Numerous models have been proposed to explain the location-specific firing of this cognitive representation, but the pattern of excitatory synaptic input leading to place firing is unknown, leaving no synaptic-scale explanation of place coding. Here we used resonant scanning two-photon microscopy to establish the pattern of synaptic glutamate input received by CA1 place cells in behaving mice.

Herded and hunted goat genomes from the dawn of domestication in the Zagros Mountains.

The Aceramic Neolithic (∼9600 to 7000 cal BC) period in the Zagros Mountains, western Iran, provides some of the earliest archaeological evidence of goat () management and husbandry by circa 8200 cal BC, with detectable morphological change appearing ∼1,000 y later. To examine the genomic imprint of initial management and its implications for the goat domestication process, we analyzed 14 novel nuclear genomes (mean coverage 1.13X) and 32 mitochondrial (mtDNA) genomes (mean coverage 143X) from two such sites, Ganj Dareh and Tepe Abdul Hosein.

Hepatitis A Seroprevalence Among Patients with Chronic Hepatitis B Infection: A Cross-Sectional Study in Iran During 2016-2017.

Introduction: The aim of this study was to determine the prevalence of exposure to hepatitis A by means of serologic markers in chronic hepatitis B patients, with the secondary aim of finding the best prevention method for hepatitis A infection in susceptible groups of our setting.

Methods: During the period between 2016 and 2017, we recruited 403 hepatitis B patients aged more than 14 years and regularly attending the infectious diseases clinic at a referral university hospital, Tehran, Iran. A blood sample was collected from all the patients and tested for hepatitis A IgG.

Ancient cattle genomics, origins, and rapid turnover in the Fertile Crescent.

Genome-wide analysis of 67 ancient Near Eastern cattle, remains reveals regional variation that has since been obscured by admixture in modern populations. Comparisons of genomes of early domestic cattle to their aurochs progenitors identify diverse origins with separate introgressions of wild stock. A later region-wide Bronze Age shift indicates rapid and widespread introgression of zebu, from the Indus Valley.

Acute silencing of hippocampal CA3 reveals a dominant role in place field responses.

Neurons in hippocampal output area CA1 are thought to exhibit redundancy across cortical and hippocampal inputs. Here we show instead that acute silencing of CA3 terminals drastically reduces place field responses for many CA1 neurons, while a smaller number are unaffected or have increased responses. These results imply that CA3 is the predominant driver of CA1 place cells under normal conditions, while also revealing heterogeneity in input dominance across cells.

Ancient goat genomes reveal mosaic domestication in the Fertile Crescent.

Current genetic data are equivocal as to whether goat domestication occurred multiple times or was a singular process. We generated genomic data from 83 ancient goats (51 with genome-wide coverage) from Paleolithic to Medieval contexts throughout the Near East. Our findings demonstrate that multiple divergent ancient wild goat sources were domesticated in a dispersed process that resulted in genetically and geographically distinct Neolithic goat populations, echoing contemporaneous human divergence across the region.

Abnormal Sleep Architecture and Hippocampal Circuit Dysfunction in a Mouse Model of Fragile X Syndrome.

Fragile X syndrome (FXS) is the most common heritable cause of intellectual disability and single-gene cause of autism spectrum disorder. The Fmr1 null mouse models much of the human disease including hyperarousal, sensory hypersensitivity, seizure activity, and hippocampus-dependent cognitive impairment. Sleep architecture is disorganized in FXS patients, but has not been examined in Fmr1 knockout (Fmr1-KO) mice.

Ancient genomes revisit the ancestry of domestic and Przewalski's horses.

The Eneolithic Botai culture of the Central Asian steppes provides the earliest archaeological evidence for horse husbandry, ~5500 years ago, but the exact nature of early horse domestication remains controversial. We generated 42 ancient-horse genomes, including 20 from Botai. Compared to 46 published ancient- and modern-horse genomes, our data indicate that Przewalski's horses are the feral descendants of horses herded at Botai and not truly wild horses.

Mining significant high utility gene regulation sequential patterns.

Background: Mining frequent gene regulation sequential patterns in time course microarray datasets is an important mining task in bioinformatics. Although finding such patterns are of paramount important for studying a disease, most existing work do not consider gene-disease association during gene regulation sequential pattern discovery. Moreover, they consider more absent/existence effects of genes during the mining process than taking the degrees of genes expression into account.

Selective activation of a putative reinforcement signal conditions cued interval timing in primary visual cortex.

As a consequence of conditioning visual cues with delayed reward, cue-evoked neural activity that predicts the time of expected future reward emerges in the primary visual cortex (V1). We hypothesized that this reward-timing activity is engendered by a reinforcement signal conveying reward acquisition to V1. In lieu of behavioral conditioning, we assessed in vivo whether selective activation of either basal forebrain (BF) or cholinergic innervation is sufficient to condition cued interval-timing activity.

Parvalbumin interneurons mediate neuronal circuitry-neurogenesis coupling in the adult hippocampus.

Using immunohistology, electron microscopy, electrophysiology and optogenetics, we found that proliferating adult mouse hippocampal neural precursors received immature GABAergic synaptic inputs from parvalbumin-expressing interneurons. Recently shown to suppress adult quiescent neural stem cell activation, parvalbumin interneuron activation promoted newborn neuronal progeny survival and development. Our results suggest a niche mechanism involving parvalbumin interneurons that couples local circuit activity to the diametric regulation of two critical early phases of adult hippocampal neurogenesis.

Impaired hippocampal ripple-associated replay in a mouse model of schizophrenia.

The cognitive symptoms of schizophrenia presumably result from impairments of information processing in neural circuits. We recorded neural activity in the hippocampus of freely behaving mice that had a forebrain-specific knockout of the synaptic plasticity-mediating phosphatase calcineurin and were previously shown to exhibit behavioral and cognitive abnormalities, recapitulating the symptoms of schizophrenia. Calcineurin knockout (KO) mice exhibited a 2.

An in vivo porcine evaluation of the safety, bioavailability, and tissue penetration of a ketorolac drug-eluting ureteral stent designed to improve comfort.

Background And Purpose: Ureteral stents often cause significant patient morbidity that can be difficult to treat. Drug-eluting stent technology allows the local delivery of a drug. Our previous work demonstrated that ketorolac instilled intravesically at the time of ureteral stent insertion significantly decreased flank pain compared with controls.