BMC Med Res Methodol
December 2024
Purpose: Generation Scotland (GS) is a large family-based cohort study established as a longitudinal resource for research into the genetic, lifestyle and environmental determinants of physical and mental health. It comprises extensive genetic, sociodemographic and clinical data from volunteers in Scotland.
Participants: A total of 24 084 adult participants, including 5501 families, were recruited between 2006 and 2011.
Introduction: Loneliness has been identified as an important public health issue, peaking during adolescence. Previous research has suggested that social interaction is a key factor in loneliness, and positive social interaction can act as a protective factor against loneliness. However, it is unclear whether there are differing impacts of in-person and online social interaction on adolescents' loneliness and mental health.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAflatoxin B (AFB) is one of the most potent carcinogens and a widespread food and feed contaminant. As for other toxins, many efforts are devoted to find efficient and environmentally-friendly methods to degrade AFB, such as enzymatic treatments, thus improving the safety of food and feed products. In this regard, the dye decolorizing peroxidase of type B (DypB) can efficiently degrade AFB.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Newborn heel prick blood spots are routinely used to screen for inborn errors of metabolism and life-limiting inherited disorders. The potential value of secondary data from newborn blood spot archives merits ethical consideration and assessment of feasibility for public benefit. Early life exposures and behaviours set health trajectories in childhood and later life.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFTeenCovidLife is part of Generation Scotland's CovidLife projects, a set of longitudinal observational studies designed to assess the psychosocial and health impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. TeenCovidLife focused on how adolescents in Scotland were coping during the pandemic. As of September 2021, Generation Scotland had conducted three TeenCovidLife surveys.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFRuralCovidLife is part of Generation Scotland's CovidLife project, investigating the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and mitigation measures on people in Scotland. The RuralCovidLife project focuses on Scotland's rural communities, and how they have been impacted by the pandemic. During survey development, Generation Scotland consulted with people living or working in rural communities, and collaborated with a patient and public involvement and engagement (PPIE) group composed of rural community leaders.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMetal-organic framework-808 has been functionalized with 11 amino acids (AA) to produce a series of MOF-808-AA structures. The adsorption of CO under flue gas conditions revealed that glycine- and dl-lysine-functionalized MOF-808 (MOF-808-Gly and -dl-Lys) have the highest uptake capacities. Enhanced CO capture performance in the presence of water was observed and studied by using single-component sorption isotherms, CO/HO binary isotherm, and dynamic breakthrough measurements.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Blood-based markers of cognitive functioning might provide an accessible way to track neurodegeneration years prior to clinical manifestation of cognitive impairment and dementia.
Results: Using blood-based epigenome-wide analyses of general cognitive function, we show that individual differences in DNA methylation (DNAm) explain 35.0% of the variance in general cognitive function (g).
Protein biomarkers have been identified across many age-related morbidities. However, characterising epigenetic influences could further inform disease predictions. Here, we leverage epigenome-wide data to study links between the DNA methylation (DNAm) signatures of the circulating proteome and incident diseases.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCovidLife is a longitudinal observational study designed to investigate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on mental health, well-being and behaviour in adults living in the UK. In total, 18,518 participants (mean age = 56.43, SD = 14.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: The COVID-19 pandemic and mitigation measures are likely to have a marked effect on mental health. It is important to use longitudinal data to improve inferences.
Aims: To quantify the prevalence of depression, anxiety and mental well-being before and during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Objective: In UK Biobank (UKB), a large population-based prospective study, cases of many diseases are ascertained through linkage to routinely collected, coded national health datasets. We assessed the accuracy of these for identifying incident strokes.
Methods: In a regional UKB subpopulation (n = 17,249), we identified all participants with ≥1 code signifying a first stroke after recruitment (incident stroke-coded cases) in linked hospital admission, primary care, or death record data.
Rapidly increasing atmospheric CO2 concentrations threaten human society, the natural environment, and the synergy between the two. In order to ameliorate the CO2 problem, carbon capture and conversion techniques have been proposed. Metal-organic framework (MOF)-based materials, a relatively new class of porous materials with unique structural features, high surface areas, chemical tunability and stability, have been extensively studied with respect to their applicability to such techniques.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFStrategies for collecting X-ray diffraction data have evolved alongside beamline hardware and detector developments. The traditional approaches for diffraction data collection have emphasised collecting data from noisy integrating detectors (i.e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFProspective, population-based studies that recruit participants in mid-life are valuable resources for dementia research. Follow-up in these studies is often through linkage to routinely-collected healthcare datasets. We investigated the accuracy of these datasets for dementia case ascertainment in a validation study using data from UK Biobank-an open access, population-based study of > 500,000 adults aged 40-69 years at recruitment in 2006-2010.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn this work, the quality of the electron density in crystals reconstructed by the multipolar model (MM) and by X-ray wavefunction refinement (XWR) is tested on a set of high-resolution X-ray diffraction data sets of four amino acids and six tripeptides. It results in the first thorough validation of XWR. Agreement statistics, figures of merit, residual- and deformation-density maps, as well as atomic displacement parameters are used to measure the quality of the reconstruction relative to the measured structure factors.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe use of two primary alkylamine functionalities covalently tethered to the linkers of IRMOF-74-III results in a material that can uptake CO at low pressures through a chemisorption mechanism. In contrast to other primary amine-functionalized solid adsorbents that uptake CO primarily as ammonium carbamates, we observe using solid state NMR that the major chemisorption product for this material is carbamic acid. The equilibrium of reaction products also shifts to ammonium carbamate when water vapor is present; a new finding that has impact on control of the chemistry of CO capture in MOF materials and one that highlights the importance of geometric constraints and the mediating role of water within the pores of MOFs.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAmino acid structures are an ideal test set for method-development studies in crystallography. High-resolution X-ray diffraction data for eight previously studied genetically encoding amino acids are provided, complemented by a non-standard amino acid. Structures were re-investigated to study a widely applicable treatment that permits accurate X-H bond lengths to hydrogen atoms to be obtained: this treatment combines refinement of positional hydrogen-atom parameters with aspherical scattering factors with constrained "TLS+INV" estimated hydrogen anisotropic displacement parameters (H-ADPs).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe methyllysine reader protein Spindlin1 has been implicated in the tumorigenesis of several types of cancer and may be an attractive novel therapeutic target. Small-molecule inhibitors of Spindlin1 should be valuable as chemical probes as well as potential new therapeutics. We applied an iterative virtual screening campaign, encompassing structure- and ligand-based approaches, to identify potential Spindlin1 inhibitors from databases of commercially available compounds.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjectives: UK Biobank is a UK-wide cohort of 502,655 people aged 40-69, recruited from National Health Service registrants between 2006-10, with healthcare data linkage. Type 2 diabetes is a key exposure and outcome. We developed algorithms to define prevalent and incident diabetes for UK Biobank.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Aberrant expression of iron(II)- and 2-oxoglutarate-dependent JumonjiC histone demethylases has been linked to cancer. Potent demethylase inhibitors are drug candidates and biochemical tools to elucidate the functional impact of demethylase inhibition.
Methods & Results: Virtual screening identified a novel lead scaffold against JMJD2A with low-micromolar potency in vitro.
Prostate cancer evolution is driven by a combination of epigenetic and genetic alterations such as coordinated chromosomal rearrangements, termed chromoplexy. TMPRSS2-ERG gene fusions found in human prostate tumors are a hallmark of chromoplexy. TMPRSS2-ERG fusions have been linked to androgen signaling and depend on androgen receptor (AR)-coupled gene transcription.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMacromolecular crystallography (MX) is the most powerful technique available to structural biologists to visualize in atomic detail the macromolecular machinery of the cell. Since the emergence of structural genomics initiatives, significant advances have been made in all key steps of the structure determination process. In particular, third-generation synchrotron sources and the application of highly automated approaches to data acquisition and analysis at these facilities have been the major factors in the rate of increase of macromolecular structures determined annually.
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