High-throughput phenotyping using hyperspectral indicators supports the genetic dissection of yield in durum wheat grown under heat and drought stress.

High-throughput phenotyping (HTP) provides new opportunities for efficiently dissecting the genetic basis of drought-adaptive traits, which is essential in current wheat breeding programs. The combined use of HTP and genome-wide association (GWAS) approaches has been useful in the assessment of complex traits such as yield, under field stress conditions including heat and drought. The aim of this study was to identify molecular markers associated with yield (YLD) in elite durum wheat that could be explained using hyperspectral indices (HSIs) under drought field conditions in Mediterranean environments in Southern Spain.

A persistent gender pay gap among faculty in a public university system.

Despite movements towards gender parity within academia, women faculty continue to be paid less than men. While previous research has explained the gap using academic rank/seniority and productivity, existing findings are limited by either their examination of base pay or reliance on self-reported data. Here we extend the analysis beyond base pay, link faculty salary records of one public university system in the U.

Corrigendum: High perceived stress in patients on opioid agonist therapies during rapid transitional response to the COVID-19 pandemic in Ukraine.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.3389/fpubh.2023.

High perceived stress in patients on opioid agonist therapies during rapid transitional response to the COVID-19 pandemic in Ukraine.

Background: The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in marked disruptions in healthcare delivery in Ukraine related to emergency guidance in response to treating opioid use disorder (OUD). Patients with OUD, a group with high levels of comorbid medical and psychiatric disorders, and prescribed opioid agonist therapies (OAT) were rapidly shifted to take-home dosing if they were deemed clinically stable. The impact of these shifts on patient stress and related substance use during the pandemic, however, is unknown.

Impact of COVID-19 on pediatric asthma-related healthcare utilization in New York City: a community-based study.

Background: COVID-19 disproportionately affects families of low socioeconomic status and may worsen health disparities that existed prior to the pandemic. Asthma is a common chronic disease in children exacerbated by environmental exposures.

Methods: A cross-sectional survey was conducted to understand the impact of the initial stage of the pandemic on environmental and social conditions, along with access to care for children with asthma in New York City (NYC).

Interest without uptake: A mixed-methods analysis of methadone utilization in Kyrgyz prisons.

HIV incidence continues to increase in Eastern Europe and Central Asia (EECA), in large part due to non-sterile injection drug use, especially within prisons. Therefore, medication-assisted therapy with opioid agonists is an evidence-based HIV-prevention strategy. The Kyrgyz Republic offers methadone within its prison system, but uptake remains low.

A pilot implementation study to scale-up methadone in incarcerated persons with opioid use disorder and retain them on treatment after release in Moldova.

Background: Eastern Europe and Central Asia have intertwined HIV and incarceration epidemics, concentrated in people who inject drugs. Moldova is one of the few countries in this region that offers methadone within prisons, but uptake and post-release retention remains suboptimal. Screening, brief intervention, and referral to treatment (SBIRT) procedures are a potential implementation strategy to address this problem.

Successful transfer of stable patients on opioid agonist therapies from specialty addiction treatment to primary care settings in Ukraine: A pilot study.

Introduction: In Ukraine, HIV is concentrated among people who inject drugs (PWID), and opioid agonist therapies (OAT) are the most effective approach to preventing HIV transmission. OAT coverage is well below internationally recommended levels, with OAT provided primarily in specialty addiction treatment clinics. Integrating OAT into primary care settings represents a promising practice for increasing OAT coverage.

Analyzing Modern Biomolecules: The Revolution of Nucleic-Acid Sequencing - Review.

Recent developments have revolutionized the study of biomolecules. Among them are molecular markers, amplification and sequencing of nucleic acids. The latter is classified into three generations.

LncMachine: a machine learning algorithm for long noncoding RNA annotation in plants.

Following the elucidation of the critical roles they play in numerous important biological processes, long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs) have gained vast attention in recent years. Manual annotation of lncRNAs is restricted by known gene annotations and is prone to false prediction due to the incompleteness of available data. However, with the advent of high-throughput sequencing technologies, a magnitude of high-quality data has become available for annotation, especially for plant species such as wheat.

BLVector: Fast BLAST-Like Algorithm for Manycore CPU With Vectorization.

New High-Performance Computing architectures have been recently developed for commercial central processing unit (CPU). Yet, that has not improved the execution time of widely used bioinformatics applications, like BLAST+. This is due to a lack of optimization between the bases of the existing algorithms and the internals of the hardware that allows taking full advantage of the available CPU cores.

Synthesis Procedure of Highly Densely Packed Carbon Nanotube Forests on TiN.

The goal of this research was to obtain high-density single-walled carbon nanotube forests (SWNTs) on conductive substrates for different applications, including field emission. For this, dip-coating was chosen as the catalyst deposition method, to subsequently grow SWNTs by Alcohol Catalytic Chemical Vapor Deposition (AC-CVD). Si (100) was chosen as the substrate, which was then coated with a TiN thin film.

Genetic dissection of agronomic and quality traits based on association mapping and genomic selection approaches in durum wheat grown in Southern Spain.

Climatic conditions affect the growth, development and final crop production. As wheat is of paramount importance as a staple crop in the human diet, there is a growing need to study its abiotic stress adaptation through the performance of key breeding traits. New and complementary approaches, such as genome-wide association studies (GWAS) and genomic selection (GS), are used for the dissection of different agronomic traits.

Hotspots in the genomic architecture of field drought responses in wheat as breeding targets.

Wheat can adapt to most agricultural conditions across temperate regions. This success is the result of phenotypic plasticity conferred by a large and complex genome composed of three homoeologous genomes (A, B, and D). Although drought is a major cause of yield and quality loss in wheat, the adaptive mechanisms and gene networks underlying drought responses in the field remain largely unknown.

Speeding-up Bioinformatics Algorithms with Heterogeneous Architectures: Highly Heterogeneous Smith-Waterman (HHeterSW).

The Smith-Waterman algorithm has a great sensitivity when used for biological sequence-database searches, but at the expense of high computing-power requirements. To overcome this problem, there are implementations in literature that exploit the different hardware-architectures available in a standard PC, such as GPU, CPU, and coprocessors. We introduce an application that splits the original database-search problem into smaller parts, resolves each of them by executing the most efficient implementations of the Smith-Waterman algorithms in different hardware architectures, and finally unifies the generated results.

[Clinical utility and psychometric properties of Prefrontal Symptoms Inventory (PSI) in acquired brain injury and degenerative dementias].

Introduction: The cognitive, emotional and behavioural alterations secondary to acquired brain injury and degenerative dementias can be quantitatively and quantitatively appraised by administering self-reports that ask both patients and reliable informants about the difficulties patients have in their everyday life.

Subjects And Methods: The Prefrontal Symptoms Inventory (PSI) and the Modified Memory Failures in Everyday Life Questionnaire (MFE-30) were administered to 174 paired participants: 87 patients with brain damage or degenerative dementias and their 87 reliable informants. In addition to the psychometric goodness of the tests, the study also explored the clinical usefulness of applying these questionnaires to patients and their informants in order to obtain a rate of discrepancy in the scores as a measure of anosognosia.

MC64-ClustalWP2: a highly-parallel hybrid strategy to align multiple sequences in many-core architectures.

We have developed the MC64-ClustalWP2 as a new implementation of the Clustal W algorithm, integrating a novel parallelization strategy and significantly increasing the performance when aligning long sequences in architectures with many cores. It must be stressed that in such a process, the detailed analysis of both the software and hardware features and peculiarities is of paramount importance to reveal key points to exploit and optimize the full potential of parallelism in many-core CPU systems. The new parallelization approach has focused into the most time-consuming stages of this algorithm.

Angiotensin II inhibits satellite cell proliferation and prevents skeletal muscle regeneration.

Cachexia is a serious complication of many chronic diseases, such as congestive heart failure (CHF) and chronic kidney disease (CKD). Although patients with advanced CHF or CKD often have increased angiotensin II (Ang II) levels and cachexia and Ang II causes skeletal muscle wasting in rodents, the potential effects of Ang II on muscle regeneration are unknown. Muscle regeneration is highly dependent on the ability of a pool of muscle stem cells (satellite cells) to proliferate and to repair damaged myofibers or form new myofibers.

Molecular mechanisms and signaling pathways of angiotensin II-induced muscle wasting: potential therapeutic targets for cardiac cachexia.

Cachexia is a serious complication of many chronic diseases, such as congestive heart failure (CHF) and chronic kidney disease (CKD). Many factors are involved in the development of cachexia, and there is increasing evidence that angiotensin II (Ang II), the main effector molecule of the renin-angiotensin system (RAS), plays an important role in this process. Patients with advanced CHF or CKD often have increased Ang II levels and cachexia, and angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE) inhibitor treatment improves weight loss.

Metabolomic study of Chilean biomining bacteria Acidithiobacillus ferrooxidans strain Wenelen and Acidithiobacillus thiooxidans strain Licanantay.

In this study, we present the first metabolic profiles for two bioleaching bacteria using capillary electrophoresis coupled with mass spectrometry. The bacteria, Acidithiobacillus ferrooxidans strain Wenelen (DSM 16786) and Acidithiobacillus thiooxidans strain Licanantay (DSM 17318), were sampled at different growth phases and on different substrates: the former was grown with iron and sulfur, and the latter with sulfur and chalcopyrite. Metabolic profiles were scored from planktonic and sessile states.

Next-generation sequencing and syntenic integration of flow-sorted arms of wheat chromosome 4A exposes the chromosome structure and gene content.

Wheat is the third most important crop for human nutrition in the world. The availability of high-resolution genetic and physical maps and ultimately a complete genome sequence holds great promise for breeding improved varieties to cope with increasing food demand under the conditions of changing global climate. However, the large size of the bread wheat (Triticum aestivum) genome (approximately 17 Gb/1C) and the triplication of genic sequence resulting from its hexaploid status have impeded genome sequencing of this important crop species.