Durability of Protection Post-Primary COVID-19 Vaccination in the United States.

The durability of immune responses after COVID-19 vaccination will drive long-term vaccine effectiveness across settings and may differ by vaccine type. To determine durability of protection of COVID-19 vaccines (BNT162b2, mRNA-1273, and Ad26.COV2.

Impact of natural selection on global patterns of genetic variation and association with clinical phenotypes at genes involved in SARS-CoV-2 infection.

Human genomic diversity has been shaped by both ancient and ongoing challenges from viruses. The current coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) has had a devastating impact on population health. However, genetic diversity and evolutionary forces impacting host genes related to SARS-CoV-2 infection are not well understood.

Radiologist-supervised Transfer Learning: Improving Radiographic Localization of Pneumonia and Prognostication of Patients With COVID-19.

Purpose: To assess the potential of a transfer learning strategy leveraging radiologist supervision to enhance convolutional neural network-based (CNN) localization of pneumonia on radiographs and to further assess the prognostic value of CNN severity quantification on patients evaluated for COVID-19 pneumonia, for whom severity on the presenting radiograph is a known predictor of mortality and intubation.

Materials And Methods: We obtained an initial CNN previously trained to localize pneumonia along with 25,684 radiographs used for its training. We additionally curated 1466 radiographs from patients who had a computed tomography (CT) performed on the same day.

Redondovirus Diversity and Evolution on Global, Individual, and Molecular Scales.

is a newly established family of circular Rep-encoding single-stranded (CRESS) DNA viruses found in the human ororespiratory tract. Redondoviruses were previously found in ∼15% of respiratory specimens from U.S.

Lifestyle and the presence of helminths is associated with gut microbiome composition in Cameroonians.

Background: African populations provide a unique opportunity to interrogate host-microbe co-evolution and its impact on adaptive phenotypes due to their genomic, phenotypic, and cultural diversity. We integrate gut microbiome 16S rRNA amplicon and shotgun metagenomic sequence data with quantification of pathogen burden and measures of immune parameters for 575 ethnically diverse Africans from Cameroon. Subjects followed pastoralist, agropastoralist, and hunter-gatherer lifestyles and were compared to an urban US population from Philadelphia.

Investigating zoonotic infection barriers to ape Plasmodium parasites using faecal DNA analysis.

African apes are endemically infected with numerous Plasmodium spp. including close relatives of human Plasmodium falciparum, Plasmodium vivax, Plasmodium ovale, and Plasmodium malariae. Although these ape parasites are not believed to pose a zoonotic threat, their ability to colonise humans has not been fully explored.

Facing the facts: The Runx2 gene is associated with variation in facial morphology in primates.

The phylogenetic and adaptive factors that cause variation in primate facial form-including differences among the major primate clades and variation related to feeding and/or social behavior-are relatively well understood. However, comparatively little is known about the genetic mechanisms that underlie diversity in facial form in primates. Because it is essential for osteoblastic differentiation and skeletal development, the runt-related transcription factor 2 (Runx2) is one gene that may play a role in these genetic mechanisms.

Inferences of African evolutionary history from genomic data.

Africa is the origin of anatomically modern humans and a continent of linguistic, cultural, environmental, phenotypic, and genetic diversity. However, African populations remain underrepresented in genetic studies, which have largely focused on individuals with European and Asian ancestry. The expansion of high-throughput 'omic' technologies to interrogate multiple tissue types across many biomolecules-DNA, proteins, epigenetic modifications, metabolites, and others-has heralded a new era of investigation into African history.

Population genetic structure of traditional populations in the Peruvian Central Andes and implications for South American population history.

Molecular-based characterizations of Andean peoples are traditionally conducted in the service of elucidating continent-level evolutionary processes in South America. Consequently, genetic variation among "western" Andean populations is often represented in relation to variation among "eastern" Amazon and Orinoco River Basin populations. This west-east contrast in patterns of population genetic variation is typically attributed to large-scale phenomena, such as dual founder colonization events or differing long-term microevolutionary histories.

Regulatory element copy number differences shape primate expression profiles.

Gene expression differences are shaped by selective pressures and contribute to phenotypic differences between species. We identified 964 copy number differences (CNDs) of conserved sequences across three primate species and examined their potential effects on gene expression profiles. Samples with copy number different genes had significantly different expression than samples with neutral copy number.