Publications by authors named "Megan Taylor"

In the aftermath of Hurricane María's devastating impact on Puerto Rico in September 2017, a wave of migration to the continental United States followed. Despite Puerto Rico's territorial association with the United States, its distinct culture and language often render its migrants as cultural minorities who are often treated as foreigners. Prior research has indicated that natural disasters can have a profound effect on the family unit, so examining the experiences of displacement and resettlement of Puerto Rican parents can shed light on the challenges faced by these families.

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endophthalmitis is a rare cause of endogenous endophthalmitis, with very few cases documented in the US. We present a male patient in his 60s with a history of latent tuberculosis who presented to the hospital with complaints of acute bilateral vision loss that began three days prior to admission. The workup revealed bacteremia, a large hepatic abscess, severe orbital swelling, and acute angle-closure glaucoma.

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Objectives: Atenolol is a commonly used beta bloscker in non-pregnant women. Many providers are hesitant in prescribing atenolol in pregnancy because of a possible association with poor fetal growth. We aimed to assess the association between atenolol and the occurrence of small for gestational age neonates compared to other beta blockers, as described in the existing literature.

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Cases of concurrent duodenal adenocarcinoma and gastrointestinal stromal tumors (GISTs) are rare, and only a few have been reported. While some cases of other synchronous primary tumors with GIST have been reported, no shared mutations have been consistently found, creating challenges in selecting chemotherapy in cases of inoperable tumors. Here, we presented a case of a stage IIIA locally advanced/unresectable duodenal adenocarcinoma with concurrent metastatic small bowel GIST successfully being treated with combined imatinib and modified folinic acid, 5-fluorouracil, and irinotecan (mFOLFIRI) regimen.

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This article for the Highlights of 2023 Series explores recent work that suggests that targeting CD4 CAR T cells may be critical for both of these challenges.

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Background: High levels of infant negative emotionality (NE) and low positive emotionality (PE) predict future emotional and behavioral problems. The prefrontal cortex (PFC) supports emotional regulation, with each PFC subregion specializing in specific emotional processes. Neurite orientation dispersion and density imaging estimates microstructural integrity and myelination via the neurite density index (NDI) and dispersion via the orientation dispersion index (ODI), with potential to more accurately evaluate microstructural alterations in the developing brain.

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Microbial evolution within polymicrobial communities is a complex process. Here, we report within-species diversification within multispecies microbial communities during experimental evolution with the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans. We describe morphological diversity in the target species Chryseobacterium gleum, which developed a novel colony morphotype in a small number of replicate communities.

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Ageing is the greatest risk factor for a multitude of age-related diseases including sarcopenia -the loss of skeletal muscle mass and strength - which occurs at remarkable rates each year. There is an unmet need not only to understand the mechanisms that drive sarcopenia, but also to identify novel therapeutic strategies. Given the ease and affordability of husbandry, along with advances in genomics, genome editing technologies and imaging capabilities, teleost models are increasingly used for ageing and sarcopenia research.

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The house mouse (Mus musculus) is an exceptional model system, combining genetic tractability with close evolutionary affinity to humans. Mouse gestation lasts only 3 weeks, during which the genome orchestrates the astonishing transformation of a single-cell zygote into a free-living pup composed of more than 500 million cells. Here, to establish a global framework for exploring mammalian development, we applied optimized single-cell combinatorial indexing to profile the transcriptional states of 12.

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The ability to coordinate the hands together to act on objects where each hand does something different is known as role-differentiated bimanual manipulation (RDBM). This study investigated two motor skills that may support the development of RDBM: infants' early object skill and their early sitting skill. To evaluate these potential predictors of RDBM growth, 90 infants were examined in a lab-based longitudinal design over a 9-month period.

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Accumulating evidence suggests that psychological distress during pregnancy is linked to offspring risk for externalizing outcomes (e.g., reactive/aggressive behaviors, hyperactivity, and impulsivity).

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Introduction: Gestational diabetes mellitus is the most common metabolic disorder in pregnancy, and it is associated with detrimental short- and long-term consequences to both the fetus and the mother. Some studies in the literature have found an association between the identification of fetal hyperechogenic pancreas via prenatal ultrasound and the presence of gestational diabetes mellitus. The aim of our study was to assess the association of fetal hyperechogenic pancreas with gestational diabetes mellitus using the meta-analytic method.

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A defining feature of most primates is a hand with five fingers. Spider monkeys are an exception because they have four fingers and no thumb. Despite the prevalence of reach-to-grasp research in primates, it is not known how the lack of a thumb affects reaching and grasping in spider monkeys.

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Article Synopsis
  • High levels of infant negative emotionality (NE) can lead to emotional and behavioral problems later in childhood, so identifying neural markers in infants could help with early interventions.
  • Prefrontal cortical (PFC) subregions play a crucial role in regulating NE and positive emotionality (PE), and gray matter volume in these areas may serve as reliable indicators for vulnerability to psychiatric issues.
  • The study found that greater medial superior frontal cortical volume in 3-month-old infants was linked to higher NE, while greater ventrolateral prefrontal cortical volume correlated with lower PE at 9 months, with these associations remaining significant after accounting for various demographic factors.
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The house mouse, , is an exceptional model system, combining genetic tractability with close homology to human biology. Gestation in mouse development lasts just under three weeks, a period during which its genome orchestrates the astonishing transformation of a single cell zygote into a free-living pup composed of >500 million cells. Towards a global framework for exploring mammalian development, we applied single cell combinatorial indexing (sci-*) to profile the transcriptional states of 12.

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Background: Elucidating the neural basis of infant positive emotionality and negative emotionality can identify biomarkers of pathophysiological risk. Our goal was to determine how functional interactions among large-scale networks supporting emotional regulation influence white matter (WM) microstructural-emotional behavior relationships in 3-month-old infants. We hypothesized that microstructural-emotional behavior relationships would be differentially mediated or suppressed by underlying resting-state functional connectivity (rsFC), particularly between default mode network and central executive network structures.

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Melanoma is one of the most aggressive forms of skin cancer and is characterized by high metastatic potential. Despite improvements in early diagnosis and treatment, the mortality rate among metastatic melanoma patients continues to represent a significant clinical challenge. Therefore, it is imperative that we search for new forms of treatment.

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Hydrogen peroxide (HO) is a ubiquitous oxidant produced in a regulated manner by various enzymes in mammalian cells. HO reversibly oxidizes thiol groups of cysteine residues to mediate intracellular signaling. While examples of HOdependent signaling have been reported, the exact molecular mechanism(s) of signaling and the pathways affected are not well understood.

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The gut microbiome is essential for processing complex food compounds and synthesizing nutrients that the host cannot digest or produce, respectively. New model systems are needed to study how the metabolic capacity provided by the gut microbiome impacts the nutritional status of the host, and to explore possibilities for altering host metabolic capacity via the microbiome. Here, we colonized the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans gut with cellulolytic bacteria that enabled C.

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Adaptation of replicate microbial communities frequently produces shared trajectories of community composition and structure. However, divergent adaptation of individual community members can occur and is associated with community-level divergence. The extent to which community-based adaptation of microbes should be convergent when community members are similar but not identical is, therefore, not well-understood.

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The nematode Caenorhabditis elegans is a model system for host-microbe and host-microbiome interactions. Many studies to date use batch digests rather than individual worm samples to quantify bacterial load in this organism. Here it is argued that the large inter-individual variability seen in bacterial colonization of the C.

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The number of older adults in the United States is projected to increase in coming years, including the number of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, or questioning (LGBTQ+) older adults requiring long-term care (LTC) services. We conducted an online survey of older LGBTQ+ adults living in the Southern United States between January and March of 2018 to inquire about their anticipation of discrimination in and willingness to utilize LTC services. We found that 78.

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Background: Behavioral research indicates that caregiver mood disorders and emotional instability in the early months following childbirth are associated with lower positive emotionality and higher negative emotionality in infants, but the neural mechanisms remain understudied.

Methods: Using resting-state functional connectivity as a measure of the functional architecture of the early infant brain, we aimed to determine the extent to which connectivity between the amygdala, a key region supporting emotional learning and perception, and large-scale neural networks mediated the association between caregiver affect and anxiety and early infant negative emotionality and positive emotionality. Two samples of infants (first sample: n = 58; second sample: n = 31) 3 months of age underwent magnetic resonance imaging during natural sleep.

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A growing body of data suggests that the microbiome of a species can vary considerably from individual to individual, but the reasons for this variation-and the consequences for the ecology of these communities-remain only partially explained. In mammals, the emerging picture is that the metabolic state and immune system status of the host affect the composition of the microbiome, but quantitative ecological microbiome studies are challenging to perform in higher organisms. Here, we show that these phenomena can be quantitatively analyzed in the tractable nematode host Mutants in innate immunity, in particular the DAF-2/insulin growth factor (IGF) pathway, are shown to contain a microbiome that differs from that of wild-type nematodes.

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