Widespread natural selection on metabolite levels in humans.

Natural selection acts ubiquitously on complex human traits, predominantly constraining the occurrence of extreme phenotypes (stabilizing selection). These constraints propagate to DNA sequence variants associated with traits under selection. The genetic signatures of such evolutionary events can thus be detected via combining effect size estimates from genetic association studies and the corresponding allele frequencies.

Principles of metabolome conservation in animals.

Metabolite levels shape cellular physiology and disease susceptibility, yet the general principles governing metabolome evolution are largely unknown. Here, we introduce a measure of conservation of individual metabolite levels among related species. By analyzing multispecies tissue metabolome datasets in phylogenetically diverse mammals and fruit flies, we show that conservation varies extensively across metabolites.

Trends in dental care utilisation among the elderly using longitudinal data from 14 European countries: A multilevel analysis.

Background: The use of dental care among older people is low compared to other forms of health care, with significant health consequences. However, the evidence on the extent to which countries' welfare systems and socio-economic factors influence the uptake of dental care by older people is limited. This study aimed to describe trends of dental care utilisation, and to compare use of dental care with other types of healthcare services among the elderly, considering different socio-economic factors and welfare systems in European countries.

TFLink: an integrated gateway to access transcription factor-target gene interactions for multiple species.

Analysis of transcriptional regulatory interactions and their comparisons across multiple species are crucial for progress in various fields in biology, from functional genomics to the evolution of signal transduction pathways. However, despite the rapidly growing body of data on regulatory interactions in several eukaryotes, no databases exist to provide curated high-quality information on transcription factor-target gene interactions for multiple species. Here, we address this gap by introducing the TFLink gateway, which uniquely provides experimentally explored and highly accurate information on transcription factor-target gene interactions (∼12 million), nucleotide sequences and genomic locations of transcription factor binding sites (∼9 million) for human and six model organisms: mouse, rat, zebrafish, fruit fly, worm and yeast by integrating 10 resources.