Contraceptive-specific antimüllerian hormone values in reproductive-age women: a population study of 42,684 women.

Objective: To determine how the contraceptive-specific serum antimüllerian hormone (AMH) levels compare across ages and percentiles in a reproductive-age cohort.

Design: Cross-sectional analysis of a prospectively recruited cohort.

Setting: Community.

Ethnic discordance in serum anti-Müllerian hormone in European and Indian healthy women and Indian infertile women.

Research Question: Does anti-Müllerian hormone (AMH) differ between healthy European and Indian women, and are potential ethnic differences modified by infertility diagnosis?

Design: Cross-sectional analysis of three prospectively recruited cohorts (n = 2758); healthy European women (n = 758), healthy community cohort from Kolhapur, India (n = 400) and infertility cohort from Kolhapur, India (n = 1600). AMH was determined by assay. Ethnicity, age and cause of infertility were modelled using additive quantile regression models.

Association of Epidural Analgesia in Women in Labor With Neonatal and Childhood Outcomes in a Population Cohort.

Importance: Although use of epidural analgesia during labor is safe, detailed information about its association with neonatal and child outcomes is limited.

Objective: To investigate the association of labor epidural analgesia with neonatal outcomes and childhood development during the first 1000 days of life.

Design, Setting, And Participants: This population-based cohort study used Scottish National Health Service hospital administrative data of all 435 281 singleton live births in Scotland between January 1, 2007, and December 31, 2016, with follow-up over the first 1000 days of life.

SARS-Cov-2 viral and serological screening of staff in 31 European fertility units.

Study Question: What is the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) viral presence and seroconversion in staff members in European fertility units prior to recommencement of clinical activity?

Summary Answer: A large proportion of fertility clinic staff remain susceptible to SARS-CoV-2 with no evidence of seroconversion, indicating that continued comprehensive risk mitigation strategies are essential.

What Is Known Already: In response to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, caused by SARS-CoV-2, routine fertility treatment was temporarily stopped in several European countries. The SARS-CoV-2 prevalence and seroconversion in fertility clinic staff, who are at potentially lower risk than routine healthcare workers, are unknown.

Identifying molecules as biosignatures with assembly theory and mass spectrometry.

The search for alien life is hard because we do not know what signatures are unique to life. We show why complex molecules found in high abundance are universal biosignatures and demonstrate the first intrinsic experimentally tractable measure of molecular complexity, called the molecular assembly index (MA). To do this we calculate the complexity of several million molecules and validate that their complexity can be experimentally determined by mass spectrometry.

2008 financial crisis versus 2020 economic fallout: how COVID-19 might influence fertility treatment and live births.

Research Question: The economic and reproductive medicine response to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic in the USA has reduced the affordability and accessibility of fertility care. What is the impact of the 2008 financial recession and the COVID-19 recession on fertility treatments and cumulative live births?

Design: The study examined annual US natality, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention IVF cycle activity and live birth data from 1999 to 2018 encompassing 3,286,349 treatment cycles, to estimate the age-stratified reduction in IVF cycles undertaken after the 2008 financial recession, with forward quantitative modelling of IVF cycle activity and cumulative live births for 2020 to 2023.

Results: The financial recession of 2008 caused a 4-year plateau in fertility treatments with a predicted 53,026 (95% confidence interval [CI] 49,581 to 56,471) fewer IVF cycles and 16,872 (95% CI 16,713 to 17,031) fewer live births.

Neonatal and early childhood outcomes following maternal anesthesia for cesarean section: a population-based cohort study.

Background: The fetus is vulnerable to maternal drug exposure. We determined associations of exposure to spinal, epidural, or general anesthesia on neonatal and childhood development outcomes during the first 1000 days of life.

Methods: Population-based study of all singleton, cesarean livebirths of 24+0 to 43+6 weeks gestation between January 2007 and December 2016 in Scotland, stratified by urgency with follow-up to age 2 years.

Population implications of cessation of IVF during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Research Question: Discontinuation of IVF cycles has been part of the radical transformation of healthcare provision to enable reallocation of staff and resources to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic. This study sought to estimate the impact of cessation of treatment on individual prognosis and US population live birth rates.

Design: Data from 271,438 ovarian stimulation UK IVF cycles was used to model the effect of age as a continuous, yet non-linear, function on cumulative live birth rate.

Environmental control programs the emergence of distinct functional ensembles from unconstrained chemical reactions.

Many approaches to the origin of life focus on how the molecules found in biology might be made in the absence of biological processes, from the simplest plausible starting materials. Another approach could be to view the emergence of the chemistry of biology as process whereby the environment effectively directs "primordial soups" toward structure, function, and genetic systems over time. This does not require the molecules found in biology today to be made initially, and leads to the hypothesis that environment can direct chemical soups toward order, and eventually living systems.

Designing Algorithms To Aid Discovery by Chemical Robots.

Recently, automated robotic systems have become very efficient, thanks to improved coupling between sensor systems and algorithms, of which the latter have been gaining significance thanks to the increase in computing power over the past few decades. However, intelligent automated chemistry platforms for discovery orientated tasks need to be able to cope with the unknown, which is a profoundly hard problem. In this Outlook, we describe how recent advances in the design and application of algorithms, coupled with the increased amount of chemical data available, and automation and control systems may allow more productive chemical research and the development of chemical robots able to target discovery.

Miller-Urey Spark-Discharge Experiments in the Deuterium World.

We designed and conducted a series of primordial-soup Miller-Urey style experiments with deuterated gases and reagents to compare the spark-discharge products of a "deuterated world" with the standard reaction in the "hydrogenated world". While the deuteration of the system has little effect on the distribution of amino acid products, significant differences are seen in other regions of the product-space. Not only do we observe about 120 new species, we also see significant differences in their distribution if the two hydrogen isotope worlds are compared.

Ethnic differences in male reproductive hormones and relationships with adiposity and insulin resistance in older men.

Objectives: To assess ethnic differences in male reproductive hormone levels and to determine whether any differences are explained by adiposity, insulin resistance (IR) or comorbidities in older men.

Design: Multi-ethnic cross-sectional observational study.

Participants: Community dwelling middle-aged and elderly men residing in the UK aged 40-84 years of South Asian (SA; n = 180), White European (WE; n = 328) or African Caribbean (AC; n = 166) origin.

Multivariate data analysis and metabolic profiling of artemisinin and related compounds in high yielding varieties of Artemisia annua field-grown in Madagascar.

An improved liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS) protocol for rapid analysis of co-metabolites of A. annua in raw extracts was developed and extensively characterized. The new method was used to analyse metabolic profiles of 13 varieties of A.

A tutorial review: Metabolomics and partial least squares-discriminant analysis--a marriage of convenience or a shotgun wedding.

The predominance of partial least squares-discriminant analysis (PLS-DA) used to analyze metabolomics datasets (indeed, it is the most well-known tool to perform classification and regression in metabolomics), can be said to have led to the point that not all researchers are fully aware of alternative multivariate classification algorithms. This may in part be due to the widespread availability of PLS-DA in most of the well-known statistical software packages, where its implementation is very easy if the default settings are used. In addition, one of the perceived advantages of PLS-DA is that it has the ability to analyze highly collinear and noisy data.

A comparison of different chemometrics approaches for the robust classification of electronic nose data.

Accurate detection of certain chemical vapours is important, as these may be diagnostic for the presence of weapons, drugs of misuse or disease. In order to achieve this, chemical sensors could be deployed remotely. However, the readout from such sensors is a multivariate pattern, and this needs to be interpreted robustly using powerful supervised learning methods.

Influence of missing values substitutes on multivariate analysis of metabolomics data.

Missing values are known to be problematic for the analysis of gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) metabolomics data. Typically these values cover about 10%-20% of all data and can originate from various backgrounds, including analytical, computational, as well as biological. Currently, the most well known substitute for missing values is a mean imputation.

A comparative investigation of modern feature selection and classification approaches for the analysis of mass spectrometry data.

Many analytical approaches such as mass spectrometry generate large amounts of data (input variables) per sample analysed, and not all of these variables are important or related to the target output of interest. The selection of a smaller number of variables prior to sample classification is a widespread task in many research studies, where attempts are made to seek the lowest possible set of variables that are still able to achieve a high level of prediction accuracy; in other words, there is a need to generate the most parsimonious solution when the number of input variables is huge but the number of samples/objects are smaller. Here, we compare several different variable selection approaches in order to ascertain which of these are ideally suited to achieve this goal.