Putting one health to the test: Operational challenges and critical reflections from the global South.

One Health as a policy framework to tackle zoonoses has gained wide-ranging validation with multiple international organizations throwing their collective might behind it. Such endorsement has convinced several governments to adopt One Health as a national strategy to address zoonoses. Although some argue that One Health is so many things that there are in fact multiple 'One Healths', others find that most international policy documents that use the One Health framing contain certain key recommendations, with intersectoral coordination and disease surveillance prominent among them.

Reduced loss and bend sensitivity in hermetically-sealed hollow-core fiber gas cells using gas-induced differential refractive index.

Hollow-core optical fiber (HCF) gas cells are an attractive option for many applications including metrology and non-linear optics due to the enhanced gas-light interaction length in a compact and lightweight format. Here, we report the first demonstration and characterization of a selectively pressurized, hermetically sealed hollow-core fiber-based gas cell, where the core is filled with a higher gas pressure than the cladding to enhance the optical performance. This differential gas pressure creates a gas-induced differential refractive index (GDRI) that is shown to enable significant modification of the HCF's optical performance.

An augmented transformer model trained on protein family specific variant data leads to improved prediction of variants of uncertain significance.

Variants of uncertain significance (VUS) represent variants that lack sufficient evidence to be confidently associated with a disease, thus posing a challenge in the interpretation of genetic testing results. Here we report an improved method for predicting the VUS of Arylsulfatase A (ARSA) gene as part of the Critical Assessment of Genome Interpretation challenge (CAGI6). Our method uses a transfer learning approach that leverages a pre-trained protein language model to predict the impact of mutations on the activity of the ARSA enzyme, whose deficiency is known to cause a rare genetic disorder, metachromatic leukodystrophy.

Ameliorating salt stress in tomato by a top-down approach of acclimatizing the rhizosphere microbiome.

Soil salinization adversely impacts plant and soil health. While amendment with chemicals is not sustainable, the application of bioinoculants suffers from competition with indigenous microbes. Hence, microbiome-based rhizosphere engineering, focussing on acclimatization of rhizosphere microbiome under selection pressure to facilitate plant growth, exhibits promise.

Dissecting the genetic basis of fruiting efficiency for genetic enhancement of harvest index, grain number, and yield in wheat.

Background: Grain number (GN) is one of the key yield contributing factors in modern wheat (Triticum aestivum) varieties. Fruiting efficiency (FE) is a key trait for increasing GN by making more spike assimilates available to reproductive structures. Thousand grain weight (TGW) is also an important component of grain yield.