Adverse changes in close social ties in aging women and men: A population-based longitudinal study of the CLSA (2011-2021).

Close social ties are important for health but these can decline as people age. Moreover, losses of close social ties may be worse for women, older age and low socioeconomic groups. We characterized alterations in both marital status or living arrangement over 6 years by gender, and assessed patterns by age, country of origin, geographic location, education, wealth, and household income.

Trends, transitions and patterning in social activity over time among aging women and men: A secondary analysis of the Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging (CLSA).

Social isolation matters for health and longevity, but little research examines transitions into or out of social isolation or whether transitions are gendered or socially patterned. We described gender-specific trends in breadth and lack of social participation over 6 years overall and by age, country of origin, geographic location, education, wealth, and household income. We used three waves of CLSA data to evaluate changes in social isolation (0-1 activities) and broad social participation (5+ activities) in adults aged 45-75 (n = 24,788), by gender and socio-demographics, in linear and multinomial logistic regressions with post-estimated predicted probabilities.

A systematic review of social connections as determinants of obesity: Longitudinal evidence limited to marital transitions.

Background: Social relationships impact health and may affect proximal determinants such as obesity. Our review examined empirical evidence of the impact of changes in social relationships on risk of obesity in aging adults, with attention to gender.

Methods: We systematically searched Medline, EMBASE, Scopus, CINAHL, and ProQuest Dissertations and reference lists of relevant reviews and papers published up to November 2022.

Intergenerational reproduction and self-assessed mental health in adulthood in China.

Physical and mental health disparities by socioeconomic status in China are well documented but the effects of the intergenerational reproduction in socioeconomic status on adult mental health have received little attention to date. We utilized cross-sectional data from the 2017 Chinese General Social Survey to examine the significance of intergenerational socioeconomic reproduction for differences in self-assessed mental health in a national sample of Chinese adults between the ages of 23 and 65. We documented substantial elasticities between the socioeconomic status of the survey respondents and their parents: father's education, mother's education and childhood social class were all associated with both respondent education and respondent household income.

Mass production of lumenogenic human embryoid bodies and functional cardiospheres using in-air-generated microcapsules.

Organoids are engineered 3D miniature tissues that are defined by their organ-like structures, which drive a fundamental understanding of human development. However, current organoid generation methods are associated with low production throughputs and poor control over size and function including due to organoid merging, which limits their clinical and industrial translation. Here, we present a microfluidic platform for the mass production of lumenogenic embryoid bodies and functional cardiospheres.

Social mobility and mental health in Canada.

Objectives: To investigate whether intergenerational mobility in education and income are associated with levels of psychological distress in Canada, a context in which rates of intergenerational mobility are higher than those of the United States but lower than those of Nordic countries.

Methods: The data came from the Longitudinal and International Study of Adults (LISA) linked to tax records from the Canada Revenue Agency (N = 4100). Diagonal reference models were used to investigate whether educational mobility and income mobility were associated with levels of psychological distress in adulthood as assessed by the Kessler (K-10) scale.

ONECUT2 regulates RANKL-dependent enterocyte and microfold cell differentiation in the small intestine; a multi-omics study.

Microfold (M) cells reside in the intestinal epithelium of Peyer's patches (PP). Their unique ability to take up and transport antigens from the intestinal lumen to the underlying lymphoid tissue is key in the regulation of the gut-associated immune response. Here, we applied a multi-omics approach to investigate the molecular mechanisms that drive M cell differentiation in mouse small intestinal organoids.

The Role of Polycomb Proteins in Cell Lineage Commitment and Embryonic Development.

Embryonic development is a highly intricate and complex process. Different regulatory mechanisms cooperatively dictate the fate of cells as they progress from pluripotent stem cells to terminally differentiated cell types in tissues. A crucial regulator of these processes is the Polycomb Repressive Complex 2 (PRC2).

Preparation of Intact Nuclei for Single-Nucleus Omics Using Frozen Cell Suspensions from Mutant Embryos of .

Single-cell omics such as single-cell RNA-sequencing (RNA-seq) have been used extensively to obtain single-cell genome-wide expression data. This technique can be used to compare mutant and wild-type embryos at predifferentiation stages when individual tissues are not yet formed (therefore requiring genotyping to distinguish among embryos), for example, to determine effects of mutations on developmental trajectories or congenital disease phenotypes. It is, however, hard to use single cells for this technique, because such embryos or cells would need to be frozen until genotyping is complete to capture a given developmental stage precisely, but intact cells cannot be isolated from frozen samples.

Intergenerational reproduction and adult self-rated physical health in China.

We used cross-sectional data from the 2017 Chinese General Social Survey to investigate whether and how Chinese parents utilize their socioeconomic resources to facilitate the acquisition of socioeconomic resources by their children that in turn affect the self-rated health of the adult children. We found that father's type of work unit () and father's membership in the Chinese Communist Party were not independently associated with the self-rated health of survey respondents. Father's education was associated with the self-rated health of women, especially younger women, and self-reported childhood social class was associated with the self-rated health of men and older women, most strongly so for younger men.

Intergenerational reproduction and self-rated health in Canada.

Intergenerational processes in which the socioeconomic status of middle- and upper-class parents is reproduced in their children have been extensively documented by social scientists. We mobilized a unique dataset, the Longitudinal and International Study of Adults (LISA) linked to income data from the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA), to investigate the relevance of intergenerational socioeconomic reproduction for inequalities in self-rated health in a national sample of Canadians aged 25 to 50. We found strong intergenerational elasticities implicating both parental education and parental family income in the acquisition of both personal education and personal family income.

Electronic health record implementation and healthcare workers' work characteristics and autonomous motivation-a before-and-after study.

Background: Technological innovation in healthcare is often assumed to contribute to the quality of care. However, the question how technology implementation impacts healthcare workers has received little empirical attention. This study investigates the consequences of Electronic Health Record (EHR) implementation for healthcare workers' autonomous work motivation.

Uncovering the mesendoderm gene regulatory network through multi-omic data integration.

Mesendodermal specification is one of the earliest events in embryogenesis, where cells first acquire distinct identities. Cell differentiation is a highly regulated process that involves the function of numerous transcription factors (TFs) and signaling molecules, which can be described with gene regulatory networks (GRNs). Cell differentiation GRNs are difficult to build because existing mechanistic methods are low throughput, and high-throughput methods tend to be non-mechanistic.

Gender Differences in the Role of Social Support for Hypertension Prevention in Canada: A Population-Based Cross-Sectional Study of the Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging Cohort.

Background: The relationship between social support and hypertension is poorly understood in women and men. We investigated whether multiple measures of social support are linked to blood pressure levels differentially by gender.

Methods: Cross-sectional study of 28,779 middle-age and older-age adults (45-85 years) in the baseline Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging comprehensive cohort.

Conditional immortalization of human atrial myocytes for the generation of in vitro models of atrial fibrillation.

The lack of a scalable and robust source of well-differentiated human atrial myocytes constrains the development of in vitro models of atrial fibrillation (AF). Here we show that fully functional atrial myocytes can be generated and expanded one-quadrillion-fold via a conditional cell-immortalization method relying on lentiviral vectors and the doxycycline-controlled expression of a recombinant viral oncogene in human foetal atrial myocytes, and that the immortalized cells can be used to generate in vitro models of AF. The method generated 15 monoclonal cell lines with molecular, cellular and electrophysiological properties resembling those of primary atrial myocytes.

Loss of PRC2 subunits primes lineage choice during exit of pluripotency.

Polycomb Repressive Complex 2 (PRC2) is crucial for the coordinated expression of genes during early embryonic development, catalyzing histone H3 lysine 27 trimethylation. Two distinct PRC2 complexes, PRC2.1 and PRC2.

Interactions between parental and personal socioeconomic resources and self-rated health: Adjudicating between the resource substitution and resource multiplication theories.

A small body of research has documented intriguing findings, mostly from the United States but also from Europe, which suggest that the positive health effects of socioeconomic resources in adulthood may be conditioned by socioeconomic circumstances in childhood. There are two competing theories in this literature. The first contends that socioeconomic resources have a stronger effect on adult health for people from disadvantaged backgrounds because socioeconomic resources in adulthood substitute or compensate for a paucity of health-related resources earlier in life.

Isolation of multipotent progenitor cells from pleura and pericardium for tracheal tissue engineering purposes.

Tissue engineering (TE) of long tracheal segments is conceptually appealing for patients with inoperable tracheal pathology. In tracheal TE, stem cells isolated from bone marrow or adipose tissue have been employed, but the ideal cell source has yet to be determined. When considering the origin of stem cells, cells isolated from a source embryonically related to the trachea may be more similar.

Adiposity and the role of diverse social supports: an observational, gender-sensitive study using the baseline Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging.

Objective: To quantify associations between four types of social support and measured adiposity among women and men.

Design: The cross-sectional sample from the Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging (CLSA, 2012-2015). Height, weight and waist circumference (WC) were clinically measured, and perceived availability of informational, tangible, emotional and belonging social supports was self-reported.

Intergenerational social mobility and self-rated health in Canada.

A growing body of research seeks to reveal the health effects of 'falling from grace' or 'rising from rags,' i.e., experiencing downward or upward mobility relative to one's family socioeconomic background.

ANANSE: an enhancer network-based computational approach for predicting key transcription factors in cell fate determination.

Proper cell fate determination is largely orchestrated by complex gene regulatory networks centered around transcription factors. However, experimental elucidation of key transcription factors that drive cellular identity is currently often intractable. Here, we present ANANSE (ANalysis Algorithm for Networks Specified by Enhancers), a network-based method that exploits enhancer-encoded regulatory information to identify the key transcription factors in cell fate determination.

Socio-economic resources and adult mental health in Canada: controlling for time-invariant confounders and investigating causal directionality.

Objective: The aim of this study was to investigate whether family income and education have a causal effect on psychological distress among Canadian adults.

Methods: We executed fixed-effects regression analyses using data from the Longitudinal and International Study of Adults (LISA). We investigated whether changes in family income and education from wave 2 (2014) to wave 3 (2016) corresponded with changes in psychological distress during this same time period.

Family income and health in Canada: a longitudinal study of stability and change.

Background: Extensive research has shown strong associations between income and health. However, the health effects of income dynamics over time are less known. We investigated how stability, volatility and trajectory in family incomes from 2002 to 2011 predicted (1) fair/poor self-rated health and (2) the presence of a longstanding illness or health problem in 2012.

Combinatorial transcription factor activities on open chromatin induce embryonic heterogeneity in vertebrates.

During vertebrate gastrulation, mesoderm is induced in pluripotent cells, concomitant with dorsal-ventral patterning and establishing of the dorsal axis. We applied single-cell chromatin accessibility and transcriptome analyses to explore the emergence of cellular heterogeneity during gastrulation in Xenopus tropicalis. Transcriptionally inactive lineage-restricted genes exhibit relatively open chromatin in animal caps, whereas chromatin accessibility in dorsal marginal zone cells more closely reflects transcriptional activity.