Pathway Polygenic Risk Scores (pPRS) for the Analysis of Gene-environment Interaction.

Unlabelled: A polygenic risk score (PRS) is used to quantify the combined disease risk of many genetic variants. For complex human traits there is interest in determining whether the PRS modifies, i.e.

Construction of 4-Vinyl-1,2-oxaphospholane 2-Oxides from Vinyloxiranes and Phosphoryl Diazomethanes.

Various 4-vinyl-1,2-oxaphospholane 2-oxides are prepared in good to excellent yields from vinyloxiranes and in situ-generated phosphenes from phosphoryl diazomethanes via the phosphene-induced ring expansion of oxiranes. The reaction is a novel and expeditious strategy for the synthesis of 1,2-oxaphospholane 2-oxide derivatives, featuring ring expansion of readily available starting materials, high atom economy, no catalyst, a fast reaction rate, broad functional group tolerance, high yields, and separable diastereomers.

π-Stacking-Controlled Dearomatic Sulfur-Shifted Ene Reaction of Ketenes and Polycyclic Arylthiiranes: Access to Areno[]-ε-thiolactones.

Electrophilic ring-expansion of polycyclic arylthiiranes and ketenes generated from alkoxy/aryloxyacetyl chlorides in the presence of triethylamine (TEA) is developed and provides a new strategy for the synthesis of areno[]-ε-thiolactones, areno[]thiepinones, directly without catalysts or additives. This strategy features atom- and step-economic one-pot characteristic via a tandem sequence of in situ ketene generation, π-stacking-controlled dearomatic sulfur-shifted ene, and aromatization. The current reaction is a novel strategy of electrophilic ring expansions of three-membered saturated heterocycles.

Genetic determinants for the racial disparities in the risk of prostate and testicular cancers.

Background: A worldwide higher incidence of prostate cancer and lower incidence of testicular cancer in men of African ancestry compared to European ancestry has been observed previously. However, underlying mechanisms accounting for these observations are largely unknown.

Methods: The current study analyzed previously reported SNPs associated with either prostate cancer or testicular cancer to examine whether the risk allele frequency could help us understand the observed incidence disparities in men of African ancestry and European ancestry.

Visual Affective Stimulus Database: A Validated Set of Short Videos.

Two hundred and ninety-nine videos representing four categories (people, animals, objects, and scenes) were standardized using Adobe Premiere Pro CC 2018, with a unified duration of 3 s, a resolution of 1080 pixels/inch, and a size of 1920 × 1080 mm. One-hundred and sixteen participants (mean age 22.60 ± 2.

Experimental observations of marginal criticality in granular materials.

SignificanceAmorphous materials, such as grains, foams, colloids, and glasses, are ubiquitous in nature and our daily life. They can undergo glass transitions or jamming transitions to obtain rigidity either by fast quench or compression, but show subtle changes in the structures compared to the liquid states or liquid-like states. Recent progress on the first-principle replica theory unifies the glass transition and the jamming transition and points out the marginal phase with fractal free-energy landscape within the stable glass phase.

The Edwards volume ensemble in cyclically sheared granular experiments.

We experimentally investigate the Edwards volume ensemble in cyclically sheared bidisperse disks of two friction coefficients ( ≈ 0.3 and → ∞) subjected to a range of shear amplitudes . Despite the local and global anisotropy, hysteresis, and the potential long-range correlation of the free volume, the Edwards volume ensemble surprisingly provides an excellent statistical description of disk packings in cyclically sheared systems.

Turbulent-like velocity fluctuations in two-dimensional granular materials subject to cyclic shear.

We perform a systematic experimental study to investigate the velocity fluctuations in the two-dimensional granular matter of low and high friction coefficients subjected to cyclic shear of a range of shear amplitudes, whose velocity fields are strikingly turbulent-like with vortices of different scales. The scaling behaviors of both the transverse velocity power spectra () ∝ and, more severely, the longitudinal velocity power spectra () ∝ are affected by the prominent peak centered around ≈ 2π of the inter-particle distance due to the static structure factor of the hard-particle nature in contrast to the real turbulence. To reduce the strong peak effect to the actual values of (the subscript '' refers to either T or L), we subsequently analyze the second-order velocity structure functions of (2)ν() in real space, which show the power-law scalings of (2)ν() ∝ for both modes.

Joint t-SNE for Comparable Projections of Multiple High-Dimensional Datasets.

We present Joint t-Stochastic Neighbor Embedding (Joint t-SNE), a technique to generate comparable projections of multiple high-dimensional datasets. Although t-SNE has been widely employed to visualize high-dimensional datasets from various domains, it is limited to projecting a single dataset. When a series of high-dimensional datasets, such as datasets changing over time, is projected independently using t-SNE, misaligned layouts are obtained.

Data-Driven Colormap Adjustment for Exploring Spatial Variations in Scalar Fields.

Colormapping is an effective and popular visualization technique for analyzing patterns in scalar fields. Scientists usually adjust a default colormap to show hidden patterns by shifting the colors in a trial-and-error process. To improve efficiency, efforts have been made to automate the colormap adjustment process based on data properties (e.

Frictional Granular Matter: Protocol Dependence of Mechanical Properties.

Theoretical treatments of frictional granular matter often assume that it is legitimate to invoke classical elastic theory to describe its coarse-grained mechanical properties. Here, we show, based on experiments and numerical simulations, that this is generically not the case since stress autocorrelation functions decay more slowly than what is expected from elasticity theory. It was theoretically shown that standard elastic decay demands pressure and torque density fluctuations to be normal, with possibly one of them being hyperuniform.

Emergent Elasticity in Amorphous Solids.

The mechanical response of naturally abundant amorphous solids such as gels, jammed grains, and biological tissues are not described by the conventional paradigm of broken symmetry that defines crystalline elasticity. In contrast, the response of such athermal solids are governed by local conditions of mechanical equilibrium, i.e.

Connecting shear localization with the long-range correlated polarized stress fields in granular materials.

One long-lasting puzzle in amorphous solids is shear localization, where local plastic deformation involves cooperative particle rearrangements in small regions of a few inter-particle distances, self-organizing into shear bands and eventually leading to the material failure. Understanding the connection between the structure and dynamics of amorphous solids is essential in physics, material sciences, geotechnical and civil engineering, and geophysics. Here we show a deep connection between shear localization and the intrinsic structures of internal stresses in an isotropically jammed granular material subject to shear.

Experimental studies of vibrational modes in a two-dimensional amorphous solid.

The boson peak, which represents an excess of vibrational states compared to Debye's prediction at low frequencies, has been studied extensively, and yet, its nature remains controversial. In this study, we focus on understanding the nature of the boson peak based on the spatial heterogeneity of modulus fluctuations using a simple model system of a highly jammed two-dimensional granular material. Despite the simplicity of our system, we find that the boson peak in our two-dimensional system shows a shape very similar to that of three-dimensional molecular glasses when approaching their boson peak frequencies.

[Diversity of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi in special habitats: a review].

Arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) are one of the important components in ecosystems, which not only have the diversity in genetics, species composition, and function, but also have the diversity in distribution and habitat. AMF infect plant root, form mycorrhiza, and nourish as obligate biotroph symbiont, with strong ecological adaptability. They not only distribute in forest, prairie, and farm land, but also distribute in the special habitats with less plant species diversity, such as commercial greenhouse soil, saline-alkali soil, mining pollution land, petroleum-contaminated land, pesticide-polluted soil, desert, dry land, wetland, marsh, plateau, volcanic, cooler, and arctic tundra, composing a unique community structure and playing an important irreplaceable role in the physiological and ecological functions.