Transcriptomic alterations in the ovine caruncular endometrium due to imbalanced nutrition and FSH-induced ovarian hyperstimulation.

Background: Imbalanced diet and exogenous gonadotrophins affect uterine function and morphology. In sheep, FSH-induced superovulation alters implantation-related gene expression, influenced by both treatment and diet. In this study, we used deep RNA sequencing (NGS, RNA-Seq) to expand our understanding of these effects on the caruncular endometrium.

Unveiling adipose populations linked to metabolic health in obesity.

Precision medicine is still not considered as a standard of care in obesity treatment, despite a large heterogeneity in the metabolic phenotype of individuals with obesity. One of the strongest factors influencing the variability in metabolic disease risk is adipose tissue (AT) dysfunction; however, there is little understanding of the link between distinct cell populations, cell-type-specific transcriptional programs, and disease severity. Here, we generated a comprehensive cellular map of subcutaneous and visceral AT of individuals with metabolically healthy and unhealthy obesity.

A dataset profiling the multiomic landscape of the prefrontal cortex in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is the most common motor neuron disease, which still lacks effective disease-modifying therapies. Similar to other neurodegenerative disorders, such as Alzheimer and Parkinson disease, ALS pathology is presumed to propagate over time, originating from the motor cortex and spreading to other cortical regions. Exploring early disease stages is crucial to understand the causative molecular changes underlying the pathology.

Inferring context-dependent computations through linear approximations of prefrontal cortex dynamics.

The complex neural activity of prefrontal cortex (PFC) is a hallmark of cognitive processes. How these rich dynamics emerge and support neural computations is largely unknown. Here, we infer mechanisms underlying the context-dependent integration of sensory inputs by fitting dynamical models to PFC population responses of behaving monkeys.

No evidence for an association of testosterone and cortisol hair concentrations with social decision-making in a large cohort of young adults.

Prior research has established that testosterone is an important modulator of social decision-making. However, evidence on the relationship between basal testosterone levels, commonly measured in saliva or blood, and social behavior has been inconsistent due to methodological shortcomings. Additionally, it has been suggested that cortisol might moderate the association between basal testosterone and social behavior.

The effects of single testosterone administration and stress induction on steroid hormone levels in hair.

Hair steroid analysis is increasingly recognized for its ability to capture cumulative hormone secretion, thought to reflect an individual's response to long-term environmental conditions. Despite its growing use, the influence of single, isolated events on hair steroid concentrations remains underexplored. Our study therefore examined the effects of a single-dose transdermal testosterone administration (150 mg) and acute laboratory stress induction on hair testosterone and cortisol levels in a randomized, between-subject, placebo-controlled, and double-blind design.

Mastering the Narrative: Precision Reporting of Risk and Outcomes in Liver Transplantation.

Liver transplantation is associated with a high risk of postoperative complications due to the complexity of the surgical procedure, recipient disease severity and wide range of graft quality which remains somewhat unpredictable. However, survival rates after transplantation continue to improve and the focus has thus turned to other clinically relevant endpoints including posttransplant complications, patient quality of life and costs. Procedures like liver transplantation offer the entire spectrum of postsurgical events, even in donor-recipient constellations deemed of low risk within recently defined benchmark criteria.

Analysis of behavioral flow resolves latent phenotypes.

The accurate detection and quantification of rodent behavior forms a cornerstone of basic biomedical research. Current data-driven approaches, which segment free exploratory behavior into clusters, suffer from low statistical power due to multiple testing, exhibit poor transferability across experiments and fail to exploit the rich behavioral profiles of individual animals. Here we introduce a pipeline to capture each animal's behavioral flow, yielding a single metric based on all observed transitions between clusters.

Highly Multiplexed Tissue Imaging in Precision Oncology and Translational Cancer Research.

Precision oncology tailors treatment strategies to a patient's molecular and health data. Despite the essential clinical value of current diagnostic methods, hematoxylin and eosin morphology, immunohistochemistry, and gene panel sequencing offer an incomplete characterization. In contrast, highly multiplexed tissue imaging allows spatial analysis of dozens of markers at single-cell resolution enabling analysis of complex tumor ecosystems; thereby it has the potential to advance our understanding of cancer biology and supports drug development, biomarker discovery, and patient stratification.

High-Throughput RPLC-MS/MS Quantification of Short- and Medium-Chain Fatty Acids.

Short- and medium-chain fatty acids (SMCFA) are monocarboxylic acids with a carbon chain length of 1-12 carbon atoms. They are mainly produced in humans by the gut microbiota, play crucial metabolic roles, are vital for intestinal health, and have multifaceted impact on immune and neurological functions. Accurate detection and quantification of SMCFA in different human biofluids is achieved using 3-nitro phenylhydrazine (3-NPH) derivatization of the free fatty acids followed by reverse phase liquid chromatography (RPLC) separation and detection by tandem mass spectrometry (MS/MS).

Microbial genetic potential differs among cryospheric habitats of the Damma glacier.

Climate warming has led to glacier retreat worldwide. Studies on the taxonomy and functions of glacier microbiomes help us better predict their response to glacier melting. Here, we used shotgun metagenomic sequencing to study the microbial functional potential in different cryospheric habitats, i.

Custom integration of a magnetic-field monitoring system into a 32-channel MRI head coil.

Purpose: Customizing a Siemens 32-channel coil for use in a Philips 3T MRI system with incorporated magnetic field probes for collecting high-quality MRI and magnetic-field monitoring data concurrently.

Methods: The development process of the custom coil involved several (iterative) phases. Standard temporal SNR and B data were collected with the 32-channel Siemens and for reference the 32-channel/8-channel Philips head coils before and after the custom coil was made compatible with the 3T Philips Achieva system, and magnetic field probes were installed into it along with ancillary electronics around it.

Causal involvement of dorsomedial prefrontal cortex in learning the predictability of observable actions.

Social learning is well established across species. While recent neuroimaging studies show that dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (DMPFC/preSMA) activation correlates with observational learning signals, the precise computations that are implemented by DMPFC/preSMA have remained unclear. To identify whether DMPFC/preSMA supports learning from observed outcomes or observed actions, or possibly encodes even a higher order factor (such as the reliability of the demonstrator), we downregulate DMPFC/preSMA excitability with continuous theta burst stimulation (cTBS) and assess different forms of observational learning.

Core outcome sets and benchmarking complications: Defining best practices for standardized outcome reporting in liver transplantation.

The comparison of outcomes in liver transplantation (LT) is hampered by using clinically nonrelevant surrogate endpoints and considerable variability in reported relevant posttransplant outcomes. Such variability stems from nonstandard outcome measures across studies, variable definitions of the same complication, and different timing of reporting. The Clavien-Dindo classification was established to improve the rigor of outcome reporting but is nonspecific to an intervention, and there are unsolved dilemmas specifically related to LT.

Inter-individual and inter-regional variability of breast milk antibody reactivity to bacterial lipopolysaccharides.

Breast milk is a vital source of nutrients, prebiotics, probiotics, and protective factors, including antibodies, immune cells and antimicrobial proteins. Using bacterial lipopolysaccharide arrays, we investigated the reactivity and specificity of breast milk antibodies towards microbial antigens, comparing samples from rural Kenya and urban Switzerland. Results showed considerable variability in antibody reactivity both within and between these locations.

A molecular brain atlas reveals cellular shifts during the repair phase of stroke.

Ischemic stroke triggers a cascade of pathological events that affect multiple cell types and often lead to incomplete functional recovery. Despite advances in single-cell technologies, the molecular and cellular responses that contribute to long-term post-stroke impairment remain poorly understood. To gain better insight into the underlying mechanisms, we generated a single-cell transcriptomic atlas from distinct brain regions using a mouse model of permanent focal ischemia at one month post-injury.

SAD: semi-supervised automatic detection of BOLD activations in high temporal resolution fMRI data.

Objective: Despite the prevalent use of the general linear model (GLM) in fMRI data analysis, assuming a pre-defined hemodynamic response function (HRF) for all voxels can lead to reduced reliability and may distort the inferences derived from it. To overcome the necessity of presuming a specific model for the hemodynamic response, we introduce a semi-supervised automatic detection (SAD) method.

Materials And Methods: The proposed SAD method employs a Bi-LSTM neural network to classify high temporal resolution fMRI data.

Run-time motion and first-order shim control by expanded servo navigation.

Purpose: To provide a navigator-based run-time motion and first-order field correction for three-dimensional human brain imaging with high precision, minimal calibration and acquisition, and fast processing.

Methods: A complex-valued linear perturbation model with feedback control is extended to estimate and correct for gradient shim fields using orbital navigators (2.3 ms).

TCR clustering by contrastive learning on antigen specificity.

Effective clustering of T-cell receptor (TCR) sequences could be used to predict their antigen-specificities. TCRs with highly dissimilar sequences can bind to the same antigen, thus making their clustering into a common antigen group a central challenge. Here, we develop TouCAN, a method that relies on contrastive learning and pretrained protein language models to perform TCR sequence clustering and antigen-specificity predictions.

GLUD1 determines murine muscle stem cell fate by controlling mitochondrial glutamate levels.

Muscle stem cells (MuSCs) enable muscle growth and regeneration after exercise or injury, but how metabolism controls their regenerative potential is poorly understood. We describe that primary metabolic changes can determine murine MuSC fate decisions. We found that glutamine anaplerosis into the tricarboxylic acid (TCA) cycle decreases during MuSC differentiation and coincides with decreased expression of the mitochondrial glutamate deaminase GLUD1.