Publications

CONCLUSION: This study provides the first longitudinal mapping of clinical and neural trajectories in an RCT of EEG-NFB for PTSD, demonstrating early stabilization of response and identifying neural mechanisms associated with symptom improvement. These findings may inform the optimization of EEG-NFB protocols and support its role as an adjunctive, symptom-stabilizing scaffold for psychotherapy.

CONCLUSION: This is the largest multinational study to date evaluating the incidence and risk factors for the development of a femoral nerve palsy in these children. The incidence of femoral nerve palsy was 3.1%. The severity of DDH was identified as a significant risk factor for its development. The use of a Pavlik harness was significantly associated with the development of a femoral nerve palsy. Understanding the factors which influence its development will be important to optimize outcomes...

We present Orobas, a computational approach for transforming raw read count data from CRISPR-Cas9 chemical-genetic screens into quantitative interaction scores. We describe steps for computing differential interaction scores with statistical tests that account for multiple CRISPR guides per gene. We then outline approaches for post-processing differential log(2)-fold-change scores across multiple screens, incorporating normalization to reduce technical artifacts and correct batch effects.

STUDY QUESTION: Is the hydrolase ABHD2 required for progesterone-induced Ca2+ influx via CatSper and the resulting motility responses in human sperm?

Chlorinated ethanes, such as 1,1,1-trichloroethane (1,1,1-TCA) and 1,1-dichloroethane (1,1-DCA), are common groundwater contaminants that undergo abiotic and biotic transformation, although the specific mechanisms remain unresolved. Compound-specific isotope analysis (CSIA) can provide insight into transformation mechanisms, but its application to chlorinated ethanes has been limited compared to the extensive literature on chlorinated ethenes. This study presents the first dual-element stable...

Natural genetic variation shapes how microbial populations adapt to environmental and chemical challenges, but scalable approaches to map genotype-phenotype relationships across diverse genetic backgrounds remain limited. Here, we developed a systematically barcoded collection of 520 Saccharomyces cerevisiae natural isolates that captures the ecological, geographical and genetic diversity of the species. Using pooled barcode sequencing, we profiled fitness responses to over 600 bioactive and...

Inflammation activates blood cells, contributing to ageing and malignancy^(1-3). Haematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) survive a lifetime of infection to sustain life-long haematopoiesis^(1-9), but how human HSCs respond and adapt to inflammatory stress is largely unknown. Here, to empirically understand this adaptation, we developed xenograft inflammation-recovery models and performed single-cell multiomics on xenografted human HSCs. Two transcriptionally and epigenetically distinct HSC subsets were...

Pediatric brain tumors are highly prevalent and remain one of the leading causes of cancer-related deaths in children. There are numerous different brain tumor types that are now well characterized by magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), patient clinical course, and neuropathological and molecular genetic alterations. One of the challenges with treating pediatric brain tumors with systemic chemotherapy is the inability of several chemotherapeutic agents to cross the blood-brain barrier (BBB), which...

Ex vivo expansion of mobilized peripheral blood (mPB) hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) represents a promising approach to advance cell and gene therapy strategies yet is hampered by loss of stem cell function when applying commonly used culture protocols. We performed in-depth characterization of mPB expansion cultures by single cell RNA sequencing, which highlighted differentiation trajectories with preservation of lineage fidelity in committed progenitors. Defining a putative HSC cluster...

Antioxidants added to tires to prevent degradation have recently been recognized as emerging environmental contaminants. While their acute aquatic toxicity has raised concern, these compounds are also emitted to the atmosphere and can be associated with particulate matter (PM). On PM they can react heterogeneously with oxidants, producing a range of transformation products (TPs) with unknown impacts to human health via inhalation. Here, we show through laboratory experiments that many previously...

The important role of paternal health in reproductive success, particularly time to pregnancy (TTP) and miscarriage, is gaining recognition. This scoping review aims to identify, consolidate and analyze the literature on paternal preconception health related to TTP and miscarriage. This review was conducted using the Joanna Briggs Institute methodology. The Medline, PsycINFO, Embase, Scopus and CINAHL databases were searched from January 1, 2013-July 26, 2025. Two independent reviewers screened...

Early recognition of patients at risk for deterioration in the emergency department (ED) is critical for patient safety. Traditional early warning scores rely on structured triage data and often perform poorly in the dynamic ED environment. We developed and evaluated two machine learning models integrating structured triage data with transformer-based embeddings of free-text nursing triage notes to predict early clinical deterioration prior to initial physician assessment, designed as a...

CONCLUSIONS: In this single-institution cohort of patients with recurrent ependymoma and long-term follow-up, gross total resection of recurrence was associated with better survival, and locally recurrent patients treated with CSI-RT2 had longer OS. Further work is required to determine the independent effects of CSI-RT2 together with the extent of re-resection.

Introns play a critical role in regulating alternative splicing. However, identifying functional intronic motifs is challenging due to their short and degenerate sequence composition. Massively parallel reporter assays have provided insights into cis-regulatory logic governing alternative splicing, but these approaches are generally performed in cell culture, limiting their ability to capture tissue-specific contexts. Here, we implemented in vivo parallelized reporter assays (PRA) in...

Oncostatin M receptor (OSMR) plays diverse roles in several human malignancies, including brain, breast, and pancreatic cancer. In glioblastoma (GB), OSMR orchestrates a feedforward signaling mechanism with the truncated active mutant of epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR), the EGFRvIII, and signal transducer and activator of transcription 3 (STAT3) to drive GB progression. Beyond EGFRvIII, OSMR promotes brain tumor stem cell (BTSC) respiration and therapy resistance. The molecular...

Enzymes are adapted to perform optimally in different thermal regimes that would otherwise alter kinetics and stability. Whether adaptive evolution in the photosynthetic enzyme ribulose-1,5-bisphosphate carboxylase/oxygenase (rubisco) also compensates for thermal variation remains uncertain. We examined molecular evolution and modelled the change in folding free energy (ΔΔG, where negative values indicate stabilization) of the rubisco large subunit (RbcL) in four phylogenetically distant plant...

Phytopathogenic bacteria rely on type III effectors to suppress host immunity and facilitate colonization. While necessary for virulence, effectors can also trigger effector-triggered immunity (ETI) if hosts have appropriate NLR immune receptors, resulting in a coevolutionary arms races driving high diversity in both the pathogen "effectorome" and the host "NLRome." Here, we synthesize current knowledge of effectoromes into an "interconnected module model", that emphasizes how functional...

Ubiquitin-Specific Protease 18 (USP18) is a deISGylation enzyme and antineoplastic target. To develop USP18 inhibitors, an enzymatically active human recombinant USP18 protein was engineered suitable for high-throughput screening of ~80,000 chemical compounds. Three of them substantially inhibited USP18 enzymatic activity with β-lapachone having prominent antineoplastic activity. Independent β-lapachone treatments of murine and human lung cancer cell lines statistically-significantly reduced...

The Hippo signaling pathway, first identified in Drosophila, is a conserved regulator of organ size and tissue homeostasis that balances proliferation and apoptosis. In mammals, its core kinases mammalian Sterile 20-like kinases 1 and 2 (MST1/2) and large tumor suppressor kinases 1 and 2 (LATS1/2) restrict the transcriptional coactivators Yes-associated protein 1 (YAP) and transcriptional coactivator with PDZ-binding motif (TAZ), whose nuclear translocation drives cell proliferation and...

Polycomb repressive complex 2 (PRC2)-mediated histone H3 K27 trimethylation (H3K27me3) recruits canonical PRC1 (cPRC1) to maintain heterochromatin. In early development, Polycomb-regulated genes can display long-range three-dimensional interactions, many of which resolve during lineage differentiation. Here we report that Polycomb-anchored looping is controlled by H3K27me3 spreading and regulates target gene silencing to influence cell fate specification. Using glioma-derived H3 Lys27-to-Met...