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We review evidence supporting that ineffective anti-SARS-CoV-2 responses, coupled with a predisposition for inappropriate hyperinflammatory responses, could provide a biological explanation for the male bias in COVID-19 mortality. A prominent finding in COVID-19 is the increased risk of death with pre-existing cardiovascular comorbidities, such as hypertension, obesity, and age. We contextualize how important features of sexual dimorphism and inflammation in COVID-19 may exhibit a reciprocal relationship with comorbidities, and explain their increased mortality risk. Ultimately, we demonstrate that biological sex is a fundamental variable of critical relevance to our mechanistic understanding of SARS-CoV-2 infection and the pursuit of effective COVID-19 preventative and therapeutic strategies.Nearly one in ten patients experience complications in relation to cardiac implantable electronic device (CIED) implantations. CIED complications have serious implications for the patients and for the healthcare system. In light of the rising rates of new implants and consistent rate of complications, primary prevention remains a major concern. To guide future efforts, we sought to review the evidence base underlying common preventive actions made during a primary CIED implantation.

Electronic health record systems are increasingly used to send messages to physicians, but research on physicians’ inbox use patterns is limited. This study’s aims were to (1) quantify the time primary care physicians (PCPs) spend managing inboxes; (2) describe daily patterns of inbox use; (3) investigate which types of messages consume the most time; and (4) identify factors associated with inbox work duration.

We analyzed 1 month of electronic inbox data for 1275 PCPs in a large medical group and linked these data with physicians’ demographic data.

PCPs spent an average of 52 minutes on inbox management on workdays, including 19 minutes (37%) outside work hours. Temporal patterns of electronic inbox use differed from other EHR functions such as charting. Patient-initiated messages (28%) and results (29%) accounted for the most inbox work time. PCPs with higher inbox work duration were more likely to be female (P < .001), have more patient encounters (P < .001), have older patients (P < .001), spend proportionally more time on patient messages (P < .001), and spend more time per message (P < .001). Compared with PCPs with the lowest duration of time on inbox work, PCPs with the highest duration had more message views per workday (200 vs 109; P < .001) and spent more time on the inbox outside work hours (30 minutes vs 9.7 minutes; P < .001).

Electronic inbox work by PCPs requires roughly an hour per workday, much of which occurs outside scheduled work hours. Interventions to assist PCPs in handling patient-initiated messages and results may help alleviate inbox workload.

Electronic inbox work by PCPs requires roughly an hour per workday, much of which occurs outside scheduled work hours. Interventions to assist PCPs in handling patient-initiated messages and results may help alleviate inbox workload.Acute myocardial infarction (MI) inflicts massive injury to the coronary microcirculation leading to vascular disintegration and capillary rarefication in the infarct region. Tissue repair after MI involves a robust angiogenic response that commences in the infarct border zone and extends into the necrotic infarct core. Technological advances in several areas have provided novel mechanistic understanding of postinfarction angiogenesis and how it may be targeted to improve heart function after MI. Cell lineage tracing studies indicate that new capillary structures arise by sprouting angiogenesis from preexisting endothelial cells (ECs) in the infarct border zone with no meaningful contribution from non-endothelial cell sources. Single cell RNA sequencing (scRNAseq) shows that ECs in infarcted hearts may be grouped into clusters with distinct gene expression signatures, likely reflecting functionally distinct cell populations. EC-specific multicolor lineage tracing reveals that EC subsets clonally expand after e majority of patients nowadays do well after MI, clinical translation will require careful selection of patients in need of proangiogenic therapies.

Nearly 40% of the genes in sequenced genomes have no experimentally- or computationally-derived functional annotations. To fill this gap, we seek to develop methods for network-based gene function prediction that can integrate heterogeneous data for multiple species with experimentally-based functional annotations and systematically transfer them to newly-sequenced organisms on a genomewide scale. However, the large sizes of such networks pose a challenge for the scalability of current methods.

We develop a label propagation algorithm called FastSinkSource. By formally bounding its rate of progress, we decrease the running time by a factor of 100 without sacrificing accuracy. We systematically evaluate many approaches to construct multi-species bacterial networks and apply FastSinkSource and other state-of-the-art methods to these networks. We find that the most accurate and efficient approach is to pre-compute annotation scores for species with experimental annotations, and then to transfer them to other organisms. In this manner, FastSinkSource runs in under three minutes for 200 bacterial species.

An implementation of our framework and all data used in this research are available at https//github.com/Murali-group/multi-species-GOA-prediction.

murali@cs.vt.edu.

Supplementary information is available at Bioinformatics online.

Supplementary information is available at Bioinformatics online.In this study, a high fat diet induced obesity mouse model (DIO) was used to investigate the modulatory effect of high purity conjugated linoleic acid (CLA) on the intestinal microbiota. CLA was prepared by a simulated moving bed chromatography system and its influence on the gut microbes was analyzed by 16S amplicon V3-V4 region analysis. We observed a significant increase in the bacterial biodiversity and the abundance of genera of butyrate- and acetate-producing bacteria. After taking CLA for 6 weeks, the abundance of Bacteroides in the intestines of mice greatly increased, while the abundance of Firmicutes decreased. BRD7389 molecular weight The corresponding decrease in the Firmicutes/Bacteroidetes ratio reflected a positive modulatory effect of CLA on the intestinal microbiota. In addition, KEGG pathways for the nucleotide metabolism, metabolism of terpenoids and polyketides and lipid metabolism were among the most differentially expressed genes after CLA intervention. The current study revealed that CLA can be used as a functional food component with potential therapeutic value to prevent obesity-related metabolic disorders by manipulating the intestinal microbiota.