The composition of the human gut microbiome matures within the first years of life. It has been hypothesized that microbial compositions in this period can cause immune dysregulations and potentially ...cause asthma. Here we show, by associating gut microbial composition from 16S rRNA gene amplicon sequencing during the first year of life with subsequent risk of asthma in 690 participants, that 1-year-old children with an immature microbial composition have an increased risk of asthma at age 5 years. This association is only apparent among children born to asthmatic mothers, suggesting that lacking microbial stimulation during the first year of life can trigger their inherited asthma risk. Conversely, adequate maturation of the gut microbiome in this period may protect these pre-disposed children.
As the world is transitioning towards highly renewable energy systems, advanced tools are needed to analyze the complex energy networks. Energy system design is, however, challenged by real-world ...objective functions consisting of a blurry mix of technical and socioeconomic agendas, with limitations that cannot always be clearly stated. As a result, economically suboptimal solutions will likely be preferable. Here, a method capable of determining the continuum containing all economically near-optimal solutions is presented, moving the field of energy system modeling from discrete solutions to a new era where continuous solution ranges are available. The proposed method is applied to study a range of technical and socioeconomic metrics on a model of the European electricity system. The near-optimal region is found to be relatively flat allowing for solutions that are slightly more expensive than the optimum but better in terms of equality, land use, and implementation time.
•Modeling all near-optimal solutions for a green European electricity supply.•Large variation among near-optimal solutions in renewable European energy system.•Hydrogen storage can replace gas turbines as a green backup capacity technology.•Solar PV combined with batteries ensure equality in energy production.
Asthma is believed to arise through early life aberrant immune development in response to environmental exposures that may influence the airway microbiota. Here, we examine the airway microbiota ...during the first three months of life by 16S rRNA gene amplicon sequencing in the population-based Copenhagen Prospective Studies on Asthma in Childhood 2010 (COPSAC
) cohort consisting of 700 children monitored for the development of asthma since birth. Microbial diversity and the relative abundances of Veillonella and Prevotella in the airways at age one month are associated with asthma by age 6 years, both individually and with additional taxa in a multivariable model. Higher relative abundance of these bacteria is furthermore associated with an airway immune profile dominated by reduced TNF-α and IL-1β and increased CCL2 and CCL17, which itself is an independent predictor for asthma. These findings suggest a mechanism of microbiota-immune interactions in early infancy that predisposes to childhood asthma.
European law differs from other fields of law in that it has no well-established tradition for legal history. This places European law at a real disadvantage when it comes to critically reflecting ...upon its own tradition of great classics as well as understanding the relatively conflictual role European law plays in the EU today. This Article first offers a few reflections about why there is no established tradition for legal history in European law and what this means for legal scholars in the field. In a second step, the Article explores what kind of legal history could be developed in the field of European law. Ultimately, the Article concludes that legal history today generally has adopted mainstream historians' contextual and archival approach to explore the role of law in broader society. This Special Section consequently represents an important first step for legal scholars of European law to venture into the field of legal history using the recently opened historical archives of the Court of Justice of the European Union.
Through a parametric time-series analysis of 8 years of hourly data, we quantify the storage size and balancing energy needs for highly and fully renewable European power systems for different levels ...and mixes of wind and solar energy. By applying a dispatch strategy that minimizes the balancing energy needs for a given storage size, the interplay between storage and balancing is quantified, providing a hard upper limit on their synergy. An efficient but relatively small storage reduces balancing energy needs significantly due to its influence on intra-day mismatches. Furthermore, we show that combined with a low-efficiency hydrogen storage and a level of balancing equal to what is today provided by storage lakes, it is sufficient to meet the European electricity demand in a fully renewable power system where the average power generation from combined wind and solar exceeds the demand by only a few percent.
► We model a wind and solar based European power system with storage and balancing. ► We find that storage needs peaks when average renewable generation matches load. ► We find strong synergetic effects when combining storage and balancing. ► We study the effects of a storage capable of storing 6h average use. ► We find a realisable fully renewable scenario based on wind, solar and hydro power.
Supplementation with fish oil–derived fatty acids during pregnancy reduced the incidence of cases of persistent wheeze or asthma in offspring.
The incidence of asthma and wheezing disorders has more ...than doubled in westernized countries in recent decades.
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These conditions often originate in early childhood
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and currently affect one in five young children.
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Concomitantly, the increased use of vegetable oils in cooking and of grain in the feeding of livestock has resulted in an increase in the intake of n−6 polyunsaturated fatty acids and a decrease in the intake of n−3 polyunsaturated fatty acids, especially the long-chain polyunsaturated fatty acids (LCPUFAs) — eicosapentaenoic acid (20:5n–3, EPA) and docosahexaenoic acid (22:6n–3, DHA) — found in cold-water fish.
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Observational studies have suggested an . . .
Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 has caused a pandemic in humans. Farmed mink (Neovison vison) are also susceptible. In Denmark, this virus has spread rapidly among farmed mink, ...resulting in some respiratory disease. Full-length virus genome sequencing revealed novel virus variants in mink. These variants subsequently appeared within the local human community.
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, ODKLJ, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
Marine ecosystems worldwide are under threat with many fish species and populations suffering from human over-exploitation. This is greatly impacting global biodiversity, economy and human health. ...Intriguingly, marine fish are largely surveyed using selective and invasive methods, which are mostly limited to commercial species, and restricted to particular areas with favourable conditions. Furthermore, misidentification of species represents a major problem. Here, we investigate the potential of using metabarcoding of environmental DNA (eDNA) obtained directly from seawater samples to account for marine fish biodiversity. This eDNA approach has recently been used successfully in freshwater environments, but never in marine settings. We isolate eDNA from ½-litre seawater samples collected in a temperate marine ecosystem in Denmark. Using next-generation DNA sequencing of PCR amplicons, we obtain eDNA from 15 different fish species, including both important consumption species, as well as species rarely or never recorded by conventional monitoring. We also detect eDNA from a rare vagrant species in the area; European pilchard (Sardina pilchardus). Additionally, we detect four bird species. Records in national databases confirmed the occurrence of all detected species. To investigate the efficiency of the eDNA approach, we compared its performance with 9 methods conventionally used in marine fish surveys. Promisingly, eDNA covered the fish diversity better than or equal to any of the applied conventional methods. Our study demonstrates that even small samples of seawater contain eDNA from a wide range of local fish species. Finally, in order to examine the potential dispersal of eDNA in oceans, we performed an experiment addressing eDNA degradation in seawater, which shows that even small (100-bp) eDNA fragments degrades beyond detectability within days. Although further studies are needed to validate the eDNA approach in varying environmental conditions, our findings provide a strong proof-of-concept with great perspectives for future monitoring of marine biodiversity and resources.
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
Analysis of data from multiple sources has the potential to enhance knowledge discovery by capturing underlying structures, which are, otherwise, difficult to extract. Fusing data from multiple ...sources has already proved useful in many applications in social network analysis, signal processing and bioinformatics. However, data fusion is challenging since data from multiple sources are often (i) heterogeneous (i.e., in the form of higher-order tensors and matrices), (ii) incomplete, and (iii) have both shared and unshared components. In order to address these challenges, in this paper, we introduce a novel unsupervised data fusion model based on joint factorization of matrices and higher-order tensors.
While the traditional formulation of coupled matrix and tensor factorizations modeling only shared factors fails to capture the underlying structures in the presence of both shared and unshared factors, the proposed data fusion model has the potential to automatically reveal shared and unshared components through modeling constraints. Using numerical experiments, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach in terms of identifying shared and unshared components. Furthermore, we measure a set of mixtures with known chemical composition using both LC-MS (Liquid Chromatography - Mass Spectrometry) and NMR (Nuclear Magnetic Resonance) and demonstrate that the structure-revealing data fusion model can (i) successfully capture the chemicals in the mixtures and extract the relative concentrations of the chemicals accurately, (ii) provide promising results in terms of identifying shared and unshared chemicals, and (iii) reveal the relevant patterns in LC-MS by coupling with the diffusion NMR data.
We have proposed a structure-revealing data fusion model that can jointly analyze heterogeneous, incomplete data sets with shared and unshared components and demonstrated its promising performance as well as potential limitations on both simulated and real data.
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
BACKGROUND:Data on anastomotic leak rates after stapled versus handsewn ileocolic anastomosis are conflicting. In a Cochrane review, the combined estimate favored the stapled technique, but recent ...cohort studies demonstrated a 2-fold increase in anastomotic leak with the stapled approach.
OBJECTIVE:The purpose of this study was to investigate anastomotic leak rates following stapled versus handsewn ileocolic anastomosis.
DESIGN:This was a nationwide, retrospective cohort study.
SETTING:Data were obtained from the Danish Colorectal Cancer Group and National Patient Registry databases.
PATIENTS:Danish patients, ≥18 years of age, undergoing right hemicolectomy for a first-time diagnosis of adenocarcinoma in the right colon with primary anastomosis between October 2014 and December 2015 were included.
MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES:The primary outcome was anastomotic leak rate. Secondary outcomes included 30-day mortality. Covariates included demographics, comorbidity, tumor stage, and surgical variables. Multivariable logistic regression and propensity score matching were used to adjust for confounding.
RESULTS:The 1414 patients included 391 (28%) in the stapled group and 1023 (72%) in the handsewn group. Forty-five patients (3.2%) developed anastomotic leak21 of 391 (5.4%) and 24 of 1023 (2.4%) in the stapled and handsewn group (p = 0.004). This difference was confirmed in multivariable analysis (adjusted OR, 2.91; 95% CI, 1.53–5.53; p < 0.001), and after propensity score matching (OR, 2.41; 95% CI, 1.24–4.67; p = 0.009). Thirty-day mortality was 15.6% (7/45) and 2.1% (29/1369) in patients with and without anastomotic leak (p < 0.001), with no difference between the stapled and handsewn approach.
LIMITATIONS:The study’s design was retrospective, with no information on allocation to the stapled or handsewn approach.
CONCLUSIONS:The present study demonstrated a 2-fold increase in anastomotic leak after stapled versus handsewn ileocolic anastomoses. Previous opinions on the optimal anastomosis technique for colon cancer should be scrutinized given the devastating short-term outcome of anastomotic leak. See Video Abstract at http://links.lww.com/DCR/A819.
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