A Single-Cell Atlas of the Human Healthy Airways Deprez, Marie; Zaragosi, Laure-Emmanuelle; Truchi, Marin ...
American journal of respiratory and critical care medicine,
12/2020, Volume:
202, Issue:
12
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
The respiratory tract constitutes an elaborate line of defense that is based on a unique cellular ecosystem.
We aimed to investigate cell population distributions and transcriptional changes along ...the airways by using single-cell RNA profiling.
We have explored the cellular heterogeneity of the human airway epithelium in 10 healthy living volunteers by single-cell RNA profiling. A total of 77,969 cells were collected at 35 distinct locations, from the nose to the 12th division of the airway tree.
The resulting atlas is composed of a high percentage of epithelial cells (89.1%) but also immune (6.2%) and stromal (4.7%) cells with distinct cellular proportions in different regions of the airways. It reveals differential gene expression between identical cell types (suprabasal, secretory, and multiciliated cells) from the nose (
,
,
) and tracheobronchial (
,
) airways. By contrast, cell-type-specific gene expression is stable across all tracheobronchial samples. Our atlas improves the description of ionocytes, pulmonary neuroendocrine cells, and brush cells and identifies a related population of
-positive cells. We also report the association of
with dividing cells that are reminiscent of previously described mouse "hillock" cells and with squamous cells expressing
and
.
Robust characterization of a single-cell cohort in healthy airways establishes a valuable resource for future investigations. The precise description of the continuum existing from the nasal epithelium to successive divisions of the airways and the stable gene expression profile of these regions better defines conditions under which relevant tracheobronchial proxies of human respiratory diseases can be developed.
The assessment of bone age and skeletal maturity and its comparison to chronological age is an important task in the medical environment for the diagnosis of pediatric endocrinology, orthodontics and ...orthopedic disorders, and legal environment in what concerns if an individual is a minor or not when there is a lack of documents. Being a time-consuming activity that can be prone to inter- and intra-rater variability, the use of methods which can automate it, like Machine Learning techniques, is of value.
The goal of this paper is to present the state of the art evidence, trends and gaps in the research related to bone age assessment studies that make use of Machine Learning techniques.
A systematic literature review was carried out, starting with the writing of the protocol, followed by searches on three databases: Pubmed, Scopus and Web of Science to identify the relevant evidence related to bone age assessment using Machine Learning techniques. One round of backward snowballing was performed to find additional studies. A quality assessment was performed on the selected studies to check for bias and low quality studies, which were removed. Data was extracted from the included studies to build summary tables. Lastly, a meta-analysis was performed on the performances of the selected studies.
26 studies constituted the final set of included studies. Most of them proposed automatic systems for bone age assessment and investigated methods for bone age assessment based on hand and wrist radiographs. The samples used in the studies were mostly comprehensive or bordered the age of 18, and the data origin was in most of cases from United States and West Europe. Few studies explored ethnic differences.
There is a clear focus of the research on bone age assessment methods based on radiographs whilst other types of medical imaging without radiation exposure (e.g. magnetic resonance imaging) are not much explored in the literature. Also, socioeconomic and other aspects that could influence in bone age were not addressed in the literature. Finally, studies that make use of more than one region of interest for bone age assessment are scarce.
Honorable Mention, 2020 Barnard Hewitt Award for
Outstanding Research in Theatre History, given by the American
Society for Theatre Research Argues that
Ricanness operates as a continual performance ...of bodily endurance
against US colonialism In 1954, Dolores "Lolita" Lebrón
and other members of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party led a
revolutionary action on the chambers of Congress, firing several
shots at the ceiling and calling for the independence of the
island. Ricanness: Enduring Time in Anticolonial
Performance begins with Lebrón's vanguard act, distilling the
relationship between Puerto Rican subjectivity, gender, sexuality,
and revolutionary performance under colonial time. Ruiz argues that
Ricanness-a continual performance of bodily endurance against US
colonialism through different measures of time-uncovers what's at
stake politically for the often unwanted, anticolonial, racialized
and sexualized enduring body. Moving among theatre, experimental
video, revolutionary protest, photography, poetry, and durational
performance art, Ricanness stages scenes in which the
philosophical, social, and psychic come together at the site of
aesthetics, against the colonization of time. Analyzing the work of
artists and revolutionaries like ADÁL, Lebrón, Papo Colo, Pedro
Pietri, and Ryan Rivera, Ricanness imagines a Rican future
through the time travel extended in their aesthetic interventions,
illustrating how they have reformulated time itself through
nonlinear aesthetic practices.
The growing global demand for animal products and processed meat has created a challenge for the livestock sector to enhance animal productivity without compromising product quality. The restriction ...of antibiotics in animal feeds as growth promoters makes the use of probiotics a natural and safe alternative to obtain functional foods that provide animal health and quality and to maintain food safety for consumers. To incorporate these additives into the diet, detailed studies are required, in which in vitro and in vivo assays are used to prove the efficacy and to ensure the safety of probiotic candidate strains. Studies on the use of Bacillus subtilis natto as a spore-forming probiotic bacterium in animal nutrition have shown no hazardous effects and have demonstrated the effectiveness of its use as a probiotic, mainly due to its proven antimicrobial, anti-inflammatory, antioxidant, enzymatic, and immunomodulatory activity. This review summarizes the recent scientific background on the probiotic effects of B. subtilis natto in animal nutrition. It focuses on its safety assessment, host-associated efficacy, and industrial requirements.
Generation, manipulation, and sensing of magnetic domain walls are cornerstones in the design of efficient spintronic devices. Half‐metals are amenable for this purpose as large low field ...magnetoresistance signals can be expected from spin accumulation at spin textures. Among half metals, La1−xSrxMnO3 (LSMO) manganites are considered as promising candidates for their robust half‐metallic ground state, Curie temperature above room temperature (Tc = 360 K, for x = 1/3), and chemical stability. Yet domain wall magnetoresistance is poorly understood, with large discrepancies in the reported values and conflicting interpretation of experimental data due to the entanglement of various source of magnetoresistance, namely, spin accumulation, anisotropic magnetoresistance, and colossal magnetoresistance. In this work, the domain wall magnetoresistance is measured in LSMO cross‐shape nanowires with single‐domain walls nucleated across the current path. Magnetoresistance values above 10% are found to be originating at the spin accumulation caused by the mistracking effect of the spin texture of the domain wall by the conduction electrons. Fundamentally, this result shows the importance on non‐adiabatic processes at spin textures despite the strong Hund coupling to the localized t2g electrons of the manganite. These large magnetoresistance values are high enough for encoding and reading magnetic bits in future oxide spintronic sensors.
Generation, manipulation, and sensing of magnetic domain walls are cornerstones in the design of more efficient spintronic devices. In this work, it is shown that the domain wall magnetoresistance in manganite perovskite nanowires can reach values in excess of 10% caused by the mistracking effect of the spin texture of the domain wall by the conduction electrons.
The fundamental limits currently faced by traditional computing devices necessitate the exploration of ways to store, compute, and transmit information going beyond the current CMOS-based ...technologies. Here, we propose a three-dimensional (3D) magnetic interconnector that exploits geometry-driven automotion of domain walls (DWs), for the transfer of magnetic information between functional magnetic planes. By combining state-of-the-art 3D nanoprinting and standard physical vapor deposition, we prototype 3D helical DW conduits. We observe the automotion of DWs by imaging their magnetic state under different field sequences using X-ray microscopy, observing a robust unidirectional motion of DWs from the bottom to the top of the spirals. From experiments and micromagnetic simulations, we determine that the large thickness gradients present in the structure are the main mechanism for 3D DW automotion. We obtain direct evidence of how this tailorable magnetic energy gradient is imprinted in the devices, and how it competes with pinning effects that are due to local changes in the energy landscape. Our work also predicts how this effect could lead to high DW velocities, reaching the Walker limit during automotion. This work demonstrates a possible mechanism for efficient transfer of magnetic information in three dimensions.
Single cell RNA sequencing approaches are instrumental in studies of cell-to-cell variability. 5΄ selective transcriptome profiling approaches allow simultaneous definition of the transcription start ...size and have advantages over 3΄ selective approaches which just provide internal sequences close to the 3΄ end. The only currently existing 5΄ selective approach requires costly and labor intensive fragmentation and cell barcoding after cDNA amplification. We developed an optimized 5΄ selective workflow where all the cell indexing is done prior to fragmentation. With our protocol, cell indexing can be performed in the Fluidigm C1 microfluidic device, resulting in a significant reduction of cost and labor. We also designed optimized unique molecular identifiers that show less sequence bias and vulnerability towards sequencing errors resulting in an improved accuracy of molecule counting. We provide comprehensive experimental workflows for Illumina and Ion Proton sequencers that allow single cell sequencing in a cost range comparable to qPCR assays.
Bone age assessment (BAA) is an important tool for diagnosis and in determining the time of treatment in a number of pediatric clinical scenarios, as well as in legal settings where it is used to ...estimate the chronological age of an individual where valid documents are lacking. Traditional methods for BAA suffer from drawbacks, such as exposing juveniles to radiation, intra- and interrater variability, and the time spent on the assessment. The employment of automated methods such as deep learning and the use of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) can address these drawbacks and improve the assessment of age.
The aim of this paper is to propose an automated approach for age assessment of youth and young adults in the age range when the length growth ceases and growth zones are closed (14-21 years of age) by employing deep learning using MRI of the knee.
This study carried out MRI examinations of the knee of 402 volunteer subjects-221 males (55.0%) and 181 (45.0%) females-aged 14-21 years. The method comprised two convolutional neural network (CNN) models: the first one selected the most informative images of an MRI sequence, concerning age-assessment purposes; these were then used in the second module, which was responsible for the age estimation. Different CNN architectures were tested, both training from scratch and employing transfer learning.
The CNN architecture that provided the best results was GoogLeNet pretrained on the ImageNet database. The proposed method was able to assess the age of male subjects in the range of 14-20.5 years, with a mean absolute error (MAE) of 0.793 years, and of female subjects in the range of 14-19.5 years, with an MAE of 0.988 years. Regarding the classification of minors-with the threshold of 18 years of age-an accuracy of 98.1% for male subjects and 95.0% for female subjects was achieved.
The proposed method was able to assess the age of youth and young adults from 14 to 20.5 years of age for male subjects and 14 to 19.5 years of age for female subjects in a fully automated manner, without the use of ionizing radiation, addressing the drawbacks of traditional methods.
Many degraded ecosystems need active restoration to conserve biodiversity and re‐establish ecosystem function, both highlighted targets of the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration and the proposed EU ...Nature restoration law. Soil translocation, where both plant propagules and their associated soil biota are co‐introduced, has increasingly been proposed as a powerful restoration technique for terrestrial ecosystems. However, a synthesis of the effectiveness of this method across ecosystems is lacking.
To address how soil translocation affects restoration success, we performed a meta‐analysis synthesizing data from 46 field experiments and their respective reference ecosystems in 17 countries across four continents. In each experiment, vegetation composition was recorded in response to soil translocation treatments and the resultant vegetational changes (diversity and composition) were quantified.
We found that soil translocation leads to plant community development further away from the control and more towards the reference plant communities compared with treatments where only plant propagules were introduced. However, the variability of effect sizes among experiments was large, suggesting strong dependence of restoration success on restoration context. We found that restoration success was more likely on loamy soils and when translocation treatments were implemented over larger spatial areas (>180 m2).
Furthermore, we found that restoration success either consistently increased or decreased over time depending on the experiment. Not only is this congruent with positive feedbacks between plant and soil communities driving plant community development, but it also suggests that the composition of the translocated plant and soil communities, and initial starting conditions, are critical for long‐term restoration success.
Synthesis and applications. Our analysis highlights soil translocation can be a successful restoration method across a broad range of ecosystems. However, its implementation needs to depend on a thorough evaluation of local conditions and the potential added value. Further refinement of soil translocation techniques is needed to increase success rates.
Resumen
Muchos ecosistemas degradados necesitan restauración activa para conservar la biodiversidad y reestablecer las funciones ecosistémicas, objetivos principales del Decenio de las Naciones Unidas sobre la Restauración de los Ecosistemas y de la ley Europea de Restauración de la Naturaleza. La translocación de suelos, en la que se introducen simultáneamente propágulos vegetales y microorganismos del suelo, se ha propuesto cada vez con más fuerza como una técnica efectiva para restaurar ecosistemas terrestres. Sin embargo, falta una síntesis de la eficacia de este método para múltiples ecosistemas.
Para abordar cómo la translocación del suelo afecta el éxito de la restauración, se realizó un metanálisis de 46 experimentos de campo realizados en 17 países de cuatro continentes. En cada experimento, se registró la riqueza y composición de la vegetación en respuesta a los tratamientos de translocación del suelo (incluido el control) y en sus respectivos ecosistemas de referencia.
Nuestros resultados muestran que la translocación del suelo conduce a la comunidad de plantas más lejos del control y más cerca de las comunidades de plantas de referencia en comparación con los tratamientos en los que solo se introdujeron propágulos de plantas. Sin embargo, la variabilidad de los tamaños del efecto entre los experimentos fue grande, lo que sugiere que el éxito de la restauración, entendida como acercamiento a los ecosistemas de referencia, depende del contexto. Así, encontramos que el éxito de la restauración era más probable en suelos arcillosos y cuando los tratamientos de translocación se implementaron en áreas espaciales más grandes (>180 m2).
Además, encontramos una alta direccionalidad en el tiempo en las trayectorias de restauración de cada caso de estudio, muchas de ellas exitosas pero otras no. Esto es congruente con las retroalimentaciones positivas entre las comunidades de plantas y suelos que impulsan el desarrollo de las comunidades de plantas, pero también sugiere que las condiciones iniciales de las comunidades de plantas y de los suelos translocados son críticas para el éxito de la restauración a largo plazo.
Síntesis y aplicaciones. Nuestro análisis sugiere que la translocación del suelo puede ser un método de restauración exitoso en una amplia gama de ecosistemas. Sin embargo, su implementación debe hacerse tras una evaluación exhaustiva de las condiciones locales y el valour añadido potencial. Se necesita un mayor cuidado en la aplicación de las técnicas de translocación del suelo para aumentar las tasas de éxito.
Our analysis highlights soil translocation can be a successful restoration method across a broad range of ecosystems. However, its implementation needs to depend on a thorough evaluation of local conditions and the potential added value. Further refinement of soil translocation techniques is needed to increase success rates.
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