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- Fresard, Laure, et al.
(författare)
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Identification of rare-disease genes using blood transcriptome sequencing and large control cohorts
- 2019
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Ingår i: Nature Medicine. - : NATURE PUBLISHING GROUP. - 1078-8956 .- 1546-170X. ; 25:6, s. 911-919
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- It is estimated that 350 million individuals worldwide suffer from rare diseases, which are predominantly caused by mutation in a single gene(1). The current molecular diagnostic rate is estimated at 50%, with whole-exome sequencing (WES) among the most successful approaches(2-5). For patients in whom WES is uninformative, RNA sequencing (RNA-seq) has shown diagnostic utility in specific tissues and diseases(6-8). This includes muscle biopsies from patients with undiagnosed rare muscle disorders(6,9), and cultured fibroblasts from patients with mitochondrial disorders(7). However, for many individuals, biopsies are not performed for clinical care, and tissues are difficult to access. We sought to assess the utility of RNA-seq from blood as a diagnostic tool for rare diseases of different pathophysiologies. We generated whole-blood RNA-seq from 94 individuals with undiagnosed rare diseases spanning 16 diverse disease categories. We developed a robust approach to compare data from these individuals with large sets of RNA-seq data for controls (n = 1,594 unrelated controls and n = 49 family members) and demonstrated the impacts of expression, splicing, gene and variant filtering strategies on disease gene identification. Across our cohort, we observed that RNA-seq yields a 7.5% diagnostic rate, and an additional 16.7% with improved candidate gene resolution.
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- Krys, K, et al.
(författare)
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Happiness Maximization Is a WEIRD Way of Living
- 2024
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Ingår i: Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. - 1745-6924. ; , s. 17456916231208367-
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)
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- Murdock, Duncan J.E., et al.
(författare)
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Evaluating scenarios for the evolutionary assembly of the brachiopod body plan.
- 2014
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Ingår i: Evolution & Development. - : Wiley. - 1520-541X .- 1525-142X. ; 16:1, s. 13-24
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The fossil faunas of the Cambrian provide the only direct insight into the assembly of animal body plans. However, for many animal groups, their early fossil record is linked to disarticulated remains, interpretation of which is problematic since they possess few characters from which their affinity to phyla can be established and, indeed, few characters at all. One such group is the tommotiids, which has been interpreted, on the basis of skeletal anatomy, as a paraphyletic assemblage uniting brachiopods and phoronids, through the acquisition and subsequent modification, or loss, of an imbricated set of dorsal phosphatic sclerites. Here we present a reexamination of the fossil evidence uniting the tommotiids and brachiopods, supplemented with new anatomical data from synchrotron radiation X-ray tomographic microscopy of key tommotiid taxa. The characters used to support the complex hypothesis of character evolution in the brachiopod stem lineage relies on scleritome reconstructions and inferred mode of life which themselves rely on brachiopods being chosen as the interpretative model. We advocate a more conservative interpretation of the affinity of these fossils, based a priori on their intrinsic properties, rather than the modern analogue in whose light they have been interpreted.
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- Murdock, Duncan J.E., et al.
(författare)
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Ontogeny and microstructure of the enigmatic Cambrian tommotiid Sunnaginia Missarzhevsky 1969.
- 2012
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Ingår i: Palaeontology. - : Wiley. - 0031-0239. ; 55:3, s. 661-676
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The tommotiids are a significant component of the earliest skeletal animal remains in the fossil record, occurring in large numbers in the Lower Cambrian. Sclerites of the tommotiid genus Sunnaginia have been implicated as integral to hypotheses regarding the evolution of the brachiopod body plan, with a morphology intermediate between the unspecialized sclerites of the tubular Eccentrotheca and the specialized sclerites of the tannuolinids. Abundant Sunnaginia ?imbricata sclerites, of a broad ontogenetic spectrum, were recovered from the Comley Limestone, Lower Cambrian (Stages 3–4), Shropshire, UK and compared to Sunnaginia imbricata from the Aldan River, Siberia (uppermost Tommotian). New microstructural data, collected using synchrotron radiation X-ray tomographic microscopy, reveal a unique microstructure for Sunnaginia ?imbricata sclerites among the tommotiids; interlamellar cavities spanned by a series of continuous pillars, giving a colonnaded appearance contrasting to that of S. imbricata. These data refute the inclusion of Eccentrotheca within the Sunnaginiidae and highlight the need for a revision of suprageneric classification of the tommotiids. Rather, structural similarities between Sunnaginia sclerites and those of the tannuolinids suggest a close affinity to this group. Recent phylogenetic hypotheses place the tannuolinids as stem-linguliform brachiopods, with Paterimitra plus the paterinid (and possibly rhynchonelliform) brachiopods as their sister group. Our new data therefore resolve Sunnaginia as close to the node defining crown-Brachiopoda. However, the characters supporting this phylogenetic scheme cannot be consistently applied to all taxa, nor do they define a series of nested clades. We therefore suggest that a more thorough phylogenetic analysis is required in the light of the data presented here and other recent descriptions.
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- Ondicova, Miroslava, et al.
(författare)
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Folic acid intervention during pregnancy alters DNA methylation, affecting neural target genes through two distinct mechanisms
- 2022
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Ingår i: Clinical Epigenetics. - : BioMed Central (BMC). - 1868-7083 .- 1868-7075. ; 14:1
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Background: We previously showed that continued folic acid (FA) supplementation beyond the first trimester of pregnancy appears to have beneficial effects on neurocognitive performance in children followed for up to 11 years, but the biological mechanism for this effect has remained unclear. Using samples from our randomized controlled trial of folic acid supplementation in second and third trimester (FASSTT), where significant improvements in cognitive and psychosocial performance were demonstrated in children from mothers supplemented in pregnancy with 400 mu g/day FA compared with placebo, we examined methylation patterns from cord blood (CB) using the EPIC array which covers approximately 850,000 cytosine-guanine (CG) sites across the genome. Genes showing significant differences were verified using pyrosequencing and mechanistic approaches used in vitro to determine effects on transcription. Results: FA supplementation resulted in significant differences in methylation, particularly at brain-related genes. Further analysis showed these genes split into two groups. In one group, which included the CES1 gene, methylation changes at the promoters were important for regulating transcription. We also identified a second group which had a characteristic bimodal profile, with low promoter and high gene body (GB) methylation. In the latter, loss of methylation in the GB is linked to decreases in transcription: this group included the PRKAR1B/HEATR2 genes and the dopamine receptor regulator PDE4C. Overall, methylation in CB also showed good correlation with methylation profiles seen in a published data set of late gestation foetal brain samples. Conclusion: We show here clear alterations in DNA methylation at specific classes of neurodevelopmental genes in the same cohort of children, born to FA-supplemented mothers, who previously showed improved cognitive and psychosocial performance. Our results show measurable differences at neural genes which are important for transcriptional regulation and add to the supporting evidence for continued FA supplementation throughout later gestation.
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