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- Rajewsky, N., et al.
(författare)
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LifeTime and improving European healthcare through cell-based interceptive medicine
- 2020
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Ingår i: Nature. - : Springer Nature. - 0028-0836 .- 1476-4687. ; 587:7834, s. 377-386
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- LifeTime aims to track, understand and target human cells during the onset and progression of complex diseases and their response to therapy at single-cell resolution. This mission will be implemented through the development and integration of single-cell multi-omics and imaging, artificial intelligence and patient-derived experimental disease models during progression from health to disease. Analysis of such large molecular and clinical datasets will discover molecular mechanisms, create predictive computational models of disease progression, and reveal new drug targets and therapies. Timely detection and interception of disease embedded in an ethical and patient-centered vision will be achieved through interactions across academia, hospitals, patient-associations, health data management systems and industry. Applying this strategy to key medical challenges in cancer, neurological, infectious, chronic inflammatory and cardiovascular diseases at the single-cell level will usher in cell-based interceptive medicine in Europe over the next decade.
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- Askri, Dalel, et al.
(författare)
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A blood test to monitor bee health across a European network of agricultural sites of different land-use by MALDI BeeTyping mass spectrometry
- 2024
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Ingår i: Science of the Total Environment. - 0048-9697. ; 929
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- There are substantial concerns about impaired honey bee health and colony losses due to several poorly understood factors. We used MALDI profiling (MALDI BeeTyping®) analysis to investigate how some environmental and management factors under field conditions across Europe affected the honey bee haemolymph peptidome (all peptides in the circulatory fluid), as a profile of molecular markers representing the immune status of Apis mellifera. Honey bees were exposed to a range of environmental stressors in 128 agricultural sites across eight European countries in four biogeographic zones, with each country contributing eight sites each for two different cropping systems: oilseed rape (OSR) and apple (APP). The full haemolymph peptide profiles, including the presence and levels of three key immunity markers, namely the antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) Apidaecin, Abaecin and Defensin-1, allowed the honey bee responses to environmental variables to be discriminated by country, crop type and site. When considering just the AMPs, it was not possible to distinguish between countries by the prevalence of each AMP in the samples. However, it was possible to discriminate between countries on the amounts of the AMPs, with the Swedish samples in particular expressing high amounts of all AMPs. A machine learning model was developed to discriminate the haemolymphs of bees from APP and OSR sites. The model was 90.6 % accurate in identifying the crop type from the samples used to build the model. Overall, MALDI BeeTyping® of bee haemolymph represents a promising and cost-effective “blood test” for simultaneously monitoring dozens of peptide markers affected by environmental stressors at the landscape scale, thus providing policymakers with new diagnostic and regulatory tools for monitoring bee health.
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- Sherratt, K., et al.
(författare)
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Predictive performance of multi-model ensemble forecasts of COVID-19 across European nations
- 2023
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Ingår i: eLIFE. - : eLife Sciences Publications Ltd. - 2050-084X. ; 12
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Methods: We used open-source tools to develop a public European COVID-19 Forecast Hub. We invited groups globally to contribute weekly forecasts for COVID-19 cases and deaths reported by a standardised source for 32 countries over the next 1–4 weeks. Teams submitted forecasts from March 2021 using standardised quantiles of the predictive distribution. Each week we created an ensemble forecast, where each predictive quantile was calculated as the equally-weighted average (initially the mean and then from 26th July the median) of all individual models’ predictive quantiles. We measured the performance of each model using the relative Weighted Interval Score (WIS), comparing models’ forecast accuracy relative to all other models. We retrospectively explored alternative methods for ensemble forecasts, including weighted averages based on models’ past predictive performance.Results: Over 52 weeks, we collected forecasts from 48 unique models. We evaluated 29 models’ forecast scores in comparison to the ensemble model. We found a weekly ensemble had a consistently strong performance across countries over time. Across all horizons and locations, the ensemble performed better on relative WIS than 83% of participating models’ forecasts of incident cases (with a total N=886 predictions from 23 unique models), and 91% of participating models’ forecasts of deaths (N=763 predictions from 20 models). Across a 1–4 week time horizon, ensemble performance declined with longer forecast periods when forecasting cases, but remained stable over 4 weeks for incident death forecasts. In every forecast across 32 countries, the ensemble outperformed most contributing models when forecasting either cases or deaths, frequently outperforming all of its individual component models. Among several choices of ensemble methods we found that the most influential and best choice was to use a median average of models instead of using the mean, regardless of methods of weighting component forecast models.Conclusions: Our results support the use of combining forecasts from individual models into an ensemble in order to improve predictive performance across epidemiological targets and populations during infectious disease epidemics. Our findings further suggest that median ensemble methods yield better predictive performance more than ones based on means. Our findings also highlight that forecast consumers should place more weight on incident death forecasts than incident case forecasts at forecast horizons greater than 2 weeks.
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- Bretman, Amanda, et al.
(författare)
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Systematic approaches to assessing high-temperature limits to fertility in animals
- 2024
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Ingår i: Journal of Evolutionary Biology. - 1010-061X .- 1420-9101.
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Critical thermal limits (CTLs) gauge the physiological impact of temperature on survival or critical biological function, aiding predictions of species range shifts and climatic resilience. Two recent Drosophila species studies, using similar approaches to determine temperatures that induce sterility (thermal fertility limits [TFLs]), reveal that TFLs are often lower than CTLs and that TFLs better predict both current species distributions and extinction probability. Moreover, many studies show fertility is more sensitive at less extreme temperatures than survival (thermal sensitivity of fertility [TSF]). These results present a more pessimistic outlook on the consequences of climate change. However, unlike CTLs, TFL data are limited to Drosophila, and variability in TSF methods poses challenges in predicting species responses to increasing temperature. To address these data and methodological gaps, we propose 3 standardized approaches for assessing thermal impacts on fertility. We focus on adult obligate sexual terrestrial invertebrates but also provide modifications for other animal groups and life-history stages. We first outline a gold-standard protocol for determining TFLs, focussing on the effects of short-term heat shocks and simulating more frequent extreme heat events predicted by climate models. As this approach may be difficult to apply to some organisms, we then provide a standardized TSF protocol. Finally, we provide a framework to quantify fertility loss in response to extreme heat events in nature, given the limitations in laboratory approaches. Applying these standardized approaches across many taxa, similar to CTLs, will allow robust tests of the impact of fertility loss on species responses to increasing temperatures. Graphical AbstractOverview of the systematic methods (A, C, and D) to simultaneously assay lethal limits and thermal fertility limits or (B and E) thermal sensitivity of fertility. These are most easily applied to laboratory settings but can be used for assessing the fertility of wild-caught animals that have been exposed to natural temperatures.
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- Dougherty, Liam R., et al.
(författare)
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A systematic map of studies testing the relationship between temperature and animal reproduction
- 2024
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Ingår i: Ecological Solutions and Evidence. - : John Wiley & Sons. - 2688-8319. ; 5:1
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Exposure to extreme temperatures can negatively affect animal reproduction, by disrupting the ability of individuals to produce any offspring (fertility), or the number of offspring produced by fertile individuals (fecundity). This has important ecological consequences, because reproduction is the ultimate measure of population fitness: a reduction in reproductive output lowers the population growth rate and increases the extinction risk. Despite this importance, there have been no large-scale summaries of the evidence for effect of temperature on reproduction.We provide a systematic map of studies testing the relationship between temperature and animal reproduction. We systematically searched for published studies that statistically test for a direct link between temperature and animal reproduction, in terms of fertility, fecundity or indirect measures of reproductive potential (gamete and gonad traits).Overall, we collated a large and rich evidence base, with 1654 papers that met our inclusion criteria, encompassing 1191 species.The map revealed several important research gaps. Insects made up almost half of the dataset, but reptiles and amphibians were uncommon, as were non-arthropod invertebrates. Fecundity was the most common reproductive trait examined, and relatively few studies measured fertility. It was uncommon for experimental studies to test exposure of different life stages, exposure to short-term heat or cold shock, exposure to temperature fluctuations, or to independently assess male and female effects. Studies were most often published in journals focusing on entomology and pest control, ecology and evolution, aquaculture and fisheries science, and marine biology. Finally, while individuals were sampled from every continent, there was a strong sampling bias towards mid-latitudes in the Northern Hemisphere, such that the tropics and polar regions are less well sampled.This map reveals a rich literature of studies testing the relationship between temperature and animal reproduction, but also uncovers substantial missing treatment of taxa, traits, and thermal regimes. This database will provide a valuable resource for future quantitative meta-analyses, and direct future studies aiming to fill identified gaps.
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