by Jackie Knee, Trent Sumner, Zaida Adriano, David Berendes, Ellen de Bruijn, Wolf-Peter Schmidt, Rassul Nalá, Oliver Cumming, Joe Brown

Background

Enteric infections are common where public health infrastructure is lacking. This study assesses risk factors for a range of enteric infections among children living in low-income, unplanned communities of urban Maputo, Mozambique.

Methods & findings

We conducted a cross-sectional survey in 17 neighborhoods of Maputo to assess the prevalence of reported (altro…)

by Sam Debaveye, Claudia Virginia Gonzalez Torres, Delphine De Smedt, Bert Heirman, Shane Kavanagh, Jo Dewulf

Background

Mass anthelmintic drug administration is recommended in developing countries to address infection by soil-transmitted helminthiases (STH). We quantified the public health benefit of treatment with mebendazole in eight million Vietnamese children aged 5–14 years from 2006 to 2011. This was compared to the environmental impact of the pharmaceutical supply chain of mebendazole, as the resource (altro…)

by Catherine E. Oldenburg, Ahmed M. Arzika, Ramatou Maliki, Mohamed Salissou Kane, Elodie Lebas, Kathryn J. Ray, Catherine Cook, Sun Y. Cotter, Zhaoxia Zhou, Sheila K. West, Robin Bailey, Travis C. Porco, Jeremy D. Keenan, Thomas M. Lietman

Background

Mass azithromycin distribution reduces under-5 child mortality. Trachoma control programs currently treat infants aged 6 months and older. Here, we report findings from an infant adverse event survey in 1–5 month olds who (altro…)

by Benjamin F. R. Dickson, Patricia M. Graves, Ni Ni Aye, Thet Wai Nwe, Tint Wai, San San Win, Myint Shwe, Janet Douglass, Richard S. Bradbury, William J. McBride

Lymphatic filariasis is widely endemic in Myanmar. Despite the establishment of an elimination program in 2000, knowledge of the remaining burden of disease relies predominantly on programmatic information. To assist the program, we conducted an independent cross-sectional household cluster survey to determine the (altro…)

by Ícaro Rodrigues-dos-Santos, Myllena F. Melo, Liane de Castro, Alejandro Marcel Hasslocher-Moreno, Pedro Emmanuel A. A. do Brasil, Andréa Silvestre de Sousa, Constança Britto, Otacilio C. Moreira

Chagas disease is still a major public health issue in many Latin American countries. One of the current major challenges is to find an association between Trypanosoma cruzi discrete typing units (DTUs) and clinical manifestations of the disease. In this study, we used a multilocus (altro…)

by Mirende Kichuki Matiko, Linda Peniel Salekwa, Christopher Jacob Kasanga, Sharadhuli Idd Kimera, Magnus Evander, Wambura Philemon Nyangi

Background

Tanzania is among the Rift Valley fever (RVF) epizootic/endemic countries in sub Saharan Africa, where RVF disease outbreaks occur within a range of 3 to 17-year intervals. Detection of Rift Valley fever virus (RVFV) antibodies in animals in regions with no previous history of outbreaks raises the question of whether the disease is (altro…)

by Wen-Ping Guo, Baicheng Huang, Qin Zhao, Gang Xu, Baoyuan Liu, Yi-Han Wang, En-Min Zhou

In China, thirteen species of tick-borne rickettsiales bacteria pathogenic to human have been reported in ticks and host animals, and human patients caused by them also has been identified. However, investigation for rickettsiales bacteria circulating in Xi’an wasn’t performed although diseases resembling human diseases caused by these organisms have been found. In this study, domestic animals and (altro…)

by Aayushi Kamthan, Tushar Shaw, Chiranjay Mukhopadhyay, Subodh Kumar

Background

The Gram-negative soil dwelling bacterium Burkholderia pseudomallei is the etiological agent of melioidosis. The disease is endemic in most parts of Southeast Asia and northern Australia. Over last few years, there has been an increase in number of melioidosis cases from India; however the disease epidemiology is less clearly understood. Multi-locus sequence typing (MLST) is a powerful genotypic method used to characterize (altro…)

by Carolina Rosadas, Bassit Malik, Graham P. Taylor, Marzia Puccioni-Sohler

Background

Brazil has at least 800,000 HTLV-1 infected individuals. HTLV-1 can be transmitted via sexual intercourse, contact with blood and from mother to child, mainly by breastfeeding. Treatments for the high morbidity/mortality associated diseases (ATL and HAM/TSP) are limited, therefore, infection prevention is of utmost importance. However, antenatal screening is not routinely performed in Brazil. A lack of data regarding the number (altro…)

by Joabi Nascimento, Vanderson S. Sampaio, Stephan Karl, Andrea Kuehn, Anne Almeida, Sheila Vitor-Silva, Gisely Cardoso de Melo, Djane C. Baia da Silva, Stefanie C. P. Lopes, Nelson F. Fé, José B. Pereira Lima, Maria G. Barbosa Guerra, Paulo F. P. Pimenta, Quique Bassat, Ivo Mueller, Marcus V. G. Lacerda, Wuelton M. Monteiro

Vector-borne diseases account for more than 17% of all infectious diseases, causing more than one million deaths annually. Malaria (altro…)

by Justine Schaeffer, Xavier Carnec, Stéphanie Reynard, Mathieu Mateo, Caroline Picard, Natalia Pietrosemoli, Marie-Agnès Dilliès, Sylvain Baize

Lassa virus (LASV) is responsible for a viral hemorrhagic fever in humans and the death of 3,000 to 5,000 people every year. The immune response to LASV is poorly understood, but type I interferon (IFN-I) and T-cell responses appear to be critical for the host. We studied the response of myeloid dendritic cells (mDC) to (altro…)

by Angela D. Pack, Matthew H. Collins, Charles S. Rosenberg, Rick L. Tarleton

Trypanosoma cruzi infection is characterized by chronic parasitism of non-lymphoid tissues and is rarely eliminated despite potent adaptive immune responses. This failure to cure has frequently been attributed to a loss or impairment of anti-T. cruzi T cell responses over time, analogous to the T cell dysfunction described for other persistent infections. In this study, we have evaluated the (altro…)

by Natacha Merindol, Mohamed El-Far, Mohamed Sylla, Nasser Masroori, Caroline Dufour, Jia-xin Li, Pearl Cherry, Mélodie B. Plourde, Cécile Tremblay, Lionel Berthoux

Elite controllers (ECs) are a rare subset of HIV-1 slow progressors characterized by prolonged viremia suppression. HLA alleles B27 and B57 promote the cytotoxic T lymphocyte (CTL)-mediated depletion of infected cells in ECs, leading to the emergence of escape mutations in the viral capsid (CA). Whether those mutations modulate CA (altro…)

by Artemis Perraki, Julien Gronnier, Paul Gouguet, Marie Boudsocq, Anne-Flore Deroubaix, Vincent Simon, Sylvie German-Retana, Cyril Zipfel, Emmanuelle Bayer, Sébastien Mongrand, Véronique Germain, Anthony Legrand, Birgit Habenstein

Plants respond to pathogens through dynamic regulation of plasma membrane-bound signaling pathways. To date, how the plant plasma membrane is involved in responses to viruses is mostly unknown. Here, we show that plant cells sense the Potato virus X (PVX) COAT PROTEIN and TRIPLE GENE (altro…)

by Yaxian Lan, Xiaonan Liu, Ying Fu, Shanjin Huang

A population of dynamic apical actin filaments is required for rapid polarized pollen tube growth. However, the cellular mechanisms driving their assembly remain incompletely understood. It was postulated that formin is a major player in nucleating apical actin assembly, but direct genetic and cytological evidence remains to be firmly established. Here we found that both Arabidopsis formin 3 (AtFH3) and formin 5 (AtFH5) (altro…)

by Nhung H. Vuong, David P. Cook, Laura A. Forrest, Lauren E. Carter, Pascale Robineau-Charette, Joshua M. Kofsky, Kendra M. Hodgkinson, Barbara C. Vanderhyden

Estrogen therapy increases the risk of ovarian cancer and exogenous estradiol accelerates the onset of ovarian cancer in mouse models. Both in vivo and in vitro, ovarian surface epithelial (OSE) cells exposed to estradiol develop a subpopulation that loses cell polarity, contact inhibition, and forms multi-layered foci of (altro…)

by Vamsi K. Gali, David Dickerson, Yuki Katou, Katsunori Fujiki, Katsuhiko Shirahige, Tom Owen-Hughes, Takashi Kubota, Anne D. Donaldson

Elg1, the major subunit of a Replication Factor C-like complex, is critical to ensure genomic stability during DNA replication, and is implicated in controlling chromatin structure. We investigated the consequences of Elg1 loss for the dynamics of chromatin re-formation following DNA replication. Measurement of Okazaki fragment length and the micrococcal nuclease sensitivity of (altro…)

by Lusine Nazaryan-Petersen, Jesper Eisfeldt, Maria Pettersson, Johanna Lundin, Daniel Nilsson, Josephine Wincent, Agne Lieden, Lovisa Lovmar, Jesper Ottosson, Jelena Gacic, Outi Mäkitie, Ann Nordgren, Francesco Vezzi, Valtteri Wirta, Max Käller, Tina Duelund Hjortshøj, Cathrine Jespersgaard, Rayan Houssari, Laura Pignata, Mads Bak, Niels Tommerup, Elisabeth Syk Lundberg, Zeynep Tümer, Anna Lindstrand

Clustered copy number variants (CNVs) as detected by chromosomal microarray analysis (CMA) are often reported as germline chromothripsis. However, such cases (altro…)

by Caitlin Morris, Olivia K. Foster, Simran Handa, Kimberly Peloza, Laura Voss, Hannah Somhegyi, Youli Jian, My Van Vo, Marie Harp, Fiona M. Rambo, Chonglin Yang, Greg J. Hermann

Cell type-specific modifications of conventional endosomal trafficking pathways lead to the formation of lysosome-related organelles (LROs). C. elegans gut granules are intestinally restricted LROs that coexist with conventional degradative lysosomes. The formation of gut granules requires the Rab32 family member GLO-1. We show (altro…)

by Chao Zhang, Yi Shen, Ding Tang, Wenqing Shi, Dongmei Zhang, Guijie Du, Yihua Zhou, Guohua Liang, Yafei Li, Zhukuan Cheng

Meiotic cytokinesis influences the fertility and ploidy of gametes. However, limited information is available on the genetic control of meiotic cytokinesis in plants. Here, we identified a rice mutant with low male fertility, defective callose in meiosis 1 (dcm1). The pollen grains of dcm1 are proved to be defective in exine (altro…)

by Magali Jaillard, Leandro Lima, Maud Tournoud, Pierre Mahé, Alex van Belkum, Vincent Lacroix, Laurent Jacob

Genome-wide association study (GWAS) methods applied to bacterial genomes have shown promising results for genetic marker discovery or detailed assessment of marker effect. Recently, alignment-free methods based on k-mer composition have proven their ability to explore the accessory genome. However, they lead to redundant descriptions and results which are sometimes hard to interpret. Here we introduce (altro…)

by Mikkel-Holger S. Sinding, Shyam Gopalakrishan, Filipe G. Vieira, Jose A. Samaniego Castruita, Katrine Raundrup, Mads Peter Heide Jørgensen, Morten Meldgaard, Bent Petersen, Thomas Sicheritz-Ponten, Johan Brus Mikkelsen, Ulf Marquard-Petersen, Rune Dietz, Christian Sonne, Love Dalén, Lutz Bachmann, Øystein Wiig, Anders J. Hansen, M. Thomas P. Gilbert

North America is currently home to a number of grey wolf (Canis lupus) and wolf-like canid populations, including the coyote (Canis latrans) and the taxonomically (altro…)

by Laura Anton-Sanchez, Felix Effenberger, Concha Bielza, Pedro Larrañaga, Hermann Cuntz

Neurons collect their inputs from other neurons by sending out arborized dendritic structures. However, the relationship between the shape of dendrites and the precise organization of synaptic inputs in the neural tissue remains unclear. Inputs could be distributed in tight clusters, entirely randomly or else in a regular grid-like manner. Here, we analyze dendritic branching structures using a regularity index R, (altro…)

by James A. Henderson, Pulin Gong

Diverse plasticity mechanisms are orchestrated to shape the spatiotemporal dynamics underlying brain functions. However, why these plasticity rules emerge and how their dynamics interact with neural activity to give rise to complex neural circuit dynamics remains largely unknown. Here we show that both Hebbian and homeostatic plasticity rules emerge from a functional perspective of neuronal dynamics whereby each neuron learns to encode its own activity in (altro…)

by Stefano Giaimo, Jordi Arranz, Arne Traulsen

Population structure can strongly affect evolutionary dynamics. The most general way to describe population structures are graphs. An important observable on evolutionary graphs is the probability that a novel mutation spreads through the entire population. But what drives this spread of a mutation towards fixation? Here, we propose a novel way to understand the forces driving fixation by borrowing techniques from evolutionary demography to quantify (altro…)

by Anton Arkhipov, Nathan W. Gouwens, Yazan N. Billeh, Sergey Gratiy, Ramakrishnan Iyer, Ziqiang Wei, Zihao Xu, Reza Abbasi-Asl, Jim Berg, Michael Buice, Nicholas Cain, Nuno da Costa, Saskia de Vries, Daniel Denman, Severine Durand, David Feng, Tim Jarsky, Jerome Lecoq, Brian Lee, Lu Li, Stefan Mihalas, Gabriel K. Ocker, Shawn R. Olsen, R. Clay Reid, Gilberto Soler-Llavina, Staci A. Sorensen, Quanxin Wang, Jack Waters, Massimo Scanziani, Christof Koch

Despite advances in (altro…)

by Jason E. Pina, Mark Bodner, Bard Ermentrout

Neural oscillations have been recorded and implicated in many different basic brain and cognitive processes. For example, oscillatory neural activity has been suggested to play a role in binding and in the maintenance of information in working memory. With respect to the latter, the majority of work has focused primarily on oscillations in terms of providing a “code” in working memory. However, oscillations may (altro…)

by David W. Rogers, Ellen McConnell, Jasmine Ono, Duncan Greig

Genome-wide sequence divergence between populations can cause hybrid sterility through the action of the anti-recombination system, which rejects crossover repair of double strand breaks between nonidentical sequences. Because crossovers are necessary to ensure proper segregation of homologous chromosomes during meiosis, the reduced recombination rate in hybrids can result in high levels of nondisjunction and therefore low gamete viability. Hybrid sterility in interspecific (altro…)