Objective: The first year of university is a particularly stressful period and can impact academic performance and students’ health. The aim of this study was to evaluate the health and lifestyle of undergraduates and assess risk factors associated with psychiatric symptoms. Materials and methods: Between September 2012 and June 2013, we included all undergraduate students who underwent compulsory a medical visit at the university medical service in Nice (France) during which they were screened for...

Traditional means for scoring the effects of anti-cancer drugs on the growth and survival of cell lines is based on relative cell number in drug-treated and control samples and is seriously confounded by unequal division rates arising from natural biological variation and differences in culture conditions. This problem can be overcome by computing drug sensitivity on a per-division basis. The normalized growth rate inhibition (GR) approach yields per-division metrics for drug potency (GR50) and efficacy...

Phenotypic variance heterogeneity across genotypes at a single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) may reflect underlying gene-environment (G·E) or gene-gene interactions. We modeled variance heterogeneity for blood lipids and BMI in up to 44,211 participants and investigated relationships between variance effects (Pv), G·E interaction effects (with smoking and physical activity), and marginal genetic effects (Pm). Correlations between Pv and Pm were stronger for SNPs with established marginal effects (Spearman's ρ=0.401 for triglycerides, and ρ=0.236 for BMI) compared...

Cellular DNA/RNA tags (barcodes) allow for multiplexed cell lineage tracing and neuronal projection mapping with cellular resolution. Conventional approaches to reading out cellular barcodes trade off spatial resolution with throughput. Bulk sequencing achieves high throughput but sacrifices spatial resolution, whereas manual cell picking has low throughput. In situ sequencing could potentially achieve both high spatial resolution and high throughput, but current in situ sequencing techniques are inefficient at reading out cellular barcodes. Here we describe...

Bacteria can evolve rapidly under positive selection owing to their vast numbers, allowing their genes to diversify by adapting to different environments. We asked whether the same genes that evolve rapidly in the long-term evolution experiment with Escherichia coli (LTEE) have also diversified extensively in nature. To make this comparison, we identified ~2000 core genes shared among 60 E. coli strains. During the LTEE, core genes accumulated significantly more nonsynonymous mutations than flexible (i.e., noncore)...

The spread of cancer cells from primary tumors to regional lymph nodes is often associated with reduced survival. One prevailing model to explain this association posits that fatal, distant metastases are seeded by lymph node metastases. This view provides a mechanistic basis for the TNM staging system and is the rationale for surgical resection of tumor-draining lymph nodes. Here we examine the evolutionary relationship between primary tumor, lymph node, and distant metastases in human colorectal...

The ESCRT machinery mediates reverse membrane scission. By quantitative fluorescence lattice light-sheet microscopy, we have shown that ESCRT-III subunits polymerize rapidly on yeast endosomes, together with the recruitment of at least two Vps4 hexamers. During their 3-45 second lifetimes, the ESCRT-III assemblies accumulated 75-200 Snf7 and 15-50 Vps24 molecules. Productive budding events required at least two additional Vps4 hexamers. Membrane budding was associated with continuous, stochastic exchange of Vps4 and ESCRT-III components, rather than steady...

Several homeobox-related gene (HOX) transcription factors such as mesenchyme HOX-2 (MEOX2) have previously been associated with cancer drug resistance, malignant progression and/or clinical prognostic responses in lung cancer patients; however, the mechanisms involved in these responses have yet to be elucidated. Here, an epigenomic strategy was implemented to identify novel MEOX2 gene promoter transcription targets and propose a new molecular mechanism underlying lung cancer drug resistance and poor clinical prognosis. Chromatin immunoprecipitation (ChIP) assays derived...

Background: Dystonia, a debilitating movement disorder characterized by abnormal fixed positions and/or twisting postures, is associated with dysfunction of motor control networks. While gross brain lesions can produce secondary dystonias, advanced neuroimaging techniques have been required to identify network abnormalities in primary dystonias. Prior neuroimaging studies have provided valuable insights into the pathophysiology of dystonia, but few directly assessed the gross volume of motor control regions, and to our knowledge, none identified abnormalities common to...

Prion diseases include a number of progressive neuropathies involving conformational changes in cellular prion protein (PrPc) that may be fatal sporadic, familial or infectious. Pathological evidence indicated that neurons affected in prion diseases follow a dying-back pattern of degeneration. However, specific cellular processes affected by PrPc that explain such a pattern have not yet been identified. Results from cell biological and pharmacological experiments in isolated squid axoplasm and primary cultured neurons reveal inhibition of fast...