Survey on Infection Preventive Behaviors for COVID-19 Among Children and Parents / 日本プライマリ・ケア連合学会誌

Introduction: We aimed to investigate the actual situation of infection preventive behaviors among children, and to investigate changes in parent-child physical contact during the COVID-19 pandemic.Method: We conducted an anonymous questionnaire survey among parents whose children attended the Certified Public Childcare Center in Toyota City between February and March 2021. Descriptive statistics, univariate analysis (Spearman's correlation coefficient, Fisher's exact test), and multivariate analysis were performed.Result: A total of 767 parents responded to the survey. Among them, 78.6% of parents and 76.2% of children always washed their hands when they got home.92.7% of parents and 68.9% of children always wore masks when going out. Breastfeeding and face-to-face contact tended to decrease compared to other behaviors (p < 0.001), but there was most often no change in the frequency of parent-child physical contact.Conclusion: It was difficult for children to take the same infection preventive behaviors as adults. Changes in the frequency of parent-child physical contact were not observed in many parents and children.

New avenues for systematically inferring cell-cell communication: through single-cell transcriptomics data

For multicellular organisms, cell-cell communication is essential to numerous biological processes. Drawing upon the latest development of single-cell RNA-sequencing (scRNA-seq), high-resolution transcriptomic data have deepened our understanding of cellular phenotype heterogeneity and composition of complex tissues, which enables systematic cell-cell communication studies at a single-cell level. We first summarize a common workflow of cell-cell communication study using scRNA-seq data, which often includes data preparation, construction of communication networks, and result validation. Two common strategies taken to uncover cell-cell communications are reviewed, e.g., physically vicinal structure-based and ligand-receptor interaction-based one. To conclude, challenges and current applications of cell-cell communication studies at a single-cell resolution are discussed in details and future perspectives are proposed.