American Heart Association's Children's Strategically Focused Research Network Experience.

The American Heart Association's Strategically Focused Children's Research Network started in July 2017 with 4 unique programs at Children's National Hospital in Washington, DC; Duke University in Durham, North Carolina; University of Utah in Salt Lake City, Utah; and Lurie Children's Hospital/Northwestern University in Chicago, Illinois. The overarching goal of the Children's National center was to develop evidence-based strategies to strengthen the health system response to rheumatic heart disease through synergistic basic, clinical, and population science research. The overall goals of the Duke center were to determine risk factors for obesity and response to treatment including those that might work on a larger scale in communities across the country. The integrating theme of the Utah center focused on leveraging big data-science approaches to improve the quality of care and outcomes for children with congenital heart defects, within the context of the patient and their family. The overarching hypothesis of the Northwestern center is that the early course of change in cardiovascular health, from birth onward, reflects factors that result in either subsequent development of cardiovascular risk or preservation of lifetime favorable cardiovascular health. All 4 centers exceeded the original goals of research productivity, fellow training, and collaboration. This article describes details of these accomplishments and highlights challenges, especially around the COVID-19 pandemic.

Origin determination of the Eastern oyster (Crassostrea virginica) using a combination of whole-body compound-specific isotope analysis and heavy metal analysis.

Various samples of the Eastern oyster, Crassostrea virginica, were collected from five harvest bay areas in the Gulf of Mexico coastal waters of Florida (FL), Louisiana (LA) and Texas (TX). Cadmium and lead concentrations from the extracted whole-body soft tissues were analyzed by inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry (ICP-MS), and bulk δ13C and δ15N isotope ratios and amino-acid-specific δ13C values were analyzed via isotope ratio mass-spectrometry (IRMS). The combined data was subjected to multivariate statistical analysis to assess whether oysters could be linked to their harvest area. Results indicate that discriminant analysis using the δ13C values of five amino acids-serine, glycine, valine, lysine and phenylalanine-could discriminate oysters from two adjacent harvesting in Florida with 90% success rate, using leave-one-out cross validation. The combination of trace elements and isotope ratios could also predict geographic provenance of oysters with a success rate superior to the isolated use of each technique. The combinatory approach proposed in this study is a proof-of-concept that compound specific stable isotope analysis is a potential tool for oyster fisheries managers, wildlife, and food safety enforcement officers, as well as to forensics and ecology research areas, although significantly more work would need to be completed to fully validate the approach and achieve more reliable statistical results.

Mercury, lead, and cadmium in blue crabs, Callinectes sapidus, from the Atlantic coast of Florida, USA: a multipredator approach.

Blue crabs, Callinectes sapidus, from the Atlantic coast of Florida were analyzed for total mercury, methylmercury, lead, and cadmium. Paired samples of two tissue types were analyzed for each crab, (1) muscle tissue (cheliped and body muscles) and (2) whole-body tissue (all organs, muscle tissue and connective tissue), for evaluation of the concentration of metals available to human consumers as well as estuarine predators. There were clear patterns of tissue-specific partitioning for each metal. Total mercury was significantly greater in muscle tissue (mean=0.078 µg/g) than in whole-body tissue (mean=0.055 µg/g). Conversely, whole-body concentrations of lead and cadmium (means=0.131 and 0.079 µg/g, respectively) were significantly greater than concentrations in muscle (means=0.02 and 0.029 µg/g, respectively). There were no significant correlations between any metal contaminant and crab size. Cadmium levels were significantly greater in the muscle tissue of females, but, no other sex-related differences were seen for other metals or tissue types. Methylmercury composed 93-100% of the total mercury in tissues. Compared to previous blue crab studies from different regions of the United States, mean concentrations of mercury, lead, and cadmium were relatively low, although isolated groups or individual blue crabs accumulated high metal concentrations.