Dielectric Barrier Plasma Discharge Exsolution of Nanoparticles at Room Temperature and Atmospheric Pressure.

Exsolution of metal nanoparticles (NPs) on perovskite oxides has been demonstrated as a reliable strategy for producing catalyst-support systems. Conventional exsolution requires high temperatures for long periods of time, limiting the selection of support materials. Plasma direct exsolution is reported at room temperature and atmospheric pressure of Ni NPs from a model A-site deficient perovskite oxide (La0.43Ca0.37Ni0.06Ti0.94O2.955). Plasma exsolution is carried out within minutes (up to 15 min) using a dielectric barrier discharge configuration both with He-only gas as well as with He/H2 gas mixtures, yielding small NPs (<30 nm diameter). To prove the practical utility of exsolved NPs, various experiments aimed at assessing their catalytic performance for methanation from synthesis gas, CO, and CH4 oxidation are carried out. Low-temperature and atmospheric pressure plasma exsolution are successfully demonstrated and suggest that this approach could contribute to the practical deployment of exsolution-based stable catalyst systems.

Graphene derivative-based ink advances inkjet printing technology for fabrication of electrochemical sensors and biosensors.

The field of biosensing would significantly benefit from a disruptive technology enabling flexible manufacturing of uniform electrodes. Inkjet printing holds promise for this, although realizing full electrode manufacturing with this technology remains challenging. We introduce a nitrogen-doped carboxylated graphene ink (NGA-ink) compatible with commercially available printing technologies. The water-based and additive-free NGA-ink was utilized to produce fully inkjet-printed electrodes (IPEs), which demonstrated successful electrochemical detection of the important neurotransmitter dopamine. The cost-effectiveness of NGA-ink combined with a total cost per electrode of $0.10 renders it a practical solution for customized electrode manufacturing. Furthermore, the high carboxyl group content of NGA-ink (13 wt%) presents opportunities for biomolecule immobilization, paving the way for the development of advanced state-of-the-art biosensors. This study highlights the potential of NGA inkjet-printed electrodes in revolutionizing sensor technology, offering an affordable, scalable alternative to conventional electrochemical systems.

The Laboratory of Brain and Cognition: A Brief History.

Leslie Ungerleider was the Chief of the Laboratory of Brain and Cognition in the Intramural Research Program of the National Institute of Mental Health from its creation in the early 1990s until her untimely death in 2020. Here, I describe the events leading up to the formation of the laboratory and its early history.

Naturalistic food categories are driven by subjective estimates rather than objective measures of food qualities.

Food-related studies often categorize foods using criteria such as fat and sugar content (e.g., high-fat, high-sugar foods; low-fat, low-sugar foods), and use these categorizations for further analyses. While these criteria are relevant to nutritional health, it is unclear whether they agree with the ways in which we typically group foods. Do these objective categories correspond to our subjective sense? To address this question, we recruited a group of 487 online participants to perform a triplet comparison task involving implicit object similarity judgements on images of 36 foods, which varied in their levels of fat and sugar. We also acquired subjective ratings of other food properties from another set of 369 online participants. Data from the online triplet task was used to generate a similarity matrix of these 36 foods. Principal Components Analysis (PCA) of this matrix identified that the strongest determinant of food similarity (the first PC) was most highly related to participants' judgements of how processed the foods were, while the second component was most related to estimates of sugar and fat content. K-means clustering analysis revealed five emergent food groupings along these PC axes: sweets, fats, starches, fruits, and vegetables. Our results suggest that naturalistic categorizations of food are driven primarily by knowledge of the origin of foods (i.e., grown or manufactured), rather than by their sensory or macronutrient properties. These differences should be considered and explored when developing methods for scientific food studies.

Microbiome Responses to Oral Fecal Microbiota Transplantation in a Cohort of Domestic Dogs.

Fecal microbiota transplants (FMTs) have been successful at treating digestive and skin conditions in dogs. The degree to which the microbiome is impacted by FMT in a cohort of dogs has not been thoroughly investigated. Using 16S rRNA gene sequencing, we document the changes in the microbiome of fifty-four dogs that took capsules of lyophilized fecal material for their chronic diarrhea, vomiting, or constipation. We found that the relative abundances of five bacterial genera (Butyricicoccus, Faecalibacterium, Fusobacterium, Megamonas, and Sutterella) were higher after FMT than before FMT. Fecal microbiome alpha- and beta-diversity were correlated with kibble and raw food consumption, and prior antibiotic use. On average, 18% of the stool donor's bacterial amplicon sequence variants (ASVs) engrafted in the FMT recipient, with certain bacterial taxa like Bacteroides spp., Fusobacterium spp., and Lachnoclostridium spp. engrafting more frequently than others. Lastly, analyses indicated that the degree of overlap between the donor bacteria and the community of microbes already established in the FMT recipient likely impacts engraftment. Collectively, our work provides further insight into the microbiome and engraftment dynamics of dogs before and after taking oral FMTs.

Scene construction and autobiographical memory retrieval in autism spectrum disorder.

Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) frequently exhibit difficulties in retrieving autobiographical memories (AMs) of specific events from their life. Such memory deficits are frequently attributed to underlying disruptions in self-referential or social cognition processes. This makes intuitive sense as these are hallmarks of ASD. However, an emerging literature suggests that parallel deficits also exist in ASD individuals' ability to reconstruct the rich spatial contexts in which events occur. This is a capacity known as scene construction, and in typically developing individuals is considered a core process in retrieving AMs. In this review, we discuss evidence of difficulties with scene construction in ASD, drawing upon experiments that involve AM retrieval, other forms of mental time travel, and spatial navigation. We also highlight aspects of extant data that cannot be accounted for using purely social explanations of memory deficits in ASD. We conclude by identifying key questions raised by our framework and suggest how they might be addressed in future research.

Essential transcription factors for induced neuron differentiation.

Neurogenins are proneural transcription factors required to specify neuronal identity. Their overexpression in human pluripotent stem cells rapidly produces cortical-like neurons with spiking activity and, because of this, they have been widely adopted for human neuron disease models. However, we do not fully understand the key downstream regulatory effectors responsible for driving neural differentiation. Here, using inducible expression of NEUROG1 and NEUROG2, we identify transcription factors (TFs) required for directed neuronal differentiation by combining expression and chromatin accessibility analyses with a pooled in vitro CRISPR-Cas9 screen targeting all ~1900 TFs in the human genome. The loss of one of these essential TFs (ZBTB18) yields few MAP2-positive neurons. Differentiated ZBTB18-null cells have radically altered gene expression, leading to cytoskeletal defects and stunted neurites and spines. In addition to identifying key downstream TFs for neuronal differentiation, our work develops an integrative multi-omics and TFome-wide perturbation platform to rapidly characterize essential TFs for the differentiation of any human cell type.

Frequent microbiological profile changes are seen in subsequent-revision hip and knee arthroplasty for prosthetic joint infection.

A proportion of patients with hip and knee prosthetic joint infection (PJI) undergo multiple revisions with the aim of eradicating infection and improving quality of life. The aim of this study was to describe the microbiology cultured from multiply revised hip and knee replacement procedures to guide antimicrobial therapy at the time of surgery. Patients and methods: Consecutive patients were retrospectively identified from databases at two specialist orthopaedic centres in the United Kingdom between 2011 and 2019. Patient were included who had undergone repeat-revision total knee replacement (TKR) or total hip replacement (THR) for infection, following an initial failed revision for infection. Results: A total of 106 patients were identified. Of these patients, 74 underwent revision TKR and 32 underwent revision THR. The mean age at first revision was 67 years (SD 10). The Charlson comorbidity index was ≤ 2 for 31 patients, 3-4 for 57 patients, and ≥ 5 for 18 patients. All patients underwent at least two revisions, 73 patients received three, 47 patients received four, 31 patients received five, and 21 patients received at least six. After six revisions, 90 % of patients had different organisms cultured compared with the initial revision, and 53 % of organisms were multidrug resistant. The most frequent organisms at each revision were coagulase-negative Staphylococcus (36 %) and Staphylococcus aureus (19 %). Fungus was cultured from 3 % of revisions, and 21 % of infections were polymicrobial. Conclusion: Patients undergoing multiple revisions for PJI are highly likely to experience a change in organism, with 90 % of patients having a different organism cultured by their sixth revision. It is therefore important to administer empirical antibiotics at each subsequent revision, taking into account known drug resistance from previous cultures. Our results do not support the routine use of empirical antifungals.

Microbiome Responses to Fecal Microbiota Transplantation in Cats with Chronic Digestive Issues.

There is growing interest in the application of fecal microbiota transplants (FMTs) in small animal medicine, but there are few published studies that have tested their effects in the domestic cat (Felis catus). Here we use 16S rRNA gene sequencing to examine fecal microbiome changes in 46 domestic cats with chronic digestive issues that received FMTs using lyophilized stool that was delivered in oral capsules. Fecal samples were collected from FMT recipients before and two weeks after the end of the full course of 50 capsules, as well as from their stool donors (N = 10), and other healthy cats (N = 113). The fecal microbiomes of FMT recipients varied with host clinical signs and dry kibble consumption, and shifts in the relative abundances of Clostridium, Collinsella, Megamonas, Desulfovibrio and Escherichia were observed after FMT. Overall, donors shared 13% of their bacterial amplicon sequence variants (ASVs) with FMT recipients and the most commonly shared ASVs were classified as Prevotella 9, Peptoclostridium, Bacteroides, and Collinsella. Lastly, the fecal microbiomes of cats with diarrhea became more similar to the microbiomes of age-matched and diet-matched healthy cats compared to cats with constipation. Overall, our results suggest that microbiome responses to FMT may be modulated by the FMT recipient's initial presenting clinical signs, diet, and their donor's microbiome.

Mutations in the acetolactate synthase (ALS) enzyme affect shattercane (Sorghum bicolor) response to ALS-inhibiting herbicides.

BACKGROUND: Shattercane [Sorghum bicolor (L.) Moench ssp. Arundinaceum (Desv.)] is a competitive weed in North America's corn, soybean, sorghum, and other agronomic crops. Control of shattercane with POST herbicides in corn became possible with the introduction of acetolactate synthase (ALS)-inhibiting herbicides in the 1980s, and their extensive use resulted in the evolution of ALS-inhibitors resistant shattercane. RESULTS: Shattercane seeds were collected from 16 south-eastern and south-central Nebraska fields that were treated with primisulfuron for three consecutive years. Three resistant plants were found in greenhouse evaluations of more than 30,000 plants. Results from a greenhouse bioassay conducted to assess the response of each shattercane biotype to ALS-inhibiting herbicides showed a differential response to ALS inhibitors within and between chemical classes. Biotype P8-30 was resistant or partially resistant to all ALS-inhibiting herbicides applied and displayed a unique amino acid sequence substitution (Trp574 to Leu) relative to the other two resistant biotypes, P2-205 and P9-102. Whole plant dose-response studies confirmed a 4- to the 12-fold level of primisulfuron resistance in three shattercane biotypes compared with the known primisulfuron-susceptible shattercane biotype. The ALS gene was sequenced using primers designed from the corn ALS sequence to identify mutations in the ALS gene that confer resistance. A total of seven nucleotide substitutions were detected in the three herbicide-resistant biotypes P2-205, P8-30, and P9-102. These biotypes are being crossed to adapted sorghum lines (grain, sweet, and forage) to broaden germplasm with resistance to ALS-inhibiting herbicides. CONCLUSION: The discovery of these mutants should accelerate the development of sorghum genotypes that tolerate ALS-based herbicides, which provide additional choices for sorghum farmers to control weeds, especially grasses, in their fields.

Dietary fat restriction affects brain reward regions in a randomized crossover trial.

BACKGROUNDWeight-loss diets often target dietary fat or carbohydrates, macronutrients that are sensed via distinct gut-brain pathways and differentially affect peripheral hormones and metabolism. However, the effects of such diet changes on the human brain are unclear. METHODSWe investigated whether selective isocaloric reductions in dietary fat or carbohydrates altered dopamine D2/3 receptor binding potential (D2BP) and neural activity in brain-reward regions in response to visual food cues in 17 inpatient adults with obesity as compared with a eucaloric baseline diet using a randomized crossover design. RESULTSOn the fifth day of dietary fat restriction, but not carbohydrate restriction, both D2BP and neural activity to food cues were decreased in brain-reward regions. After the reduced-fat diet, ad libitum intake shifted toward foods high in both fat and carbohydrates. CONCLUSIONThese results suggest that dietary fat restriction increases tonic dopamine in brain-reward regions and affects food choice in ways that may hamper diet adherence. TRIAL REGISTRATIONClinicalTrials.gov NCT00846040 FUNDING. NIDDK 1ZIADK013037.

Analysis of Bacterial Communities around the Adventdalen Landfill Site in Svalbard.

Ecosystems are often resilient enough to fully recover following a natural disturbance, or to transform into a new equilibrium favourable to the surrounding flora and fauna. However, at a local level, whether this transformation will be beneficial or not depends strongly on the level of disturbance and the available mechanisms for recovery. The Arctic, however, provides a potentially extreme environment for microbial growth and this is reflected in the microbial biodiversity, the in-situ growth rates, the biogeochemical cycling and its sensitivity to environmental change. In this study, we evaluated the current microbial biodiversity and environmental conditions around the landfill site in Adventdalen, Svalbard to identify differences across bacterial communities that might promote or accelerate naturally occurring environmental recovery. Landfill sites can induce changes in the local environment through the input of exogenous chemicals (both organic and inorganic) and microorganisms. Leachate can flow with run-off from the primary location of the landfill site due to rain, snow or ice melt and spread material into soils surrounding the site. In this study we found a strong effect of the landfill site on the bacterial diversity in the local landscape. Intervention is highly desirable to enhance the environment and improve the restoration by subtly altering the conditions at the site (such as the pH or drainage courses) and by encouraging specific groups of naturally occurring indigenous microorganisms to bioremediate the site.

Atypical connectivity aids conversation in autism.

It is well-established that individuals with autism exhibit atypical functional brain connectivity. However, the role this plays in naturalistic social settings has remained unclear. Atypical patterns may reflect core deficits or may instead compensate for deficits and promote adaptive behavior. Distinguishing these possibilities requires measuring the 'typicality' of spontaneous behavior and determining how connectivity relates to it. Thirty-nine male participants (19 autism, 20 typically-developed) engaged in 115 spontaneous conversations with an experimenter during fMRI scanning. A classifier algorithm was trained to distinguish participants by diagnosis based on 81 semantic, affective and linguistic dimensions derived from their use of language. The algorithm's graded likelihood of a participant's group membership (autism vs. typically-developed) was used as a measure of task performance and compared with functional connectivity levels. The algorithm accurately classified participants and its scores correlated with clinician-observed autism signs (ADOS-2). In support of a compensatory role, greater functional connectivity between right inferior frontal cortex and left-hemisphere social communication regions correlated with more typical language behavior, but only for the autism group. We conclude that right inferior frontal functional connectivity increases in autism during communication reflect a neural compensation strategy that can be quantified and tested even without an a priori behavioral standard.

The impact of "freedom day" on COVID-19 health protective behaviour in England: An observational study of hand hygiene, face covering use and physical distancing in public spaces pre and post the relaxing of restrictions.

Objectives: To study the prevalence of COVID-19 health protective behaviours before and after rules eased in England on the 19th July 2021. Design: Observational study pre (12th-18th July) and post (26th July-1st August) 19th July, and a cross-sectional online survey (26th to 27th July). Setting: Observations occurred in supermarkets (n = 10), train stations (n = 10), bus stops (n = 10), a coach station (n = 1) and a London Underground station (n = 1). The survey recruited a nationally representative sample. Participants: All adults entering the observed locations during a one-hour period (n = 3819 pre- and n = 2948 post-19th July). In the online survey, 1472 respondents reported having been shopping for groceries/visited a pharmacy and 566 reported having used public transport or having been in a taxi/minicab in the last week. Main outcome measures: We observed whether people wore a face covering, maintained distance from others and cleaned their hands. We investigated self-reports of wearing a face covering while in shops or using public transport. Results: In most locations observed, the proportion of people wearing face coverings, cleaning the hands and maintaining physical distance declined post 19th July. Pre 19th July, 70.2% (95% CI 68.7 to 71.7%) of people were observed to be wearing a face covering versus 55.8% (54.2 to 57.9%) post 19th July. Equivalent rates for physical distancing were 40.9% (39.0 to 42.8%) versus 29.5% (27.4 to 31.7%), and for hand hygiene were 4.4% (3.8 to 5.1%) versus 3.9% (3.2 to 4.6%). Self-reports of "always" wearing face coverings were broadly similar to observed rates. Conclusions: Adherence to protective behaviours was sub-optimal and declined during the relaxation of restrictions, despite appeals to exercise caution. Self-reports of "always" wearing a face covering in specific locations appear valid.

Mother and father depression symptoms and child emotional difficulties: a network model.

BACKGROUND: Mother and father depression symptoms often co-occur, and together can have a substantial impact on child emotional well-being. Little is understood about symptom-level mechanisms underlying the co-occurrence of depression symptoms within families. AIMS: The objective was to use network analysis to examine depression symptoms in mothers and fathers after having a baby, and emotional symptoms in children in early adolescence. METHOD: We examined data from 4492 mother-father-child trios taken from a prospective, population-based cohort in the UK. Symptoms were examined using two unregularised partial correlation network models. The initial model was used to examine the pattern of associations, i.e. the overall network structure, for mother and father depression symptoms, and then to identify bridge symptoms that reinforce depression symptoms between parents during offspring infancy. The second model examined associations between the parent symptom network, including bridge symptoms, with later child emotional difficulties. RESULTS: The study included 4492 mother-father-child trios; 2204 (49.1%) children were female. Bridge symptoms reinforcing mother and father depression symptoms were feeling guilty and self-harm ideation. For mothers, the bridge symptom of feeling guilty, and symptoms of anhedonia, panic and sadness were highly connected with child emotional difficulties. For fathers, the symptom of feeling overwhelmed associated with child emotional difficulties. Guilt and anhedonia in fathers appeared to indirectly associate with child emotional difficulties through the same symptom in mothers. CONCLUSIONS: Our findings suggest that specific symptom cascades are central for co-occurring depression in parents and increased vulnerability in children, providing potential therapeutic targets.

A common neural code for representing imagined and inferred tastes.

Inferences about the taste of foods are a key aspect of our everyday experience of food choice. Despite this, gustatory mental imagery is a relatively under-studied aspect of our mental lives. In the present study, we examined subjects during high-field fMRI as they actively imagined basic tastes and subsequently viewed pictures of foods dominant in those specific taste qualities. Imagined tastes elicited activity in the bilateral dorsal mid-insula, one of the primary cortical regions responsive to the experience of taste. In addition, within this region we reliably decoded imagined tastes according to their dominant quality - sweet, sour, or salty - thus indicating that, like actual taste, imagined taste activates distinct quality-specific neural patterns. Using a cross-task decoding analysis, we found that the neural patterns for imagined tastes and food pictures in the mid-insula were reliably similar and quality-specific, suggesting a common code for representing taste quality regardless of whether explicitly imagined or automatically inferred when viewing food. These findings have important implications for our understanding of the mechanisms of mental imagery and the multimodal nature of presumably primary sensory brain regions like the dorsal mid-insula.

The Underlying Mechanisms in the Association Between Traumatic Brain Injury in Childhood and Conduct Disorder Symptoms in Late Adolescence.

The present study examined i) the direct association between traumatic brain injury (TBI) in childhood and conduct disorder symptoms in adolescence, ii) whether this effect is mediated by impulsivity and/or callous unemotional traits (CU traits), and iii) whether these indirect effects are moderated by childhood family adversity and adolescent substance use. Utilising data from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC), participants with head injury information up to 12 years (4.5 years, 5.4 years, 6.5 years, 8.6 years, 11.7 years) were identified and categorised into a TBI (n = 409), orthopaedic injury (n = 1469) or non-injury group (n = 5685). Psychosocial factors such as impulsivity at 13 years, CU traits at 13 years, childhood family adversity (between birth to 4 years) and substance use at 14 years were collated for moderated mediation analyses. Conduct disorder symptoms were assessed at 16 years of age. TBI and conduct disorder symptoms were positively associated, and this association was mediated by impulsivity but not CU traits. The indirect effects were higher in magnitude for individuals with higher levels of childhood family adversity. Adolescent substance use was not found to moderate the indirect effects between TBI and conduct disorder symptoms. These results were specific to TBI individuals, and not in participants with orthopaedic injury and no reported injuries. Targeting impulsivity and early family adversity may alleviate the risk of conduct disorder symptoms following TBI in childhood. These findings have important implications for informing neuro-rehabilitative and preventative measures in clinical and community settings.

Click and Detect: Versatile Ampicillin Aptasensor Enabled by Click Chemistry on a Graphene-Alkyne Derivative.

Tackling the current problem of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) requires fast, inexpensive, and effective methods for controlling and detecting antibiotics in diverse samples at the point of interest. Cost-effective, disposable, point-of-care electrochemical biosensors are a particularly attractive option. However, there is a need for conductive and versatile carbon-based materials and inks that enable effective bioconjugation under mild conditions for the development of robust, sensitive, and selective devices. This work describes a simple and fast methodology to construct an aptasensor based on a novel graphene derivative equipped with alkyne groups prepared via fluorographene chemistry. Using click chemistry, an aptamer is immobilized and used as a successful platform for the selective determination of ampicillin in real samples in the presence of interfering molecules. The electrochemical aptasensor displayed a detection limit of 1.36 nM, high selectivity among other antibiotics, the storage stability of 4 weeks, and is effective in real samples. Additionally, structural and docking simulations of the aptamer shed light on the ampicillin binding mechanism. The versatility of this platform opens up wide possibilities for constructing a new class of aptasensor based on disposable screen-printed carbon electrodes usable in point-of-care devices.

Taxonomic structure in a set of abstract concepts.

A large portion of human knowledge comprises "abstract" concepts that lack readily perceivable properties (e.g., "love" and "justice"). Since abstract concepts lack such properties, they have historically been treated as an undifferentiated category of knowledge in the psychology and neuropsychology literatures. More recently, the categorical structure of abstract concepts is often explored using paradigms that ask participants to make explicit judgments about a set of concepts along dimensions that are predetermined by the experimenter. Such methods require the experimenter to select dimensions that are relevant to the concepts and further that people make explicit judgments that accurately reflect their mental representations. We bypassed these requirements by collecting two large sets of non-verbal and implicit judgments about which dimensions are relevant to the similarity between pairs of 50 abstract nouns to determine the representational space of the concepts. We then identified categories within the representational space using a clustering procedure that required categories to replicate across two independent data sets. In a separate experiment, we used automatic semantic priming to further validate the categories and to show that they are an improvement over categories that were defined within the same set of abstract concepts using explicit ratings along predetermined dimensions. These results demonstrate that abstract concepts can be characterized beyond their negative relation to concrete concepts and that categories of abstract concepts can be defined without using a priori dimensions for the concepts or explicit judgments from participants.