bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Impact of Hormonal Contraceptives on HPV Dynamics in Adolescent Girls and Young Women: Insights from a Randomized Controlled Sub-Study in South Africa
Authors: Tanko Ramla F. , Taku Ongeziwe , Mbulawa Zizipho Z. A. , Phohlo Keletso , Konstantinus Iyaloo , Balle Christina , Pidwell Tanya , Happel Anna-Ursula , Gill Katherine , Bekker Linda-Gail , Jaspan Heather B. , Williamson Anna-Lise , Passmore Jo-Ann S. 
Published: January 2025

ABSTRACTObjectivesHuman papillomavirus (HPV) is the leading cause of cervical cancer, with adolescent girls and young women (AGYW) in sub-Saharan Africa carrying a disproportionately high burden of infection. Hormonal contraceptives may influence HPV acquisition, persistence, and clearance, but evidence remains inconclusive. This sub-study aimed to evaluate the impact of different hormonal contraceptives on HPV prevalence and genotype distribution in AGYW.MethodsNinety-eight HIV-seronegative AGYW aged 15–19 years from South Africa were randomized to receive one of three hormonal contraceptive methods: norethisterone enanthate (Net-EN) injectable, combined oral contraceptive pills (COCPs), or the etonorgesterol/ethinyl estradiol combined contraceptive vaginal ring (CCVR). Cervical DNA samples were collected at baseline and after 16 weeks for HPV genotyping using the HPV Direct Flow Chip test. HPV prevalence, persistence, clearance, and acquisition were analyzed across contraceptive methods.ResultsAt baseline, HPV prevalence was high (94.9%), with no differences among contraceptive arms. After 16 weeks, HPV prevalence remained high (89.5%) across groups. No significant differences were observed in overall HPV prevalence or genotype distribution by contraceptive method. Longitudinal analysis revealed that AGYW using Net-EN tended to have a higher cumulative number of high-risk HPV (HR-HPV) genotypes that cleared whereas those using CCVR acquired more HR-HPV types and had greater HR-HPV persistence compared to other groups.ConclusionsThis study highlights the high burden of HPV among South African AGYW. However, different hormonal contraceptive methods did not significantly influence HR-HPV dynamics.
Level of Adherence to Recommended Lifestyle Modifications and Associated Factors Among Adult Hypertensive Patients Attending Chronic Follow-Up Units at Hypertension Sentinel Site Health Facilities - Bahir Dar City, Northwest Ethiopia, 2024
Authors: Abebe Melaku , Muchie Kindie Fentahun , Taddege Tesfahun , Mulat Kebadnew 
Published: January 2025

AbstractBackgroundHypertension is one of the leading risk factors for mortality and morbidity worldwide. It is a chronic medical condition characterized by blood pressure (BP) consistently elevated above normal. Even though it is a global public health issue, it disproportionately affects populations in low- and middle-income countries that account for nearly 80% of deaths where health systems are weak. Adherence to medication therapy and lifestyle change is an aspect of patients’ care that is often overlooked and should be evaluated as a crucial part of cardiovascular management.ObjectiveTo assess the adherence to recommended lifestyle modifications and associated factors among adult hypertensive patients attending chronic follow-up units at hypertension sentinel site health facilities in Bahir Dar City, northwest Ethiopia in 2024.MethodsA facility-based cross-sectional study was conducted in hypertension sentinel site health facilities in Bahir Dar city from April 24 to May 23, 2024. A total of 421 hypertensive patients were included in the study using a systematic random sampling technique. Data were collected through Computer-Assisted Personal Interviews (CAPI) and patient reviews using the KoboCollect. Data were analyzed using SPSS. Logistic regression analysis was used to identify factors associated with adherence to lifestyle modifications.ResultsThe study found that 271 (64.4%) of the respondents were adherent to all studied lifestyle practices. Participants with good knowledge about lifestyle modification (AOR = 4.48 (2.30-8.75), good self-efficacy (AOR = 2.84 (1.61-5.01), good adherence to antihypertensive medication (AOR = 4.64 (2.54-8.45), primary education (AOR = 0.40 (0.18-0.89), underweight (AOR = 0.26(0.08-0.87), and overweight/ obese (AOR = 0.07 (0.04 -0.14) were factors associated with adherence to lifestyle modification.ConclusionsThe study revealed moderate level of adherence to lifestyle modifications among hypertensive patients. Good knowledge about lifestyle modification, good self-efficacy, and good adherence to antihypertensive medication were the factors positively associated with adherence to lifestyle modification, whereas, Patients with Primary education, underweight, and overweight/ obese were the factors negatively associated. Interventions targeting primary education, and underweight and overweight to raise knowledge status, medication adherence, and good self-efficacy will result in increased adherence.
Lower Cancer Incidence Three Years After COVID-19 Infection in a Large Veteran Population
Authors: Bradley Jerry , Tang Fei , Resendes Natasha , Tosi Dominique , Hammel Iriana 
Published: January 2025

AbstractBackgroundThe role of COVID-19 infection in cancer incidence risk is not known. COVID-19 infection could lead to increased cancer risk, as seen with other viruses, or it could lead to decreased risk due to the activation of the immune response during acute infection. This study aimed to determine the association between cancer incidence in US Veterans after COVID-19 infection.MethodsWe conducted a retrospective cohort study of US Veterans comparing those who tested positive for COVID-19 during the first wave of COVID-19 between March 15, 2020, and Nov 30, 2020, to those who tested negative. We used data from the COVID-19 Shared Data Resource and used Cox proportional hazard regression models to determine the hazard ratio of a new cancer diagnosis within a three-year follow-up period for the COVID-19 positive patients compared to those who were negative. Covariates included age, race, ethnicity, sex, BMI, smoking, being an active patient in the VHA system in the past 12 months of the COVID-19 test, and other factors.Results516156 patients were included in this study, with 88590 (17.2%) COVID-19 positive, 427566 (82.8%) COVID-19 negative. The ages of the COVID-19 positive and negative patients were 57.8±16.4 and 59.4±15.8, respectively. For those who survived for at least 30 days after COVID-19 testing, COVID-19 infection was associated with a 32% reduction in the hazard of cancer. The reduction of the hazard was similar across sexes and races, except in Asians. Above 45 years of age, the hazard of cancer incidence further decreases with advancing age.ConclusionsPatients who were diagnosed with COVID-19 in the first wave of the pandemic had a decreased risk of cancer incidence in a 3-year follow-up across gender and race. Further multicenter prospective cohort studies are needed to evaluate the mechanism of this interaction.
Associations between social capital and other living conditions among young Angolan women: A cross-sectional study in three provinces
Authors: Priebe Gunilla Elise , Macama Arciolanda , Kessel Barbora , dos Reis Francisca Van Dúnem , Van Dúnem João E , Katito José , Ng Nawi , Engström Karin 
Published: January 2025

AbstractSocial support systems play a crucial role in promoting young women’s well-being and their human rights fulfilment, not least in contexts where institutions are weak and socioeconomic and gender inequalities prevail. However, research on young women’s social networks and trust in their benevolent function is scarce. This study attempts to reduce this knowledge gap by exploring young Angolan women’s access to social capital and how it clustered and was associated with other living conditions. The data were derived from a cross-sectional study of 2,071 women, aged 18-24 years, from rural and urban areas in Huambo, Luanda and Lunda Sul provinces. The results included a univariate description of the participants socioeconomic and social capital characteristics stratified by province and residential area, an exploratory factor analysis of 17 social capital variables, and tests for associations between social capital factors and socioeconomic variables (literacy, household wealth, work and pregnancy), the latter measured by means of logistic regressions. The study revealed that the women in Luanda had generally better living conditions, those from Lunda Sul were worse off, and those from Huambo were often in between. The factor analysis’ identification of structural, cognitive, and applied factors aligned well with established research. Literate and wealthier participants often had higher structural but less cognitive social capital. Social capital measures showed less variability compared to literacy and household wealth. The social capital factors were distributed and associated differently with the socioeconomic attributes based on location. The study highlights the intricate relationship between social capital and other living conditions, conditional on where women live. It draws attention to the need for further investigations into which social spheres young women perceive as supportive. The study emphasises the importance of analysing social capital domains separately, appreciating links to other resources and local uniqueness in social capital-enhancing interventions.
SPIRIT-CONSORT-TM: a corpus for assessing transparency of clinical trial protocol and results publications
Authors: Jiang Lan , Vorland Colby J , Ying Xiangji , Brown Andrew W , Menke Joe D , Hong Gibong , Lan Mengfei , Mayo-Wilson Evan , Kilicoglu Halil 
Published: January 2025

AbstractRandomized controlled trials (RCTs) can produce valid estimates of the benefits and harms of therapeutic interventions. However, incomplete reporting can undermine the validity of their conclusions. Reporting guidelines, such as SPIRIT for protocols and CONSORT for results, have been developed to improve transparency in RCT publications. In this study, we report a corpus of 200 RCT publications, named SPIRIT-CONSORT-TM, annotated for transparency. We used a comprehensive data model that includes 83 items from SPIRIT and CONSORT checklists for annotation. Inter-annotator agreement was calculated for 30 pairs. The dataset includes 26,613 sentences annotated with checklist items and 4,231 terms. We also trained natural language processing (NLP) models that automatically identify these items in publications. The sentence classification model achieved 0.742 micro-F1 score (0.865 at the article level). The term extraction model yielded 0.545 and 0.663 micro-F1 score in strict and lenient evaluation, respectively. The corpus serves as a benchmark to train models that assist stakeholders of clinical research in maintaining high reporting standards and synthesizing information on study rigor and conduct.
Resolution of a human super-enhancer by targeted genome randomisation
Authors: Koeppel Jonas , Murat Pierre , Girling Gareth , Peets Elin Madli , Gouley Mélanie , Rebernig Valentin , Maheshwari Anant , Hepkema Jacob , Weller Juliane , Johnkingsly Jebaraj Jenie Hannah , Crawford Ronnie , Liberante Fabio Giuseppe , Parts Leopold 
Published: January 2025

AbstractHuman gene expression is controlled from distance via enhancers, which can form longer ‘super-enhancer’-regions of intense regulatory activity. Whether super-enhancers constitute a separate regulatory paradigm remains unclear, largely due to the difficulty of dissecting the contributions and interactions of individual elements within their natural chromosomal context. To address this challenge, we developed enhancer scrambling, a high-throughput strategy to generate stochastic inversions and deletions of targeted enhancer regions by combining CRISPR prime editing insertion of symmetrical loxP sites with Cre recombinase-induced rearrangements. We applied our approach to dissect a distal super-enhancer of theOTX2gene, generating up to 134 alternative regulatory configurations in a single experiment, and establishing how they drive gene expression and chromatin accessibility, as well as the individual contributions of its elements to this activity. Surprisingly, the presence of the sequence containing a single DNase I hypersensitive site predominantly controlsOTX2expression. Our findings highlight that enhancer-driven regulation of some highly expressed, cell-type-specific genes can rely on an individual element within a cluster of non-interacting, dispensable components, and suggest a simple functional core to a subset of super-enhancers. The targeted randomisation method to scramble enhancers can scale to resolve many super-enhancers and human gene regulatory landscapes.
Spatiotemporal Complexity in the Psychotic Brain
Authors: Li Qiang , Liu Jingyu , Pearlson Godfrey D. , Chen Jiayu , Wang Yu-Ping , Turner Jessica A. , Calhoun Vince D. 
Published: January 2025

AbstractPsychotic disorders, such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, pose significant diagnostic challenges with major implications on mental health. The measures of resting-state fMRI spatiotemporal complexity offer a powerful tool for identifying irregularities in brain activity. To capture global brain connectivity, we employed information-theoretic metrics, overcoming the limitations of pairwise correlation analysis approaches. This enables a more comprehensive exploration of higher-order interactions and multiscale intrinsic connectivity networks (ICNs) in the psychotic brain. In this study, we provide converging evidence suggesting that the psychotic brain exhibits states of randomness across both spatial and temporal dimensions. To further investigate these disruptions, we estimated brain network connectivity using redundancy and synergy measures, aiming to assess the integration and segregation of topological information in the psychotic brain. Our findings reveal a disruption in the balance between redundant and synergistic information, a phenomenon we termbrainquakein this study, which highlights the instability and disorganization of brain networks in psychosis. Moreover, our exploration of higher-order topological functional connectivity reveals profound disruptions in brain information integration. Aberrant information interactions were observed across both cortical and subcortical ICNs. We specifically identified the most easily affected irregularities in the sensorimotor, visual, temporal, default mode, and fronto-parietal networks, as well as in the hippocampal and amygdalar regions, all of which showed disruptions. These findings underscore the severe impact of psychotic states on multiscale critical brain networks, suggesting a profound alteration in the brain’s complexity and organizational states.
Phage susceptibility to a minimal, modular synthetic CRISPR-Cas system inPseudomonas aeruginosais nutrient dependent
Authors: Elliott Josie F K , Watson Bridget N J , Cozens Keira , Westra Edze R , Taylor Tiffany B 
Published: January 2025

AbstractCRISPR-Cas systems can provide adaptive, heritable immunity to their prokaryotic hosts against invading genetic material such as phages. It is clear that the importance of acquiring CRISPR-Cas immunity to anti-phage defence varies across environments, but it is less clear if and how this varies across different phages. To explore this, we created a synthetic, modular version of the type I-F CRISPR-Cas system ofPseudomonas aeruginosa. We used this synthetic system to test CRISPR-Cas interference against a panel of 13 diverse phages using engineered phage-targeting spacers. We observed complete protection against eight of these phages, both lytic and lysogenic and with a range of infectivity profiles. However, for two phages CRISPR-Cas interference was only partially protective in high nutrient conditions, yet completely protective in low nutrient conditions. This work demonstrates that nutrient conditions modulate the strength of CRISPR-Cas immunity and highlights the importance of environmental conditions when screening defence systems for their efficacy against various phages.
Nematicidal and antifeedant activity of ethyl acetate extracts from culture filtrates ofArabidopsis thalianafungal endophytes
Authors: Díaz-González Sandra , Andrés María Fe , González-Sanz Carlos , Sacristán Soledad , González-Coloma Azucena 
Published: January 2025

AbstractEndophytic fungi produce a diverse range of bioactive secondary metabolites with potential applications in biopesticide development. This study investigates the nematicidal and antifeedant properties of ethyl acetate extracts from endophytic fungi isolated from wildArabidopsis thalianapopulations in Spain. The extracts were tested against the plant-parasitic nematodeMeloidogyne javanica, and two common insect pests,Myzus persicaeandSpodoptera littoralis. Nine of the 13 extracts demonstrated significant nematicidal and/or antifeedant activity, indicating their potential as biopesticides. The active extracts were derived from six genera:Alternaria(3 isolates),Dydimella(1),Dothiora(1),Pleiochaeta(1),Penicillium(1), andFusarium(2). Five extracts exhibited nematicidal activity above 90%, with three reducing the total number ofM. javanicasecond-stage juveniles hatched from egg masses by 22–37%. Four extracts showed strong settling inhibition (>70%) againstM. persicae, and three exhibited feeding inhibition againstS. littoralis. Chemical analysis by GC-MS and LC-MS revealed a wide array of unique secondary metabolites in the active extracts, reflecting substantial chemical diversity, regardless of the fungal origin. This study highlights the potential of fungal endophytes fromA. thalianaas sources of novel biopesticides, paving the way for future research focused on harnessing these fungi for biopesticide development.
The olivocerebellar system differentially encodes the effect sensory events exert on behavior
Authors: Scheer Irina , Prsa Mario 
Published: January 2025

AbstractInferior olive neurons convey information about sensorimotor events via climbing fibers to the cerebellum, but their functional significance remains unclear. We directly imaged, with two-photon microscopy, climbing fiber axonal terminals in the cerebellum during a task that successively exposed mice to a force perturbation, a movement instruction and reward; each followed by multiple modes of motor activity. Climbing fiber activations by the sensory events were either generic or informative about the consequences the encoded event has on behavior. The number of informative cells and the information strength are regulated by event modality and functional complexity of the cell’s activity. We observed an additional, previously unreported activation of climbing fibers: they carried probabilistic information on the behavioral context during idle waiting periods preceding stimulus presentation. Our findings reveal properties of olivary neurons that are key for defining their function in the cerebellum-dependent control of behavior. They suggest that the inferior olive flexibly instructs the cerebellum of any process that may shape an animal’s action.
ERGA-BGE Reference Genome ofPhyllidia flava(Nudibranchia: Phyllidiidae), a Relict Species Endemic to the Mediterranean Sea
Authors: Galià-Camps Carles , Pontes Miquel , Marcussen Thomas , Struck Torsten H. , Oomen Rebekah , Böhne Astrid , Monteiro Rita , Aguilera Laura , Gut Marta , Ferreira Francisco Câmara , Cruz Fernando , Gómez-Garrido Jèssica , Alioto Tyler S. , De Panis Diego 
Published: January 2025

AbstractPhyllidia flava, the only Mediterranean representative of the otherwise Indo-Pacific family Phyllididae, is a radula-less dorid nudibranch that feeds exclusively on toxic sponges, from which it derives defensive and camouflage compounds. Although not currently listed as endangered, this relict species remains vulnerable due to its restricted distribution and the rising temperatures of the Mediterranean Sea. A total of 13 contiguous chromosomal pseudomolecules were assembled, resulting in a chromosome-level genome spanning 1.9 Gb. This assembly comprises 2,032 contigs and 62 scaffolds, with contig and scaffold N50 values of 2.4 Mb and 169.7 Mb, respectively. This reference genome will serve as a valuable resource for conservation efforts, provide a robust calibration point for studying nudibranch phylogenetics based on the Tethys Ocean closure, and lay the groundwork for research into toxic prey diet specialisation.
Identification of two glycosyltransferases required for synthesis of membrane glycolipids inClostridioides difficile
Authors: Zbylicki Brianne R. , Cochran Sierra , Weiss David S. , Ellermeier Craig D. 
Published: January 2025

AbstractClostridioides difficileinfections cause over 12,000 deaths and an estimated one billion dollars in healthcare costs annually in the United States. The cell membrane is an essential structure that is important for protection from the extracellular environment, signal transduction, and transport of nutrients. The polar membrane lipids ofC. difficileare ∼50% glycolipids, a higher percentage than most other organisms. The glycolipids ofC. difficileconsist of monohexosyldiradylglycerol (MHDRG) (∼14%), dihexosyldiradylglycerol (DHDRG) (∼15%), trihexosyldiradylglycerol (THDRG) (∼5%), and a unique glycolipid aminohexosyl-hexosyldiradylglycerol (HNHDRG) (∼16%). Previously, we found HexSDF are required for synthesis of HNHDRG. The enzymes required for synthesis of MHDRG, DHDRG, and THDRG are not known. In this study, we identified the glycosyltransferases UgtA (CDR20291_0008), which is required for synthesis of all glycolipids, and UgtB (CDR20291_1186), which is required for synthesis of DHDRG and THDRG. We propose a model where UgtA synthesizes only MHDRG, HexSDF synthesize HNHDRG from MHDRG, and UgtB synthesizes DHDRG and potentially THDRG from MHDRG. We also report that glycolipids are important for critical cell functions, including sporulation, cell size and morphology, maintaining membrane fluidity, colony morphology, and resistance to some membrane targeting antimicrobials.ImportanceClostridioides difficileinfections are the leading cause of healthcare associated diarrhea.C. difficileposes a risk to public health due to its ability to form spores and cause recurrent infections. Glycolipids make up ∼50% of the polar lipids in theC. difficilemembrane, a higher percentage than other common pathogens and include a unique glycolipid not present in other organisms. Here, we identify glycosyltransferases required for synthesis of glycolipids inC. difficileand demonstrate the important role glycolipids play inC. difficilephysiology.