Many individuals experience traumatic and stressful events, but very few develop post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Research focused on people with PTSD and trauma-exposed healthy controls has examined how learning and memory processes may be associated with PTSD symptoms. While there is a growing literature focused on factors associated with PTSD development, fewer studies investigate relationships between stressful event exposure and learning and memory processes in healthy individuals. We aimed to study relationships between stressful event exposure, PTSD symptoms, and neural activity underlying performance during a fear extinction recall task.

Infections may spread indirectly when an infected person touches an object (i.e., fomite) leaving behind a pathogen that is picked up by the next person to touch that object. Fitness centers offer a unique opportunity for investigating fomite transmission of pathogenic bacteria, because these facilities are used by persons with varying levels of personal hygiene routinely sharing equipment via frequent and direct surface-to-skin contact. Previous studies of this phenomenon have investigated too few species, and/or failed to differentiate pathogenic or antibiotic resistant bacteria from non-pathogenic or antibiotic susceptible bacteria. The aims of this study were to survey fitness equipment for the presence of World Health Organization (WHO) priority pathogens and to test the hypothesis that fitness equipment are hosts to an abundance of pathogenic and antibiotic resistant bacteria.

This paper demonstrates the impact of Co Flow Jets (CFJ) on airfoil performance. CFJ airfoils are an active airfoil performance enhancing method which uses injection and suction on the airfoil leeward side. Our research shows that better lift augmentation, higher stall angle and drag reduction is achieved when the injection point of the jet is located close to the point of maximum thickness. This method provides superior performance compared to passive augmenting methods and can be integrated with unified jet-based lift and thrust systems. We analyzed CFJ airfoils based on NACA 2414 by varying location of injection slots on the airfoil.

Popular elections may be conducted using a wide variety of algorithms, each of which aims to produce a winner reflective, in some way, of the general consensus of the voters. Despite the common objective, electoral algorithms may produce a different winner given the same underlying set of voters and voter preferences. In this study, we characterize the likelihood that two common electoral algorithms, the Plurality algorithm and the Instant-Runoff Voting (IRV) algorithm, produce concordant winners as a function of the underlying dispersion of voter preferences.

Weight loss failure is driven by dietary lapses, i.e., instances of non-adherence to a dietary prescription. Lapses can occur when an individual eats a larger portion than intended, a type of food intended to be avoided, or food at an unintended time. It is important to identify determinants of dietary lapses to tailor weight loss treatment. Higher implicit preference for high-calorie, hedonic food may be a predictor of each of these lapse types. The aim of the study was to examine if baseline implicit preference for high-calorie food is positively associated with large portion, unintended food, and unintended time dietary lapses.

In an age of antibiotic resistance and viruses becoming more transmissible, new drugs need to be developed faster than ever. But drug development is a long process: The pipeline from a potential drug candidate to an approved and usable drug can take up to several decades, and diseases are evolving too fast for drug development to keep up. One way scientists aim to make drug development a more efficient process is by repurposing drugs: using currently available drugs to treat different diseases - diseases other than the ones they were first developed to treat.

Prostate cancer is the second most prevalent cancer in men and one of the leading causes of mortality globally. Therefore, clinical prostate cancer therapy requires better prognosis and treatment methods. Research on proteomics has enhanced the understanding of the processes underlying tumorigenesis, cancer cell migration, and metastasis. Considering that proteins are the drivers of most cellular responses and the targets for drug delivery, a methodical analysis of the proteome alterations taking place during the initiation and development of prostate cancer might lead to scientific breakthroughs. This review is a systematic literature search to retrieve primary research articles related to prostate cancer proteomics disease mechanisms and aims to discuss and compare current proteomics methods in both the clinical and research context.

Fetal alcohol exposure (FAE) in humans may lead to a lifetime of developmental deficits ranging from mild to severe. These defects are largely dependent on timing and consistency of alcohol exposure. The majority of FAE experiments examine moderate to heavy alcohol exposure, while fewer studies examine responses to lower levels of alcohol consumption on development. Here, we tested the effects of relatively mild ethanol exposure on development, behavior, and hormone levels in Northern Leopard Frog (Lithobates pipiens) tadpoles.

Dr. Toby Parkes is currently a biologist contracted as a Founder at Deep Science Ventures, a venture studio that funds science company development, particularly in sectors which tend to see fewer start-ups created. Given his work in using novel technologies to reduce the impacts of humans on the climate crisis, Parkes has created a startup to further his research interests; Rhizocore focuses on soil technologies that can boost the carbon capture potential of ecosystem regeneration projects, as well as commercial forestry.

Viruses infect billions of people yearly, seasonal flu is a commonplace occurrence and COVID-19 updates make daily headlines. But not all viruses infect humans. Bacteriophages are viruses that infect bacteria, which could advance medicine by killing antibiotic resistant bacteria.

Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) often rely heavily on a strong sense of routine and predictability in order to make sense of the world around them, which can feel confusing and overwhelming. Without this, they can have trouble feeling safe and comfortable in their environment and can feel anxious or depressed or lose their temper.

Across the world, citrus trees infected with Huanglongbing disease are producing fruit that are lopsided, bitter, hard, and green when ripe, instead of juicy and fresh. The citrus industry in Florida has collapsed due to this disease, going from having a turnover of $9 billion to merely $3.28 billion as of 2018. And more plants are becoming infected every day.

Cancer is a leading cause of high mortality rates around the world. Many scientists have explored anticancer peptides (ACPs), which are peptides with anti-tumor activity that can be safer than conventional drugs due to high activity coupled with high selectivity and delivery control. However, current in vitro methods of discovery are both time-consuming and expensive. This study aims to use modern machine learning tools to discover new ACP candidates.

With over 3.5 million deaths worldwide – exceeding the death toll of any pandemic in the past two decades – COVID-19 has undeniably left a drastic and lasting impact on the physical, financial, and psychosocial well-being of people all over the world. One specific vulnerable group suffering from the profound impact of COVID-19 is those who have lost a loved one to the virus, and who are thus at a higher risk for developing mental health disorders compounded by the circumstances of isolation and restricted visitation in healthcare settings.

Prostate cancer is the second most prevalent cancer found in men globally, and the fifth leading cause of cancer-related mortality in men. Some patients have a more aggressive disease with increased progression and metastasis, while others have a less aggressive disease with slower progression. There have been recent discoveries on the complexity of molecular and genetic factors behind prostate cancer in order to understand the disease mechanisms.

Swallowing four different tablets three times a day may not sound like a pleasant experience. Neither does injecting medication every day. A new drug delivery system gives hope to bypass these issues by taking advantage of the skin’s physical and chemical properties, and the mass application is imminent.

As entire populations around the world slowly reoccupy the streets after months of uncertainty, medical staff face the traces of a still latent pandemic. Months’ worth of diagnoses regarding chronic illnesses have gone unnoticed due to a lack of advancement of the healthcare system to adjust to the digital lifestyle. The Journal of Young Investigators had the privilege to chat with Dr. Ana M. Wägner, here main collaborator in the European project “Watching the Risk Factors (WARIFA)”, which aims to break the virtual barrier in healthcare by providing individualized early risk prediction using AI.

Dr. Jadavji serves as the chair of the board of directors for the Journal of Young Investigators. Her relationship with JYI, however, spans a decade into the past. As an undergraduate, Dr. Jadavji started off her relationship with JYI in the Research Department as the Associate Editor. From 2004-2008, Dr. Jadavji got promoted from Associate Editor to Research Editor to Senior Research Editor. After graduate school, she returned to JYI through an invite to join the Board of Directors (BoD) in 2011.

Even with insatiable curiosity driven by experiments and observation, science unfortunately cannot proceed without the support of money. Many of the pharmaceuticals and drugs commonly used today are the products of industry, rather than academia, which plays a small role (Frearson and Wyatt). In the past, industry has been a large producer of antibiotics, but the profits earned by manufacturing costly drugs are negligible, and the industry has since lost significant interest in production (Martens and Demain).

Over the past centuries, chess has been a game enjoyed by people of all ages and classes. Being traced as far back as 500 A.D., chess has taken many variations and the rules have changed as it was introduced to various parts of the world. In recent times, artificial intelligence has been playing an ever-greater role in the progression of chess. With such an influence, many have wondered the implications for the game itself. Will AI involvement make chess against humans boring and disinteresting? Is there any point in human play as these supercomputers have far exceeded man’s ability?

Two centuries ago, an English surgeon began noticing three elderly strangers with disrupted movements in the crowded streets of London. They shared similar characteristics of trembling hands, speaking difficulty, and postural instability. These symptoms were documented in ‘An Essay of the Shaking Palsy’ by the surgeon James Parkinson. While the discovery of the disease was merely through observation, there has been tremendous progress in the science of shaking palsy, later renamed as Parkinson’s disease in regards to the surgeon’s name. In a paper published this month by the Journal of Young Investigators, Diego Machado Reyes and Dr. Ana Lilia Reyes-Herrera explore the many ways technology has advanced the diagnosis and monitoring of people with Parkinson’s.

As the world is still combating the COVID-19 pandemic through mass inoculations and finding the definitive treatment, studying medicine efficacy and safety in the human biological system has never been more important. Before any treatment is approved, clinical trials are done to ensure that the new intervention works for every member of society. This, however, is not often the case as there are still many external obstacles to equitable clinical trials.

If you look at each of the cells in our body, you will notice that cells, such as a neural cell and a red blood cell look completely different. Cells with different functions such as muscle cells, liver cells, heart cells, etc. all have differing looks; yet, these differences are not a variation in genes. All of the cells in an individual’s body have the same genetic information, and the dissimilarity that we observe are the result of regulating gene expression. Gene expression is the production of proteins, and in a cell not every part of the genome is used to make all the possible proteins. Rather, complex interactions between various molecules regulate our genes. Regulation of genes is important for both development and maintenance of one’s health. Disease states are linked to a dysregulation of genes, where some genes may be overexpressed or expressed when it should be silent. Therefore, scientists have been looking into gene regulation to distinguish the root causes of certain diseases and innovate therapeutic agents.

Parkinson’s disease is the second most common neurodegenerative disorder, affecting nearly 1 million people in the US and is predicted to keep increasing. Parkinson’s disease is difficult to diagnose due to the similarity with other diseases that share the parkinsonian symptoms, thus increasing the probabilities of misdiagnosis. Therefore, it is relevant to develop diagnostic tools that are quantitatively based and monitoring tools that will improve the patient’s quality of life. Computer-based assessment systems have shown to be successful in this field through diverse approaches that can be classified in two main categories: sensor-based and computer vision-based systems. In this article a comprehensive review is performed to analyze the different approaches taken; moreover, their challenges and future perspectives are discussed.

On April 22nd 2016, one hundred seventy-four states and the European Union signed the Paris Agreement; an international framework that aims to avert an irreversible climate catastrophe. Aware of the disastrous consequences climate change has on our planet these nations compromise, inter alia, to keep global warming at least under 2ºC, with an ideal target of 1.5ºC.

Since April 2016, many efforts have been made to restrain the causes of global warming yet climate scientists warn the 1.5ºC target will not be met unless global carbon emissions reach net-zero around mid-century. Luckily, mechanisms exist to achieve “net-zero”: Negative Emission Technologies.

What makes us human: our genes or the microbes that colonize us? Throughout our body the microbes that constitute our microbiome outnumber our human cells, meaning there are more microbes present on us than our own genetically distinct cells (Gallager). Moreover, our microbiome contains more genetic information than our human genome (University of Washington). Does this evidence of a large amount of life colonizing our bodies influence our lives? Indeed, the microbiome has been linked to health outcomes such as the development of autoimmune diseases and contraction of non-communicable diseases (West et al.).

Deemed undruggable for almost 40 years since its discovery, mutated KRAS protein has now found its match with Amgen’s sotorasib (LUMAKRAS)—the first drug that specifically inhibits KRAS activity in non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) recently approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

With the advent of many new machine learning packages and tools being open-sourced, there has been increased popularity in machine learning applications among various industries. From predicting the best routes for pharmaceutical drug delivery to gaining insights on stock movements using prior financial data, machine learning has been ever-expanding for the past few decades. Although there has been an increase in its utilization, there are still many who do not know the underlying math used in these algorithms.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a field of computer science and computer systems that emphasizes frameworks to perform tasks that conventionally are perceived as requiring human cognition and intelligence. It is an industry that has been progressing and integrating into our daily lives through the technologies we use. With recent scientific developments, Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Learning (DL) have been prominent names associated with AI. While there is an overlap among all of them, they are not the same.

Metabolic engineers use technology and ways of thinking from traditional science and engineering disciplines as well as the emergent field of synthetic biology to genetically manipulate cellular metabolic pathways for applications in medicine, energy, the environment, and more. Two important challenges to successful metabolic engineering are how to optimize the metabolic output and how to make products that are toxic to cells. Our research addressed these challenges with the development of a new strategy for the selection of optimal genotypes for enzyme production and the use of microfluidic droplets for cell-free protein synthesis. We focused on a prototype metabolic reaction by which caffeine demethylase converts caffeine into theophylline, and used a ribozyme-riboswitch that cleaves itself upon binding theophylline as the basis for selection of genetic regulatory elements that most efficiently produce caffeine demethylase.

The gastrocnemius muscle is the main muscle in the calf that flexes the foot and knee, and partially generates force during a jump. A muscle’s contractile force can be influenced by many factors including muscle thickness, the angle between the muscle body and the muscle fibers (pennation angle), and the length of the muscle fibers. During contraction, the fascicles shorten and rotate to greater pennation angles to generate force for movement. While much is known about the behavior and force generation of individual muscles, it’s less clear how the orientation of the muscle in relation to other bones and muscles affects the generation of force during contraction. Therefore, the focus of this experiment was to determine the orientation, or angle, of the gastrocnemius that would generate the greatest contractile force when stimulated. Four different orientations of the frog gastrocnemius were used to determine which generated the greatest contractile force. In this experiment, we assessed the contractile force generated across leg configurations that would occur during a jump. The muscle was stimulated with an electrode and force from muscle contraction was measured using a force transducer. The results from the overall model showed no significant differences in contractile force among the positions tested (p = 0.071). Using this information can help us understand how frogs generate such great contractile forces. This would be beneficial to understanding the mechanisms underlying jumping in this species, as well as inform future research about contractile force and kinematics that occur during jumping in other species.

Cystic Fibrosis (CF) is a genetic disease that affects the thickness of digestive fluids, mucus, and sweat, which often leads to obstructions in body organs ducts. The most common CF mutation is the removal of amino acid phenylalanine at position 508 (deltaF508) on the CFTR gene. On CFTR, there are variants of uncertain significance (VUS) as well as classified variations that may cause similarly negative effects. The missense point variations Q493P, W496R, G500D, and Y515C were VUS when this research project began. The aim of this study was to classify them as harmful, neutral, or beneficial. These variations are non-conservative, meaning that there is a change in the biochemical properties between substituted and original amino acids. A drastic change in the biochemical properties might be detrimental to protein folding and functionality. The variants were assessed through the “sequence-to-structure-to-function” workflow developed by the Prokop lab. Data gathered from several databases were used to determine the variants’ impact on CFTR function by comparing them to all known variants as of October 2019.