Efforts to identify meaningful functional imaging-based biomarkers are limited by the ability to reliably characterize inter-individual differences in human brain function. Although a growing number of connectomics-based measures are reported to have moderate to high test-retest reliability, the variability in data acquisition, experimental designs, and analytic methods precludes the ability to generalize results. The Consortium for Reliability and Reproducibility (CoRR) is working to address this challenge and establish test-retest reliability as a minimum standard for methods development in functional connectomics. Specifically, CoRR has aggregated 1,629 typical individuals’ resting state fMRI (rfMRI) data (5,093 rfMRI scans) from 18 international sites, and is openly sharing them via the International Data-sharing Neuroimaging Initiative (INDI). To allow researchers to generate various estimates of reliability and reproducibility, a variety of data acquisition procedures and experimental designs are included. Similarly, to enable users to assess the impact of commonly encountered artifacts (for example, motion) on characterizations of inter-individual variation, datasets of varying quality are included.

Obesity presents a major health hazard of the 21st century. It promotes co-morbid diseases such as heart disease, type 2 diabetes, obstructive sleep apnea, certain types of cancer, and osteoarthritis. Excessive energy intake, physical inactivity, and genetic susceptibility are main causal factors for obesity, while gene mutations, endocrine disorders, medication, or psychiatric illnesses may be underlying causes in some cases. The development and maintenance of obesity may involve central pathophysiological mechanisms such as impaired brain circuit regulation and neuroendocrine hormone dysfunction. Dieting and physical exercise offer the mainstays of obesity treatment, and anti-obesity drugs may be taken in conjunction to reduce appetite or fat absorption. Bariatric surgeries may be performed in overtly obese patients to lessen stomach volume and nutrient absorption, and induce faster satiety. This review provides a summary of literature on the pathophysiological studies of obesity and discusses relevant therapeutic strategies for managing obesity.

Improving energy efficiency of electrocatalytic and photocatalytic CO conversion to useful chemicals poses a significant scientific challenge. We report on using a colloidal nanographene to form a molecular complex with a metal ion to tackle this challenge. In this work, a well-defined nanographene-Re complex was synthesized, in which electron delocalization over the nanographene and the metal ion significantly decreases the electrical potential needed to drive the chemical reduction. We show the complex can selectively electrocatalyze CO reduction to CO in tetrahydrofuran at -0.48 V vs NHE, the least negative potential reported for a molecular catalyst. In addition, the complex can absorb a significant spectrum of visible light to photocatalyze the chemical transformation without the need for a photosensitizer.

BackgroundMaintaining maximum genetic diversity and preserving breed viability in conserved populations necessitates the rigorous evaluation of conservation schemes. Three chicken breeds (Baier Yellow Chicken (BEC), Beijing You Chicken (BYC) and Langshan Chicken (LSC)) are currently in conservation programs in China. Changes in genetic diversity were measured by heterozygosity, genomic inbreeding coefficients, and autozygosity, using estimates derived from runs of homozygosity (ROH) that were identified using SNPs.ResultsNinety DNA samples were collected from three generations for each breed. In the most recent generation, the highest genetic diversity was observed in LSC, followed by BEC and BYC. Inbreeding coefficients based on ROH for the three breeds declined slightly between the first and middle generations, and then rapidly increased. No inbreeding coefficients exceeded 0.1. Population structure assessments using neighbor-joining tree analysis, principal components analysis, and STRUCTURE analysis indicated that no genetic differentiation existed within breeds. LD decay and ROH at different cut-off lengths were used to identify traces left by recent or ancient inbreeding. Few long ROH were identified, indicating that inbreeding has been largely avoided with the current conservation strategy. The observed losses in genetic diversity and occurrences of inbreeding might be consequences of sub-optimal effective population sizes.ConclusionsThe conserved Chinese chicken populations have high genomic diversity under the current conservation program (R: F). Furthermore, this study highlights the need to monitor dynamic changes in genetic diversity in conserved breeds over successive generations. Our research provides new insights into genetic diversity dynamics in conserved populations, and lays a solid foundation for improving conservation schemes.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (10.1186/s12864-018-4973-6) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

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Adaptation is fundamental in sensory processing and has been studied extensively within the same sensory modality. However, little is known about adaptation across sensory modalities, especially in the context of high-level processing, such as the perception of emotion. Previous studies have shown that prolonged exposure to a face exhibiting one emotion, such as happiness, leads to contrastive biases in the perception of subsequently presented faces toward the opposite emotion, such as sadness. Such work has shown the importance of adaptation in calibrating face perception based on prior visual exposure. In the present study, we showed for the first time that emotion-laden sounds, like laughter, adapt the visual perception of emotional faces, that is, subjects more frequently perceived faces as sad after listening to a happy sound. Furthermore, via electroencephalography recordings and event-related potential analysis, we showed that there was a neural correlate underlying the perceptual bias: There was an attenuated response occurring at ∼ 400 ms to happy test faces and a quickened response to sad test faces, after exposure to a happy sound. Our results provide the first direct evidence for a behavioral cross-modal adaptation effect on the perception of facial emotion, and its neural correlate.

Social support refers to interpersonal exchanges that include the combinations of aid, affirmation and affection. Perceived social support is a kind of subjective judgment of one's availability of social support. In spite of the importance of perceived social support to health, however, its neural substrate remains unknown. To address this question, voxel-based morphometry was employed to investigate the neural bases of individual differences in responses to the Perceived Social Support Scale (PSSS) in healthy volunteers (144 men and 203 women; mean age = 19.9; SD = 1.33, age range : 17-27). As a result, multiple regression analysis revealed that the PSSS scores were significantly and positively correlated with gray matter volume in a cluster that mainly included areas in posterior parts of posterior cingulate cortex, bilateral lingual cortex, left occipital lobe and cuneus. Highly-supported individuals had larger gray matter volume in these brain regions, implying a relatively high level of ability to engage in self-referential processes and social cognition. Our results provide a biological basis for exploring perceived social support particularly in relationship to various health parameters and outcomes.

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