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Journal articleBai W, Suzuki H, Huang J, et al., 2020,
A population-based phenome-wide association study of cardiac and aortic structure and function
, Nature Medicine, Vol: 26, Pages: 1654-1662, ISSN: 1078-8956Differences in cardiac and aortic structure and function are associated with cardiovascular diseases and a wide range of other types of disease. Here we analyzed cardiovascular magnetic resonance images from a population-based study, the UK Biobank, using an automated machine-learning-based analysis pipeline. We report a comprehensive range of structural and functional phenotypes for the heart and aorta across 26,893 participants, and explore how these phenotypes vary according to sex, age and major cardiovascular risk factors. We extended this analysis with a phenome-wide association study, in which we tested for correlations of a wide range of non-imaging phenotypes of the participants with imaging phenotypes. We further explored the associations of imaging phenotypes with early-life factors, mental health and cognitive function using both observational analysis and Mendelian randomization. Our study illustrates how population-based cardiac and aortic imaging phenotypes can be used to better define cardiovascular disease risks as well as heart–brain health interactions, highlighting new opportunities for studying disease mechanisms and developing image-based biomarkers.
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Journal articleSethi S, Ewers R, Jones N, et al., 2020,
SAFE Acoustics: an open-source, real-time eco-acoustic monitoring network in the tropical rainforests of Borneo
, Methods in Ecology and Evolution, Vol: 11, Pages: 1182-1185, ISSN: 2041-210X1. Automated monitoring approaches offer an avenue to unlocking large‐scale insight into how ecosystems respond to human pressures. However, since data collection and data analyses are often treated independently, there are currently no open‐source examples of end‐to‐end, real‐time ecological monitoring networks. 2. Here, we present the complete implementation of an autonomous acoustic monitoring network deployed in the tropical rainforests of Borneo. Real‐time audio is uploaded remotely from the field, indexed by a central database, and delivered via an API to a public‐facing website.3. We provide the open‐source code and design of our monitoring devices, the central web2py database, and the ReactJS website. Furthermore, we demonstrate an extension of this infrastructure to deliver real‐time analyses of the eco‐acoustic data. 4. By detailing a fully functional, open source, and extensively tested design, our work will accelerate the rate at which fully autonomous monitoring networks mature from technological curiosities, and towards genuinely impactful tools in ecology.
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Journal articleMeyer H, Dawes T, Serrani M, et al., 2020,
Genetic and functional insights into the fractal structure of the heart
, Nature, Vol: 584, Pages: 589-594, ISSN: 0028-0836The inner surfaces of the human heart are covered by a complex network of muscular strands that is thought to be a vestigeof embryonic development.1,2 The function of these trabeculae in adults and their genetic architecture are unknown. Toinvestigate this we performed a genome-wide association study using fractal analysis of trabecular morphology as animage-derived phenotype in 18,096 UK Biobank participants. We identified 16 significant loci containing genes associatedwith haemodynamic phenotypes and regulation of cytoskeletal arborisation.3,4 Using biomechanical simulations and humanobservational data, we demonstrate that trabecular morphology is an important determinant of cardiac performance. Throughgenetic association studies with cardiac disease phenotypes and Mendelian randomisation, we find a causal relationshipbetween trabecular morphology and cardiovascular disease risk. These findings suggest an unexpected role for myocardialtrabeculae in the function of the adult heart, identify conserved pathways that regulate structural complexity, and reveal theirinfluence on susceptibility to disease
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Journal articleLechuga-Vieco AV, Latorre-Pellicer A, Johnston IG, et al., 2020,
Cell identity and nucleo-mitochondrial genetic context modulate OXPHOS performance and determine somatic heteroplasmy dynamics
, Science Advances, Vol: 6, Pages: eaba5345-eaba5345, ISSN: 2375-2548Heteroplasmy, multiple variants of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) in the same cytoplasm, may be naturally generated by mutations but is counteracted by a genetic mtDNA bottleneck during oocyte development. Engineered heteroplasmic mice with nonpathological mtDNA variants reveal a nonrandom tissue-specific mtDNA segregation pattern, with few tissues that do not show segregation. The driving force for this dynamic complex pattern has remained unexplained for decades, challenging our understanding of this fundamental biological problem and hindering clinical planning for inherited diseases. Here, we demonstrate that the nonrandom mtDNA segregation is an intracellular process based on organelle selection. This cell type–specific decision arises jointly from the impact of mtDNA haplotypes on the oxidative phosphorylation (OXPHOS) system and the cell metabolic requirements and is strongly sensitive to the nuclear context and to environmental cues.
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Journal articleSethi S, Jones NS, Fulcher B, et al., 2020,
Characterising soundscapes across diverse ecosystems using a universal acoustic feature set
, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of USA, Vol: 117, Pages: 17049-17055, ISSN: 0027-8424Natural habitats are being impacted by human pressures at an alarming rate. Monitoring these ecosystem-level changes often requires labor-intensive surveys that are unable to detect rapid or unanticipated environmental changes. Here we have developed a generalizable, data-driven solution to this challenge using eco-acoustic data. We exploited a convolutional neural network to embed soundscapes from a variety of ecosystems into a common acoustic space. In both supervised and unsupervised modes, this allowed us to accurately quantify variation in habitat quality across space and in biodiversity through time. On the scale of seconds, we learned a typical soundscape model that allowed automatic identification of anomalous sounds in playback experiments, providing a potential route for real-time automated detection of irregular environmental behavior including illegal logging and hunting. Our highly generalizable approach, and the common set of features, will enable scientists to unlock previously hidden insights from acoustic data and offers promise as a backbone technology for global collaborative autonomous ecosystem monitoring efforts.
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Journal articleFulcher B, Lubba C, Sethi S, et al., 2020,
A self-organizing, living library of time-series data
, Scientific Data, Vol: 7, ISSN: 2052-4463Time-series data are measured across the sciences, from astronomy to biomedicine, but meaningful cross-disciplinary interactions are limited by the challenge of identifying fruitful connections. Here we introduce the web platform, CompEngine, a self-organizing, living library of time-series data, that lowers the barrier to forming meaningful interdisciplinary connections between time series. Using a canonical feature-based representation, CompEngine places all time series in a common feature space, regardless of their origin, allowing users to upload their data and immediately explore diverse data with similar properties, and be alerted when similar data is uploaded in future. In contrast to conventional databases which are organized by assigned metadata, CompEngine incentivizes data sharing by automatically connecting experimental and theoretical scientists across disciplines based on the empirical structure of the data they measure. CompEngine’s growing library of interdisciplinary time-series data also enables the comprehensive characterization of time-series analysis algorithms across diverse types of empirical data.
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Journal articleHeaton LLM, Jones NS, Fricker MD, 2020,
A mechanistic explanation of the transition to simple multicellularity in fungi.
, Nature Communications, Vol: 11, ISSN: 2041-1723Development of multicellularity was one of the major transitions in evolution and occurred independently multiple times in algae, plants, animals, and fungi. However recent comparative genome analyses suggest that fungi followed a different route to other eukaryotic lineages. To understand the driving forces behind the transition from unicellular fungi to hyphal forms of growth, we develop a comparative model of osmotrophic resource acquisition. This predicts that whenever the local resource is immobile, hard-to-digest, and nutrient poor, hyphal osmotrophs outcompete motile or autolytic unicellular osmotrophs. This hyphal advantage arises because transporting nutrients via a contiguous cytoplasm enables continued exploitation of remaining resources after local depletion of essential nutrients, and more efficient use of costly exoenzymes. The model provides a mechanistic explanation for the origins of multicellular hyphal organisms, and explains why fungi, rather than unicellular bacteria, evolved to dominate decay of recalcitrant, nutrient poor substrates such as leaf litter or wood.
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Journal articleHoffmann T, Peel L, Lambiotte R, et al., 2020,
Community detection in networks without observing edges
, Science Advances, Vol: 6, ISSN: 2375-2548We develop a Bayesian hierarchical model to identify communities of time series. Fitting the model provides an end-to-end community detection algorithmthat does not extract information as a sequence of point estimates but propagates uncertainties from the raw data to the community labels. Our approachnaturally supports multiscale community detection as well as the selection ofan optimal scale using model comparison. We study the properties of the algorithm using synthetic data and apply it to daily returns of constituents of theS&P100 index as well as climate data from US cities.
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Journal articleGreenbury S, Barahona M, Johnston I, 2020,
HyperTraPS: Inferring probabilistic patterns of trait acquisition in evolutionary and disease progression pathways
, Cell Systems, Vol: 10, Pages: 39-51, ISSN: 2405-4712The explosion of data throughout the biomedical sciences provides unprecedented opportunities to learn about the dynamics of evolution and disease progression, but harnessing these large and diverse datasets remains challenging. Here, we describe a highly generalisable statistical platform to infer the dynamic pathways by which many, potentially interacting, discrete traits are acquired or lost over time in biomedical systems. The platform uses HyperTraPS (hypercubic transition path sampling) to learn progression pathways from cross-sectional, longitudinal, or phylogenetically-linked data with unprecedented efficiency, readily distinguishing multiple competing pathways, and identifying the most parsimonious mechanisms underlying given observations. Its Bayesian structure quantifies uncertainty in pathway structure and allows interpretable predictions of behaviours, such as which symptom a patient will acquire next. We exploit the model’s topology to provide visualisation tools for intuitive assessment of multiple, variable pathways. We apply the method to ovarian cancer progression and the evolution of multidrug resistance in tuberculosis, demonstrating its power to reveal previously undetected dynamic pathways.
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Journal articleLiu Z, Barahona M, 2020,
Graph-based data clustering via multiscale community detection
, Applied Network Science, Vol: 5, Pages: 1-20, ISSN: 2364-8228We present a graph-theoretical approach to data clustering, which combines the creation of a graph from the data with Markov Stability, a multiscale community detection framework. We show how the multiscale capabilities of the method allow the estimation of the number of clusters, as well as alleviating the sensitivity to the parameters in graph construction. We use both synthetic and benchmark real datasets to compare and evaluate several graph construction methods and clustering algorithms, and show that multiscale graph-based clustering achieves improved performance compared to popular clustering methods without the need to set externally the number of clusters.
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