Valuable Community Resource Research Articles

Mapping of specialized metabolite terms onto a plant phylogeny using text mining and large language models.

Plants produce a staggering array of chemicals that are the basis for organismal function and important human nutrients and medicines. However, it is poorly defined how these compounds evolved and are distributed across the plant kingdom, hindering a systematic view and understanding of plant chemical diversity. Recent advances in plant genome/transcriptome sequencing have provided a well-defined molecular phylogeny of plants, on which the presence of diverse natural products can be mapped to systematically determine their phylogenetic distribution. Here, we built a proof-of-concept workflow where previously reported diverse tyrosine-derived plant natural products were mapped onto the plant tree of life. Plant chemical-species associations were mined from literature, filtered, evaluated through manual inspection of over 2500 scientific articles, and mapped onto the plant phylogeny. The resulting "phylochemical" map confirmed several highly lineage-specific compound class distributions, such as betalain pigments and Amaryllidaceae alkaloids. The map also highlighted several lineages enriched in dopamine-derived compounds, including the orders Caryophyllales, Liliales, and Fabales. Additionally, the application of large language models, using our manually curated data as a ground truth set, showed that post-mining processing can largely be automated with a low false-positive rate, critical for generating a reliable phylochemical map. Although a high false-negative rate remains a challenge, our study demonstrates that combining text mining with language model-based processing can generate broader phylochemical maps, which will serve as a valuable community resource to uncover key evolutionary events that underlie plant chemical diversity and enable system-level views of nature's millions of years of chemical experimentation.

A Community Ionosphere‐Thermosphere Observing System Simulation Experiment (OSSE) Tool: Geospace Dynamics Constellation Example

AbstractObserving System Simulation Experiments (OSSEs) provide an effective way to evaluate the impact of assimilating data from a specific observing system on hindcasting, nowcasting, and forecasting of environmental systems. The NSF NCAR's Data Assimilation (DA) Research Testbed/Thermosphere‐Ionosphere‐Electrodynamics General Circulation Model (DART/TIEGCM) tool, to be hosted at the NASA Community Coordinated Modeling Center, serves as a valuable and accessible community resource for quantitatively evaluating the impact of observations from both current and future ionosphere‐thermosphere (IT) observing systems. This study demonstrates the utility of DART/TIEGCM as an IT OSSE tool, using synthetic observations simulated using a currently planned NASA Geospace Dynamics Constellation (GDC) observing system design. Five sets of OSSEs are carried out to compare the effects of assimilating various combinations of prospective GDC observations (e.g., neutral temperature, neutral wind, neutral composition, atomic oxygen ion density, and ion and electron temperature) during a major geomagnetic storm period of the St Patrick's Day Storm on 17 March 2013. The maximum error reduction in neutral temperature and atomic ion oxygen density is 24.6% and 43.3% compared to the control experiment. These OSSEs indicate the benefits of coupled IT DA approaches implemented in DART/TIEGCM to maximize the impact of multi‐parameter IT observations, such as those expected from the GDC mission. Although more work is required to draw any definitive conclusion on the GDC data impact, the study provides an illustrative example of how the DART/TIEGCM community tool can be used to evaluate observational impacts of planned or existing missions for geospace research and applications.

In-depth transcriptomic analysis of Anopheles gambiae hemocytes uncovers novel genes and the oenocytoid developmental lineage

BackgroundHemocytes are immune cells that patrol the mosquito hemocoel and mediate critical cellular defense responses against pathogens. However, despite their importance, a comprehensive transcriptome of these cells was lacking because they constitute a very small fraction of the total cells in the insect, limiting the study of hemocyte differentiation and immune function.ResultsIn this study, an in-depth hemocyte transcriptome was built by extensive bulk RNA sequencing and assembly of hemocyte RNAs from adult A. gambiae female mosquitoes, based on approximately 2.4 billion short Illumina and about 9.4 million long PacBio high-quality reads that mapped to the A. gambiae PEST genome (P4.14 version). A total of 34,939 transcripts were annotated including 4,020 transcripts from novel genes and 20,008 novel isoforms that result from extensive differential splicing of transcripts from previously annotated genes. Most hemocyte transcripts identified (89.8%) are protein-coding while 10.2% are non-coding RNAs. The number of transcripts identified in the novel hemocyte transcriptome is twice the number in the current annotation of the A. gambiae genome (P4.14 version). Furthermore, we were able to refine the analysis of a previously published single-cell transcriptome (scRNAseq) data set by using the novel hemocyte transcriptome as a reference to re-define the hemocyte clusters and determine the path of hemocyte differentiation. Unsupervised pseudo-temporal ordering using the Tools for Single Cell Analysis software uncovered a novel putative prohemocyte precursor cell type that gives rise to prohemocytes. Pseudo-temporal ordering with the Monocle 3 software, which analyses changes in gene expression during dynamic biological processes, determined that oenocytoids derive from prohemocytes, a cell population that also gives rise to the granulocyte lineage.ConclusionA high number of mRNA splice variants are expressed in hemocytes, and they may account for the plasticity required to mount efficient responses to many different pathogens. This study highlights the importance of a comprehensive set of reference transcripts to perform robust single-cell transcriptomic data analysis of cells present in low abundance. The detailed annotation of the hemocyte transcriptome will uncover new facets of hemocyte development and function in adult dipterans and is a valuable community resource for future studies on mosquito cellular immunity.

Development of an Integrated Home-Based Jamu Industry to Improve the Quality of Product Diversification in Yogyakarta: Case study in Kiringan, Bantul

This study examines the ways that Kiringan, Bantul, Yogyakarta, is creating an integrated home-based Jamu industry in order to diversify its product offerings and enhance product quality. The product and asset of home-based Jamu industry are still traditional and not diversified enough, which could result in a significant reliance on a single source of income and increase the community’s vulnerability to economic volatility. Total number of producers in this study were 25, and we asked about their knowledge and the understanding of Halal and Good Manufacturing practice (GMP) by using likert-scale. The results showed that 86.96% of the households were aware of the significance of the production staff hygiene system in herbal drink producing facilities, however, in the reality, perception of hygiene among producers is often limited to washing with their hands and water. The finding suggest that the adoption of Halal and Good Manufacturing Practices is critical to the long-term viability of Jamu producers in Kiringan Village. Also, modernizing traditional techniques, expanding market distribution, and promoting sustainable cultivation practice may boost the scalability and quality of Jamu products. This all-encompassing approach guarantees not only ensure the sustainable growth of the Jamu industry but also highlights its potential as a valuable community resource.

Examining the Relationship between Individualism and Pro-Environmental Behavior: The Moderating Role of Social Cohesion.

Combining Hofstede's cultural dimensions, value-belief-norm theory, and social exchange theory, this study explores the impact of individualism and social cohesion on pro-environmental behavior (PEB) as well as the moderating role of social cohesion in the individualism-PEB link in the context of Korean society. Using the 2021 Korean General Social Survey and multiple linear regression analyses, we found that individualism is negatively related to PEB, whereas social cohesion is positively related to PEB. Further analysis showed that social cohesion attenuates the negative relationship between individualism and PEB. Our findings suggest that although individuals with high levels of individualism are less likely to perform PEB than those with a high level of collectivism, social cohesion is a valuable community resource that encourages them to engage in eco-friendly activities even when they seek to achieve person-oriented goals and pursue their own interests. The implications and contributions of these findings regarding environmental psychology are discussed.

Resilience Compendium: Strategies to Reduce Communities’ Risk to Disasters

Introduction:The Victorian Compendium of Community-Based Resilience Building Case Studies supports place-based disaster risk reduction by promoting strategies to reduce communities’ risk before, during, and after disasters or emergencies and by strengthening community resilience through shared learning. It grew from Community Resilience Forums at Monash University, where community resilience practitioners presented their programs, explained their evolution, how they solved challenges, and shared unforeseen learnings. Forum attendees expressed an urgency for a sharing platform to help build community expertise, save precious community resources, avoid program duplication to prevent communities from reinventing the wheel. These now represent key tenets of the Compendium.Method:International exemplars inform the structure of the Compendium and a thematic analysis identified critical success factors for underpinning disaster risk reduction and resilience strategies.Results:As an Australian first, the Compendium gathered 38 programs between 2012 and 2022, which were addressed before (29), during (7), and after (17) events. Programs addressed all hazards (23), bushfires (11), heat (2), fire safety (1), and house fires (1). Twenty programs used a framework. Thirty received funding, with nine receiving less than $20,000 and five receiving more than $100,000. Twenty-nine addressed a whole-of-community perspective.Critical success factors included: strong governance and Board support; trust, partnerships, commitment, adaptability, stamina, and community leadership; paid facilitator, local government support, external funding; and celebrating often-neglected success.Conclusion:Offering an innovative contribution to resilience practice and research, the Compendium supports and enables locally-led and owned place-based disaster risk reduction efforts. It supports the Sendai Framework and augments principles in the National Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction by connecting people from diverse sectors to deliver distinct, adaptable actions to help reduce communities’ risk before, during, and after disasters or emergencies. The Compendium enables communities to preserve valuable community resources offering opportunities to extend to a national or international Compendium.

IGDP: An integrated genome decontamination pipeline for wild ciliated microeukaryotes.

Ciliates are a large group of ubiquitous and highly diverse single-celled eukaryotes that play an essential role in the functioning of microbial food webs. However, their genomic diversity is far from clear due to the need to develop cultivation methods for most species, so most research is based on wild organisms that almost invariably contain contaminants. Here we establish an integrated Genome Decontamination Pipeline (iGDP) that combines homology search, telomere reads-assisted and clustering approaches to filter contaminated ciliate genome assemblies from wild specimens. We benchmarked the performance of iGDP using genomic data from a contaminated ciliate culture and the results showed that iGDP could recall 91.9% of the target sequences with 96.9% precision. We also used a synthetic dataset to offer guidelines for the application of iGDP in the removal of various groups of contaminants. Compared with several popular metagenome binning tools, iGDP could show better performance. To further validate the effectiveness of iGDP on real-world data, we applied it to decontaminate genome assemblies of three wild ciliate specimens and obtained their genomes with high quality comparable to that of previously well-studied model ciliate genomes. It is anticipated that the newly generated genomes and the established iGDP method will be valuable community resources for detailed studies on ciliate biodiversity, phylogeny, ecology and evolution. The pipeline (https://github.com/GWang2022/iGDP) can be implemented automatically to reduce manual filtering and classification and may be further developed to apply to other microeukaryotes.

How Do Colorado Public Libraries Respond to Patron Queries about Opioid Use Disorder? A Secret Shopper Study

Background: Colorado’s age-adjusted fatal opioid overdose rate increased over 400% from 2000 to 2020. Public libraries are increasingly valuable community resources for accessing health-related information. We sought to evaluate the availability and types of opioid use disorder (OUD)-related resources offered through Colorado Public Library branches using secret shoppers to collect data. Methods: This was a cross sectional study of 197 Colorado Public Libraries in 2021. Anonymous auditors posed as library patrons asking a brief standardized script about availability of OUD-related resources over the phone. We conducted descriptive analyses of the libraries contacted, the response types of OUD resources provided, and information about naloxone availability. Outcomes were compared between urban/rural and libraries within/outside the Denver Public Library (DPL) system via means comparison tests. Results: Approximately 50% of libraries were classified as urban. Most (81%) of the libraries offered a valid OUD-resource, and over half (51%) provided a referral to a treatment center offering at least one medication for OUD. Over a third (36%) of librarians referenced the statewide naloxone standing order allowing patients to obtain naloxone from a pharmacy without prescription. One in ten libraries provided at least one invalid referral resource. Libraries within the DPL system referenced Colorado’s naloxone standing order at higher rates than non-DPL libraries. Conclusions: Public libraries may benefit from the development of a standard for OUD-related resource training/education that can be distributed across the state to create a space for community members to obtain resources related to substance use.

LI-Detector: a Method for Curating Ordered Gene-Replacement Libraries.

ABSTRACTIn recent years the availability of genome sequence information has grown logarithmically resulting in the identification of a plethora of uncharacterized genes. To address this gap in functional annotation, many high-throughput screens have been devised to uncover novel gene functions. Gene-replacement libraries are one such tool that can be screened in a high-throughput way to link genotype and phenotype and are key community resources. However, for a phenotype to be attributed to a specific gene, there needs to be confidence in the genotype. Construction of large libraries can be laborious and occasionally errors will arise. Here, we present a rapid and accurate method for the validation of any ordered library where a gene has been replaced or disrupted by a uniform linear insertion (LI). We applied our method (LI-detector) to the well-known Keio library of Escherichia coli gene-deletion mutants. Our method identified 3,718 constructed mutants out of a total of 3,728 confirmed isolates, with a success rate of 99.7% for identifying the correct kanamycin cassette position. This data set provides a benchmark for the purity of the Keio mutants and a screening method for mapping the position of any linear insertion, such as an antibiotic resistance cassette in any ordered library.IMPORTANCE The construction of ordered gene replacement libraries requires significant investment of time and resources to create a valuable community resource. During construction, technical errors may result in a limited number of incorrect mutants being made. Such mutants may confound the output of subsequent experiments. Here, using the remarkable E. coli Keio knockout library, we describe a method to rapidly validate the construction of every mutant.

Professional Counselors’ Roles and Opportunities in Special Education Advocacy

Professional counselors are called upon by the American Counseling Association (2018) to advocate on behalf of clients and their families to empower them and facilitate treatment goal achievement. They may accomplish this advocacy work in a variety of ways, including the provision of education and support when external barriers prevent clients' access to valuable community systems and resources. Special education (SPED) represents one such systemic resource that many clients and their families interface, but the lack of knowledge of a family's rights in the individual education planning (IEP) process continues to hinder their participation and utilization of SPED services (Jung, 2011; Lo, 2012). In this article, we illuminate opportunities for clinical mental health counselors to adequately prepare client families for the SPED process and act on behalf of families to advance their children’s treatment progress, educational prospects, and lifelong success.

Public Volume Electron Microscopy Data: An Essential Resource to Study the Brain Microvasculature.

Electron microscopy is the primary approach to study ultrastructural features of the cerebrovasculature. However, 2D snapshots of a vascular bed capture only a small fraction of its complexity. Recent efforts to synaptically map neuronal circuitry using volume electron microscopy have also sampled the brain microvasculature in 3D. Here, we perform a meta-analysis of 7 data sets spanning different species and brain regions, including two data sets from the MICrONS consortium that have made efforts to segment vasculature in addition to all parenchymal cell types in mouse visual cortex. Exploration of these data have revealed rich information for detailed investigation of the cerebrovasculature. Neurovascular unit cell types (including, but not limited to, endothelial cells, mural cells, perivascular fibroblasts, microglia, and astrocytes) could be discerned across broad microvascular zones. Image contrast was sufficient to identify subcellular details, including endothelial junctions, caveolae, peg-and-socket interactions, mitochondria, Golgi cisternae, microvilli and other cellular protrusions of potential significance to vascular signaling. Additionally, non-cellular structures including the basement membrane and perivascular spaces were visible and could be traced between arterio-venous zones along the vascular wall. These explorations revealed structural features that may be important for vascular functions, such as blood-brain barrier integrity, blood flow control, brain clearance, and bioenergetics. They also identified limitations where accuracy and consistency of segmentation could be further honed by future efforts. The purpose of this article is to introduce these valuable community resources within the framework of cerebrovascular research. We do so by providing an assessment of their vascular contents, identifying features of significance for further study, and discussing next step ideas for refining vascular segmentation and analysis.

Enhancing the Role of Government, Non-Profits, Universities, and Resident Associations as Valuable Community Resources to Advance Equity, Access, Diversity, and Inclusion

Asset-based community development (ABCD) recognizes the value of six local assets: (1) individuals or community residents, (2) neighborhood resident associations (3) local institutions (e.g., government, non-profits, and universities) (4), physical space (e.g., parks, vacant lots, etc.), (5) economy and exchange (e.g., business development, barter, etc.), and (6) culture, history, and stories. ABCD draws upon these assets to build stronger and more sustainable communities [1] (see Figure 1) [...]

Crisis line services: A 12-month descriptive analysis of callers, call content, and referrals.

Crisis lines are a valuable community resource that anonymously and freely serve those in acute crisis. As a result of anonymity, it has been difficult to fully characterise crisis line services. However, appraising and improving crisis line services for the communities they serve is essential, even with the additional difficulty anonymity poses. This study seeks to increase our understanding of current crisis services and utilisation via a characterisation of various aspects of a United States crisis line service centre over 12-months including features of calls (e.g. call length), callers (e.g. victimisation history), and information provided to the caller (e.g. referrals). We examine five crisis lines totalling 5,001 calls from October 2018 to September 2019. Descriptive information is provided on call volume, patterns across time, caller characteristics, victimisation types, and referrals. Although we were unable to assess prospective outcomes due to anonymity, 99.5% of callers that were asked (61.35% of all calls; n=3,068) reported the call as helpful. This provides an important overview of crisis line services and suggests they are a valuable community health resource serving a range of callers. Given the findings of the present study, we conclude with a discussion of recommendations and implications for community crisis line centres and future research.

A strategy for complete telomere-to-telomere assembly of ciliate macronuclear genome using ultra-high coverage Nanopore data

Ciliates contain two kinds of nuclei: the germline micronucleus (MIC) and the somatic macronucleus (MAC) in a single cell. The MAC usually have fragmented chromosomes. These fragmented chromosomes, capped with telomeres at both ends, could be gene size to several megabases in length among different ciliate species. So far, no telomere-to-telomere assembly of entire MAC genome in ciliate species has been finished. Development of the third generation sequencing technologies allows to generate sequencing reads up to megabases in length that could possibly span an entire MAC chromosome. Taking advantage of the ultra-long Nanopore reads, we established a simple strategy for the complete assembly of ciliate MAC genomes. Using this strategy, we assembled the complete MAC genomes of two ciliate species Tetrahymena thermophila and Tetrahymena shanghaiensis, composed of 181 and 214 chromosomes telomere-to-telomere respectively. The established strategy as well as the high-quality genome data will provide a useful approach for ciliate genome assembly, and a valuable community resource for further biological, evolutionary and population genomic studies.

The Ground State Electronic Energy of Benzene.

We report on the findings of a blind challenge devoted to determining the frozen-core, full configuration interaction (FCI) ground-state energy of the benzene molecule in a standard correlation-consistent basis set of double-ζ quality. As a broad international endeavor, our suite of wave function-based correlation methods collectively represents a diverse view of the high-accuracy repertoire offered by modern electronic structure theory. In our assessment, the evaluated high-level methods are all found to qualitatively agree on a final correlation energy, with most methods yielding an estimate of the FCI value around -863 mEH. However, we find the root-mean-square deviation of the energies from the studied methods to be considerable (1.3 mEH), which in light of the acclaimed performance of each of the methods for smaller molecular systems clearly displays the challenges faced in extending reliable, near-exact correlation methods to larger systems. While the discrepancies exposed by our study thus emphasize the fact that the current state-of-the-art approaches leave room for improvement, we still expect the present assessment to provide a valuable community resource for benchmark and calibration purposes going forward.

The Emergence of Amish Genetic Studies: A Brief History of Collaboration and Reciprocity

Since the 1960s, Amish genetic studies has become a significant arena of collaboration between medical researchers and Old Order Anabaptists. This article describes the origins of and early actors in this field of research and pushes beyond the handful of cursory accounts that focus exclusively on Dr. Victor McKusick, central though he was, to include the critical contributions of other researchers, physicians, and Amish liaisons. The collective work of these individuals quickly pointed to four areas of ongoing inquiry: the cultural context of health and illness, documentation of known but very rare conditions, identification of previously undocumented conditions and diseases, and demography. A remarkable feature of this early research was its interdisciplinary nature and its collaborative engagement with Amish people. That collaboration resulted not only in numerous medical breakthroughs, but also in expanded settlement directories and updated family genealogies, which Amish communities embraced, replicated, and came to regard as valuable community resources.

De novo Sequencing and Analysis of Salvia hispanica Tissue-Specific Transcriptome and Identification of Genes Involved in Terpenoid Biosynthesis.

Salvia hispanica (commonly known as chia) is gaining popularity worldwide as a healthy food supplement due to its low saturated fatty acid and high polyunsaturated fatty acid content, in addition to being rich in protein, fiber, and antioxidants. Chia leaves contain plethora of secondary metabolites with medicinal properties. In this study, we sequenced chia leaf and root transcriptomes using the Illumina platform. The short reads were assembled into contigs using the Trinity software and annotated against the Uniprot database. The reads were de novo assembled into 103,367 contigs, which represented 92.8% transcriptome completeness and a diverse set of Gene Ontology terms. Differential expression analysis identified 6151 and 8116 contigs significantly upregulated in the leaf and root tissues, respectively. In addition, we identified 30 contigs belonging to the Terpene synthase (TPS) family and demonstrated their evolutionary relationships to tomato TPS family members. Finally, we characterized the expression of S. hispanica TPS members in leaves subjected to abiotic stresses and hormone treatments. Abscisic acid had the most pronounced effect on the expression of the TPS genes tested in this study. Our work provides valuable community resources for future studies aimed at improving and utilizing the beneficial constituents of this emerging healthy food source.

A framework for assessing 16S rRNA marker-gene survey data analysis methods using mixtures.

BackgroundThere are a variety of bioinformatic pipelines and downstream analysis methods for analyzing 16S rRNA marker-gene surveys. However, appropriate assessment datasets and metrics are needed as there is limited guidance to decide between available analysis methods. Mixtures of environmental samples are useful for assessing analysis methods as one can evaluate methods based on calculated expected values using unmixed sample measurements and the mixture design. Previous studies have used mixtures of environmental samples to assess other sequencing methods such as RNAseq. But no studies have used mixtures of environmental to assess 16S rRNA sequencing.ResultsWe developed a framework for assessing 16S rRNA sequencing analysis methods which utilizes a novel two-sample titration mixture dataset and metrics to evaluate qualitative and quantitative characteristics of count tables. Our qualitative assessment evaluates feature presence/absence exploiting features only present in unmixed samples or titrations by testing if random sampling can account for their observed relative abundance. Our quantitative assessment evaluates feature relative and differential abundance by comparing observed and expected values. We demonstrated the framework by evaluating count tables generated with three commonly used bioinformatic pipelines: (i) DADA2 a sequence inference method, (ii) Mothur a de novo clustering method, and (iii) QIIME an open-reference clustering method. The qualitative assessment results indicated that the majority of Mothur and QIIME features only present in unmixed samples or titrations were accounted for by random sampling alone, but this was not the case for DADA2 features. Combined with count table sparsity (proportion of zero-valued cells in a count table), these results indicate DADA2 has a higher false-negative rate whereas Mothur and QIIME have higher false-positive rates. The quantitative assessment results indicated the observed relative abundance and differential abundance values were consistent with expected values for all three pipelines.ConclusionsWe developed a novel framework for assessing 16S rRNA marker-gene survey methods and demonstrated the framework by evaluating count tables generated with three bioinformatic pipelines. This framework is a valuable community resource for assessing 16S rRNA marker-gene survey bioinformatic methods and will help scientists identify appropriate analysis methods for their marker-gene surveys.

Undergrad Leaves a Legacy of Literacy

You have accessThe ASHA LeaderStudent's Say1 Nov 2019Undergrad Leaves a Legacy of LiteracyA program founded by a NSSLHA member brings enrichment to kindergartners in a city school. Kacey RigaBA Kacey Riga Google Scholar More articles by this author , BA https://doi.org/10.1044/leader.SSAY.24112019.38 SectionsAboutPDF ToolsAdd to favorites ShareFacebookTwitterLinked In During my final undergrad year at The Ohio State University (OSU), I wanted to leave an impression—not only within the Department of Speech and Hearing Science, but on the surrounding community. As our National Student Speech Language Hearing Association (NSSLHA) chapter vice president, I also wanted to strengthen the relationship between our chapter and the community. I joined forces with a speech-language pathologist for the Columbus City Schools who had graduated from OSU several years earlier and was looking to boost her elementary school students’ literacy skills. Together, we created the Columbus Literacy Committee to provide additional literacy stimulation to kindergartners who need it, while introducing undergraduates to a population they may work with in the future. As part of our program, we visit schools once a month to read aloud to the students and work in small groups to promote conversation and language. Literacy for little ones Committee members are all undergraduate NSSLHA members selected through an application process. Two co-chairs help create our monthly activities and choose books for students at all reading levels. One of our biggest challenges has been creating activities that are simple enough for beginners, but engaging for our most advanced readers. We decided to use basic activities or games that are fun but that require participation from everyone, regardless of reading level. Once we found that balance, we created games focused on different aspects of language, such as verb charades that focus on snowy day activities, noun and adjective Venn diagrams, and fill-in-the-blank Mad Libs. The next task was to schedule classroom visits. I worked closely with my collaborating SLP and the kindergarten teachers at a city school to work out a schedule, and then committee members signed up for time slots. Coordinating schedules among the teachers and our 17 members was probably the most difficult part to plan. It took a lot of communication and trial-and-error, but after the first month we got the hang of it. Everyone benefits During the first year we’ve been working with the Columbus City Schools, we’ve received considerable positive feedback from teachers, NSSLHA members, and the kindergartners. The teachers report that the students are engaged during our small-group activities and love the extra stimulation they receive from outside sources. They look forward to the reading activities and games their “special visitors” bring when they come by. Teachers appreciate our program, too, with some saying they’d like weekly, rather than monthly, visits. In addition, our own NSSLHA members report receiving benefits from the program. The undergrads get firsthand experience with elementary school kids, gaining foundational knowledge before entering grad school. They report that this has been their first hands-on experience in treatment-like situations—outside of observing—and say they are more confident in their decision to pursue a career in this field. Some how-tos If you’re interested in starting your own community outreach program, here are a few tips to get you started. Contact organizations and schools in your community that you think might benefit from your NSSLHA members’ passion and expertise. Reach out to faculty you interact with every day. One of them may know of an organization that could use some help. Contact local SLPs, audiologists, or local alumni of your program to form a partnership. NSSLHA chapters and their members are a valuable community resource—market yourself that way! Watching the excitement on the kindergartners’ faces and the relationships they have forged with NSSLHA members has been the best part of this experience. It’s sparked a passion in literacy for me. I graduated in May and no longer head the program, but I can’t wait to come back and see how the committee has grown. Author Notes Kacey Riga, BA, received her undergraduate degree in speech and hearing science from The Ohio State University in May. She is a first-year master’s student in speech-language pathology at Cleveland State University. [email protected] Additional Resources FiguresSourcesRelatedDetails Volume 24Issue 11November 2019 Get Permissions Add to your Mendeley library History Published in print: Oct 31, 2019 Metrics Downloaded 873 times Topicsleader_do_tagleader-topicsasha-article-typesCopyright & Permissions© 2019 American Speech-Language-Hearing AssociationLoading ...

A large-scale pedigree resource of wheat reveals evidence for adaptation and selection by breeders.

Information on crop pedigrees can be used to help maximise genetic gain in crop breeding and allow efficient management of genetic resources. We present a pedigree resource of 2,657 wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) genotypes originating from 38 countries, representing more than a century of breeding and variety development. Visualisation of the pedigree enables illustration of the key developments in United Kingdom wheat breeding, highlights the wide genetic background of the UK wheat gene pool, and facilitates tracing the origin of beneficial alleles. A relatively high correlation between pedigree- and marker-based kinship coefficients was found, which validated the pedigree and enabled identification of errors in the pedigree or marker data. Using simulations with a combination of pedigree and genotype data, we found evidence for significant effects of selection by breeders. Within crosses, genotypes are often more closely related than expected by simulations to one of the parents, which indicates selection for favourable alleles during the breeding process. Selection across the pedigree was demonstrated on a subset of the pedigree in which 110 genotyped varieties released before the year 2000 were used to simulate the distribution of marker alleles of 45 genotyped varieties released after the year 2000, in the absence of selection. Allelic diversity in the 45 varieties was found to deviate significantly from the simulated distributions at a number of loci, indicating regions under selection over this period. The identification of one of these regions as coinciding with a strong yield component quantitative trait locus (QTL) highlights both the potential of the remaining loci as wheat breeding targets for further investigation, as well as the utility of this pedigree-based methodology to identify important breeding targets in other crops. Further evidence for selection was found as greater linkage disequilibrium (LD) for observed versus simulated genotypes within all chromosomes. This difference was greater at shorter genetic distances, indicating that breeder selections have conserved beneficial linkage blocks. Collectively, this work highlights the benefits of generating detailed pedigree resources for crop species. The wheat pedigree database developed here represents a valuable community resource and will be updated as new varieties are released at https://www.niab.com/pages/id/501/UK_Wheat_varieties_Pedigree.