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ASD children are characterised by their refusal to change and difficulty in changing their responses to different social situations, which make it difficult for them to communicate with others, including their parents. We applied the comprehensive care technique Humanitude™ to mothers of children with ASD to support them from a multimodal communication perspective.Changes in mother-child communication were analysed in terms of mother-child gaze and the time the mother-child spent playing together. The results indicate that after the intervention with Humanitude™, there were significant differences in eye contact, mothers looking at their children, and children looking at their mothers. There was also a decrease in the amount of time children spent playing alone was found. There was a high correlation between pre and post-Humanitude™ intervention in the amount of time both mothers and children spent looking at each other, which suggests that incorporating multimodal communication can affect communication between parents-children.

ANISEED (www.aniseed.cnrs.fr) is the main model organism database for tunicates, the sister-group of vertebrates. This release gives access to annotated genomes, gene expression patterns, and anatomical descriptions for nine ascidian species. It provides increased integration with external molecular and taxonomy databases, better support for epigenomics datasets, in particular RNA-seq, ChIP-seq and SELEX-seq, and features novel interactive interfaces for existing and novel datatypes. In particular, the cross-species navigation and comparison is enhanced through a novel taxonomy section describing each represented species and through the implementation of interactive phylogenetic gene trees for 60% of tunicate genes. The gene expression section displays the results of RNA-seq experiments for the three major model species of solitary ascidians. Gene expression is controlled by the binding of transcription factors to cis-regulatory sequences. A high-resolution description of the DNA-binding specificity for 131 Ciona robusta (formerly C. intestinalis type A) transcription factors by SELEX-seq is provided and used to map candidate binding sites across the Ciona robusta and Phallusia mammillata genomes. Finally, use of a WashU Epigenome browser enhances genome navigation, while a Genomicus server was set up to explore microsynteny relationships within tunicates and with vertebrates, Amphioxus, echinoderms and hemichordates.

Malaria, a major global health challenge worldwide, is accompanied by a severe anemia secondary to hemolysis and increased erythrophagocytosis. Iron is an essential functional component of erythrocyte hemoglobin and its availability is controlled by the liver-derived hormone hepcidin. We examined the regulation of hepcidin during malarial infection in mice using the rodent parasite Plasmodium berghei K173. Mice infected with Plasmodium berghei K173 develop a severe anemia and die after 18 to 22 days without cerebral malaria. During the early phase of blood-stage infection (days 1 to 5), a strong inflammatory signature was associated with an increased production of hepcidin. Between days 7 and 18, while infection progressed, red blood cell count, hemoglobin and hematocrit dramatically decreased. In the late phase of malarial infection, hepcidin production was reduced concomitantly to an increase in the messenger RNA expression of the hepcidin suppressor erythroferrone in the bone marrow and the spleen. Compared with wild-type mice, Erfe-/- mice failed to adequately suppress hepcidin expression after infection with Plasmodium berghei K173. Importantly, the sustained production of hepcidin allowed by erythroferrone ablation was associated with decreased parasitemia, providing further evidence that transient iron restriction could be beneficial in the treatment of malaria.

Ascidians belong to the tunicates, the sister group of vertebrates and are recognized model organisms in the field of embryonic development, regeneration and stem cells. ANISEED is the main information system in the field of ascidian developmental biology. This article reports the development of the system since its initial publication in 2010. Over the past five years, we refactored the system from an initial custom schema to an extended version of the Chado schema and redesigned all user and back end interfaces. This new architecture was used to improve and enrich the description of Ciona intestinalis embryonic development, based on an improved genome assembly and gene model set, refined functional gene annotation, and anatomical ontologies, and a new collection of full ORF cDNAs. The genomes of nine ascidian species have been sequenced since the release of the C. intestinalis genome. In ANISEED 2015, all nine new ascidian species can be explored via dedicated genome browsers, and searched by Blast. In addition, ANISEED provides full functional gene annotation, anatomical ontologies and some gene expression data for the six species with highest quality genomes. ANISEED is publicly available at: http://www.aniseed.cnrs.fr.