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Objective: To evaluate growth response and renal allograft measures after recombinant human growth-hormone (GH) treatment in pediatric renal transplant recipients. Study design: Data on GH-treated children in the National Cooperative Growth Study (NCGS) database were linked to the database of the North American Pediatric Renal Transplant Cooperative Study (NAPRTCS). Data were analyzed for growth rate, graft survival, graft function, acute rejection, and adverse events. Data on 2390 transplant recipients in the NAPRTCS who had at least 24 months of graft function were used in the comparisons. Results: Fifty-nine patients were treated with GH after renal transplantation. One-year growth data were available for 42 of these; 2-year, for 31; and 3-year, for 13. Growth velocity increased from 2.47 +/- 1.83 cm/yr to 7.17 +/- 2.97 cm/yr after 1 year. Year-2 and -3 growth rates were 5.93 +/- 2.29 cm/yr and 6.31 +/- 2.32 cm/yr. Height standard deviation score immediately after transplantation was -3.26 +/- 1.44 and at the initiation of GH was -3.59 +/- 1.15; it increased to -3.18 +/- 1.06 at year 1 and to -3.15 +/- 0.92 at year 2 and was -3.31 +/- 1.00 at year 3. Five-year graft survival was 80% in the GH cohort and 85% in the NAPRTCS cohort. Acute rejection ratio was 1.44 and 1.43 episodes per patient in the GH and NAPRTCS cohorts, respectively. Calculated creatinine clearance at 5 years was 68 and 63 ml/min per 1.73 m^2, respectively. Conclusions: Growth hormone increases growth velocity for up to 3 years without an apparent decrease in graft survival or renal function, and no relation between GH therapy and acute rejection is seen. A randomized, prospective study to evaluate further the safety and efficacy of this promising therapy is required.

The article reports on some simple combine adjustments that can help to prevent grain damage and harvest loss in soybean plants including the use of a floating, flexible cutter bar and automatic header height control.

The article offers tips for farmers on how to get a corn crop off to a good start. Corn growers are advised by the article to till only when necessary and under proper soil conditions. Early May is suggested as the time to complete planting. Farmers are urged to avoid early planting on poorly drained soils.

Competing Interests: A.M.B. is a beneficiary of a licensing agreement with Axovant Gene Therapies (royalties) and Neurogene (royalties) and has received income from Neurogene (consulting and honorarium). A.M.B. is an inventor on multiple patents. None of these declarations is in conflict with the work herein.

Competing Interests: D.A.L. is on the scientific advisory board of and consults for Avidicure, receives consulting, licensing, and royalty fees from Kiadis Pharma (a Sanofi Company), and has intellectual property interests related to NK cell therapy.

Competing Interests: The authors declare no competing interests.

Asexuality in vertebrates is often generated via hybridization, but is it a rare product of pervasive hybridization or a common product of rare hybridization? Freitas et al. show that hybridization is frequent among the sexual species of Darevskia, although the crossings between parents of the asexual hybrids are undetected. This study illustrates that hybridization is not extraordinary in nature, and thus scalable phylogenetic network inference methods, rather than phylogenetic trees, are needed to accurately represent the true evolutionary history., (© 2022 The Authors. Evolution published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of The Society for the Study of Evolution.)

The International Society of RNA Nanotechnology and Nanomedicine (ISRNN) hosts an annual meeting series focused on presenting the latest research achievements involving RNA-based therapeutics and strategies, aiming to expand their current biomedical applications while overcoming the remaining challenges of the burgeoning field of RNA nanotechnology. The most recent online meeting hosted a series of engaging talks and discussions from an international cohort of leading nanotechnologists that focused on RNA modifications and modulation, dynamic RNA structures, overcoming delivery limitations using a variety of innovative platforms and approaches, and addressing the newly explored potential for immunomodulation with programmable nucleic acid nanoparticles. In this Nano Focus, we summarize the main discussion points, conclusions, and future directions identified during this two-day webinar as well as more recent advances to highlight and to accelerate this exciting field.

This study mainly examines the different effects and mechanisms of news feed advertising (vs. traditional display advertising) on advertising attitude and brand attitude by using an observational experiment that categorized participants based on their past experiences . By analyzing the video advertising of the "Li Ning" brand, three conclusion were drawn. First, compared with traditional display advertising, news feed advertising led to more positive advertising attitude and brand attitude. Second, generation and transmission mechanism of attitudes were applicable to the interpretation rules of the classical information processing process model, which showed that the information processing process of the news feed advertising and the traditional display advertising were consistent. Third, consumer's brand experience did not affect the direct effects of "attention" on "memory," but affected the mediate role of "interpretation," which showed that news feed advertising may have a stronger "drainage" effect when promoting new products and developing new markets. However, if the consumer's experience is not enhanced, the brand attitude triggered by news feed advertising will still not be stable. These findings are conducive to further understanding the effect of news feed advertising on advertising attitude and brand attitude., Competing Interests: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2021 Du, Yang, Liu and He.)

In March 2020, following the annual International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses (ICTV) ratification vote on newly proposed taxa, the phylum Negarnaviricota was amended and emended. At the genus rank, 20 new genera were added, two were deleted, one was moved, and three were renamed. At the species rank, 160 species were added, four were deleted, ten were moved and renamed, and 30 species were renamed. This article presents the updated taxonomy of Negarnaviricota as now accepted by the ICTV.

Stable isotopes of oxygen often vary within a community of primates. For example, folivorous monkeys that forage in the upper reaches of the forest canopy tend to evince high δ18O values, whereas those that prefer the understory tend to have lower δ18O values. Given that leaves also have high δ18O values, particularly higher in the canopy, there is uncertainty as to which behavioural variable - vertical stratification or folivory - is the primary determinant of variation in δ18O values. Here, we explore further δ18O values from the Taï Forest monkeys (n = 7 species; n = 33 individuals) by examining the interaction between diet and vertical stratification, thereby allowing us to differentiate the effects of each covariate. We found that δ18O values varied as a function of mean canopy height, but not folivory, resolving uncertainty about the primary cause of δ18O variation. This outcome revolves largely, but not entirely, on the behaviours of Procolobus verus, a highly folivorous but understory forager. Relatively elevated values in Cercopithecus diana, a frugivorous but middle-to-high canopy forager, raises the possibility that plant reproductive tissues (e.g., fruits, flowers) may be increasingly sensitive to evaporative fractionation at higher forest canopy levels. Overall, our results further affirm the value of using δ18O values to estimate the vertical behaviour of primate species in a fossil assemblage., (© 2019 S. Karger AG, Basel.)

Reproductive isolation is the result of either the inability to produce viable and fertile offspring or the avoidance of mating altogether. While these mechanisms can evolve either over time via genetic drift or natural selection, the genetic result is usually a complex set of traits that are often linked. Explaining how reproductive isolation proceeds from the initiation of divergence to the complete prevention of mating is often a difficult task, as the underlying genes for traits associated with reproductive isolation can change via molecular evolution and subsequent protein coding alterations or through alterations of gene expression regulation. In this issue of Molecular Ecology, Treer, Maex, VanBocxlaer, Proost, and Bossuyt () use transcriptomic, proteomic and phylogenetic analyses to show that species-specific sex pheromones are the result of gradual sequence divergence on the same set of proteins in two closely related newt species (Ichthyosaura alpestris and Lissotriton helveticus). This study shows that salamander pheromone systems provide an enticing opportunity to connect the evolution of reproductive isolation to the changes in genes that underlie a key phenotype., (© 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.)