Biology subjects

Voges, J.

Publications and source records attributed to Voges, J..

8 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2026

Interleukin-6 responses to acute stress are not altered in alcohol use disorder despite elevated baseline inflammation

Acute stress activates the immune system, leading to the release of pro-inflammatory cytokines, such as interleukin-6 (IL-6). Chronic alcohol consumption alters the physiological stress systems and is associated with increased chronic inflammation. However, it remains unclear how IL-6 responds to acute stress in individuals with alcohol use disorder (AUD). Forty patients with AUD during early abstinence and 37 healthy controls (HC) completed two study visits. On one day, an acute stress induction task was performed, and on the other, a non-stressful control task, with the order of tasks being balanced. Plasma IL-6 and C-reactive protein (CRP) were measured as inflammatory markers at baseline and changes in IL-6 were assessed 90 minutes after the experimental manipulation. Patients with AUD showed significantly elevated baseline IL-6 and CRP compared to HC and the levels correlated positively with the amount of consumed alcohol in patients. IL-6 responses to the stress intervention did not differ between groups. Increases in IL-6 were observed on stress and control days and were larger when samples were collected via an indwelling catheter than with a butterfly needle. These findings suggest that IL-6 responses to acute stress do not differ between AUD and HC, despite increased baseline inflammation. Furthermore, the results indicate that blood collection methods can influence IL-6 measurements and highlight the importance of methodological considerations.

immunology↗

bioRxiv2025

No neurobehavioral evidence for reduced motivational potential of social rewards in alcohol use disorder

BackgroundThe mesolimbic dopamine system plays a central role in motivating behavior. In alcohol use disorder (AUD), this system is thought to be dysfunctional, leading to hyperreactivity to alcohol-related cues. In contrast, evidence on how individuals with AUD respond to alcohol-unrelated reward cues is inconclusive, and the motivation for social rewards has not yet been investigated. MethodsTo address this gap, 36 individuals with AUD and 34 healthy controls performed an incentive delay task to assess social reward anticipation with a monetary and a non-reward control condition while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging. The ventral striatum was defined as region of interest because of its central role in neuronal circuits for motivation. ResultsNeither behavioral nor neuroimaging data provided any evidence of reduced motivation for social or monetary rewards in AUD. Exploratory whole-brain analyses only revealed stronger activation in the occipital/cuneal cortex in individuals with AUD than in healthy controls across all trials. ConclusionTogether, these results suggest that sensitivity to social reward cues is not fundamentally impaired in AUD. Furthermore, they imply that motivational changes related to the substance do not generally alter the reward potential of alcohol-unrelated domains in AUD, opening perspectives for social-behavioral treatments for this disorder.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2024

Altered physiological, affective, and functional connectivity responses to acute stress in patients with alcohol use disorder

BackgroundThere is evidence that the processing of acute stress is altered in alcohol use disorder (AUD), but little is known about how this is manifested simultaneously across different stress parameters and which neural processes are involved. The present study examined physiological and affective responses to stress and functional connectivity in AUD. MethodsSalivary cortisol samples, pulse rate, and affect ratings were collected on two days from 34 individuals with moderate or severe AUD and 34 controls. On one day, stress was induced, and on the other day, a non-stressful control task was performed. Following the intervention, participants underwent fMRI to assess functional connectivity, focusing on cortical and subcortical seed regions previously reported to be involved in AUD and/or stress. ResultsFor pulse rate and cortisol, stress responses were blunted in AUD, whereas negative affect was increased. Furthermore, stress-related changes in pulse rate, cortisol, and affect were only correlated in healthy controls. Neuroimaging analyses revealed stress-related group differences in functional connectivity, involving the connectivity of striatal seeds with the posterior DMN, cerebellum and midcingulate cortex, and of the posterior DMN seed with the striatum and thalamus. ConclusionsThe results suggest a dissociation between subjective experienced distress and the physiological stress response in AUD as well as stress-related alterations in functional connectivity. These findings highlight the complex interplay between chronic alcohol use and acute stress regulation, offering valuable considerations for the development of therapeutic strategies.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2023

HiCMC: High-Efficiency Contact Matrix Compressor

Chromosome organization plays an important role in biological processes such as replication, regulation, and transcription. One way to study the relationship between chromosome structure and its biological functions is through Hi-C studies, a genome-wide method for capturing chromosome conformations. Such studies generate vast amounts of data. The problem is exacerbated by the fact that chromosome organization is dynamic, requiring snapshots at different points in time, further increasing the amount of data to be stored. We present a novel approach called the High-Efficiency Contact Matrix Compressor (HiCMC) for efficient compression of Hi-C data. By modeling the underlying structures found in the contact matrix, such as compartments and domains, HiCMC outperforms CMC by approximately 8% and more than 50% against cooler, LZMA, and bzip2 over the state of the art across multiple cell lines and resolutions. In addition, the domain information that is embedded in the data can be used to speed up downstream analysis. HiCMC is available at https://github.com/sXperfect/hicmc.

bioinformatics↗

bioRxiv2023

Ventrointermediate thalamic stimulation improves motor learning in humans

Ventrointermediate thalamic stimulation (VIM-DBS) modulates oscillatory activity in a cortical network including primary motor cortex, premotor cortex, and parietal cortex. Here we show that, beyond the beneficial effects of VIM-DBS on motor execution, this form of invasive stimulation facilitates production of sequential finger movements that follow a fixed sequence but not when the sequence is selected at random. These results highlight the role of thalamo-cortical activity in motor learning.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2022

Rhythmic interactions between the mediodorsal thalamus and prefrontal cortex precede human visual perception

The thalamus is much more than a simple sensory relay. High-order thalamic nuclei, such as the mediodorsal thalamus, exert a profound influence over animal cognition. However, given the difficulty of directly recording from the thalamus in humans, next-to-nothing is known about thalamic and thalamocortical contributions to human cognition. To address this, we analysed simultaneously-recorded thalamic iEEG and whole-head MEG in six patients (four female, two male; plus MEG recordings from twelve healthy controls) as they completed a visual detection task. We observed that the phase of both ongoing mediodorsal thalamic and prefrontal low-frequency activity was predictive of perceptual performance. Critically however, mediodorsal thalamic activity mediated prefrontal contributions to perceptual performance. These results suggest that it is thalamocortical interactions, rather than cortical activity alone, that is predictive of upcoming perceptual performance and, more generally, highlights the importance of accounting for the thalamus when theorising about cortical contributions to human cognition.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2019

Quantifying the dynamics of pig movements improve targeted disease surveillance and control plans

Tracking animal movements over time can fundamentally determine the success of disease control interventions throughout targeting farms that are tightly connected. In commercial pig production, animals are transported between farms based on growth stages, thus it generates time-varying contact networks that will influence the dynamics of disease spread. Still, risk-based surveillance strategies are mostly based on a static network. In this study, we reconstructed the static and temporal pig networks of one Brazilian state from 2017 to 2018, comprising 351,519 movements and 48 million transported pigs. The static networks failed to capture time-respecting movement pathways. Therefore, we propose a time-dependent network susceptible-infected (SI) model to simulate the temporal spread of an epidemic over the pig network globally through the temporal movement of animals among farms, and locally with a stochastic compartmental model in each farm, configured to calculate the minimum number of target farms needed to achieve effective disease control. In addition, we propagated disease on the pig temporal network to calculate the cumulative contacts as a proxy of epidemic sizes and evaluated the impact of network-based disease control strategies. The results show that targeting the first 1,000 farms ranked by degree would be sufficient and feasible to diminish disease spread considerably. Our finding also suggested that assuming a worst-case scenario in which every movement transmit disease, pursuing farms by degree would limit the transmission to up to 29 farms over the two years period, which is lower than the number of infected farms for random surveillance, with epidemic sizes of 2,593 farms. The top 1,000 farms could benefit from enhanced biosecurity plans and improved surveillance, which constitute important next steps in strategizing targeted disease control interventions. Overall, the proposed modeling framework provides a parsimonious solution for targeted disease surveillance when temporal movement data is available.

ecology↗

bioRxiv2018

An introduction to MPEG-G, the new ISO standard for genomic information representation

The MPEG-G standardization initiative is a coordinated international effort to specify a compressed data format that enables large scale genomic data to be processed, transported and shared. The standard consists of a set of specifications (i.e., a book) describing: i) a nor-mative format syntax, and ii) a normative decoding process to retrieve the information coded in a compliant file or bitstream. Such decoding process enables the use of leading-edge com-pression technologies that have exhibited significant compression gains over currently used formats for storage of unaligned and aligned sequencing reads. Additionally, the standard provides a wealth of much needed functionality, such as selective access, data aggregation, ap-plication programming interfaces to the compressed data, standard interfaces to support data protection mechanisms, support for streaming and a procedure to assess the conformance of implementations. ISO/IEC is engaged in supporting the maintenance and availability of the standard specification, which guarantees the perenniality of applications using MPEG-G. Fi-nally, the standard ensures interoperability and integration with existing genomic information processing pipelines by providing support for conversion from the FASTQ/SAM/BAM file formats.\n\nIn this paper we provide an overview of the MPEG-G specification, with particular focus on the main advantages and novel functionality it offers. As the standard only specifies the decoding process, encoding performance, both in terms of speed and compression ratio, can vary depending on specific encoder implementations, and will likely improve during the lifetime of MPEG-G. Hence, the performance statistics provided here are only indicative baseline examples of the technologies included in the standard.

bioinformatics↗