Germline variants in leukemia predisposition genes are increasingly detected in pediatric patients. Nevertheless, the rare variants identified in diagnostic samples may be misinterpreted without variant-level functional evaluation and cautious clinical interpretation. Whole-exome sequencing was performed on 28 individuals from five kindreds in which at least two children developed acute leukemia. Results identified a rare ETV6...

Improving cognitively healthy survival is important for achieving healthy aging. Therefore, it would be valuable to estimate the future risk of either incident dementia or death in community-dwelling older adults. This study aimed to develop a set of risk prediction models for either incident dementia or death that can be applied according to data availability across diverse clinical settings, using longitudinal data from comm...

Understanding marine surface fish diversity is crucial for ecosystem management. However, the traditional sampling methods are often invasive, costly, or unsuitable for certain species or locations. Environmental DNA (eDNA) metabarcoding provides a non-invasive and relatively cheap alternative to explore patterns of diversity. It is important to recognize that, eDNA-based inference can vary across sampling methods, potentially...

Patients with chronic hepatitis B (CHB) are at risk of developing hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) during treatment with nucleos(t)ide analogs (NAs). Several factors, including abnormal ALT levels during NA treatment, are associated with HCC risk; however, the mechanisms of ALT abnormalities remain unknown. Here, deletions in the preS1/2 region of the hepatitis B virus (HBV) genome were evaluated in the context of persistent ALT...

Adverse or fluctuating weather conditions can negatively affect health, causing symptoms known as weather-related pain. Although pharmacological treatments, including painkillers, are commonly used, they frequently provide only symptomatic relief and may cause side effects. Therefore, interest in non-pharmacological and dietary interventions is increasing. While inner ear sensitivity to barometric pressure fluctuations—activat...

Diet is widely considered essential in dementia, but its association with white matter lesions (WMLs) remains unclear. This cross-sectional study investigated the associations between dietary patterns, dementia, and WMLs in a large, nationwide, multicenter population of older Japanese adults. A total of 8,938 adults (aged ≥ 65; 73 ± 6.3 years old) from the Japan Prospective Studies Collaboration for Aging and Dementia (JPSC-AD...

Charrs ( Salvelinus ) reach their southernmost distribution in Japan, and are uniquely adapted to the short, steep streams of this island archipelago. Southern Asian Dolly Varden ( Salvelinus curilus ) occur only in Hokkaido Island, whereas white-spotted charr ( Salvelinus leucomaenis ) range to southern Honshu. Both species diverged from an ancestral lineage during the late Pliocene/early Pleistocene, when lowered sea levels...

In social hymenopterans, monandry of the queen is an ancestral trait, and polyandry is a derived trait. Polyandry of the queen is the norm in a limited number of lineages, such as honeybees, leaf-cutting ants, Pogonomyrmex ants, and Vespula wasps, which presumably provide fitness advantages for the whole colony. The queen of the introduced bumblebee, Bombus terrestris , is polyandrous in Japan, whereas it is monandrous in nati...

Dinoflagellate is one of the most diverse and pervasive protists and a fundamental player in the marine food web dynamics and biogeochemical cycles. While possessing different nutritional strategies from purely autotrophy or heterotrophy to mixotrophy, some of them are also known as toxic harmful algal bloom (HAB) formers over the world. Despite their ordinariness, their diversity and biogeography are understudied in the open...

Introduction Small pelagic fishes constitute large proportions of fisheries and are important components linking lower and higher trophic levels in marine ecosystems. Many small pelagic fishes in the Northwest Pacific spawn upstream in the Kuroshio and spend their juvenile stage in the Kuroshio Front area, indicating that the Kuroshio Current system impacts their stock fluctuations. However, the distribution of these fish rela...