ASU Scholarship Showcase

Background: Emerging interventions that rely on and harness variability in behavior to adapt to individual performance over time may outperform interventions that prescribe static goals (e.g., 10,000 steps/day). The purpose of this factorial trial was to compare adaptive vs. static goal setting and immediate vs. delayed, non-contingent financial rewards for increasing free-living physical activity (PA).

Methods: A 4-month 2 × 2 factorial randomized controlled trial tested main effects for goal setting (adaptive vs. static goals) and rewards (immediate vs. delayed) and interactions between factors to increase steps/day as measured by a Fitbit Zip. Moderate-to-vigorous PA (MVPA) minutes/day was examined as a secondary outcome.

Results: Participants (N = 96) were mainly female (77%), aged 41 ± 9.5 years, and all were insufficiently active and overweight/obese (mean BMI = 34.1 ± 6.2). Participants across all groups increased by 2389 steps/day on average from baseline to intervention phase (p < .001). Participants receiving static goals showed a stronger increase in steps per day from baseline phase to intervention phase (2630 steps/day) than those receiving adaptive goals (2149 steps/day; difference = 482 steps/day, p = .095). Participants receiving immediate rewards showed stronger improvement (2762 step/day increase) from baseline to intervention phase than those receiving delayed rewards (2016 steps/day increase; difference = 746 steps/day, p = .009). However, the adaptive goals group showed a slower decrease in steps/day from the beginning of the intervention phase to the end of the intervention phase (i.e. less than half the rate) compared to the static goals group (−7.7 steps vs. -18.3 steps each day; difference = 10.7 steps/day, p < .001) resulting in better improvements for the adaptive goals group by study end. Rate of change over the intervention phase did not differ between reward groups. Significant goal phase x goal setting x reward interactions were observed.

Conclusions: Adaptive goals outperformed static goals (i.e., 10,000 steps) over a 4-month period. Small immediate rewards outperformed larger, delayed rewards. Adaptive goals with either immediate or delayed rewards should be preferred for promoting PA.

Linnorm is a novel normalization and transformation method for the analysis of single cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) data. Linnorm is developed to remove technical noises and simultaneously preserve biological variations in scRNA-seq data, such that existing statistical methods can be improved. Using real scRNA-seq data, we compared Linnorm with existing normalization methods, including NODES, SAMstrt, SCnorm, scran, DESeq and TMM. Linnorm shows advantages in speed, technical noise removal and preservation of cell heterogeneity, which can improve existing methods in the discovery of novel subtypes, pseudo-temporal ordering of cells, clustering analysis, etc. Linnorm also performs better than existing DEG analysis methods, including BASiCS, NODES, SAMstrt, Seurat and DESeq2, in false positive rate control and accuracy.

Cities in the Global South face rapid urbanization challenges and often suffer an acute lack of infrastructure and governance capacities. Smart Cities Mission, in India, launched in 2015, aims to offer a novel approach for urban renewal of 100 cities following an area‐based development approach, where the use of ICT and digital technologies is particularly emphasized. This article presents a critical review of the design and implementation framework of this new urban renewal program across selected case‐study cities. The article examines the claims of the so‐called “smart cities” against actual urban transformation on‐ground and evaluates how “inclusive” and “sustainable” these developments are. We quantify the scale and coverage of the smart city urban renewal projects in the cities to highlight who the program includes and excludes. The article also presents a statistical analysis of the sectoral focus and budgetary allocations of the projects under the Smart Cities Mission to find an inherent bias in these smart city initiatives in terms of which types of development they promote and the ones it ignores. The findings indicate that a predominant emphasis on digital urban renewal of selected precincts and enclaves, branded as “smart cities,” leads to deepening social polarization and gentrification. The article offers crucial urban planning lessons for designing ICT‐driven urban renewal projects, while addressing critical questions around inclusion and sustainability in smart city ventures.`

Two distinct monocyte (Mo)/macrophage (Mp) subsets (Ly6C^low and Ly6C^hi) orchestrate cardiac recovery process following myocardial infarction (MI). Prostaglandin (PG) E₂ is involved in the Mo/Mp-mediated inflammatory response, however, the role of its receptors in Mos/Mps in cardiac healing remains to be determined. Here we show that pharmacological inhibition or gene ablation of the Ep3 receptor in mice suppresses accumulation of Ly6C^low Mos/Mps in infarcted hearts. Ep3 deletion in Mos/Mps markedly attenuates healing after MI by reducing neovascularization in peri-infarct zones. Ep3 deficiency diminishes CX3C chemokine receptor 1 (CX3CR1) expression and vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) secretion in Mos/Mps by suppressing TGFβ1 signaling and subsequently inhibits Ly6C^low Mos/Mps migration and angiogenesis. Targeted overexpression of Ep3 receptors in Mos/Mps improves wound healing by enhancing angiogenesis. Thus, the PGE₂/Ep3 axis promotes cardiac healing after MI by activating reparative Ly6C^low Mos/Mps, indicating that Ep3 receptor activation may be a promising therapeutic target for acute MI.

Modeling of transcriptional regulatory networks (TRNs) has been increasingly used to dissect the nature of gene regulation. Inference of regulatory relationships among transcription factors (TFs) and genes, especially among multiple TFs, is still challenging. In this study, we introduced an integrative method, LogicTRN, to decode TF–TF interactions that form TF logics in regulating target genes. By combining cis-regulatory logics and transcriptional kinetics into one single model framework, LogicTRN can naturally integrate dynamic gene expression data and TF-DNA-binding signals in order to identify the TF logics and to reconstruct the underlying TRNs. We evaluated the newly developed methodology using simulation, comparison and application studies, and the results not only show their consistence with existing knowledge, but also demonstrate its ability to accurately reconstruct TRNs in biological complex systems.

Background: Advancements in geographic information systems over the past two decades have increased the specificity by which an individual’s neighborhood environment may be spatially defined for physical activity and health research. This study investigated how different types of street network buffering methods compared in measuring a set of commonly used built environment measures (BEMs) and tested their performance on associations with physical activity outcomes.

Methods: An internationally-developed set of objective BEMs using three different spatial buffering techniques were used to evaluate the relative differences in resulting explanatory power on self-reported physical activity outcomes. BEMs were developed in five countries using ‘sausage,’ ‘detailed-trimmed,’ and ‘detailed,’ network buffers at a distance of 1 km around participant household addresses (n = 5883).

Results: BEM values were significantly different (p < 0.05) for 96% of sausage versus detailed-trimmed buffer comparisons and 89% of sausage versus detailed network buffer comparisons. Results showed that BEM coefficients in physical activity models did not differ significantly across buffering methods, and in most cases BEM associations with physical activity outcomes had the same level of statistical significance across buffer types. However, BEM coefficients differed in significance for 9% of the sausage versus detailed models, which may warrant further investigation.

Conclusions: Results of this study inform the selection of spatial buffering methods to estimate physical activity outcomes using an internationally consistent set of BEMs. Using three different network-based buffering methods, the findings indicate significant variation among BEM values, however associations with physical activity outcomes were similar across each buffering technique. The study advances knowledge by presenting consistently assessed relationships between three different network buffer types and utilitarian travel, sedentary behavior, and leisure-oriented physical activity outcomes.

Background: The World Health Organization recommends strategies to improve urban design, public transportation, and recreation facilities to facilitate physical activity for non-communicable disease prevention for an increasingly urbanized global population. Most evidence supporting environmental associations with physical activity comes from single countries or regions with limited variation in urban form. This paper documents variation in comparable built environment features across countries from diverse regions.

Methods: The International Physical Activity and the Environment Network (IPEN) study of adults aimed to measure the full range of variation in the built environment using geographic information systems (GIS) across 12 countries on 5 continents. Investigators in Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Colombia, the Czech Republic, Denmark, China, Mexico, New Zealand, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States followed a common research protocol to develop internationally comparable measures. Using detailed instructions, GIS-based measures included features such as walkability (i.e., residential density, street connectivity, mix of land uses), and access to public transit, parks, and private recreation facilities around each participant’s residential address using 1-km and 500-m street network buffers.

Results: Eleven of 12 countries and 15 cities had objective GIS data on built environment features. We observed a 38-fold difference in median residential densities, a 5-fold difference in median intersection densities and an 18-fold difference in median park densities. Hong Kong had the highest and North Shore, New Zealand had the lowest median walkability index values, representing a difference of 9 standard deviations in GIS-measured walkability.

Conclusions: Results show that comparable measures can be created across a range of cultural settings revealing profound global differences in urban form relevant to physical activity. These measures allow cities to be ranked more precisely than previously possible. The highly variable measures of urban form will be used to explain individuals’ physical activity, sedentary behaviors, body mass index, and other health outcomes on an international basis. Present measures provide the ability to estimate dose–response relationships from projected changes to the built environment that would otherwise be impossible.

It remains challenging to predict regulatory variants in particular tissues or cell types due to highly context-specific gene regulation. By connecting large-scale epigenomic profiles to expression quantitative trait loci (eQTLs) in a wide range of human tissues/cell types, we identify critical chromatin features that predict variant regulatory potential. We present cepip, a joint likelihood framework, for estimating a variant’s regulatory probability in a context-dependent manner. Our method exhibits significant GWAS signal enrichment and is superior to existing cell type-specific methods. Furthermore, using phenotypically relevant epigenomes to weight the GWAS single-nucleotide polymorphisms, we improve the statistical power of the gene-based association test.