Cooperative cellular phenotypes are universal across multicellular life. Division of labor, regulated proliferation, and controlled cell death are essential in the maintenance of a multicellular body. Breakdowns in these cooperative phenotypes are foundational in understanding the initiation and progression of neoplastic diseases, such as cancer. Cooperative cellular phenotypes are straightforward to characterize in extant species but the selective pressures that drove their emergence at the transition(s) to multicellularity have yet to be fully characterized. Here we seek to understand how a dynamic environment shaped the emergence of two mechanisms of regulated cell survival: apoptosis and senescence. We developed an agent-based model to test the time to extinction or stability in each of these phenotypes across three levels of stochastic environments.

Early detection of disease is essential for alleviating disease burden, increasing success rate and decreasing mortality rate especially for cancer. To improve disease diagnostics, many candidate biomarkers have been suggested using molecular biology or image analysis techniques over the past decade. The receiver operating characteristics (ROC) curve is a standard technique to evaluate a diagnostic accuracy of biomarkers, but it has some limitations especially for heterogeneous diseases. As an alternative of the ROC curve analysis, we suggest a jittered dot plot (JDP) and JDP-based evaluation measures, above mean difference (AMD) and averaged above mean difference (AAMD). We demonstrate how JDP and AMD or AAMD together better evaluate biomarkers than the standard ROC curve. We analyze real and heterogeneous basal-like breast cancer data.

Obesity has reached epidemic proportions all around the world, and it has doubled in prevalence in both adults and children in over 70 countries from 1980 to 2015 (Afshin et al., 2017). Excessive weight gain in this proportion has been shown to negatively affect human cognition, reward neurocircuitry, stress responsiveness, and quality of life (Morris et al., 2015). Obesity is an example of a complex interaction between the environment (i.e., high fat diets) and heredity (i.e., polygenic patterns of inheritance). The overconsumption of a high-fat diet (HFD) is an environmental factor that commonly induces weight gain (Hariri & Thibault, 2010). Two dietary-induced phenotypes have been observed in rats as a bimodal distribution of weight gain: obesity-prone (OP) and obesity-resistant (OR). Levin et al. (1997) investigated male and female HFD-fed Sprague-Dawley rats designated as OR when their weight gains were less than the heaviest chow-fed controls, and OP when their weight gains were greater than the heaviest chow-fed controls. OP rats showed greater weight gain, similar energy intake (EI), and similar feed efficiency (FE) compared to OR rats. Pagliassotti et al. (1997) designated male HFD-fed Wistar rats as OP and OR based on upper and lower tertiles of weight gain. OP rats displayed greater weight gain and EI than OR rats. These investigations highlight a predicament regarding rodent research in obesity: independent variables such as rat age, gender, strain, distribution of dietary macronutrients, and fatty acid composition of HFD and chow vary considerably, making it challenging to generalize data. Our experiment utilized outbred male Sprague-Dawley rats (5-6 weeks) administered a chow diet (19% energy from fat; 3.1 kcal/g) and a lard-based HFD (60% energy from fat; 5.24 kcal/g) over eight weeks. Separate rat populations were examined over three consecutive years (2017-2020), and independent obesogenic environmental variables were controlled. We investigated the persistence of weight gain, EI, and FE in HFD-fed rats inclusive of a population of designated OP and OR rats based on tertiles of weight gain. We define persistence as being p > 0.05. We hypothesize that the profiles (periodic data) of the dependent variables (weight gain, EI, FE) will be similar and persistent throughout the three separate years, but the magnitudes (cumulative data) of the dependent variables will differ. Our findings demonstrate that HFD, OP, and OR groups were persistent for periodic and cumulative weight gain, along with FE across the three consecutive independent years. Our findings also demonstrate impersistence for periodic EI in all groups, along with impersistence in cumulative EI for CHOW, OP, and OR groups. Therefore, our results allude to an inconsistent relationship between EI and weight gain, indicating that EI does not completely explain weight gain. Thus, the weakness between EI and weight gain relationship may be attributed to a polygenic pattern of inheritance, possibly signaling a weight setpoint regardless of EI.

Bioethics is an important aspect of the core competency of biology of understanding the relationship between science and society, but because of the controversial nature of the topics covered in bioethics courses, different groups of students may experience identity conflicts or discomfort when learning about them. However, no previous studies have investigated the impact of undergraduate bioethics students’ experiences in bioethics courses on their opinions and comfort. To fill this gap in knowledge, we investigated undergraduate bioethics students’ attitudes about and comfort when learning abortion, gene editing, and physician assisted suicide, as well as how their gender, religious, and political identity influence their attitudes and changes in their attitudes after instruction. We found that religious students were less supportive of gene editing, abortion, and physician assisted suicide than nonreligious students, non-liberal students were less supportive of abortion and physician assisted suicide than liberal students, and women were less supportive of abortion than men. Additionally, we found that religious students were less comfortable than nonreligious students when learning about gene editing, abortion, and physician assisted suicide, and non-liberal students were less comfortable than liberal students when learning about abortion. When asked how their comfort could have been improved, those who felt that their peers or instructors could have done something to increase their comfort most commonly cited that including additional unbiased materials or incorporating materials and discussions that cover both sides of every controversial issue would have helped them to feel more comfortable when learning about gene editing, abortion, and physician assisted suicide. Finally, we found that students who were less comfortable learning about abortion and physician assisted suicide were less likely to participate in discussions regarding those topics. Our findings show that students in different groups not only tend to have different support for controversial topics like gene editing, abortion, and physician assisted suicide, but they also feel differentially comfortable when learning about them, which in turn impacts their participation. We hope that this work helps instructors to recognize the importance of their students’ comfort to their learning in bioethics courses, and from this study, they can take away the knowledge that students feel their comfort could be most improved by the incorporation of additional inclusive materials and course discussions regarding the controversial topics covered in the course.