Springer Nature

Dr. Nicole Petersen is an assistant professor in the department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at UCLA. Her commentary is a new paper in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology called “Spotlighting SHAPERS: sex hormones associated with psychological and endocrine roles.” Dr. Petersen starts the paper describing an unnamed signaling molecule that can affect the physical structure of the brain and that seems to be related to a wide number of psychological and neurological conditions. Then she reveals that this is estradiol. The point she makes in the paper is that estrogen isn’t the only neuroactive substance that affects the brain in ways that we just don’t understand.

Read the full study here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41386-024-01819-0

In this second of our special episodes on the 2024 PopGroup conference, we hear from Mark Kirkpatrick, who gave the plenary talk which was the climactic end to the meeting. Mark tells us why he loves Popgroup, what his conference talk was about and what questions he's excited to dig into next.

This episode involves a conversation with senior investigator Linda de Vries, who has had a large and lasting effect in the world of pediatric research.

PopGroup is the beloved annual meeting of the Population Genetics group of the Genetics Society. This episode we hear from Mike Richie, lead organiser at this year's host organisation - the University of St Andrews, from plenary speaker Susan Johnston and from student prizewinner Diana Lobo.

The United Nations recently stated that “climate change is the defining issue of our time, and we are at a defining moment” (https://www.un.org/en/global-issues/climate-change). This statement ended the political debate about the role of human activities in climate change. Global climate change is happening and it will have a profound effect on our children.

Listen and learn from Dr. Kari Nadeau the Chair of Environmental Health from Harvard School of Public Health and one of the guest editors of Pediatric Research's special issue on climate change (https://www.nature.com/collections/chjjihfaec).

Read Dr. Nadeau's editorial here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41390-022-02290-7

Serotonin is a critical chemical when it comes to a number of psychiatric conditions, such as OCD, where it seems to play a particular role in cognitive flexibility. That is, serotonin levels are related to the fact that someone is perseverating on intrusive thoughts or compulsions and isn’t able to be as flexible as otherwise would be necessary.

Trevor Robbins, professor of cognitive neuroscience at the University of Cambridge, is one of the authors of a recent study titled Comparable roles for serotonin in rats and humans for computations underlying flexible decision-making, and he says such cognitive flexibility also plays a role in depression and schizophrenia.

Read the full study here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41386-023-01762-6

Each year Heredity awards a prize for the best student paper in the journal, this episode Ellen Nikelski, talking about her paper and how it feels to have been the winner in 2023.

Illness severity scores are commonly used for mortality prediction and risk stratification in pediatric critical care research. However, as mortality has steadily declined in the pediatric intensive care unit there has been increasing attention given to evaluating non-mortality outcomes in survivors.

In this episode we meet Early Career Investigator Elizabeth Killien from Seattle Children's Hospital. In order to evaluate the ability of two commonly used illness severity scores to predict morbidity outcomes, she performed a secondary analysis of the Life After Pediatric Sepsis Evaluation (LAPSE) multicenter longitudinal cohort study of functional and health-related quality of life outcomes among survivors of septic shock.

Read the full article here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41390-023-02619-w

One of the big decisions in planning a genetic study is what kind of sequencing approach to use. This episode we talk to Daria Martchenko and Aaron Shafer (Trent University, Canada), whose paper compares and contrasts whole genomes to RADseq in a study of mountain goat demography and adaptive history.

This episode, along with a few more to come, involves a conversation with a senior investigator who has had a large and lasting effect in the world of pediatric research. The Early Career Investigator episodes will still be coming once a month, but hopefully this will add a bit of variety to the Pediapod feed and shine a light on some of the pioneers who have helped shape the face of modern Pediatrics. This episode features Dr. Max Vento.

Read Max Vento's biocommentary here: www.nature.com/documents/Max_Vento_Biocommentary.pdf