University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

The urinary pathobiont Actinobaculum massiliense can generate androgens via the dirAB pathway

While overlooked during the Human Microbiome Project, characterizing the urinary microbiota in health and disease is a new frontier in microbiome science. Recent studies have associated differential abundance of bacterial taxa including Propionimicrobium lymphophilum and Actinoba...

Microsynteny Analysis Clarifies the Early Diversification of Cypriniform Fishes

While genomic data are powerfully informative for phylogenetic inference, traditional sequence-based analyses can be confounded by issues like homoplasy and incomplete lineage sorting, leaving deep nodes unresolved. Synteny, the conservation of gene order along a chromosome, pres...

Monte Carlo simulation of testing requirements for chronic wasting disease (CWD) surveillance via hunter-harvest in Illinois, USA

Managing chronic wasting disease (CWD) – a fatal, transmissible prion disease of cervids – has many challenges, such as determining the number of cervids to test to accurately estimate true prevalence with apparent prevalence. Options range from basic equations to complex techniq...

Sums of Schubert structure constants with bounded Coxeter length

Pak–Robichaux recently introduced a signed puzzle rule for Schubert structure constants, which they use to show that sums γ k ( n ) of these constants with a bounded number of inversions are polynomial. We give a different, conceptual proof that γ k ( n ) is (eventually) polynomi...

A genomic catalog of Earth’s bacterial and archaeal symbionts

1 SUMMARY Microbial symbiosis drives the functional and phylogenomic diversification of life on Earth, yet remains underexplored due to culturing challenges. This study employed machine learning (ML) to predict symbiotic lifestyles in hundreds of thousands of microbial genomes fr...

Neural Probabilistic Circuits: Enabling Compositional and Interpretable Predictions Through Logical Reasoning

Abstract End-to-end deep neural networks have achieved remarkable success across various domains but are often criticized for their lack of interpretability. While post hoc explanation methods attempt to address this issue, they often fail to accurately represent these black-box...

Abridged Retinal Fluorescence Lifetimes in Glaucoma

This study investigates the relationship between glaucoma and retinal fluorescence lifetimes using FLIO. The results show that participants with glaucoma have shorter mean lifetimes compared to those without glaucoma, even after adjusting for age and diabetes status. The study su...

Abridged Retinal Fluorescence Lifetimes in Glaucoma

This study investigates the relationship between glaucoma and retinal fluorescence lifetimes using FLIO. The results show that participants with glaucoma have shorter mean lifetimes compared to those without glaucoma, even after adjusting for age and diabetes status. The study su...

Taking Aristotle seriously in liberal democracy

This paper replies to Randall Curren’s review of my book, Against Aristotelian Character Education. I argue that Curren’s response leaves the book’s central dilemma untouched. First, I argue that liberal freedom and equality place demands on compulsory public education that exten...

Dams trigger long-term river-floodplain decoupling in dynamic Andean foreland rivers

Andean foreland rivers are preferential sites for ongoing and planned hydroelectric dam construction in the Amazon Basin. These rivers are characterized by high sediment fluxes that drive rapid rates of channel migration, large river-floodplain sediment exchanges, and creatediver...

Well-connected community detection at extreme scale: shared- and distributed-memory parallel algorithms

Abstract Community detection algorithms such as Leiden frequently produce clusters thatare internally disconnected or poorly connected, limiting their utility indownstream network analysis. The Well-Connected Clusters (WCC) and ConnectivityModifier (CM) algorithms address this by...

Zeros of L-functions and large partial sums of Dirichlet coefficients

Abstract Let $$L(s,\pi )=\sum _{n=1}^{\infty }\lambda _{\pi }(n)n^{-s}$$ L ( s , π ) = ∑ n = 1 ∞ λ π ( n ) n - s be an L -function that satisfies a weak form of the generalized Ramanujan conjecture. We prove that large partial sums of $$\lambda _{\pi }(n)$$ λ π ( n ) strongly rep...

Socio-Environmental Characterization of Artisanal Fishers in the Lower Magdalena River Estuarine Zone: Implications for Water Governance and Monitoring Systems

Artisanal fisheries are fundamental to riverine socioecological systems, yet fishing communities remain underrepresented in environmental governance and decision-making. This gap constrains the incorporation of local knowledge into environmental decision-making and may reduce the...

Estimating the Number of Components in Finite Mixture Models via Variational Approximation

This work introduces a new method for selecting the number of components in finite mixture models (FMMs) using variational Bayes, inspired by the large-sample properties of the Evidence Lower Bound (ELBO) derived from mean-field (MF) variational approximation. Specifically, we es...

Does Race Influence Velopharyngeal Structure Size and Velar Stretch During Sustained Phoneme Production in Children?

Purpose: Differences in the size of velopharyngeal structures across racial groups at rest have been described in the literature, with race influencing adenoid thickness, pharyngeal depth, effective velar length, and velar length. The purpose of this study was to examine differen...

Recent strengthening of eastern Pacific ENSO in the last millennium paleorecord

The Pacific El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) generates climate extremes that endanger ecosystems, infrastructure, and human well-being worldwide. The response of this system to climate warming is poorly constrained, due both to data scarcity and uncertainties in climate models...

How Norms Depend on the Presence and Status of Observers: The Relational Contingency of Everyday Behaviors in 90 Societies

Norms are fundamental to social life, but basic questions about how they are affected by social context remain. Specifically, how do normative constraints depend on the presence and status of observers, and how do such relational contingencies vary across cultures? Using data fro...

Experimental investigation of low GWP refrigerants in-tube flow condensation for medium-temperature heat pump applications

The shift toward low global warming potential (low-GWP) refrigerants has increased interest in alternatives such as R-1234ze(E), R-1233zd(E), and R-1234yf for medium to high-temperature heat pump systems. However, experimental condensation data for these refrigerants at medium-to...

Discovery and engineering of enzymes for new-to-nature photobiocatalysis

Photobiocatalysis integrates enzymatic catalysis with photochemistry, enabling challenging radical transformations with high selectivity under mild conditions. Early developments in this field were largely driven by the discovery that enzyme-bound cofactors can form photoactive c...

The urinary tract commensal Peptoniphilus spp. encodes a novel 17β-hydroxysteroid dehydrogenase

ABSTRACT Microbial steroid metabolism represents an underappreciated extension of the vertebrate endocrine system, with growing evidence that host-associated microbes contribute to the diversity and bioavailability of sex steroids to human tissues. Emerging studies have linked mi...