Hospital for Sick Children

About: Hospital for Sick Children is a healthcare organization based out in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Medicine. The organization has 4097 authors who have published 3746 publications receiving 129066 citations. The organization is also known as: Sick Kids Hospital & SickKids.

How High-Functioning Children with Autism Understand Real and Deceptive Emotion

Abstract: Autism is associated with problems in understanding and expressing emotion. We compared the ability of eight high- functioning children with autism (i.e. those with IQ scores ≥ 70) and eight age- and gender-matched controls with similar oral language development, to understand the facial expression of real and deceptive emotion. Children with autism had limited understanding of socially derived emotion. Although they could relate emotions to standard facial expressions, they were less able than controls to indicate the real emotions story characters feel, the deceptive emotions they express in the face, or the social reasons prompting a deceptive facial expression. For high- function children with autism, facial expressions may function as lexical codes but not as forms of social communication that modify beliefs.

Intercellular network structure and regulatory motifs in the human hematopoietic system

Abstract: The hematopoietic system is a distributed tissue that consists of functionally distinct cell types continuously produced through hematopoietic stem cell (HSC) differentiation. Combining genomic and phenotypic data with high-content experiments, we have built a directional cell–cell communication network between 12 cell types isolated from human umbilical cord blood. Network structure analysis revealed that ligand production is cell type dependent, whereas ligand binding is promiscuous. Consequently, additional control strategies such as cell frequency modulation and compartmentalization were needed to achieve specificity in HSC fate regulation. Incorporating the in vitro effects (quiescence, self-renewal, proliferation, or differentiation) of 27 HSC binding ligands into the topology of the cell–cell communication network allowed coding of cell type-dependent feedback regulation of HSC fate. Pathway enrichment analysis identified intracellular regulatory motifs enriched in these cell type- and ligand-coupled responses. This study uncovers cellular mechanisms of hematopoietic cell feedback in HSC fate regulation, provides insight into the design principles of the human hematopoietic system, and serves as a foundation for the analysis of intercellular regulation in multicellular systems.