McGill University

About: McGill University is a education organization based out in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Poison control. The organization has 72688 authors who have published 162565 publications receiving 6966523 citations. The organization is also known as: Royal institution of advanced learning & University of McGill College.

Genetic variation in the 5q31 cytokine gene cluster confers susceptibility to Crohn disease.

Abstract: Linkage disequilibrium (LD) mapping provides a powerful method for fine-structure localization of rare disease genes, but has not yet been widely applied to common disease1. We sought to design a systematic approach for LD mapping and apply it to the localization of a gene (IBD5) conferring susceptibility to Crohn disease. The key issues are: (i) to detect a significant LD signal (ii) to rigorously bound the critical region and (iii) to identify the causal genetic variant within this region. We previously mapped the IBD5 locus to a large region spanning 18 cM of chromosome 5q31 (P<10−4). Using dense genetic maps of microsatellite markers and single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) across the entire region, we found strong evidence of LD. We bound the region to a common haplotype spanning 250 kb that shows strong association with the disease (P<2×10−7) and contains the cytokine gene cluster. This finding provides overwhelming evidence that a specific common haplotype of the cytokine region in 5q31 confers susceptibility to Crohn disease. However, genetic evidence alone is not sufficient to identify the causal mutation within this region, as strong LD across the region results in multiple SNPs having equivalent genetic evidence—each consistent with the expected properties of the IBD5 locus. These results have important implications for Crohn disease in particular and LD mapping in general.

Active Starvation Responses Mediate Antibiotic Tolerance in Biofilms and Nutrient-Limited Bacteria

Abstract: Bacteria become highly tolerant to antibiotics when nutrients are limited. The inactivity of antibiotic targets caused by starvation-induced growth arrest is thought to be a key mechanism producing tolerance. Here we show that the antibiotic tolerance of nutrient-limited and biofilm Pseudomonas aeruginosa is mediated by active responses to starvation, rather than by the passive effects of growth arrest. The protective mechanism is controlled by the starvation-signaling stringent response (SR), and our experiments link SR-mediated tolerance to reduced levels of oxidant stress in bacterial cells. Furthermore, inactivating this protective mechanism sensitized biofilms by several orders of magnitude to four different classes of antibiotics and markedly enhanced the efficacy of antibiotic treatment in experimental infections.

The Ubuntu Dialogue Corpus: A Large Dataset for Research in Unstructured Multi-Turn Dialogue Systems

Abstract: This paper introduces the Ubuntu Dialogue Corpus, a dataset containing almost 1 million multi-turn dialogues, with a total of over 7 million utterances and 100 million words. This provides a unique resource for research into building dialogue managers based on neural language models that can make use of large amounts of unlabeled data. The dataset has both the multi-turn property of conversations in the Dialog State Tracking Challenge datasets, and the unstructured nature of interactions from microblog services such as Twitter. We also describe two neural learning architectures suitable for analyzing this dataset, and provide benchmark performance on the task of selecting the best next response.