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Holothuria sanctori is a common species of sea cucumber found in the Mediterranean Sea and the Northeast Atlantic Ocean. It typically inhabits shallow rocky and sandy seabeds, where it plays a key ecological role as a sediment engineer processing organic matter ts and thereby contributing to nutrient cycling. As an edible species, H. sanctori is harvested in several countries. Although it is currently listed as a species of "Least Concern" on the IUCN Red List, the absence of a regulatory framework to prevent overexploitation poses a risk of population decline. Given its ecological significance and economic value , H. sanctori has become a focal point in both marine conservation and aquaculture research. The entirety of the genome sequence was assembled into 23 contiguous chromosomal pseudomolecules. This chromosome-level assembly encompasses 1.2 Gb, composed of 135 contigs and 46 scaffolds, with contig and scaffold N50 values of 19.9 Mb and 50.7 Mb, respectively.

Background: Computational tools for phylogenetic inference are now routinely applied to data from historical linguistics, especially cognate data.

Methods: We initially provide an overview of the cognate datasets that are publicly available at present and compare the amount of cognate data with the available masses of molecular data. Then, we outline the drawbacks of the standard binary cognate data representation and introduce an alternative representation that alleviates some of these disadvantages. We also introduce dedicated, parameter-rich evolutionary models for this novel representation. We implement the model and investigate its behavior. In addition, we conduct an orthogonal experiment to investigate whether machine learning-based approaches can be used for cognate data.

Results: Our experiments show that our newly introduced models can currently not be applied, as they exhibit clear indications for overparameterization due to the small size of the available cognate datasets. We demonstrate that, for the same reason, the applicability of emerging machine learning-based approaches to cognate data is highly limited.

Conclusion: We conclude that it is necessary to collect more data, investigate potential data sources, and also consider alternative types of data. Historical linguistics will be able to benefit from recent advances in phylogenetics if the amount of available datasets can be substantially increased, both, in terms of number of datasets, and dataset sizes.

Background: Open Science (OS) aims at accelerating responsible scientific research, promoting transparency in data sharing, and ensuring that data is accessible to all citizens. On the other hand, One Health (OH), an interdisciplinary field addressing outbreaks of zoonotic infectious diseases, relies heavily on data sharing. Considering the current emphasis on OS practices, it is crucial to identify the challenges associated with practicing OS within the multi-sectoral framework of OH. This scoping review explores how OS principles intersect with issues of data ownership, privacy, and participation within India's multi-sectoral OH research ecosystem.

Objective: This study aims to identify the potential challenges and opportunities at the interfaces of OH, OS, society, and policy.

Methods: We conducted a scoping review, adhering to the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-analyses extension for Scoping Reviews (PRISMA-ScR) guidelines. We searched PubMed, Web of Science, Embase (OVID), MEDLINE (OVID), and Global Health to identify the articles. We included original articles and policy briefs on OS, Citizen Science, and OH published between 2013 and 2023. The protocol was preregistered in the Open Science Framework (OSF).

Results: A total of 46 studies met the inclusion criteria. We reviewed 33 original articles, 4 perspectives, 2 commentaries, 2 case studies, 2 policy briefs, 2 protocols, and 1 case report. Key challenges include barriers to cross-sector collaboration, data sharing, weak inter-ministerial collaboration, and challenges in Citizen Science. The study also highlights significant opportunities for advancing OH through improved data sharing techniques, and enhanced collaborative efforts.

Conclusion: Addressing these challenges and opportunities may foster effective collaboration, ethical data sharing in OH. These strategies are crucial for advancing OH framework and improving health at the human-animal-environment interface in India and other low-and middle-income countries. This review underscores the importance of integrating OS for the sustainable development of OH initiatives in these settings.

Background: Nigeria has the highest global prevalence of sickle cell disease (SCD), necessitating effective preventive measures to control the disease. Prenatal diagnosis (PND) is a key early intervention for SCD, yet there is a shortage of studies in Northern Nigeria focusing on mothers of children with SCD. These mothers not only carry the burden of the disease but also face the risk of having more affected children, making them vital stakeholders in managing and controlling SCD. This study assessed the awareness and acceptability of prenatal diagnosis PND for SCD among mothers of children with the disease.

Methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted involving 297 mothers of children with SCD attending the Paediatric Haematology clinic at Ahmadu Bello University Teaching Hospital, Zaria, Nigeria. Data were collected via an interviewer-administered questionnaire addressing the characteristics of the children and mothers, as well as their awareness, attitudes, and acceptability of PND. SPSS version 23 was used for data analysis, with a p-value < 0.05 considered statistically significant.

Results: Most participants (90.9%) were of Hausa ethnicity and 97.0% were of Islamic faith. A majority (77.8%) had less than tertiary education, and 57.9% lacked personal income. Nearly 41% had more than one child affected by SCD, and about one-fifth had lost a child to SCD complications. Only 22.2% of mothers had heard of PND, mostly from healthcare workers, and just 0.3% had undergone the procedure. After receiving information about PND, 93.3% were willing to accept it, though 45% of those who declined cited religious beliefs. Factors associated with PND acceptance included the mother's education and the child's SCD severity.

Conclusion: Awareness of PND among at-risk mothers is low, yet most expressed willingness to accept it. Educational level and disease severity were associated with PND acceptability.

Background: The agricultural sector is one of the leading producers of agro-industrial solid organic waste. This waste, mainly disposed of by incineration or landfilled, could be used for the production of high-value chemicals. In this study, a fermentation process for the production of microbial oil from waste lemon extract (LE), an aqueous side-stream deriving from waste lemon peel and pulp processing, was developed and assessed for its impact. Microbial oil can have many diverse applications, from plasticizers in plastic and rubber compounds to moisturizers in cosmetic formulations.

Methods and results: Characterization of LE revealed that its autoclaving process is effective for increasing the concentration of readily available glucose and fructose, reaching 28.77 ± 0.08 g L ^-1 and 25.68 ± 0.27 g L ^-1. Nitrogen content was measured too, revealing a C/N ratio of 85, optimal for triggering lipid accumulation in the selected microbial cell factory. Therefore, the oleaginous yeast Cutaneotrichosporon oleaginosum was cultivated in an unmodified LE-based medium in 2 L bioreactors, resulting in a lipid accumulation of 0.47 ± 0.08 g _oil g _CDW ^-1. Finally, a new lipid extraction method using green solvents was developed, which allowed to extract and purify 11.79 g of oil, corresponding to 35% of the cell dry weight.The carbon footprint of this laboratory-scale production was estimated to be 71 - 434 kgCO ₂eq kg ^-1 of microbial oil, with electricity consumption of the fermentation step as the main factor. Sensitivity analysis suggests that the overall impact can be reduced with process optimization and scale-up.

Conclusions: The proposed process is promising in terms of production and does not compete with edible resources and land use. However, the microbial oil yield and the downstream must be optimized to make the process sustainable.

Background: Many patients with pelvic floor complaints, including urinary and fecal incontinence, micturition and defecation problems, pelvic organ prolapses, pelvic pain, and painful intercourse, receive pelvic physical therapy treatment. Based on available evidence, pelvic floor complaint profiles, including these complaints, have not been described using real-world pelvic physical therapy records and multi-complaint clustering methods. Pelvic floor complaint profiles may help to enhance therapists' clinical reasoning and patients' understanding and self-disclosure.

Aim: This retrospective file review study explores preliminary complaint profiles and associations between pelvic floor complaints.

Method: Pelvic physical therapists entered recorded pelvic floor complaints from self-selected pregnant, parous, and nulliparous patients' files in an online survey. Complaints were extracted from clinical records and coded as binary (recorded/not recorded). Descriptive statistics and correlations were calculated, and latent class analysis was performed to gain insight into pelvic floor complaint profiles and their associations with pregnancy and parity. Model selection was based on BIC/log-likelihood statistics and expert clinical review.

Results: A model with five profiles was selected based on statistical and theoretical selection criteria. One profile showed the highest probabilities for recorded pelvic pain, one for recorded defecation and micturition problems, one for recorded fecal incontinence and defecation problems, another for recorded pelvic organ prolapses and urinary incontinence, and one for recorded painful intercourse and micturition problems. The first and second profiles appeared most characteristic for pregnant patients, the third and fourth for parous patients, and the fifth for nulliparous patients.

Conclusion: The identified profiles may facilitate the inclusion and consideration of potential contributing factors for combined pelvic floor complaints in clinical practice and scientific research. Addressing pelvic floor complaints in profiles may help pelvic healthcare providers during their history-taking, enhance multidisciplinary treatment approaches, and help patients understand experienced combinations of pelvic floor complaints. This may ultimately benefit women's pelvic health.

This paper examines the formal ways in which textual ambiguity can lead to differing and legitimate readings concerning sex/gender (Fausto-Sterling 2012) as a political issue. Pajtim Statovci's novel My Cat Yugoslavia (2017 [2014]) tells the story of Bekim, whose parents moved the family from Kosovo to Finland in the 1990s due to war. The story is narrated by Bekim and his mother Emine in turn, which, I argue, is a structural dialogism that destabilizes each of the narrators' perspectives. Bekim desires men, which, in the conservative milieu of Albanian Kosovo, is almost unimaginable, although Bekim is now a Finn, albeit marked by in-betweenness. As such, Bekim's initial description of the male sexual act shapes the way in which his mother's description of her marriage in Kosovo in the 1980s is read. I argue that this layered narration is a method of destabilizing gendered and sexual norms and questioning the political import of 'categorical' and 'practical' identities (Hogan 2018). Furthermore, I suggest that the ambiguity concerning sex/gender resulting from the alternating narrative form allows for, and in fact invites, various readings based on readers' politics. As such, textual ambiguity allows for both 'progressive' and 'conservative' readings of sex/gender in the novel, presented here heursitically to imply a multiplicity of other readings, and the ambiguity can be termed a narrative gap (Caracciolo and Guédon 2017; Iser 1978) that is filled in by readers. I also argue that the issue of Bekim's ambiguous sex/gender positioning can be extended to highlight the consequential yet perhaps less-emphasized positioning of Emine as a woman. My Cat Yugoslavia is not only an intervention in queer politics, but also in the politics of feminism and migration.

Early relational health during the first 24 months of life is a key determinant of child development and wellbeing. During this postnatal period, the parent-infant relationship plays a central role in emotional regulation, bonding, and developmental trajectories. Although the broader early relational health framework encompasses the first 1,000 days of life, this scoping review focuses specifically on the postnatal phase, where parent-infant interactions are directly observable and measurable. However, existing assessment instruments vary widely in their conceptual focus, scope, and characteristics, and no comprehensive review has systematically mapped tools used to assess the parent-infant relationship during early infancy. In response to this gap, a transdisciplinary working group within the COST Action CA22114 - TREASURE collaboratively developed a scoping review protocol to systematically map instruments assessing the parent-infant relationship from birth to 24 months of age. This Brief Report describes the collaborative methodological process underpinning the protocol's development. The process followed an iterative, consensus-driven approach involving multidisciplinary experts from multiple COST member countries. Through structured online meetings, the group clarified core constructs and established the age range using the Population-Concept-Context (PCC) framework. The JBI methodology for scoping reviews was adopted and aligned with PRISMA-ScR standards to ensure transparency and reproducibility. Progressive drafting, internal peer review, and iterative refinement led to the final protocol, which was registered on the Open Science Framework (DOI: 10.17605/OSF.IO/HRVX9).The resulting protocol provides a replicable methodological framework for mapping instruments that assess the parent-infant relationship in the first two years of life. This Brief Report presents a framework for collaborative protocol development in international research networks, promoting shared knowledge generation in early relational health research and offering potential applicability to other COST initiatives.

Background: Cruise ships are relatively small, crowded spaces where many people travel in a new environment, making infection control especially important. Proper hand hygiene is the first line of defense against the spread of infection. This study aimed to measure the effectiveness of different hand hygiene improvement measures onboard.

Methods: The study took place on the Celestyal Olympia, a medium-sized cruise ship. Our intervention study had four arms: first, baseline parameters were measured. Then, three different interventions were implemented-surface disinfection with antimicrobial spray, behavioral change through hand hygiene monitoring, and training.

Results: Each person onboard used on average 7.6 soap doses and 1.6 hand-rub doses per day, indicating suboptimal hand hygiene frequency. Surface disinfection sprays were not proven to effectively reduce microbial loads on surfaces. Staff members missed an average of 9.6% of hand surface during hand rubbing when hand hygiene was first monitored. Hand hygiene monitoring devices can only be effective if crew members can use them during their shifts. Designing hand hygiene training for crew members is challenging, as they have very limited preexisting knowledge of health sciences.

Conclusions: Surface disinfection, technique monitoring, and passenger training did not improve hand hygiene in the forms applied in this study. Crew training improved theoretical knowledge, but we were not able to demonstrate any measurable behavioural change. There were some additional lessons from the study. Hand hygiene compliance is primarily determined by the setting-the placement of dispensers and whether passengers are reminded to use them. Language barriers are a limiting factor that should be considered when planning communication strategies for both crew and passengers. On cruise ships, hand hygiene is often associated with food hygiene. While there are clear recommendations in that area, there is a lack of guidelines on how to improve passengers' hand hygiene. Some passengers have strong opinions about hand hygiene-either positive or negative-but they are a minority. The majority of passengers are not interested on hand hygiene; they perform it when the setting is optimal but otherwise skip it. Clear recommendations are needed to establish an environment that effectively promotes hand hygiene.

Dendarus foraminosus Mulsant and Rey, 1855 is a darkling beetle in the family Tenebrionidae and one of the many Dendarus species endemic to the island of Crete. Dendarus foraminosus is a commonly found species and is widespread in the lowland and montane phrygana and maquis of central Crete. The species is classified as Least Concern (LC) by the IUCN Red List. The reference genome of Dendarus foraminosus will enable phylogenetic, population, and evolutionary research regarding this endemic species and its close relatives. A total of 11 contiguous chromosomal pseudomolecules (sex chromosomes included) were assembled from the genome sequence. This chromosome-level assembly encompasses 0.59 Gb, composed of 430 contigs and 415 scaffolds, with contig and scaffold N50 values of 24.4 Mb and 51.9 Mb, respectively.