Flavonoids are a key class of polyphenols, i.e., phytochemical compounds present in foods and beverages, which have been described as having health benefits in preventing several chronic diseases. Estimating flavonoid intake has already been conducted in several countries but has yet to be performed in Portugal. This study included 5,005 participants aged 3-84 years and aimed to estimate dietary flavonoid intake in the Portuguese population, using data from the National Food and Physical Activity Survey 2015-2016, providing information on intake, main food contributors, and the socio-demographic factors associated with the intake. Food intake data from the Survey was converted to flavonoid intake using a database built to include the most updated USDA databases on flavonoids, isoflavones and proanthocyanidins, and the Phenol-Explorer database. The rationale for combining food consumption data and different flavonoid databases using the FoodEx2 classification system was established. Linear regressions assessed the associations between socio-demographic factors and dietary flavonoid intake. The total flavonoid intake of the Portuguese population was estimated to be 107.3 mg/day. Flavanols were the most representative subclass, followed by flavonols, anthocyanidins, flavanones, flavones and isoflavones. Fruits and vegetables were the primary food contributors, providing 31.5% and 12.4% of the total flavonoid intake. Adolescents had the lowest total flavonoid intake, and older adults had the highest. This study provides information on the Portuguese population’s dietary flavonoids, allowing for international comparisons. It can also streamline forthcoming investigations into the link between flavonoid consumption and its impact on health, contributing to the future establishment of dietary reference values.

There has been a growing recognition of the significant role played by the human gut microbiota in altering the bioavailability as well as the pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic aspects of orally ingested xenobiotic and biotic molecules. The determination of species-specific contributions to the metabolism of biotic and xenobiotic molecules has the potential to aid in the development of new therapeutic and nutraceutical molecules that can modulate human gut microbiota. Here we present “GutBugDB,” an open-access digital repository that provides information on potential gut microbiome-mediated biotransformation of biotic and xenobiotic molecules using the predictions from the GutBug tool. This database is constructed using metabolic proteins from 690 gut bacterial genomes and 363,872 protein enzymes assigned with their EC numbers (with representative Expasy ID and domains present). It provides information on gut microbiome enzyme-mediated metabolic biotransformation for 1439 FDA-approved drugs and nutraceuticals. GutBugDB is publicly available at https://metabiosys.iiserb.ac.in/gutbugdb/.

In the past decades, a backlash against globalization has been brewing, especially in advanced economies. Despite this backlash being only partly determined by trade, we observe an increasing demand for transparency on procedures, methodologies, and results. Impact assessments (IAs) aim at identifying expected effects of trade agreements and at highlighting policymakers' concerns, thus representing an important tool to foster public acceptance. To help us identify spillovers of trade liberalization, we construct a country and sector-specific database of impact assessments. This database provides an overview of the evolution of the coverage and methodological approaches taken by the EU and US for their IAs. We rely on official EU and US sources over the period 1990–2023. We first observe differences in terms of methodology and institutional framework within and between the two regions. Secondly, the coverage of non-trade outcomes has evolved over time both for the EU and the US, with the inclusion of more labour, environmental, and human rights indicators as well as cross-cutting issues. We observe that the depth of the evaluation is correlated with the partner country's social protection and environmental performance. Lastly, we find that the inclusion of a sector in the analysis is driven by economic reasons in the EU but by political reasons in the US.

The purpose of this short research note is to draw attention to two major pitfalls of working with databases of decisions of the Court of Justice of the European Union. The first one is technical in nature and relates to the discrepant coverage of the Curia and Eur-Lex databases. The second one is linguistic in nature and relates to the fact that most scholars using these databases work in English. New work on this front is capable of addressing the first issue but a change to research practices would be required to address the second.

Organizations supporting translational research and translational science, including Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) hubs, provide a diverse and often changing array of resources, support, and services to a myriad of researchers and research efforts. While a wide-ranging scope of programs is essential to the advancement of translational research and science, it also complicates a systematic and unified process for tracking activities, studying research processes, and examining impact. To overcome these challenges, the Duke University School of Medicine’s CTSA hub created a data platform, Translational Research Accomplishment Cataloguer (TRACER), that provides capacity to enhance strategic decision-making, impact assessment, and equitable resource distribution. This article reviews TRACER development processes, provides an overview of the TRACER platform, addresses challenges in the development process, and describes avenues for addressing or overcoming these challenges. TRACER development allowed our hub to conceptually identify key processes and goals within programs and linkages between programs, and it sets the stage for advancing evidence-based improvement across our hub. This platform development provides key insight into facilitators that can inform other initiatives seeking to collect and align organizational data for strategic decision-making and impact assessment. TRACER or similar platforms are additionally well positioned to advance the study of translational science.

Archaeologists seek to improve our understanding of the past by studying, preserving, protecting, and sharing nonreplaceable archaeological resources. Archaeological collections hold information that can assist these aims as long as they are properly cared for, identified, and accessible. One of the most serious barriers is the lack of large-scale coordinated efforts to make archaeological collections findable and accessible. This article suggests that developing and implementing the use of a standardized set of attributes regarding collections provides solutions and strategies to find collections. These attributes can connect and standardize existing archaeological collections from a variety of sources (federal and state agencies, CRM firms, Indigenous and descendant communities, and academic departments), serving the profession in multiple ways. Most critically, the baseline data can be synthesized to inform and direct priorities for future fieldwork, thereby decreasing redundancy in archaeological collections and improving curation efforts nationwide. Such efforts would also provide a resource to students and researchers looking to understand and interpret the past at multiple scales by encouraging more collections-based research and less archaeological site destruction. Access for descendant communities will also be improved with information about their cultural heritage. This, in turn, encourages transparency and collaboration between those communities and archaeologists.

We present the ‘SISAL webApp’—a web-based tool to query the Speleothem Isotope Synthesis and AnaLysis (SISAL) database. The software provides an easy-to-use front-end interface to mine data from the SISAL database while providing the SQL code alongside as a learning tool. It allows for simple and increasingly complex querying of the SISAL database based on various data and metadata fields. The SISAL webApp version currently hosts SISALv2 of the database with 691 records from 294 sites, 512 of which have standardized chronologies. The SISAL webApp has sufficient flexibility to host future versions of the SISAL database, which may include allied speleothem information such as trace elements and cave-monitoring records. The SISAL webApp will increase accessibility to the SISAL database while also functioning as a learning tool for more advanced ways of querying paleoclimate databases. The SISAL webApp is available at http://geochem.hu/SISAL_webApp.

The European Congenital Heart Surgeons Association (ECHSA) Congenital Database (CD) is the second largest clinical pediatric and congenital cardiac surgical database in the world and the largest in Europe, where various smaller national or regional databases exist. Despite the dramatic increase in interventional cardiology procedures over recent years, only scattered national or regional databases of such procedures exist in Europe. Most importantly, no congenital cardiac database exists in the world that seamlessly combines both surgical and interventional cardiology data on an international level; therefore, the outcomes of surgical and interventional procedures performed on the same or similar patients cannot easily be tracked, assessed, and analyzed. In order to fill this important gap in our capability to gather and analyze information on our common patients, ECHSA and The Association for European Paediatric and Congenital Cardiology (AEPC) have embarked on a collaborative effort to expand the ECHSA-CD with a new module designed to capture data about interventional cardiology procedures. The purpose of this manuscript is to describe the concept, the structure, and the function of the new AEPC Interventional Cardiology Part of the ECHSA-CD, as well as the potentially valuable synergies provided by the shared interventional and surgical analyses of outcomes of patients. The new AEPC Interventional Cardiology Part of the ECHSA-CD will allow centers to have access to robust surgical and transcatheter outcome data from their own center, as well as robust national and international aggregate outcome data for benchmarking. Each contributing center or department will have access to their own data, as well as aggregate data from the AEPC Interventional Cardiology Part of the ECHSA-CD. The new AEPC Interventional Cardiology Part of the ECHSA-CD will allow cardiology centers to have access to aggregate cardiology data, just as surgical centers already have access to aggregate surgical data. Comparison of surgical and catheter interventional outcomes could potentially strengthen decision processes. A study of the wealth of information collected in the database could potentially also contribute toward improved early and late survival, as well as enhanced quality of life of patients with pediatric and/or congenital heart disease treated with surgery and interventional cardiac catheterization across Europe and the world.

The IntCal family of radiocarbon (14C) calibration curves is based on research spanning more than three decades. The IntCal group have collated the 14C and calendar age data (mostly derived from primary publications with other types of data and meta-data) and, since 2010, made them available for other sorts of analysis through an open-access database. This has ensured transparency in terms of the data used in the construction of the ratified calibration curves. As the IntCal database expands, work is underway to facilitate best practice for new data submissions, make more of the associated metadata available in a structured form, and help those wishing to process the data with programming languages such as R, Python, and MATLAB. The data and metadata are complex because of the range of different types of archives. A restructured interface, based on the “IntChron” open-access data model, includes tools which allow the data to be plotted and compared without the need for export. The intention is to include complementary information which can be used alongside the main 14C series to provide new insights into the global carbon cycle, as well as facilitating access to the data for other research applications. Overall, this work aims to streamline the generation of new calibration curves.

Adaptive façades (AF) present a promising approach to reduce environmental impacts in the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction sector. However, the automatization of the façade produces new challenges as the complexity of the system increases. To support the early phase of interdisciplinary development, solution collections such as databases are helpful. Previous research identified that existing solution collections of AF do not meet the requirements that such a method demands. In the effort to develop an optimized database, this paper investigates how the state of the art can be structured in terms of content in order to present it in the database. Here, a set of design parameters is developed based on identified requirements and on the main characteristics of AF that were previously elaborated. This set offers a comprehensive perspective on the previously realized functions and mechanisms of AF and can also contribute to finding creative solutions in the form of new concepts by combining the design parameters in new ways. Finally, 40 case studies of previously implemented adaptive façades are used to evaluate the set of design parameters.