A Brief Transdiagnostic Pandemic Mental Health Maintenance Intervention.

The COVID-19 pandemic qualifies as a major national and global disaster. Behavioral health providers are poised to provide psychological crisis interventions to reduce the psychosocial effects. This paper presents a brief transdiagnostic mental health maintenance intervention tailored to treat adults and families with distress symptoms as a consequence of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The intervention components include evidence-based techniques which have been strategically selected to address mental health distress related to the pandemic and to prevent the escalation of distress as the pandemic continues. The intervention aims to be flexibly incorporated into care based on the provider and needs of the presenting individuals. The intervention incorporates components of evidence-based treatments such as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and associated "third wave" therapies (e.g. Dialectical Behavioral Therapy and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy). The intervention can be delivered via telehealth and includes the following modules: 1) Agenda Setting & Avoidance Identification; 2) Responding to Difficult News/Normalizing Reactions; 3) Perspective Taking; 4) Situational Control/Acceptance; 5) Maintaining a Healthy Routine; 6) Coping with Stress; 7) Insomnia Preventions; and 8) Building Resiliency & Hope. A list of pleasurable activities that can be completed at home and technology modalities to maintain social interactions is included. The intervention also includes the Pandemic Mental Health Maintenance Intervention handout to provide to patients. Research is needed to test this intervention in a randomized controlled trial and assess efficacious intervention implementation strategies.

A phylogenomic approach for studying plastid endosymbiosis.

Gene transfer is a major contributing factor to functional innovation in genomes. Endosymbiotic gene transfer (EGT) is a specific instance of lateral gene transfer (LGT) in which genetic materials are acquired by the host genome from an endosymbiont that has been engulfed and retained in the cytoplasm. Here we present a comprehensive approach for detecting gene transfer within a phylogenetic framework. We applied the approach to examine EGT of red algal genes into Thalassiosira pseudonana, a free-living diatom for which a complete genome sequence has recently been determined. Out of 11,390 predicted protein-coding sequences from the genome of T. pseudonana, 124 (1.1%, clustered into 80 gene families) are inferred to be of red algal origin (bootstrap support >or= 75%). Of these 80 gene families, 22 (27.5%) encode novel, unknown functions. We found 21.3% of the gene families to putatively encode non-plastid-targeted proteins. Our results suggest that EGT of red algal genes provides a relatively minor contribution to the nuclear genome of the diatom, but the transferred genes have functions that extend beyond photosynthesis. This assertion awaits experimental validation. Whereas the current study is focused within the context of secondary endosymbiosis, our approach can be applied to large-scale detection of gene transfer in any system.