Rapid developments and methodological divides hinder the study of how scientific knowledge accumulates, consolidates and transfers to the public sphere. Our work proposes using Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, as a historiographical source for contemporary science. We chose the high-profile field of gene editing as our test case, performing a historical analysis of the English-language Wikipedia articles on CRISPR. Using a mixed-method approach, we qualitatively and quantitatively analyzed the CRISPR article\'s text, sections and references, alongside 50 affiliated articles. These, we found, documented the CRISPR field\'s maturation from a fundamental scientific discovery to a biotechnological revolution with vast social and cultural implications. We developed automated tools to support such research and demonstrated its applicability to two other scientific fields-coronavirus and circadian clocks. Our method utilizes Wikipedia as a digital and free archive, showing it can document the incremental growth of knowledge and the manner scientific research accumulates and translates into public discourse. Using Wikipedia in this manner compliments and overcomes some issues with contemporary histories and can also augment existing bibliometric research.

BACKGROUND: The purpose of this study is to investigate the association of rotating night shift work, CLOCK, MTNR1A, MTNR1B genes polymorphisms and their interactions with type 2 diabetes among steelworkers.
METHODS: A case-control study was conducted in the Tangsteel company in Tangshan, China. The sample sizes of the case group and control group were 251 and 451, respectively. The logistic regression, log-linear model and generalized multifactor dimensionality (GMDR) method were used to investigate the interaction between circadian clock gene, melatonin receptor genes and rotating night shift work on type 2 diabetes among steelworkers. Relative excess risk due to interaction (RERI) and attributable proportions (AP) were used to evaluate additive interactions.
RESULTS: Rotating night shift work, current shift status, duration of night shifts, and average frequency of night shifts were associated with an increased risk of type 2 diabetes after adjustment for confounders. Rs1387153 variants in MTNR1B was found to be associated with an increased risk of type 2 diabetes, which was not found between MTNR1A gene rs2119882 locus, CLOCK gene rs1801260 locus and the risk of type 2 diabetes. The association between rotating night shift work and risk of type 2 diabetes appeared to be modified by MTNR1B gene rs1387153 locus (RERI = 0.98, (95% CI, 0.40-1.55); AP = 0.60, (95% CI, 0.07-1.12)). The interaction between MTNR1A gene rs2119882 locus and CLOCK gene rs1801260 locus was associated with the risk of type 2 diabetes (RERI = 1.07, (95% CI, 0.23-1.91); AP = 0.77, (95% CI, 0.36-1.17)). The complex interaction of the MTNR1A-MTNR1B-CLOCK-rotating night shift work model based on the GMDR methods may increase the risk of type 2 diabetes (P = 0.011).
CONCLUSIONS: Rotating night shift work and rs1387153 variants in MTNR1B were associated with an increased risk of type 2 diabetes among steelworkers. The complex interaction of MTNR1A-MTNR1B-CLOCK-rotating night shift work may increase the risk of type 2 diabetes.

Our purpose is to investigate the impact of circadian and melatonin pathway genes as well as their interactions with night-shift work (NSW) on breast cancer risk in Korean women. Information about NSW and other covariates was collected using a structured questionnaire and twenty-two polymorphisms in 11 genes were analyzed in a hospital-based case-control study with 941 cases of breast cancer and 959 controls. In analysis of the main effects of each single nucleotide polymorphisms(SNPs), variants in CLOCK rs11133373 was associated with breast cancer risk even after false discovery rate (FDR) correction (Odd Ratios (OR) = 1.38 (95% Confident Interval (CI) 1.14-1.69) in CG and CC compared to GG genotype. Analysis of MTNR1A rs2119882 demonstrated a decreased risk of breast cancer in CC compared to TT (p-FDR = 0.043). A correlation between NSW and breast cancer interaction was found in two loci. NSW increased risk of breast cancer in women who carried the heterozygote genotype of CRY2 rs2292912 (OR = 1.98, 95% CI = 1.14-3.44) or carried at least one minor allele of RORA rs1482057 (OR = 2.20, 95% CI = 1.10-4.37). Our study results support a putative role for several loci of circadian genes and genes of melatonin biosynthesis and their interaction, and the gene interactions with NSW in the development of breast cancer.

The circadian clock is entrained to light by the intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cells. Loss of these cells in glaucoma, an eye disease with loss of retinal ganglion cells as its key feature, might thus result in a change in chronotype. We aimed to compare the chronotype between glaucoma patients and healthy subjects.
We sent the Munich ChronoType Questionnaire to 221 glaucoma patients (response rate 81%); controls (primary control group) were primarily their spouses. After exclusion of shift workers and participants who woke-up due to an alarm clock on days off, 159 glaucoma patients (88 early, 21 moderate, 23 severe) and 163 controls remained. We calculated chronotype as the mid-sleep on days off, corrected for workweek accumulated sleep debt (MSFsc). We compared means and variances between groups using Welch\'s tests and F-tests, respectively. A secondary control group was recruited from participants in a citizen-science project (n = 17073) who completed an online questionnaire. A resampling method was applied to enable an age- and gender- matched comparison with the glaucoma patients.
Compared to the primary control group, glaucoma did not affect the mean MSFsc (controls 3:47; early, moderate, and severe glaucoma 3:40, 3:45, and 3:33, respectively [P = 0.62]). Chronotype variability seemed to increase with increasing disease severity (severe glaucoma versus controls: P = 0.023). The mean MSFsc of the secondary control group was 3:50 (95% confidence interval 3:48 to 3:52); significantly later than that of the glaucoma patients (3:40; P = 0.024). Mean MSFsc did not differ significantly between the control groups (P = 0.42).
No clear changes were found in the chronotype as determined by sleep phase in patients with glaucoma, especially not in early and moderate glaucoma. In severe glaucoma, chronotype variability seems to increase, possibly alongside a small advancement.

While research has shown that scientists use Wikipedia and that scientific content on Wikipedia ramifies back into scientific literature, many questions remain on how the two sides interact and through what paradigm this dynamic may be best understood. Using the circadian clock field as a case study, we discuss this scientific field\'s representation on Wikipedia. We traced the changes made to the articles for \"Circadian clock\" and \"Circadian rhythm\" and reviewed the debates that informed them over a span of a decade, using Wikipedia\'s native and third-party tools. Specifically, we focused on how groundbreaking research pertaining to the function of biological oscillators was integrated into the articles to reflect a wider paradigmatic shift within the field. We also identified the articles\' main editors to detail the dynamic collective editorial process that took place during a time that saw the field undergo a fundamental change. We discuss the different concerns the academic community has with Wikipedia-specifically regarding its content and its contributors-to ask whether the online encyclopedia\'s open model is inherently at odds with scientific culture or whether the model could reflect science or even expand on its core values and practices such as peer review and the idea of communicating science.

Circadian clocks drive daily oscillations in a variety of biological processes through the coordinate orchestration of precise gene expression programs. Global expression profiling experiments have suggested that a significant fraction of the transcriptome and proteome is under circadian control, and such output rhythms have historically been assumed to rely on the rhythmic transcription of these genes. Recent genome-wide studies, however, have challenged this long-held view and pointed to a major contribution of posttranscriptional regulation in driving oscillations at the messenger RNA (mRNA) level, while others have highlighted extensive clock translational regulation, regardless of mRNA rhythms. There are various examples of genes that are uniformly transcribed throughout the day but that exhibit rhythmic mRNA levels, and of flat mRNAs, with oscillating protein levels, and such observations have largely been considered to result from independent regulation at each step. These studies have thereby obviated any connections, or coupling, that might exist between the different steps of gene expression and the impact that any of them could have on subsequent ones. Here, we argue that due to both biological and technical reasons, the jury is still out on the determination of the relative contributions of each of the different stages of gene expression in regulating output molecular rhythms. In addition, we propose that through a variety of coupling mechanisms, gene transcription (even when apparently arrhythmic) might play a much relevant role in determining oscillations in gene expression than currently estimated, regulating rhythms at downstream steps. Furthermore, we posit that eukaryotic genomes regulate daily RNA polymerase II (RNAPII) recruitment and histone modifications genome-wide, setting the stage for global nascent transcription, but that tissue-specific mechanisms locally specify the different processes under clock control.

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