Suchergebnisse

Questa ricerca intende esaminare l'impatto della circolazione transfrontaliera dei servizi sul bilanciamento tra regole di mercato e politiche sociali. L'analisi di questa tensione costituisce il punto di partenza per una riflessione più ampia che si propone di comprendere come la conciliazione tra solidarietà e competitività e, più generalmente, tra esigenze di protezione sociale degli Stati membri e tradizionali competenze comunitarie nell'ambito del mercato comune, possa operare nel settore dei servizi. Un mercato comune dei servizi in costante espansione in senso transfrontaliero ha indubbiamente effetti non trascurabili sul piano sociale ed in particolare sul diritto del lavoro consolidatosi nelle tradizioni costituzionali degli Stati membri. La necessità di conciliare solidarietà e competitività alla base del concetto di economia sociale ed il rinnovato accento sulla dimensione sociale dell'Unione accolto nel Trattato di Lisbona dovrebbero promuovere una convivenza armoniosa tra un'integrazione europea di carattere principalmente economico ed i residui spazi di intervento statale a tutela dei mercati nazionali del lavoro. Prima di analizzare cause ed effetti di tale potenziale conflitto nell'ambito del mercato europeo dei servizi risulta necessario fornire un panorama del quadro normativo applicabile agli operatori economici che intendano fornire a titolo temporaneo una prestazione in uno Stato membro diverso da quello di stabilimento. Nell'ambito di tale disamina, dedicata alle fonti conflittuali del diritto europeo applicabili ai prestatori di servizi, individueremo le condizioni che devono rispettare gli operatori per esercitare un'attività in uno Stato membro diverso da quello di origine (Parte I). Potremo quindi illustrare come l'esercizio delle libertà comunitarie di circolazione da parte delle imprese europee abbia fatto emergere le contraddizioni ed i limiti del funzionamento del mercato comune rispetto alla fruizione dei diritti sociali da parte dei lavoratori locali e distaccati (Parte II). ; This research aims at exploring the relationship between the free movement of services within the internal market and the need to protect the fundamental social rights at national level. To this extent, our purpose is to identify the role of the EU regulation on services in ensuring a smooth cohabitation between EU economic policies and national social goals. Following the adoption of the Treaty of Lisbon, the EU has shown a new approach which aims not only at keeping a high level of competitiveness, but also at establishing a social market economy. The contradiction between the implementation of the single market and the preservation of domestic welfare policies shall therefore be analysed in the light of the social oriented approach enshrined in this new EU legal framework. The need to reconcile social and market values which inspires the concept of social market economy should guarantee that the exercise of EU freedoms of movement does not prejudge the substance of social rights. Before studying the causes and effects of this potential legal conflict it seems essential to make a brief analysis of the rules provided under EU law in order to ensure the proper functioning of the internal market for services (Part I). The second part of the research will then be focused on the effects of the internal market rules on solidarity. In this context we will examine how, according to a recent case-law of the ECJ, the economic freedoms of circulation, as a priority of the market, may jeopardize the national social rights. These rulings of the EU courts have put in discussion the European integration process in respect of the constitutional traditions relating to employment law and has shown the unstable balance between a border-less market and the aspiration of a social economy at European level.

L'article se propose d'examiner comment le cadre réglementaire du marché intérieur et du droit de la concurrence et, plus généralement, la dynamique de libéralisation et d'externalisation progressive des activités de services peuvent s'appliquer aux prestations de nature solidaire. Les services sociaux comportent des caractéristiques spécifiques, illustrant parfaitement la tension entre solidarité et compétitivité, et une application stricte de la réglementation communautaire pourrait conduire à la mise en cause des systèmes nationaux d'organisation et de gestion des services sociaux et de santé. Ces derniers reposent en effet sur une programmation territoriale de l'offre, sur un financement principalement public et sur un encadrement national des opérateurs qui, en privilégiant certains fournisseurs, peuvent fausser la concurrence et entrer en contradiction avec le caractère transfrontalier du marché commun européen des services. Face à cette contradiction potentielle, et dans un contexte de modification des besoins des usagers, de crise économique et de plans d'austérité, la Commission européenne a annoncé une évolution du cadre réglementaire applicable aux services sociaux, en particulier pour ce qui concerne la réforme de la réglementation en matière d'aides d'État et de compensations octroyées aux services d'intérêt économique général. Il n'est toutefois pas certain que cette évolution réglementaire suffise à résoudre les questions que soulève la spécificité des services sociaux.

Rare variants are thought to play an important role in the etiology of complex diseases and may explain a significant fraction of the missing heritability in genetic disease studies. Next-generation sequencing facilitates the association of rare variants in coding or regulatory regions with complex diseases in large cohorts at genome-wide scale. However, rare variant association studies (RVAS) still lack power when cohorts are small to medium-sized and if genetic variation explains a small fraction of phenotypic variance. Here we present a novel Bayesian rare variant Association Test using Integrated Nested Laplace Approximation (BATI). Unlike existing RVAS tests, BATI allows integration of individual or variant-specific features as covariates, while efficiently performing inference based on full model estimation. We demonstrate that BATI outperforms established RVAS methods on realistic, semi-synthetic whole-exome sequencing cohorts, especially when using meaningful biological context, such as functional annotation. We show that BATI achieves power above 70% in scenarios in which competing tests fail to identify risk genes, e.g. when risk variants in sum explain less than 0.5% of phenotypic variance. We have integrated BATI, together with five existing RVAS tests in the 'Rare Variant Genome Wide Association Study' (rvGWAS) framework for data analyzed by whole-exome or whole genome sequencing. rvGWAS supports rare variant association for genes or any other biological unit such as promoters, while allowing the analysis of essential functionalities like quality control or filtering. Applying rvGWAS to a Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia study we identified eight candidate predisposition genes, including EHMT2 and COPS7A ; SO, HS, XE, FM and GD received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 635290 (PanCanRisk). SO and GD received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 779257 (Solve-RD). ...

In recent years, next-generation sequencing (NGS) has become a cornerstone of clinical genetics and diagnostics. Many clinical applications require high precision, especially if rare events such as somatic mutations in cancer or genetic variants causing rare diseases need to be identified. Although random sequencing errors can be modeled statistically and deep sequencing minimizes their impact, systematic errors remain a problem even at high depth of coverage. Understanding their source is crucial to increase precision of clinical NGS applications. In this work, we studied the relation between recurrent biases in allele balance (AB), systematic errors, and false positive variant calls across a large cohort of human samples analyzed by whole exome sequencing (WES). We have modeled the AB distribution for biallelic genotypes in 987 WES samples in order to identify positions recurrently deviating significantly from the expectation, a phenomenon we termed allele balance bias (ABB). Furthermore, we have developed a genotype callability score based on ABB for all positions of the human exome, which detects false positive variant calls that passed state-of-the-art filters. Finally, we demonstrate the use of ABB for detection of false associations proposed by rare variant association studies. Availability: https://github.com/Francesc-Muyas/ABB. ; Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, Grant/Award Number: 'Centro de Excelencia Severo Ochoa 2017–2021'; CERCA Programme/Generalitat de Catalunya; The "la Caixa" Foundation; CRG Emergent Translational Research Award; European Union's H2020 Research and Innovation Programme, Grant/Award Number: 635290 (PanCanRisk); MINECO Severo Ochoa Fellowship, Grant/Award Number: SVP‐2013‐0680066; PERIS Program, Grant/Award Number: SLT002/16/00310.

Rett syndrome (RTT) is a rare neurological disorder mostly caused by a genetic variation in MECP2. Making new MECP2 variants and the related phenotypes available provides data for better understanding of disease mechanisms and faster identification of variants for diagnosis. This is, however, currently hampered by the lack of interoperability between genotype-phenotype databases. Here, we demonstrate on the example of MECP2 in RTT that by making the genotype-phenotype data more Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR), we can facilitate prioritization and analysis of variants. In total, 10,968 MECP2 variants were successfully integrated. Among these variants 863 unique confirmed RTT causing and 209 unique confirmed benign variants were found. This dataset was used for comparison of pathogenicity predicting tools, protein consequences, and identification of ambiguous variants. Prediction tools generally recognised the RTT causing and benign variants, however, there was a broad range of overlap Nineteen variants were identified that were annotated as both disease-causing and benign, suggesting that there are additional factors in these cases contributing to disease development. ; The authors would like to thank the Mutalyzer team for support and feedback, Henk van Kranen for support in liftover of ancient genetic variant descriptions, and Eric Smeets for collection of the Maastricht Rett dataset.This work was funded by ELIXIR (funded by the European Commission within the Research Infrastructures programme of Horizon 2020), the research infrastructure for life-science data (MolData2). FE and LC were also funded by The Dutch Rett Syndrome Foundation (Stichting Terre). CE, AJ, RK, AV, SCG, MB, MRi and MR also received funding from EXCELERATE (H2020, Grant No. 676559). AJ, RK, MR, MB, and SCG also received funding from RD-Connect, European Union Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007–2013, Grant No. 305444). FE, CE, AJ, RK, MR, MB, and SCG received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Program under grant agreement EJP RD N°825575. RK was also funded by NWO in project VWData (grant no. 400.17.605) and BBMRI-NL (NWO, National Roadmap for Large-Scale Research Facilities, grant no. 184.033.111). AV and SCG also received funding from INB Grant (Grant No. PT17/0009/0001 - ISCIII-SGEFI / ERDF). ; Peer Reviewed ; Postprint (published version)

Mendelian diseases have shown to be an and efficient model for connecting genotypes to phenotypes and for elucidating the function of genes. Whole-exome sequencing (WES) accelerated the study of rare Mendelian diseases in families, allowing for directly pinpointing rare causal mutations in genic regions without the need for linkage analysis. However, the low diagnostic rates of 20-30% reported for multiple WES disease studies point to the need for improved variant pathogenicity classification and causal variant prioritization methods. Here, we present the exome Disease Variant Analysis (eDiVA; http://ediva.crg.eu), an automated computational framework for identification of causal genetic variants (coding/splicing single-nucleotide variants and small insertions and deletions) for rare diseases using WES of families or parent-child trios. eDiVA combines next-generation sequencing data analysis, comprehensive functional annotation, and causal variant prioritization optimized for familial genetic disease studies. eDiVA features a machine learning-based variant pathogenicity predictor combining various genomic and evolutionary signatures. Clinical information, such as disease phenotype or mode of inheritance, is incorporated to improve the precision of the prioritization algorithm. Benchmarking against state-of-the-art competitors demonstrates that eDiVA consistently performed as a good or better than existing approach in terms of detection rate and precision. Moreover, we applied eDiVA to several familial disease cases to demonstrate its clinical applicability. ; This project has received funding from the "la Caixa" Foundation, the CRG emergent translational research award and the European Union's H2020 Research and Innovation Programme under the grant agreement No 635290 (PanCanRisk).

Opitz trigonocephaly C syndrome (OTCS) is a rare genetic disorder characterized by craniofacial anomalies, variable intellectual and psychomotor disability, and variable cardiac defects with a high mortality rate. Different patterns of inheritance and genetic heterogeneity are known in this syndrome. Whole exome and genome sequencing of a 19-year-old girl (P7), initially diagnosed with OTCS, revealed a de novo nonsense mutation, p.Q638*, in the MAGEL2 gene. MAGEL2 is an imprinted, maternally silenced, gene located at 15q11-13, within the Prader-Willi region. Patient P7 carried the mutation in the paternal chromosome. Recently, mutations in MAGEL2 have been described in Schaaf-Yang syndrome (SHFYNG) and in severe arthrogryposis. Patient P7 bears resemblances with SHFYNG cases but has other findings not described in this syndrome and common in OTCS. We sequenced MAGEL2 in nine additional OTCS patients and no mutations were found. This study provides the first clear molecular genetic basis for an OTCS case, indicates that there is overlap between OTCS and SHFYNG syndromes, and confirms that OTCS is genetically heterogeneous. Genes encoding MAGEL2 partners, either in the retrograde transport or in the ubiquitination-deubiquitination complexes, are promising candidates as OTCS disease-causing genes. ; Funding was from Associació Síndrome Opitz C, Terrassa, Spain; Spanish Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (SAF2014-56562-R; FECYT, crowdfunding PRECIPITA); Catalan Government (2014SGR932) and from CIBERER (U720). We acknowledge support of the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, 'Centro de Excelencia Severo Ochoa 2013-2017'.

Sex differences have been observed in multiple facets of cancer epidemiology, treatment and biology, and in most cancers outside the sex organs. Efforts to link these clinical differences to specific molecular features have focused on somatic mutations within the coding regions of the genome. Here we report a pan-cancer analysis of sex differences in whole genomes of 1983 tumours of 28 subtypes as part of the ICGC/TCGA Pan-Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes (PCAWG) Consortium. We both confirm the results of exome studies, and also uncover previously undescribed sex differences. These include sex-biases in coding and non-coding cancer drivers, mutation prevalence and strikingly, in mutational signatures related to underlying mutational processes. These results underline the pervasiveness of molecular sex differences and strengthen the call for increased consideration of sex in molecular cancer research. ; This study was conducted with the support of the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research to P.C.B. through funding provided by the Government of Ontario. This work was supported by the Discovery Frontiers: Advancing Big Data Science in Genomics Research program, which is jointly funded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) of Canada, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), Genome Canada and the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI). P.C.B. was supported by a Terry Fox Research Institute New Investigator Award and a CIHR New Investigator Award. This work was supported by an NSERC Discovery grant and by Canadian Institutes of Health Research, grant #SVB-145586, to P.C.B. This work was supported by the NIH/NCI under award number P30CA016042 and an operating grant from the National Cancer Institute Early Detection Research Network (1U01CA214194-01)