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Institute
In today’s social online world there is a variety of interaction and participatory possibilities which enable web users to actively produce content themselves.
This user-generated content is omnipresent in the web and there is growing evidence that it is used to select or evaluate professionally created online information.
The present study investigated how this surrounding content affects online advertising by drawing from social influence theory. Specifically, it was assumed that
web users sharing an interpersonal relationship (interpersonal influence) and/or a group membership (collective influence) with authors of user-generated content
which appears next to advertising on the web page are more strongly influenced in their response to the advertising than unrelated users. These assumptions were
tested in a 2 × 2 between-subject experiment with 118 students who were exposed to four different Facebook profiles that differed in terms of interpersonal
connection to the source (existent/non-existent) and collective connection to the source (existent/non-existent). The results show a significant impact in the case
of collective influence, but not in the case of interpersonal influence. The underlying mechanisms of this effect and implications of the results for online advertising
are discussed.
Introduction
Genes involved in body weight regulation that were previously investigated in genome-wide association studies (GWAS) and in animal models were target-enriched followed by massive parallel next generation sequencing.
Methods
We enriched and re-sequenced continuous genomic regions comprising FTO, MC4R, TMEM18, SDCCAG8, TKNS, MSRA and TBC1D1 in a screening sample of 196 extremely obese children and adolescents with age and sex specific body mass index (BMI) ≥ 99th percentile and 176 lean adults (BMI ≤ 15th percentile). 22 variants were confirmed by Sanger sequencing. Genotyping was performed in up to 705 independent obesity trios (extremely obese child and both parents), 243 extremely obese cases and 261 lean adults.
Results and Conclusion
We detected 20 different non-synonymous variants, one frame shift and one nonsense mutation in the 7 continuous genomic regions in study groups of different weight extremes. For SNP Arg695Cys (rs58983546) in TBC1D1 we detected nominal association with obesity (pTDT = 0.03 in 705 trios). Eleven of the variants were rare, thus were only detected heterozygously in up to ten individual(s) of the complete screening sample of 372 individuals. Two of them (in FTO and MSRA) were found in lean individuals, nine in extremely obese. In silico analyses of the 11 variants did not reveal functional implications for the mutations. Concordant with our hypothesis we detected a rare variant that potentially leads to loss of FTO function in a lean individual. For TBC1D1, in contrary to our hypothesis, the loss of function variant (Arg443Stop) was found in an obese individual. Functional in vitro studies are warranted.