Predicting deterioration of patients with early sepsis at the emergency department using continuous heart rate variability analysis: a model-based approach.

Background: Sepsis is a life-threatening disease with an in-hospital mortality rate of approximately 20%. Physicians at the emergency department (ED) have to estimate the risk of deterioration in the coming hours or days and decide whether the patient should be admitted to the general ward, ICU or can be discharged. Current risk stratification tools are based on measurements of vital parameters at a single timepoint.

Prognostic value of serial score measurements of the national early warning score, the quick sequential organ failure assessment and the systemic inflammatory response syndrome to predict clinical outcome in early sepsis.

Background And Importance: Sepsis is a common and potentially lethal syndrome, and early recognition is critical to prevent deterioration. Yet, currently available scores to facilitate recognition of sepsis lack prognostic accuracy.

Objective: To identify the optimal time-point to determine NEWS, qSOFA and SIRS for the prediction of clinical deterioration in early sepsis and to determine whether the change in these scores over time improves their prognostic accuracy.

Cohort profile of Acutelines: a large data/biobank of acute and emergency medicine.

Purpose: Research in acute care faces many challenges, including enrolment challenges, legal limitations in data sharing, limited funding and lack of singular ownership of the domain of acute care. To overcome these challenges, the Center of Acute Care of the University Medical Center Groningen in the Netherlands, has established a de novo data, image and biobank named 'Acutelines'.

Participants: Clinical data, imaging data and biomaterials (ie, blood, urine, faeces, hair) are collected from patients presenting to the emergency department (ED) with a broad range of acute disease presentations.

Protein Tethering for Folding Studies.

Optical tweezers allow the detection of unfolding and refolding transitions in individual proteins, and how interacting molecules such as chaperones affect these transitions. Typical methods that tether individual proteins are based on cysteine chemistry, which is less suitable for proteins with essential cysteines. Here we describe a cysteine-independent tethering protocol that can be performed in situ.

Circuit topology of proteins and nucleic acids.

Folded biomolecules display a bewildering structural complexity and diversity. They have therefore been analyzed in terms of generic topological features. For instance, folded proteins may be knotted, have beta-strands arranged into a Greek-key motif, or display high contact order.

Trehalose facilitates DNA melting: a single-molecule optical tweezers study.

Using optical tweezers, here we show that the overstretching transition force of double-stranded DNA (dsDNA) is lowered significantly by the addition of the disaccharide trehalose as well as certain polyol osmolytes. This effect is found to depend linearly on the logarithm of the trehalose concentration. We propose an entropic driving mechanism for the experimentally observed destabilization of dsDNA that is rooted in the higher affinity of the DNA bases for trehalose than for water, which promotes base exposure and DNA melting.