Patterns of Marijuana Use and Nicotine Exposure in Patients Seeking Elective Aesthetic Procedures.

Background: With the increasing legalization and popularity of marijuana, it is frequently and sometimes unintentionally combined with nicotine-containing products. As a consequence, patients may fail to accurately report usage during preoperative examinations or remain unaware of the inclusion of nicotine. This poses a challenge for clinicians in identifying preoperative nicotine exposure.

The Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Geographic Placement of Applicants to General Surgery Residency Programs.

Objective: COVID-19 greatly influenced medical education and the residency match. As new guidelines were established to promote safety, travel was restricted, visiting rotations discontinued, and residency interviews turned virtual. The purpose of this study is to assess the geographic trends in distribution of successfully matched General Surgery applicants prior to and after the implementation of pandemic guidelines, and what we can learn from them as we move forward.

Peptide diffusion in biomolecular condensates.

Diffusion determines the turnover of biomolecules in liquid-liquid phase-separated condensates. We considered the mean square displacement and thus the diffusion constant for simple model systems of peptides GGGGG, GGQGG, and GGVGG in aqueous solutions after phase separation by simulating atomic-level models. These solutions readily separate into aqueous and peptide-rich droplet phases.

Parameter Dependence of the Solubility Limit for Disodium Phosphate.

The solubility limit was calculated for supersaturated solutions of disodium phosphate in water as a function of the sodium-oxygen Lennard-Jones radius parameter . We found that changes in the sodium-oxygen were clearly exponentially related to the concentration of the solubility limit. Starting from standard force fields more suited to nucleic acids and phospholipids, only relatively small changes were required to achieve the experimentally known solubility limit.

Transition Mutations in the hTERT Promoter Are Unrelated to Potential i-motif Formation in the C-Rich Strand.

Increased expression of the human telomere reverse transcriptase (hTERT) in tumors promotes tumor cell survival and diminishes the survival of patients. Cytosine-to-thymine (C-to-T) transition mutations (C250T or C228T) in the promoter create binding sites for transcription factors, which enhance transcription. The G-rich strand of the promoter can form G-quadruplex structures, whereas the C-rich strand can form an i-motif in which multiple cytosine residues are protonated.