Tuberculosis (TB) is the most common cause of death from an infectious disease. Although treatment has been available for more than 70 years, it still takes too long and many patients default risking relapse and the emergence of resistance. It is known that lipid-rich, phenotypically antibiotic-tolerant, bacteria are more resistant to antibiotics and may be responsible for relapse necessitating extended therapy.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFRecent advances have enabled organotypic culture of beating human myocardial slices that are stable for weeks. However, human myocardial samples are rare, exhibit high variability and frequently originate from diseased hearts. Thus, there is a need to adapt long-term slice culture for animal myocardium.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: Arterial injuries following central venous catheterization (CVC) range between 0.1%-2.7%.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPenetrating aortic injuries are infrequent. Its incidence is unknown because most patients die of hemorrhage even before they receive adequate treatment. Aortic wounds generally require conventional thoracotomy/laparotomy repair and are related to high mortality rates.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPrimary (pIgAN), secondary IgA nephropathy (sIgAN), and IgA-associated nephropathy can be distinguished. While pIgAN has been thoroughly studied, information about the etiology of sIgAN remains scarce. As concerns sIgAN, several studies suggest that different etiologic factors play a role and ultimately lead to a pathophysiologic process similar to that of pIgAN.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPurpose: Thoracic endovascular aortic repair (TEVAR) has been described to be superior to an open surgical approach, and previous studies have found superiority in TEVAR by reducing overall morbidity and mortality rates. This study aimed to describe the outcomes of TEVAR for patients with thoracic aortic disease at a high complexity.
Materials And Methods: Descriptive study, developed by a retrospective review of a prospectively collected database.
Standardized cross-cultural databases of the arts are critical to a balanced scientific understanding of the performing arts, and their role in other domains of human society. This paper introduces the Global Jukebox as a resource for comparative and cross-cultural study of the performing arts and culture. The Global Jukebox adds an extensive and detailed global database of the performing arts that enlarges our understanding of human cultural diversity.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFElectrical discharges (EDs) in the African sharptooth catfish Clarias gariepinus were studied. Irregular monopolar EDs, lasting for 8-10 ms and longer, and more complex EDs, lasting for 20-50 ms and characterized by specific indentation of the discharge pattern, were recorded in pairs of individuals exhibiting both aggressive and defensive behavior. The pattern of long discharges was reconstructed by adding short EDs with different latencies and amplitudes.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFReduction in greenhouse gas emission from beef production is essential to the survival of the beef industry from environmental and social-economic perspectives. There are different systems available to measure methane from animals, but they are expensive, not easily accessible, and not suitable for large-scale methane measurements on the farm. Therefore exploring indicator traits, which are easy to measure, cost-effective, and suitable for large-scale measurement, are recommended.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn many acoustic imaging applications, conventional beamforming (CBF) cannot provide both accurate position and source level estimates simultaneously. Also, the CBF acoustic maps suffer from many artifacts due to the spreading of large point-spread-functions. An original CLEAN deconvolution procedure, including an additional plane containing out-of-plane interfering sources, is proposed here to achieve simultaneous localization, source level estimation, and de-noising.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe study determined in vitro enteric methane (CH) emission potential of whole-plant cereal (WPC) forages in relationship to nutrient composition, degradability, and rumen fermentation. Two varieties of each WPC (barley, oat, triticale, and wheat) were harvested from two field replications in each of two locations in central Alberta, Canada, and an in vitro batch culture technique was used to characterize gas production (GP), fermentation, and degradability. Starch concentration (g/kg dry matter (DM)) was least ( < 0.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWinter survival is a determinant factor for the persistence of perennials grown in northern climates. High winter survival cultivars, however, have lower yield due to their early transition into a dormant state in the fall. Here we describe a whole plant assay entirely performed indoor in growth chambers and walk-in freezers to identify low-dormant genotypes with superior freezing tolerance within populations of open pollinated species.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFTuberculosis is caused by Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb), a pathogen classified by the United Nations (UN) as a dangerous category B biological substance. For the sake of the workers' safety, handling of all samples presumed to carry Mtb must be conducted in a containment level (CL) 3 laboratory. The TB molecular bacterial load assay (TB-MBLA) test is a reverse transcriptase quantitative polymerase chain reaction (RT-qPCR) test that quantifies Mtb bacillary load using primers and dual-labelled probes for 16S rRNA.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPlumbagin (5-hydroxy-2-methyl-1,4-naphthoquinone) is a small molecule with potent anticancer activity. Like other 1,4-naphthoquinones, it exhibits electrophilic reactivity towards biological nucleophiles. We demonstrate that plumbagin and structurally related 1,4-naphthoquinones with at least one unsubstituted quinoid carbon (C2 or C3) bind to albumin, an ubiquitously present nucleophile, with minimum recovery of free drug.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFTuberculosis (TB) remains a leading cause of death worldwide. Lipid rich, phenotypically antibiotic tolerant, bacteria are more resistant to antibiotics and may be responsible for relapse and the need for long-term TB treatment. We present a microfluidic system that acoustically traps live mycobacteria, M.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Vasc Surg Cases Innov Tech
December 2019
Fenestrated endovascular aneurysm repair is frequently used for juxtarenal and pararenal aortic aneurysms. In urgent cases, however, the use of premanufactured patient-specific devices is not an option. Physician-modified endografts may be used to treat these patients but require experience and a steep learning curve for accurate planning to position fenestrations and to perform the graft modifications.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWeak electric discharges generated by the two species of the African upside-down catfishes, Synodontis sorex and S. batensoda are described. In both species two types of discharges were recorded in the course of aggressive-defense interactions in the pairs of individuals: short simple biphasic and longer (duration >20 ms) discharges with more complex waveform.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Plumbagin, a medicinal plant-derived 5-hydroxy-2-methyl-1,4-naphthoquinone, is an emerging drug with a variety of pharmacological effects, including potent anticancer activity. We have previously shown that plumbagin improves the efficacy of androgen deprivation therapy (ADT) in prostate cancer and it is now being evaluated in phase I clinical trial. However, the development of formulation of plumbagin as a compound with sparing solubility in water is challenging.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: In polypharmacy patients, medication therapy management (MTM) services provide a comprehensive review of current medications and future treatment goals. Pharmacogenetics (PGx) may further optimize the identification of potential drug therapy problems (DTPs); however, the clinical utility of PGx information with a clinical decision support tool (CDST) in an MTM setting in identifying DTPs has not been systematically assessed.
Objective: To assess the clinical utility of an MTM service enhanced by pharmacogenetic test results and a clinical decision support tool.
Diagnosis and treatment monitoring of patients with tuberculosis (TB) requires detection of all viable mycobacteria in clinical samples. Quantitation of Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb) in sputum is commonly performed by culture after sample decontamination to prevent overgrowth by contaminant organisms. Exponentially growing cultures have cells that predominately lack non-polar lipid bodies whereas stationary cultures have a predominance of cells with non-polar lipid bodies.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe waveform and some characteristics of the electric organ discharges have been studied in 11 individuals of Cyphomyrus petherici, the only representative of the genus in the Nilotic fauna. The discharge is characterized by three to five phases with a prevalence of the second phase in terms of the relative amplitude and a wide variability of the total duration of discharge (from 212 to 558 μs). The comparison of the discharges of the species under study with those in the congeneric species and representatives of the genus Pollimyrus (which previously encompassed C.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe objective of this in situ study was to evaluate the rumen degradability of kernels from short-season corn hybrids grown for silage in Western Canada (Lacombe, AB) and determine whether decreasing kernel particle size would enhance ruminal degradability in a similar manner for all hybrids. The study was a completely randomized design with 3 beef cows (replicates) and a 6 (hybrid) × 3 (particle size) factorial arrangement of treatments. Kernels were processed to generate three different particle sizes: large (2.
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