Reducing Undue Burden on Nurses Related to Limited Care Partner Visitation: Lessons Learned for the Future.

Objective: The purpose of this article was to report best practices for reducing undue burden on nurses related to limited care partner visitation.

Background: Care partners are beneficial to hospitalized patients. Restricted care partner visitation not only impacts patients and care partners but also affects nurses.

Genetic engineering of a Lemna isoleucine auxotroph.

Lemna, a member of the Lemnaceae or duckweed family, is a small aquatic plant that can be quickly transformed to produce recombinant proteins in a contained and controlled bioprocessing environment. The containment capability of Lemna has been further improved with the creation of an auxotroph platform that requires isoleucine supplementation for survival of transformed plant lines. Using an RNAi based approach, threonine deaminase (TD) expression was targeted and thus resulted in dramatically reduced expression of this key enzyme in the isoleucine biosynthesis pathway.

Businesses and advocacy groups create a road map for safer chemicals: the BizNGO Principles for Chemicals Policy.

This paper details how businesses and environmental organizations are collaborating to define and implement a visionary agenda for integrating safer chemicals into products, describing the challenges they confront and how they are overcoming those challenges. The framework for this assessment is the Principles for Chemicals Policy developed by the Business-NGO Working Group for Safer Chemicals and Sustainable Materials (BizNGO). The four principles--1) knowing and disclosing chemicals in products, 2) assessing and avoiding hazards, 3) committing to continuous improvement, and 4) supporting public policies and industry standards--while appearing to be straightforward, are, in fact, very complex to implement in practice.

Glycan optimization of a human monoclonal antibody in the aquatic plant Lemna minor.

N-glycosylation is critical to the function of monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) and distinguishes various systems used for their production. We expressed human mAbs in the small aquatic plant Lemna minor, which offers several advantages for manufacturing therapeutic proteins free of zoonotic pathogens. Glycosylation of a mAb against human CD30 was optimized by co-expressing the heavy and light chains of the mAb with an RNA interference construct targeting expression of the endogenous alpha-1,3-fucosyltransferase and beta-1,2-xylosyltransferase genes.

Gene silencing from plant DNA carried by a Geminivirus.

The geminivirus tomato golden mosaic virus (TGMV) replicates in nuclei and expresses genes from high copy number DNA episomes. The authors used TGMV as a vector to determine whether episomal DNA can cause silencing of homologous, chromosomal genes. Two markers were used to asses silencing: (1) the sulfur allele (su) of magnesium chelatase, an enzyme required for chlorophyll formation; and (2) the firefly luciferase gene (luc).