Publications by authors named "COLIN J"

Antifungal resistance in humans is a clinical reality of increasing incidence that raises problems for patient care. In this current event, we discuss the link that can be made between the presence of antifungals in the environment and the development of resistance in humans, as well as the ecotoxicology of antifungals. The presence of antifungals in the environment has a health, but also an ecological impact.

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Article Synopsis
  • The study aimed to identify factors that lead to both general and inappropriate antibiotic prescriptions for residents with lower respiratory tract infections (LRTI) in long-term care facilities (LTCFs).
  • Conducted in Western Switzerland, researchers observed 114 residents and found that over half received antibiotics, but a significant portion of these prescriptions were deemed inappropriate.
  • The use of diagnostic tests, particularly PCR for respiratory viruses, was linked to reduced antibiotic prescriptions, suggesting that enhanced testing could improve prescribing practices in LTCFs.
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Alternative transcription start site (TSS) usage regulation has been identified as a major means of gene expression regulation in metazoans. However, in fungi, its impact remains elusive as its study has thus far been restricted to model yeasts. Here, we first re-analyzed TSS-seq data to define genuine TSS clusters in 2 species of pathogenic Cryptococcus.

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Occupational medicine is an essential branch of preventive medicine that aims to protect the health of workers in the workplace. Any work situation exposes the worker to occupational hazards. The three levels of prevention applied in occupational medicine make it possible, together, to control risks.

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Attribution methods, which employ heatmaps to identify the most influential regions of an image that impact model decisions, have gained widespread popularity as a type of explainability method. However, recent research has exposed the limited practical value of these methods, attributed in part to their narrow focus on the most prominent regions of an image - revealing "where" the model looks, but failing to elucidate "what" the model sees in those areas. In this work, we try to fill in this gap with CRAFT - a novel approach to identify both "what" and "where" by generating concept-based explanations.

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Objective: Patients with focal drug resistant epilepsy are excellent candidates for epilepsy surgery. Status epilepticus (SE) and seizure clusters (SC), described in a subset of patients, have both been associated with extended epileptogenic cerebral networks within one or both hemispheres. In this retrospective study, we were interested to determine if a history of SE or SC is associated with a worse surgical outcome.

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Delirium is a commonly encountered syndrome in clinical practice. Older people with cognitive disorders are most at risk of developing delirium during the hospital stay. However, the risk of underdiagnosis is significant, particularly because of the overlap of behavioral symptoms and cognitive impairment between delirium and dementia.

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With the advent of high-brilliance synchrotron sources, the issue of beam damage on the samples deserves proper attention. It is especially true for studies in batteries, since the intense photon fluxes are commonly used to probe ever finer effects. Here we report on the causes and consequences of synchrotron X-ray beam damage in batteries, based on the case study of X-ray diffraction.

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A fundamental component of human vision is our ability to parse complex visual scenes and judge the relations between their constituent objects. AI benchmarks for visual reasoning have driven rapid progress in recent years with state-of-the-art systems now reaching human accuracy on some of these benchmarks. Yet, there remains a major gap between humans and AI systems in terms of the sample efficiency with which they learn new visual reasoning tasks.

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Introduction: Atopic dermatitis (AD) is a chronic, inflammatory skin disorder with eczematous and pruritic lesions. Topical moisturisers and either topical corticosteroids or calcineurin inhibitors are usually recommended. Restoring the skin barrier function alleviates AD symptoms.

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The EPI VITRAKVI study is a retrospective study designed to place the results of the single-arm Phase I/II larotrectinib SCOUT trial into context by comparison with external historical controls. Its primary objective is to compare the time to medical treatment failure between larotrectinib and the historical standard of care (chemotherapy) in patients with infantile fibrosarcoma. External historical cohorts have been selected by using objective criteria.

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The combined effects of compressive stress, applied pressure, and edge folding of a freestanding thin film have been theoretically investigated on the buckle morphologies of the structure. In the framework of the Föppl-von Kármán theory of thin plates, the different buckle profiles have been analytically determined, and two buckling regimes have been identified for the film: one regime where the transition from upward to downward buckling is continuous, and one that is discontinuous (snap-through). The critical pressures characterizing the different regimes have then been determined, and an hysteresis cycle has been identified through the study of buckling versus pressure.

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A persistent rise in the costs of construction materials has led to the need to address this problem in line with the Sustainable Development Goals. This research employed vegetal soft and rigid fibers in a screed mortar to produce a sustainable fabric-cement matrix. Four different vegetal-dried fibers (hemp, flax, miscanthus, and bamboo) with dosages of 0.

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Lipoproteins are natural nanostructures responsible for the transport of cholesterol and other lipids in the blood. They are characterized by having a lipophilic core surrounded by an amphiphilic shell composed of phospholipids, cholesterol and one or more apolipoproteins. Being endogenous carriers makes them suitable for drug delivery purposes.

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Pathogenic fungi require delicate gene regulation mechanisms to adapt to diverse living environments and escape host immune systems. Recent advances in sequencing technology have exposed the complexity of the fungal genome, thus allowing the gradual disentanglement of multiple layers of gene expression control. Alternative transcription start site (aTSS) usage, previously reported to be prominent in mammals and to play important roles in physiopathology, is also present in fungi to fine-tune gene expression.

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imaginal discs are larval internal structures that become the external organs of the adult. They have been used to study numerous developmental processes for more than fifty years. Dissecting these imaginal discs for collection is challenging, as the size of third-instar larvae organs is typically less than 1 mm.

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Dental caries is a multifactorial biofilm- and sugar-dependent disease. This study investigated the influence of different agents on the induction of surviving Streptococcus mutans cells after successive treatment cycles and characterized the biofilms formed by these cells recovered posttreatment. The agents (with their main targets listed in parentheses) were compound 1771 (lipoteichoic acids), 4' hydroxychalcone (exopolysaccharides), myricetin (exopolysaccharides), -farnesol (cytoplasmatic membrane), sodium fluoride (enolase-glycolysis), chlorhexidine (antimicrobial), and vehicle.

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Acid-catalyzed hydrocarbon transformations are essential for industrial processes, including oligomerization, cracking, alkylation, and aromatization. However, these chemistries are extremely complex, and computational (automatic) reaction network generation is required to capture these intricacies. The approach relies on the concept that underlying mechanisms for the transformations can be described by a limited number of reaction families applied to various species, with both gaseous and protonated intermediate species tracked.

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Article Synopsis
  • Lithium-rich disordered rocksalt Li2TiS3 shows high discharge capacities over 350 mAh·g−1, making it a strong candidate for lithium-ion battery cathodes, but it suffers from rapid capacity loss during cycling.
  • Researchers developed new selenium-substituted materials (Li2TiSexS3−x) through a wet mechanochemistry process to address the stability issues, which led to better cycling performance.
  • X-ray diffraction confirmed that the substituted materials maintained a disordered rocksalt phase with expanded lattice parameters, resulting in improved reversible capacities and enhanced cycling stability compared to the original Li2TiS3.
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Detecting protein-RNA interactions in vivo is essential for deciphering many important cellular pathways. Several methods have been described for this purpose, among which cross-linking analysis of cDNA, CRAC. This method relies on a first step of UV cross-linking of living yeast cells and several subsequent steps of purification of the protein-RNA complexes, some of which under denaturing condition.

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A multitude of explainability methods has been described to try to help users better understand how modern AI systems make decisions. However, most performance metrics developed to evaluate these methods have remained largely theoretical - without much consideration for the human end-user. In particular, it is not yet clear (1) how useful current explainability methods are in real-world scenarios; and (2) whether current performance metrics accurately reflect the usefulness of explanation methods for the end user.

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The extractive industry is increasingly faced with problems of managing contaminated sites. The red gypsum landfill at the Ochsenfeld site is representative of the typology byproduct storage of the Ti-extraction activity. The management of the elemental content and the water body are the issues at this site.

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Apoptosis is associated with numerous phenotypical characteristics, and is thus studied with many tools. In this study, we compared two broadly used apoptotic assays: TUNEL and staining with an antibody targeting the activated form of an effector caspase. To compare them, we developed a protocol based on commonly used tools such as image filtering, z-projection, and thresholding.

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We describe the case of a 27-year-old female patient who presented to the emergency ward with hypoesthesia and paresthesia developing over the last two months, initially in both feet and progressing to the knees in a few days without associated gait disorders. Dystonia in the thumb and index finger of both hands was noted. Blood tests including toxic drugs were negative.

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This study proposes a DAEM (Distributed Activation Energy Model) approach to predict the chemical alterations of lignocellulosic biomass as a function of hydrothermal treatment conditions. The model is first tuned by an original device allowing the sample shrinkage to be continuously assessed during hydrothermal treatment in saturated water vapor up to 190 °C. The shrinkage dynamic is supplied in the DAEM model as an indicator of the degree of biomass conversion.

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