Proximal Tibial Fracture in Pseudo-Rheumatoid Synovial Chondromatosis: A Case Study.

Introduction: Progressive pseudorheumatoid dysplasia is an autosomal recessively inherited rare disorder with features of growth retardation, multiple joint deformities, and intra-articular loose bodies.

Case Report: This case study is about a 34-year-old man who presented to us following trauma to his right leg. On general assessment, he was short statured with multiple deformities of both upper and lower limbs with local signs suggestive of proximal tibial fracture over his right tibia.

Loss of immune cell identity with age inferred from large atlases of single cell transcriptomes.

By analyzing two large atlases of almost 4 million cells, we show that immune-senescence involves a gradual loss of cellular identity, reflecting increased cellular heterogeneity, for effector, and cytotoxic immune cells. The effects are largely similar in both males and females and were robustly reproduced in two atlases, one assembled from 35 diverse studies including 678 adults, the other the OneK1K study of 982 adults. Since the mean transcriptional differences among cell-types remain constant across age deciles, there is little evidence for the alternative mechanism of convergence of cell-type identity.

MCPNet: a parallel maximum capacity-based genome-scale gene network construction framework.

Motivation: Gene network reconstruction from gene expression profiles is a compute- and data-intensive problem. Numerous methods based on diverse approaches including mutual information, random forests, Bayesian networks, correlation measures, as well as their transforms and filters such as data processing inequality, have been proposed. However, an effective gene network reconstruction method that performs well in all three aspects of computational efficiency, data size scalability, and output quality remains elusive.

Knowledge, attitude, and awareness of biocompatibility of orthodontic materials among dental students.

The aim of this study is to find the knowledge, attitude and awareness of biocompatibility of orthodontic materials among dental students.A survey of 13 questions was created using Google Forms. The questions on the survey cover a wide range of topics including the awareness of cytotoxicity of orthodontic materials, their corrosive potential, ways of preventing corrosion and release of subsequent substances, and various means by which these physiological actions occur.

Interfacial cavitation.

Cavitation has long been recognized as a crucial predictor, or precursor, to the ultimate failure of various materials, ranging from ductile metals to soft and biological materials. Traditionally, cavitation in solids is defined as an unstable expansion of a void or a defect within a material. The critical applied load needed to trigger this instability -- the critical pressure -- is a lengthscale independent material property and has been predicted by numerous theoretical studies for a breadth of constitutive models.

EnGRaiN: a supervised ensemble learning method for recovery of large-scale gene regulatory networks.

Motivation: Reconstruction of genome-scale networks from gene expression data is an actively studied problem. A wide range of methods that differ between the types of interactions they uncover with varying trade-offs between sensitivity and specificity have been proposed. To leverage benefits of multiple such methods, ensemble network methods that combine predictions from resulting networks have been developed, promising results better than or as good as the individual networks.

Observation of Ultraslow Shock Waves in a Tunable Magnetic Lattice.

The combination of fast propagation speeds and highly localized nature has hindered the direct observation of the evolution of shock waves at the molecular scale. To address this limitation, an experimental system is designed by tuning a one-dimensional magnetic lattice to evolve benign waveforms into shock waves at observable spatial and temporal scales, thus serving as a "magnifying glass" to illuminate shock processes. An accompanying analysis confirms that the formation of strong shocks is fully captured.

Connexin and gap junctions: perspectives from biology to nanotechnology based therapeutics.

The concept of gap junctions and their role in intercellular communication has been known for around 50 years. Considerable progress has been made in understanding the fundamental biology of connexins in mediating gap junction intercellular communication (GJIC) and their role in various cellular processes including pathological conditions. However, this understanding has not led to development of advanced therapeutics utilizing GJIC.

An alignment-free heuristic for fast sequence comparisons with applications to phylogeny reconstruction.

Background: Alignment-free methods for sequence comparisons have become popular in many bioinformatics applications, specifically in the estimation of sequence similarity measures to construct phylogenetic trees. Recently, the average common substring measure, ACS, and its k-mismatch counterpart, ACS, have been shown to produce results as effective as multiple-sequence alignment based methods for reconstruction of phylogeny trees. Since computing ACS takes O(n logkn) time and hence impractical for large datasets, multiple heuristics that can approximate ACS have been introduced.

Conventional and Nanotechnology Based Approaches to Combat Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease: Implications for Chronic Airway Diseases.

Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is the most prevalent obstructive lung disease worldwide characterized by decline in lung function. It is associated with airway obstruction, oxidative stress, chronic inflammation, mucus hypersecretion, and enhanced autophagy and cellular senescence. Cigarette smoke being the major risk factor, other secondary risk factors such as the exposure to air pollutants, occupational exposure to gases and fumes in developing countries, also contribute to the pathogenesis of COPD.

TiO doped chitosan/poly (vinyl alcohol) nanocomposite film with enhanced mechanical properties for application in bone tissue regeneration.

Here, TiO nanoparticles have been doped into the polymer film-construct of Chitosan/poly (vinyl alcohol)/Nano-hydroxyapatite (CPHT I - III) to enhance the mechanical and biological properties of the film so as to mimic the human bone extracellular matrix for application in human bone regeneration. The synthesized films are highly porous in nature along with the presence of macrovoids. Significantly enhanced mechanical properties were obtained upon the addition of TiO in comparison to previous literature.

Tunable Mechanical, Electrical, and Thermal Properties of Polymer Nanocomposites through GMA Bridging at Interface.

Polymer nanocomposites (PNCs) have become an exciting field of current research and have attracted a huge interest among both academia and industry during the last few decades. However, the multifunctional single-nanocomposite film exhibiting the combination of desired structure and properties still remains a big challenge. Herein, we report a novel strategy to address these problems by using versatile polymer glycidyl methacrylate (GMA) as a bridging medium between the filler and the polymer matrix, resulting in high density of interfaces as well as strong interactions, which lead to generation of tunable thermal, mechanical, and electrical properties in the materials.

Connexin-43 enhances tumor suppressing activity of artesunate via gap junction-dependent as well as independent pathways in human breast cancer cells.

The gap junction (GJ) protein connexin-43 (Cx43) is considered as a tumour suppressor protein for its role in reversing the phenotype of the cancer cells. In this study, we exploited the antitumor property of Cx43 in conjunction with the artesunate (ART), a plant-based active anti-malarial compound. The reactive oxygen species (ROS) generated by ART resulted in DNA damage, which in turn led to DNA damage response by activation of DNA damage repair proteins.

A greedy alignment-free distance estimator for phylogenetic inference.

Background: Alignment-free sequence comparison approaches have been garnering increasing interest in various data- and compute-intensive applications such as phylogenetic inference for large-scale sequences. While k-mer based methods are predominantly used in real applications, the average common substring (ACS) approach is emerging as one of the prominent alignment-free approaches. This ACS approach has been further generalized by some recent work, either greedily or exactly, by allowing a bounded number of mismatches in the common substrings.

Efficient detection of viral transmissions with Next-Generation Sequencing data.

Background: Hepatitis C is a major public health problem in the United States and worldwide. Outbreaks of hepatitis C virus (HCV) infections associated with unsafe injection practices, drug diversion, and other exposures to blood are difficult to detect and investigate. Molecular analysis has been frequently used in the study of HCV outbreaks and transmission chains; helping identify a cluster of sequences as linked by transmission if their genetic distances are below a previously defined threshold.

Microarray Data Processing Techniques for Genome-Scale Network Inference from Large Public Repositories.

Pre-processing of microarray data is a well-studied problem. Furthermore, all popular platforms come with their own recommended best practices for differential analysis of genes. However, for genome-scale network inference using microarray data collected from large public repositories, these methods filter out a considerable number of genes.

ALFRED: A Practical Method for Alignment-Free Distance Computation.

Alignment-free approaches are gaining persistent interest in many sequence analysis applications such as phylogenetic inference and metagenomic classification/clustering, especially for large-scale sequence datasets. Besides the widely used k-mer methods, the average common substring (ACS) approach has emerged to be one of the well-known alignment-free approaches. Two recent works further generalize this ACS approach by allowing a bounded number k of mismatches in the common substrings, relying on approximation (linear time) and exact computation, respectively.

LGR5 regulates pro-survival MEK/ERK and proliferative Wnt/β-catenin signalling in neuroblastoma.

LGR5 is a marker of normal and cancer stem cells in various tissues where it functions as a receptor for R-spondins and increases canonical Wnt signalling amplitude. Here we report that LGR5 is also highly expressed in a subset of high grade neuroblastomas. Neuroblastoma is a clinically heterogenous paediatric cancer comprising a high proportion of poor prognosis cases (~40%) which are frequently lethal.

Biogenesis, characterization, and the effect of vicenin-gold nanoparticles on glucose utilization in 3T3-L1 adipocytes: a bioinformatic approach to illuminate its interaction with PTP 1B and AMPK.

This study reported the synthesis of Vicenin-2 gold nanoparticles (VN-AuNPs) and evaluated their effect on the glucose utilization efficiency of 3T3-L1 adipocytes. The VN-AuNPs were characterized by microscopic, DLS and spectral analysis. The bio-reducing efficiency of Vicenin-2 (VN) was computed and confirmed by HPLC analysis.

Macrophage colony-stimulating factor and cancer: a review.

Tumor growth is influenced by a wide variety of external and internal factors. One of the most important mediators of tumor development is our immune system. The nonstop surveillance of the immune system was originally expected to clear the transformed cells from the body and guard against the development of tumor.

Structural, nanomechanical, field emission and ammonia gas sensing properties of nitrogenated amorphous carbon films deposited by filtered anodic jet carbon arc technique.

This paper reports the effect of substrate bias on the structural, nanomechanical, field emission and ammonia gas sensing properties of nitrogenated amorphous carbon films embedded with nanocrystallites (a-C: N: nc) deposited by a filtered anodic jet carbon arc (FAJCA) technique. The films are characterized by X-ray diffraction, high resolution transmission electron microscopy, energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopic analysis, Raman spectroscopy, nanoindentation, field emission and ammonia gas sensing measurements. The properties of the films obtained are found to depend on the substrate bias.

Amelioration of cancer stem cells in macrophage colony stimulating factor-expressing U87MG-human glioblastoma upon 5-fluorouracil therapy.

Macrophage colony stimulating factor (MCSF) regulates growth, proliferation and differentiation of haematopoietic cell lineages. Many cancers are known to secrete high level of MCSF, which recruit macrophages into the tumour micro-environment, supporting tumour growth. Herein, we report the cloning of MCSF and subsequent generation of U87MG expressing MCSF stable cell line (U87-MCSF).

Silver nanoparticles impregnated alginate-chitosan-blended nanocarrier induces apoptosis in human glioblastoma cells.

Herein, a green method for the development of a novel biodegradable silver nanoparticles (NPs) impregnated alginate-chitosan-blended nanocarrier (Ag NPs-Alg-Chi NC) is reported. The synthesis of Ag NPs-Alg-Chi NC is based on the polyelectrolyte complex formation between alginate and chitosan. The composite NC is characterized by ultraviolet-visible spectroscopy, transmission electron microscopy, scanning electron microscopy (SEM), Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, and X-ray diffraction.