Transgender Women Exhibit a Distinct Stress Echocardiography Profile Compared With Age-Matched Cisgender Counterparts: The Mayo Clinic Women's Heart Clinic Experience.

Background: Stress echocardiographic (SE) testing is an important modality in cardiovascular risk stratification and obstructive coronary artery disease assessment. Binary sex-based parameters are classically used for the interpretation of these studies, even among transgender women (TGW). Coronary artery disease is a leading cause of morbidity and mortality in this population.

Protease-Activatable Porphyrin Molecular Beacon for Osteoarthritis Management.

Despite the substantial burden posed by osteoarthritis (OA) globally, difficult challenges remain in achieving early OA diagnosis and adopting effective disease-modifying treatments. In this study, we use a biomolecular approach to address these limitations by creating an inherently theranostic molecular beacon whose imaging and therapeutic capabilities are activated by early pathological changes in OA. This platform comprised (1) a peptide linker substrate for metalloproteinase-13 (MMP-13), a pathological protease upregulated in OA, which was conjugated to (2) a porphyrin moiety with inherent multimodal imaging, photodynamic therapy, and drug delivery capabilities, and (3) a quencher that silences the porphyrin's endogenous fluorescence and photoreactivity when the beacon is intact.

Seroconversion following Heplisav-B, hepatitis B vaccine (recombinant), adjuvanted, in patients with end-stage renal disease at an urban safety net hospital.

Purpose: Heplisav-B is a novel recombinant adjuvanted vaccine for hepatitis B virus (HBV) that has been approved as a 2-dose regimen and shown to have similar seroconversion rates in healthy adults as single-antigen HBV vaccines. More data are needed to determine whether similarly high rates of seroconversion and immunity are observed in immunocompromised patient populations such as in patients with end-stage renal disease (ESRD) on hemodialysis.

Methods: Patients with ESRD who presented for emergency-only hemodialysis and either were HBV vaccine naive or had a hepatitis B surface antibody (anti-HBs) titer of less than 10 IU/mL received 3 standard 20-μg doses of Heplisav-B at week 0, week 4 (±2 weeks), and week 24 (±2 weeks), with anti-HBs titer measured at week 28 (±2 weeks).

Complementarity, completeness and quality of long-term faunal archives in an Asian biodiversity hotspot.

Long-term baselines on biodiversity change through time are crucial to inform conservation decision-making in biodiversity hotspots, but environmental archives remain unavailable for many regions. Extensive palaeontological, zooarchaeological and historical records and indigenous knowledge about past environmental conditions exist for China, a megadiverse country experiencing large-scale biodiversity loss, but their potential to understand past human-caused faunal turnover is not fully assessed. We investigate a series of complementary environmental archives to evaluate the quality of the Holocene-historical faunal record of Hainan Island, China's southernmost province, for establishing new baselines on postglacial mammalian diversity and extinction dynamics.

Advanced Photosensitizer Activation Strategies for Smarter Photodynamic Therapy Beacons.

Photodynamic therapy (PDT) is a clinical treatment in which a light-absorbing drug called a photosensitizer (PS) is combined with light and molecular oxygen to generate cytotoxic singlet oxygen. PDT provides additional tissue selectivity compared to conventional chemotherapy as singlet oxygen is generated only in areas in which PS accumulates and that are simultaneously illuminated by a light source with sufficient irradiance and dose. Early PDT beacons built on this concept by adding an analyte-responsive element that simultaneously turns on PDT and fluorescence, providing both an additional layer of selectivity and real-time feedback of the PS's activation state.

In Silico Evaluation of the Impacts of Quorum Sensing Inhibition (QSI) on Strain Competition and Development of QSI Resistance.

As understanding of bacterial regulatory systems and pathogenesis continues to increase, QSI has been a major focus of research. However, recent studies have shown that mechanisms of resistance to quorum sensing (QS) inhibitors (QSIs) exist, calling into question their clinical value. We propose a computational framework that considers bacteria genotypes relative to QS genes and QS-regulated products including private, quasi-public, and public goods according to their impacts on bacterial fitness.