See one, simulate many, do one, teach one: cardiac surgical simulation.

Purpose Of Review: To review the cardiac surgical simulation experience with a focus on data supporting its use.

Recent Findings: Simulators have been used to improve trainee performance across multiple surgical domains. Few cardiac surgery residency programs have incorporated the use of simulation individually and Boot Camp programs in the United States and Canada have also introduced surgical simulation early in cardiac surgical training.

Motor vehicle crashes during pregnancy and cerebral palsy during infancy: a longitudinal cohort analysis.

Objectives: To assess the incidence of cerebral palsy among children born to mothers who had their pregnancy complicated by a motor vehicle crash.

Design: Retrospective longitudinal cohort analysis of children born from 1 April 2002 to 31 March 2012 in Ontario, Canada.

Participants: Cases defined as pregnancies complicated by a motor vehicle crash and controls as remaining pregnancies with no crash.

Synapse formation changes the rules for desensitization of PKC translocation in Aplysia.

Protein kinase Cs (PKCs) are activated by translocating from the cytoplasm to the membrane. We have previously shown that serotonin-mediated translocation of PKC to the plasma membrane in Aplysia sensory neurons was subject to desensitization, a decrease in the ability of serotonin to induce translocation after previous application of serotonin. In Aplysia, changes in the strength of the sensory-motor neuron synapse are important for behavioral sensitization and PKC regulates a number of important aspects of this form of synaptic plasticity.

Tunable oscillations and chaotic dynamics in systems with localized synthesis.

Biological systems contain biochemical control networks that reside within a remarkable spatial structure. We present a theoretical study of a biological system in which two chemically coupled species, an activating species and an inhibiting species forming a negative feedback, are synthesized at unique sites and interact with each other through diffusion. The dynamical behaviors in these systems depend on the spatial locations of these synthetic sites.

Molecular determinants of the spacing effect.

Long-term memory formation is sensitive to the pattern of training sessions. Training distributed over time (spaced training) is superior at generating long-term memories than training presented with little or no rest interval (massed training). This spacing effect was observed in a range of organisms from invertebrates to humans.

The rates of protein synthesis and degradation account for the differential response of neurons to spaced and massed training protocols.

The sensory-motor neuron synapse of Aplysia is an excellent model system for investigating the biochemical changes underlying memory formation. In this system, training that is separated by rest periods (spaced training) leads to persistent changes in synaptic strength that depend on biochemical pathways that are different from those that occur when the training lacks rest periods (massed training). Recently, we have shown that in isolated sensory neurons, applications of serotonin, the neurotransmitter implicated in inducing these synaptic changes during memory formation, lead to desensitization of the PKC Apl II response, in a manner that depends on the method of application (spaced versus massed).

Germ-line DNA copy number variation frequencies in a large North American population.

Genomic copy number variation (CNV) is a recently identified form of global genetic variation in the human genome. The Affymetrix GeneChip 100 and 500 K SNP genotyping platforms were used to perform a large-scale population-based study of CNV frequency. We constructed a genomic map of 578 CNV regions, covering approximately 220 Mb (7.