Agricultural soils are responsible for ecological functions and services that include primary production of food, fiber and fuel, nutrient cycling, carbon cycling and storage, water infiltration and purification, among others. Fungi are important drivers of most of those ecosystem services. Given the importance of fungi in agricultural soils, in this study, we aimed to characterize and analyse the changes of the soil fungal communities of three cropping systems from Madeira Island, where family farming is predominant, and investigate the response of fungi and its functional groups to soil physicochemical properties.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFHumans can use the contents of memory to construct scenarios and events that they have not encountered before, a process colloquially known as imagination. Much of our current understanding of the neural mechanisms mediating imagination is limited by paradigms that rely on participants' subjective reports of imagined content. Here, we used a novel behavioral paradigm that was designed to systematically evaluate the contents of an individual's imagination.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDehydroepiandrosterone (DHEA) and cortisol release appear to have contrasting effects on stress perception during stressful tasks. This study aimed to investigate anticipatory examination stress in college students by considering DHEA, cortisol, psycho-emotional aspects and examination performance. Seventy-six students (66 females, 10 males; age range 18-25 years) provided saliva samples and completed questionnaires in two sessions 48 hours apart.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAugmented reality (AR) technology allows virtual objects to be superimposed on the real-world environment, offering significant potential for improving cognitive assessments and rehabilitation processes in the field of visuospatial learning. This study examines how patients with acquired brain injury (ABI) evaluate the functions and usability of a SLAM-based smartphone AR app to assess object-location skills. Ten ABI patients performed a task for the spatial recall of four objects using an AR app.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis article is the second in a series of two publications on the European Crohn's and Colitis Organisation [ECCO] evidence-based consensus on the management of Crohn's disease. The first article covers medical management; the present article addresses surgical management, including preoperative aspects and drug management before surgery. It also provides technical advice for a variety of common clinical situations.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe present study aims to characterize the bacterial community, resistome and integron abundance of a municipal wastewater treatment plant (WWTP) over the course of 12 months and evaluate the year-long performance of integron-related genes as potential indicators of antibiotic resistance mechanisms in influents and effluents. For that, total DNA was extracted and subjected to 16S rRNA-targeted metabarcoding, high-throughput (HT) qPCR (48 targets) and standard qPCR (5 targets). Targets included integrase genes, antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) and putative pathogenic groups.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Women are vulnerable to stress-related disorders. Examinations are a source of stress, triggering emotional, cognitive, and hormonal responses. We examined women's psychological and hormonal stress responses and academic performance according to personality during a real-life examination.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFRev Esp Enferm Dig
October 2023
A 35-year old male from Brazil presented with intermittent abdominal pain. Abdominal computed tomography revealed a nodule adjacent to splenic hilum and multiple abdominal nodules, suspicious of carcinomatosis. The patient underwent gastroscopy and endoscopic ultrasound (EUS), that revealed an ill-defined hypoechogenic lesion adjacent to the spleen and two hypoechogenic subepithelial lesions located in the 4th layer of the stomach and duodenal bulb.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjective: Depression is a common mental health disorder and a major public health concern, significantly interfering with the lives of those affected. The complex clinical presentation of depression complicates symptom assessments. Day-to-day fluctuations of depression symptoms within an individual bring an additional barrier, since infrequent testing may not reveal symptom fluctuation.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIEEE Trans Vis Comput Graph
February 2023
The recent pandemic, war, and oil crises have caused many to reconsider their need to travel for education, training, and meetings. Providing assistance and training remotely has thus gained importance for many applications, from industrial maintenance to surgical telemonitoring. Current solutions such as video conferencing platforms lack essential communication cues such as spatial referencing, which negatively impacts both time completion and task performance.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAccording to PubMed statistics when writing this review, the year 2022 is expected to mark the first dip in the number of articles published in relation to the Covid-19 pandemic. This review, without any mention to Sars-CoV-2, highlight this transition and addresses many topics in internal medicine: gastroenterology, cardiology, endocrinology, respiratory medicine, infectious diseases and venous access. Each year, the chief residents of the internal medicine ward in Lausanne university hospital (CHUV) in Switzerland meet up to share their readings: here is a selection of ten articles that have caught our attention, summarized and commented for you, which should change our daily practice.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNeuropsychol Dev Cogn B Aging Neuropsychol Cogn
February 2024
Associative memory deficits in aging are frequently characterized by false recognition of novel stimulus associations, particularly when stimuli are similar. Introducing distinctive stimuli, therefore, can help guide item differentiation in memory and can further our understanding of how age-related brain changes impact behavior. How older adults use different types of distinctive information to distinguish overlapping events in memory and to avoid false associative recognition is still unknown.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCurrent agricultural methodologies are vulnerable to erratic climate and are dependent on cost-intensive fertilization to ensure high yields. Sustainable practices should be pursued to ensure food security. L.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground And Purpose: Long-COVID describes the long-term effects of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). In long-COVID patients, neuropsychological alterations are frequently reported symptoms. Research points to medial temporal lobe dysfunction and its association with anosmia in long-COVID patients.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: Groove pancreatitis (GP) is a type of chronic segmental pancreatitis that affects the pancreatoduodenal groove area, and it is often misdiagnosed. Outflow obstruction of the minor papilla associated with alcohol consumption seems to be the main pathophysiological mechanism, and it affects mainly middle-aged males. Symptoms include nausea and postprandial vomiting from gastric outlet obstruction, weight loss, and abdominal pain.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFis a fungal plant pathogen of a wide range of hosts but knowledge about the virulence factors of and host-pathogen interactions is rather limited. The molecules involved in the interaction between and are mostly unknown, so we used a multi-omics approach to understand pathogen-host interactions. We present the first comprehensive characterization of the secretome of and a prediction of protein-protein interactions using a dry-lab non-targeted interactomics strategy.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: The increased risk of bowel cancer in patients with inflammatory bowel disease can be related with the extent, duration and severity of inflammation or with the cancer immune surveillance interference of immunosuppressive drugs used in inflammatory bowel disease treatment. Therefore, the risk-benefit ratio associated with long-term therapeutic strategies should be based on the patient's age, sex, comorbidities and disease phenotype.
Case Report: We present the case of a 76-year-old man with a history of melanoma stage Clark III and steroid-dependent left-sided colitis, refractory to mesalamine and thiopurines, with a diagnosis of a multifocal colorectal adenocarcinoma shortly after clinical and endoscopic remission 1 year after starting vedolizumab.
Extracellular matrix (ECM)-based bioinks have been steadily gaining interest in the field of bioprinting to develop biologically relevant and functional tissue constructs. Herein, we propose the use of supercritical carbon dioxide (scCO) technology to extract the ECM components of cell-sheets that have shown promising results in creating accurate 3D microenvironments replicating the cell's own ECM, to be used in the preparation of bioinks. The ECM extraction protocol best fitted for cell sheets was defined by considering efficient DNA removal with a minor effect on the ECM.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFFunctional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) is a non-invasive optical imaging technique that employs near-infrared light to measure cortical brain oxygenation. The use of fNIRS has increased exponentially in recent years. Spatial memory is defined as the ability to learn and use spatial information.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: Patients with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) do not seem to be at increased risk of infection by SARS-CoV-2, but there is a concern whether immunosuppressive therapy may be associated with more severe disease. Several clinical practice recommendations have been published to help guide IBD care during the COVID-19 pandemic. Nonetheless, few studies have addressed patients' perspectives and fears.
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