Pitfalls and Safeguards in Industry-Funded Research.

Physicians should follow ethical principles in their relationships with industry and be mindful that such relationships-if they are perceived as conflicts of interest-can undermine trust in the patient-physician relationship. By identifying potential pitfalls and safeguards that can help prevent problems, this article focuses on ensuring that physician-industry relationships do not result in ethical transgressions or cause damage to doctor-patient relationships. Patient trust in physicians can be undermined by the perception that a physician-investigator is operating in the best interest of the research rather than the best interest of the patient.

Quaternary Structure, Salt Sensitivity, and Allosteric Regulation of β-AMYLASE2 From .

The β-amylase family in has nine members, four of which are both plastid-localized and, based on active-site sequence conservation, potentially capable of hydrolyzing starch to maltose. We recently reported that one of these enzymes, BAM2, is catalytically active in the presence of physiological levels of KCl, exhibits sigmoidal kinetics with a Hill coefficient of over 3, is tetrameric, has a putative secondary binding site (SBS) for starch, and is highly co-expressed with other starch metabolizing enzymes. Here we generated a tetrameric homology model of Arabidopsis BAM2 that is a dimer of dimers in which the putative SBSs of two subunits form a deep groove between the subunits.

An Analysis of Informed Consent Form Readability of Oncology Research Protocols.

Twenty-two percent of adults in the United States have only basic health literacy skills. We used a multiple linear regression model to identify associations between readability of informed consent documents with study sponsor, study phase, and approval year using a sample of 143 oncology studies at Ochsner Medical Center. The M ± SD Flesh-Kincaid Reading Grade Level (RGL) was 10.

Arabidopsis β-Amylase2 Is a K-Requiring, Catalytic Tetramer with Sigmoidal Kinetics.

The Arabidopsis () genome contains nine β-amylase () genes, some of which play important roles in starch hydrolysis. However, little is known about BAM2, a plastid-localized enzyme reported to have extremely low catalytic activity. Using conservation of intron positions, we determined that the nine Arabidopsis genes fall into two distinct subfamilies.