Evaluating the feasibility, sensitivity, and specificity of next-generation molecular methods for pleural infection diagnosis.

Pleural infections are common and associated with substantial healthcare costs, morbidity, and mortality. Accurate diagnosis remains challenging due to low culture positivity rates, frequent polymicrobial involvement, and non-specific diagnostic biomarkers. Here, we undertook a prospective study examining the feasibility and performance of molecular methods for diagnosing suspected pleural infection.

Unusual bot fly larva removed from the scalp of a returning traveler.

An aberrant bot fly specimen was removed from the scalp of a patient 3 wk after returning from Belize. The specimen showed little resemblance to the typical human bot fly larva, Dermatobia hominis, prompting a molecular identification using cytochrome oxidase I and II (COI and COII, respectively) mitochondrial DNA sequence regions. A BLAST search was subsequently performed, and both our COI and COII amplicon sequences showed 99-100% match with Dermatobia hominis, despite the specimen's clearly aberrant morphology.

Drivers of behavior in two tick species, and (Acari: Ixodidae), in a laboratory setting.

Ticks and tick-borne diseases are of increasing concern in the United States, and understanding tick behavior could be crucial to limiting the exposure of humans and other animals to ticks. Here, we wanted to understand the drivers of questing and burrowing in and . We used a factorial design to assess the effects of substrate (sand, soil, and rock), temperature (16° and 22° C), tick species ( and ), and competition (homogenous or heterogenous mixture of ticks in the arena) on tick behavior in laboratory arenas.

Murine typhus: a re-emerging rickettsial zoonotic disease.

Murine typhus, caused by , is re-emerging in many parts of the world. The disease is also called endemic typhus to differentiate from epidemic typhus (caused by ), and sometimes also named flea-borne typhus. Occasionally, literature sources will include as a causative agent of flea-borne typhus, but illnesses caused by are actually flea-borne spotted fever.

Catalytic Deprotection of Alkyne Dicobalt Hexacarbonyl Complexes using Near-Infrared Photocatalysis.

Dicobalt hexacarbonyl complexes are well-known for their applications in the Nicholas reaction or simply as a protecting group for alkynes. To recover the alkyne, demetalation is necessary, which usually involves a stoichiometric amount of an oxidizing agent or a strong ligand. This article reports a demetalation methodology based on a photocatalytic process.