Mucosal healing and inflammatory bowel disease: Therapeutic implications and new targets.

Mucosal healing (MH) is vital in maintaining homeostasis within the gut and protecting against injury and infections. Multiple factors and signaling pathways contribute in a dynamic and coordinated manner to maintain intestinal homeostasis and mucosal regeneration/repair. However, when intestinal homeostasis becomes chronically disturbed and an inflammatory immune response is constitutively active due to impairment of the intestinal epithelial barrier autoimmune disease results, particularly inflammatory bowel disease (IBD).

Nanoparticulate air pollution disrupts proteostasis in Caenorhabditis elegans.

The proteostasis network comprises the biochemical pathways that together maintain and regulate proper protein synthesis, transport, folding, and degradation. Many progressive neurodegenerative diseases, such as Huntington's disease (HD) and Alzheimer's disease (AD), are characterized by an age-dependent failure of the proteostasis network to sustain the health of the proteome, resulting in protein misfolding, aggregation, and, often, neurotoxicity. Although important advances have been made in recent years to identify genetic risk factors for neurodegenerative diseases, we still know relatively little about environmental risk factors such as air pollution.

Susceptibility of anaerobic bacteria to five antimicrobial agents and demonstration of resistance of Bacteroides fragilis to clindamycin.

Minimal inhibitory concentrations (MICs) of penicillin G, cefamandole, tetracycline, clindamycin and metronidazole were determined against 42 isolates of anaerobic bacteria. metronidazole was the most active antimicrobial agent against all anaerobic bacteria tested and especially against the Bacteroides fragilis group (MICs for all strains ranged from less than equal to 0.5 to 4 micrograms/ml).

Plasmid determined drug resistance in clinically isolated Escherichia coli.

The results of a survey for the presence of R plasmids in 100 clinically isolated strains of Escherichia coli are presented. Sixty-nine per cent of the strains were resistant to at least one of the antimicrobial agents tested and 63.7% of the resistant strains transferred all or part of their resistance genes to Escherichia coli k 12.