Background: There is limited data on the number and distribution of academically qualified professionals in the field of Public Health at the lower level of health authorities. The aim of this study was to analyze the distribution of Public Health Professionals in Public Health Authorities in Germany.
Method: An online survey was conducted with the directors of the 376 German Public Health Authorities regarding the presence of Public Health Professionals and their views on personnel needs.
Objective: The etiopathogenesis of systemic sclerosis (SSc) is unknown. Platelet-derived growth factor receptors (PDGFRs) are overexpressed in patients with SSc. Because PDGFRα is targeted by the adeno-associated virus type 5 (AAV5), we investigated whether AAV5 forms a complex with PDGFRα exposing epitopes that may induce the immune responses to the virus-PDGFRα complex.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFRecent years have witnessed an in-depth proliferation of the Internet of Things (IoT) and Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) systems linked to Industry 4.0 technology. The increasing rate of IoT device usage is associated with rising security risks resulting from malicious network flows during data exchange between the connected devices.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFTransmembrane proteins span lipid bilayer membranes and serve essential functions in all living cells. Membrane-inserted domains are of either α-helical or -barrel structure. Despite their biological importance, the biophysical mechanisms of the folding and insertion of proteins into membranes are not well understood.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Heart-focused anxiety (HFA) raises the risk for adverse outcomes in patients with heart disease. Despite this great importance, it is rarely assessed in clinical practice. Three dimensions are commonly defined in the context of HFA: heart-related fear, avoidance, and attention.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCurrently (March 2022), more than 17 million people in Germany have been infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus. It is expected that 5-10% of those infected will develop a clinically relevant post-COVID syndrome. The most common symptoms are fatigue, dyspnoea and cognitive impairment.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFExtraction of integral membrane proteins into detergents for structural and functional studies often leads to a strong loss in protein stability. The impact of the lipid bilayer on the thermodynamic stability of an integral membrane protein in comparison to its solubilized form in detergent was examined and compared for FhuA from Escherichia coli and for a mutant, FhuAΔ5-160, lacking the N-terminal cork domain. Urea-induced unfolding was monitored by fluorescence spectroscopy to determine the effective free energies [Formula: see text] of unfolding.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjectives: To quantify dental forces during double-lumen tube intubations with different laryngoscopy techniques.
Design: Experimental biomechanical mannequin study.
Setting: Two German university hospitals.
The growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) led to the deployment of many applications that use wireless networks, like smart cities and smart agriculture. Low Power Wide Area Networks (LPWANs) meet many requirements of IoT, such as energy efficiency, low cost, large coverage area, and large-scale deployment. Long Range Wide Area Network (LoRaWAN) networks are one of the most studied and implemented LPWAN technologies, due to the facility to build private networks with an open standard.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAdeno-associated virus (AAV) has proven to be a promising candidate for gene therapy due to its nonpathogenic nature, ease of production, and broad tissue tropism. However, its transduction capabilities are not optimal due to the interaction with various host factors within the cell. In a previous study, we identified members of the small ubiquitin-like modifier (SUMO) pathway as significant restriction factors in AAV gene transduction.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAdeno-associated viruses (AAV) are composed of nonenveloped, icosahedral protein shells that can be adapted to package and deliver recombinant therapeutic DNA. Approaches to engineer recombinant capsids for gene therapy applications have focused on rational design or library-based approaches that can address one or two desirable attributes; however, there is an unmet need to comprehensively improve AAV vector properties. Such cannot be achieved by utilizing sequence data alone but requires harnessing the three-dimensional (3D) structural properties of AAV capsids.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFLayered internet of things (IoT) architectures have been proposed over the last years as they facilitate understanding the roles of different networking, hardware, and software components of smart applications. These are inherently distributed, spanning from devices installed in the field up to a cloud datacenter and further to a user smartphone, passing by intermediary stages at different levels of fog computing infrastructure. However, IoT architectures provide almost no hints on where components should be deployed.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDental trauma is a common complication of tracheal intubation. As existing evidence is insufficient to validly assess the impact of different laryngoscopy techniques on the incidence of dental trauma, the force exerted onto dental structures during tracheal intubation was investigated. An intubation manikin was equipped with hidden force sensors in all maxillary incisors.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFProtein-lipid interactions are important for folding and membrane insertion of integral membrane proteins that are composed either of α-helical or of β-barrel structure in their transmembrane domains. While α-helical transmembrane proteins fold co-translationally while they are synthesized by a ribosome, β-barrel transmembrane proteins (β-TMPs) fold and insert posttranslationally-in bacteria after translocation across the cytoplasmic membrane, in cell organelles of eukaryotes after import across the outer membrane of the organelle. β-TMPs can be unfolded in aqueous solutions of chaotropic denaturants like urea and spontaneously refold upon denaturant dilution in the presence of preformed lipid bilayers.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFTo examine the mechanisms of folding and insertion of TMPs into membranes, kinetic studies are instrumental, for example, for the analysis of folding steps and involved intermediates or for the determination of activation energies. For many β-barrel transmembrane proteins (β-TMPs) it has been shown that the folded, functional form can be separated from the unfolded form by a simple electrophoretic mobility assay. The only requirements for a separation by SDS-polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis (SDS-PAGE) are that the folded form is sufficiently stable and that the samples are not heat-denatured before the electrophoresis is performed.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjectives: The aim of the present study was to evaluate the topographic relationship between mandibular third molars and the mandibular canal in panoramic tomography and cone beam computed tomography (CBCT).
Method And Materials: Records of all patients visiting for removal of a mandibular third molar between January 2014 and December 2015 were evaluated retrospectively. In panoramic tomography, the relationship of the roots to the mandibular canal was diagnosed according to the literature.
This chapter was inadvertently published with the expansion of the term "MNB" printed incorrectly as "N-Methyl-N-nitrosobenzamide" under section 2.5. Instead, it should have been "Methyl 4- nitrobenzenesulfonate.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFOlder adults are underrepresented in research, and a potential barrier to their participation may be the increasing prevalence of vision loss and lack of accommodation for this challenge. Although vision loss may initially pose a challenge to research participation, its effects can be mitigated with early, in-depth planning. For example, recruitment is more inclusive when best practices identified in the literature are used in the preparation of written materials to reduce glare and improve readability and legibility.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAdeno-associated viruses (AAVs) are being developed as vectors for the treatment of genetic disorders. However, pre-existing antibodies present a significant limitation to achieving optimal efficacy for the AAV gene delivery system. Efforts aimed at engineering vectors with the ability to evade the immune response include identification of residues on the virus capsid important for these interactions and changing them.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFGene therapy critically relies on vectors that combine high transduction efficiency with a high degree of target specificity and that can be administered through a safe intravenous route. The lack of suitable vectors, especially for gene therapy of brain disorders, represents a major obstacle. Therefore, we applied an in vivo screening system of random ligand libraries displayed on adeno-associated viral capsids to select brain-targeted vectors for the treatment of neurovascular diseases.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFVectors mediating strong, durable, and tissue-specific transgene expression are mandatory for safe and effective gene therapy. In settings requiring systemic vector administration, the availability of suited vectors is extremely limited. Here, we present a strategy to select vectors with true specificity for a target tissue from random peptide libraries displayed on adeno-associated virus (AAV) by screening the library under circulation conditions in a murine model.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAdeno-associated viruses are members of the genus dependoviruses of the parvoviridae family. AAV vectors are considered promising vectors for gene therapy and genetic vaccination as they can be easily produced, are highly stable and non-pathogenic. Nevertheless, transduction of cells in vitro and in vivo by AAV in the absence of a helper virus is comparatively inefficient requiring high multiplicity of infection.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAdeno-associated viral (AAV) vectors yield high potential for clinical gene therapy but, like for other vectors systems, they frequently do not sufficiently transduce the target tissue and their unspecific tropism prevents their application for multifocal diseases such as disseminated cancer. Targeted AAV vectors have been obtained from random AAV display peptide libraries but so far, all vector variants selected from AAV libraries upon systemic administration in vivo retained some collateral tropism, frequently the heart. Here we explored, if this impediment can be overcome by microRNA-regulated transgene cassettes as the combination of library-derived capsid targeting and micro-RNA control has not been evaluated so far.
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