Investigation of the Urinary Peptidome to Unravel Collagen Degradation in Health and Kidney Disease.

Naturally occurring fragments of collagen type I alpha 1 chain (COL1A1) have been previously associated with chronic kidney disease (CKD), with some fragments showing positive and others negative associations. Using urinary peptidome data from healthy individuals (n = 1131) and CKD patients (n = 5585) this aspect was investigated in detail. Based on the hypothesis that many collagen peptides are derived not from the full, mature collagen molecule, but from (larger) collagen degradation products, relationships between COL1A1 peptides containing identical sequences were investigated, with the smaller (offspring) peptide being a possible degradation product of the larger (parent) one.

Flexible large-area ultrasound arrays for medical applications made using embossed polymer structures.

With the huge progress in micro-electronics and artificial intelligence, the ultrasound probe has become the bottleneck in further adoption of ultrasound beyond the clinical setting (e.g. home and monitoring applications).

OntoloViz: a GUI for interactive visualization of ranked disease or drug lists using the MeSH and ATC ontologies.

Motivation: Structured vocabularies for drugs and diseases represent, besides their primary use for annotating scientific literature or scientific information in general, a valuable resource for visualizing aggregated information. The Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) and Anatomical Therapeutic Chemical (ATC) ontologies are widely used structured vocabularies for diseases and drugs, respectively. Their hierarchical tree-like structure can be used as a basis for creating intuitive visual displays for specific diseases and drugs within their higher-order classifications.

Spatial and Annual Variation in Microbial Abundance, Community Composition, and Diversity Associated With Alpine Surface Snow.

Understanding microbial community dynamics in the alpine cryosphere is an important step toward assessing climate change impacts on these fragile ecosystems and meltwater-fed environments downstream. In this study, we analyzed microbial community composition, variation in community alpha and beta diversity, and the number of prokaryotic cells and virus-like particles (VLP) in seasonal snowpack from two consecutive years at three high altitude mountain summits along a longitudinal transect across the European Alps. Numbers of prokaryotic cells and VLP both ranged around 10 and 10 per mL of snow meltwater on average, with variation generally within one order of magnitude between sites and years.