The global burden of respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) and severe associated disease is prodigious. RSV-specific vaccines have been launched recently but there is no antiviral medicine commercially available. RSV polymerase (L) protein is one of the promising antiviral targets, along with fusion and nucleocapsid proteins.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: Hypoalgesic inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) may provide critical insights into human abdominal pain. This condition was previously associated with homozygosity for a polymorphism (rs6795970, A1073V; 1073 val/val ) related to Na v 1.8, a voltage-gated sodium channel preferentially expressed on nociceptors.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFGastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD) is a very common condition characterized by chronic symptoms, such as heartburn or epigastric and/or substernal pain, that are frequently associated with mucosal damage resulting from abnormal reflux of gastric contents into the esophagus (Fass et al. in Nat Rev Dis Primers 7:55, 2021; Richter and Rubenstein in Gastroenterology 154:267-276, 2018). However, this damage can manifest in patients who do not exhibit typical GERD symptoms.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe investigate the photoinduced dissociation reaction of NO → NO + O upon electronic excitation of the X̃A (D) to the ÃB (D) state by femtosecond X-ray absorption spectroscopy at the nitrogen K-edge. We obtain key insight into the chemical bond breaking event and its associated electronic structural dynamics. Calculations of the photoinduced reaction allow to assign the transient absorption features at time scales of 10-50 fs to wave packet motions in the excited D and ground D states, followed by the formation of the NO photoproduct with a 255 ± 23 fs time constant.
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