Development of a Drawing Application to Evaluate Hand and Wrist Function: A Pilot Study.

Introduction: We developed a custom digital drawing application to assess hand function. We conducted an initial validation study of this technique to (1) assess which drawing features are associated with hand function, (2) differentiate patients from control subjects for both dominant and nondominant hands, and (3) assess the correlation of drawing features with previously validated patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs).

Methods: In this prospective study, participants were asked to draw shapes on an Apple iPad with a digital pen using a custom app.

Extensor Pollicis Longus Entrapment on CT in Acute Distal Radius Fracture May Be a Predictor of Tendon Rupture.

Background: Extensor pollicis longus (EPL) rupture is a well-described complication after volar plate fixation of distal radius fractures. Although protrusion of screw tips through the dorsal cortex of the distal radius is likely the cause of a substantial proportion of EPL ruptures, it is probably not the sole cause for EPL rupture after distal radius fracture. The purpose of this study was to evaluate preoperative computed tomography (CT) scans of distal radius fractures to characterize the incidence of EPL damage at the time of injury.

Unloader brace or high tibial osteotomy in the treatment of the young patient with medial knee osteoarthritis: a randomized controlled trial.

Background And Purpose:  For medial knee osteoarthritis (OA), operative and nonoperative treatment options are available. Two widely applied unloading therapies are a valgus unloader brace and a high tibial osteotomy (HTO). We aimed to compare the effects of a valgus unloader knee brace with an HTO on knee pain after 1 year in patients with symptomatic medial knee OA.

A refined picture of the native amine dehydrogenase family revealed by extensive biodiversity screening.

Native amine dehydrogenases offer sustainable access to chiral amines, so the search for scaffolds capable of converting more diverse carbonyl compounds is required to reach the full potential of this alternative to conventional synthetic reductive aminations. Here we report a multidisciplinary strategy combining bioinformatics, chemoinformatics and biocatalysis to extensively screen billions of sequences in silico and to efficiently find native amine dehydrogenases features using computational approaches. In this way, we achieve a comprehensive overview of the initial native amine dehydrogenase family, extending it from 2,011 to 17,959 sequences, and identify native amine dehydrogenases with non-reported substrate spectra, including hindered carbonyls and ethyl ketones, and accepting methylamine and cyclopropylamine as amine donor.

SulfAtlas, the sulfatase database: state of the art and new developments.

SulfAtlas (https://sulfatlas.sb-roscoff.fr/) is a knowledge-based resource dedicated to a sequence-based classification of sulfatases.

Carrageenan catabolism is encoded by a complex regulon in marine heterotrophic bacteria.

Macroalgae contribute substantially to primary production in coastal ecosystems. Their biomass, mainly consisting of polysaccharides, is cycled into the environment by marine heterotrophic bacteria using largely uncharacterized mechanisms. Here we describe the complete catabolic pathway for carrageenans, major cell wall polysaccharides of red macroalgae, in the marine heterotrophic bacterium Zobellia galactanivorans.

Profiling the orphan enzymes.

The emergence of Next Generation Sequencing generates an incredible amount of sequence and great potential for new enzyme discovery. Despite this huge amount of data and the profusion of bioinformatic methods for function prediction, a large part of known enzyme activities is still lacking an associated protein sequence. These particular activities are called "orphan enzymes".

Gene expression signature for spontaneous cancer regression in melanoma pigs.

Incomplete spontaneous regression of melanoma is common. However, complete melanoma regression is still a very rare phenomenon. Because melanoma is the most immunogenic human malignancy, the mechanisms leading to regression, based on accumulative evidence, are the host's immune responses.

Dividing the large glycoside hydrolase family 13 into subfamilies: towards improved functional annotations of alpha-amylase-related proteins.

Family GH13, also known as the alpha-amylase family, is the largest sequence-based family of glycoside hydrolases and groups together a number of different enzyme activities and substrate specificities acting on alpha-glycosidic bonds. This polyspecificity results in the fact that the simple membership of this family cannot be used for the prediction of gene function based on sequence alone. In order to establish robust groups that show an improved correlation between sequence and enzymatic specificity, we have performed a large-scale analysis of 1691 family GH13 sequences by combining clustering, similarity search and phylogenetic methods.

Evolutionary and mechanistic relationships between glycosidases acting on alpha- and beta-bonds.

Because of the fast accumulation of sequences derived from genome sequencing efforts, the sampling of the sequence space in glycosidase and related enzyme families is such that sensitive sequence similarity detection methods like PSI-BLAST are now able to reveal distant, but clear, structural and evolutionary relations between glycosidases acting on alpha- and beta-bonds. We have observed this trend within groups of glycosidases with completely different folds. We postulate that the evolutionary interconversion between alpha- and beta-acting glycosidases was greatly facilitated by the fact that both types share a similar axial orientation of the glycosidic bond in the reactive bound substrate.

Carbohydrate-active enzymes involved in the secondary cell wall biogenesis in hybrid aspen.

Wood formation is a fundamental biological process with significant economic interest. While lignin biosynthesis is currently relatively well understood, the pathways leading to the synthesis of the key structural carbohydrates in wood fibers remain obscure. We have used a functional genomics approach to identify enzymes involved in carbohydrate biosynthesis and remodeling during xylem development in the hybrid aspen Populus tremula x tremuloides.

Why are there so many carbohydrate-active enzyme-related genes in plants?

Plants contain far more carbohydrate-active enzyme-encoding genes than any other organism sequenced to date. The extremely large number of glycosidase and glycosyltransferase-related genes in plant genomes can be explained by the complex structure of the plant cell wall, by ancient genome duplication and by recent local duplications, but also by the recent emergence of novel and unrelated protein functions based on widely available pre-existing scaffolds.