Publications by authors named "N Newell"
Article Synopsis
- Up to 20% of people may experience osteoporotic vertebral fractures, and current bone mineral density (BMD) measurements present challenges in predicting these fractures.
- The study examined how intervertebral disc (IVD) degeneration affects stress and strain distribution in adjacent vertebrae by using human cadaveric lumbar specimens and advanced imaging techniques.
- Results indicated that trabecular bone near degenerated IVDs experienced significantly higher strains and altered stress distributions compared to non-degenerated IVDs, suggesting that incorporating IVD metrics could enhance fracture risk assessments.
MapTurns: mapping the structure, H-bonding, and contexts of beta turns in proteins.
Bioinformatics
December 2024
Motivation: Beta turns are the most common type of secondary structure in proteins after alpha helices and beta sheets and play many key structural and functional roles. Turn backbone (BB) geometry has been classified at multiple levels of precision, but the current picture of side chain (SC) structure and interaction in turns is incomplete, because the distribution of SC conformations associated with each sequence motif has commonly been represented only by a static image of a single, typical structure for each turn BB geometry, and only motifs which specify a single amino acid (e.g.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBeta turns, in which the protein backbone abruptly changes direction over four amino acid residues, are the most common type of protein secondary structure after alpha helices and beta sheets and play key structural and functional roles. Previous work has produced classification systems for turn geometry at multiple levels of precision, but these operate in backbone dihedral-angle (Ramachandran) space, and the absence of a local Euclidean-space coordinate system and structural alignment for turns, or of any systematic Euclidean-space characterization of turn backbone shape, presents challenges for the visualization, comparison and analysis of the wide range of turn conformations and the design of turns and the structures that incorporate them. This work derives a turn-local coordinate system that implicitly aligns turns, together with a set of geometric descriptors that characterize the bulk BB shapes of turns and describe modes of structural variation not explicitly captured by existing systems.
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- The study aimed to investigate the incidence of interbody subsidence in patients who underwent transforaminal lumbar interbody fusion (TLIF), along with identifying risk factors and evaluating the consequences of subsidence on complications and fusion rates.
- A retrospective analysis was conducted on adult patients who had one- or two-level TLIF from 2017-2019, excluding those with certain conditions or incomplete follow-ups, and used CT scans to measure subsidence after surgery.
- Results indicated that 28% of fusion levels encountered moderate subsidence, while 35% faced severe subsidence, with factors such as cage surface area and material type linked to higher subsidence rates.
Background: Nucleus replacement devices (NRDs) are not routinely used in clinic, predominantly due to the risk of device expulsion. Rigorous in vitro testing may enable failure mechanisms to be identified prior to clinical trials; however, current testing standards do not specify a particular expulsion test. Multiple methods have therefore been developed, complicating comparisons between NRD designs.
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