Missed opportunities: saving lives through organ donation following voluntary assisted dying.

Organ donation after voluntary assisted dying (VAD) in Australia may potentially increase organ transplant rates. Despite significant international experience with donation after VAD, there has been little discussion of this in Australia. We review potential ethical and practical concerns relating to donation after VAD and advocate action to establish programmes in Australia that ensure safe, ethical and effective donation after VAD.

Altered Mental Status and Cyanosis in a Pediatric Patient with Methemoglobinemia.

Methemoglobinemia results from increased amounts of oxidized hemoglobin in the blood with an ensuing change in oxygen dissociation curve and lack of oxygen delivery to tissue. A previously well, male toddler was brought to the Pediatric Emergency Department (PED) by Emergency Medical Services (EMS) with abrupt onset of altered mental status and cyanosis after a suspected ingestion of "Rush" nail polish remover. He was quickly diagnosed with methemoglobinemia by both clinical presentation and chocolate-colored blood appearance.

The Neuroanatomical Ultrastructure and Function of a Biological Ring Attractor.

Neural representations of head direction (HD) have been discovered in many species. Theoretical work has proposed that the dynamics associated with these representations are generated, maintained, and updated by recurrent network structures called ring attractors. We evaluated this theorized structure-function relationship by performing electron-microscopy-based circuit reconstruction and RNA profiling of identified cell types in the HD system of Drosophila melanogaster.

Nitric oxide acts as a cotransmitter in a subset of dopaminergic neurons to diversify memory dynamics.

Animals employ diverse learning rules and synaptic plasticity dynamics to record temporal and statistical information about the world. However, the molecular mechanisms underlying this diversity are poorly understood. The anatomically defined compartments of the insect mushroom body function as parallel units of associative learning, with different learning rates, memory decay dynamics and flexibility (Aso and Rubin, 2016).

Apical and Basal Matrix Remodeling Control Epithelial Morphogenesis.

Epithelial tissues can elongate in two dimensions by polarized cell intercalation, oriented cell division, or cell shape change, owing to local or global actomyosin contractile forces acting in the plane of the tissue. In addition, epithelia can undergo morphogenetic change in three dimensions. We show that elongation of the wings and legs of Drosophila involves a columnar-to-cuboidal cell shape change that reduces cell height and expands cell width.

Enhanced flight performance by genetic manipulation of wing shape in Drosophila.

Insect wing shapes are remarkably diverse and the combination of shape and kinematics determines both aerial capabilities and power requirements. However, the contribution of any specific morphological feature to performance is not known. Using targeted RNA interference to modify wing shape far beyond the natural variation found within the population of a single species, we show a direct effect on flight performance that can be explained by physical modelling of the novel wing geometry.

Patterned Anchorage to the Apical Extracellular Matrix Defines Tissue Shape in the Developing Appendages of Drosophila.

How tissues acquire their characteristic shape is a fundamental unresolved question in biology. While genes have been characterized that control local mechanical forces to elongate epithelial tissues, genes controlling global forces in epithelia have yet to be identified. Here, we describe a genetic pathway that shapes appendages in Drosophila by defining the pattern of global tensile forces in the tissue.

Improving bed turnover time with a bed management system.

Efficient patient throughput requires a high degree of coordination and communication. Opportunities abound to improve the patient experience by eliminating waste from the process and improving communication among the multiple disciplines involved in facilitating patient flow. In this article, we demonstrate how an interdisciplinary team at a large tertiary cancer center implemented an electronic bed management system to improve the bed turnover component of the patient throughput process.

Different requirements for proteolytic processing of bone morphogenetic protein 5/6/7/8 ligands in Drosophila melanogaster.

Bone morphogenetic proteins (BMPs) are synthesized as proproteins that undergo proteolytic processing by furin/subtilisin proprotein convertases to release the active ligand. Here we study processing of BMP5/6/7/8 proteins, including the Drosophila orthologs Glass Bottom Boat (Gbb) and Screw (Scw) and human BMP7. Gbb and Scw have three functional furin/subtilisin proprotein convertase cleavage sites; two between the prodomain and ligand domain, which we call the Main and Shadow sites, and one within the prodomain, which we call the Pro site.

Rapid evolution of a novel signalling mechanism by concerted duplication and divergence of a BMP ligand and its extracellular modulators.

Gene duplication and divergence is widely considered to be a fundamental mechanism for generating evolutionary novelties. The Bone Morphogenetic Proteins (BMPs) are a diverse family of signalling molecules found in all metazoan genomes that have evolved by duplication and divergence from a small number of ancestral types. In the fruit fly Drosophila, there are three BMPs: Decapentaplegic (Dpp) and Glass bottom boat (Gbb), which are the orthologues of vertebrate BMP2/4 and BMP5/6/7/8, respectively, and Screw (Scw), which, at the sequence level, is equally divergent from Dpp and Gbb.

Dystroglycan and perlecan provide a basal cue required for epithelial polarity during energetic stress.

Dystroglycan localizes to the basal domain of epithelial cells and has been reported to play a role in apical-basal polarity. Here, we show that Dystroglycan null mutant follicle cells have normal apical-basal polarity, but lose the planar polarity of their basal actin stress fibers, a phenotype it shares with Dystrophin mutants. However, unlike Dystrophin mutants, mutants in Dystroglycan or in its extracellular matrix ligand Perlecan lose polarity under energetic stress.

The detached locus encodes Drosophila Dystrophin, which acts with other components of the Dystrophin Associated Protein Complex to influence intercellular signalling in developing wing veins.

Dystrophin and Dystroglycan are the two central components of the multimeric Dystrophin Associated Protein Complex, or DAPC, that is thought to provide a mechanical link between the extracellular matrix and the actin cytoskeleton, disruption of which leads to muscular dystrophy in humans. We present the characterization of the Drosophila 'crossveinless' mutation detached (det), and show that the gene encodes the fly ortholog of Dystrophin. Our genetic analysis shows that, in flies, Dystrophin is a non-essential gene, and the sole overt morphological defect associated with null mutations in the locus is the variable loss of the posterior crossvein that has been described for alleles of det.

Analysis of the shortvein cis-regulatory region of the decapentaplegic gene of Drosophila melanogaster.

In mammals, the Transforming Growth Factor-beta (TGF-beta) superfamily controls a variety of developmental processes. In Drosophila, by contrast, a single member of the superfamily, decapentaplegic (dpp) performs most TGF-beta developmental functions. The complexity of dpp functions is reflected in the complex cis-regulatory sequences that flank the gene.

Prostate specific antigen as a clinical biomarker for prostate cancer: what's the take home message?

Prostate specific antigen (PSA) continues to be challenged as a legitimate clinical biomarker in early detection of prostate cancer due to lack of specificity for malignant transformation. Skepticism surrounding the utility of serum PSA as a clinical marker is not new and many questioned its initial use in widespread prostate cancer screening due to non-specific expression and low predictive value for cancer detection. Despite these initial concerns, serum PSA measurement along with digital rectal examination (DRE) is currently the accepted practice for prostate cancer screening in the United States with hundreds of thousands of men undergoing serum PSA measurement annually.

crossveinless-c is a RhoGAP required for actin reorganisation during morphogenesis.

Members of the Rho family of small GTPases are required for many of the morphogenetic processes required to shape the animal body. The activity of this family is regulated in part by a class of proteins known as RhoGTPase Activating Proteins (RhoGAPs) that catalyse the conversion of RhoGTPases to their inactive state. In our search for genes that regulate Drosophila morphogenesis, we have isolated several lethal alleles of crossveinless-c (cv-c).

Electrophoretic analysis and purification of fluorescent single-walled carbon nanotube fragments.

Arc-synthesized single-walled carbon nanotubes have been purified through preparative electrophoresis in agarose gel and glass bead matrixes. Two major impurities were isolated: fluorescent carbon and short tubular carbon. Analysis of these two classes of impurities was done.