"Are They Just Experimenting With All of Us?" Cultural Considerations for Clinicians Caring for Seriously Ill Great Plains American Indians.

Serious illnesses like cancer disproportionately affect American Indians and Alaska Native (AI/AN) Peoples. AI/AN patients deserve culturally responsive healthcare at all times, and especially when journeying through serious illness. To learn about specific clinician-related factors that AI/AN cancer survivors, caregivers, Tribal leaders, and traditional healers want from their clinicians while experiencing cancer.

Analytical assessment of metagenomic workflows for pathogen detection with NIST RM 8376 and two sample matrices.

We assessed the analytical performance of metagenomic workflows using NIST Reference Material (RM) 8376 DNA from bacterial pathogens spiked into two simulated clinical samples: cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) and stool. Sequencing and taxonomic classification were used to generate signals for each sample and taxa of interest and to estimate the limit of detection (LOD), the linearity of response, and linear dynamic range. We found that the LODs for taxa spiked into CSF ranged from approximately 100 to 300 copy/mL, with a linearity of 0.

Substrate recognition in Bacillus anthracis sortase B beyond its canonical pentapeptide binding motif and use in sortase-mediated ligation.

Sortases are critical cysteine transpeptidases that facilitate the attachment of proteins to the cell wall in Gram-positive bacteria. These enzymes are potential targets for novel antibiotic development, and versatile tools in protein engineering applications. There are six classes of sortases recognized, yet class A sortases (SrtA) are the most widely studied and utilized.