Cardiomyopathies and Psychiatric Disorders: An Overview and General Clinical Recommendations.

The association between cardiomyopathies (CMPs) and psychiatric disorders is a complex and bidirectional phenomenon that involves multiple mechanisms and factors. CMPs may raise the risk of psychiatric disorders due to the psychological stress, physical limitations, social isolation, or poor prognosis associated with the underlying disease. Psychiatric disorders, on the other hand, can increase the possibility of developing or worsening CMPs due to the behavioral, neuroendocrine, inflammatory, or pharmacological effects of mental illness or its treatment.

Heart Failure and Erectile Dysfunction: a Review of the Current Evidence and Clinical Implications.

Purpose Of Review: Heart failure (HF) and erectile dysfunction (ED) are two common conditions that affect millions of men worldwide and impair their quality of life. ED is a frequent complication of HF, as well as a possible predictor of cardiovascular events and mortality. ED deserves more attention from clinicians and researchers.

Pain in Colorectal Surgery: How Does It Occur and What Tools Do We Have for Treatment?

Pain is a complex entity with deleterious effects on the entire organism. Poorly controlled postoperative pain impacts the patient outcome, being associated with increased morbidity, inadequate quality of life and functional recovery. In the current surgical environment with less invasive surgical procedures increasingly being used and a trend towards rapid discharge home after surgery, we need to continuously re-evaluate analgesic strategies.

Assessment of the Severity of Left Anterior Descending Coronary Artery Stenoses by Enhanced Transthoracic Doppler Echocardiography: Validation of a Method Based on the Continuity Equation.

Background: To verify whether the severity of coronary stenosis could be non-invasively assessed by enhanced transthoracic coronary echo Doppler in convergent color Doppler mode (E-Doppler TTE) over a wide range of values (from mild to severe).

Methods: Color-guided pulsed wave Doppler sampling in the left anterior descending coronary artery (LAD) was performed in 103 diseased LAD segments (corresponding to 94 patients examined) as assessed by quantitative coronary angiography (QCA) or intracoronary ultrasound (IVUS). The E-Doppler TTE examinations consisted of measuring the velocity (vel) at the stenosis site and a reference adjacent segment.

Free Radicals and Obesity-Related Chronic Inflammation Contrasted by Antioxidants: A New Perspective in Coronary Artery Disease.

We are surrounded by factors called free radicals (FR), which attach to the molecules our body is made of, first among them the endothelium. Even though FR are to a certain extent a normal factor, nowadays we face an escalating increase in these biologically aggressive molecules. The escalating formation of FR is linked to the increased usage of man-made chemicals for personal care (toothpaste, shampoo, bubble bath, etc.

Case report: Diagnosis of apical hypertrophic cardiomyopathy that escaped clinical and echocardiographic investigations for twenty years: Reasons and clinical implications.

Background: Apical hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (ApHCM) is a rare form of hypertrophic cardiomyopathy which predominantly affects the apex of the left ventricle. The diagnosis can be challenging due to several factors, ranging from no typical clinical and electrocardiogram (EKG) findings to potential difficulties in executing and interpreting the echocardiographic examination.

Case Presentation: We report the case of an 84-year-old woman who came to our echo-lab to undergo a routine echocardiogram.

Optimization of a locomotion-based zebrafish seizure model.

Background: Locomotor assays in zebrafish have emerged as a screening test in early drug discovery for antiseizure compounds. However, parameters differ considerably between published studies, which may explain some discrepant results with (candidate) antiseizure medications.

New Method: We optimized a locomotor-based seizure assay in zebrafish with pentylenetetrazol (PTZ) as the pharmacological proconvulsant to generate a therapeutic window in which proconvulsant-treated zebrafish larvae could be discriminated from a non-treated control.

Skin Diseases Classification Using Deep Leaning Methods.

Due to the high incidence of skin tumors, the development of computer aided-diagnosis methods will become a very powerful diagnosis tool for dermatologists. The skin diseases are initially diagnosed visually, through clinical screening and followed in some cases by dermoscopic analysis, biopsy and histopathological examination. Automatic classification of dermatoscopic images is a challenge due to fine-grained variations in lesions.

Neuromuscular monitoring: an update.

This review makes an advocacy for neuromuscular blockade monitoring during anaesthesia care, by: (i) describing the fundamental principles of the methods currently available, at the same time emphasizing quantitative recording measurements; (ii) describing the different ways in which muscles respond to the effect of neuromuscular blockade and their use in clinical practice; (iii) presenting results of different studies on timing and agents of neuromuscular block reversal, including a recommendation for sugammadex use and experimental results with calabadion and (iv) in the end emphasizing the need for implementing neuromuscular monitoring as a practice that should be used every time a neuromuscular block is required.

Physical Mapping of Bread Wheat Chromosome 5A: An Integrated Approach.

The huge size, redundancy, and highly repetitive nature of the bread wheat [Triticum aestivum (L.)] genome, makes it among the most difficult species to be sequenced. To overcome these limitations, a strategy based on the separation of individual chromosomes or chromosome arms and the subsequent production of physical maps was established within the frame of the International Wheat Genome Sequence Consortium (IWGSC).

Raman spectroscopic monitoring of the growth of pigmented and non-pigmented mycobacteria.

Raman microspectroscopy has increased in popularity in the field of microbiology because it allows a spectral fingerprinting of bacterial pathogens at an unrivaled speed, which is important for the early treatment of infectious diseases such as tuberculosis. An indispensable prerequisite for the success of this method is a profound knowledge, how the spectral profiles depend on the age of the bacteria. We therefore followed the growth of two rapidly growing Mycobacterium tuberculosis relatives, the pigmented Mycobacterium aurum, and the non-pigmented Mycobacterium smegmatis, by means of Raman microspectroscopy.

Identification of a protein network interacting with TdRF1, a wheat RING ubiquitin ligase with a protective role against cellular dehydration.

Plants exploit ubiquitination to modulate the proteome with the final aim to ensure environmental adaptation and developmental plasticity. Ubiquitination targets are specifically driven to degradation through the action of E3 ubiquitin ligases. Genetic analyses have indicated wide functions of ubiquitination in plant life; nevertheless, despite the large number of predicted E3s, only a few of them have been characterized so far, and only a few ubiquitination targets are known.

First survey of the wheat chromosome 5A composition through a next generation sequencing approach.

Wheat is one of the world's most important crops and is characterized by a large polyploid genome. One way to reduce genome complexity is to isolate single chromosomes using flow cytometry. Low coverage DNA sequencing can provide a snapshot of individual chromosomes, allowing a fast characterization of their main features and comparison with other genomes.

Effects of barley β-glucan-enriched flour fractions on the glycaemic index of bread.

The aim of this research was to evaluate β-glucan-enriched flours, obtained from barleys with either normal or waxy starch, for their effects on the glycaemic index (GI) and the quality of bread. Rheological results confirmed that when barley flour was included in the dough the overall quality of bread slightly worsened. However, positive consequences on glycaemia were obtained with the normal starch barley: the GI of all-wheat bread (82.

Mixed model association scans of multi-environmental trial data reveal major loci controlling yield and yield related traits in Hordeum vulgare in Mediterranean environments.

An association panel consisting of 185 accessions representative of the barley germplasm cultivated in the Mediterranean basin was used to localise quantitative trait loci (QTL) controlling grain yield and yield related traits. The germplasm set was genotyped with 1,536 SNP markers and tested for associations with phenotypic data gathered over 2 years for a total of 24 year × location combinations under a broad range of environmental conditions. Analysis of multi-environmental trial (MET) data by fitting a mixed model with kinship estimates detected from two to seven QTL for the major components of yield including 1000 kernel weight, grains per spike and spikes per m(2), as well as heading date, harvest index and plant height.

The CC-NB-LRR-type Rdg2a resistance gene confers immunity to the seed-borne barley leaf stripe pathogen in the absence of hypersensitive cell death.

Background: Leaf stripe disease on barley (Hordeum vulgare) is caused by the seed-transmitted hemi-biotrophic fungus Pyrenophora graminea. Race-specific resistance to leaf stripe is controlled by two known Rdg (Resistance to Drechslera graminea) genes: the H. spontaneum-derived Rdg1a and Rdg2a, identified in H.

Constitutive differences between steely and mealy barley samples associated with endosperm modification.

Background: Structurally different areas may occur in the endosperm of the barley grain, and they can be visually classified as either mealy or steely. Barleys with a high proportion of grains that are mostly steely often show uneven physical-chemical modification of the endosperm during malting. To study the relationship between steeliness and endosperm modification, two samples of barley cv.

Identification and validation of reference genes for gene expression studies in water buffalo.

In gene expression analysis, a key step to obtain informative data from reverse transcription quantitative PCR (RT qPCR) assay is normalization, that is usually achieved by ratio to correct the abundance of the gene of interest against that of an endogenous reference gene. The finding of such reference genes, ideally expressed in a stable way in multiple tissue samples and in different experimental conditions, is a non-trivial problem. In this work, a set of genes potentially useful as reference for gene expression studies in water buffalo has been identified and evaluated.

Parallel pigment and transcriptomic analysis of four barley albina and xantha mutants reveals the complex network of the chloroplast-dependent metabolism.

We investigated the pigment composition and the transcriptome of albina (alb-e ( 16 ) and alb-f ( 17 )) and xantha (xan-s ( 46 ) and xan-b ( 12 )) barley mutants to provide an overall transcriptional picture of genes whose expression is interconnected with chloroplast activities and to search for candidate genes associated with the mutations. Beside those encoding plastid-localized proteins, more than 3,000 genes involved in non-chloroplast localized metabolism were up-/down-regulated in the mutants revealing the network of chloroplast-dependent metabolic pathways. The alb-e ( 16 ) mutant was characterized by overaccumulation of protoporphyrin IX upon ALA (5-amino levulinic acid) feeding and down-regulation of the gene encoding one subunit of Mg-chelatase, suggesting a block of the chlorophyll biosynthetic pathway before Mg-protoporphyrin IX biosynthesis, while alb-f ( 17 ) overaccumulated Mg-protoporphyrin IX and repressed PorA expression, without alterations in Mg-chelatase mRNA level.

Patterns of genetic diversity and linkage disequilibrium in a highly structured Hordeum vulgare association-mapping population for the Mediterranean basin.

Population structure and genome-wide linkage disequilibrium (LD) were investigated in 192 Hordeum vulgare accessions providing a comprehensive coverage of past and present barley breeding in the Mediterranean basin, using 50 nuclear microsatellite and 1,130 DArT((R)) markers. Both clustering and principal coordinate analyses clearly sub-divided the sample into five distinct groups centred on key ancestors and regions of origin of the germplasm. For given genetic distances, large variation in LD values was observed, ranging from closely linked markers completely at equilibrium to marker pairs at 50 cM separation still showing significant LD.

Histological and molecular analysis of Rdg2a barley resistance to leaf stripe.

Barley (Hordeum vulgare L.) leaf stripe is caused by the seed-borne fungus Pyrenophora graminea. We investigated microscopically and molecularly the reaction of barley embryos to leaf stripe inoculation.

Fine mapping of a HvCBF gene cluster at the frost resistance locus Fr-H2 in barley.

Barley is an economically important model for the Triticeae tribe. We recently developed a new resource: the 'Nure' x 'Tremois' mapping population. Two low temperature QTLs were found to segregate on the long arm of chromosome 5H (Fr-H1, distal; Fr-H2, proximal).

In vivo modeling of beta-glucan degradation in contrasting barley (Hordeum vulgare L.) genotypes.

An important determinative of malt quality is the malt beta-glucan content, which in turn depends on the initial barley beta-glucan content as well as the beta-glucan depolymerization by beta-glucanase (EC 3.2.1.

A combined strategy of "in silico" transcriptome analysis and web search engine optimization allows an agile identification of reference genes suitable for normalization in gene expression studies.

Traditionally housekeeping genes have been employed as endogenous reference (internal control) genes for normalization in gene expression studies. Since the utilization of single housekeepers cannot assure an unbiased result, new normalization methods involving multiple housekeeping genes and normalizing using their mean expression have been recently proposed. Moreover, since a gold standard gene suitable for every experimental condition does not exist, it is also necessary to validate the expression stability of every putative control gene on the specific requirements of the planned experiment.