Chemerin in immunity.

Chemerin is a distant member of the cystatin protein family, initially discovered as a chemotactic factor and subsequently also reported to act as adipokine and angiogenetic factor. The biological activity of chemerin is regulated at different levels, such as gene expression, protein processing and interaction with both signaling and nonsignaling receptors. Chemerin is mostly produced by stromal cells, such as adipocytes, fibroblasts, epithelial and endothelial cells and circulates in almost all human tissues as a zymogen that needs to be proteolytically activated to exert its biological functions.

Detection of volatile organic compounds as new paradigm to accelerate antimicrobial susceptibility testing: performance evaluation of VITEK® REVEAL™.

Objectives: The measurement of VOCs release in the headspace of a bacterial culture represents a new approach to rapidly assess antimicrobial susceptibility. Herein, we evaluated the diagnostic performance of the VITEK® REVEAL™ system directly from a collection of Gram-negative positive blood cultures.

Materials And Methods: One hundred and twenty-eight positive blood cultures were included in the analysis (Enterobacterales, n = 95; Pseudomonas aeruginosa, n = 21; Acinetobacter baumannii complex, n = 12).

Antimicrobial Efficacy of a Vegetable Oil Plasticizer in PVC Matrices.

The growing prevalence of bacterial and viral infections, highlighted by the recent COVID-19 pandemic, urgently calls for new antimicrobial strategies. To this end, we have synthesized and characterized a novel fatty acid epoxy-ester plasticizer for polymers, named GDE. GDE is not only sustainable and user-friendly but also demonstrates superior plasticizing properties, while its epoxy components improve the heat stability of PVC-based matrices.