Combined Use of Intranasal Methylprednisolone and Allopregnanolone: Revisiting Anti-inflammatory and Remyelinating Treatment in a Murine Model of Multiple Sclerosis.

Background: Multiple sclerosis (MS) is a demyelinating, neuroinflammatory, progressive disease that severely affects human health of young adults. Neuroinflammation (NI) and demyelination, as well as their interactions, are key therapeutic targets to halt or slow disease progression. Potent steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs such as methylprednisolone (MP) and remyelinating neurosteroids such as allopregnanolone (ALLO) could be co-administered intranasally to enhance their efficacy by providing direct access to the central nervous system (CNS).

Circadian Disruption in Glaucoma: Causes, Consequences, and Countermeasures.

This review explores the intricate relationship between glaucoma and circadian rhythm disturbances. As a principal organ for photic signal reception and transduction, the eye plays a pivotal role in coordinating the body's circadian rhythms through specialized retinal ganglion cells (RGCs), particularly intrinsically photosensitive RGCs (ipRGCs). These cells are critical in transmitting light signals to the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN), the central circadian clock that synchronizes physiological processes to the 24-hour light-dark cycle.

The MuCAYA Study-Influence of Physical Activity and Metabolic Parameters on the Structure and Function of the Cardiovascular System in Young Athletes.

Exercise has a significant impact on the cardiovascular (CV) health of children and adolescents, with resultant alterations in CV structure and function being evident, even at an early age. Engagement in regular, moderate physical activity (PA) is associated with long-term CV health benefits and a reduced risk of CV disease and mortality later in life. However, competitive sports often involve PA training intensities that are beyond recommended levels for young athletes, potentially leading to adverse CV outcomes.

High-Affinity Lectin Ligands Enable the Detection of Pathogenic Biofilms: Implications for Diagnostics and Therapy.

is a critical priority pathogen and causes life-threatening acute and biofilm-associated chronic infections. The choice of suitable treatment for complicated infections requires lengthy culturing for species identification from swabs or an invasive biopsy. To date, no fast, pathogen-specific diagnostic tools for infections are available.

Hydrogen Bond Blueshifts in Nitrile Vibrational Spectra Are Dictated by Hydrogen Bond Geometry and Dynamics.

Vibrational Stark effect (VSE) spectroscopy has become one of the most important experimental approaches to determine the strength of noncovalent, electrostatic interactions in chemistry and biology and to quantify their influence on structure and reactivity. Nitriles (C≡N) have been widely used as VSE probes, but their application has been complicated by an anomalous hydrogen bond (HB) blueshift which is not encompassed within the VSE framework. We present an empirical model describing the anomalous HB blueshift in terms of H-bonding geometry, i.

Concatenating Microbial, Enzymatic, and Organometallic Catalysis for Integrated Conversion of Renewable Carbon Sources.

The chemical industry can now seize the opportunity to improve the sustainability of its processes by replacing fossil carbon sources with renewable alternatives such as CO, biomass, and plastics, thereby thinking ahead and having a look into the future. For their conversion to intermediate and final products, different types of catalysts-microbial, enzymatic, and organometallic-can be applied. The first part of this review shows how these catalysts can work separately in parallel, each route with unique requirements and advantages.

Proton Tunneling Allows a Proton-Coupled Electron Transfer Process in the Cancer Cell.

Proton-coupled electron transfer (PCET) is a fundamental redox process and has clear advantages in selectively activating challenging C-H bonds in many biological processes. Intrigued by this activation process, we aimed to develop a facile PCET process in cancer cells by modulating proton tunneling. This approach should lead to the design of an alternative photodynamic therapy (PDT) that depletes the mitochondrial electron transport chain (ETC), the key redox regulator in cancer cells under hypoxia.

Sequencing and Optical Genome Mapping for the Adventurous Chemist.

This review provides a comprehensive overview of the chemistries and workflows of the sequencing methods that have been or are currently commercially available, providing a very brief historical introduction to each method. The main optical genome mapping approaches are introduced in the same manner, although only a subset of these are or have ever been commercially available. The review comes with a deck of slides containing all of the figures for ease of access and consultation.

Physicians' Social Skills - Conceptualization, Taxonomy, and Behavioral Assessment.

Social skills (e.g., assertiveness, empathy, ability to accept criticism) are essential for the medical profession and therefore also for the selection and development of medical students.

xMEN: a modular toolkit for cross-lingual medical entity normalization.

Objective: To improve performance of medical entity normalization across many languages, especially when fewer language resources are available compared to English.

Materials And Methods: We propose xMEN, a modular system for cross-lingual (x) medical entity normalization (MEN), accommodating both low- and high-resource scenarios. To account for the scarcity of aliases for many target languages and terminologies, we leverage multilingual aliases via cross-lingual candidate generation.

The interaction networks of small rubber particle proteins in the latex of reveal diverse functions in stress responses and secondary metabolism.

The Russian dandelion () is a promising source of natural rubber (NR). The synthesis of NR takes place on the surface of organelles known as rubber particles, which are found in latex - the cytoplasm of specialized cells known as laticifers. As well as the enzymes directly responsible for NR synthesis, the rubber particles also contain small rubber particle proteins (SRPPs), the most abundant of which are SRPP3, 4 and 5.

Broad-spectrum resistance to fungal foliar diseases in wheat: recent efforts and achievements.

Wheat ( spp.) is one of the most important cereal crops in the world. Several diseases affect wheat production and can cause 20-80% yield loss annually.

Gender-specific perception of job stressors and resources: a structural equation model-based secondary analysis.

Objective: Stress is an extensive issue in modern society, affecting men and women differently. A better understanding of these patterns is required within the work context. Therefore, this study aimed to identify gender differences in the effects of stressors (quantitative demands, qualitative demands, working time) and resources (job control, quality of leadership, co-worker support) on subjective perceived stress across occupational groups.

Wastewater-based epidemiology: deriving a SARS-CoV-2 data validation method to assess data quality and to improve trend recognition.

Introduction: Accurate and consistent data play a critical role in enabling health officials to make informed decisions regarding emerging trends in SARS-CoV-2 infections. Alongside traditional indicators such as the 7-day-incidence rate, wastewater-based epidemiology can provide valuable insights into SARS-CoV-2 concentration changes. However, the wastewater compositions and wastewater systems are rather complex.

Prediction of stroke in patients with severe aortic stenosis by left atrial appendage filling defect patterns on early and late-phase computed tomography.

Background: Stroke is a feared complication after TAVI. The objective was to assess whether left atrial appendage (LAA) filling-defect (FD) patterns from early and late-phase computed tomography (CT), predict stroke/TIA in patients with severe aortic stenosis.

Methods: 124 patients with severe aortic stenosis (79.

Subseasonal Prediction of Heat-Related Mortality in Switzerland.

Heatwaves pose a range of severe impacts on human health, including an increase in premature mortality. The summers of 2018 and 2022 are two examples with record-breaking temperatures leading to thousands of heat-related excess deaths in Europe. Some of the extreme temperatures experienced during these summers were predictable several weeks in advance by subseasonal forecasts.

Horticultural additives influence peat biogeochemistry and increase short-term CO production from peat.

Aims: Peat is used as a major ingredient of growing media in horticulture. Peat extracted from bogs can be acidic and low in nutrient availability and is therefore mixed with liming agents, nutrients, surfactants, perlite and so on. This study aims to estimate the rates at which raw peat and the modified peat ('growing media') decompose to release carbon dioxide (CO), to estimate the release of carbon (C) from liming agents and to estimate how peat biogeochemistry is changed.

Analyzing the regulatory framework gaps for gas distribution networks with decreasing natural gas demand in Germany.

German energy system studies, investigating the energy transition pathways to the set climate targets, depict a significant decrease in gas demand. This leads to a discussion about the long-term need of gas distribution networks. The discussion intensified with the war in Ukraine and the subsequent energy price crisis.

CCfrag: scanning folding potential of coiled-coil fragments with AlphaFold.

Motivation: Coiled coils are a widespread structural motif consisting of multiple α-helices that wind around a central axis to bury their hydrophobic core. While AlphaFold has emerged as an effective coiled-coil modeling tool, capable of accurately predicting changes in periodicity and core geometry along coiled-coil stalks, it is not without limitations, such as the generation of spuriously bent models and the inability to effectively model globally non-canonical-coiled coils. To overcome these limitations, we investigated whether dividing full-length sequences into fragments would result in better models.

Ge Epitaxy at Ultralow Growth Temperatures Enabled by a Pristine Growth Environment.

Germanium (Ge), the next-in-line group-IV material, bears great potential to add functionality and performance to next-generation nanoelectronics and solid-state quantum transport based on silicon (Si) technology. Here, we investigate the direct epitaxial growth of two-dimensional high-quality crystalline Ge layers on Si deposited at ultralow growth temperatures ( = 100-350 °C) and pristine growth pressures (≲10 mbar). First, we show that a decreasing does not degrade the crystal quality of homoepitaxial Ge/Ge(001) by comparing the point defect density using positron annihilation lifetime spectroscopy.

Frequency, characteristics, and immunological accompaniments of ataxia in anti-NMDAR antibody-associated encephalitis.

Introduction: Very rarely, adult NMDAR antibody-associated encephalitis (NMDAR-E) leads to persistent cerebellar atrophy and ataxia. Transient cerebellar ataxia is common in pediatric NMDAR-E. Immune-mediated cerebellar ataxia may be associated with myelin oligodendrocyte glycoprotein (MOG), aquaporin-4 (AQP-4), kelch-like family member 11 (KLHL11), and glutamate kainate receptor subunit 2 (GluK2) antibodies, all of which may co-occur in NMDAR-E.

A gradient of hemisphere-specific dorsal to ventral processing routes in parieto-premotor networks.

Networks in the parietal and premotor cortices enable essential human abilities regarding motor processing, including attention and tool use. Even though our knowledge on its topography has steadily increased, a detailed picture of hemisphere-specific integrating pathways is still lacking. With the help of multishell diffusion magnetic resonance imaging, probabilistic tractography, and the Graph Theory Analysis, we investigated connectivity patterns between frontal premotor and posterior parietal brain areas in healthy individuals.

Comparison of different group-level templates in gradient-based multimodal connectivity analysis.

The study of large-scale brain connectivity is increasingly adopting unsupervised approaches that derive low-dimensional spatial representations from high-dimensional connectomes, referred to as gradient analysis. When translating this approach to study interindividual variations in connectivity, one technical issue pertains to the selection of an appropriate group-level template to which individual gradients are aligned. Here, we compared different group-level template construction strategies using functional and structural connectome data from neurotypical controls and individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) to identify between-group differences.

Simulated brain networks reflecting progression of Parkinson's disease.

The neurodegenerative progression of Parkinson's disease affects brain structure and function and, concomitantly, alters the topological properties of brain networks. The network alteration accompanied by motor impairment and the duration of the disease has not yet been clearly demonstrated in the disease progression. In this study, we aim to resolve this problem with a modeling approach using the reduced Jansen-Rit model applied to large-scale brain networks derived from cross-sectional MRI data.

Conservation of structural brain connectivity in people with multiple sclerosis.

Multiple sclerosis (MS) is a neurodegenerative disease that affects the central nervous system. Structures affected in MS include the corpus callosum, connecting the hemispheres. Studies have shown that in mammalian brains, structural connectivity is organized according to a conservation principle, an inverse relationship between intra- and interhemispheric connectivity.