Mapuche Herbal Medicine Inhibits Blood Platelet Aggregation

12 plant species traditionally used by the Mapuche people in Chile to treat wounds and inflammations have been evaluated for their direct blood platelet inhibition. Seven of the 12 tested plant species showed platelet inhibitory effect in sheep blood, and four of these were also able to inhibit the ADP- (5.0 μM) and collagen- (2.0 μg/mL) induced aggregations in human blood. These four species in respective extracts (in brackets) were Blechnum chilense (MeOH), Luma apiculata (H2O), Amomyrtus luma (DCM : MeOH 1 : 1) and Cestrum parqui (DCM : MeOH 1 : 1). The platelet aggregating inhibitory effects of A. luma (DCM : MeOH 1 : 1), and L. apiculata (H2O) were substantial and confirmed by inhibition of platelet surface activation markers

Myocardial injury in dogs with snake envenomation and its relation to systemic inflammation

OBJECTIVE : To investigate the presence of myocardial injury in dogs hospitalized for snake envenomation and to examine its relationship with systemic inflammation. DESIGN : Prospective case-control study. SETTINGS : University teaching hospital and small animal referral hospital. ANIMALS : Dogs naturally envenomed by the European viper (Vipera berus; n = 24), African puff adder (Bitis arietans; n = 5), or snouted cobra (Naja annulifera; n = 9). INTERVENTIONS : Blood was collected from dogs envenomed by V. berus at admission, 12–24 hours postadmission, and 5–10 days postadmission. Blood was collected from dogs envenomed by B. arietans or N. annulifera at admission, and 12, 24, and 36 hours postadmission. MEASUREMENTS AND MAIN RESULTS : Concentrations of cardiac troponin I (cTnI), a marker of myocardial injury, and C-reactive protein (CRP), a marker of systemic inflammation, were measured in each blood sample. Evidence of myocardial injury was found in 58% of dogs envenomed by V. berus at one or more time points. A significant correlation between cTnI and CRP concentrations was found at all time points. Evidence of myocardial injury was found in 80% of dogs envenomed by B. arietans at one or more time points; however, no correlation was found between cTnI and CRP concentrations. Evidence of myocardial injury was found in 67% of dogs envenomed by N. annulifera at one or more time points. A significant correlation between cTnI and CRP concentrations was found at admission, but not at other time points. CONCLUSIONS : Myocardial injury frequently occurred in dogs with snake envenomation. While the degree of systemic inflammation was significantly correlated with degree of myocardial injury in V. berus envenomation at all time points, this was not the case in dogs envenomed by N. annulifera or B. arietans. This could be due to differences in the toxic substances of the snake venoms or to differences in the cytokines induced by the venom toxins.http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1111/(ISSN)1476-44312015-04-30hb201

Faster Sliding Window String Indexing in Streams

The classical string indexing problem asks to preprocess the input string S for efficient pattern matching queries. Bille, Fischer, Gørtz, Pedersen, and Stordalen [CPM 2023] generalized this to the streaming sliding window string indexing problem, where the input string S arrives as a stream, and we are asked to maintain an index of the last w characters, called the window. Further, at any point in time, a pattern P might appear, again given as a stream, and all occurrences of P in the current window must be output. We require that the time to process each character of the text or the pattern is worst-case. It appears that standard string indexing structures, such as suffix trees, do not provide an efficient solution in such a setting, as to obtain a good worst-case bound, they necessarily need to work right-to-left, and we cannot reverse the pattern while keeping a worst-case guarantee on the time to process each of its characters. Nevertheless, it is possible to obtain a bound of O(log w) (with high probability) by maintaining a hierarchical structure of multiple suffix trees. We significantly improve this upper bound by designing a black-box reduction to maintain a suffix tree under prepending characters to the current text. By plugging in the known results, this allows us to obtain a bound of O(log log w + log log σ) (with high probability), where σ is the size of the alphabet. Further, we introduce an even more general problem, called the streaming dynamic window string indexing, where the goal is to maintain the current text under adding and deleting characters at either end and design a similar black-box reduction