Intraoperative hypotension and the risk of acute kidney injury following liver transplantation

Background: Acute kidney injury (AKI) is a frequent adverse outcome following liver transplantation (LT) with a multifactorial etiology. It is critical to identify modifiable risk factors to mitigate the risk. One key area of interest is the role of intraoperative hypotension, which remains relatively unexplored in liver transplant cohorts. Methods: This was a retrospective observational cohort study of 1292 adult patients who underwent LT (between 2009 and 2019). Multivariable logistic regression analysis was used to explore the association between intraoperative hypotension, quantified by time duration (in min) under various mean arterial pressure (MAP) thresholds, and the primary outcome of early postoperative AKI according to the KDIGO criteria. Results: AKI occurred in 40% of patients and was independently associated with greater than 20 min spent below MAP thresholds of 55 mm Hg (adjusted OR = 1.866; 95% CI = 1.037–3.44; P = 0.041) and 50 mm Hg (adjusted OR = 1.801; 95% CI = 1.087–2.992; P = 0.023). Further sensitivity analyses demonstrated that the association between intraoperative hypotension and postoperative AKI was accentuated after restricting the analysis to patients with a normal preoperative renal function. Conclusions: Prolonged (>20 min) intraoperative hypotension (below a MAP of 55 mm Hg) was independently associated with AKI following LT, after adjusting for several known confounders

A Glial Variant of the Vesicular Monoamine Transporter Is Required To Store Histamine in the Drosophila Visual System

Unlike other monoamine neurotransmitters, the mechanism by which the brain's histamine content is regulated remains unclear. In mammals, vesicular monoamine transporters (VMATs) are expressed exclusively in neurons and mediate the storage of histamine and other monoamines. We have studied the visual system of Drosophila melanogaster in which histamine is the primary neurotransmitter released from photoreceptor cells. We report here that a novel mRNA splice variant of Drosophila VMAT (DVMAT-B) is expressed not in neurons but rather in a small subset of glia in the lamina of the fly's optic lobe. Histamine contents are reduced by mutation of dVMAT, but can be partially restored by specifically expressing DVMAT-B in glia. Our results suggest a novel role for a monoamine transporter in glia that may be relevant to histamine homeostasis in other systems

30 years of collaboration

We highlight some of the most important cornerstones of the long standing and very fruitful collaboration of the Austrian Diophantine Number Theory research group and the Number Theory and Cryptography School of Debrecen. However, we do not plan to be complete in any sense but give some interesting data and selected results that we find particularly nice. At the end we focus on two topics in more details, namely a problem that origins from a conjecture of Rényi and Erdős (on the number of terms of the square of a polynomial) and another one that origins from a question of Zelinsky (on the unit sum number problem). This paper evolved from a plenary invited talk that the authors gaveat the Joint Austrian-Hungarian Mathematical Conference 2015, August 25-27, 2015 in Győr (Hungary)

Origami voting: a non-cryptographic approach to transparent ballot verification

International audienceOver the past four decades, fear of election manipulation and hacking has spurred the security technology community to propose a variety of voting systems to implement verifiable voting. Most of these rely on hard to understand cryptographic protocols, which can affect whether users actually verify their selections. Three-Ballot and Vote/Anti-Vote/Vote, two related systems among the few non-cryptographic end-to-end verifiable voting systems, made improvements in security while eliminating complex protocols. They unfortunately suffered from usability issues, and although they did not require cryptographic primitives, they still relied on electronic devices. To address this, we introduce three folded-paper based systems that allow verifiable voting and resist common attacks despite not relying on any cryptography or electronic devices. The proposals are based on 1) semi-translucent ballots, 2) masking tape, or 3) folding and punching. These Origami voting methods help users understand the underlying mechanisms and give them a direct geometric approach to verification

PCR identification of Fusarium graminearum isolated from wheat grain

Species-specific PCR assay was used for the identification of Hungarian Fusarium graminearum isolates in pure mycelial culture. The Fg16F/Fg16R primer pair of the three known species-specific primers appeared to be the most appropriate one to identify F. graminearum .Two methods were used for comparative determination of the amplicon size of F. graminearum strains: traditional agarose gel electrophoresis, and chip electrophoresis. Our results have shown that the chip electrophoresis is an easy-to-use, time-efficient substitute for conventional agarose gel electrophoresis; moreover it provides a more precise size determination of amplicons. Amplicon size ranging from 415 bp to 421 bp in tested isolates may be associated with genetic diversity in the Hungarian population of F. graminearum .The PCR assay described in this study can be used for the routine detection and identification of F. graminearum without isolation and morphological investigation of this fungus