New Nanostructured Carbon Coating Inhibits Bacterial Growth, but Does Not Influence on Animal Cells

An electrospark technology has been developed for obtaining a colloidal solution containing nanosized amorphous carbon. The advantages of the technology are its low cost and high performance. The colloidal solution of nanosized carbon is highly stable. The coatings on its basis are nanostructured. They are characterized by high adhesion and hydrophobicity. It was found that the propagation of microorganisms on nanosized carbon coatings is significantly hindered. At the same time, eukaryotic animal cells grow and develop on nanosized carbon coatings, as well as on the nitinol medical alloy. The use of a colloidal solution as available, cheap and non-toxic nanomaterial for the creation of antibacterial coatings to prevent biofilm formation seems to be very promising for modern medicine, pharmaceutical and food industries

Identity domains capture individual differences from across the behavioral repertoire

Personality traits can offer considerable insight into the biological basis of individual differences. However, existing approaches toward understanding personality across species rely on subjective criteria and limited sets of behavioral readouts, which result in noisy and often inconsistent outcomes. Here we introduce a mathematical framework for describing individual differences along dimensions with maximum consistency and discriminative power. We validate this framework in mice, using data from a system for high-throughput longitudinal monitoring of group-housed male mice that yields a variety of readouts from across the behavioral repertoire of individual animals. We demonstrate a set of stable traits that capture variability in behavior and gene expression in the brain, allowing for better-informed mechanistic investigations into the biology of individual differences