Pericardial effusion as the only manifestation of infection with Francisella tularensis: a case report

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Introduction</p> <p><it>Francisella tularensis</it>, a facultative intracellular Gram-negative bacterium, has rarely been reported as an agent of pericarditis, generally described as a complication of tularemia sepsis. <it>F. tularensis </it>is a fastidious organism that grows poorly on standard culture media and diagnosis is usually based on serological tests. However, cross-reactions may occur. Western blotting allows the correct diagnosis.</p> <p>Case presentation</p> <p>A non-smoking 53-year-old woman was admitted to hospital with a large posterior pericardial effusion. Serological tests showed a seroconversion in antibody titers to <it>F. tularensis </it>(IgG titer = 400) and <it>Legionella pneumophila </it>(IgG titer = 512). <it>F. tularensis </it>was identified by Western immunoblotting following cross-adsorption. The patient reported close contact with rabbits 2 weeks prior to the beginning of symptoms of pericarditis.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>We report a rare case of pericardial effusion as the only manifestation of infection by <it>F. tularensis</it>. The etiological diagnosis is based on serology. Western blotting and cross-adsorption allow differential diagnosis.</p

Extrato de erva-de-rato (Palicourea marcgravii) como inseticida alternativo visando o controle do pulgão preto (Toxoptera citricida) dos citros.

Este trabalho objetivou avaliar a toxicidade de cinco concentrações de extrato de Palicourea marcgravii, aplicado por pulverização via contato sobre a mortalidade do pulgão preto, em condições de laboratório

Extrato de Manihot esculenta como inseticida alternativo no controle de pulgão preto (Toxoptera citricida) dos citros.

Este trabalho objetivou avaliar a toxicidade de cinco concentrações de extrato de Manihot esculenta aplicado por pulverização via translaminar sobre a mortalidade de pulgão preto em condições de laboratório

Potencial de manipueira de mandioca (Manihot esculenta Crantz) no controle de pulgão preto de citros (Toxoptera citricida Kirkaldy, 1907).

Esta pesquisa teve como principal objetivo, investigar o inseticida potencial inseticida do extrado de manipueira em, Pulgão preto dos citros, Toxoptera citricida Kirkaldy,1907

Revisão do Simulium spinibranchium Lutz, 1910 (Diptera: Simuliidae), com a primeira descrição dos adultos e larva, e redescrição da pupa

Adults and larva of Simulium spinibranchium Lutz, 1910 are described for the first time and the pupa is redescribed. A lectotype is estabilished for the species. The Geographical Distribuition and some Biologic data are presented.Os adultos e larva de Simulium spinibranchium Lutz, 1910 são descritos pela primeira vez, como também é redescrita a pupa. É designado um lectótlpo para a espécie. São apresentados a distribuição geográfica e alguns dados sobre a biologia

Piercing an interface with a brush: collaborative stiffening

The hairs of a painting brush withdrawn from a wetting liquid self-assemble into clumps whose sizes rely on a balance between liquid surface tension and hairs bending rigidity. Here we study the situation of an immersed carpet in an evaporating liquid bath : the free extremities of the hairs are forced to pierce the liquid interface. The compressive capillary force on the tip of flexible hairs leads to buckling and collapse. However we find that the spontaneous association of hairs into stronger bundles may allow them to resist capillary buckling. We explore in detail the different structures obtained and compare them with similar patterns observed in micro-structured surfaces such as carbon nanotubes "forests".Comment: 9 pages, 6 figure

Mapping the genetic architecture of gene expression in human liver

Genetic variants that are associated with common human diseases do not lead directly to disease, but instead act on intermediate, molecular phenotypes that in turn induce changes in higher-order disease traits. Therefore, identifying the molecular phenotypes that vary in response to changes in DNA and that also associate with changes in disease traits has the potential to provide the functional information required to not only identify and validate the susceptibility genes that are directly affected by changes in DNA, but also to understand the molecular networks in which such genes operate and how changes in these networks lead to changes in disease traits. Toward that end, we profiled more than 39,000 transcripts and we genotyped 782,476 unique single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in more than 400 human liver samples to characterize the genetic architecture of gene expression in the human liver, a metabolically active tissue that is important in a number of common human diseases, including obesity, diabetes, and atherosclerosis. This genome-wide association study of gene expression resulted in the detection of more than 6,000 associations between SNP genotypes and liver gene expression traits, where many of the corresponding genes identified have already been implicated in a number of human diseases. The utility of these data for elucidating the causes of common human diseases is demonstrated by integrating them with genotypic and expression data from other human and mouse populations. This provides much-needed functional support for the candidate susceptibility genes being identified at a growing number of genetic loci that have been identified as key drivers of disease from genome-wide association studies of disease. By using an integrative genomics approach, we highlight how the gene RPS26 and not ERBB3 is supported by our data as the most likely susceptibility gene for a novel type 1 diabetes locus recently identified in a large-scale, genome-wide association study. We also identify SORT1 and CELSR2 as candidate susceptibility genes for a locus recently associated with coronary artery disease and plasma low-density lipoprotein cholesterol levels in the process. © 2008 Schadt et al

Inner Space Preserving Generative Pose Machine

Image-based generative methods, such as generative adversarial networks (GANs) have already been able to generate realistic images with much context control, specially when they are conditioned. However, most successful frameworks share a common procedure which performs an image-to-image translation with pose of figures in the image untouched. When the objective is reposing a figure in an image while preserving the rest of the image, the state-of-the-art mainly assumes a single rigid body with simple background and limited pose shift, which can hardly be extended to the images under normal settings. In this paper, we introduce an image "inner space" preserving model that assigns an interpretable low-dimensional pose descriptor (LDPD) to an articulated figure in the image. Figure reposing is then generated by passing the LDPD and the original image through multi-stage augmented hourglass networks in a conditional GAN structure, called inner space preserving generative pose machine (ISP-GPM). We evaluated ISP-GPM on reposing human figures, which are highly articulated with versatile variations. Test of a state-of-the-art pose estimator on our reposed dataset gave an accuracy over 80% on PCK0.5 metric. The results also elucidated that our ISP-GPM is able to preserve the background with high accuracy while reasonably recovering the area blocked by the figure to be reposed.Comment: http://www.northeastern.edu/ostadabbas/2018/07/23/inner-space-preserving-generative-pose-machine

Parallel Mapper

The construction of Mapper has emerged in the last decade as a powerful and effective topological data analysis tool that approximates and generalizes other topological summaries, such as the Reeb graph, the contour tree, split, and joint trees. In this paper, we study the parallel analysis of the construction of Mapper. We give a provably correct parallel algorithm to execute Mapper on multiple processors and discuss the performance results that compare our approach to a reference sequential Mapper implementation. We report the performance experiments that demonstrate the efficiency of our method