Revisiting aminocoumarins for the treatment of melioidosis.

Burkholderia pseudomallei causes melioidosis, a potentially lethal disease that can establish both chronic and acute infections in humans. It is inherently recalcitrant to many antibiotics, there is a paucity of effective treatment options and there is no vaccine. In the present study, the efficacies of selected aminocoumarin compounds, DNA gyrase inhibitors that were discovered in the 1950s but are not in clinical use for the treatment of melioidosis were investigated. Clorobiocin and coumermycin were shown to be particularly effective in treating B. pseudomallei infection in vivo. A novel formulation with dl-tryptophan or l-tyrosine was shown to further enhance aminocoumarin potency in vivo. It was demonstrated that coumermycin has superior pharmacokinetic properties compared with novobiocin, and the coumermycin in l-tyrosine formulation can be used as an effective treatment for acute respiratory melioidosis in a murine model. Repurposing of existing approved antibiotics offers new resources in a challenging era of drug development and antimicrobial resistance

Effectiveness of neonatal pulse oximetry screening for detection of critical congenital heart disease in daily clinical routine—results from a prospective multicenter study

Pulse oximetry screening (POS) has been proposed as an effective, noninvasive, inexpensive tool allowing earlier diagnosis of critical congenital heart disease (cCHD). Our aim was to test the hypothesis that POS can reduce the diagnostic gap in cCHD in daily clinical routine in the setting of tertiary, secondary and primary care centres. We conducted a prospective multicenter trial in Saxony, Germany. POS was performed in healthy term and post-term newborns at the age of 24–72 h. If an oxygen saturation (SpO2) of ≤95% was measured on lower extremities and confirmed after 1 h, complete clinical examination and echocardiography were performed. POS was defined as false-negative when a diagnosis of cCHD was made after POS in the participating hospitals/at our centre. From July 2006–June 2008, 42,240 newborns from 34 institutions have been included. Seventy-two children were excluded due to prenatal diagnosis (n = 54) or clinical signs of cCHD (n = 18) before POS. Seven hundred ninety-five newborns did not receive POS, mainly due to early discharge after birth (n = 727; 91%). In 41,445 newborns, POS was performed. POS was true positive in 14, false positive in 40, true negative in 41,384 and false negative in four children (three had been excluded for violation of study protocol). Sensitivity, specificity, positive and negative predictive value were 77.78%, 99.90%, 25.93% and 99.99%, respectively. With POS as an adjunct to prenatal diagnosis, physical examination and clinical observation, the percentage of newborns with late diagnosis of cCHD was 4.4%. POS can substantially reduce the postnatal diagnostic gap in cCHD, and false-positive results leading to unnecessary examinations of healthy newborns are rare. POS should be implemented in routine postnatal care

Mining and validating grape (Vitis L.) ESTs to develop EST-SSR markers for genotyping and mapping

Grape expressed sequence tags (ESTs) are a new resource for developing simple sequence repeat (SSR) functional markers for genotyping and genetic mapping. An integrated pipeline including several computational tools for SSR identification and functional annotation was developed to identify 6,447 EST-SSR sequences from a total collection of 215,609 grape ESTs retrieved from NCBI. The 6,447 EST-SSRs were further reduced to 1,701 non-redundant sequences via clustering analysis, and 1,037 of them were successfully designed with primer pairs flanking the SSR motifs. From them, 150 pairs of primers were randomly selected for PCR amplification, polymorphism and heterozygosity analysis in V. vinifera cvs. Riesling and Cabernet Sauvignon, and V. rotundifolia (muscadine grape) cvs. Summit and Noble, and 145 pairs of these primers yielded PCR products. Pairwise comparisons of loci between the parents Riesling and Cabernet Sauvignon showed that 72 were homozygous in both cultivars, while 70 loci were heterozygous in at least one cultivar of the two. Muscadine parents Noble and Summit had 90 homozygous SSR loci in both parents and contained 50 heterozygous loci in at least one of the two. These EST-SSR functional markers are a useful addition for grape genotyping and genome mapping

An overview of concepts and approaches used in estimating the burden of congenital disorders globally.

Congenital disorders are an important cause of pregnancy loss, premature death and life-long disability. A range of interventions can greatly reduce their burden, but the absence of local epidemiological data on their prevalence and the impact of interventions impede policy and service development in many countries. In an attempt to overcome these deficiencies, we have developed a tool-The Modell Global Database of Congenital Disorders (MGDb) that combines general biological principles and available observational data with demographic data, to generate estimates of the birth prevalence and effects of interventions on mortality and disability due to congenital disorders. MGDb aims to support policy development by generating country, regional and global epidemiological estimates. Here we provide an overview of the concepts and methodological approach used to develop MGDb