Yeasts

Yeasts are a group of eukaryotic microfungi with a well-defined cell wall whose growth is either entirely unicellular or a combination of hyphal and unicellular reproduction. The approximately 1500 known yeast species belong to two distinct fungal phyla, the Ascomycota and the Basidiomycota. Within each these phyla, yeasts can be found in several subphyla or classes, reflecting the enormous diversity of their evolutionary origins and biochemical properties. In nature, yeasts are found mainly in association with plants or animals but are also present in soil and aquatic environments. Yeasts grow rapidly and have simple nutritional requirements, for which reason they have been used as model systems in biochemistry, genetics and molecular biology. They were the first microorganisms to be domesticated for the production of beer, bread or wine, and they continue to be used for the benefit of humanity in the production of many important health care and industrial commodities, including recombinant proteins, biopharmaceuticals, biocontrol agents and biofuels. The best-known yeast is the species Saccharomyces cerevisiae, which may be regarded as the world’s foremost industrial microbe

A Guide for Delivering Evidence - Based Discharge Intructions for Emergency Department Patients

Discharge instructions provided to patients discharged from the emergency department (ED) are often provided in a way that is neither clear nor concise. Patients are often discharged home without a clear understanding of their diagnosis, medications, reasons to return to the ED, follow-up instructions, or how to manage their care at home during their illness. Therefore, a guideline needed to be developed in order to help the ED staff provide clear and concise discharge instructions to patients discharged from the ED. The Ace Star Model of Knowledge Transformation was the foundation for the development of the evidence-based guideline. A formative group of 7 individuals was created to critique the initial draft of the guideline, and a final version of the guideline was then distributed to 10 medical professionals to aid in the approval and determination of the quality of the guideline. The data analysis from the formative group questionnaire, and the appraisal of guidelines for research and evaluation tool led to the recommendations for a guideline on the delivery of evidence-based discharge instructions. This project has implications for social change in practice by (a) increasing the awareness among medical professionals about the importance of their communication style on patient discharge and (b) allowing for more efficient communication to occur between them and their patients. The use of an evidence-based practice guideline for providing discharge instructions to patients discharged from the ED will allow improved quality of care to patients, efficient communication between the healthcare providers and patients, a positive impact for social change in practice, and a consistent and reliable method for patients to understand their discharge instructions in a way that is clear and concise

Baryon mass splittings and strong CP violation in SU(3) Chiral Perturbation Theory

We study $SU(3)$ flavor-breaking corrections to the relation between the octet baryon masses and the nucleon-meson CP-violating interactions induced by the QCD $\bar\theta$ term. We work within the framework of $SU(3)$ chiral perturbation theory and work through next-to-next-to-leading order in the $SU(3)$ chiral expansion, which is $\mathcal{O}(m_q^2)$. At lowest order, the CP-odd couplings induced by the QCD $\bar\theta$ term are determined by mass splittings of the baryon octet, the classic result of Crewther et al. We show that for each isospin-invariant CP-violating nucleon-meson interaction there exists one relation which is respected by loop corrections up to the order we work, while other leading-order relations are violated. With these relations we extract a precise value of the pion-nucleon coupling $\bar g_0$ by using recent lattice QCD evaluations of the proton-neutron mass splitting. In addition, we derive semi-precise values for CP-violating coupling constants between heavier mesons and nucleons with $\sim 30\%$ uncertainty and discuss their phenomenological impact on electric dipole moments of nucleons and nuclei.Comment: 49 pages. Published versio