Helicobacter pullorum cytolethal distending toxin targets vinculin and cortactin and triggers formation of lamellipodia in intestinal epithelial cells

Helicobacter pullorum, a bacterium initially isolated from poultry, has been associated with human digestive disorders. However, the factor responsible for its cytopathogenic effects on epithelial cells has not been formally identified. The cytopathogenic alterations induced by several human and avian H. pullorum strains were investigated on human intestinal epithelial cell lines. Moreover, the effects of the cytolethal distending toxin (CDT) were evaluated first by using a wild-type strain and its corresponding cdtB isogenic mutant and second by delivering the active CdtB subunit of the CDT directly into the cells. All of the H. pullorum strains induced cellular distending phenotype, actin cytoskeleton remodeling, and G2/M cell cycle arrest. These effects were dependent on the CDT, as they were (1) not observed in response to a cdtB isogenic mutant strain and (2) present in cells expressing CdtB. CdtB also induced an atypical delocalization of vinculin from focal adhesions to the perinuclear region, formation of cortical actin-rich large lamellipodia with an upregulation of cortactin, and decreased cellular adherence. In conclusion, the CDT of H. pullorum is responsible for major cytopathogenic effects in vitro, confirming its role as a main virulence factor of this emerging human pathogen.This work was supported by the Institut national de la santé et de la recherche médicale, the University Bordeaux Segalen, the Conseil Régional d’Aquitaine (grants 20030304002FA and 20040305003 FA), the Société Nationale Française de Gastroentérologie, the European Union (FEDER no. 2003227

Systems and technologies for objective evaluation of technical skills in laparoscopic surgery

Minimally invasive surgery is a highly demanding surgical approach regarding technical requirements for the surgeon, who must be trained in order to perform a safe surgical intervention. Traditional surgical education in minimally invasive surgery is commonly based on subjective criteria to quantify and evaluate surgical abilities, which could be potentially unsafe for the patient. Authors, surgeons and associations are increasingly demanding the development of more objective assessment tools that can accredit surgeons as technically competent. This paper describes the state of the art in objective assessment methods of surgical skills. It gives an overview on assessment systems based on structured checklists and rating scales, surgical simulators, and instrument motion analysis. As a future work, an objective and automatic assessment method of surgical skills should be standardized as a means towards proficiency-based curricula for training in laparoscopic surgery and its certification

InfoSyll: A Syllabary Providing Statistical Information on Phonological and Orthographic Syllables

here is now a growing body of evidence in various languages supporting the claim that syllables are functional units of visual word processing. In the perspective of modeling the processing of polysyllabic words and the activation of syllables, current studies investigate syllabic effects with subtle manipulations. We present here a syllabary of the French language aiming at answering new constraints when designing experiments on the syllable issue. The InfoSyll syllabary provides exhaustive characteristics and statistical information for each phonological syllable (e.g. /fi/) and for its corresponding orthographic syllables (e.g. fi, phi, phy, fee, fix, fis). Variables such as the type and token positional frequencies, the number and frequencies of the correspondences between orthographic and phonological syllables are provided. As discussed, such computations should allow precise controls, manipulations and quantitative descriptions of syllabic variables in the field of psycholinguistic research.SCOPUS: ar.jinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishe

Integer Programs with Prescribed Number of Solutions and a Weighted Version of Doignon-Bell-Scarf’s Theorem

peer reviewedIn this paper we study a generalization of the classical fesibility problem in integer linear programming, where an ILP needs to have a prescribed number of solutions to be considered solved. We first provide a generalization of the famous Doignon-Bell-Scarf theorem: Given an integer k, we prove that there exists a constant c(k, n), depending only on the dimension n and k, such that if a polyhedron {x : Ax ≤ b} contains exactly k integer solutions, then there exists a subset of the rows of cardinality no more than c(k,n), defining a polyhedron that contains exactly the same k integer solutions. The second contribution of the article presents a structure theory that characterizes precisely the set Sg≥k (A) of all vectors b such that the problem Ax = b, x ≥ 0, x ∈ Zn , has at least k-solutions. We demonstrate that this set is finitely generated, a union of translated copies of a semigroup which can be computed explicitly via Hilbert bases computation. Similar results can be derived for those right-hand-side vectors that have exactly k solutions or fewer than k solutions. Finally we show that, when n, k are fixed natural numbers, one can compute in polynomial time an encoding of Sg≥k(A) as a generating function, using a short sum of rational functions. As a consequence, one can identify all right-hand-side vectors that have exactly k solutions (similarly for at least k or less than k solutions). Under the same assumptions we prove that the k-Frobenius number can be computed in polynomial time