Enhancement of Gap Junction Function During Acute Myocardial Infarction Modifies Healing and Reduces Late Ventricular Arrhythmia Susceptibility

Objectives: To investigate the effects of enhancing gap junction (GJ) coupling during acute myocardial infarction (MI) on the healed infarct scar morphology and late post-MI arrhythmia susceptibility. Background: Increased heterogeneity of myocardial scarring after MI is associated with greater arrhythmia susceptibility. We hypothesized that short-term enhancement of GJ coupling during acute MI can produce more homogeneous infarct scars, reducing late susceptibility to post-MI arrhythmias. Methods: Following arrhythmic characterisation of the rat 4-week post-MI model (n=24), a further 27 Sprague-Dawley rats were randomised to receive rotigaptide to enhance GJ coupling (n=13) or saline control (n=14) by osmotic minipump immediately prior to, and for the first 7 days following surgical MI. At 4 weeks post-MI, hearts were explanted for ex vivo programmed electrical stimulation (PES) and optical mapping. Heterogeneity of infarct border zone (IBZ) scarring was quantified by histomorphometry. Results: Despite no detectable difference in infarct size at 4 weeks post-MI, rotigaptide-treated hearts had reduced arrhythmia susceptibility during PES (Inducibility score: rotigaptide 2.40.8, control 5.00.6, p=0.02) and less heterogeneous IBZ scarring (standard deviation of IBZ Complexity Score: rotigaptide 1.10.1, control 1.40.1, p=0.04), associated with an improvement in IBZ conduction velocity (rotigaptide 43.13.4 cm/s, control 34.82.0 cm/s, p=0.04). Conclusions: Enhancement of GJ coupling for only 7 days at the time of acute MI produced more homogeneous IBZ scarring and reduced arrhythmia susceptibility at 4 weeks post-MI. Short-term GJ modulation at the time of MI may represent a novel treatment strategy to modify the healed infarct scar morphology and reduce late post-MI arrhythmic risk

Accretion Processes for General Spherically Symmetric Compact Objects

We investigate the accretion process for different spherically symmetric space-time geometries for a static fluid. We analyse this procedure using the most general black hole metric ansatz. After that, we examine the accretion process for specific spherically symmetric metrics obtaining the velocity of the sound during the process and the critical speed of the flow of the fluid around the black hole. In addition, we study the behaviour of the rate of change of the mass for each chosen metric for a barotropic fluid.Comment: 10 pages, 15 figures, v2 accepted for publication in 'European Physical Journal C

Automated annotation of chemical names in the literature with tunable accuracy

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>A significant portion of the biomedical and chemical literature refers to small molecules. The accurate identification and annotation of compound name that are relevant to the topic of the given literature can establish links between scientific publications and various chemical and life science databases. Manual annotation is the preferred method for these works because well-trained indexers can understand the paper topics as well as recognize key terms. However, considering the hundreds of thousands of new papers published annually, an automatic annotation system with high precision and relevance can be a useful complement to manual annotation.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>An automated chemical name annotation system, MeSH Automated Annotations (MAA), was developed to annotate small molecule names in scientific abstracts with tunable accuracy. This system aims to reproduce the MeSH term annotations on biomedical and chemical literature that would be created by indexers. When comparing automated free text matching to those indexed manually of 26 thousand MEDLINE abstracts, more than 40% of the annotations were false-positive (FP) cases. To reduce the FP rate, MAA incorporated several filters to remove "incorrect" annotations caused by nonspecific, partial, and low relevance chemical names. In part, relevance was measured by the position of the chemical name in the text. Tunable accuracy was obtained by adding or restricting the sections of the text scanned for chemical names. The best precision obtained was 96% with a 28% recall rate. The best performance of MAA, as measured with the F statistic was 66%, which favorably compares to other chemical name annotation systems.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Accurate chemical name annotation can help researchers not only identify important chemical names in abstracts, but also match unindexed and unstructured abstracts to chemical records. The current work is tested against MEDLINE, but the algorithm is not specific to this corpus and it is possible that the algorithm can be applied to papers from chemical physics, material, polymer and environmental science, as well as patents, biological assay descriptions and other textual data.</p

Tribal Formulations for Treatment of Pain: A Study of the Bede Community Traditional Medicinal Practitioners of Porabari Village in Dhaka District, Bangladesh

The Bedes form one of the largest tribal or indigenous communities in Bangladesh and are popularly known as the boat people or water gypsies because of their preference for living in boats. They travel almost throughout the whole year by boats on the numerous waterways of Bangladesh and earn their livelihood by selling sundry items, performing jugglery acts, catching snakes, and treating village people by the various riversides with their traditional medicinal formulations. Life is hard for the community, and both men and women toil day long. As a result of their strenuous lifestyle, they suffer from various types of pain, and have developed an assortment of formulations for treatment of pain in different parts of the body. Pain is the most common reason for physician consultation in all parts of the world including Bangladesh. Although a number of drugs are available to treat pain, including non-steroidal, steroidal, and narcotic drugs, such drugs usually have side-effects like causing bleeding in the stomach over prolonged use (as in the case of rheumatic pain), or can be addictive. Moreover, pain arising from causes like rheumatism has no proper treatment in allopathic medicine. It was the objective of the present study to document the formulations used by the Bede traditional practitioners for pain treatment, for they claim to have used these formulations over centuries with success. Surveys were conducted among a large Bede community, who reside in boats on the Bangshi River by Porabari village of Savar area in Dhaka district of Bangladesh. Interviews of 30 traditional practitioners were conducted with the help of a semi-structured questionnaire and the guided field-walk method. It was observed that the Bede practitioners used 53 formulations for treatment of various types of pain, the main ingredient of all formulations being medicinal plants. Out of the 53 formulations, 25 were for treatment of rheumatic pain, either exclusively, or along with other types of body pain. A total of 65 plants belonging to 39 families were used in the formulations. The Fabaceae family provided 7 plants followed by the Solanaceae family with 4 plants. 47 out of the 53 formulations were used topically, 5 formulations were orally administered, and 1 formulation had both topical and oral uses. 8 formulations for treatment of rheumatic pain contained Calotropis gigantea, suggesting that the plant has strong potential for further scientific studies leading to discovery of novel efficacious compounds for rheumatic pain treatment

Reduction of seafood processing wastewater using technologies enhanced by swim–bed technology

The increasing growth of the seafood processing industries considerably requires more industrial process activities and water consumption. It is estimated that approximately 10–40 m3 of wastewater is generated from those industries for processing one-tonne of raw materials. Due to limitations and regulations in natural resources utilization, a suitable and systematic wastewater treatment plant is very important to meet rigorous discharge standards. As a result of food waste biodegradability, the biological treatment and some extent of swim-bed technology, including a novel acryl-fibre (biofilm) material might be used effectively to meet the effluent discharge criteria. This chapter aims to develop understanding on current problems and production of the seafood wastewater regarding treatment efficiency and methods of treatment

Osteoarticular Infection in Three Young Thoroughbred Horses Caused by a Novel Gram Negative Cocco-Bacillus

© 2020 Bernard J. Hudson et al. We describe three cases of osteoarticular infection (OAI) in young thoroughbred horses in which the causative organism was identified by MALDI-TOF as Kingella species. The pattern of OAI resembled that reported with Kingella infection in humans. Analysis by 16S rRNA PCR enabled construction of a phylogenetic tree that placed the isolates closer to Simonsiella and Alysiella species, rather than Kingella species. Average nucleotide identity (ANI) comparison between the new isolate and Kingella kingae and Alysiella crassa however revealed low probability that the new isolate belonged to either of these species. This preliminary analysis suggests the organism isolated is a previously unrecognised species

Diffuse-reflectance spectroscopy using a frequency-switchable terahertz quantum cascade laser

We demonstrate diffuse-reflectance (DR) spectroscopy of powders using a discretely-tunable terahertz-frequency quantum cascade laser (THz QCL) with a heterogeneous active region. DR signatures were obtained at frequencies of 3.06, 3.21, 3.28 and 3.35 THz, and the relative absorption coefficients were inferred at each frequency using a Kubelka–Munk (KM) scattering model. The spectral lineshapes reproduce the absolute Beer–Lambert (BL) absorption spectra of a range of materials, which were also measured using conventional transmission-mode THz time-domain spectroscopy. It is shown that the DR technique works reliably for materials that include pharmaceutical compounds and foodstuffs, with BL absorption coefficients in the range 2–10 mm−1. This method is potentially suitable for automated material identification, without any requirement for a priori knowledge of the refractive index or scattering properties of the sampled material

Dynamics of a Quantum Phase Transition and Relaxation to a Steady State

We review recent theoretical work on two closely related issues: excitation of an isolated quantum condensed matter system driven adiabatically across a continuous quantum phase transition or a gapless phase, and apparent relaxation of an excited system after a sudden quench of a parameter in its Hamiltonian. Accordingly the review is divided into two parts. The first part revolves around a quantum version of the Kibble-Zurek mechanism including also phenomena that go beyond this simple paradigm. What they have in common is that excitation of a gapless many-body system scales with a power of the driving rate. The second part attempts a systematic presentation of recent results and conjectures on apparent relaxation of a pure state of an isolated quantum many-body system after its excitation by a sudden quench. This research is motivated in part by recent experimental developments in the physics of ultracold atoms with potential applications in the adiabatic quantum state preparation and quantum computation.Comment: 117 pages; review accepted in Advances in Physic

Apolipoprotein E gene polymorphism is not a strong risk factor for diabetic nephropathy and retinopathy in Type I diabetes: case-control study

BACKGROUND: The gene encoding apolipoprotein E (APOE) has been proposed as a candidate gene for vascular complications in Type I diabetes. This study aimed to investigate the influence of three-allelic variations in the APOE gene for the development of diabetic retinopathy and nephropathy. RESULTS: Neither APOE alleles frequencies or APOE genotypes frequencies differed between Type I diabetic groups either with or without nephropathy. Similar results were found for patients with and without diabetic retinopathy. CONCLUSIONS: APOE gene polymorphism does not determine genetic susceptibility for the development of diabetic retinopathy in Type I diabetes patients. Association between APOE gene polymorphism and diabetic nephropathy may be weak or moderate, but not strong