Measuring horizontal stresses during jacked pile installation

Jacking is an installation technique for displacement piles which is commonly used onshore in urban environments owing to its low noise and vibration. During pile jacking, stress changes occur in the soil which are substantial close to the pile, but also extend a significant radial distance. These stresses are difficult to measure accurately owing to arching around stress sensors. In the field, stress measurements are commonly made by means of an adjacent pile whose stiffness changes the stress field within the soil. Accurate measurements of stresses due to the installation of a single pile under laboratory conditions are needed in order to quantify this error. In this paper, null gauges that do not suffer from membrane deflection are used to measure horizontal stress changes during the jacked installation of a cylindrical pile in dry sand. Stresses are measured by means of both an adjacent pre-installed square pile and in-soil sensors. The paper also presents a comparison between the centrifuge results and the radial stress distribution estimated using conventional methods, such as Boussinesq's elastic analysis and elasto-plastic spherical cavity expansion. The research was funded by Giken Ltd. and the Coleman-Cohen Exchange Programme to whom a great acknowledgement is addressedThis is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from ICE via http://dx.doi.org/10.1680/geng.14.0006

Aspergillus section fumigati pneumonia and oxalate nephrosis in a foal

Equine pulmonary aspergillosis is a rare deep mycosis often due to the hematogenous spread of hyphae after gastrointestinal tract disease. We describe herein the main clinic-pathological findings observed in a foal, which spontaneously died after showing diarrhea and respiratory distress. Necropsy and histopathological investigations allowed to diagnose pulmonary aspergillosis, which likely developed after necrotic typhlitis-colitis. Biomolecular studies identified Aspergillus section Fumigati strain as the causative agent. Notably, severe oxalate nephrosis was concurrently observed. Occasionally, oxalate nephropathy can be a sequela of pulmonary aspergillosis in humans. The present case report suggests that the renal precipitation of oxalates can occur also in horses affected by pulmonary aspergillosis and could likely contribute to the fatal outcome of the disease

Isolation of KPC 3-producing Enterobacter aerogenes in a patient colonized by MDR Klebsiella pneumoniae

We describe the interspecies transmission of the plasmid-mediated blaKPC-3 gene, which confers carbapenem resistance, between clinically relevant gram-negative bacteria in a single patient. A KPC-3 producing Enterobacter aerogenes was isolated from a hospitalized patient previously colonized and then infected by a Klebsiella pneumoniae ST101 carrying the blaKPC-3 gene. The strains showed identical plasmids. Since intense horizontal exchanges among bacteria can occur in the gut, clinicians should be aware that patients colonized by carbapenem-resistant K. pneumoniae could become carriers of other carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae. © 2016 by Edimes - Edizioni Internazionali Srl. All rights reserved

Clonal diversity and detection of carbapenem resistance encoding genes among multidrug-resistant Acinetobacter baumannii isolates recovered from patients and environment in two intensive care units in a Moroccan hospital

Background Carbapenem-resistant Acinetobacter baumannii has recently been defined by the World Health Organization as a critical pathogen. The aim of this study was to compare clonal diversity and carbapenemase-encoding genes of A. baumannii isolates collected from colonized or infected patients and hospital environment in two intensive care units (ICUs) in Morocco. Methods The patient and environmental sampling was carried out in the medical and surgical ICUs of Mohammed V Military teaching hospital from March to August 2015. All A. baumannii isolates recovered from clinical and environmental samples, were identified using routine microbiological techniques and Matrix-Assisted Laser Desorption/Ionization Time-of-Flight Mass Spectrometry. Antimicrobial susceptibility testing was performed using disc diffusion method. The carbapenemase-encoding genes were screened for by PCR. Clonal relatedness was analyzed by digestion of the DNA with low frequency restriction enzymes and pulsed field gel electrophoresis (PFGE) and the multi locus sequence typing (MLST) was performed on two selected isolates from two major pulsotypes. Results A total of 83 multidrug-resistant A. baumannii isolates were collected: 47 clinical isolates and 36 environmental isolates. All isolates were positive for the bla OXA51-like and bla OXA23-like genes. The coexistence of bla NDM-1 /bla OXA-23-like and bla OXA 24-like /bla OXA-23-like were detected in 27 (32.5%) and 2 (2.4%) of A. baumannii isolates, respectively. The environmental samples and the fecally-colonized patients were significantly identified (p < 0.05) as the most common sites of isolation of NDM-1-harboring isolates. PFGE grouped all isolates into 9 distinct clusters with two major groups (0007 and 0008) containing up to 59% of the isolates. The pulsotype 0008 corresponds to sequence type (ST) 195 while pulsotype 0007 corresponds to ST 1089.The genetic similarity between the clinical and environmental isolates was observed in 80/83 = 96.4% of all isolates, belonging to 7 pulsotypes. Conclusion This study shows that the clonal spread of environmental A. baumannii isolates is related to that of clinical isolates recovered from colonized or infected patients, being both associated with a high prevalence of the bla OXA23-like and bla NDM-1genes. These findings emphasize the need for prioritizing the bio-cleaning of the hospital environment to control and prevent the dissemination of A. baumannii clonal lineages

Short-term effect of thyroid hormone in prenatal development and cell differentiation

Extranuclear or nongenomic effects of thyroid hormones do not require interaction with the nuclear receptor, but are probably mediated by specific membrane receptors. This review will focus on the extranuclear effects of thyroid hormones on plasma membrane transport systems in non mammalian cells: chick embryo hepatocytes at two different stages of development, 14 and 19 days. At variance with mammals, the chick embryo develops in a closed compartment, beyond the influence of maternal endocrine factors. Thyroid hormones inhibit the Na+/K+-ATPase but stimulate the Na+/H+ exchanger and amino acid transport System A with different dose-responses: a bell-shaped curve in the case of the exchanger and a classic saturation curve in the case of System A. These effects are mimicked by the analog 3,5-diiodothyronine. Signal transduction is mediated by inter-play among kinases, mainly protein kinase C and the MAPK pathway, initially primed by second messengers such as Ca2+, IP3, and DAG as in mammalian cells. Thyroid hormones and 3,5-diiodothyronine stimulate thymidine incorporation and DNA synthesis, associated with the increased levels and activity of cyclins and cyclin-dependent kinases involved in the G1/S transition, and also these effects have their starting point at the plasma membrane. Increasing evidence now demonstrates that thyroid hormones act as growth factors for chick embryo hepatocytes and their extranuclear effects are important for prenatal development and differentiation. (c) 2005 Elsevier Inc

Epidemic multidrug-resistant Acinetobacter baumannii related to European clonal types I and II in Rome (Italy)

AbstractThe molecular epidemiology and the genetic basis of antibiotic resistance in 88 multidrug-resistant (MDR) Acinetobacter baumannii strains isolated during 18 months from infected patients in seven intensive care units (ICUs) in Rome were investigated. Random amplified polymorphic DNA and macrorestriction analysis identified two predominant clonal types, genetically related to the European epidemic clones I (type 2) and II (type 1), accounting for 98.9% of A. baumannii ICU isolates. Type 1 was isolated from all ICUs under survey. Class 1 integrons of 2.2 and 2.5 kb were detected in type 1 and type 2 isolates, respectively. The integron structures were similar to those previously determined for epidemic A. baumannii strains from various European countries, and suggestive of integron rearrangement/exchange among isolates related to the European epidemic clones I and II. Carbapenem resistance was associated with the presence of the blaOXA-58 gene in type 1 isolates. The results indicate that the A. baumannii type 1 clone has a high potential of spreading among hospitals

Analysis of guazatine mixture by Lc and LC-MS and antimycotic activity determination of principal components

iminodi(octamethylene)diamine, octamethylenebis(imino-octamethylene) diamine and carbamonitrile. In this work, the analysis of guazatine mixture by LC and LC–MS has been treated for the first time. In the guazatine mixture diamine derivatives account for 40% of the constituents of guazatine, triamines for 46%, tetramines for 11% and other amine derivatives for 3%. The most abundant individual components are the fully guanidated triamine (GGG, 30.6%) and the fully guanidated diamine (GG, 29.5%) followed by the monoguanidated diamine (GN, 9.8%) and a diguanidated triamine (GGN, 8.1%). The identification and separation of main components of commercial guazatine was performed through a new LC–MS method. The separation was performed on an Alltima C18 column using linear gradient elution (formic acid in water and acetonitrile) with UV-detection at 200 nm and the identification was performed by ESI+-mass spectrometry analysis. The main components (GN, GG, GNG, GGN, GGG and GGGG) were then purified and separated from the mixture. Antimycotic activity of guazatine derivatives was determined on different species and strains belonging to genus Candida. The results obtained suggest that GNG and GGGG components can further be developed in new antifungal compounds with high potential for the treatment of Candida infections

Identification of variable-number tandem-repeat (VNTR) sequences in Legionella pneumophila and development of an optimized multiple-locus VNTR analysis typing scheme

The utility of a genotypic typing assay for Legionella pneumophila was investigated. A multiple-locus variable number of tandem repeats (VNTR) analysis (MLVA) scheme using PCR and agarose gel electrophoresis is proposed based on eight minisatellite markers. Panels of well-characterized strains were examined in a multicenter analysis to validate the assay and to compare its performance to that of other genotyping assays. Excellent typeability, reproducibility, stability, and epidemiological concordance were observed. The MLVA type or profile is composed of a string of allelle numbers, corresponding to the number of repeats at each VNTR locus, separated by commas, in a predetermined order. A database containing information from 99 L. pneumophila serogroup I strains and four strains of other serogroups and their MLVA profiles, which can be queried online, is available from http://bacterial-genotyping.igmors.u-psud.fr/