An experimental study to determine the effectiveness of the electric typewriter as compared with the manual typewriter in typing straight copy material, numbers, fill-in forms and tabulations

Thesis(Ed.D.)--Boston Universit

Sertraline and Phenytoin Drug Interaction in a Geriatric Patient

This report presents the case of a 78-year-old man residing in a nursing home who presented with a 2-month history of increasing lethargy and confusion. These symptoms coincided with the initiation of sertraline in the patient. Among other medications, he was also taking phenytoin. The medical team concluded that the cause of the patient’s lethargy and confusion was a drug interaction between sertraline and phenytoin. Phenytoin was held, while the sertraline was slowly tapered to discontinuation. The patient’s symptoms resolved soon thereafter. Future research is needed to better guide clinicians in appropriate selection, dosing, and monitoring of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors with concomitant phenytoin use.Key words: phenytoin, sertraline, SSRIs, drug interactio

The cinnamyl alcohol dehydrogenase gene family in Populus: phylogeny, organization, and expression

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Lignin is a phenolic heteropolymer in secondary cell walls that plays a major role in the development of plants and their defense against pathogens. The biosynthesis of monolignols, which represent the main component of lignin involves many enzymes. The cinnamyl alcohol dehydrogenase (CAD) is a key enzyme in lignin biosynthesis as it catalyzes the final step in the synthesis of monolignols. The CAD gene family has been studied in <it>Arabidopsis thaliana, Oryza sativa </it>and partially in <it>Populus</it>. This is the first comprehensive study on the CAD gene family in woody plants including genome organization, gene structure, phylogeny across land plant lineages, and expression profiling in <it>Populus</it>.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The phylogenetic analyses showed that CAD genes fall into three main classes (clades), one of which is represented by CAD sequences from gymnosperms and angiosperms. The other two clades are represented by sequences only from angiosperms. All <it>Populus </it>CAD genes, except <it>PoptrCAD 4 </it>are distributed in Class II and Class III. CAD genes associated with xylem development (<it>PoptrCAD 4 and PoptrCAD 10</it>) belong to Class I and Class II. Most of the CAD genes are physically distributed on duplicated blocks and are still in conserved locations on the homeologous duplicated blocks. Promoter analysis of CAD genes revealed several motifs involved in gene expression modulation under various biological and physiological processes. The CAD genes showed different expression patterns in poplar with only two genes preferentially expressed in xylem tissues during lignin biosynthesis.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>The phylogeny of CAD genes suggests that the radiation of this gene family may have occurred in the early ancestry of angiosperms. Gene distribution on the chromosomes of <it>Populus </it>showed that both large scale and tandem duplications contributed significantly to the CAD gene family expansion. The duplication of several CAD genes seems to be associated with a genome duplication event that happened in the ancestor of <it>Salicaceae</it>. Phylogenetic analyses associated with expression profiling and results from previous studies suggest that CAD genes involved in wood development belong to Class I and Class II. The other CAD genes from Class II and Class III may function in plant tissues under biotic stresses. The conservation of most duplicated CAD genes, the differential distribution of motifs in their promoter regions, and the divergence of their expression profiles in various tissues of <it>Populus </it>plants indicate that genes in the CAD family have evolved tissue-specialized expression profiles and may have divergent functions.</p

Conservation and divergence of microRNAs in Populus

Research articl

Comparison of the transcriptomes of American chestnut (Castanea dentata) and Chinese chestnut (Castanea mollissima) in response to the chestnut blight infection

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background1471-2229-9-51</p> <p>American chestnut (<it>Castanea dentata</it>) was devastated by an exotic pathogen in the beginning of the twentieth century. This chestnut blight is caused by <it>Cryphonectria parasitica</it>, a fungus that infects stem tissues and kills the trees by girdling them. Because of the great economic and ecological value of this species, significant efforts have been made over the century to combat this disease, but it wasn't until recently that a focused genomics approach was initiated. Prior to the Genomic Tool Development for the Fagaceae project, genomic resources available in public databases for this species were limited to a few hundred ESTs. To identify genes involved in resistance to <it>C. parasitica</it>, we have sequenced the transcriptome from fungal infected and healthy stem tissues collected from blight-sensitive American chestnut and blight-resistant Chinese chestnut (<it>Castanea mollissima</it>) trees using ultra high throughput pyrosequencing.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>We produced over a million 454 reads, totaling over 250 million bp, from which we generated 40,039 and 28,890 unigenes in total from <it>C. mollissima </it>and <it>C. dentata </it>respectively.</p> <p>The functions of the unigenes, from GO annotation, cover a diverse set of molecular functions and biological processes, among which we identified a large number of genes associated with resistance to stresses and response to biotic stimuli. <it>In silico </it>expression analyses showed that many of the stress response unigenes were expressed more in canker tissues versus healthy stem tissues in both American and Chinese chestnut. Comparative analysis also identified genes belonging to different pathways of plant defense against biotic stresses that are differentially expressed in either American or Chinese chestnut canker tissues.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Our study resulted in the identification of a large set of cDNA unigenes from American chestnut and Chinese chestnut. The ESTs and unigenes from this study constitute an important resource to the scientific community interested in the discovery of genes involved in various biological processes in Chestnut and other species. The identification of many defense-related genes differentially expressed in canker vs. healthy stem in chestnuts provides many new candidate genes for developing resistance to the chestnut blight and for studying pathways involved in responses of trees to necrotrophic pathogens. We also identified several candidate genes that may underline the difference in resistance to <it>Cryphonectria parasitica </it>between American chestnut and Chinese chestnut.</p

FOXA1 mutations alter pioneering activity, differentiation and prostate cancer phenotypes.

Mutations in the transcription factor FOXA1 define a unique subset of prostate cancers but the functional consequences of these mutations and whether they confer gain or loss of function is unknown1-9. Here, by annotating the landscape of FOXA1 mutations from 3,086 human prostate cancers, we define two hotspots in the forkhead domain: Wing2 (around 50% of all mutations) and the highly conserved DNA-contact residue R219 (around 5% of all mutations). Wing2 mutations are detected in adenocarcinomas at all stages, whereas R219 mutations are enriched in metastatic tumours with neuroendocrine histology. Interrogation of the biological properties of wild-type FOXA1 and fourteen FOXA1 mutants reveals gain of function in mouse prostate organoid proliferation assays. Twelve of these mutants, as well as wild-type FOXA1, promoted an exaggerated pro-luminal differentiation program, whereas two different R219 mutants blocked luminal differentiation and activated a mesenchymal and neuroendocrine transcriptional program. Assay for transposase-accessible chromatin using sequencing (ATAC-seq) of wild-type FOXA1 and representative Wing2 and R219 mutants revealed marked, mutant-specific changes in open chromatin at thousands of genomic loci and exposed sites of FOXA1 binding and associated increases in gene expression. Of note, ATAC-seq peaks in cells expressing R219 mutants lacked the canonical core FOXA1-binding motifs (GTAAAC/T) but were enriched for a related, non-canonical motif (GTAAAG/A), which was preferentially activated by R219-mutant FOXA1 in reporter assays. Thus, FOXA1 mutations alter its pioneering function and perturb normal luminal epithelial differentiation programs, providing further support for the role of lineage plasticity in cancer progression

Limits on WWZ and WW\gamma couplings from p\bar{p}\to e\nu jj X events at \sqrt{s} = 1.8 TeV

We present limits on anomalous WWZ and WW-gamma couplings from a search for WW and WZ production in p-bar p collisions at sqrt(s)=1.8 TeV. We use p-bar p -> e-nu jjX events recorded with the D0 detector at the Fermilab Tevatron Collider during the 1992-1995 run. The data sample corresponds to an integrated luminosity of 96.0+-5.1 pb^(-1). Assuming identical WWZ and WW-gamma coupling parameters, the 95% CL limits on the CP-conserving couplings are -0.33<lambda<0.36 (Delta-kappa=0) and -0.43<Delta-kappa<0.59 (lambda=0), for a form factor scale Lambda = 2.0 TeV. Limits based on other assumptions are also presented.Comment: 11 pages, 2 figures, 2 table