1,721 research outputs found
A NEW METHODOLOGY FOR DIAGNOSIS OF FANCONI ANEMIA BASED ON BIOLOGICAL DOSIMETRY
Fanconi Anemia (FA) is a syndrome associated with chromosomal fragility. Current laboratory tests to diagnose this disease are based on the scoring of chromosomal aberrations induced in peripheral blood lymphocytes by clastogenic chemical agents, mainly: diepoxybutane (DEB) or mitomycin C (MMC). This study evaluated an alternative test for the diagnosis of FA, in which ionizing radiation replaces DEB/MMC. Two groups were studied: normal and DEB-sensitive individuals. From each individual, samples of peripheral blood were irradiated using an electron linear accelerator. Following lymphocyte cultures, and slide preparation, metaphases were scored based on the same methodology for biological dosimetry, according to recommendations of the International Atomic Energy Agency. Our results emphasized a pattern of distribution of dicentrics, fragments, as well as abnormal chromosomal arrangements. The methodology of analysis here proposed permitted to distinguish normal from DEB-sensitive subjects
Impact of mechanical ventilation on the functional status in patients admitted to the intensive care unit
Quantum Acoustics with Surface Acoustic Waves
It has recently been demonstrated that surface acoustic waves (SAWs) can
interact with superconducting qubits at the quantum level. SAW resonators in
the GHz frequency range have also been found to have low loss at temperatures
compatible with superconducting quantum circuits. These advances open up new
possibilities to use the phonon degree of freedom to carry quantum information.
In this paper, we give a description of the basic SAW components needed to
develop quantum circuits, where propagating or localized SAW-phonons are used
both to study basic physics and to manipulate quantum information. Using
phonons instead of photons offers new possibilities which make these quantum
acoustic circuits very interesting. We discuss general considerations for SAW
experiments at the quantum level and describe experiments both with SAW
resonators and with interaction between SAWs and a qubit. We also discuss
several potential future developments.Comment: 14 pages, 12 figure
Patterns of knowledge used by nurses in caring for the patient in the first psychotic outbreak
Rapid Analysis of Vessel Elements (RAVE): A Tool for Studying Physiologic, Pathologic and Tumor Angiogenesis
Quantification of microvascular network structure is important in a myriad of emerging research fields including microvessel remodeling in response to ischemia and drug therapy, tumor angiogenesis, and retinopathy. To mitigate analyst-specific variation in measurements and to ensure that measurements represent actual changes in vessel network structure and morphology, a reliable and automatic tool for quantifying microvascular network architecture is needed. Moreover, an analysis tool capable of acquiring and processing large data sets will facilitate advanced computational analysis and simulation of microvascular growth and remodeling processes and enable more high throughput discovery. To this end, we have produced an automatic and rapid vessel detection and quantification system using a MATLAB graphical user interface (GUI) that vastly reduces time spent on analysis and greatly increases repeatability. Analysis yields numerical measures of vessel volume fraction, vessel length density, fractal dimension (a measure of tortuosity), and radii of murine vascular networks. Because our GUI is open sourced to all, it can be easily modified to measure parameters such as percent coverage of non-endothelial cells, number of loops in a vascular bed, amount of perfusion and two-dimensional branch angle. Importantly, the GUI is compatible with standard fluorescent staining and imaging protocols, but also has utility analyzing brightfield vascular images, obtained, for example, in dorsal skinfold chambers. A manually measured image can be typically completed in 20 minutes to 1 hour. In stark comparison, using our GUI, image analysis time is reduced to around 1 minute. This drastic reduction in analysis time coupled with increased repeatability makes this tool valuable for all vessel research especially those requiring rapid and reproducible results, such as anti-angiogenic drug screening
Quality of Computationally Inferred Gene Ontology Annotations
Gene Ontology (GO) has established itself as the undisputed standard for protein function annotation. Most annotations are inferred electronically, i.e. without individual curator supervision, but they are widely considered unreliable. At the same time, we crucially depend on those automated annotations, as most newly sequenced genomes are non-model organisms. Here, we introduce a methodology to systematically and quantitatively evaluate electronic annotations. By exploiting changes in successive releases of the UniProt Gene Ontology Annotation database, we assessed the quality of electronic annotations in terms of specificity, reliability, and coverage. Overall, we not only found that electronic annotations have significantly improved in recent years, but also that their reliability now rivals that of annotations inferred by curators when they use evidence other than experiments from primary literature. This work provides the means to identify the subset of electronic annotations that can be relied upon—an important outcome given that >98% of all annotations are inferred without direct curation
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