COVID-19 and Cytomegalovirus Co-infection: A Challenging Case of a Critically Ill Patient with Gastrointestinal Symptoms

COVID-19 is a severe disease that has reached pandemic status. To the best of our knowledge, we describe the first case of COVID-19 and cytomegalovirus (CMV) co-infection in a critically ill patient. We discuss the challenge of establishing the diagnosis as well as the management of tissue-invasive gastrointestinal CMV infection (TI-GI CMV) simulating vascular involvement and intestinal obstruction in a critically ill patient

Leaving hints: Using player in-game hints to measure and improve learning

Student reflection has been shown to be important for learning in educational domains. In this study, we embedded a student reflection task into a video game to diagnose how players were constructing new knowledge. The game took place in a space station in which odd things had been happening. In order to secure a position on the space station, players had to improve their decision making and solve the mystery. As part of the game narrative, players reflected on each learning opportunity or mini-game by providing hints for future players at the end of each round. A corpus of 674 hints from 41 players, playing a 60-min version of the game were coded independently by two coders. Coding covered four levels of understanding in the hints and ranged from a simple restatement of information to a deeper reflection that integrated ideas and created new knowledge. Analyzing hints provided an in-game learning measure that may complement other measures and a way to understand game play experience that did not interrupt game flow. This study provides some recommendations for the design of embedding user hints into video games

Two Crystal Structures Demonstrate Large Conformational Changes in the Eukaryotic Ribosomal Translocase

Two crystal structures of yeast translation elongation factor 2 (eEF2) were determined: the apo form at 2.9 Å resolution and eEF2 in the presence of the translocation inhibitor sordarin at 2.1 Å resolution. The overall conformation of apo eEF2 is similar to that of its prokaryotic homolog elongation factor G (EF-G) in complex with GDP. Upon sordarin binding, the three tRNA-mimicking C-terminal domains undergo substantial conformational changes, while the three N-terminal domains containing the nucleotide-binding site form an almost rigid unit. The conformation of eEF2 in complex with sordarin is entirely different from known conformations observed in crystal structures of EF-G or from cryo-EM studies of EF-G–70S complexes. The domain rearrangements induced by sordarin binding and the highly ordered drug-binding site observed in the eEF2–sordarin structure provide a high-resolution structural basis for the mechanism of sordarin inhibition. The two structures also emphasize the dynamic nature of the ribosomal translocase