Familial Mediterranean fever (FMF) in Turkey - Results of a nationwide multicenter study

Familial Mediterranean fever (FMF) is an autosomal recessive disease that is prevalent among eastern Mediterranean populations, mainly non-Ashkenazi Jews, Armenians, Turks, and Arabs. Since a large proportion of all the FMF patients in the world live in Turkey, the Turkish FMF Study Group (FMF-TR) was founded to develop a patient registry database and analyze demographic, clinical, and genetic features

Laser Processing of Natural Biomaterials

Natural biomaterials have been extensively employed in biomedical applications because of their superior biocompatibility and biodegradability. Among the large family of techniques to process natural biomaterials, laser techniques have been rapidly developed to fabricate biomimetic artificial organs, tissue engineering scaffolds, and other biomedical constructs. Compared to other techniques, laser processing allows more precise control over the geometry and is able to fabricate smaller features with minimal debris generated. The laser processing techniques are generally grouped by three categories: polymerization, ablation, and activation. This chapter introduces several widely used natural biomaterials, including collagen, agarose, hyaluronic acid, and Matrigel TMTM as well as the recent development in laser processing techniques of those natural biomaterials.Department of Electrical Engineerin

Anti-virulence Strategies to Target Bacterial Infections.

Resistance of important bacterial pathogens to common antimicrobial therapies and the emergence of multidrug-resistant bacteria are increasing at an alarming rate and constitute one of our greatest challenges in the combat of bacterial infection and accompanied diseases. The current shortage of effective drugs, lack of successful prevention measures and only a few new antibiotics in the clinical pipeline demand the development of novel treatment options and alternative antimicrobial therapies. Our increasing understanding of bacterial virulence strategies and the induced molecular pathways of the infectious disease provides novel opportunities to target and interfere with crucial pathogenicity factors or virulence-associated traits of the bacteria while bypassing the evolutionary pressure on the bacterium to develop resistance. In the past decade, numerous new bacterial targets for anti-virulence therapies have been identified, and structure-based tailoring of intervention strategies and screening assays for small-molecule inhibitors of such pathways were successfully established. In this chapter, we will take a closer look at the bacterial virulence-related factors and processes that present promising targets for anti-virulence therapies, recently discovered inhibitory substances and their promises and discuss the challenges, and problems that have to be faced