Trichomonas vaginalis: Clinical relevance, pathogenicity and diagnosis

Trichomonas vaginalis is the etiological agent of trichomoniasis, the most prevalent non-viral sexually transmitted disease worldwide. Trichomoniasis is a widespread, global health concern and occurring at an increasing rate. Infections of the female genital tract can cause a range of symptoms, including vaginitis and cervicitis, while infections in males are generally asymptomatic. The relatively mild symptoms, and lack of evidence for any serious sequelae, have historically led to this disease being under diagnosed, and under researched. However, growing evidence that T. vaginalis infection is associated with other disease states with high morbidity in both men and women has increased the efforts to diagnose and treat patients harboring this parasite. The pathology of trichomoniasis results from damage to the host epithelia, caused by a variety of processes during infection and recent work has highlighted the complex interactions between the parasite and host, commensal microbiome and accompanying symbionts. The commercial release of a number of nucleic acid amplification tests (NAATs) has added to the available diagnostic options. Immunoassay based Point of Care testing is currently available, and a recent initial evaluation of a NAAT Point of Care system has given promising results, which would enable testing and treatment in a single visit

The proportion of cancer-related entries in PubMed has increased considerably; is cancer truly "The Emperor of All Maladies"?

In this work, the public database of biomedical literature PubMed was mined using queries with combinations of keywords and year restrictions. It was found that the proportion of Cancer-related entries per year in PubMed has risen from around 6% in 1950 to more than 16% in 2016. This increase is not shared by other conditions such as AIDS, Malaria, Tuberculosis, Diabetes, Cardiovascular, Stroke and Infection some of which have, on the contrary, decreased as a proportion of the total entries per year. Organ-related queries were performed to analyse the variation of some specific cancers. A series of queries related to incidence, funding, and relationship with DNA, Computing and Mathematics, were performed to test correlation between the keywords, with the hope of elucidating the cause behind the rise of Cancer in PubMed. Interestingly, the proportion of Cancer-related entries that contain "DNA", "Computational" or "Mathematical" have increased, which suggests that the impact of these scientific advances on Cancer has been stronger than in other conditions. It is important to highlight that the results obtained with the data mining approach here presented are limited to the presence or absence of the keywords on a single, yet extensive, database. Therefore, results should be observed with caution. All the data used for this work is publicly available through PubMed and the UK's Office for National Statistics. All queries and figures were generated with the software platform Matlab and the files are available as supplementary material

Feedback mechanisms control coexistence in a stem cell model of acute myeloid leukaemia

AbstractHaematopoietic stem cell dynamics regulate healthy blood cell production and are disrupted during leukaemia. Competition models of cellular species help to elucidate stem cell dynamics in the bone marrow microenvironment (or niche), and to determine how these dynamics impact leukaemia progression. Here we develop two models that target acute myeloid leukaemia with particular focus on the mechanisms that control proliferation via feedback signalling. It is within regions of parameter space permissive of coexistence that the effects of competition are most subtle and the clinical outcome least certain. Steady state and linear stability analyses identify parameter regions that allow for coexistence to occur, and allow us to characterise behaviour near critical points. Where analytical expressions are no longer informative, we proceed statistically and sample parameter space over a coexistence region. We find that the rates of proliferation and differentiation of healthy progenitors exert key control over coexistence. We also show that inclusion of a regulatory feedback onto progenitor cells promotes healthy haematopoiesis at the expense of leukaemia, and that – somewhat paradoxically – within the coexistence region feedback increases the sensitivity of the system to dominance by one lineage over another

Octupole excitations in Cs-141,Cs-144 and the pronounced decrease of dipole moments with neutron number in odd-Z neutron-rich Cs-141,Cs-143,Cs-144

The level scheme of odd-Z neutron-rich 141Cs (Z=55, N=86) was extended and expanded and that of 144Cs (N=89) was identified for the first time by means of γ-γ-γ coincidence measurements of prompt γ rays in the spontaneous fission of 252Cf with Gammasphere. Spin/parity was assigned to the levels based on angular correlations and level systematics in 141,143Cs. Parity doublets characteristic of both simplex quantum number s=+i and s=-i were proposed in 141Cs. The tests by using rotational frequency ratio ω-(I)/ω+(I) imply octupole vibrations in 141Cs and 143Cs. B(E1)/B(E2) values and electric dipole moments D0 were calculated for 141Cs, and re-determined for 143Cs. It was found that B(E1)/B(E2) values of 141Cs are simplex-dependent and the average value is one order of magnitude larger than that of 143Cs, and the deduced dipole moment D0 of 141Cs is considerably larger than that of 143Cs, and comparable to the N=86 isotone 142Ba. For 144Cs the yrast sequence looks like a well-deformed rotational band, but no octupole band structure was identified in this nucleus. The overall variations of D0 in 141,143,144Cs exhibit a pronounced drop of dipole moment with increasing neutron number in this odd-Z isotopic chain, which may be analogous in nature to the quenching of D0 observed in even-even 146Ba (Z=56, N=90) and 224Ra (Z=88, N=136), and to the drop of D0 in the odd-Z neutron-rich 147La (Z=57, N=90) reported by our collaboration. © 2010