The molecular characterisation of Escherichia coli K1 isolated from neonatal nasogastric feeding tubes

Background: The most common cause of Gram-negative bacterial neonatal meningitis is E. coli K1. It has a mortality rate of 10–15%, and neurological sequelae in 30– 50% of cases. Infections can be attributable to nosocomial sources, however the pre-colonisation of enteral feeding tubes has not been considered as a specific risk factor. Methods: Thirty E. coli strains, which had been isolated in an earlier study, from the residual lumen liquid and biofilms of neonatal nasogastric feeding tubes were genotyped using pulsed-field gel electrophoresis, and 7-loci multilocus sequence typing. Potential pathogenicity and biofilm associated traits were determined using specific PCR probes, genome analysis, and in vitro tissue culture assays. Results: The E. coli strains clustered into five pulsotypes, which were genotyped as sequence types (ST) 95, 73, 127, 394 and 2076 (Achman scheme). The extra-intestinal pathogenic E. coli (ExPEC) phylogenetic group B2 ST95 serotype O1:K1:NM strains had been isolated over a 2 week period from 11 neonates who were on different feeding regimes. The E. coli K1 ST95 strains encoded for various virulence traits associated with neonatal meningitis and extracellular matrix formation. These strains attached and invaded intestinal, and both human and rat brain cell lines, and persisted for 48 h in U937 macrophages. E. coli STs 73, 394 and 2076 also persisted in macrophages and invaded Caco-2 and human brain cells, but only ST394 invaded rat brain cells. E. coli ST127 was notable as it did not invade any cell lines. Conclusions: Routes by which E. coli K1 can be disseminated within a neonatal intensive care unit are uncertain, however the colonisation of neonatal enteral feeding tubes may be one reservoir source which could constitute a serious health risk to neonates following ingestion

Clinical relevance of biomarkers of oxidative stress

SIGNIFICANCE Oxidative stress is considered to be an important component of various diseases. A vast number of methods have been developed and used in virtually all diseases to measure the extent and nature of oxidative stress, ranging from oxidation of DNA to proteins, lipids, and free amino acids. Recent Advances: An increased understanding of the biology behind diseases and redox biology has led to more specific and sensitive tools to measure oxidative stress markers, which are very diverse and sometimes very low in abundance. CRITICAL ISSUES The literature is very heterogeneous. It is often difficult to draw general conclusions on the significance of oxidative stress biomarkers, as only in a limited proportion of diseases have a range of different biomarkers been used, and different biomarkers have been used to study different diseases. In addition, biomarkers are often measured using nonspecific methods, while specific methodologies are often too sophisticated or laborious for routine clinical use. FUTURE DIRECTIONS Several markers of oxidative stress still represent a viable biomarker opportunity for clinical use. However, positive findings with currently used biomarkers still need to be validated in larger sample sizes and compared with current clinical standards to establish them as clinical diagnostics. It is important to realize that oxidative stress is a nuanced phenomenon that is difficult to characterize, and one biomarker is not necessarily better than others. The vast diversity in oxidative stress between diseases and conditions has to be taken into account when selecting the most appropriate biomarker. Antioxid. Redox Signal. 00, 000-000

A Novel Unsupervised Method to Identify Genes Important in the Anti-viral Response: Application to Interferon/Ribavirin in Hepatitis C Patients

Background: Treating hepatitis C with interferon/ribavirin results in a varied response in terms of decrease in viral titer and ultimate outcome. Marked responders have a sharp decline in viral titer within a few days of treatment initiation, whereas in other patients there is no effect on the virus (poor responders). Previous studies have shown that combination therapy modifies expression of hundreds of genes in vitro and in vivo. However, identifying which, if any, of these genes have a role in viral clearance remains challenging. Aims: The goal of this paper is to link viral levels with gene expression and thereby identify genes that may be responsible for early decrease in viral titer. Methods: Microarrays were performed on RNA isolated from PBMC of patients undergoing interferon/ribavirin therapy. Samples were collected at pre-treatment (day 0), and 1, 2, 7, 14 and 28 days after initiating treatment. A novel method was applied to identify genes that are linked to a decrease in viral titer during interferon/ribavirin treatment. The method uses the relationship between inter-patient gene expression based proximities and inter-patient viral titer based proximities to define the association between microarray gene expression measurements of each gene and viral-titer measurements. Results: We detected 36 unique genes whose expressions provide a clustering of patients that resembles viral titer based clustering of patients. These genes include IRF7, MX1, OASL and OAS2, viperin and many ISG's of unknown function. Conclusion: The genes identified by this method appear to play a major role in the reduction of hepatitis C virus during the early phase of treatment. The method has broad utility and can be used to analyze response to any group of factors influencing biological outcome such as antiviral drugs or anti-cancer agents where microarray data are available. © 2007 Brodsky et al

Regional variation of the minimum wages in China

This paper analyzes the regional variation of minimum wage in China. We first introduce the institutional background of China's minimum wage policy, and then describe the regional variation of the minimum wages using detailed minimum wage data since the late 1990s. Large regional variation exists in the period studied, and the regional variation has been declining since the late 1990s. Economic factors, including GDP, economic structure, consumption level, are the main determinants for the large regional variation in the minimum wages. There is weak evidence suggesting that the regional variation is influenced by political factors, such as competition of local officials

Genomic Regions Identified by Overlapping Clusters of Nominally-Positive SNPs from Genome-Wide Studies of Alcohol and Illegal Substance Dependence

Declaring “replication” from results of genome wide association (GWA) studies is straightforward when major gene effects provide genome-wide significance for association of the same allele of the same SNP in each of multiple independent samples. However, such unambiguous replication is unlikely when phenotypes display polygenic genetic architecture, allelic heterogeneity, locus heterogeneity and when different samples display linkage disequilibria with different fine structures. We seek chromosomal regions that are tagged by clustered SNPs that display nominally-significant association in each of several independent samples. This approach provides one “nontemplate” approach to identifying overall replication of groups of GWA results in the face of difficult genetic architectures. We apply this strategy to 1 M SNP GWA results for dependence on: a) alcohol (including many individuals with dependence on other addictive substances) and b) at least one illegal substance (including many individuals dependent on alcohol). This approach provides high confidence in rejecting the null hypothesis that chance alone accounts for the extent to which clustered, nominally-significant SNPs from samples of the same racial/ethnic background identify the same sets of chromosomal regions. It identifies several genes that are also reported in other independent alcohol-dependence GWA datasets. There is more modest confidence in: a) identification of individual chromosomal regions and genes that are not also identified by data from other independent samples, b) the more modest overlap between results from samples of different racial/ethnic backgrounds and c) the extent to which any gene not identified herein is excluded, since the power of each of these individual samples is modest. Nevertheless, the strong overlap identified among the samples with similar racial/ethnic backgrounds supports contributions to individual differences in vulnerability to addictions that come from newer allelic variants that are common in subsets of current humans

Improved Constraints on Sterile Neutrino Mixing from Disappearance Searches in the MINOS, MINOS+, Daya Bay, and Bugey-3 Experiments.

Searches for electron antineutrino, muon neutrino, and muon antineutrino disappearance driven by sterile neutrino mixing have been carried out by the Daya Bay and MINOS+ collaborations. This Letter presents the combined results of these searches, along with exclusion results from the Bugey-3 reactor experiment, framed in a minimally extended four-neutrino scenario. Significantly improved constraints on the θ_{μe} mixing angle are derived that constitute the most constraining limits to date over five orders of magnitude in the mass-squared splitting Δm_{41}^{2}, excluding the 90% C.L. sterile-neutrino parameter space allowed by the LSND and MiniBooNE observations at 90% CL_{s} for Δm_{41}^{2}<13  eV^{2}. Furthermore, the LSND and MiniBooNE 99% C.L. allowed regions are excluded at 99% CL_{s} for Δm_{41}^{2}<1.6 eV^{2}

Consensus Analysis of Whole Transcriptome Profiles from Two Breast Cancer Patient Cohorts Reveals Long Non-Coding RNAs Associated with Intrinsic Subtype and the Tumour Microenvironment.

Long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) are emerging as crucial regulators of cellular processes and diseases such as cancer; however, their functions remain poorly characterised. Several studies have demonstrated that lncRNAs are typically disease and tumour subtype specific, particularly in breast cancer where lncRNA expression alone is sufficient to discriminate samples based on hormone status and molecular intrinsic subtype. However, little attempt has been made to assess the reproducibility of lncRNA signatures across more than one dataset. In this work, we derive consensus lncRNA signatures indicative of breast cancer subtype based on two clinical RNA-Seq datasets: the Utah Breast Cancer Study and The Cancer Genome Atlas, through integration of differential expression and hypothesis-free clustering analyses. The most consistent signature is associated with breast cancers of the basal-like subtype, leading us to generate a putative set of six lncRNA basal-like breast cancer markers, at least two of which may have a role in cis-regulation of known poor prognosis markers. Through in silico functional characterization of individual signatures and integration of expression data from pre-clinical cancer models, we discover that discordance between signatures derived from different clinical cohorts can arise from the strong influence of non-cancerous cells in tumour samples. As a consequence, we identify nine lncRNAs putatively associated with breast cancer associated fibroblasts, or the immune response. Overall, our study establishes the confounding effects of tumour purity on lncRNA signature derivation, and generates several novel hypotheses on the role of lncRNAs in basal-like breast cancers and the tumour microenvironment

Dynamics of HIV-1 Quasispecies during Antiviral Treatment Dissected Using Ultra-Deep Pyrosequencing

Background: Ultra-deep pyrosequencing (UDPS) allows identification of rare HIV-1 variants and minority drug resistance mutations, which are not detectable by standard sequencing. Principal Findings: Here, UDPS was used to analyze the dynamics of HIV-1 genetic variation in reverse transcriptase (RT) (amino acids 180–220) in six individuals consecutively sampled before, during and after failing 3TC and AZT containing antiretroviral treatment. Optimized UDPS protocols and bioinformatic software were developed to generate, clean and analyze the data. The data cleaning strategy reduced the error rate of UDPS to an average of 0.05%, which is lower than previously reported. Consequently, the cut-off for detection of resistance mutations was very low. A median of 16,016 (range 2,406–35,401) sequence reads were obtained per sample, which allowed detection and quantification of minorit

Impact of febrile neutropenia on R-CHOP chemotherapy delivery and hospitalizations among patients with diffuse large B-cell lymphoma

PURPOSE: This analysis from an observational study of clinical practice describes the impact of febrile neutropenia (FN) on chemotherapy delivery and hospitalizations. METHODS: Adults with diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL) scheduled to receive ≥3 cycles of 2- or 3-weekly CHOP with rituximab (R-CHOP-14/21) were eligible. Primary outcome was incidence of FN. RESULTS:FN data were available for 409 patients receiving R-CHOP-14 and 702 patients receiving R-CHOP-21. FN incidence was R-CHOP-14, 20% (81/409) and R-CHOP-21, 19% (133/702). Rates of primary prophylaxis with granulocyte-colony stimulating factor were R-CHOP-14, 84% (345/409) and R-CHOP-21, 36% (252/702). A large number of patients experienced their first FN episode in cycle 1 (R-CHOP-14, 24/81 [30%]; R-CHOP-21, 63/133 [47%]). Multiple risk factors (≥2) for FN were more frequent in patients experiencing FN than in patients not experiencing FN (R-CHOP-14, 60/81 [74%] versus 179/328 [55%]; R-CHOP-21, 98/133 [74%] versus 339/569 [60%]). A similar trend was observed for unplanned hospitalizations (R-CHOP-14, 63/81 [78%] versus 68/328 [21%]; R-CHOP-21, 105/133 [79%] versus 100/569 [18%]). Achievement of chemotherapy relative dose intensity ≥90% was lower among patients experiencing FN than in patients not experiencing FN (R-CHOP-14, 30/81 [37%] versus 234/328 [71%]; R-CHOP-21, 83/133 [62%] versus 434/569 [76%]). CONCLUSIONS:In patients with DLBCL treated with R-CHOP-14 or R-CHOP-21, patients with an event of FN were more likely to experience suboptimal chemotherapy delivery and increased incidence of unplanned hospitalizations than those without FN. FN-related hospitalizations are likely to impact chemotherapy delivery and to incur substantial costs