Procalcitonin in liver transplant patients – yet another stone turned

Liver transplantation has been reported to initiate increases in procalcitonin levels, in the absence of bacterial infection. The results of a study investigating the course of procalcitonin levels over several days after liver transplantation in noninfected patients were recently reported in Critical Care. This study shows that procalcitonin levels increase only transiently, immediately after surgery, and thereafter they rapidly decrease. This new information gives us hope that procalcitonin can be used as a marker of bacterial infection in these patients. Further studies of patients undergoing liver transplantation with and without bacterial infection are needed

1/z-renormalization of the mean-field behavior of the dipole-coupled singlet-singlet system HoF_3

The two main characteristics of the holmium ions in HoF_3 are that their local electronic properties are dominated by two singlet states lying well below the remaining 4f-levels, and that the classical dipole-coupling is an order of magnitude larger than any other two-ion interactions between the Ho-moments. This combination makes the system particularly suitable for testing refinements of the mean-field theory. There are four Ho-ions per unit cell and the hyperfine coupled electronic and nuclear moments on the Ho-ions order in a ferrimagnetic structure at T_C=0.53 K. The corrections to the mean-field behavior of holmium triflouride, both in the paramagnetic and ferrimagnetic phase, have been calculated to first order in the high-density 1/z-expansion. The effective medium theory, which includes the effects of the single-site fluctuations, leads to a substantially improved description of the magnetic properties of HoF_3, in comparison with that based on the mean-field approximation.Comment: 26pp, plain-TeX, JJ

Diet in mangrove snails: preliminary data on gut contents and stable isotope analysis

International audienc

Mean-field model of the ferromagnetic ordering in the superconducting phase of ErNi_2B_2C

A mean-field model explaining most of the details in the magnetic phase diagram of ErNi_2B_2C is presented. The low-temperature magnetic properties are found to be dominated by the appearance of long-period commensurate structures. The stable structure at low temperatures and zero field is found to have a period of 40 layers along the a direction, and upon cooling it undergoes a first-order transition at T_C = 2.3 K to a different 40-layered structure having a net ferromagnetic component of about 0.4 mu_B/Er. The neutron-diffraction patterns predicted by the two 40-layered structures, above and below T_C, are in agreement with the observations of Choi et al.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures (Revtex4

Transcriptional reprogramming in yeast using dCas9 and combinatorial gRNA strategies

Additional file 3: Figure S2. Time-dependent regulation of reporter gene expression. Data were obtained with a BioLector from the same cultures as used in Supplementary Fig. S1. Indicated strains were targeted at pHMG1 or pOLE1 as in Fig. 1C with controls (ctrl) expressing dCas9 and no gRNA. Data were collected for ~47 hrs and are presented as the average of three biological replicates. A. MFI from strains targeted with the constitutive system is presented per DCW/L (dry cell weight per liter) as a function of time. Blue; control. Green; activation (MCP-VPR). Red; repression (PCP-Mxi1). B. MFI from cultures added 250 ng/mL aTc to activate the inducible system is presented per OD (OD600) over time. Blue; control. Green; activation (dCas9-VPR). Red; repression (dCas9-Mxi1)