MRI Findings After a Subchondroplasty Procedure of the Ankle: A Case Report

Osteoarthritis (OA) of the ankle is a common disease and it is estimated that almost 1% of the world’s adult population have a painful ankle. Often in patients who fail conservative treatment, the use of an MRI is deemed necessary to identify pathologies. Bone marrow lesions (BMLs) seen on MRI have been recognized as a source of the ankle pain. Majority of the BMLs fluctuate in size over time and are seen as hyperintense lesions on MRI.We present MRI findings of a patient following arthroscopy with subchondroplasty

4-Chloro-N-m-tolyl­benzamide

In the title compound, C14H12ClNO, the dihedral angle between the two aromatic rings is 11.29 (15)°. The crystal packing is stabilized by N—H⋯O hydrogen bonds linking the mol­ecules into chains running along the c axis

Cell Wall N-Linked Mannoprotein Biosynthesis Requires Goa1p, a Putative Regulator of Mitochondrial Complex I in Candida Aabicans

This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. The Goa1p of Candida albicans regulates mitochondrial Complex I (CI) activities in its role as a putative CI accessory protein. Transcriptional profiling of goa1Δ revealed a down regulation of genes encoding β-oligomannosyl transferases. Herein, we present data on cell wall phenotypes of goa1Δ (strain GOA31). We used transmission electron microscopy (TEM), GPC/MALLS, and NMR to compare GOA31 to a gene-reconstituted strain (GOA32) and parental cells. We note by TEM a reduction in outer wall fibrils, increased inner wall transparency, and the loss of a defined wall layer close to the plasma membrane. GPC-MALLS revealed a reduction in high and intermediate Mw mannan by 85% in GOA31. A reduction of β-mannosyl but not α-mannosyl linkages was noted in GOA31 cells. β-(1,6)-linked glucan side chains were branched about twice as often but were shorter in length for GOA31. We conclude that mitochondrial CI energy production is highly integrated with cell wall formation. Our data also suggest that not all cell wall biosynthetic processes are dependent upon Goa1p even though it provides high levels of ATP to cells. The availability of both broadly conserved and fungal-specific mutants lacking CI subunit proteins should be useful in assessing functions of fungal-specific functions subunit proteins

Interventions to promote adherence to antiretroviral therapy in Africa: a network meta-analysis

Background: Adherence to antiretroviral therapy (ART) is necessary for the improvement of the health of patients and for public health. We sought to determine the comparative effectiveness of different interventions for improving ART adherence in HIV-infected people living in Africa. Methods: We searched for randomised trials of interventions to promote antiretroviral adherence within adults in Africa. We searched AMED, CINAHL, Embase, Medline (via PubMed), and ClinicalTrials.gov from inception to Oct 31, 2014, with the terms “HIV”, “ART”, “adherence”, and “Africa”. We created a network of the interventions by pooling the published and individual patients\u27 data for comparable treatments and comparing them across the individual interventions with Bayesian network meta-analyses. The primary outcome was adherence defined as the proportion of patients meeting trial defined criteria; the secondary endpoint was viral suppression. Findings: We obtained data for 14 randomised controlled trials, with 7110 patients. Interventions included daily and weekly short message service (SMS; text message) messaging, calendars, peer supporters, alarms, counselling, and basic and enhanced standard of care (SOC). Compared with SOC, we found distinguishable improvement in self-reported adherence with enhanced SOC (odds ratio [OR] 1·46, 95% credibility interval [CrI] 1·06–1·98), weekly SMS messages (1·65, 1·25–2·18), counselling and SMS combined (2·07, 1·22–3·53), and treatment supporters (1·83, 1·36–2·45). We found no compelling evidence for the remaining interventions. Results were similar when using viral suppression as an outcome, although the network contained less evidence than that for adherence. Treatment supporters with enhanced SOC (1·46, 1·09–1·97) and weekly SMS messages (1·55, 1·01–2·38) were significantly better than basic SOC. Interpretation: Several recommendations for improving adherence are unsupported by the available evidence. These findings can inform future intervention choices for improving ART adherence in low-income settings. Funding: None

The next generation fungal diversity researcher

Fungi are more important to our lives than is assumed by the general public. They can comprise both devastating pathogens and plant-associated mutualists in nature, and several species have also become important workhorses of biotechnology. Fungal diversity research has in a short time transcended from a low-tech research area to a method-intensive high-tech discipline. With the advent of the new genomic and post-genomic methodologies, large quantities of new fungal data are currently becoming available each year. Whilst these new data and methodologies may help modern fungal diversity researchers to explore and discover the yet hidden diversity within a context of biological processes and organismal diversity, they need to be reconciled with the traditional approaches. Such a synthesis is actually difficult to accomplish given the current discouraging situation of fungal biology education, especially in the areas of biodiversity and taxonomic research. The number of fungal diversity researchers and taxonomists in academic institutions is decreasing, as are opportunities for mycological education in international curricula. How can we educate and stimulate students to pursue a career in fungal diversity research and taxonomy and avoid the situation whereby only those few institutions with strong financial support are able to conduct excellent research? Our short answer is that we need a combination of increased specialization and increased collaboration, i.e. that scientists with specialized expertise (e.g., in data generation, compilation, interpretation, and communication) consistently work together to generate and deliver new fungal knowledge in a more integrative manner – closing the gap between both traditional and modern approaches and academic and non-academic environments. Here we discuss how this perspective could be implemented in the training of the ‘next generation fungal diversity researcher’

Methodologies for in vitro and in vivo evaluation of efficacy of antifungal and antibiofilm agents and surface coatings against fungal biofilms

KT acknowledges receipt of a mandate of Industrial Research Fund (IOFm/05/022). JB acknowledges funding from the European Research Council Advanced Award 3400867/RAPLODAPT and the Israel Science Foundation grant # 314/13 (www.isf.il). NG acknowledges the Wellcome Trust and MRC for funding. CD acknowledges funding from the Agence Nationale de Recherche (ANR-10-LABX-62-IBEID). CJN acknowledges funding from the National Institutes of Health R35GM124594 and R21AI125801. AW is supported by the Wellcome Trust Strategic Award (grant 097377), the MRC Centre for Medical Mycology (grant MR/N006364/1) at the University of Aberdeen MaCA: outside this study MaCA has received personal speaker’s honoraria the past five years from Astellas, Basilea, Gilead, MSD, Pfizer, T2Candida, and Novartis. She has received research grants and contract work paid to the Statens Serum Institute from Astellas, Basilea, Gilead, MSD, NovaBiotics, Pfizer, T2Biosystems, F2G, Cidara, and Amplyx. CAM acknowledges the Wellcome Trust and the MRC MR/N006364/1. PVD, TC and KT acknowledge the FWO research community: Biology and ecology of bacterial and fungal biofilms in humans (FWO WO.009.16N). AAB acknowledges the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft – CRC FungiNet.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Prebiotically plausible mechanisms increase compositional diversity of nucleic acid sequences

During the origin of life, the biological information of nucleic acid polymers must have increased to encode functional molecules (the RNA world). Ribozymes tend to be compositionally unbiased, as is the vast majority of possible sequence space. However, ribonucleotides vary greatly in synthetic yield, reactivity and degradation rate, and their non-enzymatic polymerization results in compositionally biased sequences. While natural selection could lead to complex sequences, molecules with some activity are required to begin this process. Was the emergence of compositionally diverse sequences a matter of chance, or could prebiotically plausible reactions counter chemical biases to increase the probability of finding a ribozyme? Our in silico simulations using a two-letter alphabet show that template-directed ligation and high concatenation rates counter compositional bias and shift the pool toward longer sequences, permitting greater exploration of sequence space and stable folding. We verified experimentally that unbiased DNA sequences are more efficient templates for ligation, thus increasing the compositional diversity of the pool. Our work suggests that prebiotically plausible chemical mechanisms of nucleic acid polymerization and ligation could predispose toward a diverse pool of longer, potentially structured molecules. Such mechanisms could have set the stage for the appearance of functional activity very early in the emergence of life