Genome-wide association analysis of susceptibility and clinical phenotype in multiple sclerosis

Multiple sclerosis (MS), a chronic disorder of the central nervous system and common cause of neurological disability in young adults, is characterized by moderate but complex risk heritability. Here we report the results of a genome-wide association study performed in a 1000 prospective case series of well-characterized individuals with MS and group-matched controls using the Sentrix® HumanHap550 BeadChip platform from Illumina. After stringent quality control data filtering, we compared allele frequencies for 551 642 SNPs in 978 cases and 883 controls and assessed genotypic influences on susceptibility, age of onset, disease severity, as well as brain lesion load and normalized brain volume from magnetic resonance imaging exams. A multi-analytical strategy identified 242 susceptibility SNPs exceeding established thresholds of significance, including 65 within the MHC locus in chromosome 6p21.3. Independent replication confirms a role for GPC5, a heparan sulfate proteoglycan, in disease risk. Gene ontology-based analysis shows a functional dichotomy between genes involved in the susceptibility pathway and those affecting the clinical phenotyp

Disperse dyeing and antibacterial properties of nylon and wool fibers using two novel nanosized copper(II) complexes bearing phosphoramide

Disperse dyeing of nylon and wool fibers with two new nanosized copper(II) complexes including phosphoric triamide ligands with formula Cu(NO3)2L2 (1) and Cu(CH3COO)2L2 (2) where L = 4-NO2C6H4NHP(O)(NC4H8O)2 (A) was performed successfully. Both complexes 1 and 2 produced yellow and green colored nylon and wool fabrics, respectively. The complexes were synthesized by ultrasonic method and characterized by 1H, 13C, 31P NMR, Fourier-transform infrared, photoluminescence, ultraviolet–visible spectroscopy, X-ray diffraction, field-emission microscopy and elemental analysis. The FE-SEM micrographs revealed that the nanoparticles of these compounds are spherical in morphology and ∼17–20 nm in size. Very appropriate washfastness while poor lightfastness results were deduced for the dyed fibers. The in vitro antibacterial activities of the dyes 1, 2 and dyed wool/nylon fibers against the Gram-positive Bacillus subtilis bacterium illustrated increasing in the antibacterial effect by increasing the dye concentration from 0.1% to 0.5% o.w.f. on both wool and nylon dyed fibers

Effects of contextual interference and differential learning on performance and mental representations in a golf putting task

Mousavi SH, Kakhki AS, Fazeli D, Vogel L, Horst F, Schöllhorn WI. Effects of contextual interference and differential learning on performance and mental representations in a golf putting task. European Journal of Sport Science. 2024.It is widely accepted that mental representations can have an important influence on motor performance. Although differences in mental representations of motor tasks have been reported between novices and experts, little is known about their development as a function of motor learning approaches. The aim of this study was to compare the effects of contextual interference (CI) and differential learning (DL) on the performance and mental representations in a golf putting task. A total of 40 participants were randomly assigned into four groups: blocked contextual interference (BCI), random contextual interference (RCI), DL, and control. First, the participant's initial mental representation level was tested by means of the structural dimensional analysis of mental representation. Then, the participant's initial performance level was tested by 12 golf-putting trials from 2.44 m. During the acquisition phase, participants practiced golf putting according to their grouping for three consecutive days with 10 blocks of 12 trials per day. No intervention was applied for the control group. The retention-tests were performed 72 h after the last acquisition day. In addition, a transfer test to a novel distance outside the acquired range (4 m) was performed immediately after the retention-test. The results of the putting performance in the retention test showed that RCI and DL performed better compared to BCI and the control group (all p < 0.05). In the transfer test, BCI and RCI outperformed the control group (all p < 0.05), but both were further outperformed by the DL group (all p < 0.05). Moreover, the DL group showed a more structured mental representation than the other groups during the retention test. These results indicated that DL used a different underlying mechanism that resulted in different levels of performance during transfer and a more structured mental representation compared with CI