Home delivery complicated with puerperal sepsis in urban India

Puerperal sepsis is among the leading and preventable causes of maternal morbidity and mortality worldwide and especially in developing countries. We report an interesting case of home delivery complicated with puerperal sepsis, who required obstetric hysterectomy. Inspite of being a resident of an urban metropolitan city patient had no access to antepartum, intrapartum or even postpartum care. She presented on day eleven postpartum to our institute by which time, her condition had progressed to frank pyoperitoneum and severe anaemia. Urgent, aggressive intervention in the form of evacuation of intra-abdominal pus, obstetric hysterectomy with oophorectomy saved her life

Trade-offs between structural integrity and acquisition time in stochastic super-resolution microscopy techniques

10.1364/OE.25.023146Optics Express251923146-2316

Expression pattern of Drosophila translin and behavioral analyses of the mutant.

Translin is an evolutionarily conserved approximately 27-kDa protein that binds to specific DNA and RNA sequences and has diverse cellular functions. Here, we report the cloning and characterization of the translin orthologue from the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. Under protein-denaturing conditions, purified Drosophila translin exists as a mixture of dimers and monomers just like human translin. In contrast to human translin, the Drosophila translin dimers do not appear to be stabilized by disulfide interactions. Drosophila translin shows a ubiquitous cytoplasmic localization in early embryonal syncytial stage, with an enhanced staining in ventral neuroblasts at later stages (8-9), which are probably at metaphase. An elevated expression was seen in several other cell types, such as cells around the tracheal pits in the embryo and oenocytes in the third instar larva. RNA in situ hybridization showed an increased expression in the ventral midline cells of the larval brain, suggesting a neuronal expression, which was corroborated by protein immunostaining. In adult flies, Drosophila translin is localized in the brain neuronal cell bodies and in early spermatocytes. Interestingly, Drosophila translin mutants exhibit an impaired motor response which is sex specific. Taken together, the multiple cellular localizations, the high neuronal expression and the attendant locomotor defect of the Drosophila translin mutant suggest that Drosophila translin may have roles in neuronal development and behavior analogous to that of mouse translin.We gratefully acknowledge the financial support from Tata Institute of Fundamental Research. A DBT Postdoctoral Fellowship (K. Suseendranathan) is gratefully acknowledged

Fluorescence recovery after photobleaching to study the dynamics of membrane-bound proteins in vivo using the Drosophila embryo

The epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition is a highly dynamic cell process and tools such as fluorescence recovery after photobleaching (FRAP), which allow the study of rapid protein dynamics, enable the following of this process in vivo. This technique uses a short intense pulse of photons to disrupt the fluorescence of a tagged protein in a region of a sample. The fluorescent signal intensity after this bleaching is then recorded and the signal recovery used to provide an indicator of the dynamics of the protein of interest. This technique can be applied to any fluorescently tagged protein, but membrane-bound proteins present an interesting challenge as they are spatially confined and subject to specialized cellular trafficking. Several methods of analysis can be applied which can disentangle these various processes and enable the extraction of information from the recovery curves. Here we describe this technique when applied to the quantification of the plasma membrane-bound E-cadherin protein in vivo using the epidermis of the late embryo of Drosophila melanogaster (Drosophila) as an example of this technique