Comparison of intravaginal and oral metronidazole in patients with bacterial vaginosis

Background: Metronidazole is considered an effective treatment for bacterial vaginosis. Only oral preparations were available until 2014, but an intravaginal gel preparation recently became commercially available in South Korea. In this report, the efficacy and safety of metronidazole intravaginal gel application was compared to that of the conventional oral metronidazole preparation.Methods: Patients who were treated with either intravaginal metronidazole or oral metronidazole after diagnosis of bacterial vaginosis were included in this study. Patient characteristics, mode of treatment, recurrence rate, and complications including gastro-intestinal discomfort and concomitant vulvovaginal candidiasis were analyzed.Results: There were no differences in patient characteristics, except the mean age was older in the intravaginal group. Treatment outcomes were similar in both groups. In the oral metronidazole group, 6.3% of patients reported ongoing symptoms of bacterial vaginosis within one month of treatment and required a refill, while 7.3% of the intravaginal group required a refill. Significantly more patients on oral metronidazole treatment complained about gastro-intestinal discomfort including nausea (13.4%) and diarrhea (9.4%). Patients who took intravaginal metronidazole complained about increased watery vaginal discharge (26.8%). The comparatively high cost of metronidazole intravaginal gel was another factor that could affect patient access to this treatment versus the oral preparation. The incidence of vulvovaginal candidiasis was similar between groups (oral 3.9%, intravaginal 4.9%).Conclusions: Intravaginal metronidazole usage can be considered as an effective alternative treatment for bacterial vaginosis in patients with gastro-intestinal complications. However, the increased incidence of watery vaginal discharge and high cost remain obstacles to widespread use of the intravaginal preparation

Nitrogen doping of carbon nanoelectrodes for enhanced control of DNA translocation dynamics

Controlling the dynamics of DNA translocation is a central issue in the emerging nanopore-based DNA sequencing. To address the potential of heteroatom doping of carbon nanostructures to achieve this goal, herein we carry out atomistic molecular dynamics simulations for single-stranded DNAs translocating between two pristine or doped carbon nanotube (CNT) electrodes. Specifically, we consider the substitutional nitrogen doping of capped CNT (capCNT) electrodes and perform two types of molecular dynamics simulations for the entrapped and translocating single-stranded DNAs. We find that the substitutional nitrogen doping of capCNTs stabilizes the edge-on nucleobase configurations rather than the original face-on ones and slows down the DNA translocation speed by establishing hydrogen bonds between the N dopant atoms and nucleobases. Due to the enhanced interactions between DNAs and N-doped capCNTs, the duration time of nucleobases within the nanogap was extended by up to ~ 290 % and the fluctuation of the nucleobases was reduced by up to ~ 70 %. Given the possibility to be combined with extrinsic light or gate voltage modulation methods, the current work demonstrates that the substitutional nitrogen doping is a promising direction for the control of DNA translocation dynamics through a nanopore or nanogap based of carbon nanomaterials.Comment: 11 pages, 4 figure

An economic cost model for network deployment and spectrum in wireless networks

We describe the basic economic theory of cost model for network deployment and spectrum in wireless networks. In particular, we develop a production function for wireless networks. With this production function model, we explore the technical rate of substitution and the elasticity of substitution in the production function for wireless network and find its insight for wireless network. Finally, we compare the engineering value of spectrum and economic value of spectrum

A Typology of Organizational Behavior : At the Crossroad of Risk and Uncertainty

Four modes of organizational behavior are proposed by crossing two behavioral dimensions adopted from organizational ecology (inertia vs. change) and neoinstitutionalism (normative vs. deviant). Those four modes are innovative (deviant change), reformative (normative change), conservative (normative inertia), and reactionary (deviant inertia) modes in the life-cycle of organizational behavior. Also identified are two distributional characteristics underlying each behavioral dimension: low risk vs. high risk underlying inertia vs. change, and certainty vs. uncertainty underlying normative vs. deviant. Through the integration of inertia-conformity and risk-uncertainty dimensions, hypotheses are generated on how transition to the next mode can be either promoted or hindered by sociopolitical resources at the organizational level and by intervention of the state and the civil society at the societal level. The typology and hypotheses outlined in this paper aim to further theoretical articulation and empirical tests on the evolutionary dynamics of organizational forms and institutions in the market

An efficient method for visualization and growth of fluorescent Xanthomonas oryzae pv. oryzae in planta

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p><it>Xanthomonas oryzae </it>pv. <it>oryzae</it>, the causal agent of bacterial blight disease, is a serious pathogen of rice. Here we describe a fluorescent marker system to study virulence and pathogenicity of <it>X. oryzae </it>pv. <it>oryzae</it>.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>A fluorescent <it>X. oryzae </it>pv. <it>oryzae </it>Philippine race 6 strain expressing green fluorescent protein (GFP) (PXO99_GFP) was generated using the <it>gfp </it>gene under the control of the neomycin promoter in the vector, pP<it>neo</it>-<it>gfp</it>. The PXO99_GFPstrain displayed identical virulence and avirulence properties as the wild type control strain, PXO99. Using fluorescent microscopy, bacterial multiplication and colonization were directly observed in rice xylem vessels. Accurate and rapid determination of bacterial growth was assessed using fluoremetry and an Enzyme-Linked ImmunoSorbant Assay (ELISA).</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Our results indicate that the fluorescent marker system is useful for assessing bacterial infection and monitoring bacterial multiplication <it>in planta</it>.</p

Identification, Selection, and Enrichment of Cardiomyocyte Precursors

The large-scale production of cardiomyocytes is a key step in the development of cell therapy and tissue engineering to treat cardiovascular diseases, particularly those caused by ischemia. the main objective of this study was to establish a procedure for the efficient production of cardiomyocytes by reprogramming mesenchymal stem cells from adipose tissue. First, lentiviral vectors expressing neoR and GFP under the control of promoters expressed specifically during cardiomyogenesis were constructed to monitor cell reprogramming into precardiomyocytes and to select cells for amplification and characterization. Cellular reprogramming was performed using 5'-azacytidine followed by electroporation with plasmid pOKS2a, which expressed Oct4, Sox2, and Klf4. Under these conditions, GFP expression began only after transfection with pOKS2a, and less than 0.015% of cells were GFP(+). These GFP(+) cells were selected for G418 resistance to find molecular markers of cardiomyocytes by RT-PCR and immunocytochemistry. Both genetic and protein markers of cardiomyocytes were present in the selected cells, with some variations among them. Cell doubling time did not change after selection. Together, these results indicate that enrichment with vectors expressing GFP and neoR under cardiomyocyte-specific promoters can produce large numbers of cardiomyocyte precursors (CMPs), which can then be differentiated terminally for cell therapy and tissue engineering.Universidade Federal de São Paulo, Gene Therapy Invest Ctr, Dept Biophys, BR-04044010 São Paulo, BrazilUniversidade Federal de São Paulo, Dept Surg, BR-04044010 São Paulo, BrazilUniversidade Federal de São Paulo, Gene Therapy Invest Ctr, Dept Biophys, BR-04044010 São Paulo, BrazilUniversidade Federal de São Paulo, Dept Surg, BR-04044010 São Paulo, BrazilWeb of Scienc

GPS-GLASS: Learning Nighttime Semantic Segmentation Using Daytime Video and GPS data

Semantic segmentation for autonomous driving should be robust against various in-the-wild environments. Nighttime semantic segmentation is especially challenging due to a lack of annotated nighttime images and a large domain gap from daytime images with sufficient annotation. In this paper, we propose a novel GPS-based training framework for nighttime semantic segmentation. Given GPS-aligned pairs of daytime and nighttime images, we perform cross-domain correspondence matching to obtain pixel-level pseudo supervision. Moreover, we conduct flow estimation between daytime video frames and apply GPS-based scaling to acquire another pixel-level pseudo supervision. Using these pseudo supervisions with a confidence map, we train a nighttime semantic segmentation network without any annotation from nighttime images. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method on several nighttime semantic segmentation datasets. Our source code is available at https://github.com/jimmy9704/GPS-GLASS.Comment: ICCVW 202

On Monotonic Aggregation for Open-domain QA

Question answering (QA) is a critical task for speech-based retrieval from knowledge sources, by sifting only the answers without requiring to read supporting documents. Specifically, open-domain QA aims to answer user questions on unrestricted knowledge sources. Ideally, adding a source should not decrease the accuracy, but we find this property (denoted as "monotonicity") does not hold for current state-of-the-art methods. We identify the cause, and based on that we propose Judge-Specialist framework. Our framework consists of (1) specialist retrievers/readers to cover individual sources, and (2) judge, a dedicated language model to select the final answer. Our experiments show that our framework not only ensures monotonicity, but also outperforms state-of-the-art multi-source QA methods on Natural Questions. Additionally, we show that our models robustly preserve the monotonicity against noise from speech recognition. We publicly release our code and setting.Comment: INTERSPEECH 2023 Camera Read