TmaDB: a repository for tissue microarray data

Background: Tissue microarray (TMA) technology has been developed to facilitate large, genome-scale molecular pathology studies. This technique provides a high-throughput method for analyzing a large cohort of clinical specimens in a single experiment thereby permitting the parallel analysis of molecular alterations ( at the DNA, RNA, or protein level) in thousands of tissue specimens. As a vast quantity of data can be generated in a single TMA experiment a systematic approach is required for the storage and analysis of such data. Description: To analyse TMA output a relational database ( known as TmaDB) has been developed to collate all aspects of information relating to TMAs. These data include the TMA construction protocol, experimental protocol and results from the various immunocytological and histochemical staining experiments including the scanned images for each of the TMA cores. Furthermore the database contains pathological information associated with each of the specimens on the TMA slide, the location of the various TMAs and the individual specimen blocks ( from which cores were taken) in the laboratory and their current status i.e. if they can be sectioned into further slides or if they are exhausted. TmaDB has been designed to incorporate and extend many of the published common data elements and the XML format for TMA experiments and is therefore compatible with the TMA data exchange specifications developed by the Association for Pathology Informatics community. Finally the design of the database is made flexible such that TMA experiments from several types of cancer can be stored in a single database, which incorporates the national minimum data set required for pathology reports supported by the Royal College of Pathologists (UK). Conclusion: TmaDB will provide a comprehensive repository for TMA data such that a large number of results from the numerous immunostaining experiments can be efficiently compared for each of the TMA cores. This will allow a systematic, large-scale comparison of tumour samples to facilitate the identification of gene products of clinical importance such as therapeutic or prognostic markers. In addition this work will contribute to the establishment of a standard for reporting TMA data analogous to MIAME in the description of microarray dat

Rare Coinfection of Scrub Typhus and Malaria in Immunocompetent Person

Scrub Typhus, or tsutsugamushi disease is a febrile illness caused by bacteria of the family Rickettsiaceae and named Orientia tsutsugamushi. Recently it has been found to endemic in Subhimalayan region of India.Malaria is highly endemic in rest of India but its prevalence is low in Subhimalayan region because of the altitude. We report a rare case of a patient having coinfection with scrub typhus and malaria

Quantification of the density of cooperative neighboring synapses required to evoke endocannabinoid signaling

The spatial pattern of synapse activation may impact on synaptic plasticity. This applies to the synaptically-evoked endocannabinoid-mediated short-term depression at the parallel fiber (PF) to Purkinje cell synapse, the occurrence of which requires close proximity between the activated synapses. Here, we determine quantitatively this required proximity, helped by the geometrical organization of the cerebellar molecular layer. Transgenic mice expressing a calcium indicator selectively in granule cells enabled the imaging of action potential-evoked presynaptic calcium rise in isolated, single PFs. This measurement was used to derive the number of PFs activated within a beam of PFs stimulated in the molecular layer, from which the density of activated PFs (input density) was calculated. This density was on average 2.8μm in sagittal slices and twice more in transverse slices. The synaptically-evoked endocannabinoid-mediated suppression of excitation (SSE) evoked by ten stimuli at 200Hz was determined from the monitoring of either postsynaptic responses or presynaptic calcium rise. The SSE was significantly larger when recorded in transverse slices, where the input density is larger. The exponential description of the SSE plotted as a function of the input density suggests that the SSE is half reduced when the input density decreases from 6 to 2μm. We conclude that, although all PFs are truncated in an acute sagittal slice, half of them remain respondent to stimulation, and activated synapses need to be closer than 1.5μm to synergize in endocannabinoid signaling. © 2013 The authors

On positivity and roots in operator algebras

In earlier papers the second author and Charles Read have introduced and studied a new notion of positivity for operator algebras, with an eye to extending certain C*-algebraic results and theories to more general algebras. The present paper consists of complements to some facts in the just mentioned papers, concerning this notion of positivity. For example we prove a result on the numerical range of products of the roots of commuting operators with numerical range in a sector.Comment: 11 pages, to appear Integral Equations Operator Theor

Primary Amoebic (Naegleria fowleri) Meningoencephalitis Presenting as Status Epilepticus

Primary amebic meningoencephalitis (PAM) is a rare entity. Usual presenting features are fever, headache and seizures with meningeal signs and this disease carries high mortality rate. We present a case report of PAM presenting as status epilepticus

A normalisation procedure for biaxial bias extension tests

Biaxial Bias Extension tests have been performed on a plain-weave carbon fibre engineering fabric. The test results have been normalised using both the upper and lower bound method proposed by Potluri et al. and also using a novel alternative normalisation method based on energy arguments. The normalised results from both methods are compared and discussed