Tomorrow\u27s doctors and today\u27s changes: neo-liberal discourses and the daily practices of medical interns at a state university hospital in Cairo

As the State shifts towards liberalization policies in the health sector, debates surrounding the outcomes of medical encounters came to the core of public debate. To understand changes that are influencing medical encounters and their outcomes, this study focused on the socialization process medical students go through to become practicing physicians. A public university hospital (Al Kasr Al Ainy) where medical students get their practical training was the focus of this study. Courses on physician-patient encounters, newly implemented under the government\u27s education reform plan, were analyzed as an example of how discourses are produced to shift the responsibility of public health from being a state responsibility to becoming an individualized one

Compression of Multi-frequency Eddy Current Data using Principal Components Analysis for Pressure Tube to Calandria Tube Gap Measurement

Inspection of components with multi-variable influential parameters may result in a loss of accuracy for the measurement of the target variable. A particular example occurs in the case of a pressure tube (PT) that is contained within a calandria tube (CT) in the fuel channels of CANDU® nuclear reactors. Eddy current (EC) based measurement of gap between PT and CT, as required by nuclear regulators, is affected by variation of PT wall thickness and resistivity, which may confound the accurate gap measurement. In this work principal components analysis (PCA) is examined as a means of simplifying changes in multi-frequency EC data so that the effect on EC signals from multiple parameters may be identified. PCA of analytical model and laboratory results are examined and redundant information in the multi-frequency EC data is removed. An additional benefit of PCA is compressed data acquisition, which permits increased inspection speed and monitoring of multi-parameter variation using a reduced number of variables

Molecular Cloning of Brucella Abortus Genes in a Cosmid Vector and Their Expression in Escherichia Coli

Microbiolog

Stepwise implementation of high-throughput sequencing metabarcoding to estuarine macrobenthic communities

This work was supported by FEDER through POFC-COMPETE by national funds from ‘Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT)’ in the scope of the grant FCOMP-01-0124-FEDER-015429 and also by the strategic programme UID/BIA/04050/2013 (POCI-01- 0145-FEDER-007569) also funded by national funds through the FCT I.P. and by the ERDF through the COMPETE2020 - Programa Operacional Competitividade e Internacionalização (POCI). Jorge Lobo was supported by a PhD fellowship (SFRH/BD/69750/2010) from FCT.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

DNA metabarcoding for high-throughput monitoring of estuarine macrobenthic communities

Morphology-based profling of benthic communities has been extensively applied to aquatic ecosystems’ health assessment. However, it remains a low-throughput, and sometimes ambiguous, procedure. Despite DNA metabarcoding has been applied to marine benthos, a comprehensive approach providing species-level identifcations for estuarine macrobenthos is still lacking. Here we report a combination of experimental and feld studies to assess the aptitude of COI metabarcoding to provide robust species-level identifcations for high-throughput monitoring of estuarine macrobenthos. To investigate the ability of metabarcoding to detect all species present in bulk DNA extracts, we contrived three phylogenetically diverse communities, and applied four diferent primer pairs to generate PCR products within the COI barcode region. Between 78–83% of the species in the contrived communities were recovered through HTS. Subsequently, we compared morphology and metabarcoding-based approaches to determine the species composition from four distinct estuarine sites. Our results indicate that species richness would be considerably underestimated if only morphological methods were used: globally 27 species identifed through morphology versus 61 detected by metabarcoding. Although further refnement is required to improve efciency and output of this approach, here we show the great aptitude of COI metabarcoding to provide high quality and auditable species identifcations in estuarine macrobenthos monitoring.This study has been funded by the project “Te NextSea: Next generation monitoring of coastal ecosystems in a scenario of global change” (operação NORTE-01-0145-FEDER-000032), supported by Norte Portugal Regional Operational Programme (NORTE 2020), under the PORTUGAL 2020 Partnership Agreement, through the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF). JL was supported by a PhD fellowship (SFRH/BD/69750/2010) from FCT. Tis study had the fnancial support of Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (FCT), through the strategic project UID/MAR/04292/2013 granted to MARE. Te authors would like to thank Stephanie Boilard (Biodiversity Institute of Ontario) for her support in the lab work.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

A Practical Fast Acting Control Scheme For Fuzzy Logic-Based Voltage Stabilization Control

This paper presents a simplified control model for stabilizing a load voltage using a switched reactor in parallel with a fixed capacitor of static VAR compensator. Two IGBT’s are used to control the reactance of the switched reactor. A uniform pulse width modulation is used for controlling the two switches. The compensator has a simple control circuit and structure. A complete modeling and numerical simulation for the proposed systems is presented. A high speed Digital Signal Processor is used for implementing proportional-integral (PI) and fuzzy load voltage controllers. Experimental results indicate the superiority of fuzzy logic control over the conventional proportional-integral control method. Simulation results are reported and proved to be in good agreement with the relevant experimental results

Environmental Barcoding: A Next-Generation Sequencing Approach for Biomonitoring Applications Using River Benthos

Timely and accurate biodiversity analysis poses an ongoing challenge for the success of biomonitoring programs. Morphology-based identification of bioindicator taxa is time consuming, and rarely supports species-level resolution especially for immature life stages. Much work has been done in the past decade to develop alternative approaches for biodiversity analysis using DNA sequence-based approaches such as molecular phylogenetics and DNA barcoding. On-going assembly of DNA barcode reference libraries will provide the basis for a DNA-based identification system. The use of recently introduced next-generation sequencing (NGS) approaches in biodiversity science has the potential to further extend the application of DNA information for routine biomonitoring applications to an unprecedented scale. Here we demonstrate the feasibility of using 454 massively parallel pyrosequencing for species-level analysis of freshwater benthic macroinvertebrate taxa commonly used for biomonitoring. We designed our experiments in order to directly compare morphology-based, Sanger sequencing DNA barcoding, and next-generation environmental barcoding approaches. Our results show the ability of 454 pyrosequencing of mini-barcodes to accurately identify all species with more than 1% abundance in the pooled mixture. Although the approach failed to identify 6 rare species in the mixture, the presence of sequences from 9 species that were not represented by individuals in the mixture provides evidence that DNA based analysis may yet provide a valuable approach in finding rare species in bulk environmental samples. We further demonstrate the application of the environmental barcoding approach by comparing benthic macroinvertebrates from an urban region to those obtained from a conservation area. Although considerable effort will be required to robustly optimize NGS tools to identify species from bulk environmental samples, our results indicate the potential of an environmental barcoding approach for biomonitoring programs

A review on environmental DNA (eDNA) metabarcoding markers for wildlife monitoring research

Environmental DNA or eDNA utilizes traceable genetic materials in the environment for monitoring the presence of organisms in a given area and it is now gaining popularity as an alternative for traditional monitoring methods. Thus, the selection of genetic markers is crucial for identification of species in wildlife monitoring. This paper aims to review several DNA markers which are appropriate and reliable for detection of organisms from the environmental samples. We performed systematic literature search from SCOPUS database to review all molecular markers of eDNA. This study focuses on the importance of markers selection which can be utilized by next-generation sequencing (NGS) for biodiversity monitoring. Cytochrome C oxidase Subunit I (COI) are noted as the most widely used marker in metabarcoding research for detection of targeted species