Modelling the growth of Salmonella spp. and Escherichia coli O157 on lettuce

This study aimed to model the growth of Salmonella and Escherichia coli O157 on lettuce at different temperatures. Microorganisms were inoculated separately on lettuce and stored at 5, 10, 25, and 37°C. Growth curves were built by fitting the data to the Baranyi’s DMFit model and Ratkowsky equation was used as secondary model. The models were able to assess the growth of both microorganisms and data showed that bacteria did not growth for 24 hours at 10°C, what can be a suitable temperature for lettuce distribution on food services. However, prolonged periods demonstrated growth at every temperatures examined

Transfusion Related Acute Lung Injury (TRALI) Caused by Red Blood Cell Transfusion Involving Residual Plasma Anti-HLA Antibodies: A report on two Cases and General Considerations

TRALI is considered a serious hazard among immune complications of blood transfusion and its occurrence is admitted to be globally underestimated. Each type of blood product is likely to cause TRALI. We report here on two consecutive observations of TRALI caused by red blood cell concentrates, in which anti-HLA class I and class II antibodies resulting from post-gravitational allo-immunization were evidenced in donors. HLA class I and II antigenic community between recipients and donors' husbands were found and strong reacting IgG antibodies directed at several of those common antigens were detected in the donors' serum. Both donors had more than 3 pregnancies, raising the issue of blood donor selection or of plasma reduction for cellular products

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Plurimodalité et intermodalité sensorielle, l'exemple du métro

National audienc

Determination of the ruminant origin of bone particles using fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH).

Molecular biology techniques such as PCR constitute powerful tools for the determination of the taxonomic origin of bones. DNA degradation and contamination by exogenous DNA, however, jeopardise bone identification. Despite the vast array of techniques used to decontaminate bone fragments, the isolation and determination of bone DNA content are still problematic. Within the framework of the eradication of transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (including BSE, commonly known as "mad cow disease"), a fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) protocol was developed. Results from the described study showed that this method can be applied directly to bones without a demineralisation step and that it allows the identification of bovine and ruminant bones even after severe processing. The results also showed that the method is independent of exogenous contamination and that it is therefore entirely appropriate for this application

Merging metathesis and photochemical Csp3-H activation: Access to masked β-formyl hexanolides and their rearrangement to furofuranones

International audienc