Guidelines for the treatment of bacterial vaginosis: focus on tinidazole

Bacterial vaginosis (BV) is a complex vaginal infection most commonly associated with women of child-bearing age. Risk factors for BV are numerous. There are currently multiple clinical and laboratory tests for diagnosis of BV, including the most commonly used diagnostic methods: Amsel’s criteria or Nugent’s Gram stain scale. The mainstay of BV therapy is metronidazole, but tinidazole as well as a few other agents have also been used successfully. Tinidazole is the second nitroimidazole antiprotozoal agent and a structural derivative of metronidazole. With a favorable pharmacokinetic profile and reduced side effects, tinidazole is an alternative agent for BV treatment. There are minimal head-to-head comparative data to establish tinidazole’s superiority to metronidazole or other therapeutic agents. Available data suggest tinidazole has a role in special populations particularly for refractory or relapsing BV

Whole genome sequencing of \u3ci\u3eMoraxella bovoculi\u3c/i\u3e reveals high genetic diversity and evidence for interspecies recombination at multiple loci

Moraxella bovoculi is frequently cultured from the ocular secretions and conjunctiva of cattle with Infectious Bovine Keratoconjunctivitis (IBK). Previous work has shown that single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) diversity in this species is quite high with 81,284 SNPs identified in eight genomes representing two distinct genotypes isolated from IBK affected eyes (genotype 1) and the nasopharynx of cattle without clinical IBK signs (genotype 2), respectively. The goals of this study were to identify SNPs from a collection of geographically diverse and epidemiologically unlinked M. bovoculi strains from the eyes of IBK positive cattle (n = 183) and another from the eyes of cattle (most from a single population at a single time-point) without signs of IBK (n = 63) and to characterize the genetic diversity. Strains of both genotypes were identified from the eyes of cattle without IBK signs. Only genotype 1 strains were identified from IBK affected eyes, however, these strains were isolated before the discovery of genotype 2, and the protocol for their isolation would have preferentially selected genotype 1 M. bovoculi. The core genome comprised ~74% of the whole and contained \u3e127,000 filtered SNPs. More than 80% of these characterize diversity within genotype 1 while 23,611 SNPs (~18%) delimit the two major genotypes. Genotype 2 strains lacked a repeats-in-toxin (RTX) putative pathogenesis factor and any of ten putative antibiotic resistance genes carried within a genomic island. Within genotype 1, prevalence of these elements was 0.85 and 0.12 respectively in strains from eyes that were IBK positive. Recombination appears to be an important source of genetic diversity for genotype 1 and undermines the utility of ribosomal-locus-based species identification. The extremely high genetic diversity in genotype 1 presents a challenge to the development of an efficacious vaccine directed against them, however, several low-diversity pilin-like genes were identified. Finally, the genotype-defining SNPs described in this study are a resource that can facilitate the development of more accurate M. bovoculi diagnostic tests

Conflict Resolution and Goal Maintenance Components of Executive Attention are Impaired in Persons With Aphasia: Evidence from the Picture-Word Interference Task

The relationship between language processing and attention has been a topic of research in linguistics, psychology and speech-language pathology for a very long time. Following the hypothesis that attention (e.g., Kahneman, 1973) may be related to impaired language performance in aphasia (McNeil, 1982), researchers have increasingly investigated this hypothesis (McNeil, Odell, & Tseng, 1991; Murray, 1999; Robin & Rizzo, 1989; Tseng, McNeil, & Milenkovic, 1993)

Charge Transport and Rectification in Arrays of SAM-Based Tunneling Junctions

This paper describes a method of fabrication that generates small arrays of tunneling junctions based on self-assembled monolayers (SAMs); these junctions have liquid-metal top-electrodes stabilized in microchannels and ultraflat (template-stripped) bottom-electrodes. The yield of junctions generated using this method is high (70−90%). The junctions examined incorporated SAMs of alkanethiolates having ferrocene termini (11-(ferrocenyl)-1-undecanethiol, SC$_{11}$Fc); these junctions rectify currents with large rectification ratios (R), the majority of which fall within the range of 90−180. These values are larger than expected (theory predicts R ≤ 20) and are larger than previous experimental measurements. SAMs of n-alkanethiolates without the Fc groups (SC$_{n−1}$CH$_3$, with n = 12, 14, 16, or 18) do not rectify (R ranged from 1.0 to 5.0). These arrays enable the measurement of the electrical characteristics of the junctions as a function of chemical structure, voltage, and temperature over the range of 110−293 K, with statistically large numbers of data (N = 300−800). The mechanism of rectification with Fc-terminated SAMs seems to be charge transport processes that change with the polarity of bias: from tunneling (at one bias) to hopping combined with tunneling (at the opposite bias).Chemistry and Chemical Biolog

Interfacial Tension Hysteresis of Eutectic Gallium-Indium

When in a pristine state, gallium and its alloys have the largest interfacial tensions of any liquid at room temperature. Nonetheless, applying as little as 0.8 V of electric potential across eutectic gallium indium (EGaIn) placed within aqueous NaOH (or other electrolyte) solution will cause the metal to behave as if its interfacial tension is near zero. The mechanism behind this phenomenon has remained poorly understood because NaOH dissolves the oxide species, making it difficult to directly measure the concentration, thickness, or chemical composition of the film that forms at the interface. In addition, the oxide layers formed are atomically-thin. Here, we present a suite of techniques which allow us to simultaneously measure both electrical and interfacial properties as a function of applied electric potential, allowing for new insights into the mechanisms which cause the dramatic decrease in interfacial tension. A key discovery from this work is that the interfacial tension displays hysteresis while lowering the applied potential. We combine these observations with electrochemical impedance spectroscopy to evaluate how these changes in interfacial tension arise from chemical, electrical, and mechanical changes on the interface, and close with ideas for how to build a free energy model to predict these changes from first principles

Integration of pre-aligned liquid metal electrodes for neural stimulation within a user-friendly microfluidic platform

Electrical stimulation of nervous tissue is used clinically for the treatment of multiple neurological disorders and experimentally for basic research. With the increase of optical probes to record neuronal activity, simple and user-friendly methods are desired to stimulate neurons and their subcellular compartments for biological experimentation. Here we describe the novel integration of liquid metal electrodes with microfluidic culture platforms to accomplish this goal. We integrated electrode and cell channels into a single poly(dimethylsiloxane) (PDMS) chip, eliminating entirely the need to align electrodes with microchannels. We designed the electrode channels such that the metal can be injected by hand and when the device is non-covalently bound to glass. We demonstrated the biocompatibility of the electrodes for long-term cultures (12 days) using hippocampal neurons. We demonstrated the use of these electrodes to depolarize neurons and recorded neuronal activity using the calcium indicator dye, Fluo-4. We established optimal stimulation parameters that induce neuronal spiking without inducing damage. We showed that the liquid metal electrode evoked larger calcium responses in somata than bath electrodes using the same stimulus parameters. Lastly we demonstrated the use of these liquid metal electrodes to target and depolarize axons. In summary, the integration of liquid metal electrodes with neuronal culture platforms provides a user-friendly and targeted method to stimulate neurons and their subcellular compartments, thus providing a novel tool for future biological investigations

The Gradient Expansion for the Free-Energy of a Clean Superconductor

We describe a novel method for obtaining the gradient expansion for the free energy of a clean BCS superconductor. We present explicit results up to fourth order in the gradients of the order parameter.Comment: 33 pages, Late