Undiagnosed osteoid osteoma of the spine presenting as painful scoliosis from adolescence to adulthood: a case report

Presented here is a case of a young woman, with an undiagnosed osteoid osteoma of the spine, which presented with painful scoliosis in adolescence and was treated by bracing until her accession to adulthood. A more thorough investigation, years after the initial one, revealed the tumor. Surgical excision and stabilization offered the long-awaited cure. Misdiagnosis resulted in intractable pain for years, deformity, the discomfort of brace therapy, and the frustration of a prolonged yet ineffective treatment

SNP assay to detect the ‘Hyuuga’ red-brown lesion resistance gene for Asian soybean rust

Asian soybean rust (ASR), caused by Phakopsora pachyrhizi Syd., has the potential to become a serious threat to soybean, Glycine max L. Merr., production in the USA. A novel rust resistance gene, Rpp?(Hyuuga), from the Japanese soybean cultivar Hyuuga has been identified and mapped to soybean chromosome 6 (Gm06). Our objectives were to fine-map the Rpp?(Hyuuga) gene and develop a high-throughput single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) assay to detect this ASR resistance gene. The integration of recombination events from two different soybean populations and the ASR reaction data indicates that the Rpp?(Hyuuga) locus is located in a region of approximately 371 kb between STS70887 and STS70923 on chromosome Gm06. A set of 32 ancestral genotypes which is predicted to contain 95% of the alleles present in current elite North American breeding populations and the sources of the previously reported ASR resistance genes (Rpp1, Rpp2, Rpp3, Rpp4, Rpp5, and rpp5) were genotyped with five SNP markers. We developed a SimpleProbe assay based on melting curve analysis for SNP06-44058 which is tighly linked to the Rpp?(Hyuuga) gene. This SNP assay can differentiate plants/lines that are homozygous/homogeneous or heterozygous/heterogeneous for the resistant and susceptible alleles at the Rpp?(Hyuuga) locus

Reproducibility of Standing Posture for X-Ray Radiography: A Feasibility Study of the BalancAid with Healthy Young Subjects

Unreliable spinal X-ray radiography measurement due to standing postural variability can be minimized by using positional supports. In this study, we introduce a balancing device, named BalancAid, to position the patients in a reproducible position during spinal X-ray radiography. This study aimed to investigate the performance of healthy young subjects’ standing posture on the BalancAid compared to standing on the ground mimicking the standard X-rays posture in producing a reproducible posture for the spinal X-ray radiography. A study on the posture reproducibility measurement was performed by taking photographs of 20 healthy young subjects with good balance control standing on the BalancAid and the ground repeatedly within two consecutive days. We analyzed nine posterior–anterior (PA) and three lateral (LA) angles between lines through body marks placed in the positions of T3, T7, T12, L4 of the spine to confirm any translocations and movements between the first and second day measurements. No body marks repositioning was performed to avoid any error. Lin’s CCC test on all angles comparing both standing postures demonstrated that seven out of nine angles in PA view, and two out of three angles in LA view gave better reproducibility for standing on the BalancAid compared to standing on the ground. The PA angles concordance is on average better than that of the LA angles

Genome-wide diversity and phylogeography of Mycobacterium avium subsp. paratuberculosis in Canadian dairy cattle

Mycobacterium avium subsp. paratuberculosis (MAP) is the causative bacterium of Johne’s disease (JD) in ruminants. The control of JD in the dairy industry is challenging, but can be improved with a better understanding of the diversity and distribution of MAP subtypes. Previously established molecular typing techniques used to differentiate MAP have not been sufficiently discriminatory and/or reliable to accurately assess the population structure. In this study, the genetic diversity of 182 MAP isolates representing all Canadian provinces was compared to the known global diversity, using single nucleotide polymorphisms identified through whole genome sequencing. MAP isolates from Canada represented a subset of the known global diversity, as there were global isolates intermingled with Canadian isolates, as well as multiple global subtypes that were not found in Canada. One Type III and six “Bison type” isolates were found in Canada as well as one Type II subtype that represented 86% of all Canadian isolates. Rarefaction estimated larger subtype richness in Québec than in other Canadian provinces using a strict definition of MAP subtypes and lower subtype richness in the Atlantic region using a relaxed definition. Significant phylogeographic clustering was observed at the inter-provincial but not at the intra-provincial level, although most major clades were found in all provinces. The large number of shared subtypes among provinces suggests that cattle movement is a major driver of MAP transmission at the herd level, which is further supported by the lack of spatial clustering on an intra-provincial scale

Using semantic clustering to support situation awareness on Twitter: The case of World Views

In recent years, situation awareness has been recognised as a critical part of effective decision making, in particular for crisis management. One way to extract value and allow for better situation awareness is to develop a system capable of analysing a dataset of multiple posts, and clustering consistent posts into different views or stories (or, world views). However, this can be challenging as it requires an understanding of the data, including determining what is consistent data, and what data corroborates other data. Attempting to address these problems, this article proposes Subject-Verb-Object Semantic Suffix Tree Clustering (SVOSSTC) and a system to support it, with a special focus on Twitter content. The novelty and value of SVOSSTC is its emphasis on utilising the Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) typology in order to construct semantically consistent world views, in which individuals---particularly those involved in crisis response---might achieve an enhanced picture of a situation from social media data. To evaluate our system and its ability to provide enhanced situation awareness, we tested it against existing approaches, including human data analysis, using a variety of real-world scenarios. The results indicated a noteworthy degree of evidence (e.g., in cluster granularity and meaningfulness) to affirm the suitability and rigour of our approach. Moreover, these results highlight this article's proposals as innovative and practical system contributions to the research field

Genotyping of Genetically Monomorphic Bacteria: DNA Sequencing in Mycobacterium tuberculosis Highlights the Limitations of Current Methodologies

Because genetically monomorphic bacterial pathogens harbour little DNA sequence diversity, most current genotyping techniques used to study the epidemiology of these organisms are based on mobile or repetitive genetic elements. Molecular markers commonly used in these bacteria include Clustered Regulatory Short Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR) and Variable Number Tandem Repeats (VNTR). These methods are also increasingly being applied to phylogenetic and population genetic studies. Using the Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex (MTBC) as a model, we evaluated the phylogenetic accuracy of CRISPR- and VNTR-based genotyping, which in MTBC are known as spoligotyping and Mycobacterial Interspersed Repetitive Units (MIRU)-VNTR-typing, respectively. We used as a gold standard the complete DNA sequences of 89 coding genes from a global strain collection. Our results showed that phylogenetic trees derived from these multilocus sequence data were highly congruent and statistically robust, irrespective of the phylogenetic methods used. By contrast, corresponding phylogenies inferred from spoligotyping or 15-loci-MIRU-VNTR were incongruent with respect to the sequence-based trees. Although 24-loci-MIRU-VNTR performed better, it was still unable to detect all strain lineages. The DNA sequence data showed virtually no homoplasy, but the opposite was true for spoligotyping and MIRU-VNTR, which was consistent with high rates of convergent evolution and the low statistical support obtained for phylogenetic groupings defined by these markers. Our results also revealed that the discriminatory power of the standard 24 MIRU-VNTR loci varied by strain lineage. Taken together, our findings suggest strain lineages in MTBC should be defined based on phylogenetically robust markers such as single nucleotide polymorphisms or large sequence polymorphisms, and that for epidemiological purposes, MIRU-VNTR loci should be used in a lineage-dependent manner. Our findings have implications for strain typing in other genetically monomorphic bacteria