Activity

Tissue type dependent differences were however detected, with VAT having significantly lower shear storage and loss moduli than SAT and VAT ECM independent of DM status. CONCLUSION Although DM is typically associated with adipose tissue fibrosis, it is not associated with differences in macroscopic adipose tissue mechanical properties.BACKGROUND Laminopathies are genetic diseases caused by mutations in the nuclear lamina. OBJECTIVE Given the clinical impact of laminopathies, understanding mechanical properties of cells bearing lamin mutations will lead to advancement in the treatment of heart failure. METHODS Atomic force microscopy (AFM) was used to analyze the viscoelastic behavior of neonatal rat ventricular myocyte cells expressing three human lamin A/C gene (LMNA) mutations. RESULTS Cell storage modulus was characterized, by two plateaus, one in the low frequency range, a second one at higher frequencies. The loss modulus instead showed a “bell” shape with a relaxation toward fluid properties at lower frequencies. Mutations shifted the relaxation to higher frequencies, rendering the networks more solid-like. This increase of stiffness with mutations (solid like behavior) was at frequencies around 1 Hz, close to the human heart rate. CONCLUSIONS These features resulted from a combination of the properties of cytoskeleton filaments and their temporary cross-linker. Our results substantiate that cross-linked filaments contribute, for the most part, to the mechanical strength of the cytoskeleton of the cell studied and the relaxation time is determined by the dissociation dynamics of the cross-linking proteins. The severity of biomechanical defects due to these LMNA mutations correlated with the severity of the clinical phenotype.BACKGROUND Schwannoma is an extremely rare benign tumour of the peripheral nervous system; its association with breast cancer is sporadic, and its association with the brachial plexus is extremely rare. CASE DESCRIPTION The authors report a case of a patient with breast cancer associated with nodulation in the left supraclavicular fossa, and due to the clinical and radiological features, it was considered metastatic lymph node disease. The patient underwent neoadjuvant chemotherapy, with partial response of the breast. Surgical treatment included resection of the supraclavicular nodule, which was found to be a supraclavicular fossa schwannoma. The correct diagnosis of influences the radiotherapeutic planning. The unusual presentation led to diagnostic confusion in the present case a fact that changed the breast treatment. CONCLUSION The best of our knowledge it is the third description of brachial plexus schwannoma associated with breast cancer and the first with a synchronous association. The knowledge of this pathology and its potential to alter treatment justify the reporting of the present case.This article outlines the importance of human rights in the health law curriculum. The author reflects on her experiences of teaching Health and Human Rights at the Faculty of Law, University of Copenhagen. Health and human rights, it is argued, can have important implications for students’ understanding of health and the role of law. Namely, it underscores the obligations of states and the rights of individuals, as well as the need for health laws and policies to respect rights. This approach prohibits health laws that discriminate or stigmatise. Furthermore, it is put forth that the growing body of socioeconomic rights jurisprudence should be integrated into teaching. Equally, students should be prepared for the needs of the modern labour market interdisciplinarity and digitalisation, and to assess the human rights implications. Finally, educators must acknowledge and discuss the limitations of rights so that students are equipped to address and solve challenges.We often rely on our sense of vision for understanding the spatial location of objects around us. Blasticidin S ic50 If vision cannot be used, one must rely on other senses, such as hearing and touch, in order to build spatial representations. Previous work has found evidence of a leftward spatial bias in visual and tactile tasks. In this study, we sought evidence of this leftward bias in a non-visual haptic object location memory task and assessed the influence of a task-irrelevant sound. In Experiment 1, blindfolded right-handed sighted participants used their non-dominant hand to haptically locate an object on the table, then used their dominant hand to place the object back in its original location. During placement, participants either heard nothing (no-sound condition) or a task-irrelevant repeating tone to the left, right, or front of the room. The results showed that participants exhibited a leftward placement bias on no-sound trials. On sound trials, this leftward bias was corrected; placements were faster and more accurate (regardless of the direction of the sound). One explanation for the leftward bias could be that participants were overcompensating their reach with the right hand during placement. Experiment 2 tested this explanation by switching the hands used for exploration and placement, but found similar results as Experiment 1. A third Experiment found evidence supporting the explanation that sound corrects the leftward bias by heightening attention. Together, these findings show that sound, even if task-irrelevant and semantically unrelated, can correct one’s tendency to place objects too far to the left.Cross-modal correspondence is the tendency to systematically map stimulus features across sensory modalities. The current study explored cross-modal correspondence between speech sound and shape (Experiment 1), and whether such association can influence shape representation (Experiment 2). For the purpose of closely examining the role of the two factors – articulation and pitch – combined in speech acoustics, we generated two sets of 25 vowel stimuli – pitch-varying and pitch-constant sets. Both sets were generated by manipulating articulation – frontness and height of the tongue body’s positions – but differed in terms of whether pitch varied among the sounds within the same set. In Experiment 1, participants made a forced choice between a round and a spiky shape to indicate the shape better associated with each sound. Results showed that shape choice was modulated according to both articulation and pitch, and we therefore concluded that both factors play significant roles in sound-shape correspondence. In Experiment 2, participants reported their subjective experience of shape accompanied by vowel sounds by adjusting an ambiguous shape in the response display. We found that sound-shape correspondence exerts an effect on shape representation by modulating audiovisual interaction, but only in the case of pitch-varying sounds. Therefore, pitch information within vowel acoustics plays the leading role in sound-shape correspondence influencing shape representation. Taken together, our results suggest the importance of teasing apart the roles of articulation and pitch for understanding sound-shape correspondence.Sleep is a crucial human physiologic need. Preterm infants in the NICU are exposed to noxious stimuli that often disrupt and shorten their sleep periods. Sleep disruption may have a negative effect on clinical outcomes, growth, and development and may also delay hospital discharge. Increasing evidence suggests that sleep quality is critical for brain development and synaptic plasticity and is associated with long-term neurodevelopmental outcomes. The purpose of this article is to discuss the importance of sleep in preterm infants, describe tools commonly used to assess infant sleep and identify different sleep-wake states, and identify interventions that promote sleep in preterm infants in the NICU. Nurses play a vital role in implementing appropriate interventions that promote preterm infants’ sleep. Microorganisms produce numerous secondary metabolites (SMs) with various biological activities. Many of their encoding gene clusters are silent under standard laboratory conditions because for their activation they need the ecological context, such as the presence of other microorganisms. The true ecological function of most SMs remains obscure, but understanding of both the activation of silent gene clusters and the ecological function of the produced compounds is of importance to reveal functional interactions in microbiomes. Here, we report the identification of an as-yet uncharacterized silent gene cluster of the fungus Aspergillus fumigatus, which is activated by the bacterium Streptomyces rapamycinicus during the bacterial-fungal interaction. The resulting natural product is the novel fungal metabolite fumigermin, the biosynthesis of which requires the polyketide synthase FgnA. Fumigermin inhibits germination of spores of the inducing S. rapamycinicus, and thus helps the fungus to defend resources in the shared habitat against a bacterial competitor. © 2020, Stroe et al.The pervasive occurrence of sexual dimorphism demonstrates different adaptive strategies of males and females. While different reproductive strategies of the two sexes are well-characterized, very little is known about differential functional requirements of males and females in their natural habitats. Here, we study the impact environmental change on the selection response in both sexes. Exposing replicated Drosophila populations to a novel temperature regime, we demonstrate sex-specific changes in gene expression, metabolic and behavioral phenotypes in less than 100 generations. This indicates not only different functional requirements of both sexes in the new environment but also rapid sex-specific adaptation. Supported by computer simulations we propose that altered sex-biased gene regulation from standing genetic variation, rather than new mutations, is the driver of rapid sex-specific adaptation. Our discovery of environmentally driven divergent functional requirements of males and females has importanta different direction in the two sexes. This led to differences in how the males and females made and broke down fat molecules, and in how their neurons operated. These expression changes also translated in differences for high-level biological processes. For instance, animals in the new settings ended up behaving differently, with the males at the end of the experiment spending more time chasing females than the ancestral flies. These findings demonstrate that male and female fruit flies adapt many biological processes (including metabolism and behaviors) differently to cope with changes in their environment, and that many different genes support these sex-specific adaptations. Ultimately, the work by Hsu et al. may inform medical strategies that take into account interactions between the patient’s sex and their environment. © 2020, Hsu et al.OBJECTIVES To clarify the efficacy and safety of calcineurin inhibitors (CNI) for treating adult-onset Still’s disease (AOSD). METHODS This multicentre historical cohort study enrolled the consecutive patients with AOSD according to Yamaguchi classification criteria. The endpoints were set as the time from the initiation of treatment to events, the persistency rate of CNI and safety. Based on the recurrent event data analysis, these endpoints were evaluated for each event. We divided the events into two groups according to the treatment that included CNI or conventional therapy without CNI. RESULTS One hundred seventy-eight patients with 247 events were analysed. CNI were predominantly used in 72 events with a recurrent history, typical skin rash, high ferritin levels, and/or severe complications such as macrophage activation syndrome, disseminated intravascular coagulation, serositis, meningitis. CNI led to a significantly longer event-free survival (hazard ratio 0.57, 95% confidential interval 0.32-0.99) after adjustment of concomitant medications.