Mobilizing patients with burns can be challenging due to their unique characteristics. Many times, common practice is to elevate and immobilize the burned extremity after debridement and grafting. On the contrary, mobility is imperative for patients with burns, as patients can lose function and flexibility quickly. The objective of this ...

During development, specific cells are eliminated by apoptosis to ensure that the correct number of cells is integrated in a given tissue or structure. How the apoptosis machinery is activated selectively in vivo in the context of a developing tissue is still poorly understood. In the Drosophila ovary, specialised follicle ...

An increasing number of immediate hypersensitivity reactions (HSR) have been reported after the use of Patent Blue V (PBV) for breast cancer surgery. This is the first study to publish prospective data with systematic allergological assessment. We conducted a multicentre study in 10 French cancer centres for over 6 months. ...

The safety and efficacy of mobility programs for the ventilated patient and the ability to improve outcomes related to immobility of the critically ill are well documented in the literature. Early mobility programs have been proven safe and effective in study. However, a lack of literature describing application of the ...

Critically ill patients are at high risk of malnutrition and lean body mass loss. Screening for malnutrition and performing detailed assessment of energy needs should be routine for patients admitted to intensive care units. Providing adequate calorie and protein provisions can attenuate muscle loss in many at-risk patients. Enteral nutrition ...

More than one-third of cellular proteomes traffic into and across membranes. Bacteria have invented several sophisticated secretion systems that guide various proteins to extracytoplasmic locations and in some cases inject them directly into hosts. Of these, the Sec system is ubiquitous, essential and by far the best understood. Secretory polypeptides ...

Skin ulcerations cause significant morbidity and mortality, while driving up healthcare utilization and costs. Interventions to prevent ulcers and improve wound healing times are needed to reduce the burden on patients and healthcare systems. It has been well established that weight loss, protein-calorie malnutrition, and dehydration are risk factors for ...

This review considers evidence that the clinical condition of heart failure alters skeletal muscle protein synthesis and/or breakdown to promote skeletal muscle wasting and functional decrements that ultimately contribute to the symptomology of the disease. Advanced HF is frequently accompanied by muscle atrophy and a cachectic phenotype. Protein metabolic derangements ...

The eye-antennal disc of Drosophila gives rise to numerous adult tissues, including the compound eyes, ocelli, antennae, maxillary palps and surrounding head capsule. The fate of each tissue is governed by the activity of unique gene regulatory networks (GRNs). The fate of the eye, for example, is controlled by a ...

Night-shift nurses receive fewer educational opportunities and less administrative support than do day-shift staff, tend to be newer, with less experience and fewer resources, and experience greater turnover rates, stress, and procedural errors. In an attempt to bridge the gap between day- and night-shift nursing, a night-shift clinical nurse specialist ...

Hanahan and Weinberg have proposed the 'hallmarks of cancer' to cover the biological changes required for the development and persistence of tumours [Hanahan and Weinberg (2011) Cell 144, 646-674]. We have noted that many of these cancer hallmarks are facilitated by the multifunctional protein YB-1 (Y-box-binding protein 1). In the ...

Sarcopenia is a geriatric syndrome characterized by progressive and generalized loss of skeletal muscle mass and strength with a risk of adverse outcomes such as physical disability, poor quality of life, and death. Sarcopenia is a multifactorial process involving the decline of androgens, including dehydroepiandrosterone sulphate (DHEAS) and testosterone. The ...

Multidisciplinary team (MDT) care is widely accepted as best practice for patients with head and neck cancer, although there is little evidence that MDT care improves head and neck cancer related outcomes. This study aims to determine the impact of MDT care on measurable clinical quality indicators (CQIs) associated with ...

This multi-method multi-informant study assessed 105 Puerto Rican kindergartners' sense of self-worth in family relationships as coded from their responses to the Attachment Story Completion Task (ASCT). The ASCT scores were compared with responses to two other age-appropriate self-evaluation measures (the Cassidy Puppet Interview and the Pictorial Scales of Social ...

Mobilizing critically ill patients in the intensive care unit requires careful planning and attention to detail. The risks involved in mobilizing these patients include dislodging equipment, injury to the patient, injury to the caregivers, and physiologic decompensation of the patient. To carry out the activity safely, the therapist and the ...

ABSTRACT: In the absence of a vaccine or a cure, identification of novel HIV-1 inhibitors remains important. A paper in Retrovirology describes a rationally designed bi-specific protein that irreversibly damages the viral envelope glycoprotein complex via a two-punch mechanism. In contrast to traditional drugs that inhibit essential steps in the ...

Precise spatiotemporal control of axon guidance factor expression is a prerequisite for formation of functional neuronal connections. Although Netrin/Dcc- and Robo/Slit-mediated attractive and repulsive guidance of commissural axons have been extensively studied, little is known about mechanisms controlling mediolateral positioning of longitudinal axons in vertebrates. Here, we use a genetic ...

DR (dietary restriction), or reduced food intake without malnutrition, is associated with extended longevity, improved metabolic fitness and increased stress resistance in a wide range of organisms. DR is often referred to as calorie restriction, implying that reduced energy intake is responsible for its widespread and evolutionarily conserved benefits. However, ...

A pulsed laser ablation based approach is developed on page 6289 by My Ali El Khakani and co-workers for the direct synthesis of nanohybrid structures consisting of single-wall carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs) decorated with PbS quantum dots (PbS-QDs). By varying the laser ablation conditions, the size of the PbS-QDs together with ...

A new approach to improve the power conversion efficiency of polymer bulkheterojunction solar cells by the formation of an embedded passivation layer is demonstrated. In the Communication on page 6311, Ji-Woong Park and co-workers report a simple method to generate silica-like layers along the three-dimensionally intertwined P(3) HT/PCBM interface by ...

Norrin/Frizzled4 (Fz4) signaling activates the canonical Wnt pathway to control retinal vascular development. Using genetically engineered mice, we show that precocious Norrin production leads to premature retinal vascular invasion and delayed Norrin production leads to characteristic defects in intraretinal vascular architecture. In genetic mosaics, wild-type endothelial cells (ECs) instruct neighboring ...

Reprogramming of somatic cells to a pluripotent state via expression of Oct4, Klf4, Myc, and Sox2 is a multistep process involving phased changes in gene expression. Here, we focus on the later stages of reprogramming, termed maturation and stabilization. We show that the stabilization phase and the acquisition of pluripotency ...

Flies, like all animals, need to find suitable and safe food. Because the principal food source for Drosophila melanogaster is yeast growing on fermenting fruit, flies need to distinguish fruit with safe yeast from yeast covered with toxic microbes. We identify a functionally segregated olfactory circuit in flies that is activated ...

Alastair Sloan, speaker at the 2012 BDA Christmas Lecture, describes a regenerative future for dentistry, the standing of UK dental research and his scientific heroes.

The mechanisms responsible for the transcriptional silencing of pluripotency genes in differentiated cells are poorly understood. We have observed that cells lacking the tumor suppressor p27 can be reprogrammed into induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) in the absence of ectopic Sox2. Interestingly, cells and tissues from p27 null mice, including ...

Recently in Cell, Jia et al. (2012) reported novel Utf1-controlled mechanisms of maintaining pluripotency and self-renewal in embryonic stem cells (ESCs). Utf1 buffers bivalent gene expression by competitive binding with polycomb repressive complex 2 and initiation of mRNA degradation.

In budding yeast, the essential functions of Hsp70 chaperones Ssa1-4 are regulated through expression level, isoform specificity, and cochaperone activity. Suggesting a novel regulatory paradigm, we find that phosphorylation of Ssa1 T36 within a cyclin-dependent kinase (CDK) consensus site conserved among Hsp70 proteins alters cochaperone and client interactions. T36 phosphorylation ...

It is epidemiologically established that obesity is frequently associated with the metabolic syndrome and poses an increased risk for the development of type 2 diabetes mellitus and cardiovascular disease. The molecular links that connect the phenomenon of obesity, per se, with insulin resistance and cardiovascular disease are still not fully ...

The allosteric mechanism of Hsp70 molecular chaperones enables ATP binding to the N-terminal nucleotide-binding domain (NBD) to alter substrate affinity to the C-terminal substrate-binding domain (SBD) and substrate binding to enhance ATP hydrolysis. Cycling between ATP-bound and ADP/substrate-bound states requires Hsp70s to visit a state with high ATPase activity and ...

To rejuvenate tissues and/or repair wounds, stem cells must receive extrinsic signals from their surrounding environment and integrate them with their intrinsic abilities to self-renew and differentiate to make tissues. Increasing evidence suggests that the superfamily of transforming growth factor-βs (TGF-βs) constitute integral components in the intercellular crosstalk between stem ...

The discovery that phenotypic diversity among differentiated cells results from epigenetic and not genetic differences, and can be reset to restore pluripotency, promises revolutionary advances in medicine. I discuss how this and related seminal discoveries have brought us to an exciting future.

The 2012 Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology recognizes the architects of two of the great paradigm-shifting discoveries of the last half-century of biology. In experiments performed nearly 50 years apart, Gurdon and Yamanaka made feasible the reawakening of pluripotency inherent in all cells and challenged forever our notions of ...

Objective To assess the risk of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (vCJD) associated with dental treatment.Design Case-control study, investigation of links between cases.Setting National CJD surveillance, general dental practice and practice boards in Great Britain, 2008-2009.Methods Variant CJD cases were recruited from all those referred between May 1995 and August 2009 (n ...

Genome duality in ciliated protozoa offers a unique system to showcase their epigenome as a model of inheritance. In Oxytricha, the somatic genome is responsible for vegetative growth, whereas the germline contributes DNA to the next sexual generation. Somatic nuclear development removes all transposons and other so-called "junk" DNA, which ...

Alongside the scientific barriers to the clinical translation of stem cell research are ethical and regulatory hurdles. Some of these challenges described by the Ethics and Public Policy Committee at the ISSCR Tenth Annual Meeting are presented here.

Two studies in this issue of Cell Stem Cell highlight context-dependent roles for MSCs in controlling tumor growth. Lee et al. (2012) show that preactivated MSCs have antitumor effects upon adoptive transfer in vivo, and Ren et al. (2012) show that tumor-resident MSCs can promote tumor growth by influencing macrophages.

Objective The aim of the current study was to investigate the psychosocial impact of dental aesthetics among patients who received anterior implant-supported prostheses.Methods The current study is a cross-sectional evaluation involving 115 individuals who had gone through treatment at the dental clinics of general hospitals. Participants completed the Chinese version ...

Optical imaging of the dynamics of living specimens involves tradeoffs between spatial resolution, temporal resolution, and phototoxicity, made more difficult in three dimensions. Here, however, we report that rapid three-dimensional (3D) dynamics can be studied beyond the diffraction limit in thick or densely fluorescent living specimens over many time points ...

Large intergenic noncoding (linc) RNAs represent a newly described class of ribonucleic acid whose importance in human disease remains undefined. We identified a severely developmentally delayed 16-year-old female with karyotype 46,XX,t(2;11)(p25.1;p15.1)dn in the absence of clinically significant copy number variants (CNVs). DNA capture followed by next-generation sequencing of the translocation ...

Objective The aim of the current study was to investigate the psychosocial impact of dental aesthetics among patients who received anterior implant-supported prostheses.Methods The current study is a cross-sectional evaluation involving 115 individuals who had gone through treatment at the dental clinics of general hospitals. Participants completed the Chinese version ...

The lysosome is a degradative organelle, and its fusion with other organelles is strictly regulated. In contrast to fusion with the late endosome, the mechanisms underlying autophagosome-lysosome fusion remain unknown. Here, we identify syntaxin 17 (Stx17) as the autophagosomal SNARE required for fusion with the endosome/lysosome. Stx17 localizes to the ...

'...in the metabolically abnormal group, the decline on the global score (measuring cognition) was faster among obese... than among normal weight individuals.'

Regulation of apoptosis by Bcl-2 family proteins is a paradigm for complex protein-protein and protein-membrane systems. Elucidating the molecular mechanisms of these interactions in vitro in live cells and in animal studies has been significantly enhanced by using fluorescence techniques.

During Q2-Q3 2012, the cell therapy industry benefited from a number of positive external influences including advantageous changes to future FDA regulation, but stock market activity was highly mixed. The FDA approved two more products and an appreciable number of public-company-sponsored clinical trials are progressing through phases 1-3.

An accurate prediction of how extrinsic stimuli influence changes in gene expression has been challenging. In this issue, Nagano and colleagues successfully model genome-wide mRNA expression changes under variable environmental conditions in rice, raising hopes that scientists will soon be able to predict genome-wide transcriptional responses in a variety of ...

Immunological reactions to chlorhexidine, including allergy (Type I hypersensitivity) and allergic contact dermatitis/stomatitis (Type IV hypersensitivity), have been recognised for many years. This potential safety issue, however, is not well known within dentistry. The purpose of this paper is to alert dentists and dental care professionals to the potential of ...

All cellular proteins are subject to quality control "decisions," which help to prevent or delay a myriad of diseases. Quality control within the secretory pathway creates a special challenge, as aberrant polypeptides are recognized and returned to the cytoplasm for proteasomal degradation. This process is termed endoplasmic-reticulum (ER)-associated degradation (ERAD).

In ciliates, small RNAs have been shown to target foreign sequences for silencing via elimination from the somatic genome. Fang et al. now reveal a set of Piwi-interacting RNAs (piRNAs) in Oxytricha trifallax that likewise enable genomic self versus nonself discrimination, this time by specifying self sequences for genome retention.

Cobblestone lissencephaly is a peculiar brain malformation with characteristic radiological anomalies. It is defined as cortical dysplasia that results when neuroglial overmigration into the arachnoid space forms an extracortical layer that produces agyria and/or a "cobblestone" brain surface and ventricular enlargement. Cobblestone lissencephaly is pathognomonic of a continuum of autosomal-recessive ...

Hair cells are mechanosensors for the perception of sound, acceleration, and fluid motion. Mechanotransduction channels in hair cells are gated by tip links, which connect the stereocilia of a hair cell in the direction of their mechanical sensitivity. The molecular constituents of the mechanotransduction channels of hair cells are not ...