Evaluation of monoamine oxidase in the serum (SMAO) of clinically healthy volunteers

Linearity of response "day-to-day" and "within-day" variation of a simple method for serum monoaminoxidase (SMAO) activity have been evaluated. SMAO determination in 209 clinically healthy subjects was performed to find out the "reference values" for the method.     

Activity of serum monoamine oxidase (SMAO) in patients with connective tissue diseases : preliminary results

Serum monoaminoxidase activity (SMAO) has been determined in patients with different connective tissue diseases. Preliminary results show a constant and significative increase sclerosis.     

Automated Entire Thrombus Density Measurements for Robust and Comprehensive Thrombus Characterization in Patients with Acute Ischemic Stroke

Background and Purpose

In acute ischemic stroke (AIS) management, CT-based thrombus density has been associated with treatment success. However, currently used thrombus measurements are prone to inter-observer variability and oversimplify the heterogeneous thrombus composition. Our aim was first to introduce an automated method to assess the entire thrombus density and then to compare the measured entire thrombus density with respect to current standard manual measurements.

Materials and Method

In 135 AIS patients, the density distribution of the entire thrombus was determined. Density distributions were described using medians, interquartile ranges (IQR), kurtosis, and skewedness. Differences between the median of entire thrombus measurements and commonly applied manual measurements using 3 regions of interest were determined using linear regression.

Results

Density distributions varied considerably with medians ranging from 20.0 to 62.8 HU and IQRs ranging from 9.3 to 55.8 HU. The average median of the thrombus density distributions (43.5 ± 10.2 HU) was lower than the manual assessment (49.6 ± 8.0 HU) (p<0.05). The difference between manual measurements and median density of entire thrombus decreased with increasing density (r = 0.64; p<0.05), revealing relatively higher manual measurements for low density thrombi such that manual density measurement tend overestimates the real thrombus density.

Conclusions

Automatic measurements of the full thrombus expose a wide variety of thrombi density distribution, which is not grasped with currently used manual measurement. Furthermore, discrimination of low and high density thrombi is improved with the automated method.     

Towards a framework for the evolutionary genomics of Kinetoplastids: what kind of data and how much?

The current status of kinetoplastids phylogeny and evolution is discussed in view of the recent progresses on genomics. Some ideas on a potential framework for the evolutionary genomics of kinetoplastids are presented.     

The role of intravascular ultrasound imaging in vascular brachytherapy

Intracoronary brachytherapy has recently emerged as a new therapy to prevent restenosis. Initial experimental work was achieved in animal models and the results were assessed by histomorphometry. Initial clinical trials used angiography to guide dosimetry and to assess efficacy. Intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) permits tomographic examination of the vessel wall, elucidating the true morphology of the lumen and transmural components, which cannot be investigated on the lumenogram obtained by angiography. This paper reviews the use of IVUS in the clinical studies of brachytherapy conducted to date. IVUS allows clinicians to make a thorough assessment of the remodeling of the vessel and appears to have a major role to play in facilitating understanding of the underlying mechanisms of action in this emerging field. The authors propose that state-of-the-art IVUS techniques should be employed to further knowledge of the mechanisms of action of brachytherapy in atherosclerotic human coronary arteries.     

Improving model construction of profile HMMs for remote homology detection through structural alignment

Background  

Remote homology detection is a challenging problem in Bioinformatics. Arguably, profile Hidden Markov Models (pHMMs) are one of the most successful approaches in addressing this important problem. pHMM packages present a relatively small computational cost, and perform particularly well at recognizing remote homologies. This raises the question of whether structural alignments could impact the performance of pHMMs trained from proteins in the Twilight Zone, as structural alignments are often more accurate than sequence alignments at identifying motifs and functional residues. Next, we assess the impact of using structural alignments in pHMM performance.     

Evidence for Emergence of Sex-Determining Gene(s) in a Centromeric Region in Vasconcellea parviflora

Sex chromosomes have been studied in many plant and animal species. However, few species are suitable as models to study the evolutionary histories of sex chromosomes. We previously demonstrated that papaya (Carica papaya) (2n = 2x = 18), a fruit tree in the family Caricaceae, contains recently emerged but cytologically heteromorphic X/Y chromosomes. We have been intrigued by the possible presence and evolution of sex chromosomes in other dioecious Caricaceae species. We selected a set of 22 bacterial artificial chromosome (BAC) clones that are distributed along the papaya X/Y chromosomes. These BACs were mapped to the meiotic pachytene chromosomes of Vasconcellea parviflora (2n = 2x = 18), a species that diverged from papaya ∼27 million years ago. We demonstrate that V. parviflora contains a pair of heteromorphic X/Y chromosomes that are homologous to the papaya X/Y chromosomes. The comparative mapping results revealed that the male-specific regions of the Y chromosomes (MSYs) probably initiated near the centromere of the Y chromosomes in both species. The two MSYs, however, shared only a small chromosomal domain near the centromere in otherwise rearranged chromosomes. The V. parviflora MSY expanded toward the short arm of the chromosome, whereas the papaya MSY expanded in the opposite direction. Most BACs mapped to papaya MSY were not located in V. parviflora MSY, revealing different DNA compositions in the two MSYs. These results suggest that mutation of gene(s) in the centromeric region may have triggered sex chromosome evolution in these plant species.