Synopsis: Health:

#New microscope technique could speed identification of deadly bacteria A new way of rapidly identifying bacteria,

may change the way doctors approach treatment for patients who develop potentially deadly infections and may also help the food industry screen against contamination with harmful pathogens, according to researchers.

A new way of rapidly identifying bacteria, which requires a slight modification to a simple microscope,

may change the way doctors approach treatment for patients who develop potentially deadly infections and may also help the food industry screen against contamination with harmful pathogens,

according to researchers at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) in Daejeon, South korea.

which is still the gold standard in the health care industry for making a definitive diagnosis. Also routinely used today is a newer method for rapidly identifying bacteria based on a DNA-analysis technique called quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qpcr),

"This means the present method can be utilized as a prescreening test for point-of-care bacterial diagnosis for various applications including medicine and food hygiene.""

"Why Speed Matters in Infection Control In hospitals and clinics worldwide, bacterial infections are a major source of illness,

In the most severe cases, bacterial poisoning causes severe disease and syndromes like sepsis, meningitis, pneumonia,

and gastroenteritis--all of which can be deadly unless the patient is given immediate and appropriate treatment.

The true challenge of fighting those infections is time. In order to best treat their patients, doctors would like to know exactly which bacteria they are infected with,

but the lost hours or days spent identifying the exact pathogen can make the road to recovery that much steeper.

Sepsis, for instance, can develop so rapidly that mortality has been seen to increase by 9 percent per hour until treatment is given.

Waiting two days may kill the patient, Park added. For that reason, many hospital-acquired infections are treated presumptively,

before they are identified definitively, using broad-spectrum antibiotics. These powerful combinations of potent drugs are often effective,

allowing doctors to prescribe the best drugs available to treat an infection and improving outcomes for people with hospital-acquired infections--though the effectiveness of the approach remains to be proven in future clinical trials.

In their initial experiments, Park and his colleagues showed as a proof of principle that they could identify bacteria with high accuracy.

The first three are known all pathogens to infect humans through the food chain or via hospital-acquired infections.

which is the base for Anthrax. Under a microscope, all four of these rodlike bacteria look nearly identical.

In addition to helping in the clinic the new method may be useful in the food industry or for homeland security applications.

#New approach for treating idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis Arrayprof. Dr. Oliver Eickelberg and Dr. Claudia Staab-Weijnitz of the Comprehensive Pneumology Center (CPC) at Helmholtz Zentrum München and their colleagues at LMU University Hospital in Munich and Yale university

School of medicine have discovered now a new therapeutic target for IPF. The main focus of their research was to identify causative mechanisms involved in the disease.

The researchers analyzed microarray data of samples from German patients and from an IPF cohort of the Lung Tissue Research Consortium in the U s. The analysis revealed elevated levels of the protein FKBP10

in the lungs of IPF patients. The researchers hypothesized that if the production or activity of the protein could be inhibited,

this might lead to a new therapeutic approach. Further experiments confirmed that knockdown of this protein in IPF fibroblasts diminished the collagen synthesis."Thus,

FKBP10 represents a potential new target molecule for the individualized therapy of IPF, "said Claudia Staab-Weijnitz."

"In the future, these results could also lead to new therapeutic options for the treatment of other fibrotic diseases."

Together with his team of researchers, he is studying the pathogenic mechanisms with the aim to develop causal therapies--and thus one day to actually cure IPF.

however, the main focus is on delaying the progression of the disease and alleviating the symptoms."

"we want to help alleviate the suffering of patients with lung disease.""In the case of IPF, the researchers now want to establish a drug screening assay

#Ultrasound, algorithms to diagnose bacterial meningitis in babies Three researchers from Spain and one from UK, Javier Jiménez, Carlos Castro, Berta Martí and Ian Butterworth,

which will allow bacterial meningitis to be diagnosed in babies in seconds with a high-resolution ultrasound of the fontanelle.

which aims to revolutionise the detection of this illness, has already been tested on a small sample of patients at the La paz University Hospital and in ex vivo tissues of animal models.

The project has been financed by Madrid-MIT M+Visión a consortium that wants to boost the collaboration between research centres and hospitals in the autonomous community of Madrid with the Massachusetts institute of technology (MIT) and other institutions in the Boston area (USA.

Carlos Castro tells Sinc, in a telephone interview from the Research Laboratory of Electronics of MIT in Boston,

-which already has a prototype-was to"facilitate the diagnosis of bacterial meningitis using imaging technologies and algorithms."

"Array"We were searching for an alternative to the lumbar puncture (LP), the only existing procedure up until now for its diagnosis,

"We witnessed a LP on a 29-day-old baby that had arrived at the accident and emergency department at Boston Children's Hospital with a fever.

which tell whether there is an infection in the fluid, can take between 24 and 48 hours"says Castro.

meningitis is not the cause of the fever in babies and therefore, "lumbar punctures do not benefit the patient in any way."

which would indicate the cellularity in CSF in a simple, economical and noninvasive way for newborns and babies on suspicion of infection.

The image obtained is analysed then by image-processing algorithms to determine the presence of cells indicating infection

"Therefore-he adds-it not only provides the doctor with an image, but information about the presence or absence of cells in the cerebrospinal fluid.

"The team believes that their system will mean a breakthrough for diagnosing bacterial meningitis in babies

Madrid hospitals La paz, Quirón and San Carlos also provided significant assistance. In Boston, they worked with Massachusetts General Hospital.

Arrayto date, 300,000 euros has been invested in the project, awarded by the Madrid-MIT M+Visión Consortium.

whose speed and precision make them useful for cataract and other eye surgeries. A femtosecond is one-quadrillionth,

#Disrupting tumor cell'microenvironment'suggests a new way to treat a prevalent childhood leukemia Researchers at NYU Langone Medical center

and its Laura and Isaac Perlmutter Cancer Center are reporting a potentially important discovery in the battle against one of the most devastating forms of leukemia that accounts for as many as one in five children with a particularly aggressive form of the disease

and attracts blood cells to the bone marrow--halted disease progression in bone marrow and spleen tissue within two weeks.

The experiments also left white blood cells cancer free for more than 30 weeks in live mice. Further, the research team found that in mice bred to develop T-ALL

Researchers say their study results for the first time"clearly establish CXCR4 signaling as essential for T-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia cell growth and disease progression.""

""Our experiments showed that blocking CXCR4 decimated leukemia cells, "says co-senior study investigator and NYU Langone cell biologist Susan Schwab, Phd.

Schwab, an assistant professor at NYU Langone and its Skirball Institute of Biomolecular Medicine, says similar laboratory test plans are underway for more potent CXCR4 antagonists, most likely in combination with established chemotherapy regimens.

Schwab says T-ALL is"a particularly devastating cancer "because there are not many treatment options.

Co-senior study investigator and cancer biologist Iannis Aifantis, Phd, says the study offers the first evidence that"drugs targeting

and disrupting leukemia cells'microenvironment--or what goes on around them--could prove effective against the disease."

"Aifantis, the chair of the Department of Pathology at NYU Langone and a member of its Perlmutter Cancer Center,

and an early career scientist at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, says experiments in his laboratory had shown that leukemia-initiating cells concentrate in the bone marrow near CXCL12-producing blood vessels.

This finding prompted a collaborative effort to investigate expression and function of CXCR4 because it binds to CXCL12,

which in turn led to the researchers determining the vital role played by CXCR4-CXCL12 molecular signaling in disease growth.

Disease progression in the bone marrow stalled within three weeks and tumors were smaller than in similar mice that retained CXCL12 production.

Deletion of the CXCR4 gene led to sustained T-ALL remission within a month in similar mice,

Subsequent transplant of millions of human T-ALL cells into normal mice that were treated then with an anti-CXCR4 drug induced remission within two weeks,

#Researchers boost body's inflammation-reduction mechanism to combat obesity-fueled disease"This is a new way of reducing inflammation

"said co-senior author Kumar Sharma, MD, a professor of medicine and director of the Center for Renal Translational Medicine at UC San diego School of medicine."

"Essentially, we're boosting the body's natural response for reducing inflammation and showing the benefit in obesity-driven diseases."

"Catherine Godson, Phd, co-senior author and director of the UCD Diabetes Complications Research Centre in UCD School of medicine and UCD Conway Institute, said the study's findings demonstrate the value

"Drawing on collaborative expertise in synthetic chemistry, molecular biology and translational medicine, the team has produced findings with significant potential to reduce inflammation, a critical driver of the devastating consequences of obesity-related diseases,

In the body, inflammation is normally a natural healing response to infection or injury.""You get a recruitment of white blood cells that fight off the infection

or work to heal the injury, "explained first author Emma Borgeson, Phd, a postdoctoral fellow at UC San diego and UCD."

"It is a good thing. It's only when the inflammation becomes chronic that it can cause disease to occur."

"Borgeson said that a family of lipids, known as specialized pro-resolving mediators (SPMS), are the body's natural shut off mechanism for inflammation."

The results showed significant disease improvement, primarily by affecting fat tissue.""The mice had been on a high-fat diet for three months

We found that it significantly reduced inflammation in the fat tissues and improved kidney and liver disease.

who has started already this work as a guest researcher at the Sahlgrenska Academy Hospital in Sweden."

"Our ultimate hope would be to use these findings to create a lipoxin-based drug for obese people to help protect them against associated illnesses, such as kidney and liver disease,

#How a gut feeling for infection programs our immune response An unexpected finding by an international team of scientists based at The University of Manchester

It's hoped the discovery will inform the development of better treatments for a range of conditions from inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD) to certain cancers.

and Dr Yasmine Belkaid from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious diseases (NIAID) in the USA will be published in the journal Immunity.

These cells are called rapidly to sites of infection and injury and have an amazing ability to change

what they do to suit the situation in which they find themselves. This either involves them protecting the body from an attacking infection

or acting as a repair agent to aid wound healing. However, when these cells choose the wrong function this can result in severe inflammation leading to conditions such as inflammatory bowel diseases and even cancer.

What scientists haven't been able to do is identify how the cells decide which function to fulfil.

It has always been assumed that the programming takes place once the cells arrive at the point of injury

or infection but this has not been investigated well. Using mouse models Dr Grainger and his team looked at how

and where monocytes are programs in response to toxoplasmosis, an infection caused by a common parasite called Toxoplasma gondii.

The parasite infects the gut and is most commonly found in undercooked meat. Pregnant women are advised also to avoid cat faeces due to the risk of infection.

Dr Grainger, a Wellcome Trust and Royal Society Fellow, explains what they found:""Our work shows that very soon after the toxoplasma invades the gut the tissue starts to communicate with other parts of the body to alter the immune system.

Your initial gut feeling about the infection is literally telling the rest of the system what to do."

At the moment a lot of therapies are focused on the site of infection or injury itself but this data suggests that it's the signals that are being sent out from the gut that are impacting the whole immune system.

It might even be possible to develop drugs to target the programming mechanisms within the bone marrow,

not only program the monocytes to protect against the infection, but also to change to a repair function

and are focused on identifying situations where this gut information system may have gone wrong such as in inflammatory bowel diseases s

#Stem cell discovery paves way for targeted treatment for osteoarthritis Researchers in the Departments of Biology and Physics at York,

working with colleagues at the Erasmus Medical centre in Rotterdam, have identified individual stem cells that can regenerate tissue, cartilage and bone.

or joint tissue opening the way for improved treatment for arthritis. The research which was funded by Arthritis Research UK is published in the latest issue of Stem Cell Reports.

The York team also isolated a rare subset of stem cells in bone marrow that while having no capability for tissue repair appeared to have a prominent role in immune function.

"While stem cell therapy is an exciting new development for the treatment for osteoarthritis, up to now it has been something of a lottery

It will help in the search to develop more targeted therapies for arthritis patients.""Co-Lead author Dr James Fox said"Working with colleagues across the Arthritis Research UK Tissue Engineering Centre will help to bring our discovery closer to patient treatment."

"Director of research at the charity Arthritis Research UK Dr Stephen Simpson added:""There are 8 million people in the UK living with the pain

and disability caused by osteoarthritis. We are fighting to find better treatments and one day, a cure.

This research is exciting and promising. Identifying specific stem cells that could help the damaged joint to repair itself,

takes us a step closer to our aim of developing an injectable, safe, stem cell therapy for people with osteoarthritis

#Cellular mechanism for how the body regulates glucose transport discovered UT Southwestern Medical center scientists have gleaned a key cellular mechanism of how the body adjusts glucose levels,

an important process that when abnormal can promote diabetes, cancer, and rare genetic diseases. The researchers determined that an enzyme called Protein kinase c (PKC) can regulate

whether more or less glucose should be transported into cells, serving as a kind of thermostat to ensure that proper levels are maintained.'

'said senior author Dr. Richard Wang, assistant professor of dermatology and a member of UT Southwestern's Harold C. Simmons Comprehensive Cancer Center.'

'This process is defective in a variety of diseases including diabetes and cancer.''Scientists have known how glucose is transported across cells,

The researchers further found that the regulation of GLUT1 by PKC was impaired in some patients with a genetic disease called GLUT1 Deficiency Syndrome (G1d.

Patients with G1d have seizures, movement disorders, speech disorders, and developmental delays as infants because insufficient glucose is transported to the brain.'

'With our ongoing studies on the regulation of GLUT1 by phosphorylation, we hope to identify pathways that may improve the diagnosis

and treatment of diseases, including G1d, diabetes, and cancer,'said Wang, whose lab focus includes non-melanoma skin cancer, in

which GLUT1 is expressed highly d

#First live birth after transplantation of ovarian tissue removed and frozen during childhood Arraythe patient, who was born in the Republic of congo,

was diagnosed with sickle-cell anemia when she was five. After emigrating to Belgium at the age of 11,

doctors decided that her disease was so severe that she should be treated with a bone marrow transplant,

the Belgian doctors removed the patient's right ovary when she was 13 years and 11 months old and froze tissue fragments.

-versus-host disease and had to continue with immunosuppressive drugs for 18 months after the transplant.

Her remaining ovary failed and when she was 15, doctors gave her hormone replacement therapy to induce the onset of menstruation.

Ten years later the patient received counselling after expressing a desire to become pregnant. In order to restore her fertility,

doctors led by Dr Isabelle Demeestere, a gynaecologist and research associate in the Fertility Clinic and Research Laboratory on Human Reproduction at Erasme Hospital, Université Libre de Bruxelles (Brussels,

Belgium), stopped the hormone replacement therapy, thawed some, but not all of the frozen ovarian tissue and grafted four fragments on to the remaining left ovary,

and 11 other fragments at other sites in the body. The transplanted tissue started to respond to her hormones

When they are diagnosed with diseases that require treatment that can destroy ovarian function, freezing ovarian tissue is the only available option for preserving their fertility."

when hormone replacement therapy is an efficient, standard, and noninvasive alternative for inducing puberty? Should the procedure only be proposed for patients with a high risk of ovarian failure or for those at low risk as well?

and her doctors say there is no reason why she could not have more babies if she wants to."

many experts working on disease control and prevention have seized upon it as a key material in creating diagnostic tools for the developing world."

#First functional, synthetic immune organ with controllable antibodies Arraythe synthetic organ is inspired bio by secondary immune organs like the lymph node or spleen.

Like a real organ, the organoid converts B cells--which make antibodies that respond to infectious invaders--into germinal centers,

mature and mutate their antibody genes when the body is under attack. Germinal centers are a sign of infection

and are not present in healthy immune organs. The engineers have demonstrated how they can control this immune response in the organ

get activated and change their antibody types. According to their paper, their 3-D organ outperforms existing 2-D cultures and can produce activated B cells up to 100 times faster.

the organ could be used to study specific infections and how the body produces antibodies to fight those infections--from Ebola to HIV.'

'You can use our system to force the production of immunotherapeutics at much faster rates,

Such a system also could be used to test toxic chemicals and environmental factors that contribute to infections or organ malfunctions.

The process of B cells becoming germinal centers is understood not well, and in fact, when the body makes mistakes in the genetic rearrangement related to this process,

blood cancer can result.''In the long run, we anticipate that the ability to drive immune reaction ex vivo at controllable rates grants us the ability to reproduce immunological events with tunable parameters for better mechanistic understanding of B cell development and generation of B cell tumors,

as well as screening and translation of new classes of drugs,'Singh said d

#'Chromosome shattering'seen in plants, cancer Plants can undergo the same extreme'chromosome shattering'seen in some human cancers and developmental syndromes,

UC Davis researchers have found. Chromosome shattering, or'chromothripsis,'has until now only been seen in animal cells.

Although plants don't get cancer it might also allow cancer researchers to use the laboratory plant Arabidopsis as a model to study chromosome behavior in cancer.

Chromothripsis involves slicing chromosomes into apparently random pieces, and reassembling it like a broken vase,

although in one recently published case a woman was cured of a genetic disorder when the gene responsible was lost due to chromothripsis.

#Single protein causes Parkinson's disease and multiple system atrophy Typical of neurodegenerative disorders is disrupted the communication between brain cells together with a loss of cells in specific brain regions.

For some brain diseases this phenomenon is linked to a protein known as alpha-synuclein. The exact function of this protein remains unclear,

However, in the case of specific diseases, including Parkinson's disease, Multiple System Atrophy (MSA), and dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB), this protein forms aggregates that cause neurodegeneration."

"When alpha-synuclein aggregates accumulate within a brain cell, they interfere with the normal functioning of the cell.

Up to now, nobody understood how aggregates of this single protein could induce different pathologies, "says Professor Veerle Baekelandt from the Research Group for Neurobiology and Gene therapy."

while the'cylinders'induced Parkinson's disease, the'ribbons'caused MSA symptoms.""This clearly demonstrates that distinct diseases result from alpha-synuclein fibres that are structurally different."

"We are gaining more insight into the differences between the diseases. But we suspect that more fibres with different shapes

and effects are waiting to be discovered, apart from the two that we examined in this study.

A drug that counteracts the development of aggregates could be used to treat a whole range of brain diseases

#Vitamin d shows promise for treating Crohn's disease Crohn's disease (CD) is a lifelong chronic relapsing and remitting gastrointestinal condition, characterised by inflammation,

CD is associated with abdominal pain, diarrhea, fatigue and in many cases can result in a reduction of quality of life, time off work, hospitalisations and surgery.

The exact causes are unknown; however, immune, genetic and environmental factors are thought to be involved. Incidence of CD varies across Europe, with up to 10 cases per 100,000 population per year.

In this new research, the authors aimed to determine changes in gut barrier function (as determined by intestinal permeability and antimicrobial peptide concentrations) as well as disease markers in CD, in response to Vitamin d supplementation.

UEG's inflammatory bowel disease expert, Dr Charles Murray of the Royal Free Hospital, London, UK comments;"

"This is an exciting development in the treatment of Crohn's disease and we welcome anything new that could potentially help patients with this debilitating condition

improve manufacturing and help develop therapies for disease. The need for this optics technology will grow with the construction of the next-generation of light sources

and localize proteins in tissues is essential for understanding disease mechanisms and for diagnostics. However, today very advanced instruments are needed often to study proteins

In order to use protein detection for diagnostic purposes, e g. in a clinic, new, less complicated methods to study proteins are needed.

The technique is based on the binding of antibodies, either to two sites on the same protein or to two proteins that are localised very close to each other.

The antibodies have been linked to DNA strands that will attach to each other if they are close enough.

and commonly available in hospital and research labs. Since two antibodies are bound in the first step alsesignals can be avoided,

tunable luminescence, superior photostability, low toxicity, and chemical resistance. Recently, Prof. Seokwoo Jeon (Material Science and Engineering), Prof.

so that electron and hole injection could be balanced, the constructed GQD LEDS exhibited luminance of 1, 000 cd/m2,

#New mechanism that attacks viral infections discovered An innovative mechanism that the innate immune system uses to control viral infections has been uncovered by researchers at the University Medical centers in Mainz and Freiburg.

but related elements of the immune system can act together in concert to fight, for example, rotavirus infections.

Infection with rotavirus is the most common cause of diarrhea in children around the world.

The results of the research have recently been published in the eminent scientific journal Nature Immunology.

The innate immune system is able to combat infective pathogens such as viruses bacteria, and parasites on several levels.

which are released quickly in response to a viral infection and which can trigger a relevant immune response against the cells under attack.

and thus participate in an early stage of the immune response to infection by viruses, bacteria, and parasites.

The researchers were able to use the example of the rotavirus to demonstrate how such an infection could be battled very effectively.

Rotaviruses are highly contagious pathogens which cause vomiting and diarrhea. Rotavirus infection is the most frequent cause of diarrhea in children

and is responsible for more than 500,000 deaths around the world each year. It attacks the epithelial cells that coat the intestine and damages them."

"We were able to show that interferon-lambda (IFN? -although a required factor, is not capable by itself to control rotavirus infection

but that the presence of interleukin-22 (IL-22) is also necessary to effectively combat rotavirus,

"explained Professor Andreas Diefenbach of the Department of Medical microbiology and Hygiene of the Mainz University Medical center.

such as, for example, defending the intestines and lungs against bacterial infections. In addition, interleukin-22 makes an important contribution to tissue repair processes in the intestines following damage to the intestinal epithelium following exposure to radiation."

Interferons are used, for example, in the immunotherapy of often refractory chronic viral infections such as hepatitis. The researchers postulate that the innovative mechanism in which two components of the innate immune system collaborate effectively in the epithelial cells may have developed in the course of evolution as a secondary line of immune defense in an environment in

The Rutgers team was able to isolate the uranium-breathing bacterium in the lab by recognizing that uranium in samples from the Rifle site could be toxic to microorganisms as well as humans.

So just like bacteria pick up resistance to things like antibiotics and heavy metal toxicity, this bacterium"picked up a genetic element that's now allowing it to detoxify uranium,

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