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“Conventional diagnosis of infectious diarrhea caused by bacteria is time-consuming, labor-intensive, and has a suboptimal sensitivity. We have therefore developed a multiplex real-time polymerase chain reaction (PCR) for the simultaneous detection of Campylobacter jejuni, Salmonella spp., Shigella spp./enteroinvasive Escherichia coli (EIEC), and Yersinia enterocolitica in
Roscovitine fecal samples. No cross reactivity between the different pathogens was observed, and the multiplex setup of the assay did not have an impact on the sensitivity of the PCR. The analytical sensitivity was 87 CFU/mL for C. jejuni, 61 CFU/mL for Shigella spp./EIEC, 5,528 CFU/mL for Salmonella spp., and 1,306 CFU/mL for Y. enterocolitica. An extensive validation of the assay was performed by testing 1,687 patient samples by both PCR and with conventional techniques. The use of PCR increased the overall clinical sensitivity from 78 to 100 % (p smaller than 0.0001), the specificity was 99.4 % for the PCR, compared with 99.9 % for conventional culture. The novel PCR assay allows for rapid, sensitive, inexpensive, and high-throughput testing of the most common bacterial causes of gastroenteritis.”
“BACKGROUND: Hypothermia may
be accidental or therapeutic. Therapeutic hypothermia is increasingly used as FG-4592 clinical trial treatment for various conditions, e.g., neuroprotection after cardiac arrest. Hypothermia leads to an impairment of the coagulation system, but the degree of impairment has been difficult to determine. Most studies have been performed on plasma instead of whole blood. We therefore evaluated whole blood investigating the effects of hypothermia on the coagulation system over a wide range of temperatures (25-40 degrees C).\n\nMETHODS: Blood was drawn from six healthy volunteers into citrated test tubes. Samples were then placed in water baths with temperatures ranging from 25 to 40 degrees C for 30 min before the coagulation system was studied using rotational thromboelastometry. www.selleckchem.com/products/BEZ235.html A
contact activator (Ellagic acid) was used for initiation of coagulation. Clotting time, clot formation time, a angle, and maximum clot strength were measured. All tests were run for 60 min and they were performed at the same temperature as the temperature in the water bath.\n\nRESULTS: Coagulation was increasingly impaired with decreasing temperatures in the temperature range studied. All variables measured were significantly impaired in a stepwise pattern (P < 0.0001).\n\nCONCLUSIONS: Evaluation using a whole blood analysis shows that hypothermia progressively impairs the coagulation system.”
“A usual approach to detect the spatial footprint left by recent adaptive events has been to follow up putative candidates emerging from multilocus scans of variation by sequencing additional fragments. We have used a similar experimental and analytical approach to study variation at 15 independently evolving and randomly chosen regions of the X chromosome of Drosophila melanogaster.