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Background Skin colonization with coagulase-negative staphylococci (CoNS) is generally beneficial, but recent investigations suggest its association with flares and atopic dermatitis (AD) severity. However, this relationship remains unclear. Objective To assess patterns of staphylococcal colonization and biofilm formation in toddlers with and without AD from rural and urban South African settings. Methods We conducted a cross-sectional study of AD-affected and non-atopic AmaXhosa toddlers from rural Umtata and urban Cape Town, South Africa. CoNS isolates were recovered from lesional, nonlesional skin samples and the anterior nares of participants. Identification of the staphylococci was achieved by MALDI-TOF mass spectrometry. The microtiter plate assay assessed in-vitro biofilm formation. Results CoNS and S. aureus commonly co-colonized nonlesional skin among cases (urban: 24% vs. 3%, p = 0.037 and rural 21% vs. 6%, pConclusion CoNS colonization is associated with AD and disease severity and may be implicated in AD exacerbations. Studies are needed to understand their underlying pathological contribution in AD pathogenesis.

Increased body mass index (BMI) has been associated with an increased prevalence of asthma in children, however the association between BMI status and asthma severity has been less well defined. The aim of this study was to describe the association between childhood obesity and asthma severity, frequency of hospital and emergency department visits as well as pattern of aeroallergen sensitization. A retrospective study was conducted at pediatric outpatient clinics in University Hospital Sharjah. All consecutive patients aged 6 years and above, with confirmed diagnosis of asthma visiting the outpatient pediatric clinics during 2018 were included in this study. Sources of information were the patient's medical file, laboratory data, pharmacy data, as well as reports from the pediatric in charge. This study included 164 children with asthma. 63% of asthma patients were male. The vast majority of patients were from Arab ethnicities (n = 154, 94%), majority had mild asthmatic conditions (n = 133, 81%), and one-third were either overweight or obese (n = 52, 32%). Overweight or obese asthmatic children with BMI percentile of equal or more than 85% was associated with more asthma severity (odds ratio [OR]: 3.27, 95% confidence interval [CI]: 1.42-7.54; P = 0.005), as well as more frequent asthma related hospital visits (OR: 2.53, 95% CI: 1.22-5.26; P = 0.013). Overweight asthmatic children with BMI between the 85th and 94th percentiles and obese asthmatic children with BMI equal to or greater than 95th percentile are associated with more severe asthma phenotype and more frequent hospital and emergency department visits.

The composite service design modeling is an essential process of the service-oriented software development life cycle, where the candidate services, composite services, operations and their dependencies are required to be identified and specified before their design. However, a systematic service-oriented design modeling method for composite services is still in its infancy as most of the existing approaches provide the modeling of atomic services only. For these reasons, a new method (ComSDM) is proposed in this work for modeling the concept of service-oriented design to increase the reusability and decrease the complexity of system while keeping the service composition considerations in mind. Furthermore, the ComSDM method provides the mathematical representation of the components of service-oriented design using the graph-based theoryto facilitate the design quality measurement. To demonstrate that the ComSDM method is also suitable for composite service design modeling of distributed embedded real-time systems along with enterprise software development, it is implemented in the case study of a smart home. The results of the case study not only check the applicability of ComSDM, but can also be used to validate the complexity and reusability of ComSDM. This also guides the future research towards the design quality measurement such as using the ComSDM method to measure the quality of composite service design in service-oriented software system.

Helicobacter spp. represent a proportionately small but significant component of the normal intestinal microflora of animal hosts. Several of these intestinal Helicobacter spp. are known to induce colitis in mouse models, yet the mechanisms by which these bacteria induce intestinal inflammation are poorly understood. To address this question, we performed in vitro co-culture experiments with mouse and human epithelial cell lines stimulated with a selection of Helicobacter spp., including known pathogenic species as well as ones for which the pathogenic potential is less clear. Strikingly, a member of the normal microflora of rodents, Helicobacter muridarum, was found to be a particularly strong inducer of CXC chemokine (Cxcl1/KC, Cxcl2/MIP-2) responses in a murine intestinal epithelial cell line. Time-course studies revealed a biphasic pattern of chemokine responses in these cells, with H. muridarum lipopolysaccharide (LPS) mediating early (24-48 h) responses and live bacteria seeming to provoke later (48-72 h) responses. H. muridarum LPS per se was shown to induce CXC chemokine production in HEK293 cells stably expressing Toll-like receptor 2 (TLR2), but not in those expressing TLR4. In contrast, live H. muridarum bacteria were able to induce NF-kappaB reporter activity and CXC chemokine responses in TLR2-deficient HEK293 and in AGS epithelial cells. These responses were attenuated by transient transfection with a dominant negative construct to NOD1, and by stable expression of NOD1 siRNA, respectively. Thus, the data suggest that both TLR2 and NOD1 may be involved in innate immune sensing of H. muridarum by epithelial cells. This work identifies H. muridarum as a commensal bacterium with pathogenic potential and underscores the potential roles of ill-defined members of the normal flora in the initiation of inflammation in animal hosts. We suggest that H. muridarum may act as a confounding factor in colitis model studies in rodents.