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Introduction: Biofilm-associated infections persist as a therapeutic challenge in contemporary medicine. The efficacy of antibiotic therapies is ineffective in numerous instances, necessitating a heightened focus on exploring novel antibiofilm medical strategies. Among these, iminosugars emerge as a distinctive class of compounds displaying promising biofilm inhibition properties. Methods: This study employs an in vivo wound infection mouse model to evaluate the effectiveness of PDIA in treating biofilm-associated skin wound infections caused by Staphylococcus aureus and Pseudomonas aeruginosa. Dermic wounds in mice were infected with biofilm-forming strains, specifically S. aureus 48 and P. aeruginosa 5, which were isolated from patients with diabetic foot, and are well-known for their strong biofilm formation. The subsequent analysis included clinical, microbiological, and histopathological parameters. Furthermore, an exploration into the susceptibility of the infectious strains to hydrogen peroxide was conducted, acknowledging its potential presence during induced inflammation in mouse dermal wounds within an in vivo model. Results: The findings revealed the efficacy of PDIA iminosugar against the S. aureus strain, evidenced by a reduction in bacterial numbers within the wound and the inflammatory focus. Discussion: This study suggests that PDIA iminosugar emerges as an active and potentially effective antibiofilm agent, positioning it as a viable treatment option for staphylococcal infections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to their lack of driving controllability, overweight vehicles are a big threat to road safety. The proposed method for a moving passenger car load estimation is capable of detecting an overweight vehicle, and thus it finds its application in road safety improvement. The weight of a car's load entering or leaving a considered zone, e.g., industrial facility, a state, etc., is also of concern in many applications, e.g., surveillance. Dedicated vehicle weight-in-motion measurement systems generally use expensive load sensors that also require deep intervention in the road while being installed and also are calibrated only for heavy trucks. In this paper, a vehicle magnetic profile (VMP) is used for defining a load parameter proportional to the passenger vehicle load. The usefulness of the proposed load parameter is experimentally demonstrated in field tests. The sensitivity of the VMP to the load change results from the fact that the higher load decreases the vehicle clearance value which in turn increases the VMP. It is also shown that a slim inductive-loop sensors allows the building of a load estimation system, with a maximum error around 30 kg, which allows approximate determination of the number of passengers in the car. The presented proof of concept extends the functionality of inductive loops, already installed in the road, for acquiring other traffic parameters, e.g., moving vehicle axle-to-axle distance measurement, to road safety and surveillance related applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper presents the application of Grade Correspondence Analysis (GCA) and Grade Correspondence Cluster Analysis (GCCA) for ordering and grouping -omics datasets, using transcriptomic data as an example. Based on gene expression data describing 256 patients with Multiple Myeloma it was shown that the GCA method could be used to find regularities in the analyzed collections and to create characteristic gene expression profiles for individual groups of patients. GCA iteratively permutes rows and columns to maximize the tau-Kendall or rho-Spearman coefficients, which makes it possible to arrange rows and columns in such a way that the most similar ones remain in each other’s neighbourhood. In this way, the GCA algorithm highlights regularities in the data matrix. The ranked data can then be grouped using the GCCA method, and after that aggregated in clusters, providing a representation that is easier to analyze–especially in the case of large sets of gene expression profiles. Regularization of transcriptomic data, which is presented in this manuscript, has enabled division of the data set into column clusters (representing genes) and row clusters (representing patients). Subsequently, rows were aggregated (based on medians) to visualise the gene expression profiles for patients with Multiple Myeloma in each collection. The presented analysis became the starting point for characterisation of differentiated genes and biochemical processes in which they are involved. GCA analysis may provide an alternative analytical method to support differentiation and analysis of gene expression profiles characterising individual groups of patients. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study presents a fragment of pilot studies showing the reconstruction of the transverse arch of the foot using a specially constructed orthosis for this purpose. It involves the mechanical reinforcement of the effect by an orthosis, which pushes down the I, IV, and V metatarsal bones while elevating or blocking the fall of the near-immobile II and III metatarsal bones according to the "three-force" rule. The correction of the transverse arch of the foot runs simultaneously with the correction of hallux valgus (HV). As a result, the significant correction of HV and associated toe deformities was achieved. In stage I foot deformity, the reduction of HV was reduced from 19.1° before to 15.1° after putting on orthosis (p = 0.024). In stage II, the reduction was from 20.1° (before) to 16.2° (after; p = 0.032). Equally satisfactory results were obtained for the remaining angles of the metatarsal bones. In the future, the method can be suitable for patients undergoing preparation for corrective HV surgery and for maintaining postoperative HV results. It can be used preventively, for example, by women who frequently wear high-heeled shoes and by those who need to remain standing for prolonged periods of time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Background: Experimental observations classify the protein-folding process as a multi-step event. The backbone conformation has been experimentally recognized as responsible for the early-stage structural forms of a polypeptide. The sequence-to-structure and structure-to-sequence relation is critical for predicting protein structure. A contingency table representing this relation for tetrapeptides in their early-stage is presented. Their correlation seems to be essential in protein-folding simulation., Material/methods: The polypeptide chains of all the proteins in the Protein Data Bank were transformed into their early-stage structural forms. The tetrapeptide was selected as the structural unit. Tetrapetide sequences and structures were expressed by letter codes. The transformation of a contingency table of any size (here: 160,000x2401) to a 2x2 table performed for each non-zero cell of the original table allowed calculation of the rho-coefficient measuring the strength of the relation., Results: High values of the rho-coefficient extracted sequences of strong structural determinability and structures of high sequence selectivity. The web-site program to calculate the rho-coefficient ranking list was constructed to enable applying this method to any problem of contingency table analysis., Conclusions: The results revealed sequence-to-structure (and vice versa) correlation in early-stage folding. Surprisingly, the irregular structural forms of loops and bends appeared to be highly determined. Comparison of these results with another method based on information entropy revealed high accordance. The method oriented on interpretation of a large contingency table seems very useful especially for large-scale microarray analysis, a very popular technique in the post-genomic era.

Characteristics of 64 possible tandem trinucleotide repeats (TSSR) from Homo sapiens (hs), Mus musculus (mm) and Rattus norvegicus (rn) genomes are presented. Comparative analysis of TSSR frequency depending on their repetitiveness and similarity of the TSSR length distributions is shown. Comparative analysis of TSSR sequence motifs and association between type of motif and its length (n) using rho-coefficient method (quantitatively measuring the association between variables in contingency tables) is presented. These analyses were carried out in the context of neurodegenerative diseases based on trinucleotide tandems. The length of these tandems and their relation to other TSSR is estimated. It was found that the higher repetitiveness (n) the lower frequency of trinucleotides tandems. Differences between genomes under consideration, especially in longer than n=9 TSSR were discussed. A significantly higher frequency off A- and T-rich tandems is observed in the human genome (as well as in human mRNA). This observation also applies to mm and rn, although lower abundant in proportion to human genomes was found. The origin of elongation (or shortening) of TSSR seems to be neither frequency nor length dependent. The results of TSSR analysis presented in this work suggest that neurodegenerative disease-related microsatellites do not differ versus the other except the lower frequency versus the other TSSR. CAG occurs with relatively high frequency in human mRNA, although there are other TSSR with higher frequency that do not cause comparable disease disorders. It suggests that the mechanism of TSSR instability is not the only origin of neurodegenerative diseases.