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Background: Awareness and proper practice of sterilization and disinfection protocols can significantly reduce the risk of infection transmission associated with the use of invasive and noninvasive medical and surgical devices. Lack of knowledge and failure to comply with scientifically based guidelines has led to numerous outbreaks of lethal diseases like HIV, Hepatitis B and C as well as transmission of various bacterial infections. Material and Methods: A descriptive cross sectional study conducted among medical students and healthcare workers using a self administered questioner which was designed to assess the awareness of sterilization and disinfection among medical students, paramedical staff and doctors in a public sector hospital in Karachi. Results: Th e sample size and response rate were 356 and 100% respectively. Th e respondents included 66 doctors, 122 paramedics and 168 medical students. About 58.3% medical students and 62.1% doctors knew the difference between sterilization and disinfection but only 37.7% paramedics were aware of the difference. 79.8% medical students, 69.7% doctors and 60.7% paramedics had received the complete regimen of any vaccine. Overall, the awareness proportion of paramedical staff was significantly lower than doctors and medical students. Conclusion: Our results show that awareness of healthcare workers regarding sterilization and disinfection is not up to the mark. Many of them have not received the complete regimen of HBV vaccine. Th ere is therefore substantial need for the education and training programs to equip the healthcare workers with awareness and knowledge regarding sterilization and disinfection protocols. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The cytoplasmic dynein light chain 1 (DYNLL1) is an important constituent of motor proteins complex. In human it is encoded by DYNLL1 gene. It is involved in cargo transport functions and interacts with many viral proteins with the help of short linear consensus motif sequence (K/R) XTQT. Viral proteins bind to DYNLL1 through its consensus short linear motif (SLiM) sequence to reach the target site in the cell and cause different infections in the host. It is still unknown if bacterial proteins also contain the same conserved SLiMs sequence through which they bind to this motor protein and cause infections. So, it is important to investigate the role of DYNLL1 in human bacterial infections. The interaction partner proteins of DYNLL1 against conserved viral motif sequences were predicted through PDBSum. Pairwise sequence alignment, between viral motif sequence and that of predicted proteins, was performed to identify conserved region in predicted interaction partners. Docking between the DYNLL1 and new pathogenic interaction partners was performed, by using PatchDock, to explore the protein-protein binding quality. Interactions of docked complexes were visualized by DimPlot. Three pathogenic bacterial proteins i.e., enterochelin esterase (3MGA), protective antigen (3J9C) and putative lipoprotein (4KT3) were selected as candidate interaction partners of DYNLL1. The putative lipoprotein (4KT3) showed low quality binding with DYNLL1. So, enterochelin esterase (3MGA) and protective antigen (3J9C) were speculated to be involved in human bacterial infections by using DYNLL1 to reach their target sites. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The double-exchange model describing interactions of itinerant electrons with localized spins is usually used to explain ferromagnetism in metals. We show that for a variety of crystal lattices of different dimensionalities and for a wide range of model parameters, the ferromagnetic state is unstable against a noncollinear spiral magnetic order. We revisit the phase diagram of the double-exchange model on a triangular lattice and show in a large part of the diagram the incommensurate spiral state has a lower energy than the previously discussed commensurate states. These results indicate that double-exchange systems are inherently frustrated and can host unconventional spin orders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Helimagnets realize an effective lamellar ordering that supports disclination and dislocation defects. Here, we investigate the micromagnetic structure of screw dislocation lines in cubic chiral magnets using analytical and numerical methods. The far field of these dislocations is universal and classified by an integer strength ν that quantifies its Burgers vector. We demonstrate that a rich variety of dislocation-core structures can be realized even for the same strength ν. In particular, the magnetization at the core can be either smooth or singular. We present a specific example with ν=1 for which the core is composed of a chain of singular Bloch points. In general, screw dislocations carry a noninteger but finite skyrmion charge so that they can be efficiently manipulated by spin currents and should contribute to the topological Hall effect.