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Metabolic changes in plants may serve as an early signal for infection in response to pathogen intrusions. In this study, metabolomic fingerprinting analysis was conducted on banana plantlets inocu...

Sickle cell anemia (SCA) is a hereditary blood disease caused by a single-gene mutation that affects millions of individuals world-wide. In this review, we focus on techniques to treat SCA by ex vivo genetic manipulation of hematopoietic stem/progenitor cells (HSPC), emphasizing replacement gene therapy and gene editing.Viral transduction of an anti-sickling β-like globin gene has been tested in pre-clinical and early-phase clinical studies, and shows promising preliminary results. Targeted editing of endogenous genes by site-directed nucleases has been developed more recently, and several approaches also are nearing clinical translation.The indications and timing of gene therapy for SCA in lieu of supportive care treatment and allogeneic hematopoietic cell transplantation are still undefined. In addition, ensuring access to the treatment where the disease is endemic will present important challenges that must be addressed. Nonetheless, gene therapy and gene editing techniques have transformative potential as a universal curative option in SCA.

Automotive image segmentation systems are becoming an important tool in the medical field for disease diagnosis. The white blood cell (WBC) segmentation is crucial, because it plays an important role in the determination of the diseases and helps experts to diagnose the blood disease disorders. The precise segmentation of the WBCs is quite challenging because of the complex contents in the bone marrow smears. In this paper, a novel neural network (NN) classifier is proposed for the classification of the bone marrow WBCs. The proposed NN classifier integrates the fractional gravitation search (FGS) algorithm for updating the weight in the radial basis function mapping for the classification of the WBC based on the cell nucleus feature. The experimentation of the proposed FGS-RBNN classifier is carried on the images collected from the publically available dataset. The performance of the proposed methodology is evaluated over the existing classifier approaches using the measures accuracy, sensitivity...

Hemoglobinopathies are one of the major problems in Pakistan. A retrospective analysis of blood samples of 2731 patients from 2010 to 2014 was done at National Institute of Blood Disease & Bone Marrow Transplantation for the workup of anemia or other blood-related disorders. Whole blood samples in EDTA were collected; complete blood counts with peripheral smears were prepared. Hemoglobin (Hb) electrophoresis on Genio was performed at alkaline pH. Samples showing borderline results were further tested by high-performance liquid chromatography or for specific mutation analysis by ARMS-PCR. Out of total 2731, 935 (34.2%) patients had hemoglobinopathies. Out of these 935 patients who had hemoglobinopathies, beta thalassemia minor 51.8%, beta thalassemia major 24.1%, HbD trait 6.7, sickle/beta thalassemia 4.5%, sickle cell disease 3.9%, HbE trait 1.9%, and sickle cell trait 1.7% were most common hemoglobinopathies. Less prevalent were delta/beta thalassemia, HbE homozygous, HbD homozygous, and HbH disease.

Fat emulsions may be used to satisfy caloric requirements when complete parenteral alimentation is necessary. Indications for fat infusion include preoperative and postoperative states, burns, severe enteritides, forms of cachexia, ulcerative colitis, prolonged unconsciousness, and renal insufficiency. Contraindications are pathologic hyperlipemia, liver damage, and blood disease with coagulation disturbance.