A new approach for the separation of spermatozoa from other cell types in forensically relevant samples.

Due to imbalance in genetic material contribution, gynecological samples collected following a sexual assault are challenging to process in order to resolve the male contributor's DNA profile. We set up a new and fast procedure for the recovery and separation of cells from cotton swabs, or other supports. Using spermatozoa specific CD52 antibody coupled to magnetic beads along with magnetic columns, this procedure was first developed and optimized by flow cytometry. It allows the recovery of two enriched cell fractions: a sperm fraction, mostly enriched with the alleged offender's spermatozoa, and a non-sperm fraction, mostly enriched with cells from the victim. Processing fresh as well as six months old mock samples, made of buccal swabs loaded with sperm dilutions, resulted in full single NGM SElect DNA profiles of the sperm donors, respectively the epithelial cells donors, for the sperm and the non-sperm fractions. Untreated duplicate samples processed in parallel only provided the autosomal DNA profiles of the epithelial cells donors. This new procedure can be rapidly tested and adopted by forensic laboratories worldwide as it uses material already commercially available. Moreover it can be easily automated with existing platform, and could therefore provide a mean to rapidly reduce existing backlogs.

Capillarity and fibre types in locomotory muscles of wild yellow-legged gulls (Larus cachinnans)

This study analyzes the capillarity and fibre-type distribution of six locomotory muscles of gulls. The morphological basis and the oxygen supply characteristics of the skeletal muscle of a species with a marked pattern of gliding flight are established, thus contributing to a better understanding of the physiology of a kind of flight with low energetic requirements. The four wing muscles studied (scapulotriceps, pectoralis, scapulohumeralis, and extensor metacarpi) exhibited higher percentages of fast oxidative glycolytic fibres (>70%) and lower percentages of slow oxidative fibres (<16%) than the muscles involved in nonflight locomotion (gastrocnemius and iliotibialis). Capillary densities ranged from 816 to 1,233 capillaries mm(-2), having the highest value in the pectoralis. In this muscle, the fast oxidative glycolytic fibres had moderate staining for succinate dehydrogenase and relatively large fibre sizes, as deduced from the low fibre densities (589-665 fibres mm(-2)). All these findings are seen as an adaptive response for gliding, when the wing is held outstretched by isometric contractions. The leg muscles studied included a considerable population of slow oxidative fibres (>14% in many regions), which suggests that they are adapted to postural activities. Regional variations in the relative distributions of fibre types in muscle gastrocnemius may reflect different functional demands placed on this muscle during terrestrial and aquatic locomotion. The predominance of oxidative fibres and capillary densities under 1,000 capillaries mm(-2) in leg muscles is probably a consequence of an adaptation for slow swimming and maintenance of the posture on land rather than for other locomotory capabilities, such as endurance or sprint activities.

Effects of Three Types of Exercise Interventions on Healthy Old Adults' Gait Speed : A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.

BACKGROUND: Habitual walking speed predicts many clinical conditions later in life, but it declines with age. However, which particular exercise intervention can minimize the age-related gait speed loss is unclear. PURPOSE: Our objective was to determine the effects of strength, power, coordination, and multimodal exercise training on healthy old adults' habitual and fast gait speed. METHODS: We performed a computerized systematic literature search in PubMed and Web of Knowledge from January 1984 up to December 2014. Search terms included 'Resistance training', 'power training', 'coordination training', 'multimodal training', and 'gait speed (outcome term). Inclusion criteria were articles available in full text, publication period over past 30 years, human species, journal articles, clinical trials, randomized controlled trials, English as publication language, and subject age ≥65 years. The methodological quality of all eligible intervention studies was assessed using the Physiotherapy Evidence Database (PEDro) scale. We computed weighted average standardized mean differences of the intervention-induced adaptations in gait speed using a random-effects model and tested for overall and individual intervention effects relative to no-exercise controls. RESULTS: A total of 42 studies (mean PEDro score of 5.0 ± 1.2) were included in the analyses (2495 healthy old adults; age 74.2 years [64.4-82.7]; body mass 69.9 ± 4.9 kg, height 1.64 ± 0.05 m, body mass index 26.4 ± 1.9 kg/m(2), and gait speed 1.22 ± 0.18 m/s). The search identified only one power training study, therefore the subsequent analyses focused only on the effects of resistance, coordination, and multimodal training on gait speed. The three types of intervention improved gait speed in the three experimental groups combined (n = 1297) by 0.10 m/s (±0.12) or 8.4 % (±9.7), with a large effect size (ES) of 0.84. Resistance (24 studies; n = 613; 0.11 m/s; 9.3 %; ES: 0.84), coordination (eight studies, n = 198; 0.09 m/s; 7.6 %; ES: 0.76), and multimodal training (19 studies; n = 486; 0.09 m/s; 8.4 %, ES: 0.86) increased gait speed statistically and similarly. CONCLUSIONS: Commonly used exercise interventions can functionally and clinically increase habitual and fast gait speed and help slow the loss of gait speed or delay its onset.

The determinants of contractual choice for private involvement in infrastructure projects in the United States

Reliance on private partners to help provide infrastructure investment and service delivery is increasing in the United States. Numerous studies have examined the determinants of the degree of private participation in infrastructure projects as governed by contract type. We depart from this simple public/private dichotomy by examining a rich set of contractual arrangements. We utilize both municipal and state-level data on 472 projects of various types completed between 1985 and 2008. Our estimates indicate that infrastructure characteristics, particularly those that reflect stand alone versus network characteristics, are key factors influencing the extent of private participation. Fiscal variables, such as a jurisdiction’s relative debt level, and basic controls, such as population and locality of government, increase the degree of private participation, while a greater tax burden reduces private participation.

Dual-Energy CT: Basic Principles, Technical Approaches, and Applications in Musculoskeletal Imaging (Part 1).

In recent years, technological advances have allowed manufacturers to implement dual-energy computed tomography (DECT) on clinical scanners. With its unique ability to differentiate basis materials by their atomic number, DECT has opened new perspectives in imaging. DECT has been used successfully in musculoskeletal imaging with applications ranging from detection, characterization, and quantification of crystal and iron deposits; to simulation of noncalcium (improving the visualization of bone marrow lesions) or noniodine images. Furthermore, the data acquired with DECT can be postprocessed to generate monoenergetic images of varying kiloelectron volts, providing new methods for image contrast optimization as well as metal artifact reduction. The first part of this article reviews the basic principles and technical aspects of DECT including radiation dose considerations. The second part focuses on applications of DECT to musculoskeletal imaging including gout and other crystal-induced arthropathies, virtual noncalcium images for the study of bone marrow lesions, the study of collagenous structures, applications in computed tomography arthrography, as well as the detection of hemosiderin and metal particles.

Handover aspects in Unlicensed Mobile Access Technology

Fixed Mobile Convergence is the recent buzz in the field of telecommunication technology. Unlicensed Mobile Access (UMA) technology is a realistic implementation of Fixed Mobile Convergence. UMA involves communication between different types of networks. Handover is a very important issue in UMA. The study is an analysis of theoretical handover mechanism and practical test results. It includes a new proposal for handover performance test in UMA. It also provides an overview of basic handover operation on different scenarios in UMA. The practical test involves an experiment on handover performance test using network analyzers. The new proposal provides a different approach for an experimental setting on handover performance test without using network analyzers. The approach is not be implemented because of some technical problem in a network equipment in UMA. The analysis of the test results reveals that time of handover between UMA and Global System for Mobile Communication (GSM) network is similar to time of handover between inter base station controller (BSC) handover in GSM networks. The new approach is simple and provides measurement at the end point communicating entities. The study gives a general understanding of handover operation, an analysis of handover performance in UMA and specifically provides a new approach useful for further study of handover in different real world environments and scenarios.

Dual-Energy CT: Basic Principles, Technical Approaches, and Applications in Musculoskeletal Imaging (Part 2).

In recent years, technological advances have allowed manufacturers to implement dual-energy computed tomography (DECT) on clinical scanners. With its unique ability to differentiate basis materials by their atomic number, DECT has opened new perspectives in imaging. DECT has been successfully used in musculoskeletal imaging with applications ranging from detection, characterization, and quantification of crystal and iron deposits, to simulation of noncalcium (improving the visualization of bone marrow lesions) or noniodine images. Furthermore, the data acquired with DECT can be postprocessed to generate monoenergetic images of varying kiloelectron volts, providing new methods for image contrast optimization as well as metal artifact reduction. The first part of this article reviews the basic principles and technical aspects of DECT including radiation dose considerations. The second part focuses on applications of DECT to musculoskeletal imaging including gout and other crystal-induced arthropathies, virtual noncalcium images for the study of bone marrow lesions, the study of collagenous structures, applications in computed tomography arthrography, as well as the detection of hemosiderin and metal particles.

Genetic associations at 53 loci highlight cell types and biological pathways relevant for kidney function.

Reduced glomerular filtration rate defines chronic kidney disease and is associated with cardiovascular and all-cause mortality. We conducted a meta-analysis of genome-wide association studies for estimated glomerular filtration rate (eGFR), combining data across 133,413 individuals with replication in up to 42,166 individuals. We identify 24 new and confirm 29 previously identified loci. Of these 53 loci, 19 associate with eGFR among individuals with diabetes. Using bioinformatics, we show that identified genes at eGFR loci are enriched for expression in kidney tissues and in pathways relevant for kidney development and transmembrane transporter activity, kidney structure, and regulation of glucose metabolism. Chromatin state mapping and DNase I hypersensitivity analyses across adult tissues demonstrate preferential mapping of associated variants to regulatory regions in kidney but not extra-renal tissues. These findings suggest that genetic determinants of eGFR are mediated largely through direct effects within the kidney and highlight important cell types and biological pathways.

Lexical Influences on Spoken Spondaic Word Recognition in Hearing-Impaired Patients.

Top-down contextual influences play a major part in speech understanding, especially in hearing-impaired patients with deteriorated auditory input. Those influences are most obvious in difficult listening situations, such as listening to sentences in noise but can also be observed at the word level under more favorable conditions, as in one of the most commonly used tasks in audiology, i.e., repeating isolated words in silence. This study aimed to explore the role of top-down contextual influences and their dependence on lexical factors and patient-specific factors using standard clinical linguistic material. Spondaic word perception was tested in 160 hearing-impaired patients aged 23-88 years with a four-frequency average pure-tone threshold ranging from 21 to 88 dB HL. Sixty spondaic words were randomly presented at a level adjusted to correspond to a speech perception score ranging between 40 and 70% of the performance intensity function obtained using monosyllabic words. Phoneme and whole-word recognition scores were used to calculate two context-influence indices (the j factor and the ratio of word scores to phonemic scores) and were correlated with linguistic factors, such as the phonological neighborhood density and several indices of word occurrence frequencies. Contextual influence was greater for spondaic words than in similar studies using monosyllabic words, with an overall j factor of 2.07 (SD = 0.5). For both indices, context use decreased with increasing hearing loss once the average hearing loss exceeded 55 dB HL. In right-handed patients, significantly greater context influence was observed for words presented in the right ears than for words presented in the left, especially in patients with many years of education. The correlations between raw word scores (and context influence indices) and word occurrence frequencies showed a significant age-dependent effect, with a stronger correlation between perception scores and word occurrence frequencies when the occurrence frequencies were based on the years corresponding to the patients' youth, showing a "historic" word frequency effect. This effect was still observed for patients with few years of formal education, but recent occurrence frequencies based on current word exposure had a stronger influence for those patients, especially for younger ones.

A Virtual Laboratory Structure for Developing Programming Labs

Virtual Laboratories are an indispensablespace for developing practical activities in a Virtual Environment. In the field of Computer and Software Engineering different types of practical activities have tobe performed in order to obtain basic competences which are impossible to achieve by other means. This paper specifies an ontology for a general virtual laboratory.The proposed ontology provides a mechanism to select the best resources needed in a Virtual Laboratory once a specific practical activity has been defined and the maincompetences that students have to achieve in the learning process have been fixed. Furthermore, the proposed ontology can be used to develop an automatic and wizardtool that creates a Moodle Classroom using the practical activity specification and the related competences.

Lateral gene exchanges shape the genomes of amoeba-resisting microorganisms.

Based on Darwin's concept of the tree of life, vertical inheritance was thought to be dominant, and mutations, deletions, and duplication were streaming the genomes of living organisms. In the current genomic era, increasing data indicated that both vertical and lateral gene inheritance interact in space and time to trigger genome evolution, particularly among microorganisms sharing a given ecological niche. As a paradigm to their diversity and their survival in a variety of cell types, intracellular microorganisms, and notably intracellular bacteria, were considered as less prone to lateral genetic exchanges. Such specialized microorganisms generally have a smaller gene repertoire because they do rely on their host's factors for some basic regulatory and metabolic functions. Here we review events of lateral gene transfer (LGT) that illustrate the genetic exchanges among intra-amoebal microorganisms or between the microorganism and its amoebal host. We tentatively investigate the functions of laterally transferred genes in the light of the interaction with their host as they should confer a selective advantage and success to the amoeba-resisting microorganisms (ARMs).

Semantic domain and grammatical class effects in the picture-word interference paradigm

The role of grammatical class in lexical access and representation is still not well understood. Grammatical effects obtained in picture-word interference experiments have been argued to show the operation of grammatical constraints during lexicalization when syntactic integration is required by the task. Alternative views hold that the ostensibly grammatical effects actually derive from the coincidence of semantic and grammatical differences between lexical candidates. We present three picture-word interference experiments conducted in Spanish. In the first two, the semantic relatedness (related or unrelated) and the grammatical class (nouns or verbs) of the target and the distracter were manipulated in an infinitive form action naming task in order to disentangle their contributions to verb lexical access. In the third experiment, a possible confound between grammatical class and semantic domain (objects or actions) was eliminated by using action-nouns as distracters. A condition in which participants were asked to name the action pictures using an inflected form of the verb was also included to explore whether the need of syntactic integration modulated the appearance of grammatical effects. Whereas action-words (nouns or verbs), but not object-nouns, produced longer reaction times irrespective of their grammatical class in the infinitive condition, only verbs slowed latencies in the inflected form condition. Our results suggest that speech production relies on the exclusion of candidate responses that do not fulfil task-pertinent criteria like membership in the appropriate semantic domain or grammatical class. Taken together, these findings are explained by a response-exclusion account of speech output. This and alternative hypotheses are discussed.