Complete Genome Sequences of Microbacterium paraoxydans Phages Cassita and Fransoyer.

Phages Cassita and Fransoyer were isolated from soil in northwestern Wisconsin using Microbacterium paraoxydans as the host. The genomes of Cassita and Fransoyer are 61,868 bp and 62,277 bp, respectively, with direct terminal repeats. Both phages exhibit siphoviral morphology and are predicted to have lytic life cycles.

Preliminary Findings of Single- and Multifocused Epileptiform Discharges in Nonepileptic Psychiatric Patients.

Epileptiform discharges (EDs) in nonepileptic populations remain controversial as to their role in psychopathology. Previous studies have unsuccessfully attempted to correlate specific waveforms of EDs, defined by duration and morphology, with broad diagnostic categories such as depression and anxiety. These diagnostic categories often include heterogeneous patient populations, with potentially divergent biological underpinnings of clinical presentation. This study examined epileptiform activities as a single phenomenon, identifying the relationships between distribution patterns of EDs and endorsement of clinical symptoms across affective, cognitive, and somatic domains. In a sample of 71 nonepileptic psychiatric patients, those with EDs appearing in homologous electrode pairs endorsed significantly fewer symptoms related to affective deregulation. These patients were also significantly less likely to endorse a history of severe symptomatology, including suicidal ideation/previous attempt, self-injurious behavior, psychoses or dissociation, and previous psychiatric hospitalization. Conversely, patients with isolated EDs focused to a single brain region endorsed greater affective deregulation and severe clinical symptoms. These findings offer new possibilities regarding the potentially protective role that EDs may play when distributed across hemispheres, particularly in light of recent theories exploring functional connectivity of neuronal networks.

Conscious attention, meditation, and bilateral information transfer.

Recent findings indicate that conscious attention is related to large-scale information integration of various brain regions, including both hemispheres, that enables integration of parallel distributed modalities of processed information. There is also evidence that the level of information transference related to integration or splitting among brain regions, and between hemispheres, establishes a certain level of efficiency of the information processing. The level of information transference also may have modulatory influences on attentional capacity that are closely linked to the emotional arousal and autonomic response related to a stimulus. These findings suggest a hypothesis that changes in conscious attention, specifically during meditation could be reflected in the autonomic activity as the left-right information transference calculated from bilateral electrodermal activity (EDA). With the aim to compare conscious attention during meditation with other attentional states (resting state, Stroop task, and memory task), we performed bilateral EDA measurement in 7 healthy persons during resting state, Stroop task, neurofeedback memory test, and meditation. The results indicate that the information transference (ie, transinformation) is able to distinguish those attentional states, and that the highest level of the transinformation has been found during attentional processing related to meditation, indicating higher level of connectivity between left and right sides. Calculations other than pointwise transinformation (PTI) performed on EDA records, such as mean skin conductance level or laterality index, were not able to distinguish attentional states. The results suggest that PTI may present an interesting method useful for the assessment of information flow, related to neural functioning, that in the case of meditation may reflect typical integrative changes in the autonomic nervous system related to brain functions and focused attentional processing.