A scoping review of successful strategies for passing the American Board of Surgery certifying examination.

Background: This scoping review identifies existing literature that investigates what factors contribute to success on the American Board of Surgery (ABS) Certifying Exam (CE) to provide practical, evidence-based recommendations. Methods: A Pubmed search was completed utilizing the preferred reporting items for systematic reviews and meta-analysis extension for scoping review (PRISMA-ScR) method. Results: Of 4368 articles identified, 45 articles met criteria for review. Manuscripts were placed into one of five categories: predictors from medical school, program interventions, modifiable candidate factors, the effect of mock oral exams, and those factors shown not to provide benefit for CE preparation. Conclusions: A variety of factors have either been shown to provide benefit for or be predictive of CE performance. Acknowledgement of these factors can provide benefit to both surgery residents as well as surgery programs. Despite these findings, research into these factors is generally of low quality, prompting the need for ongoing, high-quality investigations.

A chloroplast protein atlas reveals punctate structures and spatial organization of biosynthetic pathways.

Chloroplasts are eukaryotic photosynthetic organelles that drive the global carbon cycle. Despite their importance, our understanding of their protein composition, function, and spatial organization remains limited. Here, we determined the localizations of 1,034 candidate chloroplast proteins using fluorescent protein tagging in the model alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii. The localizations provide insights into the functions of poorly characterized proteins; identify novel components of nucleoids, plastoglobules, and the pyrenoid; and reveal widespread protein targeting to multiple compartments. We discovered and further characterized cellular organizational features, including eleven chloroplast punctate structures, cytosolic crescent structures, and unexpected spatial distributions of enzymes within the chloroplast. We also used machine learning to predict the localizations of other nuclear-encoded Chlamydomonas proteins. The strains and localization atlas developed here will serve as a resource to accelerate studies of chloroplast architecture and functions.

Guanine-based structural coloration as an indicator of oxidative stress in a cichlid fish.

Vertebrate pigmentation is known to be influenced by oxidative stress, but few studies have tested the hypothesis that structural coloration can be similarly affected. We tested whether fish iridophores, which produce structural color using guanine stacks, might be affected by the prooxidant-antioxidant balance of the animal. Specifically, we hypothesized that convict cichlids (Amatitlania nigrofasciata) metabolize guanine present in iridophores to uric acid, an antioxidant, in response to oxidative damage. We used Hunter's contrast gloss and high performance liquid chromatography to determine whether dietary guanine supplementation allows fish to maintain their structural coloration despite oxidative stress induced via ultraviolet-B (UV-B) radiation. We found that dietary guanine was associated with greater skin gloss, and that exposure to UV-B light reduced glossiness. UV-B exposure did not increase oxidative damage (acrolein) or total antioxidant capacity in the skin or liver. Our experiment did not detect effects of dietary guanine or UV-B light on uric acid, but uric acid was positively related to antioxidant capacity. Our results support the hypothesis that structural color in fish may be altered by environmental stressors such as exposure to UV light, and highlight the need for future studies to consider the role of iridophores in condition-dependent visual signaling.

Dynamically optimizing experiment schedules of a laboratory robot system with simulated annealing.

A scheduler has been developed for an integrated laboratory robot system that operates in an always-on mode. The integrated system is designed for imaging plates containing protein crystallization experiments, and it allows crystallographers to enter plates at any time and request that they be imaged at multiple time points in the future. The scheduler must rearrange tasks within the time it takes to image one plate, trading off the quality of the schedule for the speed of the computation. For this reason, the scheduler was based on a simulated annealing algorithm with an objective function that makes use of a linear programming solver. To optimize the scheduler, extensive computational simulations were performed involving a difficult but representative scheduling problem. The simulations explore multiple configurations of the simulated annealing algorithm, including both geometric and adaptive annealing schedules, 3 neighborhood functions, and 20 neighborhood diameters. An optimal configuration was found that produced the best results in less than 60 seconds, well within the window necessary to dynamically reschedule imaging tasks as new plates are entered into the system.

Conserved core substructures in the overlay of protein-ligand complexes.

The method of conserved core substructure matching (CSM) for the overlay of protein-ligand complexes is described. The method relies upon distance geometry to align structurally similar substructures without regard to sequence similarity onto substructures from a reference protein empirically selected to include key determinants of binding site location and geometry. The error in ligand position is reduced in reoriented ensembles generated with CSM when compared to other overlay methods. Since CSM can only succeed when the selected core substructure is geometrically conserved, misalignments only rarely occur. The method may be applied to reliably overlay large numbers of protein-ligand complexes in a way that optimizes ligand position at a specific binding site or subsite or to align structures from large and diverse protein families where the conserved binding site is localized to only a small portion of either protein. Core substructures may be complex and must be chosen with care. We have created a database of empirically selected core substructures to demonstrate the utility of CSM alignment of ligand binding sites in important drug targets. A Web-based interface can be used to apply CSM to align large collections of protein-ligand complexes for use in drug design using these substructures or to evaluate the use of alternative core substructures that may then be shared with the larger user community. Examples show the benefit of CSM in the practice of structure-based drug design.