Rejuvenating the Activity of Usual Antibiotics on Resistant Gram-Negative Bacteria: Recent Issues and Perspectives.

Antibiotic resistance continues to evolve and spread beyond all boundaries, resulting in an increase in morbidity and mortality for non-curable infectious diseases. Due to the failure of conventional antimicrobial therapy and the lack of introduction of a novel class of antibiotics, novel strategies have recently emerged to combat these multidrug-resistant infectious microorganisms. In this review, we highlight the development of effective antibiotic combinations and of antibiotics with non-antibiotic activity-enhancing compounds to address the widespread emergence of antibiotic-resistant strains.

A new automated multi-stage system of non-local means and multi-kernel adaptive filtering techniques for EEG noise and artifacts suppression.

Context.Electroencephalography (EEG) signals are contaminated with diverse types of noises and artifacts, which greatly distort EEG recording and increase the difficulty in obtaining accurate diagnosis.Objective.This paper investigates, for the first time, multi-kernel normalized least mean square with coherence-based sparsification (MKNLMS-CS) algorithm for suppressing different artifact components, and the 1D patch-based non-local means (NLM) algorithm for eliminating white and colored noises.Approach.A novel multi-stage system based on combining the NLM algorithm with the MKNLMS-CS algorithm is proposed for eliminating different noise and artifact sources by targeting each noise or artifact component in a single stage.Main Results.The proposed approach is applied to clinical real EEG data, and the results reveal the superior performance of the proposed system in removing white and colored noises, suppressing different artifact components, preserving the important and tiny features of the original EEG signal, and keeping the morphology of EEG frequency components.Significance.The proposed multi-stage design succeeds not only to suppress different artifact components and noise sources under low and high noise conditions, but also to achieve accurate sleep spindle detection from the filtered high-quality EEG signals. This demonstrates the usefulness of the proposed approach for obtaining high-resolution EEG signal from noisy and contaminated EEG recordings.

Diagnostic value of smoothelin and vimentin in differentiating muscularis propria from muscularis mucosa of bladder carcinoma.

BACKGROUND: Determination of the extent of involvement or pathological staging is one of the requirements for adequate evaluation of bladder cancer specimens. Therefore, the differentiation between MP and MM is essential for proper treatment and avoiding over or under staging. AIM: The present study aimed at evaluation of diagnostic value of smoothelin and vimentin expression both singly and in combination for differentiation between MM and MP. METHODS: This study was carried out on 59 cystectomy specimens of primary bladder carcinoma and eleven cystoscopic biopsies for non-neoplastic bladder lesions (cystitis). RESULTS: Histologically, MM was identified clearly in 40 cases and MP was identified in all 70 examined cases. The cases were immunostained for smoothelin and vimentin. Intensity of smoothelin expression showed significant difference (P = 0.001) between MM and MP with 97.5% sensitivity and 95% specificity and the percentage of smoothelin expression was significantly higher in MP compared to MM (P = 0.001) with 95.7% sensitivity and 85% specificity (using 65% as cut-off point). Vimentin was negative in MP and showed positive expression in 32 cases (80%) of MM with a statistical significant difference (P = 0.001) providing 80% sensitivity and 100% specificity. Combined moderate to strong smoothelin and negative vimentin offered 100% sensitivity and 100% specificity towards the identification of MP. CONCLUSIONS: Differentiation of MM from MP can be made based on histopathological criteria, which are unfortunately overlapping in many cases. Moderate to strong smoothelin expression with negative vimentin could be very helpful procedure in difficult and overlapping cases with a high diagnostic validity.

Positional assignment of differentially substituted bisaminoacylated pdCpAs.

The synthesis and NMR analysis of a 2'-O-alanyl, 3'-O-[1-(13)C]valyl-pdCpA derivative has permitted the definitive assignment of the positions of acylation of tandemly activated pdCpAs, and the bisaminoacylated transfer RNAs derived therefrom.