Advance directive

BACKGROUND AND AIMS: Diabetic Foot Ulcers (DFUs) are a significant health concern, particularly in Low- and Middle-Income Countries (LMICs). This review explores key strategies for managing DFUs in LMICs, including integrating podiatry, endocrinology, and wound care services, educating patients, promoting self-care, and preventive measures to reduce amputation rates. METHODS: A comprehensive literature review was conducted, focusing on studies conducted in Low and Middle Income Countries to facilitate a qualitative analysis...

Advancement in additive manufacturing (AM) allows the production of nanocomposites with complex and custom geometries not typically allowable with conventional manufacturing techniques. The benefits of AM have led to recent interest in producing multifunctional materials capable of being printed with current AM technologies. In this article, piezoresistive composites realized by AM and the matrices and fillers utilized to make such devices are introduced and discussed. Carbon-based nanoparticles (Carbon Nanotubes, Graphene/Graphite, and Carbon Black) are often the filler choice of most researchers and are heavily discussed throughout this review in combination with extrusion AM methods...

Ticks and tick-borne diseases (TBD) are a growing threat for human and animal health worldwide with high incidence in African countries such as Uganda where it affects cattle health and production. Considering recent advances in bibliometric analysis, in this review we used a bibliometric descriptive approach for the analysis of publications and patents in the fields of ticks, TBD, and vaccines in Uganda. The results showed that major gaps and limitations are associated with (i) low contributions from Ugandan institutions, (ii) limited international collaborations, (iii) poor impact of translational research, and (iv) little research on tick control vaccines...

Biological barriers such as the blood-brain barrier, skin, and intestinal mucosal barrier play key roles in homeostasis, disease physiology, and drug delivery - as such, it is important to create representative in vitro models to improve understanding of barrier biology and serve as tools for therapeutic development. Microfluidic cell culture and organ-on-a-chip (OOC) systems enable barrier modelling with greater physiological fidelity than conventional platforms by mimicking key environmental aspects such as fluid shear, accurate microscale dimensions, mechanical cues, extracellular matrix, and geometrically defined co-culture...

Proteolysis targeting chimeras (PROTACs) have emerged as a promising strategy for drug discovery and exploring protein functions, offering a revolutionary therapeutic modality. Currently, the predominant approach to PROTACs discovery mainly relies on an empirical design-synthesis-evaluation process involving numerous cycles of labor-intensive synthesis-purification and bioassay data collection. Therefore, the development of innovative methods to expedite PROTAC synthesis and exploration of chemical space remains highly desired...

BACKGROUND: The Advanced Plant Experiment-04 - Epigenetic Expression (APEX-04-EpEx) experiment onboard the International Space Station examined the spaceflight-altered cytosine methylation in two genetic lines of Arabidopsis thaliana, wild-type Col-0 and the mutant elp2-5, which is deficient in an epigenetic regulator Elongator Complex Subunit 2 (ELP2). Whole-genome bisulfite sequencing (WGBS) revealed distinct spaceflight associated methylation differences, presenting the need to explore specific space-altered methylation at single-molecule resolution to associate specific changes over large regions of spaceflight related genes...

CO2 is 45 to 50 times more concentrated in soil than in air, resulting in global diffusive fluxes that outpace fossil fuel combustion by an order of magnitude. Despite the scale of soil CO2 emissions, soil-based climate change mitigation strategies are underdeveloped. Existing approaches, such as enhanced weathering and sustainable land management, show promise but continue to face deployment barriers. We introduce an alternative approach: the use of solid adsorbents to directly capture CO2 in soils. Biomass-derived adsorbents could exploit favorable soil CO2 adsorption thermodynamics while also sequestering solid carbon...

PURPOSE: There has been a UK national directive to ensure that patients are offered reconstructive surgical options. We aimed to assess any change in oncoplastic practice over a 10-year period. METHODS: The surgical management of 7019 breast cancers was retrospectively assessed at Nightingale Breast Centre, Manchester University UK, from 2010 to 2019. The procedures were categorised into breast conservative surgery (BCS) and mastectomy ± immediate reconstruction...

Ischemia-reperfusion injury (IRI) poses significant challenges across various organ systems, including the heart, brain, and kidneys. Exosomes have shown great potentials and applications in mitigating IRI-induced cell and tissue damage through modulating inflammatory responses, enhancing angiogenesis, and promoting tissue repair. Despite these advances, a more systematic understanding of exosomes from different sources and their biotransport is critical for optimizing therapeutic efficacy and accelerating the clinical adoption of exosomes for IRI therapies...

INTRODUCTION: Accelerometers are devices commonly used to measure human physical activity and sedentary time. Accelerometer capabilities and analytical techniques have evolved rapidly, making it difficult for researchers to keep track of advances and best practices for data processing and analysis. OBJECTIVE: The objective of this scoping review is to determine the existing methods for analyzing accelerometer data for capturing human movement which have been validated against the criterion measure of direct observation...


Most deep neural network-based diffusion tensor imaging methods require the diffusion gradients' number and directions in the data to be reconstructed to match those in the training data. This work aims to develop and evaluate a novel dynamic-convolution-based method called FlexDTI for highly efficient diffusion tensor reconstruction with flexible diffusion encoding gradient scheme.
Approach:
FlexDTI was developed to achieve high-quality DTI parametric mapping with flexible number and directions of diffusion encoding gradients...

Humans select vegetable crops with desirable traits via a complex evolutionary process called domestication, generating a variety of cultivars worldwide. With advances in sequencing technologies, genomic scans for "signatures of selection" are widely used to identify target loci of selection. In the early phases of domestication, humans tended to favor similar sets of phenotypes in diverse crops, resulting in "domestication syndrome" and parallel evolution in multiple species. Subsequently, adaptation to distinct environments or different consumer preferences have diversified crop cultivars...

BACKGROUND: Advance healthcare decision-making presumes that a prior treatment preference expressed with sufficient mental capacity ("T1 preference") should trump a contrary preference expressed after significant cognitive decline ("T2 preference"). This assumption is much debated in normative bioethics, but little is known about lay judgments in this domain. This study investigated participants' judgments about which preference should be followed, and whether these judgments differed depending on a first-person (deciding for one's future self) versus third-person (deciding for a friend or stranger) perspective...

Chronic rhinosinusitis (CRS) is a heterogenic disease characterized by persistent mucosal inflammation of the upper airway. Researches of CRS have progressed from phenotype-based to endotype-based, looking more deeply into molecular biomarkers, signaling pathways, and immune microenvironment. Single-cell RNA sequencing is an effective tool in analyzing composition, function, and interaction of cells in disease microenvironment at transcriptome level, showing great advantage in analyzing potential biomarkers, pathogenesis, and heterogeneity of chronic airway inflammation in an unbiased manner...

OBJECTIVE: This study compared the effect of two frequencies of direct cold atmospheric plasma (direct-CAP) treatment with standard of care (SOC) alone on healing of venous leg ulcers (VLUs). APPROACH: Open-label, randomized controlled trial (ClinicalTrials.gov: NCT04922463) on chronic VLUs at two home care organizations in the Netherlands. All three groups received SOC for 12 weeks or until healing. Additionally, treatment groups received direct-CAP once (1x direct-CAP) or twice (2x direct-CAP) a week, at specialized wound care facilities and the patients' residences...

The rapid and effective identification of pathogens in patients with pulmonary infections has posed a persistent challenge in medicine, with conventional microbiological tests (CMTs) proving time-consuming and less sensitive, hindering early diagnosis of respiratory infections. While there has been some research on the clinical performance of targeted sequencing technologies, limited focus has been directed toward bronchoalveolar lavage fluid (BALF). This study primarily evaluates the pathogen detection capabilities of nanopore-targeted sequencing (NTS) in BALF, providing a comprehensive analysis...

Three-dimensional (3D) microfabrication techniques play a crucial role across various research fields. These techniques enable the creation of functional 3D structures on the microscale, unlocking possibilities for diverse applications. However, conventional fabrication methods have limits in producing complex 3D structures, which require numerous fabrication steps that increase the costs. Graphene is an atomically thin material known for its deformability and impermeability to small gases and molecules, including reactive gases like XeF2 ...

PURPOSE OF REVIEW: Advancements in antiretroviral therapy (ART) have positively impacted the life expectancy and possibility of living a normal life for people with HIV-1. However, lifelong daily medication is necessary to prevent disease progression. To this end, immunotherapeutic strategies are being tested with the aim of developing a functional cure in which the immune system effectively controls HIV-1 in the absence of ART. RECENT FINDINGS: The most promising advances in achieving sustained HIV-1 remission or cure include broadly neutralizing antibodies (bNAbs) that are administered alone or in combination with other agents...

Genome-wide approaches have significantly advanced our knowledge of the repertoire of RNA-binding proteins (RBPs) that associate with cellular polyadenylated mRNAs within eukaryotic cells. Recent studies focusing on the RBP interactomes of viral mRNAs, notably SARS-Cov-2, have revealed both similarities and differences between the RBP profiles of viral and cellular mRNAs. However, the RBPome of influenza virus mRNAs remains unexplored. Herein, we identify RBPs that associate with the viral mRNA encoding the nucleoprotein (NP) of an influenza A virus...

Ultrasmall mesoporous nanoparticles (< 50 nm), a unique porous nanomaterial, have been widely studied in the last decade owing to the abundant advantages, involving rich mesopores, low density, high surface area, numerous reaction sites, large cavity space, ultrasmall size, etc. It has been widely used in a range of applications, involving absorption, catalysis, energy storage, fluorescence imaging, and drug delivery/therapy. This paper presents a review of recent advances in the preparation, functionalization and applications of ultrasmall inorganic mesoporous nanoparticles for the first time...