Scientific reports
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The recent characterization of the gut microbiome of traditional rural and foraging societies allowed us to appreciate the essential co-adaptive role of the microbiome in complementing our physiology, opening up significant questions on how the microbiota changes that have occurred in industrialized urban populations may have altered the microbiota-host co-metabolic network, contributing to the growing list of Western diseases. Here, we applied a targeted metabolomics approach to profile the fecal metabolome of the Hadza of Tanzania, one of the world's few remaining foraging populations, and compared them to the profiles of urban living Italians, as representative of people in the post-industrialized West. Data analysis shows that during the rainy season, when the diet is primarily plant-based, Hadza are characterized by a distinctive enrichment in hexoses, glycerophospholipids, sphingolipids, and acylcarnitines, while deplete in the most common natural amino acids and derivatives. Complementary to the documented unique metagenomic features of their gut microbiome, our findings on the Hadza metabolome lend support to the notion of an alternate microbiome configuration befitting of a nomadic forager lifestyle, which helps maintain metabolic homeostasis through an overall scarcity of inflammatory factors, which are instead highly represented in the Italian metabolome.
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Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a fatal neurodegenerative disease affecting motor neurons of the brain, brainstem and spinal cord. To date, mutations in more than 30 genes have been linked to the pathogenesis of ALS. Among them, SOD1, FUS and TARDBP are ranked as the three most common genes associated with ALS. ⋯ R521H); no variants of TARDBP were observed in patients. Therefore, SOD1 mutations were present in 20.0% of familial ALS patients and 1.9% of sporadic ALS patients, while FUS mutations were responsible for 13.3% of familial ALS cases, and TARDBP mutations were rare in either familial or sporadic ALS cases. This study broadens the known mutational spectrum in patients with ALS and further demonstrates the necessity for genetic screening in ALS patients from central-southern China.
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β-thalassemia results from point mutations or small deletions in the β-globin (HBB) gene that ultimately cause anemia. The generation of induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) from the somatic cells of patients in combination with subsequent homologous recombination-based gene correction provides new approaches to cure this disease. CRISPR/Cas9 is a genome editing tool that is creating a buzz in the scientific community for treating human diseases, especially genetic disorders. ⋯ Importantly, no tumor was found in the livers, lungs, kidneys, or bone marrow at 10 weeks in the NSI mice after implantation with these HSCs. Collectively, our findings demonstrated that CRISPR/Cas9 successfully corrects β-thalassemia mutations in patient-specific iPSCs. These CRISPR/Cas9-corrected iPSC-derived HSCs express normal HBB in mice without tumorigenic potential, suggesting a safe strategy for personalized treatment of β-thalassemia.
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Multi-photon entanglement has been successfully studied by many theoretical and experimental groups. However, as the number of entangled photons increases, some problems are encountered, such as the exponential increase of time necessary to prepare the same number of copies of entangled states in experiment. ⋯ It reduces about five percent of the measuring time of eight-photon Schrödinger's Cat state compared with the scheme used in the usual planning of actual measurements, and moreover it guarantees the same low error in fidelity. In addition, we also applied the same approach to the simulation of ten-photon entanglement, and we found that it reduces in priciple about twenty two percent of the required copies of Schrödinger's Cat state compared with the conventionally used scheme of the uniform distribution; yet the distribution of optimized copies of the ten-photon Schrödinger's Cat state gives better fidelity estimation than the uniform distribution for the same number of copies of the ten-photon Schrödinger's Cat state.
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Randomized Controlled Trial
Impact of Preemptive Analgesia on inflammatory responses and Rehabilitation after Primary Total Knee Arthroplasty: A Controlled Clinical Study.
The aim of this study was to investigate the effects of preemptive analgesia on the inflammatory response and rehabilitation in TKA. 75 patients with unilateral primary knee osteoarthritis were conducted in this prospective study. All patients were randomly divided into two groups (MMA with/without preemptive analgesia group). The following parameters were used to evaluate analgesic efficacy: knee flexion, pain at rest and walking, functional walking capacity (2 MWT and 6 MWT), WOMAC score, and hs-CRP level. ⋯ The 6 MWT scores and WOMAC scores increased significantly within Groups (P = 0.020, 0.000), but no difference between groups postoperatively (P > 0.05). Less cumulative consumption of morphine was found in MMA with preemptive analgesia group at 48 h (P = 0.017, 0.023), but no difference at total requirement (P = 0.113). Preemptive analgesia added to a multimodal analgesic regime improved analgesia, reduced inflammatory reaction and accelerated functional recovery at the first week postoperatively, but not improved long-term function.