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PubMed2006

Nucleic acid aptamers and enzymes as sensors.

The function of nucleic acids has been an endless source of discovery and invention that has drastically enhanced our appreciation of DNA and RNA as multifaceted polymers. It is now widely known that nucleic acids can act as enzymes (deoxyribozymes and ribozymes) and as receptors (aptamers), and that these functional nucleic acids (FNAs) can either be found in nature or isolated from pools of random nucleic acids. The availability of many natural and artificial FNAs has opened a new horizon for the development of 'smart' molecules for a variety of chemical and biological applications. This review provides a snapshot of recent progress in the application of FNAs as novel sensors for biomolecular detection, drug discovery and nanotechnology.

Aptamers, Nucleotide↗
PubMed2006

The effect of different doses of fluvastatin on inflammatory markers in the early phase of acute coronary syndrome.

BACKGROUND: Inflammation promotes acute coronary syndromes (ACS) and ensuing clinical complications. It is well known that statins decrease the risk of coronary events and may benefit the stabilization of atherosclerotic plaque with their anti-inflammatory effects. We investigated the effects of different doses of fluvastatin on serum concentrations of high-sensitive C-reaction protein (hs-CRP) and tumor necrosis factor-alpha (TNF-alpha) in the early phase of ACS. METHODS: We prospectively randomized 60 patients with ACS to 3 groups: (1) group A (n=20): were given routine therapy; (2) group B (n=20): were administrated routine therapy with 40 mg/d oral fluvastatin; (3) group C (n=20): received routine therapy with 80 mg/d oral fluvastatin. Twenty patients with stable coronary heart disease served as controls. The following-up period was 7 days. By immunoturbidimetric assay and ELISA methods the serum concentrations of hs-CRP and TNF-alpha were measured before and after therapy. RESULTS: (1) The serum concentrations of hs-CRP and TNF-alpha in patients with ACS was significantly higher than those in the control group (P<0.05). (2) After 1 week of therapy, the serum concentrations of hs-CRP and TNF-alpha were significantly lower in group B and group C (all P<0.01), especially in group C. (3) The serum concentrations of hs-CRP and TNF-alpha did not correlate to the concentrations of TC, TG, LDL-C, or HDL-C. CONCLUSION: Early fluvastatin intervention decreases dose-dependently the serum concentrations of hs-CRP and TNF-alpha of patients with ACS. The high-dose fluvastatin invention may play a stronger anti-inflammatory effect in ACS patients. The anti-inflammatory effect of fluvastatin may be beyond the lipid lowering.

Acute Disease↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Calcium signalling: past, present and future.

Ca2+ is a universal second messenger controlling a wide variety of cellular reactions and adaptive responses. The initial appreciation of Ca2+ as a universal signalling molecule was based on the work of Sydney Ringer and Lewis Heilbrunn. More recent developments in this field were critically influenced by the invention of the patch clamp technique and the generation of fluorescent Ca2+ indicators. Currently the molecular Ca2+ signalling mechanisms are being worked out and we are beginning to assemble a reasonably complete picture of overall Ca2+ homeostasis. Furthermore, investigations of organellar Ca2+ homeostasis have added complexity to our understanding of Ca2+ signalling. The future of the Ca2+ signalling field lies with detailed investigations of the integrative function in vivo and clarification of the pathology associated with malfunctions of Ca2+ signalling cascades.

Animals↗
PubMed2006

Clearing a path through the patent thicket.

Patents do not always promote innovation, particularly when they restrict access to fundamental scientific discoveries and the tools of basic research. However, there are legal and policy approaches that may help to ameliorate problems associated with patenting these sorts of inventions.

Diffusion of Innovation↗
PubMed2004

Novel surface-modification techniques for polymer-based separation media. Stimulus-responsive phenomena based on double polymeric selectors.

A pair of polymeric selectors potentially responding to stimulation was introduced onto monosized porous polymer particles to be evaluated as a packing material for HPLC. Possible complexes formed between polyacrylamide (PAAm) and poly(methacrylic acid) (PMAA) were utilized as stimulus responsive polymeric selectors. Uniformly sized base polymer particle was prepared by multi-step swelling and polymerization method, while the introduction of PAAm and PMAA was done by newly invented modification technique. In this technique, a solvent in which both acrylamide (AAm) and methacrylic acid (MAA) monomers are soluble, but PAAm and PMAA are insoluble, was utilized as a modification medium. The polymer particle doubly modified with PAAm and PMAA was utilized as packing material for HPLC and the stimulus responses were evaluated by changing temperature or pH to check change of the slope of a Van't Hoff plot. By using water as a mobile phase, the expected inflection point of the Van't Hoff plot was observed at upper critical solution temperature (UCST) of the polymer complexes and the temperature responsive ability was observed. Moreover, pH responsive ability was studied by using buffer of either pH 4 or 10 as mobile phase. Slope of the plot was changed in buffer of pH 4, but no change of slope was observed in the buffer of pH 10.

Chromatography, High Pressure Liquid↗
PubMed2005

New principle of electromagnetophoretic adsorption-desorption microchromatography.

A new principle for the chromatographic micro-separation of micrometer-sized particles in liquid has been invented by switching the electromagnetophoretic force in a capillary flow system. The principle is the combination of the Stokes force by the bulk flow and the adsorption-desorption force on a capillary inner surface controlled by an electromagnetophoretic buoyancy generated by an alternative current and a homogenous magnetic field. The observed retention profiles of test micro-particles was explained by the "zigzag" migration model mainly depended on particle size and their adsorption force to the capillary wall. By this method, we could succeed to separate polystyrene particles of 10 microm and 20 microm in diameter dispersed in 1 M KCl solution containing 0.01% Triton X-100 using only 1 mm long fused-silica capillary under 10T.

Adsorption↗
PubMed2005

Csaba Horváth and preparative liquid chromatography.

Few chromatographers have been interested in furthering preparative liquid chromatography. The pioneers, Tswett, Kuhn and Lederer, A.J.P. Martin, Tiselius, isolated fractions but as an intermediate step in the analysis of their samples. The progress in electronics and sensors, and in their miniaturization has lead to the paradoxical situation that the analysts never see the transient pure fractions that their detector quantitates. Yet, over the last 25 years, preparative liquid chromatography has become an important industrial process for the separation, the extraction, and/or the purification of many pharmaceuticals or pharmaceutical intermediates, including pure enantiomers, purified peptides and proteins, compounds that are manufactured at the relatively large industrial scale of a few kilograms to several hundred tons per year. This development that has strongly affected the modem pharmaceutical industry is mainly due to the pioneering work of Csaba Horváth. His work in preparative HPLC was critical at both the practical and the theoretical levels. He was the first scientist in modem times to pay serious attention to the relationships between the curvature of the equilibrium isotherms, the competitive nature of nonlinear isotherms, and the chromatographic band profiles of complex mixtures. The thermodynamics of multi-component phase equilibria and mass transfer kinetics in chromatography attracted his interest and were the focus of ground-breaking contributions. He investigated displacement chromatography, an old method invented by Tiselius that Csaba was first to implement in HPLC. This choice was explained by the essential characteristic of displacement chromatography, in that it delivers fractions that can be far more concentrated than the feed. Remarkably, once the basics of nonlinear chromatography had been mastered in his group, most of the applications that were studied by his coworkers dealt with peptides of various sizes and with proteins. Thus, all the applications of preparative HPLC in the biotechnologies derive directly from Csaba's work. Although displacement did not pan out as a general method, the reasons are related more to practical constraints of the production of pharmaceuticals and to the long period of cheap energy that might be ending now. This report reviews Csaba's work in nonlinear chromatography.

Chromatography, High Pressure Liquid↗
PubMed2004

Expressing generic concepts with and without a language model.

Utterances expressing generic kinds ("birds fly") highlight qualities of a category that are stable and enduring, and thus provide insight into conceptual organization. To explore the role that linguistic input plays in children's production of generic nouns, we observed American and Chinese deaf children whose hearing losses prevented them from learning speech and whose hearing parents had not exposed them to sign. These children develop gesture systems that have language-like structure at many different levels. The specific question we addressed in this study was whether the gesture systems, developed without input from a conventional language model, would contain generics. We found that the deaf children used generics in the gestures they invented, and did so at about the same rate as hearing children growing up in the same cultures and learning English or Mandarin. Moreover, the deaf children produced more generics for animals than for artifacts, a bias found previously in adult English- and Mandarin-speakers and also found in both groups of hearing children in our current study. This bias has been hypothesized to reflect the different conceptual organizations underlying animal and artifact categories. Our results suggest that not only is a language model not necessary for young children to produce generic utterances, but the bias to produce more generics for animals than artifacts also does not require linguistic input to develop.

Child Language↗
PubMed2006

The nature of music from a biological perspective.

Music, as language, is a universal human trait. Throughout human history and across all cultures, people have produced and enjoyed music. Despite its ubiquity, the musical capacity is rarely studied as a biological function. Music is typically viewed as a cultural invention. In this paper, the evidence bearing on the biological perspective of the musical capacity is reviewed. Related issues, such as domain-specificity, innateness, and brain localization, are addressed in an attempt to offer a unified conceptual basis for the study of music processing. This scheme should facilitate the study of the biological foundations of music by bringing together the fields of genetics, developmental and comparative research, neurosciences, and musicology.

Auditory Perception↗
PubMed2006

How children make language out of gesture: morphological structure in gesture systems developed by American and Chinese deaf children.

When children learn language, they apply their language-learning skills to the linguistic input they receive. But what happens if children are not exposed to input from a conventional language? Do they engage their language-learning skills nonetheless, applying them to whatever unconventional input they have? We address this question by examining gesture systems created by four American and four Chinese deaf children. The children's profound hearing losses prevented them from learning spoken language, and their hearing parents had not exposed them to sign language. Nevertheless, the children in both cultures invented gesture systems that were structured at the morphological/word level. Interestingly, the differences between the children's systems were no bigger across cultures than within cultures. The children's morphemes could not be traced to their hearing mothers' gestures; however, they were built out of forms and meanings shared with their mothers. The findings suggest that children construct morphological structure out of the input that is handed to them, even if that input is not linguistic in form.

Asian People↗
PubMed2006

Space, self, and the theater of consciousness.

Over a decade ago, I introduced a large-scale theory of the cognitive brain which explained for the first time how the human brain is able to create internal models of its intimate world and invent models of a wider universe. An essential part of the theoretical model is an organization of neuronal mechanisms which I have named the Retinoid Model [Trehub, A. (1977). Neuronal models for cognitive processes: Networks for learning, perception and imagination. Journal of Theoretical Biology, 65, 141-169; Trehub, A. (1991). The Cognitive Brain: MIT Press]. This hypothesized brain system has structural and dynamic properties enabling it to register and appropriately integrate disparate foveal stimuli into a perspectival, egocentric representation of an extended 3D world scene including a neuronally tokened locus of the self which, in this theory, is the neuronal origin of retinoid space. As an integral part of the larger neuro-cognitive model, the retinoid system is able to perform many other useful perceptual and higher cognitive functions. In this paper, I draw on the hypothesized properties of this system to argue that neuronal activity within the retinoid structure constitutes the phenomenal content of consciousness and the unique sense of self that each of us experiences.

Attention↗
PubMed2004

Intrauterine devices and reproductive health: American women in feast and famine.

Intrauterine contraception has been available in the United States since the early 1960s. During the past 4 decades, American women have mainly used nine different devices and accumulated approximately 47 million person-years of use. Interest in IUDs, as expressed by both use patterns and market forces that created and retired products, varied tremendously over this period. In the peak years, women had unfettered access to, and choice of, IUDs, over time availability has declined. The American experience with IUDs involved a unique combination of factors: invention, expansion of publicly funded services, mass media, medical missteps, conflicting research, medical opinion and tort law. The IUD generated a controversial balance sheet of risks, benefits and reputation that still impacts reproductive health today.

Humans↗
PubMed2006

Complications of liposuction.

This article discusses the complications of liposuction and is divided into two parts. The first part discusses surgical and systemic complications. Since liposuction is surgery, it has the same complications as any surgery, but because of the minimalization of the procedure done by the author since he invented it in 1977, the complications were and are still minimal in the traditional way. Others have tried to maximalize the procedure and so, almost immediately after, appear a maximalization of complications and new severe complications. The second part discusses sequelae or undesirable results, which are numerous and complex. To really understand these sequelae, the second part is divided into four sections: description of sequelae, how and why do they appear, how to try to avoid them, and how to try to treat them.

Esthetics↗
PubMed2003

EST analysis of the cnidarian Acropora millepora reveals extensive gene loss and rapid sequence divergence in the model invertebrates.

A significant proportion of mammalian genes are not represented in the genomes of Drosophila, Caenorhabditis or Saccharomyces, and many of these are assumed to have been vertebrate innovations. To test this assumption, we conducted a preliminary EST project on the anthozoan cnidarian, Acropora millepora, a basal metazoan. More than 10% of the Acropora ESTs with strong metazoan matches to the databases had clear human homologs but were not represented in the Drosophila or Caenorhabditis genomes; this category includes a surprising diversity of transcription factors and metabolic proteins that were previously assumed to be restricted to vertebrates. Consistent with higher rates of divergence in the model invertebrates, three-way comparisons show that most Acropora ESTs match human sequences much more strongly than they do any Drosophila or Caenorhabditis sequence. Gene loss has thus been much more extensive in the model invertebrate lineages than previously assumed and, as a consequence, some genes formerly thought to be vertebrate inventions must have been present in the common metazoan ancestor. The complexity of the Acropora genome is paradoxical, given that this organism contains apparently few tissue types and the simplest extant nervous system consisting of a morphologically homogeneous nerve net.

Animals↗
PubMed2004

Diverticulitis: when and how to operate?

Diverticular disease, and particularly diverticulitis, has increasing incidence in industrialised countries. Diverticular disease can be classified as symptomatic uncomplicated disease, recurrent symptomatic disease, and complicated disease. Conservative or medical management is usually indicated for acute uncomplicated diverticulitis. Indications for surgery include recurrent attacks and complications of the disease. Surgical treatment options have changed considerably over the years along with the inventions of new diagnostic tools and new surgical therapeutic approaches. Indications and timing for surgery of diverticular disease are determined mainly by the stage of the disease. In addition to this major factor, the individual risk factors of the patient along with the course of the disease after conservative or operative therapy do play a big role in decision-making and treatment of this disease. In this context, the purpose of this article is to review the surgical treatment of diverticulitis with regard to indications, timeliness of operative intervention, operative options and techniques, and special circumstances.

Digestive System Surgical Procedures↗
PubMed2006

Rational and efficient geometric definition of pharmacophores is essential for the patent process.

The geometric description of pharmacophores suffers from approximations. No consensus has been clearly established, despite the increasing interest in using pharmacophores in drug design and in patent applications. We therefore propose an original definition of a pharmacophore using spherical coordinates. These coordinates give a precise description of each point using three parameters: distance to a geometric origin and two angles. If necessary, these parameters can be easily and rapidly converted to cartesian coordinates. Our method can guarantee, to the patent applicant, the safe protection of his intellectual property by both improving markedly the readability of a pharmacophore definition and bringing, to the person who is skilled in the art, enough information to understand easily the essence of the invention.

Computer-Aided Design↗
PubMed2004

Mary Boole and curve stitching: a look into heaven.

Mary Everest Boole had a lifelong interest in the unconscious mind, the psychology of learning, and how these relate to the teaching of mathematics and science. She recommended many practical exercises and teaching aids, one of which was the technique of curve stitching, which she had invented while still a child herself.

England↗
PubMed2004

Balloon mania: news in the air.

The hot-air balloon, invented by the Montgolfier brothers in 1783, enabled the French King to project his glory, the nobility to exhibit their valor, the literary public to transmit the ideal of the Enlightenment and the plebian public to rejoice in a scientific spectacle. The ensuing balloon mania helped create an integrated public that, because of its size and composition, can only be described as 'democratic' just a few years before the French Revolution. The monumental impact of the balloon was well represented in a flood of poetry, pamphlets, books, journal reports, academic papers and consumer items. Sifting through these artifacts and considering the crowd that witnessed the ascent of the balloon will bring us to the historical moment when things, spectacles, and events (rather than words) shaped public and popular opinion.

Air↗