L’épidémie de Covid-19 représente une crise dont l’ampleur n’avait jusque-là jamais été imaginée. Des modifications des pratiques pour y faire face ne pouvaient reposer uniquement sur des doctrines ...ou des intuitions, mais nécessitaient adaptabilité, innovation et réactivité. Un renforcement en moyens techniques et humains a été débuté dès la fin du mois de février. L’organisation de la régulation médicale du Samu de Paris a été modifiée, renforcée en fonction des flux de patients à traiter et adaptée à la spécificité de la crise de Covid. L’ensemble des mesures avait comme objectif d’apporter la réponse la plus adaptée aux patients atteints de la Covid-19 et de préserver la réponse aux appels urgents du 15. Une collaboration fructueuse s’est rapidement établie entre tous les acteurs de la santé, hospitaliers et libéraux favorisant un maintien à domicile d’un certain nombre de patients et empêchant ainsi une saturation précoce des services d’urgence. Le développement et l’intégration de nouveaux outils informatiques ont facilité et diversifié les réponses apportées. Il est, dès à présent, indispensable de pérenniser et de renforcer ces acquis afin de développer le service d’accès aux soins (SAS) nécessaire pour apporter à la population une qualité de soins optimisée.
COVID-19 represents a crisis the scale of which had never been imagined before. Changes in practices to coping with them could not be based solely on doctrines or intuitions, but require adaptability, responsiveness, and innovation. A reinforcement of technical and human resources was introduced at the end of February. The organization of the medical regulation of the Samu (Emergency Medical Service) in Paris has been modified, reinforced according to the flow of patients to be treated and adapted to the Covid evolution. All the measures were aimed at providing the most appropriate response to patients with COVID-19 and preserving the answer of the emergency calls received on the 15. A fruitful collaboration was quickly established between all the actors of health, particularly with in-hospital and liberal practitioners favoring a home maintenance of a lot of patients and thus avoiding the saturation of emergency medical services. The development and integration of new IT tools have facilitated and diversified the provided solutions. It is now essential to perpetuate and strengthen these achievements to develop the service to access to care (French acronym SAS).
There is currently no consensus on (1) the percentage of patients who develop spasticity after ischemic stroke, (2) the relation between spasticity and initial clinical findings after acute stroke, ...and (3) the impact of spasticity on activities of daily living and health-related quality of life.
In a prospective cohort study, 301 consecutive patients with clinical signs of central paresis due to a first-ever ischemic stroke were examined in the acute stage and 6 months later. At both times, the degree and pattern of paresis and muscle tone, the Barthel Index, and the EQ-5D score, a standardized instrument of health-related quality of life, were evaluated. Spasticity was assessed on the Modified Ashworth Scale and defined as Modified Ashworth Scale >1 in any of the examined joints.
Two hundred eleven patients (70.1%) were reassessed after 6 months. Of these, 42.6% (n=90) had developed spasticity. A more severe degree of spasticity (Modified Ashworth Scale >or=3) was observed in 15.6% of all patients. The prevalence of spasticity did not differ between upper and lower limbs, but in the upper limb muscles, higher degrees of spasticity (Modified Ashworth Scale >or=3) were more frequently (18.9%) observed than in the lower limbs (5.5%). Regression analysis used to test the differences between upper and lower limbs showed that patients with more severe paresis in the proximal and distal limb muscles had a higher risk for developing spasticity (P<or=0.001). Spasticity of the upper and lower limb was more frequent in patients with hemihypesthesia than in patients without sensory deficits (P<or=0.001). Patients with spasticity showed a lower Barthel Index and EQ-5D score compared with the group without spasticity.
Spasticity was present in 42.6% of patients with initial central paresis. However, severe spasticity was relatively rare. Predictors for the development of spasticity were a severe degree of paresis and hemihypesthesia at stroke onset.
Evolutionary adaptation to a constant environment is often accompanied by specialization and a reduction of fitness in other environments. We assayed the ability of the Lenski Escherichia coli ...populations to grow on a range of carbon sources after 50,000 generations of adaptation on glucose. Using direct measurements of growth rates, we demonstrated that declines in performance were much less widespread than suggested by previous results from Biolog assays of cellular respiration. Surprisingly, there were many performance increases on a variety of substrates. In addition to the now famous example of citrate, we observed several other novel gains of function for organic acids that the ancestral strain only marginally utilized. Quantitative growth data also showed that strains with a higher mutation rate exhibited significantly more declines, suggesting that most metabolic erosion was driven by mutation accumulation and not by physiological tradeoffs. These reductions in growth by mutator strains were ameliorated by growth at lower temperature, consistent with the hypothesis that this metabolic erosion is largely caused by destabilizing mutations to the associated enzymes. We further hypothesized that reductions in growth rate would be greatest for substrates used most differently from glucose, and we used flux balance analysis to formulate this question quantitatively. To our surprise, we found no significant relationship between decreases in growth and dissimilarity to glucose metabolism. Taken as a whole, these data suggest that in a single resource environment, specialization does not mainly result as an inevitable consequence of adaptive tradeoffs, but rather due to the gradual accumulation of disabling mutations in unused portions of the genome.
ABSTRACT
Familial hypocalciuric hypercalcemia (FHH) causes lifelong hypercalcemia with features that overlap with typical primary hyperparathyroidism (PHPT). The incompleteness of this overlap has ...led to divergent nomenclatures for FHH. I compare two nomenclatures. One sets FHH as an entity distinct from PHPT. The other groups FHH with PHPT but conditions FHH as atypical PHPT. I analyzed selected articles about calcium‐sensing receptors, FHH, PHPT, CASR, GNA11, and AP2S1. FHH usually results from a heterozygous germline inactivating mutation of the CASR, and less frequently from mutation of GNA11 or AP2S1. The CASR encodes the calcium‐sensing receptors. These are highly expressed on parathyroid cells, where they sense serum calcium concentration and regulate suppression of PTH secretion by serum calcium. Their mutated expression in the kidney in FHH causes increased renal tubular reabsorption of calcium (hypocalciuria). Many FHH features are shared with PHPT and thus support FHH as a form of PHPT. These include a driver mutation expressed mainly in the parathyroid cells. The mutation causes a parathyroid cell insensitivity to extracellular calcium in vivo and in vitro, a right‐shift of the set point for suppression of PTH secretion by calcium. Serum PTH is normal or mildly elevated; ie, it is not appropriately suppressed by hypercalcemia. Total parathyroidectomy causes hypoparathyroidism and durable remission of hypercalcemia. Some other features are not shared with PHPT and could support FHH as a distinct entity. These include onset of hypercalcemia in the first week of life, frequent persistence of hypercalcemia after subtotal parathyroidectomy, and hypocalciuria. The features supporting FHH as a form of PHPT are stronger than those favoring FHH as a distinct entity. Classifying FHH as an atypical form of PHPT represents compact nomenclature and supports current concepts of pathophysiology of FHH and PHPT. Published 2017. This article is a U.S. Government work and is in the public domain in the USA.
Genome reduction has been observed in many bacterial lineages that have adapted to specialized environments. The extreme genome degradation seen for obligate pathogens and symbionts appears to be ...dominated by genetic drift. In contrast, for free-living organisms with reduced genomes, the dominant force is proposed to be direct selection for smaller, streamlined genomes. Most variation in gene content for these free-living species is of "accessory" genes, which are commonly gained as large chromosomal islands that are adaptive for specialized traits such as pathogenicity. It is generally unclear, however, whether the process of accessory gene loss is largely driven by drift or selection. Here we demonstrate that selection for gene loss, and not a shortened genome, per se, drove massive, rapid reduction of accessory genes. In just 1,500 generations of experimental evolution, 80% of populations of Methylobacterium extorquens AM1 experienced nearly parallel deletions removing up to 10% of the genome from a megaplasmid present in this strain. The absence of these deletion events in a mutation accumulation experiment suggested that selection, rather than drift, has dominated the process. Reconstructing these deletions confirmed that they were beneficial in their selective regimes, but led to decreased performance in alternative environments. These results indicate that selection can be crucial in eliminating unnecessary genes during the early stages of adaptation to a specialized environment.
In the last few years, increased attention has been focused on a class of organisms called psychrophiles. These organisms, hosts of permanently cold habitats, often display metabolic fluxes more or ...less comparable to those exhibited by mesophilic organisms at moderate temperatures. Psychrophiles have evolved by producing, among other peculiarities, “cold-adapted” enzymes which have the properties to cope with the reduction of chemical reaction rates induced by low temperatures. Thermal compensation in these enzymes is reached, in most cases, through a high catalytic efficiency associated, however, with a low thermal stability. Thanks to recent advances provided by X-ray crystallography, structure modelling, protein engineering and biophysical studies, the adaptation strategies are beginning to be understood. The emerging picture suggests that psychrophilic enzymes are characterized by an improved flexibility of the structural components involved in the catalytic cycle, whereas other protein regions, if not implicated in catalysis, may be even more rigid than their mesophilic counterparts. Due to their attractive properties, i.e., a high specific activity and a low thermal stability, these enzymes constitute a tremendous potential for fundamental research and biotechnological applications.
The interspecies exchange of metabolites plays a key role in the spatiotemporal dynamics of microbial communities. This raises the question of whether ecosystem-level behavior of structured ...communities can be predicted using genome-scale metabolic models for multiple organisms. We developed a modeling framework that integrates dynamic flux balance analysis with diffusion on a lattice and applied it to engineered communities. First, we predicted and experimentally confirmed the species ratio to which a two-species mutualistic consortium converges and the equilibrium composition of a newly engineered three-member community. We next identified a specific spatial arrangement of colonies, which gives rise to what we term the “eclipse dilemma”: does a competitor placed between a colony and its cross-feeding partner benefit or hurt growth of the original colony? Our experimentally validated finding that the net outcome is beneficial highlights the complex nature of metabolic interactions in microbial communities while at the same time demonstrating their predictability.
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•Microbial community dynamics can be inferred from intracellular metabolism•Metabolic interactions drive engineered microbial consortia to predictable equilibria•Spatial organization shapes the dynamics of mutualism in a metabolic eclipse scenario•Computation of Microbial Ecosystems in Time and Space (COMETS): a flexible tool
Microbes can interact with the environment and with each other through the uptake and secretion of metabolites. Here, Harcombe et al. ask whether mathematical modeling of the metabolic network of individual species can help forecast the spatiotemporal behavior of two- and three-species engineered microbial ecosystems. In addition to accurately predicting colony growth rates and equilibrium community compositions, their approach sheds new light on the complex nature of cooperation and competition in spatially structured environments.
Six multiple endocrine neoplasia (MEN) syndromes have received a level of attention that might seem disproportionate to their low prevalence. The attention has been given because their hormonal ...excesses cause striking metabolic expressions and because they might clarify pathways disrupted in more common tumours. The recent discovery of the main gene in each MEN syndrome has furthered our understanding of not only hereditary but also sporadic tumours and has fostered new avenues of research.
Epistasis has substantial impacts on evolution, in particular, the rate of adaptation. We generated combinations of beneficial mutations that arose in a lineage during rapid adaptation of a bacterium ...whose growth depended on a newly introduced metabolic pathway. The proportional selective benefit for three of the four loci consistently decreased when they were introduced onto more fit backgrounds. These three alleles all reduced morphological defects caused by expression of the foreign pathway. A simple theoretical model segregating the apparent contribution of individual alleles to benefits and costs effectively predicted the interactions between them. These results provide the first evidence that patterns of epistasis may differ for within- and between-gene interactions during adaptation and that diminishing returns epistasis contributes to the consistent observation of decelerating fitness gains during adaptation.
Recent studies have suggested that plant genomes have undergone potentially rampant horizontal gene transfer (HGT), especially in the mitochondrial genome. Parasitic plants have provided the ...strongest evidence of HGT, which appears to be facilitated by the intimate physical association between the parasites and their hosts. A recent phylogenomic study demonstrated that in the holoparasite Rafflesia cantleyi (Rafflesiaceae), whose close relatives possess the world's largest flowers, about 2.1% of nuclear gene transcripts were likely acquired from its obligate host. Here, we used next-generation sequencing to obtain the 38 protein-coding and ribosomal RNA genes common to the mitochondrial genomes of angiosperms from R. cantleyi and five additional species, including two of its closest relatives and two host species. Strikingly, our phylogenetic analyses conservatively indicate that 24%-41% of these gene sequences show evidence of HGT in Rafflesiaceae, depending on the species. Most of these transgenic sequences possess intact reading frames and are actively transcribed, indicating that they are potentially functional. Additionally, some of these transgenes maintain synteny with their donor and recipient lineages, suggesting that native genes have likely been displaced via homologous recombination. Our study is the first to comprehensively assess the magnitude of HGT in plants involving a genome (i.e., mitochondria) and a species interaction (i.e., parasitism) where it has been hypothesized to be potentially rampant. Our results establish for the first time that, although the magnitude of HGT involving nuclear genes is appreciable in these parasitic plants, HGT involving mitochondrial genes is substantially higher. This may represent a more general pattern for other parasitic plant clades and perhaps more broadly for angiosperms.
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