It is becoming increasingly clear that fungi are important components of the gut microbiota. Fungi residing in the human intestine, for example, elicit the induction of T helper 17 cells, which are ...central orchestrators of protective immune responses. Likewise, fungal members of the intestinal microbiota have been shown to influence the immunological responses of the mammalian host by dampening or promoting local inflammatory responses. Here I review some of the latest developments regarding symbiotic fungi of the gastrointestinal tract and the consequences that fungal dysbiosis may have on human health. A major focus of the review is on the relationship between Candida albicans, the most prominent fungus inhabiting the human gut, and the mammalian host. Advances in the field underscore the need to further investigate the fungi that inhabit the human body to understand how the mixed array of microbes that constitute our microbiota contribute to health and disease.
An exploration of the functionalization of hydrocarbons by means of coinage-metal catalyzed C--H bonds is presented. The state of the art in using copper, silver, and gold based catalysts is ...discussed.
Small‐angle X‐ray scattering for macromolecules in solution is now widely used in structural biology to complement high‐resolution structure determination obtained by X‐ray crystallography or NMR. In ...the context of third‐generation synchrotron sources, this increasing interest leads to developments in sample environments and automation. The presence of an online purification system is justified by the need for sample monodispersity. A combined system including an auto‐sampler robot and online high‐performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) has been developed and optimized at the SWING beamline of Synchrotron SOLEIL (Gif‐sur‐Yvette, France). In the sample changer mode, a few microlitres of sample can be injected between two air bubbles and circulated at a controlled speed of typically 40 µl min−1. A maximum of 14 samples per hour could be measured in this mode by remote controlling the sample injections. In the HPLC mode, an initially polydisperse sample can be separated into each of its components before immediate data acquisition. The sample cell is thermostated, and offers a visualization control and online UV–Vis absorption monitoring.
Kidney transplant recipients may be at a high risk of developing critical coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID‐19) illness due to chronic immunosuppression and comorbidities. We identified hospitalized ...adult kidney transplant recipients at 12 transplant centers in the United States, Italy, and Spain who tested positive for COVID‐19. Clinical presentation, laboratory values, immunosuppression, and treatment strategies were reviewed, and predictors of poor clinical outcomes were determined through multivariable analyses. Among 9845 kidney transplant recipients across centers, 144 were hospitalized due to COVID‐19 during the 9‐week study period. Of the 144 patients, 66% were male with a mean age of 60 (±12) years, and 40% were Hispanic and 25% were African American. Prevalent comorbidities included hypertension (95%), diabetes (52%), obesity (49%), and heart (28%) and lung (19%) disease. Therapeutic management included antimetabolite withdrawal (68%), calcineurin inhibitor withdrawal (23%), hydroxychloroquine (71%), antibiotics (74%), tocilizumab (13%), and antivirals (14%). During a median follow‐up period of 52 days (IQR: 16‐66 days), acute kidney injury occurred in 52% cases, with respiratory failure requiring intubation in 29%, and the mortality rate was 32%. The 46 patients who died were older, had lower lymphocyte counts and estimated glomerular filtration rate levels, and had higher serum lactate dehydrogenase, procalcitonin, and interleukin‐6 levels. In sum, hospitalized kidney transplant recipients with COVID‐19 have higher rates of acute kidney injury and mortality.
In this multinational cohort of 144 kidney transplanted patients from 11 transplant centers in the US and Europe who were hospitalized for COVID‐19, acute kidney injury occurred in 52% and respiratory failure requiring intubation occurred in 29%, with an overall mortality of 32%.
A recent rejuvenation of experimental and theoretical interest in the physics of few-body systems has provided deep, fundamental insights into a broad range of problems. Few-body physics is a ...cross-cutting discipline not restricted to conventional subject areas such as nuclear physics or atomic or molecular physics. To a large degree, the recent explosion of interest in this subject has been sparked by dramatic enhancements of experimental capabilities in ultracold atomic systems over the past decade, which now permit atoms and molecules to be explored deep in the quantum mechanical limit with controllable two-body interactions. This control, typically enabled by magnetic or electromagnetically dressed Fano-Feshbach resonances, allows, in particular, access to the range of universal few-body physics, where two-body scattering lengths far exceed all other length scales in the problem. The Efimov effect, where three particles experiencing short-range interactions can counterintuitively exhibit an infinite number of bound or quasibound energy levels, is the most famous example of universality. Tremendous progress in the field of universal Efimov physics has taken off, driven particularly by a combination of experimental and theoretical studies in the past decade, and prior to the first observation in 2006, by an extensive set of theoretical studies dating back to 1970. Because experimental observations of Efimov physics have usually relied on resonances or interference phenomena in three-body recombination, this connects naturally with the processes of molecule formation in a low-temperature gas of atoms or nucleons, and more generally with N-body recombination processes. Some other topics not closely related to the Efimov effect are also reviewed in this article, including confinement-induced resonances for explorations of lower-dimensionality systems, and some chemically interesting systems with longer-range forces such as the ion-atom-atom recombination problem.
This study describes a promising method for understanding how halophytes adapt to extreme saline conditions and to identify populations with greater resistance. Image and colour analyses have the ...ability to obtain many image parameters and to discriminate between different aspects in plants, which makes them a suitable tool in combination with genetic analysis to study the plants salt tolerance. To the best of our knowledge, there are no publications about the monitoring of halophytic plants by non-destructive methods for identifying the differences between plants that belong to different maternal salinity environments. The aim is to evaluate the ability of image analysis as a non-destructive method and principal component analysis (PCA) to identify the multiple responses of two S. europaea populations, and to determine which population is most affected by different salinity treatments as a preliminary model of selection.
Image analysis was beneficial for detecting the phenotypic variability of two S. europaea populations by morphometric and colour parameters, fractal dimension (FD), projected area (A), shoot height (H), number of branches (B), shoot diameter (S) and colour change (ΔE). S was found to strongly positively correlate with both proline content and ΔE, and negatively with chlorophyll content. These results suggest that proline and ΔE are strongly linked to plant succulence, while chlorophyll decreases with increased succulence. The negative correlation between FD and hydrogen peroxide (HP) suggests that when the plant is under salt stress, HP content increases in plants causing a reduction in plant complexity and foliage growth. The PCA results indicate that the greater the stress, the more marked the differences. At 400 mM a shorter distance between the factorial scores was observed. Genetic variability analysis provided evidence of the differences between these populations.
Our non-destructive method is beneficial for evaluating the halophyte development under salt stress. FD, S and ΔE were relevant indicators of plant architecture. PCA provided evidence that anthropogenic saline plants were more tolerant to saline stress. Furthermore, random amplified polymorphic DNA analysis provided a quick method for determining genetic variation patterns between the two populations and provided evidence of genetic differences between them.
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