Hoveholmes4586

Georgina Mills takes a look at the winning images of this year's BVA Veterinary Photographer of the Year competition.A practitioner who went on to study law, which led to high office roles in London, before retirement enabled him to follow other interests.Peter Fordyce argues that clinical ethical review processes in centres where extreme clinical companion animal practice occurs are needed to help reduce moral distress felt by team members, and reassure the public that the profession is acting 'competently and humanely' when it comes to such procedures.Actinoid tetroxide molecules AnO4 (An = Ac - Cm) are investigated with the ab initio density matrix renormalization group (DMRG) approach. Natural orbital shapes are used to read out the oxidation state (OS) of the f-elements, and the atomic orbital energies and radii are used to explain the trends. The highest OSs reveal a "volcano"-type variation For An = Ac - Np, the OSs are equal to the number of available valence electrons, that is, AcIII , ThIV , PaV , UVI , and NpVII . Starting with plutonium as the turning point, the highest OSs in the most stable AnO4 isomers then decrease as PuV , AmV , and CmIII , indicating that the 5f-electrons are hard to be fully oxidized off from Pu onward. The variations are related to the actinoid contraction and to the 5f-covalency characteristics. Combined with previous work on OSs, we review their general trends throughout the periodic table, providing fundamental understanding of OS-relevant phenomena.

The purpose of this article is to study molecular dynamics through nuclear magnetic relaxation (NMR) dispersion of Arabic gum aqueous solutions analysed in terms of two-fraction exchange model.

The experiments revealed that relaxation of water molecules was non-monoexponential, which was interpreted in terms of a model describing the magnetization transfer due to exchange of water and polysaccharide protons. The analysis showed that water dynamics decreased slightly with gum content. Polymer-chain dynamics was assigned to regime II of the tube/reptation model. Peculiar temperature dependence of exchange rate was observed in the whole concentration range of Arabic gum solutions.

NMR relaxation probed in a broad frequency and temperature range allows probing of the molecular dynamics of complex food systems. © 2022 Society of Chemical Industry.

NMR relaxation probed in a broad frequency and temperature range allows probing of the molecular dynamics of complex food systems. © 2022 Society of Chemical Industry.The aim of this study was to identify potential plasma biomarkers for hepatitis B virus (HBV)-related liver diseases. High-throughput transcriptome sequencing analysis was performed on five patients with chronic hepatitis B (CHB), five patients with HBV-associated liver fibrosis/liver cirrhosis (LF/LC), and four healthy participants. By short time-series expression miner and functional analysis, aquaporin 1 (AQP1), dystroglycan 1 (DAG1), and hemoglobin subunit beta (HBB) were identified as potential biomarkers. Immunohistochemical analysis revealed that the expression levels of AQP1, DAG1, and HBB were upregulated in the three groups. Subsequent enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay tests on the training cohort (n = 150) indicated that the plasma levels of AQP1 and DAG1 were highest in LF/LC patients, followed by those in CHB patients, and the lowest in healthy controls. APAD model, a diagnostic panel incorporating age, platelet, AQP1, and DAG1 levels, exhibited the strongest stratification ability to distinguish LF/LC patients from CHB patients, and to differentiate CHB patients from healthy controls. Furthermore, the diagnostic accuracies of the biomarkers and APAD model were verified in an independent cohort consisting of 230 participants. In conclusion, both AQP1 and DAG1 have good diagnostic values and APAD model greatly enhances the diagnostic accuracy for HBV-related hepatic diseases.

We investigated a custom congenital heart disease (CHD) geneset to assess the diagnostic value of whole-exome sequencing (WES) in karyotype- andcopy number variation (CNV)-negative aborted fetuses with conotruncal defects (CTDs), and to explore the impact of postnatal phenotyping on genetic diagnosis.

We sequentially analyzed CNV-seq and WES data from 47 CTD fetuses detected by prenatal ultrasonography. Fetuses with either a confirmed aneuploidy or pathogenic CNV were excluded from the WES analyses, which were performed following the American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics recommendations and a custom CHD-geneset. Imaging and autopsy were applied to obtain postnatal phenotypic information about aborted fetuses.

CNV-seq identified aneuploidy in 7/47 cases while 13/47 fetuses were CNV-positive. Eighty-five rare deleterious variants in 61 genes (from custom geneset) were identified by WES in the remaining 27 fetuses. Of these, five pathogenic or likely pathogenic variants (PV/LPV) were identified in five fetuses, revealing a 10.6% (5/47) incremental diagnostic yield. Furthermore, REREc.2461_2472delGGGATGTGGCGA was reclassified as LPV based on postnatal phenotypic data.

We have developed and defined a CHD gene panel that can be utilized in a subset of fetuses with CTDs. We demonstrate the utility of incorporating both prenatal and postnatal phenotypic information may facilitate WES diagnostics.

We have developed and defined a CHD gene panel that can be utilized in a subset of fetuses with CTDs. We demonstrate the utility of incorporating both prenatal and postnatal phenotypic information may facilitate WES diagnostics.

Atrial fibrillation (AF) is a common arrhythmia and requires volumetric imaging to guide the therapy procedure. Late gadolinium-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging (LGE MRI) is an efficient noninvasive technology for imaging the diseased heart. Three-dimensional segmentation of the left atrium (LA) in LGE MRI is a fundamental step for guiding the therapy of patients with AF. MEDICA16 However, the low contrast and fuzzy surface of the LA in LGE MRI make accurate and objective LA segmentation a challenge. The purpose of this study is to propose an automatic and efficient LA segmentation model based on a convolutional neural network to obtain a more accurate predicted surface and improve the LA segmentationresults.

In this study, we proposed an uncertainty-guided symmetric multilevel supervision (SML) network for 3D LA segmentation in LGE MRI. First, we constructed an SML structure to combine the corresponding features from the encoding and decoding stages to learn the multiscale representation of LA. Second, we formstinguishing ability of the model on the surface, thereby the predicted accuracy of the LA surface can be further increased. We conducted extensive ablation and comparative experiments with state-of-the-art models. The experiment results demonstrated that our proposed model could handle the complex structure of LA and had superior advantages in improving the segmentation performance on the surface.Recruitment and growth rates for lake whitefish (Coregonus clupeaformis) inhabiting the Smallwood Reservoir, Labrador, Canada, were influenced by facets of its creation and the temporal variability in water levels associated with its operation. Filling of the reservoir between 1971 and 1974 created a concurrent increase in lake whitefish recruitment above long-term averages. In addition, recruitment was influenced by winter drawdown levels higher water levels during February enhanced recruitment, accounting for an additional 10% of the long-term variation in recruitment. Using otolith increments as a growth index, the authors determined that growth was influenced by reservoir creation. Growth rates during the initial period of flooding (1971-1975) exceeded long-term averages and were greater than those in any other 5-year period between 1965 and 1995. Growth rate increases were attributed to a simultaneous zooplankton bloom. After exceptional growth, lake whitefish showed a period (1976-1980) when growth rates decreased. The authors developed a quantitative technique using otoliths as an index to establish chronologies of fish growth rates. The index can be used to quantify and assess the impacts of reservoir hydrology on fish populations.The genome of each cell in the human body is constantly under assault from a plethora of exogenous and endogenous processes that can damage DNA. If not successfully repaired, DNA damage generally becomes permanently imprinted in cells, and all their progenies, as somatic mutations. In most cases, the patterns of these somatic mutations contain the tell-tale signs of the mutagenic processes that have imprinted and are termed mutational signatures. Recent pan-cancer genomic analyses have elucidated the compendium of mutational signatures for all types of small mutational events, including (1) single base substitutions, (2) doublet base substitutions, and (3) small insertions/deletions. In contrast to small mutational events, where, in most cases, DNA damage is a prerequisite, aneuploidy, which refers to the abnormal number of chromosomes in a cell, usually develops from mistakes during DNA replication. Such mistakes include DNA replication stress, mitotic errors caused by faulty microtubule dynamics, or cohesion defects that contribute to chromosomal breakage and can lead to copy number (CN) alterations (CNAs) or even to structural rearrangements. These aberrations also leave behind genomic scars which can be inferred from sequencing as CN signatures and rearrangement signatures. The analyses of mutational signatures of small mutational events have been extensively reviewed, so we will not comprehensively re-examine them here. Rather, our focus will be on summarising the existing knowledge for mutational signatures of CNAs. As studying CN signatures is an emerging field, we briefly summarise the utility that mutational signatures of small mutational events have provided in basic science, cancer treatment, and cancer prevention, and we emphasise the future role that CN signatures may play in each of these fields. © 2022 The Authors. The Journal of Pathology published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of The Pathological Society of Great Britain and Ireland.Organisms exist within ecological networks, connected through interactions such as parasitism, predation and mutualism which can modify their abundance and distribution within habitat patches. Differential species responses make it hard to predict the influence of climate change at the community scale. Understanding the interplay between climate and biotic interactions can improve our predictions of how ecosystems will respond to current global warming. We aim to understand how climate affects the multitrophic biotic interactions as well as the community structure using the enclosed communities of wasps associated with figs as study system. To examine the presence and strength of multitrophic species interactions, we first characterized the multitrophic community of fig wasps associated with Ficus racemosa and then applied hierarchical joint species distribution models, fitted to community monitoring data. We further evaluated the effect of climate on individual species trends as well as interspecific interactions.