Plion

Neonatal gene therapy has been shown to prevent inner ear dysfunction in mouse models of Usher syndrome type I (USH1), the most common genetic cause of combined deafness-blindness and vestibular dysfunction. However, hearing onset occurs after birth in mice and in utero in humans, making it questionable how to transpose murine gene therapy outcomes to clinical settings. Here, we sought to extend the therapeutic time window in a mouse model for USH1G to periods corresponding to human neonatal stages, more suitable for intervention in patients...

Hearing depends on fast and sustained calcium-dependent synaptic vesicle fusion at the ribbon synapses of cochlear inner hair cells (IHCs). The implication of the canonical neuronal SNARE complex in this exocytotic process has so far remained controversial. We investigated the role of SNAP-25, a key component of this complex, in hearing, by generating and analyzing a conditional knockout mouse model allowing a targeted postnatal deletion of Snap-25 in IHCs. Mice subjected to IHC Snap-25 inactivation after hearing onset developed severe to profound deafness because of defective IHC exocytosis followed by ribbon degeneration and IHC loss...

INTRODUCTION: Hypersensitivity pneumonitis (HP) is an interstitial lung disease due to an immunological reaction to exposure, by inhalation, to a large variety of antigens. The patho-physiological mechanism remains poorly understood. The diagnosis can be challenging and requires a detailed medical history taking especially when the clinical presentation is atypical or when the causal agent remains unknown. CASE REPORT: We report the case of a 75-year-old woman with a history of mammary carcinoma who presented with recently identified intramammary adenopathy...

BACKGROUND: We found three copies of blaKPC-2 on a plasmid of a Klebsiella pneumoniae strain and report the findings here. METHODS: A carbapenem-resistant K. pneumoniae clinical strain, SCEC020002, was subjected to whole genome sequencing using both short-read Illumina X10 platform and long-read MinION sequencer. Hybrid assembly was performed using Unicycler and contigs were then corrected using Plion. Based on the whole genome sequence, sequence type, capsular type, plasmid replicon type and plasmid multi-locus sequence type were determined and virulence and antimicrobial resistance genes were identified...

Nanoparticles are increasingly used to label cells to track them by imaging or to quantify them in vivo. However, normal cellular uptake mechanisms are inadequate to load cells with tracking label. We propose a simple method to coat nanoparticles, such as monocrystalline iron oxide nanoparticle (MION), with the transfection agent polylysine in order to facilitate rapid, uniform, and heavy labeling of fibroblasts. The method is based on commercially available reagents, requires no more than 1 h of laboratory contact time, and can be accomplished safely without a chemical hood...