The aims of this study were to determine the complexity of surgery required to revise failed unicompartmental knee replacements and to evaluate the outcome following revision. Between 2000 and 2009, 494 cemented Oxford phase 3 medial unicompartmental knee replacements were implanted, with 24 (4.9%) requiring revision (mean age: 63.5 years; 58% male). Mean time to revision was 3.0 years. All cas...

Restoring normal function and appearance after massive facial injuries with bone loss is an important unsolved problem in surgery. An important limitation of the current methods is heuristic ad hoc design of bone replacements by the operating surgeon at the time of surgery. This problem might be addressed by incorporating a computational method known as topological optimization into routine sur...

The replacement of a carboxylic acid with a surrogate structure, or (bio)-isostere, is a classical strategy in medicinal chemistry. The general underlying principle is that by maintaining the features of the carboxylic acid critical for biological activity, but appropriately modifying the physicochemical properties, improved analogs may result. In this context, a systematic assessment of the ph...

The SwissBioisostere database (http://www.swissbioisostere.ch) contains information on molecular replacements and their performance in biochemical assays. It is meant to provide researchers in drug discovery projects with ideas for bioisosteric modifications of their current lead molecule, as well as to give interested scientists access to the details on particular molecular replacements. As of...

BACKGROUND and purpose Improvement of positioning and alignment by the use of computer-assisted surgery (CAS) might improve longevity and function in total knee replacements, but there is little evidence. In this study, we evaluated the short-term results of computer-navigated knee replacements based on data from the Norwegian Arthroplasty Register. PATIENTS AND METHODS Primary total knee rep...

A fundamental question in evolutionary genetics concerns the extent to which adaptive phenotypic convergence is attributable to convergent or parallel changes at the molecular sequence level. Here we report a comparative analysis of hemoglobin (Hb) function in eight phylogenetically replicated pairs of high- and low-altitude waterfowl taxa to test for convergence in the oxygenation properties o...

We have performed a large-scale analysis of amino acid sequence evolution after gene duplication by comparing evolution after gene duplication with evolution after speciation in over 1,800 phylogenetic trees constructed from manually curated alignments of protein domains downloaded from the PFAM database. The site-specific rate of evolution is significantly altered by gene duplication. A signif...

The metal-on-metal articulations in total hip arthroplasty (THA) were widely used between 1960 and 1975. The McKee-Farrar and other first-generation prostheses failed at a high rate because impingement caused early component loosening. The problem of early component loosening was corrected by improved component design and better manufacturing quality. Second-generation metal-on-metal total hip ...

The complete nucleotide and encoded amino acid sequences were determined for the dihydrofolate reductase (DHFR) from the bacteria Enterobacter aerogenes and Citrobacter freundii. These were compared with the closely related Escherichia coli DHFR sequence. The ancestral DHFR sequence common to these three species was reconstructed. Since that ancestor there have been seven, nine, and one amino a...