Transcranial motor evoked potentials (MEPs) are useful for assessing the integrity of spinal cord motor tracts during major spine surgery. Anesthetic agents depress the amplitude of MEPs in a dose-dependant fashion. Anecdotal reports suggest that MEP responses degrade or ‘‘fade’’ over the duration of a surgery, despite unchanged anesthetic levels or other physiologic variables. This phenomenon ...

The principle of maximum entropy production (MEP) seeks to better understand a large variety of the Earth's environmental and ecological systems by postulating that processes far from thermodynamic equilibrium will 'adapt to steady states at which they dissipate energy and produce entropy at the maximum possible rate'. Our aim in this 'outside view', invited by Axel Kleidon, is to focus on what...

Stable IspF substrate analogs were synthesized. In the presence of substrate analogs, the E. coli IspF-MEP complex shows activities distinct from IspF, and bisphosphonates (BP) behave differently than their diphosphate (DP) counterparts. Bisphosphonate analogs activate and/or stabilize IspF, and only the closest structural substrate analog weakly inhibits the IspF-MEP complex.

This paper concerns with the sensitivity analysis for the multivariate eigenvalue problem (MEP). The concept of a simple multivariate eigenvalue of a matrix is generalized to the MEP and the first-order perturbation expansions of a simple multivariate eigenvalue and the corresponding multivariate eigenvector are presented. The explicit expressions of condition numbers, perturbation upper bounds...

The megakaryocytic (MK) and erythroid lineages are tightly associated during differentiation and are generated from a bipotent megakaryocyte-erythroid progenitor (MEP). In the mouse, a primitive MEP has been demonstrated in the yolk sac. In human, it is not known whether the primitive MK and erythroid lineages are generated from a common progenitor or independently. Using hematopoietic differen...

OBJECTIVES Cardiac surgery (CC) determines systemic and pulmonary changes that require special care. Awareness of the importance of respiratory muscle dysfunction in the development of respiratory failure motivated several studies conducted in healthy subjects to assess muscle strength. These studies were carried out by evaluating the maximal inspiratory pressure (MIP) and maximal expiratory pr...

OBJECTIVE To assess and compare the respiratory muscle strength among eutrophic, overweight and obese school children, as well as to identify anthropometric and respiratory variables related to the results. METHODS Cross-sectional survey with healthy schoolchildren aged 7-9 years old, divided into three groups: Normal weight, Overweight and Obese. The International Study of Asthma and Allergi...

The chlamydial developmental cycle is characterized by an intracellular replicative form, termed the reticulate body, and an extracellular form called the elementary body. Elementary bodies are characterized by a condensed chromatin, which is maintained by a histone H1-like protein, Hc1. Differentiation of elementary bodies to reticulate bodies is accompanied by dispersal of the chromatin as ch...

BACKGROUND Respiratory muscle strength is an important part of lung function. Assessment of the respiratory muscles' ability to generate force is important for recognizing respiratory muscle weakness in both sick and healthy people. OBJECTIVE To assess the test/retest reliability of the MicroRPM portable manometer's measurements of maximum inspiratory pressure (MIP) and maximum expiratory pre...