Recently, the newly emerged hypervirulent Klebsiella pneumoniae strain (hvKP) has caused great concern globally, but the clinical features and molecular characteristics of bacteremia caused by hvKP are rarely reported in mainland China. Seventy patients with K. pneumoniae bacteremia were investigated to study the clinical features of hvKP infection from 2008 till 2012 in Beijing Chao-Yang Hospi...

Klebsiella pneumoniae is not only a major hospital-acquired pathogen but also an important food-borne pathogen that can cause septicaemia, liver abscesses, and diarrhea in humans. The phenotypic and genotypic characteristics of K. pneumoniae in retail foods have not been thoroughly investigated in China. The objective of this study was to characterize K. pneumoniae isolates through biotyping, s...

BACKGROUND Berberine, an alkaloid with both glucose- and cholesterol-lowering action, is also characterized by an anti-diarrheal effect. Consequently, berberine-based therapies are recommended for diabetic patients with irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) or gut discomfort caused by metformin. AIM As the anti-glycemic and cholesterol-lowering action of berberine is improved by co-administration wi...

BACKGROUND Necrotizing fasciitis (NF) is a rapidly progressive, life-threatening soft-tissue infection that is traditionally caused by group A Streptococcus (GAS) or mixed aerobic/anaerobic bacteria. Monomicrobial Klebsiella pneumoniae NF (KP-NF) has been reported since 1996 but has not yet been systematically studied. METHODS We retrospectively studied consecutive NF cases treated at a unive...

Evaluation of the health state of employees in relation to the working environment is one of the main tasks of occupational medicine. The specified results represent a part of a methodically oriented project which was focused on evaluation of: age structures of employees in the metallurgical plant being monitored in comparison with the age structure in the whole region, evaluation of the health...

Fifteen andesite-dacite stratovolcanoes on the volcanic front of a single segment of the Andean arc show along-arc changes in isotopic and elemental ratios that demonstrate large crustal contributions to magma genesis. All 15 centers lie 90 km above the Benioff zone and 280 _+ 20 km from the trench axis. Rate and geometry of subduction and composition and age of subducted sediments and seafloor...

-A new chemical mass balance technique has been developed for simultaneous mineralogical quantification and chemical characterization of soil clays. The procedure includes separation of the whole clay (<2 ~tm fraction) into six particle size fractions (<0.02, <0.06, <0.2, 0.02-0.06, 0.06-0.2, and 0.22 um fractions), chemical analysis of the whole clay and each of the six fractions, and fitting ...

A distinctive syndrome caused by hypermucoviscous Klebsiella pneumoniae (HMKP) including pyogenic liver abscess (PLA) is now becoming a globally emerging disease. In the present study, 22.8% (84/369) of K. pneumoniae clinical isolates associated with various types of invasive infections were identified as HMKP, with 45.2% associated with PLA. Multivariate regression analysis showed that male pa...

DNA sequence alignment problem can be broadly defined as the character-level comparison of DNA sequences obtained from one or more samples against a database of reference (i.e., consensus) genome sequence of the same or a similar species. High throughput sequencing (HTS) technologies were introduced in 2006 [6], and the latest iterations of HTS technologies are able to read the genome of a huma...

C onsiderable information is known about the extracellular signals that drive pluripotent stem cells (PSCs) through a stepwise program to become cardiomyocytes. An article by Ohtani et al in this issue links extrinsic signals to histone demethylation needed to form mesoderm, the first step in cardiogenesis. Extrinsic signals drive the stepwise differentiation of PSCs into cardiomyocytes, and hi...