SciCombinator

In this study, the iridoidic content of two accessions of Crucianella maritima L., one from Sardinia and the second from Latium, was examined and compared. From a qualitative point of view, the iridoidic pattern of the two samples was similar, since the same compounds (asperuloside, asperulosidic acid and deacetyl asperulosidic acid) were isolated. Asperuloside was the main compound in both accessions. Asperulosidic acid was the second compound in the accession from Sardinia, while the accession from Latium exhibited a similar amount of asperulosidic acid and deacetyl asperulosidic acid. These iridoids can be considered as chemotaxonomic markers for parts of the Rubiaceae family, in particular for the Rubioideae subfamily to which C. maritima belongs.

Different approaches can be chosen to quantify the impact and merits of scientific oncology publications. These include source of publication (including journal reputation and impact factor), whether or not articles are cited by others, and access/download figures. When relying on citation counts, one needs to obtain access to citation databases and has to consider that results differ from one database to another. Accumulation of citations takes time and their dynamics might differ from journal to journal and topic to topic. Therefore, we wanted to evaluate the correlation between citation and download figures, hypothesising that articles with fewer downloads also accumulate fewer citations. Typically, publishers provide download figures together with the article. We extracted and analysed the 50 most viewed articles from 5 different open access oncology journals. For each of the 5 journals and also all journals combined, correlation between number of accesses and citations was limited (r = 0.01-0.30). Considerable variations were also observed when analyses were restricted to specific article types such as reviews only (r = 0.21) or case reports only (r = 0.53). Even if year of publication was taken into account, high correlation coefficients were the exception from the rule. In conclusion, downloads are not a universal surrogate for citation figures.

Vascular access practice is strongly associated with clinical outcomes. There is substantial international variation in the use of arteriovenous fistulas (AVFs) and grafts (AVGs), as well as AVF maturation time and location.

Point-of-care (POC) testing is highly useful when treating critically ill patients. In case of difficult vascular access, the intraosseous (IO) route is commonly used, and blood is aspirated to confirm the correct position of the IO-needle. Thus, IO blood samples could be easily accessed for POC analyses in emergency situations. The aim of this study was to determine whether IO values agree sufficiently with arterial values to be used for clinical decision making.

Web interfaces provide access to numerous biological databases. Many can be accessed to in a programmatic way thanks to Web Services. Building applications that combine several of them would benefit from a single framework.

Microsoft Excel automatically converts certain gene symbols, database accessions, and other alphanumeric text into dates, scientific notation, and other numerical representations. These conversions lead to subsequent, irreversible, corruption of the imported text. A recent survey of popular genomic literature estimates that one-fifth of all papers with supplementary gene lists suffer from this issue.

In spite of its great promise, metabolomics has proven difficult to execute in an untargeted and generalizable manner. Liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC-MS) has made it possible to gather data on thousands of cellular metabolites. However, matching metabolites to their spectral features continues to be a bottleneck, meaning that much of the collected information remains uninterpreted and that new metabolites are seldom discovered in untargeted studies. These challenges require new approaches that consider compounds beyond those available in curated biochemistry databases.

Improving Access to Psychological Therapy (IAPT) services have increased the number of people with common mental health disorders receiving psychological therapy in England, but concerns remain about how equitably these services are accessed.

Rabies is a neglected disease despite being responsible for more human deaths than any other zoonosis. A lack of adequate human and dog surveillance, resulting in low prioritization, is often blamed for this paradox. Estimation methods are often employed to describe the rabies burden when surveillance data are not available, however these figures are rarely based on country-specific data.

The 2017 update of NGSmethDB stores whole genome methylomes generated from short-read data sets obtained by bisulfite sequencing (WGBS) technology. To generate high-quality methylomes, stringent quality controls were integrated with third-part software, adding also a two-step mapping process to exploit the advantages of the new genome assembly models. The samples were all profiled under constant parameter settings, thus enabling comparative downstream analyses. Besides a significant increase in the number of samples, NGSmethDB now includes two additional data-types, which are a valuable resource for the discovery of methylation epigenetic biomarkers: (i) differentially methylated single-cytosines; and (ii) methylation segments (i.e. genome regions of homogeneous methylation). The NGSmethDB back-end is now based on MongoDB, a NoSQL hierarchical database using JSON-formatted documents and dynamic schemas, thus accelerating sample comparative analyses. Besides conventional database dumps, track hubs were implemented, which improved database access, visualization in genome browsers and comparative analyses to third-part annotations. In addition, the database can be also accessed through a RESTful API. Lastly, a Python client and a multiplatform virtual machine allow for program-driven access from user desktop. This way, private methylation data can be compared to NGSmethDB without the need to upload them to public servers. Database website: http://bioinfo2.ugr.es/NGSmethDB.