Impact of Covid-19 on the urology service in United States: perspectives and strategies to face a pandemic

ABSTRACT Over the course of several weeks following the first diagnosed case of COVID-19 In the U.S., the virus rapidly spread across our communities. It became evident that the pandemic was going to place a severe strain on all components of the U.S. healthcare system, and we needed to adapt our daily practices, training and education. In the present paper we discuss four pillars to face a pandemic: surgical and outpatients service, tele-medicine and tele-education. In the face of unprecedented risks in providing adequate health care to our patients during this current, evolving public health crisis of COVID-19, alternative patient management tools such as telemedicine services, allow clinicians to maintain necessary patient rapport with their healthcare provider when required. As a subspecialty, urology should take full advantage of telehealth and teleeducation at this juncture. As tele-urology and tele-education can obviate the potential drawbacks of "social distancing" as it pertains to healthcare, the platform can also reduce the risk of COVID-19 spread, without compromising quality urological care and educational efforts. Telehealth can bring urologists and their patients together, perhaps closer than ever.

LaNe RAGE: a new tool for genomic DNA flanking sequence determination

The determination of genomic DNA sequence flanking a known region is often problematic. Existing technologies depend on multiple, efficient enzyme-catalysed preparative processing steps and/or rely on relatively inefficient ‘one-sided' PCR mechanisms. I demonstrate the application of a simple ‘two-sided' PCR-based approach, lariat-dependent nested PCR for rapid amplification of genomic DNA ends (LaNe RAGE), applied to the mouse GAPDH and PGK1 gene flanking sequences. This demonstration offers great promise in applications such as genome walking, transposon mutagenesis mapping and DNA fingerprinting.