Purple urine bag: think of urinary tract infection.

Discoloration of urine can be alarming and may indicate a serious underlying pathology. However, majority is benign and occur as a result of ingestions of substances such as medications or food dye or trauma postinstrumentations. Purple discoloration of the urinary catheter bag is uncommon and is caused by urinary tract infection with certain organisms. Unfortunately, most clinicians including the frontline clinicians are not aware of this syndrome, and despite the striking features, purple urine bag discoloration may be overlooked and not be given appropriate treatment. We present a case of this rare phenomenon with urosepsis that was not diagnosed on 2 occasions when the patient presented to the accident and emergency department.

Optimized retroviral transduction protocol which preserves the primitive subpopulation of human hematopoietic cells.

Though both low-speed centrifugation and the use of fibronectin (Retronectin) fragments increase gene transduction efficiency, they still do not overcome the adverse effects of the presence of virus-containing medium (VCM). In this study, we improved transduction efficiency of primitive human hematopoietic cells by optimizing the conditions for preadsorbing culture dishes with retrovirus using a centrifugation protocol allowing subsequent infection to be carried out in the absence of VCM. We also demonstrate that preadsorbing tissue culture plates with retrovirus is dependent on the volume of VCM used for preadsorption and the length of centrifugation and the type of plasticware used but not on the temperature of centrifugation (4-33 degrees C). Direct exposure of CD34+ target cells to VCM depletes the primitive CD34+CD38neg subpopulation by more than 30%, whereas the optimized VCM-free infection protocol targets this population with equivalent efficiency but had no detrimental effects on CD34+CD38neg frequency. In summary, we demonstrate a high-frequency transduction protocol which preserves the therapeutically relevant primitive subpopulation of human hematopoietic cells.