ABSTRACT
Monoterpene indole alkaloids (MIAs) are specialized metabolites synthesized in many plants of the Apocynaceae family including Catharanthus roseus and Rauvolfia sp. MIAs are part of the chemical arsenal that plants evolved to face pet and herbivore attacks, and their high biological activities also confer pharmaceutical properties exploited in human pharmacopeia. Developing robust and straightforward tools to elucidate each step of MIA biosynthetic pathways thus constitutes a prerequisite to the understanding of Apocynaceae defense mechanisms and to the exploitation of MIA cytotoxicity through their production by metabolic engineering. While protocols of virus-induced gene silencing (VIGS) based on Agrobacterium-based transformation have emerged, the recalcitrance of Apocynaceae to this type of transformation prompted us to develop an universal procedure of VIGS vector inoculation. Such procedure relies on the delivery of the transforming plasmids through a particle bombardment performed using a biolistic device and offers the possibility to overcome host specificity to silence genes in any plant species. Using silencing of geissoschizine oxidase as an example, we described the main steps of this biolistic mediated VIGS in C. roseus and R. tetraphylla.
Subject(s)
Alkaloids/metabolism , Apocynaceae/genetics , Apocynaceae/metabolism , Plant Proteins/metabolism , Biolistics , Gene Expression Regulation, Plant/genetics , Gene Expression Regulation, Plant/physiology , Gene Silencing/physiology , Plant Proteins/genetics , Plasmids/geneticsABSTRACT
BACKGROUND: The retrieval of plant-related information is a challenging task due to variations in species name mentions as well as spelling or typographical errors across data sources. Scalable solutions are needed for identifying plant name mentions from text and resolving them to accepted taxonomic names. RESULTS: An Apache Solr-based fuzzy matching system enhanced with the Smith-Waterman alignment algorithm ("Solr-Plant") was developed for mapping and resolution to a plant name and synonym thesaurus. Evaluation of Solr-Plant suggests promising results in terms of both accuracy and processing efficiency on misspelled species names from two benchmark datasets: (1) SALVIAS and (2) National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) Taxonomy. Additional evaluation using S800 text corpus also reflects high precision and recall. The latest version of the source code is available at https://github.com/bcbi/SolrPlantAPI . A REST-compliant web interface and service for Solr-Plant is hosted at http://bcbi.brown.edu/solrplant . CONCLUSION: Automated techniques are needed for efficient and accurate identification of knowledge linked with biological scientific names. Solr-Plant complements the current state-of-the-art in terms of both efficiency and accuracy in identification of names restricted at species level. The approach can be extended to identify broader groups of organisms at different taxonomic levels. The results reflect potential utility of Solr-Plant as a data mining tool for extracting and correcting plant species names.
Subject(s)
Algorithms , Data Mining/methods , Plants , Terminology as Topic , Databases as TopicABSTRACT
Objetivos: describir características de las traqueostomías realizadas en niños, en el Hospital Pablo Tobón Uribe de Medellín, Colombia y compararlo con la literatura mundial. Diseño: descriptivo retrospectivo. Métodos: se revisaron 38 historias de niños traqueostomizados, del 1 octubre de 2001 al 30 junio de 003.Resultados: el 60,52 por ciento fueron varones; el 13,15 por ciento menores de 1 año y el 34,21 por ciento con edades entre 1 y 5 años. La principal causa de ingreso fueron enfermedades del sistema respiratorio (28,9 por ciento). La principal indicación fue la intubación prolongada (71,1 por ciento). No se presentaron complicaciones intraoperatorias ni en las primeras 24 horas. En la primera semana 14/38 (37 por ciento) pacientes presentaron alguna complicación siendo la complicación más frecuente la decanulación accidental. No se reportaron muertes como consecuencia del procedimiento. Conclusiones: la traqueotomía en niños es un procedimiento seguro, con baja morbimortalidad como lo muestra nuestro trabajo y la literatura mundial.
Objectives: Describe the characteristics of pediatric tracheostomies performed at Pablo Tobón Uribe Hospital in Medellin, Colombia and compare the results with the ones in the world literature. Study design: retrospective descriptive. Methods: The charts of 38 children, who had undergone tracheostomy between the 1st of October 1999 and the 30th of June, 2003. Results: 60.52 percent of the patients were male. 13,15% of the procedures were performed in children under 1 year of age and 34,21 percent were performed on children between 1 and 5 years of age. The main cause to be admitted at the hospital was alterations to the Respiratory Tract (28,9 percent). The main indication was the long intubation period (71,1 percent). There were no intra operatory complications or during the first 24 hours. 14/38 (37 percent) of the patients exhibited some complications during the first week and the most frequent complication was an accidental decannulation. No deaths were reported as a consequence of the procedure. Conclusions: pediatric tracheostomy is a safe procedure, with low morbidity and mortality, as shown in our paper and the world literature.
