[Neurorehabilitation for stroke or brain injury patients]. / Quet itinéraire de neuroréhabilitation pour les patients victimes d'un AVC ou d'un TCC?

The neurorehabilitation of brain injury patients usually begins at the hospital, during the acute care, where the aim is essentially at limiting the complications and at beginning the reeducation. The patients benefit then mostly from an inpatient and/or outpatient neurorehabilitation. During all these phases, the rehabilitation declines according to its 3 dimensions, namely: reeducation, rehabilitation and reintegration. In all this process, it is important to remain watchful to the invisible handicaps, such as cognitive impairments, post-traumatic brain injury complaints, behavioural or mood changes. These represent a potential obstacle to the social and professional reintegration.

AGMIAL: implementing an annotation strategy for prokaryote genomes as a distributed system.

We have implemented a genome annotation system for prokaryotes called AGMIAL. Our approach embodies a number of key principles. First, expert manual annotators are seen as a critical component of the overall system; user interfaces were cyclically refined to satisfy their needs. Second, the overall process should be orchestrated in terms of a global annotation strategy; this facilitates coordination between a team of annotators and automatic data analysis. Third, the annotation strategy should allow progressive and incremental annotation from a time when only a few draft contigs are available, to when a final finished assembly is produced. The overall architecture employed is modular and extensible, being based on the W3 standard Web services framework. Specialized modules interact with two independent core modules that are used to annotate, respectively, genomic and protein sequences. AGMIAL is currently being used by several INRA laboratories to analyze genomes of bacteria relevant to the food-processing industry, and is distributed under an open source license.

The complete genome sequence of Lactobacillus bulgaricus reveals extensive and ongoing reductive evolution.

Lactobacillus delbrueckii ssp. bulgaricus (L. bulgaricus) is a representative of the group of lactic acid-producing bacteria, mainly known for its worldwide application in yogurt production. The genome sequence of this bacterium has been determined and shows the signs of ongoing specialization, with a substantial number of pseudogenes and incomplete metabolic pathways and relatively few regulatory functions. Several unique features of the L. bulgaricus genome support the hypothesis that the genome is in a phase of rapid evolution. (i) Exceptionally high numbers of rRNA and tRNA genes with regard to genome size may indicate that the L. bulgaricus genome has known a recent phase of important size reduction, in agreement with the observed high frequency of gene inactivation and elimination; (ii) a much higher GC content at codon position 3 than expected on the basis of the overall GC content suggests that the composition of the genome is evolving toward a higher GC content; and (iii) the presence of a 47.5-kbp inverted repeat in the replication termination region, an extremely rare feature in bacterial genomes, may be interpreted as a transient stage in genome evolution. The results indicate the adaptation of L. bulgaricus from a plant-associated habitat to the stable protein and lactose-rich milk environment through the loss of superfluous functions and protocooperation with Streptococcus thermophilus.

Bone non-union after osteotomy in patients treated with methotrexate.

We describe 2 men with seronegative rheumatoid arthritis who presented non-union of bone after osteotomy of the tibia in one case and of a metatarsal bone in the second. Both patients were still being treated with oral low doses of methotrexate (MTX). After MTX was stopped, a prompt healing of the bone occurred. These observations suggest that MTX should be stopped temporarily in cases with delayed bone healing after surgery.