Insight into ortho-boronoaldehyde conjugation via a FRET-based reporter assay.

Ortho-boronoaldehydes react with amine-based nucleophiles with dramatically increased rates and product stabilities, relative to unfunctionalised benzaldehydes, leading to exciting applications across biological and material chemistry. We have developed a novel Förster resonance energy transfer (FRET)-based assay to provide key new insights into the reactivity of these boronoaldehydes, allowing us to track conjugation with unprecedented sensitivity and accuracy under standardised conditions. Our results highlight the key role played by reaction pH, buffer additives, and boronoaldehyde structure in controlling conjugation speed and stability, providing design criteria for further innovations and applications in the field.

B-Mode Ultrasound Findings in a Patient With Suspected Pulmonary Gangrene.

OBJECTIVES: Lung ultrasound has shown increasing diagnostic value in many lung diseases and has become an efficient tool in the management of dyspnea. In the present case report, we describe a new ultrasound feature of potential interest. DATA SOURCES: Clinical observation of a patient. STUDY SELECTION: Case report. DATA EXTRACTION: Data were extracted from medical records, after obtaining consent from the patient's family. Illustrations were extracted from the imaging software and a video device. DATA SYNTHESIS: A 56-year-old man was admitted with pneumonia of adverse outcome. Lung ultrasound, a method increasingly considered as a bedside gold standard in critically ill patients due to its overwhelming advantages, was the only tool able to specify the lung injuries. We describe herein a distinctive sign unequivocally evoking a destructive process suggestive of pulmonary gangrene, a variant of the fractal sign combining a lung consolidation with an underlying heterogeneous free fluid. CONCLUSIONS: Lung ultrasound may help highlight pulmonary gangrene, a poorly-known disease, with this new ultrasonographic description. The next step will be to ascertain the relation between this new ultrasound feature and pulmonary gangrene and to assess how this bedside diagnosis could impact the prognosis of the disease.

3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA) impairs the extinction and reconsolidation of fear memory in rats.

Clinical trials have demonstrated that 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA) paired with psychotherapy is more effective at reducing symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) than psychotherapy or pharmacotherapy, alone or in combination. The processes through which MDMA acts to enhance psychotherapy are not well understood. Given that fear memories contribute to PTSD symptomology, MDMA could augment psychotherapy by targeting fear memories. The current studies investigated the effects of a single administration of MDMA on extinction and reconsolidation of cued and contextual fear memory in adult, male Long-Evans rats. Rats were exposed to contextual or auditory fear conditioning followed by systemic administration of saline or varying doses of MDMA (between 1 and 10 mg/kg) either 30 min before fear extinction training or immediately after brief fear memory retrieval (i.e. during the reconsolidation phase). MDMA administered prior to fear extinction training failed to enhance fear extinction memory, and in fact impaired drug-free cued fear extinction recall without impacting later fear relapse. MDMA administered during the reconsolidation phase, but not outside of the reconsolidation phase, produced a delayed and persistent reduction in conditioned fear. These findings are consistent with a general memory-disrupting effect of MDMA and suggest that MDMA could augment psychotherapy by modifying fear memories during reconsolidation without necessarily enhancing their extinction.

Pain-related mood influences pain perception differently in fibromyalgia and multiple sclerosis.

In patients, the perception of pain intensity may be influenced by the subjective representation of their disease. Although both multiple sclerosis (MS) and fibromyalgia (FM) possibly include chronic pain, they seem to elicit different disease representations because of the difference in their respective etiology, the former presenting evidence of underlying lesions as opposed to the latter. Thus, we investigated whether patients with FM differed from patients with MS with respect to their perception of "own" pain as well as others' pain. In addition, the psychological concomitant factors associated with chronic pain were considered. Chronic pain patients with FM (n=13) or with MS (n=13) participated in this study. To assess specific pain-related features, they were contrasted with 12 other patients with MS but without chronic pain and 31 controls. A questionnaire describing imaginary painful situations showed that FM patients rated situations applied to themselves as less painful than did the controls. Additionally, pain intensity attributed to facial expressions was estimated as more intense in FM compared with the other groups of participants. There is good evidence that the mood and catastrophizing reactions expressed in FM differentially modulated the perception of pain according to whether it was their own pain or other's pain.