Chronic mucocutaneous candidiasis, a case study and literature review.

Chronic mucocutaneous candidiasis (CMC) is a clinically heterogeneous disease. Some immunologic and hormonal abnormalities have been associated with CMC. The factors that predispose host to CMC infection could be autosomal or acquisitive. The disease usually occurs in childhood. Here, we reviewed the published literature on chronic mucocutaneous candidiasis and a four years old girl is presented with CMC. She had a history of recurrent thrush and otomycosis since the age of one. Candida albicans was detected in skin scraping and biopsy samples. Serum iron was low. TSH hormone level was high and T4 level was low. Giardia cysts were found in stool sample. Mucocutaneous and nail manifestations of the disease were disappeared after a period of Itraconazole therapy.

Presence and distribution of yeasts in the reproductive tract in healthy female horses.

BACKGROUND: Yeasts are commensal organisms found in the reproductive and gastrointestinal tracts, and on the skin and other mucosa in mammals. OBJECTIVES: The purpose of this study was to isolate and identify yeast flora in the caudal reproductive tract in healthy female horses. STUDY DESIGN: Longitudinal study. METHODS: A total of 453 samples were collected using double-guarded swabs from the vestibule, clitoral fossa and vagina in 151 horses. All samples were cultured on Sabouraud 4% dextrose agar and incubated at 35°C for 7-10 days. Isolates were identified according to their morphological characteristics and biochemical profiles. RESULTS: Yeast colonies were isolated from 60 (39.7%) of the 151 horses. The isolated yeasts belonged to nine genera, and included Candida spp. (53.2%), Cryptococcus spp. (12.2%), Saccharomyces spp. (10.5%), Geotrichum spp. (8.0%), Rhodotorula spp. (7.1%), Malassezia spp. (3.7%), Trichosporon spp. (2.6%), Kluyveromyces spp. (2.6%) and Sporothrix spp. (0.2%). Candida krusei (43.1%) was the most frequent Candida species isolated. There was a significant difference in prevalence between C. krusei and other Candida species (P<0.05). The vestibule contained more yeast isolates (48.0%) than the vagina (18.3%). The isolation of yeast colonies from multiparous females (76.8%) was significantly higher than from maiden mares (P<0.05). MAIN LIMITATIONS: The study was limited by the difficulty of distinguishing between normal flora and potential pathogens. CONCLUSIONS: Candida spp., in particular C. krusei, represent important flora resident in the caudal reproductive tract in healthy female horses. This is particularly important in contexts that require the initiation of empirical treatment prior to the completion of culture results.

Exploiting Chromatin Biology to Understand Immunology.

The activation of immune responses relies on variations of a common rule where immune cells that are able to sense infections produce one set of cytokines to induce lymphocytes to produce another set of cytokines, which in turn activate the appropriate effector responses. This multitiered immune response is in fact a remarkable showcase of different ways the same genome can be used to facilitate cellular communications. Here, we review next-generation sequencing methods enabling us to map the differential usage of our genome in primary immune cells.

Inference of Boolean networks under constraint on bidirectional gene relationships.

The coefficient of determination (CoD) has been used to infer Boolean networks (BNs) from steady-state data, in particular, to estimate the constituent BNs for a probabilistic BN. The advantage of the CoD method over design methods that emphasise graph topology or attractor structure is that the CoD produces a network based on strong predictive relationships between target genes and their predictor (parent) genes. The disadvantage is that spurious attractor cycles appear in the inferred network, so that there is poor inference relative to the attractor structure, that is, relative to the steady-state behaviour of the network. Given steady-state data, there should not be a significant amount of steady-state probability mass in the inferred network lying outside the mass of the data distribution; however, the existence of spurious attractor cycles creates a significant amount of steady-state probability mass not accounted for by the data. Using steady-state data hampers design because the lack of temporal data causes CoD design to suffer from a lack of directionality with regard to prediction. This results in spurious bidirectional relationships among genes in which two genes are among the predictors for each other, when actually only one of them should be a predictor of the other, thereby creating a spurious attractor cycle. This paper characterises the manner in which bidirectional relationships affect the attractor structure of a BN. Given this characterisation, the authors propose a constrained CoD inference algorithm that outperforms unconstrained CoD inference in avoiding the creation of spurious non-singleton attractor. Algorithm performances are compared using a melanoma-based network.