Forensic Nursing Education and Practice in the Netherlands: Where Are We at?

BACKGROUND: Forensic nursing is a new discipline to the Netherlands. Since 2013, a program has been in place to train experienced nurses in several aspects of forensic nursing, including injury assessment and wound documentation, sexual assault examination, assessment of child abuse, death investigation, and primary care for detainees of the police. OBJECTIVE: The purpose of the study was to provide information on the working environment, self-rated competencies, and practice experiences of forensic nurses after having completed the program. METHODS: In 2017, an online questionnaire was developed by the researchers and distributed among the 114 Dutch forensic nurses who had completed the program. RESULTS: Eighty-three nurses responded to the questionnaire, resulting in a 73% response rate. Nurses who practiced in the emergency and ambulance sector or as pediatric nurses continued to work in these roles after having finished the program. Upon completion of the program, more nurses were employed at sexual assault centers. Overall, respondents indicated that they felt competent with performing forensic nursing tasks. Respondents had a positive outlook of their work as forensic nurses, with a large majority seeing possibilities for further expansion of their roles (87%). Forty-eight percent reported that, at times, they experienced resistance to their involvement with forensic matters from other professionals in their work environments. DISCUSSION: Forensic nursing in the Netherlands is an emerging profession. Although its foundation has been established, further developments will only be achieved through collaboration with the wider medical field.

Reconstruction of Transformation Processes Catalyzed by the Soil Microbiome Using Metagenomic Approaches.

Microorganisms are central players in the turnover of nutrients in soil and drive the decomposition of complex organic materials into simpler forms that can be utilized by other biota. Therefore microbes strongly drive soil quality and ecosystem services provided by soils, including plant yield and quality. Thus it is one of the major goals of soil sciences to describe the most relevant enzymes that are involved in nutrient mobilization and to understand the regulation of gene expression of the corresponding genes. This task is however impeded by the enormous microbial diversity in soils. Indeed, we are far to appreciate the number of species present in 1 g of soil, as well as the major functional traits they carry. Here, also most next-generation sequencing (NGS) approaches fail as immense sequencing efforts are needed to fully uncover the functional diversity of soils. Thus even if a gene of interest can be identified by BLAST similarity analysis, the obtained number of reads by NGS is too low for a quantitative assessment of the gene or for a description of its taxonomic diversity. Here we present an integrated approach, which we termed the second-generation full cycle approach, to quantify the abundance and diversity of key enzymes involved in nutrient mobilization. This approach involves the functional annotation of metagenomic data with a relative low coverage (5 Gbases or less) and the design of highly targeted primer systems to assess the abundance or diversity of enzyme-coding genes that are drivers for a particular transformation step in nutrient turnover.

Metagenomic analyses reveal no differences in genes involved in cellulose degradation under different tillage treatments.

Incorporation of plant litter is a frequent agricultural practice to increase nutrient availability in soil, and relies heavily on the activity of cellulose-degrading microorganisms. Here we address the question of how different tillage treatments affect soil microbial communities and their cellulose-degrading potential in a long-term agricultural experiment. To identify potential differences in microbial taxonomy and functionality, we generated six soil metagenomes of conventional (CT) and reduced (RT) tillage-treated topsoil samples, which differed in their potential extracellular cellulolytic activity as well as their microbial biomass. Taxonomic analysis of metagenomic data revealed few differences between RT and CT, and a dominance of Proteobacteria and Actinobacteria, whereas eukaryotic phyla were not prevalent. Prediction of cellulolytic enzymes revealed glycoside hydrolase families 1, 3 and 94, auxiliary activity family 8 and carbohydrate-binding module 2 as the most abundant in soil. These were annotated mainly to the phyla of Proteobacteria, Actinobacteria and Bacteroidetes. These results suggest that the observed higher cellulolytic activity in RT soils can be explained by a higher microbial biomass or changed expression levels but not by shifts in the soil microbiome. Overall, this study reveals the stability of soil microbial communities and cellulolytic gene composition under the investigated tillage treatments.

Cigarette smoke irreversibly modifies glutathione in airway epithelial cells.

In patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), an imbalance between oxidants and antioxidants is acknowledged to result in disease development and progression. Cigarette smoke (CS) is known to deplete total glutathione (GSH + GSSG) in the airways. We hypothesized that components in the gaseous phase of CS may irreversibly react with GSH to form GSH derivatives that cannot be reduced (GSX), thereby causing this depletion. To understand this phenomenon, we investigated the effect of CS on GSH metabolism and identified the actual GSX compounds. CS and H(2)O(2) (control) deplete reduced GSH in solution [Delta = -54.1 +/- 1.7 microM (P < 0.01) and -39.8 +/- 0.9 microM (P < 0.01), respectively]. However, a significant decrease of GSH + GSSG was observed after CS (Delta = -75.1 +/- 7.6 microM, P < 0.01), but not after H(2)O(2). Exposure of A549 cells and primary bronchial epithelial cells to CS decreased free sulfhydryl (-SH) groups (Delta = -64.2 +/- 14.6 microM/mg protein, P < 0.05) and irreversibly modified GSH + GSSG (Delta = -17.7 +/- 1.9 microM, P < 0.01) compared with nonexposed cells or H(2)O(2) control. Mass spectrometry (MS) showed that GSH was modified to glutathione-aldehyde derivatives. Further MS identification showed that GSH was bound to acrolein and crotonaldehyde and another, yet to be identified, structure. Our data show that CS does not oxidize GSH to GSSG but, rather, reacts to nonreducible glutathione-aldehyde derivatives, thereby depleting the total available GSH pool.