Scaling and Root Planning in a Patient Taking Chronic Corticosteroid Therapy for Lupus Erythematosus.

The dental provider should be aware of the oral manifestations of systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE). Patients with SLE may be on chronic oral corticosteroids, which can increase the risk for periodontitis and opportunistic oral infections in addition to inducing multiple systemic adverse effects. Disease complications such as lupus nephritis and comorbid antiphospholipid antibody syndrome can further impact dental decision-making including around medications to prescribe or hemostatic measures to employ during treatment.

Trsper: a web-based application for Archimedes spiral analysis.

Background: We built a web-based application of the Archimedes spiral exam that implements clinically validated spiral metrics and tested drawing instructions to define a clinical workflow.

Methods: We designed an HTML5 and Javascript implementation of the spiral exam to run on mobile touchscreen devices. We then recruited 10 volunteers each for 2 experiments designed to validate the programmed spiral metrics and assess how instructions or drawing implement affect the results.

Gender Disparity in Evaluation of Internal Medicine Clerkship Performance.

Importance: Women studying medicine currently equal men in number, but evidence suggests that men and women might not be evaluated equally throughout their education.

Objective: To examine whether there are differences associated with gender in either objective or subjective evaluations of medical students in an internal medicine clerkship.

Design, Setting, And Participants: This single-center retrospective cohort study evaluated data from 277 third-year medical students completing internal medicine clerkships in the 2017 to 2018 academic year at an academic hospital and its affiliates in Pennsylvania.

On the expanding roles of tRNA fragments in modulating cell behavior.

The fragments that derive from transfer RNAs (tRNAs) are an emerging category of regulatory RNAs. Known as tRFs, these fragments were reported for the first time only a decade ago, making them a relatively recent addition to the ever-expanding pantheon of non-coding RNAs. tRFs are short, 16-35 nucleotides (nts) in length, and produced through cleavage of mature and precursor tRNAs at various positions.

Ribosomal RNA fragmentation into short RNAs (rRFs) is modulated in a sex- and population of origin-specific manner.

Background: The advent of next generation sequencing (NGS) has allowed the discovery of short and long non-coding RNAs (ncRNAs) in an unbiased manner using reverse genetics approaches, enabling the discovery of multiple categories of ncRNAs and characterization of the way their expression is regulated. We previously showed that the identities and abundances of microRNA isoforms (isomiRs) and transfer RNA-derived fragments (tRFs) are tightly regulated, and that they depend on a person's sex and population origin, as well as on tissue type, tissue state, and disease type. Here, we characterize the regulation and distribution of fragments derived from ribosomal RNAs (rRNAs).

TRNA-derived fragments as sex-dependent circulating candidate biomarkers for Parkinson's disease.

Introduction: Parkinson's Disease (PD) is diagnosed clinically. Reliable non-invasive PD biomarkers are actively sought. Transfer RNAs produce short non-coding RNAs, the tRNA-derived fragments (tRF).

IsomiRs and tRNA-derived fragments are associated with metastasis and patient survival in uveal melanoma.

Uveal melanoma (UVM) is the most common primary intraocular malignancy in adults. With over 50% of patients developing metastatic disease, there is an unmet need for improved diagnostic and therapeutic options. Efforts to understand the molecular biology of the disease have revealed several markers that correlate with patient prognosis, including the copy number of chromosome 3, genetic alterations in the BAP1, EIF1AX and SF3B1 genes, and other transcriptional features.

tRNA Fragments Show Intertwining with mRNAs of Specific Repeat Content and Have Links to Disparities.

tRNA-derived fragments (tRF) are a class of potent regulatory RNAs. We mined the datasets from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) representing 32 cancer types with a deterministic and exhaustive pipeline for tRNA fragments. We found that mitochondrial tRNAs contribute disproportionally more tRFs than nuclear tRNAs.

Small RNA Sequencing across Diverse Biofluids Identifies Optimal Methods for exRNA Isolation.

Poor reproducibility within and across studies arising from lack of knowledge regarding the performance of extracellular RNA (exRNA) isolation methods has hindered progress in the exRNA field. A systematic comparison of 10 exRNA isolation methods across 5 biofluids revealed marked differences in the complexity and reproducibility of the resulting small RNA-seq profiles. The relative efficiency with which each method accessed different exRNA carrier subclasses was determined by estimating the proportions of extracellular vesicle (EV)-, ribonucleoprotein (RNP)-, and high-density lipoprotein (HDL)-specific miRNA signatures in each profile.

Profiles of miRNA Isoforms and tRNA Fragments in Prostate Cancer.

MicroRNA (miRNA) isoforms ("isomiRs") and tRNA-derived fragments ("tRFs") are powerful regulatory non-coding RNAs (ncRNAs). In human tissues, both types of molecules are abundant, with expression patterns that depend on a person's race, sex and population origin. Here, we present our analyses of the Prostate Cancer (PRAD) datasets of The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) from the standpoint of isomiRs and tRFs.

MINTbase v2.0: a comprehensive database for tRNA-derived fragments that includes nuclear and mitochondrial fragments from all The Cancer Genome Atlas projects.

MINTbase is a repository that comprises nuclear and mitochondrial tRNA-derived fragments ('tRFs') found in multiple human tissues. The original version of MINTbase comprised tRFs obtained from 768 transcriptomic datasets. We used our deterministic and exhaustive tRF mining pipeline to process all of The Cancer Genome Atlas datasets (TCGA).

Assessment of isomiR Discrimination Using Commercial qPCR Methods.

We sought to determine whether commercial quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qPCR) methods are capable of distinguishing isomiRs: variants of mature microRNAs (miRNAs) with sequence endpoint differences. We used two commercially available miRNA qPCR methods to quantify miR-21-5p in both synthetic and real cell contexts. We find that although these miRNA qPCR methods possess high sensitivity for specific sequences, they also pick up background signals from closely related isomiRs, which influences the reliable quantification of individual isomiRs.

Knowledge about the presence or absence of miRNA isoforms (isomiRs) can successfully discriminate amongst 32 TCGA cancer types.

Isoforms of human miRNAs (isomiRs) are constitutively expressed with tissue- and disease-subtype-dependencies. We studied 10 271 tumor datasets from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) to evaluate whether isomiRs can distinguish amongst 32 TCGA cancers. Unlike previous approaches, we built a classifier that relied solely on 'binarized' isomiR profiles: each isomiR is simply labeled as 'present' or 'absent'.

Threshold-seq: a tool for determining the threshold in short RNA-seq datasets.

Summary: We present 'Threshold-seq,' a new approach for determining thresholds in deep-sequencing datasets of short RNA transcripts. Threshold-seq addresses the critical question of how many reads need to support a short RNA molecule in a given dataset before it can be considered different from 'background.' The proposed scheme is easy to implement and incorporate into existing pipelines.

Energy recycling by co-combustion of coal and recovered paint solids from automobile paint operations.

During the past decade, there has been substantial interest in recovering energy from many unwanted byproducts from industries and municipalities. Co-combustion of these products with coal seems to be the most cost-effective approach. The combustion process typically results in emissions of pollutants, especially fine particles and trace elements.