Background: Anomalous aortic origin of a coronary artery (AAOCA) can cause myocardial ischemia and sudden cardiac death. The optimal stress-testing strategy and impact of coronary morphology on ischemia remain unclear. We assessed the effect of coronary morphology on stress-test completion and results across multiple test modalities. Methods: This retrospective cohort study included 531 adults with […]

The acid activity of enzymes, characterized by the minimum pH at which enzymes remain active (pHmin), is crucial for industrial applications in acidic environments. However, the rational design of acid-active enzymes remains challenging due to limited understanding of sequence-structure-activity relationships under acidic conditions. Here, we propose ACENet, a graph neural network that predicts enzyme pHmin […]

A systematic optimization of throughput and operational stability in Sorting by Interfacial Tension (SIFT) is presented. Reducing droplet size and enabling a broader distribution of droplet trajectories increased the number of droplets processed per sorting element, resulting in about a four fold improvement in throughput from 30 to 125 droplets per second. Throughput was further […]

Spinal cord injury (SCI) pathology is highly difficult to treat due to substantial heterogeneity in injury presentation and spread, along with unclear mechanisms linking damage to pathology. Damages from injury forces (primary injury) are exacerbated by a series of biochemical events that follow the initial damage and injure additional tissue, known as secondary injury. Reactive […]

Neutrophilic skin diseases, including Behcet disease, Sweet syndrome, pyoderma gangrenosum (PG), and epidermolysis bullosa acquisita (EBA), are characterized by an exaggerated inflammatory response following mechanical skin stimulation, yet the underlying mechanisms remain unclear. We identify adenosine triphosphate (ATP) released from keratinocytes as a key mediator of this phenomenon, promoting neutrophil extracellular trap (NET) formation. Using […]

In humans and other primates, high-acuity vision is restricted to the fovea, requiring frequent saccadic eye movements to sample visual information, a process known as overt attention. Classical visual salience theory explains how low-level image features guide these movements, but recent human studies have shown that overt attention is also strongly guided by scene meaning–the […]

Accurate transcranial electrical stimulation (TES), electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), and electroencephalography (EEG) forward modeling requires resolving numerical singularities in the charge density near electrodes and tissue interfaces. We present an adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) strategy for the charge based boundary element method (BEM) accelerated by the fast multiple method (BEM-FMM) including electrode and interface singularities. We […]

Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) is a multisystem disorder affecting striated muscle, metabolism, and the central nervous system (CNS). Although glucocorticoids remain the standard therapy, muscle-centric evaluations typically fail to capture how dosing regimen and compound selection affect CNS and metabolic phenotypes. Here, we compared daily and weekly dosing of prednisolone and vamorolone in juvenile mdx […]

Freshwater sediments face increasing anthropogenic stress, yet their effects on cross-domain microbial interactions remain understudied. We analysed co-occurrence networks encompassing bacteria, protists, and fungi in sediments from two urban river systems in central Chile (Aconcagua and Maipo), using high throughput metabarcoding. Sites under multidimensional pollution stress exhibited fragmented networks, reduced cross-domain connectivity, and a predominance […]

Malaria-causing parasites from the Plasmodium genus possess a mitochondrion that is essential across all life-cycle stages and highly divergent from its hosts, making it a suitable drug target. Transport of metabolites across the inner membrane of this metabolically active organelle is mediated by mitochondrial carrier (MC) proteins. Among these, the apicomplexan-specific MC1 (AMC1) stands out […]

Macrophage small extracellular vesicles (sEVs) carry phenotype-linked cargo and bioactivity for immunomodulation and regeneration, but therapeutic translation is limited by low secretion and poor control of function. We introduce a music-activated piezoelectric nanofiber substrate (PES) that converted audible sound into programmable electrical stimulation to enhance sEV biogenesis while tuning macrophage polarization. Adjusting acoustic parameters increased […]

Lymphedema, a chronic and incurable condition with limited therapeutic options, has limited options to quantitatively assess functional changes during its development; as a result, a deeper understanding of its pathophysiology remains hindered. To characterize lymphatic alterations and their association with disease pathology in a clinically relevant model in the rat, we developed a longitudinal iPhone-based […]