The Impact of Peptide Nucleic Acid Fluorescence In Situ Hybridization (PNA FISH®) Rapid Diagnostic Testing on the Initiation of Appropriate Antifungal Therapy in Patients with Candida Species Bloodstream Infections

Background: Traditional methods for detecting positive blood cultures include the use of broth bottles with sensitive indicators for growth. These techniques can take 24-48 hours to signal a positive test. Another 24 hours are often required to determine the species of the organism. The use of rapid diagnostic testing for Candida species bloodstream infections provides accurate species identification in less than two hours. Objective: Evaluate the time to appropriate antifungal therapy in patients in which rapid diagnostic testing was utilized. Methods: This study was a retrospective, observational cohort of patients who had positive blood cultures for Candida species and had PNA FISH® technology used as a rapid diagnostic test. Patients admitted to either Sidney & Lois Eskenazi or Wishard Memorial Hospital during the time frame of January 1,2012 to November 30,2014 were eligible for inclusion. Patients had to have at least one positive blood culture for Candida species. The following data was collected: demographics, microbiologic data, antimicrobial regimen, time to appropriate antimicrobial therapy, hospital length of stay and mortality. Results: Of the 27 blood cultures in which PNA FISH® technology was used, the average time to appropriate antifungal therapy was 15.24 ± 17.7 hours. Therapy was appropriately initiated or adjusted after the PNA FISH® results in 33%) of patients (9/27). The mean hospital length of stay was 24.4 ± 18.8 days and the mean intensive care unit (lCU) length of stay was 15 ± 20.7 days. All-cause mortality was 22.2%) (6/27). Conclusion: This study showed that the average time to appropriate antifungal therapy of 15.24 hours was comparable to current published studies. Due to the small number of patients in which therapy was appropriately adjusted after the PNA FISH®, it may be beneficial to educate healthcare providers about the usefulness of the PNA FISH® and how this technology may be utilized to enhance clinical practice and potentially improve patient outcomes

Do Political Attitudes and Religiosity Share a Genetic Path?

Author's manuscript made available in accordance with the publisher's policy.Social scientists have long recognized and sought to explain a connection between religious and political beliefs. Our research challenges the prevalent view that religion and politics constitute separate but related belief sets with a conceptual model that suggests the correlation between the two may be partially explained by an underlying psychological construct reflecting first principle beliefs on social organization. Moreover, we also push this challenge further by considering whether part of the relationship between political and religious beliefs is the result of shared genetic influences, which would suggest that a shared biological predisposition, or set of biological predispositions, underlies these attitudes. Using a classic twin design on a sample of American adults, we demonstrate that certain religious, political, and first principle beliefs can be explained by genetic and unique environmental components, and that the correlation between these three trait structures is primarily due to a common genetic path. As predicted, this relationship is found to hold for social ideology, but not for economic ideology. These findings provide evidence that the overlap between the religious and the political in the American context may in part be due to underlying principles regarding how to understand and organize society and that these principles may be adopted to satisfy biologically-influenced psychological needs

The Higher Power of Religiosity Over Personality on Political Ideology

Two streams of research, culture war and system justification, have proposed that religious orientations and personality, respectively, play critical roles in political orientations. There has been only limited work integrating these two streams. This integration is now of increased importance given the introduction of behavior-genetic frameworks into our understanding of why people differ politically. Extant research has largely considered the influence of personality as heritable and religiosity as social, but this view needs reconsideration as religiosity is also genetically influenced. Here we integrate these domains and conduct multivariate analyses on twin samples in the U.S. and Australia to identify the relative importance of genetic, environmental, and cultural influences. First, we find that religiosity’s role on political attitudes is more heritable than social. Second, religiosity accounts for more genetic influence on political attitudes than personality. When including religiosity, personality’s influence is greatly reduced. Our results suggest religion scholars and political psychologists are partially correct in their assessment of the “culture wars”—religiosity and ideology are closely linked, but their connection is grounded in genetic predispositions

Slimy Worms or Sticky Kids: How Caregiving Tasks and Gender Identity Attenuate Disgust Response

Disgust is derived from evolutionary processes to avoid pathogen contamination. Theories of gender differences in pathogen disgust utilize both evolutionary psychological and sociocultural perspectives. Drawing on research that suggests that masculine and feminine gender identities are somewhat orthogonal, we examine how gender identity intersects with pathogen disgust. In addition, building on evolutionary psychological and socio- cultural accounts of how caregiving and parental investment affect pathogen disgust, we present a new measure of caregiving disgust and compare its properties across gender, parental status, and political ideology with those of a conventional pathogen disgust measure. This registered report finds that how masculinity and femininity affect disgust varies by gender, disgust domain, and their intersection; that parental status effects vary by disgust domain but not gender; that reframing disgust in terms of caregiving eliminates the gender gap in disgust; and that the caregiving frame unexpectedly strengthens the relationship between disgust and political ideology

The gender gap in political interest: Heritability, gendered political socialization, and the enriched environment hypothesis

This article uses a behavioral genetics approach to study gender differences in expressed political interest, applying the enriched environment hypothesis to gendered political socialization. As girls are less stimulated to develop an interest in politics than boys, we theorize that these differences in the socialization environment reduce the expression of girls’ genetic predispositions compared to boys’, leading to a gender gap in the heritability of this trait. Analyses using data on German twins (11–25 years) demonstrate relevant differences by gender and age in heritability estimates. While differences in political interest between boys are largely explained by genes, this is less the case for girls, as they have considerably higher shared environment estimates. Our results imply that gender differences in expressed political interest are sustained by both genetic variation and environmental influences (such as socialization), as well as the interaction between the two

Introduction to the Special Issue -- Science in Politics: Methodological Innovations and Political Issues

We introduce the Special Issue on Life Science in Politics: Methodological Innovations and Political Issues. This issue of Politics and the Life Sciences is focused on the use of life science theory and methods to study political phenomena and the exploration of the intersection of science and political attitudes. This issue is the third in a series of special issues funded by the Association for Politics and the Life Sciences that adheres to the Open Science Framework for registered reports. Pre-analysis plans are peer reviewed and given in-principle acceptance before data are collected and/or analyzed, and the articles are published contingent upon the preregistration of the study being followed as proposed. We note various interpretations and challenges associated with studying the science of politics and discuss the contributions

Mechanistic studies on monocyte migration into multicellular spheroids of breast tumor origin

The majority of invasive-ductal breast tumors develop a desmoplastic reaction. The most abundant stromal host cell type in desmoplastic tumors are fibroblasts. Moreover, invasive ductal breast cancer is characterized by a high MO/MAC content. These immune cells are predominantly located within the fibroblastic stroma surrounding tumor cell islets. The achieved data reveal that 3-D spheroid cultures of both fibroblasts and carcinoma cells from breast tumor origin are infiltrated by MO. Five different breast tumor cell lines (Hs578T, BT549, T47D, MCF-7, BT474) were examined for MO infiltration and CCL2 release. The highly invasive Hs578T cell line showed highest levels of cellular CCL2 production and MO infiltration, while less invasive MCF-7 and BT474 cell lines, expressing very little or no CCL2 were poorly infiltrated. However, the hypothesized correlation between CCL2 expression and MO infiltration was not confirmed by linear regression analysis. To verify the relevance of paracrine factors, particularly CCL2/CCL2R signaling, for MO migration into spheroids of breast tumor origin (especially TAF and highly infiltrated Hs578T breast tumor cells) several experimental series were performed: (1) Disruption of CCL2 gradient by adding recombinant CCL2 to the external milieu of TAF spheroids, almost entirely abrogated the infiltration of TAF spheroids by MO but it does not affect the low, basic migration of MO into normal skin fibroblast spheroids. This result indicates that basic MO migration may relate to mechanisms different from MO infiltration of TAF spheroids. (2) Experiments to block downstream signaling from Gi/o and Gs protein coupled receptors by pertussis toxin (PTX) and cholera toxin (ChTX), respectively were performed. MO recruitment into TAF was inhibited by pre-exposure of MO to PTX and ChTX. However, in contrast to PTX, ChTX could not completely block MO migration. The strong inhibitory effect of PTX is consistent with described in literature involvement of Gi/o proteins in CCL2 signaling, however other 7-transmembrane G protein coupled receptors may also be affected. (3) Therefore, CCL2 receptor signaling was inhibited by pre-exposure of MO to the specific CCR2A/B blocking antibody DOC-3. CCL2/CCR2A/B signaling was shown to be important for MO infiltration into TAF but not Hs578T tumor spheroids This indicates that the migration of MO and also the localization of TAM in tumor tissues are affected by the individual expression pattern of both stromal and tumor cell compartments. A particular high infiltrative blood MO populations according to those described in the literature could not yet be identified. The expression pattern of CD14/CD16 and some antigens relevant for cell-cell interactions (CD49e, CD11a, CD11b) did not indicate the presence of a particular subpopulation. The search was extended to a multigene screening (cDNA array) of migrated versus non-migrated MO. It revealed a number of genes which seem over expressed in migrated cells and which should be validated and further explored in the future. It is concluded that paracrine factors from stromal fibroblasts are relevant to govern and/or at least fine tune the infiltration and location of blood MO in breast tumor tissue where they supposedly undergo abnormal differentiation to become tumor promoting, tumor-associated macrophages. The role of fibroblast-derived CCL2 in this scenario has to be emphasized in light of earlier evidence that the level of tumor derived CCL2 correlates with the abundance of TAM, poor prognosis and clinical outcome in breast tumors

Electrochemical contrast switching between black and white appearance of gelatin-covered zinc

Zinc and its alloys are widely used in the surface protection of metallic structural materials. Thus, zinc is an interesting and relevant candidate material for preparing stimuli-responsive surfaces. In this work, the switching of the optical appearance of zinc between black and white by an applied electrode potential is demonstrated. The zinc surface was covered by gelatin films and subjected to cyclic voltammetry (CV) in a chloride-containing electrolyte which induced pitting corrosion on the zinc surface. Between the different parts of the CV cycles, a reversible change in optical appearance was observed. During the oxidative half-cycles, the surfaces appear white, and during the reductive half-cycles, the surfaces appear brown to black, i.e. dark. Surface characterisation by x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) and infrared (IR) spectroscopy shows that the gelatin coating is slightly oxidised during intial stages of the process, but remains intact and present at the surface. Raman spectra prove the presence of ZnO at the interface. Surface analysis shows only minor differences in composition between the black and white surfaces. Based on the available characterisation data, the white appearance associated with anodic currents is attributed to the formation of a non-passivating ZnO. The black appearance associated with cathodic currents is attributed to reduction of surface-confined zinc species, including ZnO and Zn2+. The role of the gelatin is presumably to prevent diffusion of the dissolution products into solution by complex formation and by acting as a diffusion barrier; gelatin will also affect the morphology of the reduction products. A similar switching was observed when gelatin was added to chloride electrolyte; surface analysis showed gelatin adsorption in this case. The black/white switching may, e.g. be useful for surfaces self-indicating corrosion potentials of galvanised steel