Hepatitis B Virus (HBV) is a double stranded DNA virus and belongs to hepadnavirdae family. HBV infection causes a severe liver infectious disease and has become a global problem affecting human health. At least 250 million people are chronically infected with HBV, with an estimated 650,000 deaths per year from HBV associated hepatocellular carcinoma, mainly in Asia. Current clinical strategy...
Biological tissue biopsies are often heterogeneous in cell type and structure and the recognition of this heterogeneity is crucial for many diagnostic studies. For example, differentiation between involved and uninvolved tissue is paramount for the determination of exact tumour margins [DeFeo et al., 2010]. Conventional HR-MAS-NMR spectroscopy is an excellent tool to study metabolites and...
Identification of chronic kidney disease patients at risk of progressing to end-stage renal disease (ESRD) is essential for treatment decision-making and clinical trial design. Here, we show that proton nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy of blood plasma specimens together with techniques from machine learning improves the currently best performing kidney failure risk equation, the...
Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome (ARDS), as characterized by the onset of clinically significant hypoxemia and diffuse pulmonary infiltrates, has been a challenge to the critical care physicians due to high death toll rate. Categorization of the severity of ARDS is based on degree of hypoxemia enumerated by partial pressure of oxygen to the fraction of inspired oxygen (PaO2/FIO2) ratio and...
Protein folding is usually driven by the hydrophobic core while the role of the surface residues is considered to be marginal. Intimately ligated to protein folding, protein stability establishes the energy required to unfold a protein and the equilibrium populations of the folded and unfolded conformations at a given temperature. Proteins from halophilic organisms challenge this concept...
Increased dietary consumption of sugar has been implicated in a number of clinical pathologies, including obesity and other metabolic diseases. High fructose corn syrup, a sugar mixture of about 40% glucose and 60% fructose, is a ubiquitous sweetening additive in a number of drinks and food. In this study, we have investigated the metabolism of these two types of sugar in SfXL glioblastoma and...
Stable isotope tracers such as $^{13}$C are increasingly being used to study metabolism in high resolution. However, determining the metabolic fluxes within the system remains technically challenging due to both the complexity of the metabolic network and the sophisticated methods required to analyse the complex spectra derived from NMR and mass spectrometry. Here we present three tools to aid...