Chronically increased echogenicity on renal ultrasound is a sensitive early finding of chronic kidney disease that can be detected before manifestation of other symptoms. Increased echogenicity, however, is not specific for a certain etiology of chronic kidney disease. Here, we performed whole exome sequencing in 79 consanguineous or familial cases of suspected nephronophthisis in order to determine the underlying molecular disease cause. In 50 cases, there was a causative mutation in a known monogenic disease gene. In 32 of these cases whole exome sequencing confirmed the diagnosis of a nephronophthisis-related ciliopathy. In 8 cases it revealed the diagnosis of a renal tubulopathy. The remaining 10 cases were identified as Alport syndrome (4), autosomal-recessive polycystic kidney disease (2), congenital anomalies of the kidney and urinary tract (3), and APECED syndrome (1). In 5 families, in whom mutations in known monogenic genes were excluded, we applied homozygosity mapping for variant filtering and identified 5 novel candidate genes (RBM48, FAM186B, PIAS1, INCENP, and RCOR1) for renal ciliopathies. Thus, whole exome sequencing allows the detection of the causative mutation in 2/3 of affected individuals, thereby presenting the etiologic diagnosis, and allows identification of novel candidate genes.Kidney International advance online publication, 21 October 2015; doi:10.1038/ki.2015.317.

Several factors can impact lumbosacral loads during lifting, including weight knowledge and weight magnitude. However, interaction between them has never been tested. This study investigated the interaction effect of these variables on lumbosacral forces and moments. Participants performed symmetrical lifts using three different weights. Weight knowledge involved known and unknown weight conditions. A biologically assisted dynamic model was used to calculate spinal loading parameters. Weight impacted all variables, while knowledge impacted only compression, by a moderate amount (5%), and spinal moments. Lifting a lightweight resulted in a difference of 16% and 7.2% between knowledge conditions for compression and anterior-posterior shear forces, respectively, compared with a negligible difference of < 1% when lifting a heavy weight. Increased spinal loading with light unknown weight can be attributed to increased muscular co-contraction. Weight knowledge is important to consider at low weight levels as it can increase tissue loading to values equivalent to lifting a heavier weight.

BACKGROUND: Transient gene expression utilizing syringe agroinfiltration offers a simple and efficient technique for different transgenic applications. Leaves of Nicotiana benthamiana show reliable and high transformation efficiency, but in quantitative assays also a certain degree of variation. We used a nested design in our agroinfiltration experiments to dissect the sources of this variation.

RESULTS: An intron containing firefly luciferase gene was used as a reporter for agroinfiltration. A number of 6 week old tobacco plants were infiltrated for their top leaves, several samples were punched from the leaves after 2 days of transient expression, and protein extracts from the samples were repeatedly measured for luciferase activity. Interestingly, most of the variation was due to differences between the sampling spots in the leaves, the next important source being the different leaves on each plant. Variation between similar experiments, between plants and between repetitive measurements of the extracts could be easily minimized.

CONCLUSIONS: Efforts and expenditure of agroinfiltration experiments can be optimized when sources of variation are known. In summary, infiltrate more plants but less leaves, sample more positions on the leaf but run only few technical replicates.

In this paper, a proposed system for feature selection
based on social spider optimization (SSO) is proposed. SSO is
used in the proposed system as searching method to find optimal
feature set maximizing classification performance and mimics
the cooperative behavior mechanism of social spiders in nature.
The proposed SSO algorithm considers two different search
agents (social members) male and female spiders, that simulate
a group of spiders with interaction to each other based on the
biological laws of the cooperative colony. Depending on spider
gender, each spider (individual) is simulating a set of different
evolutionary operators of different cooperative behaviors that are
typically found in the colony. The proposed system is evaluated
using different evaluation criteria on 18 different datasets, which
compared with two common search methods namely particle
swarm optimization (PSO), and genetic algorithm (GA). SSO
algorithm proves an advance in classification performance using
different evaluation indicators

This article presents an automatic system for assessing water quality based on fish gills microscopic images. As fish gills are a good biomarker for assessing water quality, the proposed system uses fish gills microscopic images in order to detect water pollution. The proposed system consists of three phases; namely pre-processing, feature extraction, and classification phases. Since the shape is the main characteristic of fish gills microscopic images, the proposed system uses shape feature based on edge detection and wavelets transform for classifying the water-quality degree. Furthermore, it implemented Principal Components Analysis (PCA) along with Support Vector Machines (SVMs) algorithms for feature extraction and water quality degree classification. The datasets used for experiments were constructed based on real sample images for fish gills. Training dataset is divided into four classes representing the different histopathological changes and the corresponding water quality degrees. Experimental results showed that the proposed classification system has obtained water quality classification accuracy of 95.41%, using the SVMs linear kernel function and 10-fold cross validation with 37 images per class for training.

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Kirikou and the Sorceress ( Kirikou et la sorcière) is an animation film written and directed by Michel Ocelot, that was released in 1998. The story is based on Contes de la brousse et de la foret( Tales of the Bush ), written more than half a century before by André Davesne et Joseph Gouin (1921). The film was so successful that Ocelot followed it with two sequels, Kirikou and the Wild Beasts (Kirikou et les betes sauvages) in 2005 and Kirikou and the Men and the Women (Kirikou et les hommes et les femmes) in 2012. The first film is a feature film while the two others are composed of a series of short films (four in the second and five in the third). In these short films, it is Kirikou's grandfather who narrates the hero's adventures with the sorceress.
The present study aims to point out and analyze the relationship between the cultural and the visual aspects through Michel Ocelot's "trilogy", by exploring animation film in its connection to West African francophone culture, through a semiotic approach.