Recent Publications

These findings support the nonsurgical approach as effective for patients with septic arthritis who are not critically ill at time of presentation.

Cardiometabolic traits pose a major global public health burden. Large-scale genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have identified multiple loci accounting for up to 30% of the genetic variance in complex traits such as cardiometabolic traits. However, the contribution of parent-of-origin effects (POEs) to complex traits has been largely ignored in GWAS. Family-based studies enable the assessment of POEs in genetic association analyses. We investigated POEs on a range of complex traits in 3 family-based studies.

There are many risk factors associated with pelvic organ prolapse and this review aims to identify the epidemiology and pathophysiology while looking at the known risk factors for pelvic organ prolapse.

In our departmental setting, closure of the skin incision with nylon sutures after open posterior spine surgery carried a significantly lower risk of post-operative SSI compared with metal staples. The generalizability of our findings is unclear, but they warrant further investigation.

Diagnosing and treating neuropsychiatric systemic lupus erythematosus (NPSLE) remains challenging as the pathogenesis is still being debated. In this review, we discuss studies evaluating recent advances in diagnostic methods, pathogenic mediators and potential treatments.

The cohesin complex plays an important role in the maintenance of genome stability....we investigate the role of cohesin dynamics and stoichiometry in live yeast cells at single‐molecule resolution....Our results demonstrate that single‐molecule tools have the potential to provide new insights into the cohesin mechanism of action in live cells. (Elisheva Biton, Anjali Pathania, Avi Matityahu, Itay Onn)

One of the important lessons we have learned through handling the PHTR at the PCC is that, during daily workflows and dealing with the occasional visits of a heart transplant child, related critical clinical information to allograft rejection or its dysfunction can easily evade from awareness of the attending physician. 

The air-breathing magur catfish (Clarias magur) is a potential ureogenic teleost because of its functional ornithine-urea cycle (OUC), unlike typical freshwater teleosts. The ability to convert ammonia waste to urea was a significant step towards land-based life forms from aquatic predecessors. Here we investigated the molecular characterization of some OUC genes and the molecular basis of stimulation of ureogenesis via the OUC in magur catfish. 

Dean Karl Skorecki, on Chapter 1 of this important, recently-published book: "I have been reading the chapter for the past 20 minutes and am amazed at how elegantly you succeed in presenting a complex systemic metabolic state in the prism of neurodegenerative brain disease. I am learning metabolics, pharmacology, and neuroscience–wrapped into a chapter."

During V(D)J recombination, RAG proteins introduce DNA double-strand breaks (DSBs) at recombination signal sequences (RSSs) that contain either 12- or 23-nt spacer regions....We propose an improved model of Vκ-Jκ repertoire formation by incorporating these surprisingly frequent, evolutionarily conserved intra-Vκ cluster recombination events.

Abortive viral infections are defined as cells that have been infected with a virus but did not produce any progeny virus as a result of the infection. Recent single-cell studies have shown that abortive infection is observed frequently even during infection of susceptible and permissive cell types. Here, we recovered populations of susceptible and permissive cells that survived infection with herpes simplex virus at high multiplicity of infection.

The Biotronik Linox^Smart DX implanted cardioverter defibrillator (ICD) lead is a novel VDD lead with the advantage of integrated atrial sensing dipole combined with a special augmentation and filtering mechanisms. We sought to determine the efficacy of the Biotronik Linox^Smart DX ICD lead

Recently, a study published in "Toxicology In Vitro" (Kate Samardzic and Kenneth J. Rodgers) was entitled: "Cytotoxicity and Mitochondrial Dysfunction Caused by the Dietary Supplement L-Norvaline". The title may be greatly overstated, and here we provide several arguments showing that norvaline is not as toxic as reported.

The present case-control study was designed to compare the rate of ADs in first- and second-degree relatives of IBD patients, stratified according to Jew or Arabic ethnicity. (Research with affiliate hospitals - The Nazareth Hospital, EMMS; Galilee Medical Center, Nahariya and others)

Our results explain, at least partially, how schistosomes tune down the Th2 response, and provide further insight into the reciprocal geographic distribution between high prevalence of parasitic infections and immune disorders such as allergy. Furthermore, this worm-host crosstalk mechanism can be harnessed to develop diagnostic and therapeutic approaches for human schistosomiasis and Th2-associated diseases. (Yiftah Barsheshet, Boris Brant, Orly Avni)