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Polyetheretherketone is a promising material for implants due to its good mechanical properties and excellent biocompatibility. Its accessibility to a wide range of applications is facilitated by the ability to process it with an easy-to-use manufacturing process such as fused filament fabrication. The elimination of disadvantages associated with the manufacturing process, such as a poor surface quality, is a main challenge to deal with. As part of the mass finishing process, centrifugal disc finishing has demonstrated good results in surface optimization, making it a promising candidate for the post-processing of additively manufactured parts. The objective of this study is to identify the key parameters of the centrifugal disc finishing process on the waviness of additively manufactured PEEK specimens, which has not been investigated previously. The waviness of the specimen was investigated by means of confocal laser scanning microscopy (CLSM), while weight loss was additionally tracked. Six parameters were investigated: type, amount and speed of media, use of compound, amount of water and time. Type of media, time and speed were found to significantly influence waviness reduction and weight loss. Surface electron microscopy images demonstrated the additional effects of deburring and corner rounding. Results on previous studies with specimens made of metal showed similar results. Further investigation is required to optimize waviness reduction and polish parts in a second post-processing step.

Objective: Single-nucleotide variants (SNVs) are of great significance in prenatal diagnosis as they are the leading cause of inherited single-gene disorders (SGDs). Identifying SNVs in a non-invasive prenatal screening (NIPS) scenario is particularly challenging for maternally inherited SNVs. We present an improved method to predict inherited SNVs from maternal or paternal origin in a genome-wide manner., Methods: We performed SNV-NIPS based on the combination of fragments of cell free DNA (cfDNA) features, Bayesian inference and a machine-learning (ML) prediction refinement step using random forest (RF) classifiers trained on millions of non-pathogenic variants. We next evaluate the real-world performance of our refined method in a clinical setting by testing our models on 16 families with singleton pregnancies and varying fetal fraction (FF) levels, and validate the results over millions of inherited variants in each fetus., Results: The average area under the ROC curve (AUC) values are 0.996 over all families for paternally inherited variants, 0.81 for the challenging maternally inherited variants, 0.86 for homozygous biallelic variants and 0.95 for compound heterozygous variants. Discriminative AUCs were achieved even in families with a low FF. We further investigate the performance of our method in correctly predicting SNVs in coding regions of clinically relevant genes and demonstrate significantly improved AUCs in these regions. Finally, we focus on the pathogenic variants in our cohort and show that our method correctly predicts if the fetus is unaffected or affected in all (10/10, 100%) of the families containing a pathogenic SNV., Conclusions: Overall, we demonstrate our ability to perform genome-wide NIPS for maternal and homozygous biallelic variants and showcase the utility of our method in a clinical setting., (© 2024 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.)

Background: Immediate early genes (IEGs) are rapidly activated and initiate diverse cellular processes including neuroplasticity. We report the effect of psilocybin (PSIL), PSIL-containing psychedelic mushroom extract (PME) and 5-hydroxytryptophan (5-HTP) on expression of the IEGs, cfos, egr1 , and egr2 in mouse somatosensory cortex (SSC). Methods: In our initial experiment, male C57Bl/6j mice were injected with PSIL 4.4 mg/kg or 5-HTP 200 mg/kg, alone or immediately preceded by serotonergic receptor modulators. IEG mRNA expression 1 hour later was determined by real time qPCR. In a replication study a group of mice treated with PME was added. Results: In our initial experiment, PSIL but not 5-HTP significantly increased expression of all three IEGs. No correlation was observed between the head twitch response (HTR) induced by PSIL and its effect on the IEGs. The serotonergic receptor modulators did not significantly alter PSIL-induced IEG expression, with the exception of the 5-HT2C antagonist (RS102221), which significantly enhanced PSIL-induced egr2 expression. 5-HTP did not affect IEG expression. In our replication experiment, PSIL and PME upregulated levels of egr1 and cfos while the upregulation of egr2 was not significant. Conclusions: We have shown that PSIL and PME but not 5-HTP (at a dose sufficient to induce HTR), induced a significant increase in cfos and egr1 expression in mouse SSC. Our findings suggest that egr1 and cfos expression may be associated with psychedelic effects., Competing Interests: The study was supported in part by Parow Entheobiosciences. The funder had the following involvement in the study: KB was a scientific collaborator on the project., and as such, was involved in study design, collection, analysis, interpretation of data, the writing of this article, and the decision to submit it for publication. KB is an employee of Parow Entheobiosciences BL is a consultant to Parow Entheobiosciences. The remaining authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2024 Lerer, Botvinnik, Shahar, Grad, Blakolmer, Shomron, Lotan, Lerer and Lifschytz.)