University of Los Andes

About: University of Los Andes is a education organization based out in Bogotá, Colombia. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Large Hadron Collider. The organization has 17616 authors who have published 25555 publications receiving 413463 citations.

Detection of prions in blood from patients with variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease

Abstract: Human prion diseases are infectious and invariably fatal neurodegenerative diseases. They include sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (sCJD), the most common form, and variant CJD (vCJD), which is caused by interspecies transmission of prions from cattle infected by bovine spongiform encephalopathy. Development of a biochemical assay for the sensitive, specific, early, and noninvasive detection of prions (PrPSc) in the blood of patients affected by prion disease is a top medical priority to increase the safety of the blood supply. vCJD has already been transmitted from human to human by blood transfusion, and the number of asymptomatic carriers of vCJD in the U.K. alone is estimated to be 1 in 2000 people. We used the protein misfolding cyclic amplification (PMCA) technique to analyze blood samples from 14 cases of vCJD and 153 controls, including patients affected by sCJD and other neurodegenerative or neurological disorders as well as healthy subjects. Our results showed that PrPSc could be detected with 100% sensitivity and specificity in blood samples from vCJD patients. Detection was possible in any of the blood fractions analyzed and could be done with as little as a few microliters of sample volume. The PrPSc concentration in blood was estimated to be ~0.5 pg/ml. Our findings suggest that PMCA may be useful for premortem noninvasive diagnosis of vCJD and to identify prion contamination of the blood supply. Further studies are needed to fully validate the technology.

State-of-the-art dried blood spot analysis: an overview of recent advances and future trends

Abstract: Dried blood spots have become a popular method in a variety of micro blood-sampling techniques in the life sciences sector, consequently competing with the field of conventional, invasive blood sampling by venepuncture Dried blood spots are widely applied in numerous bioanalytical assays and have gained a significant role in the screening of inherited metabolic diseases, in PK and PD modeling; in the treatment and diagnosis of infectious diseases; and in therapeutic drug monitoring Recent technological developments such as automation, online extraction, mass spectrometric direct analysis and also conventional dried blood spot bioanalysis, as well as future developments in dried blood spot bioanalysis are highlighted and presented in this article

Long-range and short-range dihadron angular correlations in central PbPb collisions at a nucleon-nucleon center of mass energy of 2.76 TeV

Abstract: First measurements of dihadron correlations for charged particles are presented for central PbPb collisions at a nucleon-nucleon center-of-mass energy of 2.76 TeV over a broad range in relative pseudorapidity, Delta(eta), and the full range of relative azimuthal angle, Delta(phi). The data were collected with the CMS detector, at the LHC. A broadening of the away-side (Delta(phi) approximately pi) azimuthal correlation is observed at all Delta(eta), as compared to the measurements in pp collisions. Furthermore, long-range dihadron correlations in Delta(eta) are observed for particles with similar phi values. This phenomenon, also known as the "ridge", persists up to at least |Delta(eta)| = 4. For particles with transverse momenta (pt) of 2-4 GeV/c, the ridge is found to be most prominent when these particles are correlated with particles of pt = 2-6 GeV/c, and to be much reduced when paired with particles of pt = 10-12 GeV/c.

Performance of CMS muon reconstruction in cosmic-ray events

Abstract: The performance of muon reconstruction in CMS is evaluated using a large data sample of cosmic-ray muons recorded in 2008. Efficiencies of various high-level trigger, identification, and reconstruction algorithms have been measured for a broad range of muon momenta, and were found to be in good agreement with expectations from Monte Carlo simulation. The relative momentum resolution for muons crossing the barrel part of the detector is better than 1% at 10 GeV/c and is about 8% at 500 GeV/c, the latter being only a factor of two worse than expected with ideal alignment conditions. Muon charge misassignment ranges from less than 0.01% at 10 GeV/c to about 1% at 500 GeV/c.