Y Rosenblatt | PubMed Health

PubMed2000

Diagnostic odor recognition

Many diseases, toxic ingestions, and intoxications have characteristic odors. These odors may provide diagnostic clues that affect rapid treatment long before laboratory confirmation or clinical deterioration. Odor recognition skills, similar to auscultation and palpation skills, require teaching and practical exposure. Dr. Goldfrank and colleagues recognized the importance of teaching odor recognition to emergency service providers. They proposed the "sniffing bar" method for odor recognition training. OBJECTIVES: (1) To identify the recognition rates of medically important odors among emergency care providers. (2) To investigate the effectiveness of teaching odor recognition. Hypothesis: The recognition rates of medically important odors will increase after teaching exposure. METHODS: The study exposed emergency care providers to 11 tubes of odors. Identifications of each substance were recorded. After corrective feedback, subjects were re-tested on their ability to identify the odors. Analysis of odor recognition improvement after teaching was done via chi-square test. RESULTS: Improvement in identification after teaching was seen in all odors. However, the improvement was significant only in the lesscommon substances because their initial recognition was especially low. Significant changes may improve with a larger sample size. Subjects often confuse the odors of alcohol with acetone, and wintergreen with camphor. CONCLUSIONS: The recognition rates are higher for the more-common odors, and lower for the less-common odors. Teaching exposures to the less well-known odors are effective and can significantly improve the recognition rate of these substances. Because odor recognition may affect rapid diagnosis and treatment of certain medical emergencies such as toxic ingestion, future studies should investigate the correlation between odor recognition and the ability to identify corresponding medical emergencies.

Journal Article↗

PubMed1997

Palmitoylation of p59fyn is reversible and sufficient for plasma membrane association.

Members of the Src family of protein tyrosine kinases are localized to subspecialized regions of the plasma membrane. Herein we show that the N-terminal SH4 region of the Src family member p59fyn (Fyn) is both necessary and sufficient for targeting of Fyn and heterologous proteins to the plasma membrane and detergent-insoluble subdomains. Attachment of the first 16 amino acids of Fyn to a normally cytosolic protein, beta-galactosidase, resulted in distinct plasma membrane localization of the chimeric protein. Mutation of the palmitoylation site (cysteine-3) within Fyn16-beta-galactosidase or wild-type Fyn abrogated plasma membrane localization, resulting in redistribution of the mutant proteins into intracellular membranes. Substitution of the SH4 motif within Fyn with heterologous sequences from other palmitoylated proteins (G alpha o and GAP43) revealed that the presence of palmitate is sufficient to direct plasma membrane localization independent of surrounding amino acid sequences and myristate. Palmitoylated Fyn chimeras were also enriched in the Triton X-100-resistant matrix, whereas nonpalmitoylated forms of these proteins were detected in the detergent-soluble fraction. The palmitate moiety on Fyn exhibited a half-life of 1.5-2 h. In contrast, the half-life of the polypeptide backbone was 8 h, indicating that palmitoylation is a reversible modification. These studies establish that the palmitoylated SH4 sequence of Fyn can be used to specifically target proteins to the plasma membrane in a reversible manner.

3T3 Cells↗