To cite this version:J EhlbeckAbstract. The aim of this article is to provide a survey of plasma sources at atmospheric pressure used for microbicidal treatment. In order to consider the interdisciplinary character of this topic an introduction and definition of basic terms and procedures is given for plasma as well as for microbicidal issues. The list of plasma sources makes no claim to be complete, but to represent the main principles of plasma generation at atmospheric pressure and to give an example of their microbicidal efficiency. The interpretation of the microbicidal results remain difficult due to the non standardized methods uses by different authors and due to the fact that small variations in the set up can change the results dramatically.

The use of plasma for healthcare can be dated back as far as the middle of the 19th century. Only the development of room temperature atmospheric pressure plasma sources in the past decade, however, has opened the new and fast growing interdisciplinary research field of plasma medicine. Three main topics can be distinguished: plasma treated implants, plasma decontamination, and plasmas in medical therapy. Understanding of the plasma sources and the plasma processes involved is still incomplete. With the aim of a more fundamental insight we investigate plasmas in a) functionalization of implants with antimicrobial as well as cell attachment enhancing surfaces b) atmospheric pressure plasmas (APPs) in inactivation of bacteria, decontamination of bottles and food products, as well as medical equipment and c) APPs in medical therapy and their effects on cell viability as a means to finding a plasma "dosage". The possibilities of an application focused designing of plasma sources will be emphasized. On the example of feed gas humidity and its significant influence the importance of determining and controlling unobvious or hidden parameter is demonstrated.

Potato virus Y (PVY) is among the most economically important plant pathogens. Using cryoelectron microscopy, we determined the near-atomic structure of PVY’s flexuous virions, revealing a previously unknown lumenal interplay between extended carboxyl-terminal regions of the coat protein units and viral RNA. RNA–coat protein interactions are crucial for the helical configuration and stability of the virion, as revealed by the unique near-atomic structure of RNA-free virus-like particles. The structures offer the first evidence for plasticity of the coat protein’s amino- and carboxyl-terminal regions. Together with mutational analysis and in planta experiments, we show their crucial role in PVY infectivity and explain the ability of the coat protein to perform multiple biological tasks. Moreover, the high modularity of PVY virus-like particles suggests their potential as a new molecular scaffold for nanobiotechnological applications.

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An innovative device capable of generating a cold atmospheric pressure plasma inside a 5 m long flexible tube with 2 mm inner diameter is presented. In order to analyze the inner‐tube plasma, optical emission spectroscopy in the (vacuum) ultraviolet spectral range and Fourier transformed infrared spectroscopy were performed. By admixing small concentrations of nitrogen and oxygen to the standard argon gas flow rate of 1.5 slm, a drastically change in the plasma composition was observed. Additionally, it is possible to form a jet‐like plasma at the end of the tube. The microbicidal efficacy of the inner‐tube plasma and the jet‐like plasma was shown for Bacillus atrophaeus spores.

Authors are listed in an order by their first contribution part to this paper and its subsections. Some have contributed to more than one subsection. This white paper considers the future of plasma science and technology related to the manufacturing and modifications of plastics and textiles, summarizing existing efforts and the current state-of-art for major topics related to plasma processing techniques. It draws on the frontier of plasma technologies in order to see beyond and identify the grand challenges which we face in the following 5-10 years. To progress and move the frontier forward, the paper highlights the major enabling technologies

Plasma medicine and also decontamination of bacteria with physical plasmas is a promising new field of life science with huge interest especially for medical applications. Despite numerous successful applications of low temperature gas plasmas in medicine and decontamination, the fundamental nature of the interactions between plasma and microorganisms is to a large extent unknown. A detailed knowledge of these interactions is essential for the development of new as well as for the enhancement of established plasma-treatment procedures. In the present work we introduce for the first time a growth chamber system suitable for low temperature gas plasma treatment of bacteria in liquid medium. We have coupled the use of this apparatus to a combined proteomic and transcriptomic analyses to investigate the specific stress response of Bacillus subtilis 168 cells to treatment with argon plasma. The treatment with three different discharge voltages revealed not only effects on growth, but also clear evidence of cellular stress responses. B. subtilis suffered severe cell wall stress, which was made visible also by electron microscopy, DNA damages and oxidative stress as a result of exposure to plasma. These biological findings were supported by the detection of reactive plasma species by OES measurements.

1has shown that in patients at high cardiovascular (CV) risk a treatment regimen based on telmisartan or ramipril reduced to a similar degree clinic blood pressure (BP) and showed no significant difference in the incidence of CV morbid or fatal events. Clinic BP was reduced to a somewhat greater degree in patients treated with a combination of the 2 drugs (1.5-2.4 mm Hg systolic BP [SBP] and 0.8-1.4 mm Hg diastolic BP [DBP]), without, however, any significant difference in CV outcome. Because ramipril had been shown previously to reduce outcomes in high CV risk individuals 2 ; this led to the conclusion that telmisartan and ramipril have a similar protective effect, which is not enhanced by double blockade of the renin-angiotensin system, despite the potentially greater protection associated with a greater BP-lowering effect. Evidence is available that BP reductions induced by antihypertensive treatment cannot be precisely quantified if BP is measured in the clinic environment because clinic BP is affected to a variable degree by a transient increase known as the white coat effect. 4 Furthermore, clinic BP values are poorly reproducible, 5,6 and their treatment-induced changes reflect to only a modest degree the concomitant changes in daily life BP, 7-10 that is, a more reproducible 5 and prognostically important BP, which relates more steeply to CV morbidity and mortality. 11-17The ONTARGET included a prespecified substudy 18 focusing on ambulatory BP (ABP) to determine whether and to what extent treatment-induced changes in clinic BP correspond to daily life ABP. This article reports the results. Methods Patients and Monitoring ProceduresThe protocol of the ONTARGET has been described in detail previously.18 Briefly, men and women aged ≥55 years without symptomatic heart failure at entry and with a history of coronary Abstract-In the Ongoing Telmisartan Alone and in Combination with Ramipril Global Endpoint Trial, telmisartan (T; 80 mg daily) and ramipril (R; 10 mg daily) caused similar clinic blood pressure (BP) reductions, with a similar incidence of cardiovascular and renal events. The R+T combination lowered clinic BP somewhat more with no further cardiovascular or renal protection. The aim of this substudy was to see whether these clinic BP changes reflected the changes of 24-hour BP, a BP with a better prognostic value. In 422 patients in whom 24-hour BP monitoring was performed either before or after 6 to 24 months of treatment, demographic and clinical characteristics were similar in the 3 treated groups. Twenty-four-hour systolic BP was similarly reduced by R (−2.0 mm Hg) and T (−2.1 mm Hg), whereas the reduction was more than twice as large in the T+R group (−5.3 mm Hg), which showed a lower on-treatment 24-hour BP also in additional patients (n=408) in whom ambulatory BP was performed only on-treatment. Twenty-four-hour systolic BP was ≈14 mm Hg lower than clinic systolic BP at baseline, whereas during treatment the 2 values became progressively closer as clinic systolic BP was more tightly controll...