Short-term consumption of a high-fat diet increases host susceptibility to Listeria monocytogenes infection

peer-reviewedBackground A westernized diet comprising a high caloric intake from animal fats is known to influence the development of pathological inflammatory conditions. However, there has been relatively little focus upon the implications of such diets for the progression of infectious disease. Here, we investigated the influence of a high-fat (HF) diet upon parameters that influence Listeria monocytogenes infection in mice. Results We determined that short-term administration of a HF diet increases the number of goblet cells, a known binding site for the pathogen, in the gut and also induces profound changes to the microbiota and promotes a pro-inflammatory gene expression profile in the host. Host physiological changes were concordant with significantly increased susceptibility to oral L. monocytogenes infection in mice fed a HF diet relative to low fat (LF)- or chow-fed animals. Prior to Listeria infection, short-term consumption of HF diet elevated levels of Firmicutes including Coprococcus, Butyricicoccus, Turicibacter and Clostridium XIVa species. During active infection with L. monocytogenes, microbiota changes were further exaggerated but host inflammatory responses were significantly downregulated relative to Listeria-infected LF- or chow-fed groups, suggestive of a profound tempering of the host response influenced by infection in the context of a HF diet. The effects of diet were seen beyond the gut, as a HF diet also increased the sensitivity of mice to systemic infection and altered gene expression profiles in the liver. Conclusions We adopted a systems approach to identify the effects of HF diet upon L. monocytogenes infection through analysis of host responses and microbiota changes (both pre- and post-infection). Overall, the results indicate that short-term consumption of a westernized diet has the capacity to significantly alter host susceptibility to L. monocytogenes infection concomitant with changes to the host physiological landscape. The findings suggest that diet should be a consideration when developing models that reflect human infectious disease.This research was funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Program under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 641984, through funding of the List_MAPS consortium. We also acknowledge funding and support from Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) in the form of a center grant (APC Microbiome Ireland grant SFI/12/RC/2273)

Performance Evaluation of the Cable Bundle Unique Power Back-Off Algorithm

Abstract. The latest digital subscriber line (DSL) technology, VDSL2, used for broadband access over twisted-pairs, promises up to 100 Mbit/s for both transmission directions on short loops. Since these systems are designed to operate in a far-end crosstalk (FEXT) limited environment, there is a severe performance degradation when deployed in distributed network scenarios. With power back-off (PBO) the network operators attempt to protect modems deployed on long loops by reducing the transmit power of the short ones. However, currently very little guidance has been given to operators on how to set and optimize the parameters for PBO. In this paper we explore one promising method, the cable bundle unique PBO (CUPBO), which optimizes these parameters according to the actual situation in the cable with regard to noise and network topology. Using real VDSL systems and cables we show that CUPBO algorithm achieves a significant increase in performance compared to the case when one naively takes the PBO values given in the VDSL standard. Key words: DSL, VDSL, Power back-off, Optimization, Demonstrator.

Duality-Gap Bounds for Multi-Carrier Systems and Their Application to Periodic Scheduling

We investigate a novel cross-layer optimization problem for jointly performing dynamic spectrum management (DSM) and periodic rate-scheduling in time. The large number of carriers used in digital subscriber lines (DSL) makes DSM a large-scale optimization problem for which dual optimization is a commonly used method. The duality-gap which potentially accompanies the dual optimization for non-convex problems is typically assumed to be small enough to be neglected. Also, previous theoretical results show a vanishing duality-gap as the number of subcarriers approaches infinity. We will bound the potential performance improvements that can be achieved by the additional rate-scheduling procedure. This bound is found to depend on the duality-gap in the physical layer DSM problem. Furthermore, we will derive bounds on the duality-gap of the two most important optimization problems in DSL, namely the maximization of the weighted sum-rate and the minimization of the weighted sum-power. These bounds are derived for a finite number of subcarriers and are also applicable to the respective problems in orthogonal frequency division multiplex (OFDM) systems. ©2010 IEEE.</p

Method of optimizing bit rate capacities of DSL user lines

A method of optimizing the bit rate capacities of DSL user lines subject to far-end crosstalk by adjusting the transmit power spectral densities at the far ends of the user lines by means of parameterized power back-off functions is characterized by the steps of : a) selecting a desired bit rate share for each user line, b) measuring the noise and losses on each user line, and c) determining an individual set of power back-off parameters for each user line by calculating a global sum of the bit rates of all user lines and iterating the power back-off parameters until a maximum value of the global sum is found under the constraint that the desired bit rate shares are met.</p

Robust Dynamic Spectrum Management for DMT-Based Systems

In recent years an increasing effort was made to reduce the energy consumption in digital subscriber line equipment. Dynamic spectrum management (DSM) has been identified as one promising method to achieve energy-efficiency in discrete multitone based systems. An open research question is how to ensure system robustness when applying highly optimized energy-efficient spectrum management. In this paper, we study the problem of uncertainty in crosstalk noise and parameters, the knowledge of which is indispensable for many DSM algorithms. We introduce robust optimization for spectrum balancing as a technique to achieve feasibility of the optimal power-allocation under a deterministic parameter uncertainty model. This can be seen as an extension of current schemes for spectrum balancing. As a special case we consider the simple strategy of scaling the crosstalk parameters to their worst-case values, which corresponds to a specific uncertainty model and entails no changes to current DSM algorithms. Finally, we quantify the benefit in worst-case performance and the price in terms of energy by simulations. © 2010 IEEE.</p

Energy Efficient Power Back-Off Management for VDSL2 Transmission

Recently energy saving has become an important issue also for wired communication. In this paper we investigate the potential of using power back-off (PBO) as a means to achieve higher energy efficiency. Based on a global energy optimisation formulation we derive an energy efficient PBO (EEPBO) algorithm. Through simulation we compare EEPBO with continuous bit-loading to the near-optimal energy efficient spectrum balancing (EESB) algorithm and an integer bit-loading version of EEPBO with energy efficient iterative spectrum balancing (EEISB). By restricting the search to practical levels of PBO parameters instead of optimizing the bit-loading on each and every carrier separately we see a significant reduction in computational complexity. It also means that EEPBO is already supported by current VDSL2 systems. Still, even after restricting the spectrum to what the PBO in VDSL2 allows we can show, through simulations, that EEPBO achieves the same level of energy efficiency as the near-optimal methods. This high performance and low-complexity together with standard compliance makes EEPBO a very attractive choice for future energy efficient transmission in VDSL2. © EURASIP, 2009.</p

Method of optimizing bit rate capacities of DSL user lines

A method of optimizing the bit rate capacities of DSL user lines subject to far-end crosstalk by adjusting the transmit power spectral densities at the far ends of the user lines by means of parameterized power back-off functions is characterized by the steps of : a) selecting a desired bit rate share for each user line, b) measuring the noise and losses on each user line, and c) determining an individual set of power back-off parameters for each user line by calculating a global sum of the bit rates of all user lines and iterating the power back-off parameters until a maximum value of the global sum is found under the constraint that the desired bit rate shares are met.</p