Homeosis in a scorpion supports a telopodal origin of pectines and components of the book lungs

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated

The relation of steady evaporating drops fed by an influx and freely evaporating drops

We discuss a thin film evolution equation for a wetting evaporating liquid on a smooth solid substrate. The model is valid for slowly evaporating small sessile droplets when thermal effects are insignificant, while wettability and capillarity play a major role. The model is first employed to study steady evaporating drops that are fed locally through the substrate. An asymptotic analysis focuses on the precursor film and the transition region towards the bulk drop and a numerical continuation of steady drops determines their fully non-linear profiles. Following this, we study the time evolution of freely evaporating drops without influx for several initial drop shapes. As a result we find that drops initially spread if their initial contact angle is larger than the apparent contact angle of large steady evaporating drops with influx. Otherwise they recede right from the beginning

Impacts of household sources on air pollution at village and regional scales in India

Approximately 3 billion people worldwide cook with solid fuels, such as wood, charcoal, and agricultural residues. These fuels, also used for residential heating, are often combusted in inefficient devices, producing carbonaceous emissions. Between 2.6 and 3.8 million premature deaths occur as a result of exposure to fine particulate matter from the resulting household air pollution (Health Effects Institute, 2018a; World Health Organization, 2018). Household air pollution also contributes to ambient air pollution; the magnitude of this contribution is uncertain. Here, we simulate the distribution of the two major health-damaging outdoor air pollutants (PM2:5 and O3) using state-of-thescience emissions databases and atmospheric chemical transport models to estimate the impact of household combustion on ambient air quality in India. The present study focuses on New Delhi and the SOMAARTH Demographic, Development, and Environmental Surveillance Site (DDESS) in the Palwal District of Haryana, located about 80 km south of New Delhi. The DDESS covers an approximate population of 200 000 within 52 villages. The emissions inventory used in the present study was prepared based on a national inventory in India (Sharma et al., 2015, 2016), an updated residential sector inventory prepared at the University of Illinois, updated cookstove emissions factors from Fleming et al. (2018b), and PM2:5 speciation from cooking fires from Jayarathne et al. (2018). Simulation of regional air quality was carried out using the US Environmental Protection Agency Community Multiscale Air Quality modeling system (CMAQ) in conjunction with the Weather Research and Forecasting modeling system (WRF) to simulate the meteorological inputs for CMAQ, and the global chemical transport model GEOS-Chem to generate concentrations on the boundary of the computational domain. Comparisons between observed and simulated O3 and PM2:5 levels are carried out to assess overall airborne levels and to estimate the contribution of household cooking emissions

Friedreich ataxia patient tissues exhibit increased 5-hydroxymethylcytosine modification and decreased CTCF binding at the FXN locus

© 2013 Al-Mahdawi et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use,distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.This article has been made available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund.Friedreich ataxia (FRDA) is caused by a homozygous GAA repeat expansion mutation within intron 1 of the FXN gene, which induces epigenetic changes and FXN gene silencing. Bisulfite sequencing studies have identified 5-methylcytosine (5 mC) DNA methylation as one of the epigenetic changes that may be involved in this process. However, analysis of samples by bisulfite sequencing is a time-consuming procedure. In addition, it has recently been shown that 5-hydroxymethylcytosine (5 hmC) is also present in mammalian DNA, and bisulfite sequencing cannot distinguish between 5 hmC and 5 mC.The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement number 242193/EFACTS (CS), the Wellcome Trust [089757] (SA) and Ataxia UK (RMP) to MAP

The Hip Fracture Surgery in Elderly Patients (HIPELD) study: protocol for a randomized, multicenter controlled trial evaluating the effect of xenon on postoperative delirium in older patients undergoing hip fracture surgery

BackgroundStrategies to protect the brain from postoperative delirium (POD) after hip fracture are urgently needed. The development of delirium often is associated with the loss of independence, poor functional recovery, and increased morbidity, as well as increases in length of hospital stay, discharges to nursing facilities, and healthcare costs. We hypothesize that xenon may reduce the burden of POD, (i) by avoiding the need to provide anesthesia with a drug that targets the γ-amino-butyric acid (GABA)A receptor and (ii) through beneficial anesthetic and organ-protective effects.Methods and designAn international, multicenter, phase 2, prospective, randomized, blinded, parallel group and controlled trial to evaluate the incidence of POD, diagnosed with the Confusion Assessment Method (CAM), in older patients undergoing hip fracture surgery under general anesthesia with xenon or sevoflurane, for a period of 4 days post surgery (primary outcome) is planned. Secondary objectives are to compare the incidence of POD between xenon and sevoflurane, to evaluate the incidence of POD from day 5 post surgery until discharge from hospital, to determine the time to first POD diagnosis, to evaluate the duration of POD, to evaluate the evolution of the physiological status of the patients in the postoperative period, to evaluate the recovery parameters, to collect preliminary data to evaluate the economical impact of POD in the postoperative period and to collect safety data. Patients are eligible if they are older aged (≥ 75 years) and assigned to a planned hip fracture surgery within 48 h after the hip fracture. Furthermore, patients need to be willing and able to complete the requirements of this study including the signature of the written informed consent. A total of 256 randomized patients in the 10 participating centers will be recruited, that is, 128 randomized patients in each of the 2 study groups (receiving either xenon or sevoflurane).Trial registrationEudraCT Identifier: 2009-017153-35; ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier: NCT0119927

Species-level functional profiling of metagenomes and metatranscriptomes.

Functional profiles of microbial communities are typically generated using comprehensive metagenomic or metatranscriptomic sequence read searches, which are time-consuming, prone to spurious mapping, and often limited to community-level quantification. We developed HUMAnN2, a tiered search strategy that enables fast, accurate, and species-resolved functional profiling of host-associated and environmental communities. HUMAnN2 identifies a community's known species, aligns reads to their pangenomes, performs translated search on unclassified reads, and finally quantifies gene families and pathways. Relative to pure translated search, HUMAnN2 is faster and produces more accurate gene family profiles. We applied HUMAnN2 to study clinal variation in marine metabolism, ecological contribution patterns among human microbiome pathways, variation in species' genomic versus transcriptional contributions, and strain profiling. Further, we introduce 'contributional diversity' to explain patterns of ecological assembly across different microbial community types

Src Dependent Pancreatic Acinar Injury Can Be Initiated Independent of an Increase in Cytosolic Calcium

Several deleterious intra-acinar phenomena are simultaneously triggered on initiating acute pancreatitis. These culminate in acinar injury or inflammatory mediator generation in vitro and parenchymal damage in vivo. Supraphysiologic caerulein is one such initiator which simultaneously activates numerous signaling pathways including non-receptor tyrosine kinases such as of the Src family. It also causes a sustained increase in cytosolic calcium- a player thought to be crucial in regulating deleterious phenomena. We have shown Src to be involved in caerulein induced actin remodeling, and caerulein induced changes in the Golgi and post-Golgi trafficking to be involved in trypsinogen activation, which initiates acinar cell injury. However, it remains unclear whether an increase in cytosolic calcium is necessary to initiate acinar injury or if injury can be initiated at basal cytosolic calcium levels by an alternate pathway. To study the interplay between tyrosine kinase signaling and calcium, we treated mouse pancreatic acinar cells with the tyrosine phosphatase inhibitor pervanadate. We studied the effect of the clinically used Src inhibitor Dasatinib (BMS-354825) on pervanadate or caerulein induced changes in Src activation, trypsinogen activation, cell injury, upstream cytosolic calcium, actin and Golgi morphology. Pervanadate, like supraphysiologic caerulein, induced Src activation, redistribution of the F-actin from its normal location in the sub-apical area to the basolateral areas, and caused antegrade fragmentation of the Golgi. These changes, like those induced by supraphysiologic caerulein, were associated with trypsinogen activation and acinar injury, all of which were prevented by Dasatinib. Interestingly, however, pervanadate did not cause an increase in cytosolic calcium, and the caerulein induced increase in cytosolic calcium was not affected by Dasatinib. These findings suggest that intra-acinar deleterious phenomena may be initiated independent of an increase in cytosolic calcium. Other players resulting in acinar injury along with the Src family of tyrosine kinases remain to be explored. © 2013 Mishra et al

Nitrogen uptake and internal recycling in Zostera marina exposed to oyster farming: eelgrass potential as a natural biofilter

Oyster farming in estuaries and coastal lagoons frequently overlaps with the distribution of seagrass meadows, yet there are few studies on how this aquaculture practice affects seagrass physiology. We compared in situ nitrogen uptake and the productivity of Zostera marina shoots growing near off-bottom longlines and at a site not affected by oyster farming in San Quintin Bay, a coastal lagoon in Baja California, Mexico. We used benthic chambers to measure leaf NH4 (+) uptake capacities by pulse labeling with (NH4)-N-15 (+) and plant photosynthesis and respiration. The internal N-15 resorption/recycling was measured in shoots 2 weeks after incubations. The natural isotopic composition of eelgrass tissues and vegetative descriptors were also examined. Plants growing at the oyster farming site showed a higher leaf NH4 (+) uptake rate (33.1 mmol NH4 (+) m(-2) day(-1)) relative to those not exposed to oyster cultures (25.6 mmol NH4 (+) m(-2) day(-1)). We calculated that an eelgrass meadow of 15-16 ha (which represents only about 3-4 % of the subtidal eelgrass meadow cover in the western arm of the lagoon) can potentially incorporate the total amount of NH4 (+) excreted by oysters (similar to 5.2 x 10(6) mmol NH4 (+) day(-1)). This highlights the potential of eelgrass to act as a natural biofilter for the NH4 (+) produced by oyster farming. Shoots exposed to oysters were more efficient in re-utilizing the internal N-15 into the growth of new leaf tissues or to translocate it to belowground tissues. Photosynthetic rates were greater in shoots exposed to oysters, which is consistent with higher NH4 (+) uptake and less negative delta C-13 values. Vegetative production (shoot size, leaf growth) was also higher in these shoots. Aboveground/belowground biomass ratio was lower in eelgrass beds not directly influenced by oyster farms, likely related to the higher investment in belowground biomass to incorporate sedimentary nutrients

Stalking influenza by vaccination with pre-fusion headless HA mini-stem.

Inaccuracies in prediction of circulating viral strain genotypes and the possibility of novel reassortants causing a pandemic outbreak necessitate the development of an anti-influenza vaccine with increased breadth of protection and potential for rapid production and deployment. The hemagglutinin (HA) stem is a promising target for universal influenza vaccine as stem-specific antibodies have the potential to be broadly cross-reactive towards different HA subtypes. Here, we report the design of a bacterially expressed polypeptide that mimics a H5 HA stem by protein minimization to focus the antibody response towards the HA stem. The HA mini-stem folds as a trimer mimicking the HA prefusion conformation. It is resistant to thermal/chemical stress, and it binds to conformation-specific, HA stem-directed broadly neutralizing antibodies with high affinity. Mice vaccinated with the group 1 HA mini-stems are protected from morbidity and mortality against lethal challenge by both group 1 (H5 and H1) and group 2 (H3) influenza viruses, the first report of cross-group protection. Passive transfer of immune serum demonstrates the protection is mediated by stem-specific antibodies. Furthermore, antibodies indudced by these HA stems have broad HA reactivity, yet they do not have antibody-dependent enhancement activity

Outcome of ATP-based tumor chemosensitivity assay directed chemotherapy in heavily pre-treated recurrent ovarian carcinoma

BACKGROUND: We wished to evaluate the clinical response following ATP-Tumor Chemosensitivity Assay (ATP-TCA) directed salvage chemotherapy in a series of UK patients with advanced ovarian cancer. The results are compared with that of a similar assay used in a different country in terms of evaluability and clinical endpoints. METHODS: From November 1998 to November 2001, 46 patients with pre-treated, advanced ovarian cancer were given a total of 56 courses of chemotherapy based on in-vitro ATP-TCA responses obtained from fresh tumor samples or ascites. Forty-four patients were evaluable for results. Of these, 18 patients had clinically platinum resistant disease (relapse < 6 months after first course of chemotherapy). There was evidence of cisplatin resistance in 31 patients from their first ATP-TCA. Response to treatment was assessed by radiology, clinical assessment and tumor marker level (CA 125). RESULTS: The overall response rate was 59% (33/56) per course of chemotherapy, including 12 complete responses, 21 partial responses, 6 with stable disease, and 15 with progressive disease. Two patients were not evaluable for response having received just one cycle of chemotherapy: if these were excluded the response rate is 61%. Fifteen patients are still alive. Median progression free survival (PFS) was 6.6 months per course of chemotherapy; median overall survival (OAS) for each patient following the start of TCA-directed therapy was 10.4 months (95% confidence interval 7.9-12.8 months). CONCLUSION: The results show similar response rates to previous studies using ATP-TCA directed therapy in recurrent ovarian cancer. The assay shows high evaluability and this study adds weight to the reproducibility of results from different centre