Functional properties of the human ventral mesencephalic neural stem cell line hVM1.

The human fetal ventral mesencephalon-derived stem cell line, hVM1, yields high number of tyrosine hydroxylase-expressing presumed dopaminergic neurons upon in vitro differentiation. Here we report that cells generated from this line differentiate into a neuronal phenotype, express electrophysiological properties of functional neurons and respond to neurotransmitters in vitro. However, the electrophysiological properties are immature and the cells require longer maturation time than possible under in vitro condition

When Density Matters: The Spatial Balance between Early and Latewood

Understanding the influence of the current climate on the distribution, composition, and carbon storage capacity of Mediterranean tree species is key to determining future pathways under a warmer and drier climate scenario. Here, we evaluated the influence of biotic and environmental factors on earlywood (EW) and latewood (LW) growth in Aleppo pine (Pinus halepensis Mill.). Our investigation was based on a dense dendrochronological network (71 sites), which covered the entire distribution area of the species in the Iberian Peninsula (around 119.652 km2), and a high-resolution climate dataset of the Western Mediterranean area. We used generalized linear-mixed models to determine the spatial and temporal variations of EW and LW across the species distribution. Our results showed an intense but differentiated climatic influence on both EW and LW growth components. The climatic influence explained significant variations across the environmental gradients in the study area, which suggested an important adaptation through phenotypic plasticity and local adaptation to varying climatic conditions. In addition, we detected a clear spatial trade-off between efficiency and safety strategy in the growth patterns across the species distribution. Additionally, in more productive areas, the trees presented a higher proportion of EW (more efficient to water transport), while, in more xeric conditions, the LW proportion increased (more safety to avoid embolisms), implying an adaptation to more frequent drought episodes and a higher capacity of carbon depletion. We therefore concluded that Mediterranean forests adapted to dryer conditions might be more efficient as carbon reservoirs than forests growing in wetter areas. Finally, we advocated for the need to consider wood density (EW/LW proportion) when modeling current and future forest carbon sequestrations

The TransLectures-UPV Toolkit

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-13623-3_28Over the past few years, online multimedia educational repositories have increased in number and popularity. The main aim of the transLectures project is to develop cost-effective solutions for producing accurate transcriptions and translations for large video lecture repositories, such as VideoLectures.NET or the Universitat Politècnica de València s repository, poliMedia. In this paper, we present the transLectures-UPV toolkit (TLK), which has been specifically designed to meet the requirements of the transLectures project, but can also be used as a conventional ASR toolkit. The main features of the current release include HMM training and decoding with speaker adaptation techniques (fCMLLR). TLK has been tested on the VideoLectures.NET and poliMedia repositories, yielding very competitive results. TLK has been released under the permissive open source Apache License v2.0 and can be directly downloaded from the transLectures website.The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement no 287755 (transLectures) and ICT Policy Support Programme (ICT PSP/2007-2013) as part of the Competitiveness and InnovationFramework Programme (CIP) under grant agreement no 621030 (EMMA), andthe Spanish MINECO Active2Trans (TIN2012-31723) research project.Del Agua Teba, MA.; Giménez Pastor, A.; Serrano Martinez Santos, N.; Andrés Ferrer, J.; Civera Saiz, J.; Sanchis Navarro, JA.; Juan Císcar, A. (2014). The TransLectures-UPV Toolkit. En Advances in Speech and Language Technologies for Iberian Languages: Second International Conference, IberSPEECH 2014, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain, November 19-21, 2014. Proceedings. Springer International Publishing. 269-278. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-13623-3_28S269278Final report on massive adaptation (M36). To be delivered on October 2014 (2014)First report on massive adaptation (M12), https://www.translectures.eu/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/transLectures-D3.1.1-18Nov2012.pdfOpencast Matterhorn, http://opencast.org/matterhorn/sclite - Score speech recognition system output, http://www1.icsi.berkeley.edu/Speech/docs/sctk-1.2/sclite.htmSecond report on massive adaptation (M24), https://www.translectures.eu//wp-content/uploads/2014/01/transLectures-D3.1.2-15Nov2013.pdfTLK: The transLectures-UPV Toolkit, https://www.translectures.eu/tlk/Baum, L.E., Petrie, T., Soules, G., Weiss, N.: A Maximization Technique Occurring in the Statistical Analysis of Probabilistic Functions of Markov Chains. The Annals of Mathematical Statistics 41(1), 164–171 (1970)Dahl, G.E., Yu, D., Deng, L., Acero, A.: Context-Dependent Pre-Trained Deep Neural Networks for Large-Vocabulary Speech Recognition. IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing 20(1), 30–42 (2012)Digalakis, V., Rtischev, D., Neumeyer, L., Sa, E.: Speaker Adaptation Using Constrained Estimation of Gaussian Mixtures. IEEE Transactions on Speech and Audio Processing 3, 357–366 (1995)Huang, J.T., Li, J., Yu, D., Deng, L., Gong, Y.: Cross-language knowledge transfer using multilingual deep neural network with shared hidden layers. In: Proc. of ICASSP (2013)Munteanu, C., Baecker, R., Penn, G., Toms, E., James, D.: The Effect of Speech Recognition Accuracy Rates on the Usefulness and Usability of Webcast Archives. In: Proc. of CHI, pp. 493–502 (2006)Ney, H., Ortmanns, S.: Progress in dynamic programming search for LVCSR. Proceedings of the IEEE 88(8), 1224–1240 (2000)Ortmanns, S., Ney, H., Eiden, A.: Language-model look-ahead for large vocabulary speech recognition. In: Proc. of ICSLP, vol. 4, pp. 2095–2098 (1996)Ortmanns, S., Ney, H., Aubert, X.: A word graph algorithm for large vocabulary continuous speech recognition. Computer Speech and Language 11(1), 43–72 (1997)Povey, D., et al.: The Kaldi Speech Recognition Toolkit. In: Proc. of ASRU (2011)Rumelhart, D., Hintont, G., Williams, R.: Learning representations by back-propagating errors. Nature 323(6088), 533–536 (1986)Rybach, D., et al.: The RWTH Aachen University Open Source Speech Recognition System. In: Proc. Interspeech, pp. 2111–2114 (2009)Seide, F., Li, G., Chen, X., Yu, D.: Feature engineering in Context-Dependent Deep Neural Networks for conversational speech transcription. In: Proc. of ASRU, pp. 24–29 (2011)Viterbi, A.: Error bounds for convolutional codes and an asymptotically optimum decoding algorithm. IEEE Transactions on Information Theory 13(2), 260–269 (1967)Young, S., et al.: The HTK Book. Cambridge University Engineering Department (1995)Young, S.J., Odell, J.J., Woodland, P.C.: Tree-based state tying for high accuracy acoustic modelling. In: Proc. of HLT, pp. 307–312 (1994

Monitoring pest insect traps by means of low-power image sensor technologies

Monitoring pest insect populations is currently a key issue in agriculture and forestry protection. At the farm level, human operators typically must perform periodical surveys of the traps disseminated through the field. This is a labor-, time- and cost-consuming activity, in particular for large plantations or large forestry areas, so it would be of great advantage to have an affordable system capable of doing this task automatically in an accurate and a more efficient way. This paper proposes an autonomous monitoring system based on a low-cost image sensor that it is able to capture and send images of the trap contents to a remote control station with the periodicity demanded by the trapping application. Our autonomous monitoring system will be able to cover large areas with very low energy consumption. This issue would be the main key point in our study; since the operational live of the overall monitoring system should be extended to months of continuous operation without any kind of maintenance (i.e., battery replacement). The images delivered by image sensors would be time-stamped and processed in the control station to get the number of individuals found at each trap. All the information would be conveniently stored at the control station, and accessible via Internet by means of available network services at control station (WiFi, WiMax, 3G/4G, etc.). © 2012 by the authors; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.This work was partially funded by Ministry of Education and Science grants CTM2011-29691-C02-01, TIN2011-28435-C03-01 and TIN2011-27543-C03-03.López ., O.; Martinez Rach, MO.; Migallon ., H.; Pérez Malumbres, MJ.; Bonastre Pina, AM.; Serrano Martín, JJ. (2012). Monitoring pest insect traps by means of low-power image sensor technologies. Sensors. 12(11):15801-15819. doi:10.3390/s121115801S15801158191211Shelton, A. M., & Badenes-Perez, F. R. (2006). CONCEPTS AND APPLICATIONS OF TRAP CROPPING IN PEST MANAGEMENT. Annual Review of Entomology, 51(1), 285-308. doi:10.1146/annurev.ento.51.110104.150959Jiang, J.-A., Tseng, C.-L., Lu, F.-M., Yang, E.-C., Wu, Z.-S., Chen, C.-P., … Liao, C.-S. (2008). A GSM-based remote wireless automatic monitoring system for field information: A case study for ecological monitoring of the oriental fruit fly, Bactrocera dorsalis (Hendel). Computers and Electronics in Agriculture, 62(2), 243-259. doi:10.1016/j.compag.2008.01.005http://www.memsic.comAl-Saqer. (2011). Red Palm Weevil (Rynchophorus Ferrugineous, Olivier) Recognition by Image Processing Techniques. American Journal of Agricultural and Biological Sciences, 6(3), 365-376. doi:10.3844/ajabssp.2011.365.376http://www.ti.com/lit/ds/symlink/cc1110f32.pdfhttp://www.comedia.com.hkOliver, J., & Perez Malumbres, M. (2008). On the Design of Fast Wavelet Transform Algorithms With Low Memory Requirements. IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology, 18(2), 237-248. doi:10.1109/tcsvt.2007.91396

Estudio comparativo de prevalencia de enfermedad de chagas en zonas rurales y urbanas del Nordeste Argentino

En el presente trabajo, se informa la incidencia acumulada de casos positivos de enfermedad de Chagas en adultos y niños con edades comprendidas entre 2 y 79 años, en poblaciones de bajos recursos de Chaco y Corrientes.Se realizó en el marco del PROGRAMA UNNE SALUD durante los años 2012 y 2013. Se obtuvieron 1.233 muestras de sangre venosa a cuyos sueros se realizó inmunoserología mediante dos metodologías diferentes: Hemaglutinación Indirecta con Chagatest con valor de corte 1/32 y Enzimoinmunoensayo con Chagatest ELISA v.3, considerando reactivas a aquellas muestras que resultaron positivas por ambas técnicas. Del total de personas atendidas, 101 presentaron infección parasitaria (8%). Al analizar el lugar de residencia de los pacientes seropositivos, se observó que un 79% (N=80) de estos correspondían a la provincia de Chaco y un 21% a la provincia de Corrientes del 21 % (N=21).En la provincia de Chaco el 94%(N=75) de casos positivos eran pobladores rurales ysólo un 6% (N=5) pobladores urbanos. Por edades, la distribución encontrada fue niños(menores de 18 años) 25% (N=25) y adultos 54%(N=55). Por otra parte, en la Provinciade Corrientes la serología positiva de la población estudiada, tuvo una distribución diferente: pobladores rurales 5%(N=1) y pobladores urbanos 95% (N=20), con un 3%de niños infectados(N=3) y un 18%(N=18) de adultos. Los resultados muestran unaseroprevalencia significativa de la enfermedad en la población estudiada, principalmenteen zonas rurales de Chaco.

APOA5 Q97X Mutation Identified through homozygosity mapping causes severe hypertriglyceridemia in a Chilean consanguineous family

BACKGROUND: Severe hypertriglyceridemia (HTG) has been linked to defects in LPL, APOC2, APOA5, LMF1 and GBIHBP1 genes. However, a number of severe HTG cases are probably caused by as yet unidentified mutations. Very high triglyceride plasma levels (>112 mmol/L at diagnosis) were found in two sisters of a Chilean consanguineous family, which is strongly suggestive of a recessive highly penetrant mutation. The aim of this study was to determine the genetic locus responsible for the severe HTG in this family. METHODS: We carried out a genome-wide linkage study with nearly 300,000 biallelic markers (Illumina Human CytoSNP-12 panel). Using the homozygosity mapping strategy, we searched for chromosome regions with excess of homozygous genotypes in the affected cases compared to non-affected relatives. RESULTS: A large homozygous segment was found in the long arm of chromosome 11, with more than 2,500 consecutive homozygous SNP shared by the proband with her affected sister, and containing the APOA5/A4/C3/A1 cluster. Direct sequencing of the APOA5 gene revealed a known homozygous nonsense Q97X mutation (p.Gln97Ter) found in both affected sisters but not in non-affected relatives nor in a sample of unrelated controls. CONCLUSION: The Q97X mutation of the APOA5 gene in homozygous status is responsible for the severe hypertriglyceridemia in this family. We have shown that homozygosity mapping correctly pinpointed the genomic region containing the gene responsible for severe hypertriglyceridemia in this consanguineous Chilean famil

Clonal human fetal ventral mesencephalic dopaminergic neuron precursors for cell therapy research

A major challenge for further development of drug screening procedures, cell replacement therapies and developmental studies is the identification of expandable human stem cells able to generate the cell types needed. We have previously reported the generation of an immortalized polyclonal neural stem cell (NSC) line derived from the human fetal ventral mesencephalon (hVM1). This line has been biochemically, genetically, immunocytochemically and electrophysiologically characterized to document its usefulness as a model system for the generation of A9 dopaminergic neurons (DAn). Long-term in vivo transplantation studies in parkinsonian rats showed that the grafts do not mature evenly. We reasoned that diverse clones in the hVM1 line might have different abilities to differentiate. In the present study, we have analyzed 9 hVM1 clones selected on the basis of their TH generation potential and, based on the number of v-myc copies, v-myc down-regulation after in vitro differentiation, in vivo cell cycle exit, TH+ neuron generation and expression of a neuronal mature marker (hNSE), we selected two clones for further in vivo PD cell replacement studies. The conclusion is that homogeneity and clonality of characterized NSCs allow transplantation of cells with controlled properties, which should help in the design of long-term in vivo experimentsThis work was supported by grants from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (formerly Science and Innovation; PLE2009-0101, SAF2010-17167), Comunidad Autónoma Madrid (S2011-BMD-2336), Instituto Salud Carlos III (RETICS TerCel, RD06/0010/0009) and European Union (Excell, NMP4-SL-2008-214706). This work was also supported by an institutional grant from Foundation Ramón Areces to the Center of Molecular Biology Severo Ocho

Sirt1 protects from K-Ras-driven lung carcinogenesis.

The NAD+-dependent deacetylase SIRT1 can be oncogenic or tumor suppressive depending on the tissue. Little is known about the role of SIRT1 in non-small cell lung carcinoma (NSCLC), one of the deadliest cancers, that is frequently associated with mutated K-RAS Therefore, we investigated the effect of SIRT1 on K-RAS-driven lung carcinogenesis. We report that SIRT1 protein levels are downregulated by oncogenic K-RAS in a MEK and PI3K-dependent manner in mouse embryo fibroblasts (MEFs), and in human lung adenocarcinoma cell lines. Furthermore, Sirt1 overexpression in mice delays the appearance of K-RasG12V-driven lung adenocarcinomas, reducing the number and size of carcinomas at the time of death and extending survival. Consistently, lower levels of SIRT1 are associated with worse prognosis in human NSCLCs. Mechanistically, analysis of mouse Sirt1-Tg pneumocytes, isolated shortly after K-RasG12V activation, reveals that Sirt1 overexpression alters pathways involved in tumor development: proliferation, apoptosis, or extracellular matrix organization. Our work demonstrates a tumor suppressive role of SIRT1 in the development of K-RAS-driven lung adenocarcinomas in mice and humans, suggesting that the SIRT1-K-RAS axis could be a therapeutic target for NSCLCs.We thank Jesus Herranz for his biostatistical advice; and Alba de Martino, Patricia Gonzalez, Maria Gomez, and Zaira Vega, from the Histopathology Unit at the CNIO, for their work in mouse histopathology. Work in the laboratory of P.J.F.-M. was funded by the IMDEA Food, the Spanish Association against Cancer (aecc) and the Ramon Areces (CIVP18A3891) Foundation. Work in the laboratory of M.S. was funded by the CNIO and by grants from the Spanish Ministry of Economy co-funded by the European Regional Development Fund (SAF project), the European Research Council (ERC Advanced Grant), the European Union (RISK-IR project), and the Botin Foundation and Banco Santander (Santander Universities Global Division). Work in the laboratory of DH was funded by Rutgers Cancer Institute of New Jersey, the Alex's Lemonade Stand Foundation Shark Tank Award and by the National Institutes of Health Grant K99/R00 CA197869. Work in the laboratory of M.S.C. was supported by a grant (SAF2012-40026) from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation. L.F.C-M. was supported by a PhD Fellowship from the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT-MCTES, SFRH/BD/124022/2016).S

Síndrome metabólico en personas adultas de la Provincia de Corrientes: análisis según género, procedencia y grupo etario

El objetivo del trabajo fue estudiar y comparar la prevalencia de los diferentes factores de riesgo determinantes para el síndrome metabólico (SM) en dos poblaciones de la Provincia de Corrientes durante el año 2013. este es un estudio tipo epidemiológico, observacional, descriptivo-analítico y transversal. Se incluyeron 242 individuos adultos de ambos sexos comprendidos entre 18 y 80 años provenientes de dos regiones de la provincia (localidades de los esteros del Iberá y de la zona urbana-barrio “La olla”- ubicado al sureste de la capital provincial). Contando con el consentimiento informado de cada individuo, se realizaron encuestas, mediciones antropométricas y de tensión arterial y análisis bioquímicos (glucemia, colesterol total, triglicéridos y HDL colesterol). Se compararon los factores de riesgo según sexo, edad y lugar de residencia (mujeres y varones de 18 a 30 años y mayores de 30 años, respectivamente). La obesidad central estuvo presente en el 9% de los varones y el 34 % de las mujeres del grupo de adultos jóvenes. Sin embargo, esta cifra fue relativamente baja en comparación con el 68 % (varones) y el 73 % (mujeres) con obesidad central en la población mayor de 30 años, lo que la determina con la hipertensión arterial, factores de riesgo más prevalentes a partir de los 30 años. Asimismo, se verificó en este grupo, una mayor incidencia en la población masculina (76%) con respecto a la femenina. este trabajo podría contribuir a establecer políticas sanitarias de prevención y control de enfermedades asociadas con el SM, en particular, las de tipo cardiovascular.