Inflammation and premature aging in advanced chronic kidney disease

Systemic inflammation in end-stage renal disease (ESRD) is an established risk factor for mortality and a catalyst for other complications which are related to a premature aging phenotype, including muscle wasting, vascular calcification and other forms of premature vascular disease, depression, osteoporosis and frailty. Uremic inflammation is also mechanistically related to mechanisms involved in the aging process, such as telomere shortening, mitochondrial dysfunction, and altered nutrient sensing, which can have direct effect on cellular and tissue function. In addition to uremia-specific causes such as abnormalities in the phosphate- Klotho axis, there are remarkable similarities between the pathophysiology of uremic inflammation and so-called "inflammaging" in the general population. Potentially relevant, but still somewhat unexplored in this respect are abnormal or misplaced protein structures as well as abnormalities in tissue homeostasis, which evoke danger signals through damage associated molecular patters (DAMPS) as well as the senescence associated secretory phenotype (SASP). Systemic inflammation, in combination with the loss of kidney function, can impair the resilience of the body to external and internal stressors by reduced functional and structural tissue reserve, and by impairing normal organ crosstalk, thus providing an explanation for the greatly increased risk of homeostatic breakdown in this population. In this review, the relation between uremic inflammation and a premature aging phenotype, as well as potential causes and consequences are discussed

Horses as Sources of Proprietary Information: Commercialization, Conservation, and Compensation Pursuant to the Convention on Biological Diversity

Horses indigenous to East and Southeast (E/SE) Asia, including native, landrace, feral, and wild populations, embody valuable genetic diversity. Conservation efforts for animals have largely been driven by humane altruism, with little consideration for the information value of genomes. Yet, if horses are viewed as archives of information as well as objects of affection, their conservation shifts to a market-based paradigm. Horse genetic resources (GR) likely contain significant value to the lucrative global horse industry, including veterinary applications such as diagnostics, therapeutics, genetic markers, gene therapies, and cloning technologies. As biotechnology becomes increasingly sophisticated, mining of horse GR will accelerate, thus facilitating identification, inventorying, bioprospecting, and commercialization of genetic information. Yet, establishing a value chain that balances equitable compensation for commercial applications while promoting conservation of horse populations remains a challenge. Recommendations presented here include establishing regional and national human resource and institutional capacity (competent national authorities), that catalog eco-geographical inventories of horse GR; monitor, manage, market and direct equitable value chains from horse to genetic information to commercial products; and ensure revenue flow back to support conservation. This system will foster market incentives to build capacity for sustainable conservation of the diverse horse populations of E/SE Asia

INTEGRATING KANSEI ENGINEERING AND CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT TO IMPROVE SERVICE QUALITY: A CASE STUDY AT SHOPPING MALL IN SURABAYA

With respect to customer dynamics in experiencing products and services, nowadays, customers tend to highly demand hedonism, pleasure and individuality rather than functionality and usability. In other words, they look for a service that offers more values (both physically and emotionally) from its function. Apart from that, it is a must for a company to strive for achieving customer loyalty. Thus, this study proposes an integrative framework of Kansei Engineering (KE) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) in services. It aims to explore the customer emotional needs (Kansei in Japanese) experienced and encountered in services. As emphasized in the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) concept, understanding the customer emotional needs is one of successful keys for CRM implementation. In order to analyze the applicability of the proposed framework, a case study taken at a brand new elegant shopping mall in Surabaya that involved 100 customers was conducted. Some significant Kansei words as the representatives of customer emotional needs were obtained, such as elegant, believe, cool, wide and curious. These Kansei words have significant correlation with several service attributes, such as: “service given without social status”, “service accuracy”, “responsive employees”, “convenient parking lots”, “attractive events”, and “neat and attractive employees”. Some improvement innitiatives were proposed, including to accelerate the parking lots construction, and to provide a clear directions to the mall access. Theoretically, this study contributes to academic literatures on the relationship between CRM and KE providing in a unified integrated framework. Practically, this research provides a guidance to service managers in collecting and capturing the emotional needs of customers, and investigating what service attributes that are significantly sensitive to the customer emotions. It is, then, to be used as a prioritization tool for continuous improvement or maintenance on service attributes

Spectral Properties of Acoustic Gravity Wave Turbulence

The nonlinear turbulent interactions between acoustic gravity waves are investigated using two dimensional nonlinear fluid simulations. The acoustic gravity waves consist of velocity and density perturbations and propagate across the density gradients in the vertical direction in the Earth's atmosphere. We find that the coupled two component model exhibits generation of large scale velocity potential flows along the vertical direction, while the density perturbations relax towards an isotropic random distribution. The characteristic turbulent spectrum associated with the system has a Kolmogorov-like feature and tends to relax towards a $k^{-5/3}$ spectrum, where $k$ is a typical wavenumber. The cross field diffusion associated with the velocity potential grows linearly and saturates in the nonlinear phase

Slow and Fast Muscle Fibers

On the basis of the clear-cut differentiation used in fast (twitch) and slow (tonic) muscles of the frog, both the fast E.D.L. and the slow soleus muscle should be considered twitch muscles. However, they reveal a marked differential behavior in their contracture responses to ACh and caffeine. Moreover, all the slow muscles I have studied (i.e.. the L.D.A. of the chicken, the rectus abdominis of the frog, and the soleus of the rat) show a higher rate of proteosynthesis. This may be related to the basic function of slow muscles concerned with long-lasting maintenance of tension, the extreme being, for example, the contracture responses observed in reaction to ACh. There may be a relation of rate of protein metabolism to the mobility of protein-bound Ca⁺⁺ in the sarcoplasmatic reticulum. The differences in contracture behavior are apparent already three days after birth of the animals. All this may indicate a basic differentiation of two main groups of muscle fibers. Neural long-term influences operate in the development of this differentiation in contracture behavior of fast and slow muscle fibers. The mechanisms by which the nerve cell affects this behavior have still to be uncovered

Previously Identified Genetic Variants in ADGRL3 Are not Associated with Risk for Equine Degenerative Myeloencephalopathy across Breeds.

Equine neuroaxonal dystrophy/equine degenerative myeloencephalopathy (eNAD/EDM) is a neurologic disease that has been reported in young horses from a wide range of breeds. The disease is inherited and associated with vitamin E deficiency during the first two years of life, resulting in bilateral symmetric ataxia. A missense mutation (chr3:71,917,591 C > T) within adhesion G protein-coupled receptor L3 (ADGRL3) was recently associated with risk for EDM in the Caspian breed. In order to confirm these findings, genotyping of this missense mutation, along with the three other associated single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in the genomic region, was carried out on 31 postmortem-confirmed eNAD/EDM cases and 43 clinically phenotyped controls from various breeds. No significant association was found between eNAD/EDM confirmed cases and genotype at any of the four identified SNPs (P > 0.05), including the nonsynonymous variant (EquCab2.0 chr3:71,917,591; allelic P = 0.85). These findings suggest that the four SNPs, including the missense variant in the ADGRL3 region, are not associated with risk for eNAD/EDM across multiple breeds of horses

Skin colour changes during experimentally-induced sickness

This project was supported by Swedish foundation for humanities and social sciences and a British Academy Wolfson Foundation Research Professorship grant. AH is supported by a studentship from the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council.Skin colour may be an important cue to detect sickness in humans but how skin colour changes with acute sickness is currently unknown. To determine possible colour changes, 22 healthy Caucasian participants were injected twice, once with lipopolysaccharide (LPS, at a dose of 2 ng/kg body weight) and once with placebo (saline), in a randomised cross-over design study. Skin colour across 3 arm and 3 face locations was recorded spectrophotometrically over a period of 8 hours in terms of lightness (L∗), redness (a∗) and yellowness (b∗) in a manner that is consistent with human colour perception. In addition, carotenoid status was assessed as we predicted that a decrease it skin yellowness would reflect a drop in skin carotenoids. We found an early change in skin colouration 1-3 hours post LPS injection with facial skin becoming lighter and less red whilst arm skin become darker but also less red and less yellow. The LPS injection also caused a drop in plasma carotenoids from 3 hours onwards. However, the timing of the carotenoid changes was not consistent with the skin colour changes suggesting that other mechanisms, such as a reduction of blood perfusion, oxygenation or composition. This is the first experimental study characterising skin colour associated with acute illness, and shows that changes occur early in the development of the sickness response. Colour changes may serve as a cue to health, prompting actions from others in terms of care-giving or disease avoidance. Specific mechanisms underlying these colour changes require further investigation.PostprintPeer reviewe