Interleukin-1 beta and neurotrophin-3 synergistically promote neurite growth in vitro

Pro-inflammatory cytokines such as interleukin-1 beta (IL-1β) are considered to exert detrimental effects during brain trauma and in neurodegenerative disorders. Consistently, it has been demonstrated that IL-1β suppresses neurotrophin-mediated neuronal cell survival rendering neurons vulnerable to degeneration. Since neurotrophins are also well known to strongly influence axonal plasticity, we investigated here whether IL-1β has a similar negative impact on neurite growth. We analyzed neurite density and length of organotypic brain and spinal cord slice cultures under the influence of the neurotrophins NGF, BDNF, NT-3 and NT-4. In brain slices, only NT-3 significantly promoted neurite density and length. Surprisingly, a similar increase of neurite growth was induced by IL-1β. Additionally, both factors increased the number of brain slices displaying maximal neurite growth. Furthermore, the co-administration of IL-1β and NT-3 significantly increased the number of brain slices displaying maximal neurite growth compared to single treatments. These data indicate that these two factors synergistically stimulate two distinct aspects of neurite outgrowth, namely neurite density and neurite length from acute organotypic brain slices

Morphological Filter Detector for Image Forensics Applications

Mathematical morphology provides a large set of powerful non-linear image operators, widely used for feature extraction, noise removal or image enhancement. Although morphological filters might be used to remove artifacts produced by image manipulations, both on binary and graylevel documents, little effort has been spent towards their forensic identification. In this paper we propose a non-trivial extension of a deterministic approach originally detecting erosion and dilation of binary images. The proposed approach operates on grayscale images and is robust to image compression and other typical attacks. When the image is attacked the method looses its deterministic nature and uses a properly trained SVM classifier, using the original detector as a feature extractor. Extensive tests demonstrate that the proposed method guarantees very high accuracy in filtering detection, providing 100% accuracy in discriminating the presence and the type of morphological filter in raw images of three different datasets. The achieved accuracy is also good after JPEG compression, equal or above 76.8% on all datasets for quality factors above 80. The proposed approach is also able to determine the adopted structuring element for moderate compression factors. Finally, it is robust against noise addition and it can distinguish morphological filter from other filters

Mast cells protect from post-traumatic spinal cord damage in mice by degrading inflammation-associated cytokines via mouse mast cell protease 4

AbstractMast cells (MCs) are found abundantly in the central nervous system and play a complex role in neuroinflammatory diseases such as multiple sclerosis and stroke. In the present study, we show that MC-deficient KitW-sh/W-sh mice display significantly increased astrogliosis and T cell infiltration as well as significantly reduced functional recovery after spinal cord injury compared to wildtype mice. In addition, MC-deficient mice show significantly increased levels of MCP-1, TNF-α, IL-10 and IL-13 protein levels in the spinal cord. Mice deficient in mouse mast cell protease 4 (mMCP4), an MC-specific chymase, also showed increased MCP-1, IL-6 and IL-13 protein levels in spinal cord samples and a decreased functional outcome after spinal cord injury. A degradation assay using supernatant from MCs derived from either mMCP4−/− mice or controls revealed that mMCP4 cleaves MCP-1, IL-6, and IL-13 suggesting a protective role for MC proteases in neuroinflammation. These data show for the first time that MCs may be protective after spinal cord injury and that they may reduce CNS damage by degrading inflammation-associated cytokines via the MC-specific chymase mMCP4

Deuterium chemistry in the primordial gas

We review and update some aspects of deuterium chemistry in the post-recombination Universe with particular emphasis on the formation and destruction of HD. We examine in detail the available theoretical and experimental data for the leading reactions of deuterium chemistry and we highlight the areas where improvements in the determination of rate coefficients are necessary to reduce the remaining uncertainties. We discuss the cooling properties of HD and the modifications to the standard cooling function introduced by the presence of the cosmological radiation field. Finally, we consider the effects of deuterium chemistry on the dynamical collapse of primordial clouds in a simple ``top-hat'' scenario, and we speculate on the minimum mass a cloud must have in order to be able to cool in a Hubble time.Comment: 22 pages, 10 figures, LaTeX. Earth and Planetary Sciences, in pres

A Multilevel Asymmetric Scheme for Digital Fingerprinting

The present paper proposes an asymmetric watermarking scheme suitable for fingerprinting and precision-critical applications. The method is based on linear algebra and is proved to be secure under projection attack. The problem of anonymous fingerprinting is also addressed, by allowing a client to get a watermarked image from a server without revealing her/his own identity. In particular, we consider the specific scenario where the client is a structured organization being trusted as a whole but involving possibly untrusted members. In such a context, where the watermarked copy can be made available to all members, but only authorized subgroups should be able to remove the watermark and recover a distortion-free image, a multilevel access to the embedding key is provided by applying Birkhoff polynomial interpolation. Extensive simulations demonstrate the robustness of the proposed method against standard image degradation operators

Hierarchical ownership and deterministic watermarking of digital images via polynomial interpolation

This paper presents a novel method for the secure management of digital images formulated within the mathematical theory of polynomial interpolation. As main innovative features, our approach is based on a hierarchical joint ownership of the image by a trusted layered authority and on a deterministic watermarking procedure, embedding a short meaningful or random signature into the image. Experimental results show that the inserted signature can almost always be fully recovered even in presence of a reasonable amount of image degradation due to image processing operators, such as filtering, geometric distortions and compression

An Improved Asymmetric Watermarking Scheme Suitable for Copy Protection

A major limitation of some recently proposed asymmetric watermarking techniques based on linear algebra lies in the strong dependence of the watermark on the original image. The present letter suggests an alternative scheme which is not only secure against projection attack but allows also the insertion of arbitrary watermarking sequences

Glocal Multimedia Retrieval

Personal experience is intrinsically local while common knowledge is global. As a consequence, standard multimedia search engines suffer from a gap between local content and global concept, due to the diversity of context. Here we design a new multimedia retrieval system which integrates local diversity into an evolving global knowledge. A suitable personalization of global ontologies allows to extract information from multimedia content according to context-sensitive relevance, while a peer-to-peer communication model provides a decentralized and scalable logical architecture for media search