Aspergillus Section Flavi, Need for a Robust Taxonomy

In a recent letter to the editor, Houbraken et al. (23) provide a series of recommendations to the microbiological community to prevent the taxonomic misidentification of genome-sequenced fungal strains. In the era of genomics and bioinformatics, postulating that 1 nucleotide (nt) within a gene can “correctly” identify a species does not seem plausible. However, the authors of the letter call this the “calmodulin barcode,” meaning nucleotide substitutions within a 506-nt region of the calmodulin gene (1). After the evolutionarily conserved rRNA (18S rRNA, internal transcribed spacer [ITS], 28S rRNA) and RNA polymerase II (2–4) showed no differences between Aspergillus flavus S- and Lmorphotypes, attention shifted toward the calmodulin gene. Thus, without sequencing 18S rRNA, 28S rRNA, or the largest RNA polymerase II subunit, at least 34 new species of Aspergillus were named by Houbraken, Frisvad, Visagie, and coworkers (1, 5, 6). However, in a phylogenetic tree of 152 Aspergillus section Flavi isolates using the calmodulin 506- nt region, 40 Aspergillus minisclerotigenes isolates had only two nucleotide substitutions in common, namely, 100C.A and 269A.G, both of which are silent mutations (Fig. 1). However, only 269A.G discriminates A. minisclerotigenes from A. flavus, since 100C.A is present in three A. flavus isolates (GenBank accession numbers MK451387, MK451365, and MG517986) identified by the authors of the letter. We all agree that species identification is important; paradoxically, the calmodulin barcode assigns species based on a single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP), while there are between 133,000 and 179,000 SNPs within A. flavus S- and L-morphotypes, respectively (7). Another limitation of Aspergillus taxonomy is the chemotypes resulting from 30 genes in the aflatoxin biosynthesis gene cluster (ABC) (8), e.g., A. flavus produces B-aflatoxins and Aspergillus parasiticus produces B and G types (9). Despite that a single nucleotide change in one ABC gene can prevent aflatoxin production (10), the inheritance of the ABC is favored by environmental pressure (11), and Aspergillus spp. are not physically or reproductively isolated; intraspecies and interspecies crosses can result in gain of function, e.g., G-type aflatoxin production (9, 12, 13). Hence, a new species named by one author of the letter was later reversed to its initial name by the same author because of the chemotype, i.e., A. flavus S-morphotype to Aspergillus parvisclerotigenus (14) and back to A. flavus (6). Other groups utilized the calmodulin gene and a single deletion in the ABC to name three new Aspergillus species (15, 16)

Ingesta de macronutrientes y prevalencia de malnutrición por exceso en escolares de 5o y 6o básico de distinto nivel socioeconómico de la región metropolitana

Obesity in childhood has become an important publie health problem in Chile. Objetive: to study macronutrient intake and nutritional status in school-age children attending5th andóth grade inprimary schoolsfrom different socioeconomic status located in 6 counties in Santiago, Chile. Methods: A total of 1,732 children between 9 and 12 years oldjrom both sexes were studied. Anthropometric evaluation included weight, height, and tricipital and subescapular thickness. Macronutrient intake was determined using a 24-hours recall survey. Socioeconomic status was estimated using the ESOMAR survey. Results: In this sample overweight and obesity prevalence reached 40%. Prevalence was higher in boys and in the lower socio-economic groups. A higher consumption ofproteins andfat wasfound in the wealthier groups, while a higher intake of carbohydrates was present in the poorer ones. Comparison with the daily recommended allowancesfound that both males andfemales hada 75% ofadequacy of all ofmacronutrients with the exception offiber. Conclusión: The study revealeda highprevalence ofmalnutrition in both sexes with a better nutrition standard among children in higher socioeconomic status.El sobrepeso y la obesidad infantil se han transformado en un importante problema en salud pública. Objetivo: evaluar la ingesta de macronutrientes y determinar la prevalencia de malnutrición en escolares de 5° y 6o año básico de distintos niveles socioeconómicos de 6 comunas de la Región Metropolitana. Sujetos y método: se evaluaron 1732 niños de ambos sexos de 9 a 12 años de edad. La evaluación antropométrica incluyo peso, talla, pliegue tricipital y subescapular. La ingesta de macronutrientes se evaluó mediante la aplicación de una encuesta recordatorio de 24 hrs; el nivel socioeconómico se evaluó mediante la aplicación la encuesta ESOMAR. Resultados: la prevalencia de malnutrición por exceso fue de 40%, siendo más importante en hombres de los estratos socioeconómicos de menores ingresos. Encontramos un mayor consumo de proteínas y grasas totales en el nivel socioeconómico más alto, mientras que el nivel de menores ingresos tuvo una mayor ingesta de carbohidratos. Tanto hombres como mujeres presentaron una adecuación superior al 75% en todos los macronutrientes con excepción de la fibra. Conclusión: El estudio arrojó una elevada prevalencia de malnutrición por exceso en ambos sexos con un mejor patrón de alimentación en los niños de nivel socioeconómico alto

Female construction: discovery of women in Isabel Coixet and Claire Denis’s cinema

El concepto de feminismo hace referencia a un movimiento social que busca que las capacidades de las mujeres sean reconocidas igual que las de los hombres. Este movimiento ha sido tomado en cuenta en la industria del cine ya que parece que se le da un papel más importante a la mujer en las películas, lo que se evidencia en el cine de las directoras Isabel Coixet y Claire Denis. Ambas hacen la misma exploración de lo femenino desde el punto de vista de la mujer.Feminism refers to a social movement that seeks for women’s abilities to be recognized just like those of men. This movement has been incorporated intofilm industry as it seems that women are given a more important role in movies, which is evidenced in Isabel Coixet and Claire Denis’s films. Both authors explores on the feminine from the point of view of women

T-cell derived acetylcholine aids host defenses during enteric bacterial infection with Citrobacter rodentium.

The regulation of mucosal immune function is critical to host protection from enteric pathogens but is incompletely understood. The nervous system and the neurotransmitter acetylcholine play an integral part in host defense against enteric bacterial pathogens. Here we report that acetylcholine producing-T-cells, as a non-neuronal source of ACh, were recruited to the colon during infection with the mouse pathogen Citrobacter rodentium. These ChAT+ T-cells did not exclusively belong to one Th subset and were able to produce IFNγ, IL-17A and IL-22. To interrogate the possible protective effect of acetylcholine released from these cells during enteric infection, T-cells were rendered deficient in their ability to produce acetylcholine through a conditional gene knockout approach. Significantly increased C. rodentium burden was observed in the colon from conditional KO (cKO) compared to WT mice at 10 days post-infection. This increased bacterial burden in cKO mice was associated with increased expression of the cytokines IL-1β, IL-6, and TNFα, but without significant changes in T-cell and ILC associated IL-17A, IL-22, and IFNγ, or epithelial expression of antimicrobial peptides, compared to WT mice. Despite the increased expression of pro-inflammatory cytokines during C. rodentium infection, inducible nitric oxide synthase (Nos2) expression was significantly reduced in intestinal epithelial cells of ChAT T-cell cKO mice 10 days post-infection. Additionally, a cholinergic agonist enhanced IFNγ-induced Nos2 expression in intestinal epithelial cell in vitro. These findings demonstrated that acetylcholine, produced by specialized T-cells that are recruited during C. rodentium infection, are a key mediator in host-microbe interactions and mucosal defenses

Modeling Islamist Extremist Communications on Social Media using Contextual Dimensions: Religion, Ideology, and Hate

Terror attacks have been linked in part to online extremist content. Although tens of thousands of Islamist extremism supporters consume such content, they are a small fraction relative to peaceful Muslims. The efforts to contain the ever-evolving extremism on social media platforms have remained inadequate and mostly ineffective. Divergent extremist and mainstream contexts challenge machine interpretation, with a particular threat to the precision of classification algorithms. Our context-aware computational approach to the analysis of extremist content on Twitter breaks down this persuasion process into building blocks that acknowledge inherent ambiguity and sparsity that likely challenge both manual and automated classification. We model this process using a combination of three contextual dimensions -- religion, ideology, and hate -- each elucidating a degree of radicalization and highlighting independent features to render them computationally accessible. We utilize domain-specific knowledge resources for each of these contextual dimensions such as Qur'an for religion, the books of extremist ideologues and preachers for political ideology and a social media hate speech corpus for hate. Our study makes three contributions to reliable analysis: (i) Development of a computational approach rooted in the contextual dimensions of religion, ideology, and hate that reflects strategies employed by online Islamist extremist groups, (ii) An in-depth analysis of relevant tweet datasets with respect to these dimensions to exclude likely mislabeled users, and (iii) A framework for understanding online radicalization as a process to assist counter-programming. Given the potentially significant social impact, we evaluate the performance of our algorithms to minimize mislabeling, where our approach outperforms a competitive baseline by 10.2% in precision.Comment: 22 page

Adjunctive therapy for severe malaria: a review and critical appraisal

BACKGROUND: Despite recent efforts and successes in reducing the malaria burden globally, this infection still accounts for an estimated 212 million clinical cases, 2 million severe malaria cases, and approximately 429,000 deaths annually. Even with the routine use of effective anti-malarial drugs, the case fatality rate for severe malaria remains unacceptably high, with cerebral malaria being one of the most life-threatening complications. Up to one-third of cerebral malaria survivors are left with long-term cognitive and neurological deficits. From a population point of view, the decrease of malaria transmission may jeopardize the development of naturally acquired immunity against the infection, leading to fewer total cases, but potentially an increase in severe cases. The pathophysiology of severe and cerebral malaria is not completely understood, but both parasite and host determinants contribute to its onset and outcomes. Adjunctive therapy, based on modulating the host response to infection, could help to improve the outcomes achieved with specific anti-malarial therapy. RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONS: In the last decades, several interventions targeting different pathways have been tested. However, none of these strategies have demonstrated clear beneficial effects, and some have shown deleterious outcomes. This review aims to summarize evidence from clinical trials testing different adjunctive therapy for severe and cerebral malaria in humans. It also highlights some preclinical studies which have evaluated novel strategies and other candidate therapeutics that may be evaluated in future clinical trials

Nebulae: A Proposed Concept of Operation for Deep Space Computing Clouds

In this paper, we describe an ongoing multi-institution study in using emplaced computational resources such as high-volume storage and fast processing to enable instruments to gather and store much more data than would normally be possible, even if it cannot be downlinked to Earth in any reasonable time. The primary focus of the study is designing science pipelines for on-site summarization, archival for future downlink, and multisensor fusion. A secondary focus is on providing support for increasingly autonomous systems, including mapping, planning, and multi-platform collaboration. Key to both of these concepts is treating the spacecraft not as an autonomous agent but as an interactive batch processor, which allows us to avoid “quantum leaps” in machine intelligence required to realize the concepts. Our goal is to discuss preliminary results and technical directions for the community, and identify promising new opportunities for multi-sensor fusion with the help of planetary researchers

Easy Buy S.A

Seminario Desarrollo de Emprendedores. 2013. Carrera Administración de empresa; Economía Empresarial; Ingeniería Industrial . Docente Lic. Canales, María José.Supermercado que brinda el servicio de drive thru, donde el cliente puede realizar sus compras de víveres sin necesidad de dejar la comodidad de su automóvil. El cliente puede ver el menú de los productos para hacer su pedido mediante un comunicador, para posteriormente pagar en la primera ventanilla y por ultimo retirar su compra en la segunda ventanilla. El tiempo máximo que dilata el servicio es de 15 minutos. En una segunda etapa, la empresa pretende proveer servicios de compra en línea y tele-compras con servicios de delivery, acompañado con disponibilidad 24 horas al día por 365 días al año como parte integral del servicio. El supermercado se ubica en el sector de Carretera a Masaya

La relación entre el rendimiento universitario y la privación de sueño

Sleep deprivation is the condition of insufficient sleep, which can be chronic or acute. The effect of sleep deprivation on academic performance was investigated by applying a survey. Specifically, it was investigated: how does not sleep affect college performance. To achieve this, the parts of the brain that are related to sleep and describe the consequences caused by lack of sleep were also identified. In addition, the sleep pattern in university individuals is analyzed. Within the results, the veracity of the proposed hypothesis was evaluated, that the more rest time the students have, the better the results in their studies. However, the results of the research showed that students who sleep less time still manage to maintain acceptable results. The performance of most college students is not greatly affected by sleep deprivation, but it is better to have good sleep habits to avoid diseases that they may acquire in the future.La privación de sueño es la condición de insuficiencia de sueño, pudiendo ser crónica o aguda. Se investigó el efecto de la privación del sueño en el desempeño académico, mediante la aplicación de una encuesta. Específicamente, se investigó: cómo afecta el no dormir al rendimiento universitario. Para lograr esto, también se identificaron las partes del cerebro que se relacionan al sueño y describen las consecuencias causadas por la falta de sueño. Además, se analiza el patrón de sueño en los individuos universitarios. Dentro de los resultados se evaluó la veracidad de la hipótesis propuesta, que entre más tiempo de descanso tienen los estudiantes, mejores son los resultados en sus estudios. Sin embargo, los resultados de la investigación arrojaron que los estudiantes que duermen menos tiempo de igual manera consiguen mantener resultados aceptables. El rendimiento de la mayoría de los estudiantes universitarios no se ve alterado de gran manera por la privación de sueño, pero es mejor tener buenos hábitos de sueño, para poder evitar enfermedades que pueden adquirir en un futuro