Proliferative Diabetic Retinopathy and Hemovitreous: Red Flag for Blindness

The scars produced by the impact of laser photocoagulation appear as grey retinal round marks surrounding the temporal vascular arcades. Multiple dot and blot hemorrhages and microaneurysms can be seen in the posterior pole. There are two types of white abnormalities: multiple lipid exudate deposition near the macula and a couple of cotton-wool spots temporal to the optic disk. An abnormal tissue emerges from the optic nerve head as well as new vessels, which cannot be properly seen because of hemovitreou

Polysemy and brevity versus frequency in language

The pioneering research of G. K. Zipf on the relationship between word frequency and other word features led to the formulation of various linguistic laws. The most popular is Zipf's law for word frequencies. Here we focus on two laws that have been studied less intensively: the meaning-frequency law, i.e. the tendency of more frequent words to be more polysemous, and the law of abbreviation, i.e. the tendency of more frequent words to be shorter. In a previous work, we tested the robustness of these Zipfian laws for English, roughly measuring word length in number of characters and distinguishing adult from child speech. In the present article, we extend our study to other languages (Dutch and Spanish) and introduce two additional measures of length: syllabic length and phonemic length. Our correlation analysis indicates that both the meaning-frequency law and the law of abbreviation hold overall in all the analyzed languages

Design of a Submarine Observatory. Some Aspects to be considered

This article presents the results of the preliminary study carried out to determine the main requirements and conditions to be satisfied in the design of a submarine observatory infrastructure. The main concerns and some suggested lines to pursue are presented for discussion. Project and work is also divided in specialized work units with specific responsibilities over the whole project

Zipf's laws of meaning in Catalan

In his pioneering research, G. K. Zipf formulated a couple of statistical laws on the relationship between the frequency of a word with its number of meanings: the law of meaning distribution, relating the frequency of a word and its frequency rank, and the meaning-frequency law, relating the frequency of a word with its number of meanings. Although these laws were formulated more than half a century ago, they have been only investigated in a few languages. Here we present the first study of these laws in Catalan. We verify these laws in Catalan via the relationship among their exponents and that of the rank-frequency law. We present a new protocol for the analysis of these Zipfian laws that can be extended to other languages. We report the first evidence of two marked regimes for these laws in written language and speech, paralleling the two regimes in Zipf's rank-frequency law in large multi-author corpora discovered in early 2000s. Finally, the implications of these two regimes will be discussed.Comment: 21 pages, 11 figure

Trobas de Mosen Jaime Febrer : que contienen los nombres, apellidos y azañas de 544 señores, que de varias provincias asistieron en la conquista de Valencia...

Incipit : "Prologo. Guillermo Febrer, nobilissimo docto y experimentado fue muy estimado de D. Jaime I de Aragon"Es una traducción liberal de Berni y Català de lesÍndices: Indice de apellidos en v.

Targeting the Mild-Hypoxia Driving Force for Metabolic and Muscle Transcriptional Reprogramming of Gilthead Sea Bream (Sparus aurata) Juveniles

Reduced oxygen availability generates a number of adaptive features across all the animal kingdom, and the goal of this study was targeting the mild-hypoxia driving force for metabolic and muscle transcriptional reprogramming of gilthead sea bream juveniles. Attention was focused on blood metabolic and muscle transcriptomic landmarks before and after exhaustive exercise. Our results after mild-hypoxia conditioning highlighted an increased contribution of lipid metabolism to whole energy supply to preserve the aerobic energy production, a better swimming performance regardless of changes in feed intake, as well as reduced protein turnover and improved anaerobic fitness with the restoration of normoxia. On-growing juveniles of gilthead sea bream were acclimated for 45 days to mild-hypoxia (M-HYP, 40-60% O-2 saturation), whereas normoxic fish (85-90% O-2 saturation) constituted two different groups, depending on if they were fed to visual satiety (control fish) or pair-fed to M-HYP fish. Following the hypoxia conditioning period, all fish were maintained in normoxia and continued to be fed until visual satiation for 3 weeks. The time course of hypoxia-induced changes was assessed by changes in blood metabolic landmarks and muscle transcriptomics before and after exhaustive exercise in a swim tunnel respirometer. In M-HYP fish, our results highlighted a higher contribution of aerobic metabolism to whole energy supply, shifting towards a higher anaerobic fitness following normoxia restoration. Despite these changes in substrate preference, M-HYP fish shared a persistent improvement in swimming performance with a higher critical speed at exercise exhaustion. The machinery of muscle contraction and protein synthesis and breakdown was also largely altered by mild-hypoxia conditioning, contributing this metabolic re-adjustment to the positive regulation of locomotion and to the catch-up growth response during the normoxia recovery period. Altogether, these results reinforce the presence of large phenotypic plasticity in gilthead sea bream, and highlights mild-hypoxia as a promising prophylactic measure to prepare these fish for predictable stressful events.This work was financially supported by a grant from the European Commission of the European Union under the Horizon 2020 research infrastructure project AQUAEXCEL2020 (652831) to J.P-S. Additional funding was obtained by a Spanish MICINN project (Bream-AquaINTECH, RTI2018-094128-B-I00). J.A.M.-S. received a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship (Juan de la Cierva-Formacion, Reference FJCI-2014-20,161)

Long-term functionality of transversal intraneural electrodes is improved by dexamethasone treatment

Altres ajuts: Fundación Ramón Areces (CIVP18A3897)i CERCA Programme/Generalitat de Catalunya.Neuroprostheses aimed to restore lost functions after a limb amputation are based on the interaction with the nervous system by means of neural interfaces. Among the different designs, intraneural electrodes implanted in peripheral nerves represent a good strategy to stimulate nerve fibers to send sensory feedback and to record nerve signals to control the prosthetic limb. However, intraneural electrodes, as any device implanted in the body, induce a foreign body reaction (FBR) that results in the tissue encapsulation of the device. The FBR causes a progressive decline of the electrode functionality over time due to the physical separation between the electrode active sites and the axons to interface. Modulation of the inflammatory response has arisen as a good strategy to reduce the FBR and maintain electrode functionality. In this study transversal intraneural multi-channel electrodes (TIMEs) were implanted in the rat sciatic nerve and tested for 3 months to evaluate stimulation and recording capabilities under chronic administration of dexamethasone. Dexamethasone treatment significantly reduced the threshold for evoking muscle responses during the follow-up compared to saline-treated animals, without affecting the selectivity of stimulation. However, dexamethasone treatment did not improve the signal-to-noise ratio of the recorded neural signals. Dexamethasone treatment allowed to maintain more working active sites along time than saline treatment. Thus, systemic administration of dexamethasone appears as a useful treatment in chronically implanted animals with neural electrodes as it increases the number of functioning contacts of the implanted TIME and reduces the intensity needed to stimulate the nerve

Deciphering complexity: TULP1 variants linked to an atypical retinal dystrophy phenotype

Introduction: TULP1 exemplifies the remarkable clinical and genetic heterogeneity observed in inherited retinal dystrophies. Our research describes the clinical and molecular characteristics of a patient manifesting an atypical retinal dystrophy pattern, marked by the identification of both a previously unreported and a rarely encountered TULP1 variant. Methods: Whole-exome sequencing was performed to identify potential causative variants. The pathogenicity of the identified TULP1 variants was evaluated through in silico predictors and a minigene splice assay, specifically designed to assess the effect of the unreported TULP1 variant. Results: We identified two TULP1 gene variants in a patient exhibiting unusual and symmetrical alterations in both retinas, characterized by an increase in autofluorescence along the distribution of retinal vessels. These variants included a known rare missense variant, c.1376T>C, and a novel splice site variant, c.822G>T. For the latter variant (c.822G>T), we conducted a minigene splice assay that demonstrated the incorporation of a premature stop codon. This finding suggests a likely activation of the nonsense-mediated mRNA decay mechanism, ultimately resulting in the absence of protein production from this allele. Segregation analysis confirmed that these variants were in trans. Discussion: Our data support that individuals with biallelic TULP1 variants may present with a unique pattern of macular degeneration and periarteriolar vascular pigmentation. This study highlights the importance of further clinical and molecular characterization of TULP1 variants to elucidate genotype-phenotype correlations in the context of inherited retinal dystrophies

Understanding how high stocking densities and concurrent limited oxygen availability drive social cohesion and adaptive features in regulatory growth, antioxidant defense and lipid metabolism in farmed gilthead sea bream (Sparus aurata)

The study combined the use of biometric, behavioral, physiological and external tissue damage scoring systems to better understand how high stocking densities drive schooling behavior and other adaptive features during the finishing growing phase of farmed gilthead sea bream in the Western Mediterranean. Fish were grown at three different final stocking densities (LD, 8.5 kg/m3; MD, 17 kg/m3; HD, 25 kg/m3). Water oxygen concentration varied between 5 and 6 ppm in LD fish to 3–4 ppm in HD fish with the summer rise of water temperature from 19°C to 26°C (May–July). HD fish showed a reduction of feed intake and growth rates, but they also showed a reinforced social cohesion with a well-defined endogenous swimming activity rhythm with feeding time as a main synchronization factor. The monitored decrease of the breathing/swimming activity ratio by means of the AEFishBIT data-logger also indicated a decreased energy partitioning for growth in the HD environment with a limited oxygen availability. Plasma glucose and cortisol levels increased with the rise of stocking density, and the close association of glycaemia with the expression level of antioxidant enzymes (mn-sod, gpx4, prdx5) in liver and molecular chaperones (grp170, grp75) in skeletal muscle highlighted the involvement of glucose in redox processes via rerouting in the pentose-phosphate-pathway. Other adaptive features included the depletion of oxidative metabolism that favored lipid storage rather than fatty acid oxidation to decrease the oxygen demand as last electron acceptor in the mitochondrial respiratory chain. This was coincident with the metabolic readjustment of the Gh/Igf endocrine-growth cascade that promoted the regulation of muscle growth at the local level rather than a systemic action via the liver Gh/Igf axis. Moreover, correlation analyses within HD fish displayed negative correlations of hepatic transcripts of igf1 and igf2 with the data-logger measurements of activity and respiration, whereas the opposite was found for muscle igf2, ghr1 and ghr2. This was indicative of a growth-regulatory transition that supported a proactive instead of a reactive behavior in HD fish, which was considered adaptive to preserve an active and synchronized feeding behavior with a minimized risk of oxidative stress and epidermal skin damage