Creamatocrit, carbon content, and energy value of pooled banked human milk: Implications for feeding preterm infants

It is convenient to calculate milk energy from the creamatocrit but in order to assess the accuracy with which energy content can be predicted in this way, the creamatocrit, the percentage of carbon, and the calorie value of milk were determined in 11 samples of pooled pasteurised human milk. The calculated milk energy was compared with direct measurements of milk energy by static bomb calorimetry. The errors in calculation ranged from - 5.6 kcal/100 ml to + 19.5 kcal/100 ml in milk samples whose measured energy was 34.5 to 63.1 kcal/100 ml. In 9 milk samples energy values were over-estimated by calculation and in the remaining 2 milk samples energy values were underestimated. The correlation between creamatocrit and measured energy value in pooled pasteurised milk was weaker than in previous studies using fresh milk. The percentage carbon was determined in our milk samples as a measure of their total organic constituents, and this appeared to be a more accurate predictor of milk energy than the predictive value of the creamatocrit which is only a measure of milk fat. In pooled pasteurised milk the relatively weak predictive value of the creamatocrit may be due to variations in the other constituents of milk apart from fat which provide energy, namely protein and lactose

Manganese adlayers on i-Al-Pd-Mn quasicrystal: growth and electronic structure

Pseudomorphic growth of thin elemental metal films is often observed on a variety of crystalline solids. On quasicrystalline surfaces with their complex structure and the absence of translational periodicity, the situation is different since elemental metals do not exhibit quasicrystalline order, and hence the specific interaction between overlayer and substrate is decisive. Here we study the growth of manganese films on an icosahedral i-Al-Pd-Mn alloy with a view to establishing the growth mode and electronic structure. Although we observe an exponential intensity variation of the adlayer and substrate related x-ray photoemission spectroscopy (XPS) peaks, low energy electron diffraction (LEED) shows that Mn adlayers do not exhibit quasicrystallinity. The detailed structure of the Mn 2p core level line reveals considerable electronic structure differences between the quasicrystalline and elemental metal environment. Evidence of a substantial local magnetic moment on the Mn atoms in the overlayer (about 2.8  µ(B)) is obtained from the Mn 3s exchange splitting

Placental phenotypes of intrauterine growth

The placenta is essential to nutrition before birth. Recent work has shown that a range of clearly defined alterations can be found in the placentas of infants with intrauterine growth restriction (IUGR). In the mouse, a placental specific knockout of a single imprinted gene, encoding IGF-2, results in one pattern of alterations in placenta structure and function which leads to IUGR. We speculate that the alterations in the human placenta can also be grouped into patterns, or phenotypes, that are associated with specific patterns of fetal growth. Identifying the placental phenotypes of different fetal growth patterns will improve the ability of clinicians to recognize high-risk patients, of laboratory scientists to disentangle the complexities of IUGR, and of public health teams to target interventions aimed at ameliorating the long-term adverse effects of inadequate intrauterine growth