A Role for the Lipid Droplet Protein HIG2 in Promoting Lipid Deposition in Liver and Adipose Tissue: A Dissertation

Chronic exposure of humans or rodents to high calorie diets leads to hypertriglyceridemia and ectopic lipid deposition throughout the body, resulting in metabolic disease. Cellular lipids are stored in organelles termed lipid droplets (LDs) that are regulated by tissue-specific LD proteins. These proteins are critical for lipid homeostasis, as humans with LD protein mutations manifest metabolic dysfunction. Identification of novel components of the LD machinery could shed light on human disease mechanisms and suggest potential therapeutics for Type 2 Diabetes. Microarray analyses pinpointed the largely unstudied Hypoxia-Inducible Gene 2 (Hig2) as a gene that was highly expressed in obese human adipocytes. Imaging studies demonstrated that Hig2 localized to LDs in mouse hepatocytes and the human SGBS adipocyte cell line. Thus, this work examined the role of Hig2 as a LD protein in liver and adipose tissue. Hig2 deficiency reduced triglyceride deposition in hepatocytes; conversely, ectopic Hig2 expression promoted lipid deposition. Furthermore, liver-specific Hig2-deficient mice displayed improved glucose tolerance and reduced liver triglyceride content. Hig2 deficiency increased lipolysis and -oxidation, accounting for the reduced triglyceride accumulation. Similarly, adipocyte-specific Hig2-deficient mice displayed improved glucose tolerance, reduced adipose tissue weight and brown adipose tissue that was largely cleared of lipids. These improvements were abrogated when the animals were placed in thermoneutral housing and brown adipocyte-specific Hig2-deficient mice also displayed improved glucose tolerance, suggesting that active brown fat largely mediates the metabolic phenotype of Hig2 deletion. Thus, this work demonstrates that Hig2 localizes to LDs in liver and adipose tissue and promotes glucose intolerance

Feasible alternatives to green growth

Climate change and increasing income inequality have emerged as twin threats to contemporary standards of living, peace and democracy. These two problems are usually tackled separately in the policy agenda. A new breed of radical proposals have been advanced to manage a fair low-carbon transition. In this spirit, we develop a dynamic macrosimulation model to investigate the long-term effects of three scenarios: green growth, policies for social equity, and degrowth. The green growth scenario, based on technological progress and environmental policies, achieves a significant reduction in greenhouse gas emissions at the cost of increasing income inequality and unemployment. The policies for social equity scenario adds direct labour market interventions that result in an environmental performance similar to green growth while improving social conditions at the cost of increasing public deficit. The degrowth scenario further adds a reduction in consumption and exports, and achieves a greater reduction in emissions and inequality with higher public deficit, despite the introduction of a wealth tax. We argue that new radical social policies can combine social prosperity and low-carbon emissions and are economically and politically feasible

Cluster of legionnaires’ disease in an Italian prison

Background: Legionella pneumophila (Lp) is the most common etiologic agent causing Legionnaires’ Disease (LD). Water systems offer the best growth conditions for Lp and support its spread by producing aerosols. From 2015 to 2017, the Regional Reference Laboratory of Clinical and Environmental Surveillance of Legionellosis of Palermo monitored the presence of Lp in nine prisons in Western Sicily. During this investigation, we compared Lp isolates from environmental samples in a prison located in Palermo with isolates from two prisoners in the same prison. Methods: We collected 93 water samples from nine Sicilian prisons and the bronchoalveolar lavages (BALs) of two prisoners considered cases of LD. These samples were processed following the procedures described in the Italian Guidelines for the Prevention and Control of Legionellosis of 2015. Then, genotyping was performed on 19 Lp colonies (17 from water samples and 2 from clinical samples) using the Sequence-Based Typing (SBT) method, according to European Study Group for Legionella Infections (ESGLI) protocols. Results: Lp serogroup (sg) 6 was the most prevalent serogroup isolated from the prisons analyzed (40%), followed by Lp sg 1 (16%). Most of all, in four penitentiary institutions, we detected a high concentration of Lp >104 Colony Forming Unit/Liter (CFU/L). The environmental molecular investigation found the following Sequence Types (STs) in Lp sg 6: ST 93, ST 292, ST 461, ST 728, ST 1317 and ST 1362, while most of the isolates in sg 1 belonged to ST 1. We also found a new ST that has since been assigned the number 2451 in the ESGLI-SBT database. From the several Lp sg 1 colonies isolated from the two BALs, we identified ST 2451. Conclusions: In this article, we described the results obtained from environmental and epidemiological investigations of Lp isolated from prisons in Western Sicily. Furthermore, we reported the first cluster of Legionnaires’ in an Italian prison and the molecular typing of Lp sg 1 from one prison’s water system and two BALs, identified the source of the contamination, and discovered a new ST

Analysis of a thunderstorm downburst

Thesis (M.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Meteorology and Physical Oceanography, 1983.Microfiche copy available in Archives and Science.Bibliography: leaf 120.by John Thomas DiStefano.M.S

Evaluating techniques for sampling stream crayfish (paranephrops planifrons)

We evaluated several capture and analysis techniques for estimating abundance and size structure of freshwater crayfish (Paranephrops planifrons) (koura) from a forested North Island, New Zealand stream to provide a methodological basis for future population studies. Direct observation at night and collecting with baited traps were not considered useful. A quadrat sampler was highly biased toward collecting small individuals. Handnetting at night and estimating abundances using the depletion method were not as efficient as handnetting on different dates and analysing by a mark-recapture technique. Electrofishing was effective in collecting koura from different habitats and resulted in the highest abundance estimates, and mark-recapture estimates appeared to be more precise than depletion estimates, especially if multiple recaptures were made. Handnetting captured more large crayfish relative to electrofishing or the quadrat sampler

FAUSTA: Scaling Dynamic Analysis with Traffic Generation at WhatsApp

We introduce Fausta, an algorithmic traffic gener-ation platform that enables analysis and testing at scale. Fausta has been deployed at Meta to analyze and test the WhatsApp plat-form infrastructure since September 2020, enabling WhatsApp developers to deploy reliable code changes to a code base of millions of lines of code, supporting over 2 billion users who rely on WhatsApp for their daily communications. Fausta covers expected and unexpected program behaviors in a privacy-safe controlled environment to support multiple use cases such as reliability testing, privacy analysis and performance regression detection. It currently supports three different algorithmic input generation strategies, each of which construct realistic backend server traffic that closely simulates production data, without replaying any real user data. Fausta has been deployed and closely integrated into the WhatsApp continuous integration process, catching bugs in development before they hit production. We report on the development and deployment of Fausta's reliability use case between September 2020 and August 2021. During this period it has found 1,876 unique reliability issues, with a fix rate of 74%, indicating a high degree of true positive fault revelation. We also report on the distribution of fault types revealed by Fausta, and the correlation between coverage and faults found. Overall, we do find evidence that higher coverage is correlated with fault revelation

Coupling environmental transition and social prosperity: a scenario-analysis of the Italian case

Producción CientíficaThis paper investigates to what extent green growth is able to promote social equity and which social policies can complement environmental policies to achieve social prosperity and sustainability. We de- velop a dynamic macrosimulation model to explore the social and structural effects of the Italian national energy and climate plan. We show that green growth alone will not result in better societal conditions and needs to be compensated with social policies that directly tackle inequality. Consequently, we select two social policies that are expected to improve income distribution, namely a basic income programme and working time reduction. Our scenario analysis shows that working time reduction leads to an in- crease in employment and a parallel decrease in aggregate demand that causes a reduction in emissions and inequality. The basic income programme reduces inequality by sustaining aggregate demand which, in turn, partially offsets the positive environmental effects of the energy plan.We thank the participants of the conference “Capitalism, Con- flict, and Cooperation: A Celebration of the Work of Samuel Bowles & Herbert Gintis” held at Columbia University and Luigi Giorgio, Francesco Marghella and Bill Mebane for valuable com- ments and suggestions. The authors acknowledge funding from the Greens|EFA Group at the European Parliament and from the LO- COMOTION project, within the European Union’s Horizon 2020 re- search and innovation programme under grant agreement number 821105

Preschool Verbal and Nonverbal Ability Mediate the Association Between Socioeconomic Status and School Performance

We compared the extent to which the long-term influence of family socioeconomic status (SES) on children's school performance from age 7 through 16 years was mediated by their preschool verbal and nonverbal ability. In 661 British children, who completed 17 researcher-administered ability tests at age 4.5 years, SES correlated more strongly with verbal than nonverbal ability (.39 vs.26). Verbal ability mediated about half of the association between SES and school performance at age 7, while nonverbal ability accounted for a third of the link. Only SES, but not verbal or nonverbal ability, was associated with changes in school performance from age 7 to 16. We found that SES-related differences in school performance are only partly transmitted through children's preschool verbal abilities