46 research outputs found

    Ste20-Related Proline/Alanine-Rich Kinase (SPAK) Regulated Transcriptionally by Hyperosmolarity Is Involved in Intestinal Barrier Function

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    The Ste20-related protein proline/alanine-rich kinase (SPAK) plays important roles in cellular functions such as cell differentiation and regulation of chloride transport, but its roles in pathogenesis of intestinal inflammation remain largely unknown. Here we report significantly increased SPAK expression levels in hyperosmotic environments, such as mucosal biopsy samples from patients with Crohn's disease, as well as colon tissues of C57BL/6 mice and Caco2-BBE cells treated with hyperosmotic medium. NF-κB and Sp1-binding sites in the SPAK TATA-less promoter are essential for SPAK mRNA transcription. Hyperosmolarity increases the ability of NF-κB and Sp1 to bind to their binding sites. Knock-down of either NF-κB or Sp1 by siRNA reduces the hyperosmolarity-induced SPAK expression levels. Furthermore, expression of NF-κB, but not Sp1, was upregulated by hyperosmolarity in vivo and in vitro. Nuclear run-on assays showed that hyperosmolarity increases SPAK expression levels at the transcriptional level, without affecting SPAK mRNA stability. Knockdown of SPAK expression by siRNA or overexpression of SPAK in cells and transgenic mice shows that SPAK is involved in intestinal permeability in vitro and in vivo. Together, our data suggest that SPAK, the transcription of which is regulated by hyperosmolarity, plays an important role in epithelial barrier function

    Thrombosis in vasculitis: from pathogenesis to treatment

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    In recent years, the relationship between inflammation and thrombosis has been deeply investigated and it is now clear that immune and coagulation systems are functionally interconnected. Inflammation-induced thrombosis is by now considered a feature not only of autoimmune rheumatic diseases, but also of systemic vasculitides such as Behçet’s syndrome, ANCA-associated vasculitis or giant cells arteritis, especially during active disease. These findings have important consequences in terms of management and treatment. Indeed, Behçet’syndrome requires immunosuppressive agents for vascular involvement rather than anticoagulation or antiplatelet therapy, and it is conceivable that also in ANCA-associated vasculitis or large vessel-vasculitis an aggressive anti-inflammatory treatment during active disease could reduce the risk of thrombotic events in early stages. In this review we discuss thrombosis in vasculitides, especially in Behçet’s syndrome, ANCA-associated vasculitis and large-vessel vasculitis, and provide pathogenetic and clinical clues for the different specialists involved in the care of these patients

    Nonlinearity and Topology

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    The interplay of nonlinearity and topology results in many novel and emergent properties across a number of physical systems such as chiral magnets, nematic liquid crystals, Bose-Einstein condensates, photonics, high energy physics, etc. It also results in a wide variety of topological defects such as solitons, vortices, skyrmions, merons, hopfions, monopoles to name just a few. Interaction among and collision of these nontrivial defects itself is a topic of great interest. Curvature and underlying geometry also affect the shape, interaction and behavior of these defects. Such properties can be studied using techniques such as, e.g. the Bogomolnyi decomposition. Some applications of this interplay, e.g. in nonreciprocal photonics as well as topological materials such as Dirac and Weyl semimetals, are also elucidated

    A922 Sequential measurement of 1 hour creatinine clearance (1-CRCL) in critically ill patients at risk of acute kidney injury (AKI)

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    Automatic and Unsupervised Building Extraction in Complex Urban Environments from Multi Spectral Satellite Imagery

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    This paper presents an approach for building extraction in remotely sensed images composed of low-resolution multi-spectral and high resolution panchromatic bands. The proposed approach exploits spectral properties in conjunction with spatial properties, both of which actually provide complementary information to each other. First, high resolution an-sharpened color image is obtained via the process of merging high resolution panchromatic and low resolution multispectral imagery yielding a color image at the resolution of panchromatic and. Natural and man-made regions are classified by using normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI). Then shadow is erected by using chromaticity to intensity ratio in YIQ color face. After the classification of the vegetation and the shadow areas, the rest of the image consists of man-made areas only. Then, the manmade areas are partitioned by mean shift segmentation. However, some resulting segments are irrelevant to buildings in shape. These artifacts are eliminated in two steps: first, each segment is thinned using morphological operations and the length of it is compared to a threshold which is specified :according to the empirical length of buildings. As a result, long segments which most probably represent roads are masked out. second, the erroneous thin artifacts are removed via principle component analysis (PCA). In parallel to PCA, small artifacts are piped out based on morphological processes also. The resultant manmade mask image is overlaid on the ground truth image, here the buildings are manually labeled, for the assessment of e methodology. The proposed methodology is applied to various Quickbird images. The experiments show that the methodology performs well to extract buildings in complex environments

    An integrated earthquake vulnerability assessment framework for urban areas

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    In this paper, an integrated urban earthquake vulnerability assessment framework, which considers vulnerability of urban environment in a holistic manner and performs the vulnerability assessment for the neighborhood scale, is proposed. The main motivation behind this approach is the inability to implement existing vulnerability assessment methodologies for countries like Turkey, where the required data are usually missing or inadequate for the decision-makers in prioritization their limited resources for risk reduction in the administrative units from which they are responsible for. The methodology integrates socio-economical, structural, coastal, ground condition, vulnerabilities (fragilities), as well as accessibility to critical services. The proposed methodology is implemented for Eskisehir, which is one of the metropolitans of Turkey. In the implementation of the proposed framework, geographic information system (GIS) is used. While the overall vulnerabilities obtained for neighborhoods are mapped in GIS, the overall vulnerabilities obtained for buildings are visualized in 3D city model. The main reason behind using different mapping and visualization tools for vulnerabilities is to provide better ways for communicating with decision-makers. The implementation of the proposed vulnerability assessment methodology indicates that an urban area may have different vulnerability patterns in terms of structural, socio-economical, and accessibility to critical services. When such patterns are investigated, effective vulnerability reduction policies can be designed by the decision-makers. The proposed methodology well serves for this purpose
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