Gene and protein expression in response to different growth temperatures and oxygen availability in Burkholderia thailandensis.

Published onlineJournal ArticleResearch Support, Non-U.S. Gov'tThis is the final version of the article. Available from Public Library of Science via the DOI in this record.Burkholderia thailandensis, although normally avirulent for mammals, can infect macrophages in vitro and has occasionally been reported to cause pneumonia in humans. It is therefore used as a model organism for the human pathogen B. pseudomallei, to which it is closely related phylogenetically. We characterized the B. thailandensis clinical isolate CDC2721121 (BtCDC272) at the genome level and studied its response to environmental cues associated with human host colonization, namely, temperature and oxygen limitation. Effects of the different growth conditions on BtCDC272 were studied through whole genome transcription studies and analysis of proteins associated with the bacterial cell surface. We found that growth at 37°C, compared to 28°C, negatively affected cell motility and flagella production through a mechanism involving regulation of the flagellin-encoding fliC gene at the mRNA stability level. Growth in oxygen-limiting conditions, in contrast, stimulated various processes linked to virulence, such as lipopolysaccharide production and expression of genes encoding protein secretion systems. Consistent with these observations, BtCDC272 grown in oxygen limitation was more resistant to phagocytosis and strongly induced the production of inflammatory cytokines from murine macrophages. Our results suggest that, while temperature sensing is important for regulation of B. thailandensis cell motility, oxygen limitation has a deeper impact on its physiology and constitutes a crucial environmental signal for the production of virulence factors.This work was supported by Fondazione CARIPLO (Progetto Vaccini, contract number 2009–3577) and by Ministero dell’Istruzione, dell’Università e della Ricerca (MIUR) (project FIRB RBLA039LSF). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript

Labrador retrievers under primary veterinary care in the UK: demography, mortality and disorders

Abstract Background Labrador retrievers are reportedly predisposed to many disorders but accurate prevalence information relating to the general population are lacking. This study aimed to describe demography, mortality and commonly recorded diseases in Labrador retrievers under UK veterinary care. Methods The VetCompass™ programme collects electronic patient record data on dogs attending UK primary-care veterinary practices. Demographic analysis covered all33,320 Labrador retrievers in the VetCompass™ database under veterinary care during 2013 while disorder and mortality data were extracted from a random sample of 2074 (6.2%) of these dogs. Results Of the Labrador retrievers with information available, 15,427 (46.4%) were female and 15,252 (53.6%) were male. Females were more likely to be neutered than males (59.7% versus 54.8%, P <  0.001). The overall mean adult bodyweight was 33.0 kg (SD 6.1). Adult males were heavier (35.2 kg, SD 5.9 kg) than adult females (30.4 kg, SD 5.2 kg) (P <  0.001). The median longevity of Labrador retrievers overall was 12.0 years (IQR 9.9–13.8, range 0.0–16.0). The most common recorded colours were black (44.6%), yellow (27.8%) and liver/chocolate (reported from hereon as chocolate) (23.8%). The median longevity of non-chocolate coloured dogs (n = 139, 12.1 years, IQR 10.2–13.9, range 0.0–16.0) was longer than for chocolate coloured animals (n = 34, 10.7 years, IQR 9.0–12.4, range 3.8–15.5) (P = 0.028). Of a random sample of 2074 (6.2%) Labrador retrievers under care in 2013 that had full disorder data extracted, 1277 (61.6%) had at least one disorder recorded. The total number of dogs who died at any date during the study was 176. The most prevalent disorders recorded were otitis externa (n = 215, prevalence 10.4%, 95% CI: 9.1–11.8), overweight/obesity (183, 8.8%, 95% CI: 7.6–10.1) and degenerative joint disease (115, 5.5%, 95% CI: 4.6–6.6). Overweight/obesity was not statistically significantly associated with neutering in females (8.3% of entire versus 12.5% of neutered, P = 0.065) but was associated with neutering in males (4.1% of entire versus 11.4% of neutered, P < 0.001). The prevalence of otitis externa in black dogs was 12.8%, in yellow dogs it was 17.0% but, in chocolate dogs, it rose to 23.4% (P < 0.001). Similarly, the prevalence of pyo-traumatic dermatitis in black dogs was 1.1%, in yellow dogs it was 1.6% but in chocolate dogs it rose to 4.0% (P = 0.011). Conclusions The current study assists prioritisation of health issues within Labrador retrievers. The most common disorders were overweight/obesity, otitis externa and degenerative joint disease. Males were significantly heavier females. These results can alert prospective owners to potential health issues and inform breed-specific wellness checks

Stationary Black Holes: Uniqueness and Beyond

The spectrum of known black-hole solutions to the stationary Einstein equations has been steadily increasing, sometimes in unexpected ways. In particular, it has turned out that not all black-hole-equilibrium configurations are characterized by their mass, angular momentum and global charges. Moreover, the high degree of symmetry displayed by vacuum and electro-vacuum black-hole spacetimes ceases to exist in self-gravitating non-linear field theories. This text aims to review some developments in the subject and to discuss them in light of the uniqueness theorem for the Einstein-Maxwell system.Comment: Major update of the original version by Markus Heusler from 1998. Piotr T. Chru\'sciel and Jo\~ao Lopes Costa succeeded to this review's authorship. Significantly restructured and updated all sections; changes are too numerous to be usefully described here. The number of references increased from 186 to 32

Calf health from birth to weaning. II. Management of diarrhoea in pre-weaned calves

Calfhood diseases have a major impact on the economic viability of cattle operations. The second of this three part review series considers the management of diarrhoeic diseases in pre-weaned calves. In neonatal calf diarrhoea, oral rehydration therapy is the single most important therapeutic measure to be carried out by the farmer and is usually successful if instigated immediately after diarrhoea has developed. Continued feeding of milk or milk replacer to diarrhoeic calves is important, to prevent malnourishment and weight loss in affected calves. Indiscriminative antibiotic treatment of uncomplicated diarrhoea is discouraged, whereas systemically ill calves can benefit from systemic antibiotic treatment for the prevention of septicaemia or concurrent diseases. Ancillary treatments and specific preventive measures are discussed. Eimeriosis has a high economic impact on the farming industries due to direct cost of treatment and calf losses, but especially due to decreased performance of clinically as well as sub-clinically affected animals. Emphasis lies on prophylactic or metaphylactic treatment, since the degree of damage to the intestinal mucosa once diarrhoea has developed, makes therapeutic intervention unrewarding

Saccadic latency in hepatic encephalopathy: a pilot study

Hepatic encephalopathy is a common complication of cirrhosis. The degree of neuro-psychiatric impairment is highly variable and its clinical staging subjective. We investigated whether eye movement response times—saccadic latencies—could serve as an indicator of encephalopathy. We studied the association between saccadic latency, liver function and paper- and pencil tests in 70 patients with cirrhosis and 31 patients after liver transplantation. The tests included the porto-systemic encephalopathy (PSE-) test, critical flicker frequency, MELD score and ammonia concentration. A normal range for saccades was established in 31 control subjects. Clinical and biochemical parameters of liver, blood, and kidney function were also determined. Median saccadic latencies were significantly longer in patients with liver cirrhosis when compared to patients after liver transplantation (244 ms vs. 278 ms p < 0.001). Both patient groups had prolonged saccadic latency when compared to an age matched control group (175 ms). The reciprocal of median saccadic latency (μ) correlated with PSE tests, MELD score and critical flicker frequency. A significant correlation between the saccadic latency parameter early slope (σE) that represents the prevalence of early saccades and partial pressure of ammonia was also noted. Psychometric test performance, but not saccadic latency, correlated with blood urea and sodium concentrations. Saccadic latency represents an objective and quantitative parameter of hepatic encephalopathy. Unlike psychometric test performance, these ocular responses were unaffected by renal function and can be obtained clinically within a matter of minutes by non-trained personnel

Oral vaccination with heat inactivated Mycobacterium bovis activates the complement system to protect against tuberculosis

Tuberculosis (TB) remains a pandemic affecting billions of people worldwide, thus stressing the need for new vaccines. Defining the correlates of vaccine protection is essential to achieve this goal. In this study, we used the wild boar model for mycobacterial infection and TB to characterize the protective mechanisms elicited by a new heat inactivated Mycobacterium bovis vaccine (IV). Oral vaccination with the IV resulted in significantly lower culture and lesion scores, particularly in the thorax, suggesting that the IV might provide a novel vaccine for TB control with special impact on the prevention of pulmonary disease, which is one of the limitations of current vaccines. Oral vaccination with the IV induced an adaptive antibody response and activation of the innate immune response including the complement component C3 and inflammasome. Mycobacterial DNA/RNA was not involved in inflammasome activation but increased C3 production by a still unknown mechanism. The results also suggested a protective mechanism mediated by the activation of IFN-γ producing CD8+ T cells by MHC I antigen presenting dendritic cells (DCs) in response to vaccination with the IV, without a clear role for Th1 CD4+ T cells. These results support a role for DCs in triggering the immune response to the IV through a mechanism similar to the phagocyte response to PAMPs with a central role for C3 in protection against mycobacterial infection. Higher C3 levels may allow increased opsonophagocytosis and effective bacterial clearance, while interfering with CR3-mediated opsonic and nonopsonic phagocytosis of mycobacteria, a process that could be enhanced by specific antibodies against mycobacterial proteins induced by vaccination with the IV. These results suggest that the IV acts through novel mechanisms to protect against TB in wild boar

Dynamic load balancing on heterogeneous clusters for parallel ant colony optimization

© 2016 Springer Science+Business Media New York Ant colony optimisation (ACO) is a nature-inspired, population-based metaheuristic that has been used to solve a wide variety of computationally hard problems. In order to take full advantage of the inherently stochastic and distributed nature of the method, we describe a parallelization strategy that leverages these features on heterogeneous and large-scale, massively-parallel hardware systems. Our approach balances workload effectively, by dynamically assigning jobs to heterogeneous resources which then run ACO implementations using different search strategies. Our experimental results confirm that we can obtain significant improvements in terms of both solution quality and energy expenditure, thus opening up new possibilities for the development of metaheuristic-based solutions to “real world” problems on high-performance, energy-efficient contemporary heterogeneous computing platforms

Search for dijet resonances in proton-proton collisions at root s=13 TeV and constraints on dark matter and other models

Correction: DOI:10.1016/j.physletb.2017.09.029Peer reviewe