Accumulation of low density lipoprotein associated cholesterol in calcifying vesicle fractions correlates with intimal thickening in thoracic aortas of juvenile rabbits fed a supplemental cholesterol diet

BACKGROUND: It has been shown that calcifying vesicles play an important role in aortic calcification and that cholesterol content in the isolated vesicle fraction is increased when rabbits are fed supplemental cholesterol diets. Whether lipoprotein-associated cholesterols and other lipids are also increased in the vesicle fraction and whether the increase correlates with atherosclerosis remain unknown. RESULTS: Fourteen juvenile male rabbits fed an atherogenic diet containing 0.5% cholesterol and 2% peanut oil for 3 months developed varying degrees of hypercholesterolemia and intimal thickening in the ascending thoracic aorta. The correlation between these two parameters was insignificant, and likely attributable to the use of small numbers of rabbits in this study. Despite this lack of correlation, we demonstrate that the accumulation of cholesterol in calcifying vesicle fractions obtained from the collagenase-digested aorta fragments correlates well with intimal thickening (r(2 )= 0.98, p < 0.0001). To a smaller degree, the correlation was also significant between intimal thickening and the cholesterol accumulation in the microsomal and post-vesicle fractions. The cholesterol supplemental diet increased the low density lipoprotein-cholesterol (LDL-C) content in calcifying vesicle fractions by 3-fold but did not affect the triglyceride content. High density lipoprotein-cholesterol (HDL-C) and very low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (VLD-C) were absent in calcifying vesicle fractions. CONCLUSION: When limited numbers of rabbits are used, LDL-C accumulation in calcifying vesicle fractions is a better biomarker for atherosclerosis than LDL-C levels in the serum. The close association of LDL-C with calcifying vesicles may play an important role in atherosclerosis and calcification

Induction of calcification by serum depletion in cell culture: a model for focal calcification in aortas related to atherosclerosis

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Since aortic calcification has been shown to initiate in the lower zone of well-thickened plaques (LZP) adjacent to the aortic media of rabbits fed supplemental cholesterol diets, a restricted supply of serum to vascular cells could play a role in vascular calcification. This study was designed to use a cell culture model to support this hypothesis.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Rabbit aortic smooth muscle cells were grown to confluence in a culture media containing 10 % fetal bovine serum (FBS). The confluent cells were then exposed to the media for 2 hrs with or without serum at a Ca × P ion product range of 4.5–9.4 mM². In contrast to the cells cultured in the presence of FBS, confluent cells in its absence displayed marked mineral-positive alizarin red staining and infrared absorption of mineral phosphate. A kinetic parameter C_1/2was used to designate the concentration of serum or its protein constituents needed to reduce the deposition of Ca and P by half. The C_1/2for FBS and rabbit serum was 0.04–0.07 % The C_1/2value for rabbit serum proteins was 13.5 μg/ml corresponding to the protein concentration in 0.06 % of serum. This C_1/2was markedly smaller than 86.2 μg/ml for bovine serum albumin present in 0.37 % serum (p < 0.05). Serum depletion also caused marked membrane translocation as evidenced through a specific apoptosis dye uptake by cells. The proteomic analysis of calcifying vesicles, which can be released by serum depletion, revealed several calcification-related proteins.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>The aortic smooth muscle cell culture model suggests that serum depletion may play a role in the initiation of aortic calcification. The serum exhibits remarkable ability to inhibit cell-mediated calcification.</p

The effect of glutamine supplement on small intestinal morphology and xylose absorptive ability of weaned piglets

The purpose of this study is to demonstrate the effects of glutamine (Gln) supplement on small intestinal  morphology, xylose absorptive and growth performance of weaned piglets. Forty eight piglets weaned at 28 ± 2 days of age were randomly allotted to three treatment groups. A basal corn-soybean diet was formulated to contain 20.3% protein and 3450 kcal DE/kg diet. Glutamine was supplemented to the basal diet at 0% (control), 1% (Gln 1%) and 2% (Gln 2%). Pigs were fed experimental diets for three weeks. The results  showed that the villous height of the Gln groups tended higher than the control group in duodenum and jejunum (P &lt; 0.1). Glutamine supplementation increased plasma net xylose absorptive concentration from 0.78 to 1.20 and 0.95 to 1.23 in Gln 1% and Gln 2% group, respectively, which were better than the control group (0.86 to 0.97) in day 7 to 14 after weaning. Growth performance was not significantly affected by Gln supplement;  however, average daily gain was approximately improved from 21 to 28% by Gln supplement compared to the control group during 21 days of experimental period. In summary, the results suggested that dietary  supplementation of Gln could be beneficial in small intestinal villous morphology and xylose absorptive  capacity, and could have a slight contribution to the average daily gain of weaned piglets.Key words: Glutamine, growth performance, intestinal morphology, weaned piglets

A novel osmosis membrane bioreactor-membrane distillation hybrid system for wastewater treatment and reuse

© 2016 . A novel approach was designed to simultaneously enhance nutrient removal and reduce membrane fouling for wastewater treatment using an attached growth biofilm (AGB) integrated with an osmosis membrane bioreactor (OsMBR) system for the first time. In this study, a highly charged organic compound (HEDTA3-) was employed as a novel draw solution in the AGB-OsMBR system to obtain a low reverse salt flux, maintain a healthy environment for the microorganisms. The AGB-OsMBR system achieved a stable water flux of 3.62 L/m2 h, high nutrient removal of 99% and less fouling during a 60-day operation. Furthermore, the high salinity of diluted draw solution could be effectively recovered by membrane distillation (MD) process with salt rejection of 99.7%. The diluted draw solution was re-concentrated to its initial status (56.1 mS/cm) at recovery of 9.8% after 6 h. The work demonstrated that novel multi-barrier systems could produce high quality potable water from impaired streams

BIOADI: a machine learning approach to identifying abbreviations and definitions in biological literature

BACKGROUND: To automatically process large quantities of biological literature for knowledge discovery and information curation, text mining tools are becoming essential. Abbreviation recognition is related to NER and can be considered as a pair recognition task of a terminology and its corresponding abbreviation from free text. The successful identification of abbreviation and its corresponding definition is not only a prerequisite to index terms of text databases to produce articles of related interests, but also a building block to improve existing gene mention tagging and gene normalization tools. RESULTS: Our approach to abbreviation recognition (AR) is based on machine-learning, which exploits a novel set of rich features to learn rules from training data. Tested on the AB3P corpus, our system demonstrated a F-score of 89.90% with 95.86% precision at 84.64% recall, higher than the result achieved by the existing best AR performance system. We also annotated a new corpus of 1200 PubMed abstracts which was derived from BioCreative II gene normalization corpus. On our annotated corpus, our system achieved a F-score of 86.20% with 93.52% precision at 79.95% recall, which also outperforms all tested systems. CONCLUSION: By applying our system to extract all short form-long form pairs from all available PubMed abstracts, we have constructed BIOADI. Mining BIOADI reveals many interesting trends of bio-medical research. Besides, we also provide an off-line AR software in the download section on http://bioagent.iis.sinica.edu.tw/BIOADI/

Soft tagging of overlapping high confidence gene mention variants for cross-species full-text gene normalization

Abstract Background Previously, gene normalization (GN) systems are mostly focused on disambiguation using contextual information. An effective gene mention tagger is deemed unnecessary because the subsequent steps will filter out false positives and high recall is sufficient. However, unlike similar tasks in the past BioCreative challenges, the BioCreative III GN task is particularly challenging because it is not species-specific. Required to process full-length articles, an ineffective gene mention tagger may produce a huge number of ambiguous false positives that overwhelm subsequent filtering steps while still missing many true positives. Results We present our GN system participated in the BioCreative III GN task. Our system applies a typical 2-stage approach to GN but features a soft tagging gene mention tagger that generates a set of overlapping gene mention variants with a nearly perfect recall. The overlapping gene mention variants increase the chance of precise match in the dictionary and alleviate the need of disambiguation. Our GN system achieved a precision of 0.9 (F-score 0.63) on the BioCreative III GN test corpus with the silver annotation of 507 articles. Its TAP-k scores are competitive to the best results among all participants. Conclusions We show that despite the lack of clever disambiguation in our gene normalization system, effective soft tagging of gene mention variants can indeed contribute to performance in cross-species and full-text gene normalization.</p

Exploring high charge of phosphate as new draw solute in a forward osmosis-membrane distillation hybrid system for concentrating high-nutrient sludge

© 2016 Elsevier B.V. For the first time, a high charge of phosphate was used as the draw solute in a forward osmosis-membrane distillation (FO-MD) hybrid system for concentrating high-nutrient sludge. A high water flux (12.5 L/m2 h) and a low reverse salt flux (0.84 g/m2) were simultaneously achieved at pH 9 by using 0.1 M Na3PO4 as the draw solute and deionized water as the feed solution in the FO process. The specific reverse salt flux of 0.1 M Na3PO4 (Js/Jw = 0.07 g/L) was considerably less than that of 0.1 M NaCl (Js/Jw = 0.37 g/L) because the complexion between Na+ and HPO42- at pH 9 led to the reduction of free Na+ ions, which subsequently reduced the reverse salt diffusion substantially. Moreover, for a feed solution with an initial sludge concentration of 3500 mg/L, the sludge concentration could be concentrated to 19,800 and 22,000 mg/L in the pressure-retarded osmosis (PRO) and FO membrane orientations, respectively, after 15 h of operation. Four types of MD membranes were selected for draw solution recovery; of these, a polytetrafluoroethylene membrane with a pore size of 0.45 μm was the most effective in achieving a high water flux (10.28 L/m2 h) and high salt rejection (approximately 100%) in a diluted Na3PO4 draw solution

A tool to support the creation of datasets of tampered videos

Digital Video Forensics is getting a growing interest from the Multimedia research community, as the need for methods to validate the authenticity of a video content is increasing with the number of videos freely available to the digital users. Unlike Digital Image Forensics, to our knowledge, there are not standard datasets to test video forgery detection techniques. In this paper we present a new tool to support the users in creating datasets of tampered videos. We furthermore present our own dataset and we discuss some remarks about how to create forgeries difficult to be detected by an observer, to the naked eye