Hepatocyte growth factor stimulates neutrophil degranulation but not respiratory burst

Neutrophil function is regulated in part by cytokines with growth factor activities for different cell types. Hepatocyte growth factor (HGF) is a cytokine produced during injury to the liver and other organs. Neutrophils are numerous in such tissue injury sites and may be influenced by HGF. In the present study the effect of HGF on neutrophils was investigated. The data show that HGF at 1–10 ng/ml increased lysosomal enzyme release from both specific and azurophilic granules of cytochalasin-B treated neutrophils. The release of specific granule contents in response to N-formyl-methionyl-leucylphenylalanine was also increased by HGF. In contrast there were no significant effects of HGF on neutrophil respiratory burst, adherence or locomotion. It is concluded that HGF modulates neutrophil granule exocytosis

review of the social and environmental factors affecting the behavior and welfare of turkeys meleagris gallopavo

ABSTRACT In modern rearing systems, turkey producers often face economic losses due to increased aggression, feather pecking, cannibalism, leg disorders, or injuries among birds, which are also significant welfare issues. The main underlying causes appear to relate to rapid growth, flock size, density, poor environmental complexity, or lighting, which may be deficient in providing the birds with an adequate physical or social environment. To date, there is little information regarding the effect of these factors on turkey welfare. This knowledge is, however, essential to ensure the welfare of turkeys and to improve their quality of life, but may also be beneficial to industry, allowing better bird performance, improved carcass quality, and reduced mortality and condemnations. This paper reviews the available scientific literature related to the behavior of turkeys as influenced by the physical and social environment that may be relevant to advances toward turkey production systems that take welfare into consideration. We addressed the effects that factors such as density, group size, space availability, maturation, lightning, feeding, and transport may have over parameters that may be relevant to ensure welfare of turkeys. Available scientific studies were based in experimental environments and identified individual factors corresponding to particular welfare problems. Most of the studies aimed at finding optimal levels of rearing conditions that allow avoiding or decreasing most severe welfare issues. This paper discusses the importance of these factors for development of production environments that would be better suited from a welfare and economic point of view

Strong approximations of Brownian sheet by uniform transport processes.

Many years ago, Griego, Heath and Ruiz-Moncayo proved that it is possible to define realizations of a sequence of uniform transport processes that converges almost surely to the standard Brownian motion, uniformly on the unit time interval. In this paper we extend their results to the multi parameter case. We begin constructing a family of processes, starting from a set of independent standard Poisson processes, that has realizations that converge almost surely to the Brownian sheet, uniformly on the unit square. At the end the extension to the d-parameter Wiener processes is presented

Diatom flagellar genes and their expression during sexual reproduction in Leptocylindrus danicus

Background: Flagella have been lost in the vegetative phase of the diatom life cycle, but they are still present in male gametes of centric species, thereby representing a hallmark of sexual reproduction. This process, besides maintaining and creating new genetic diversity, in diatoms is also fundamental to restore the maximum cell size following its reduction during vegetative division. Nevertheless, sexual reproduction has been demonstrated in a limited number of diatom species, while our understanding of its different phases and of their genetic control is scarce. Results: In the transcriptome of Leptocylindrus danicus, a centric diatom widespread in the world's seas, we identified 22 transcripts related to the flagella development and confirmed synchronous overexpression of 6 flagellum-related genes during the male gamete formation process. These transcripts were mostly absent in the closely related species L. aporus, which does not have sexual reproduction. Among the 22 transcripts, L. danicus showed proteins that belong to the Intra Flagellar Transport (IFT) subcomplex B as well as IFT-A proteins, the latter previously thought to be absent in diatoms. The presence of flagellum-related proteins was also traced in the transcriptomes of several other centric species. Finally, phylogenetic reconstruction of the IFT172 and IFT88 proteins showed that their sequences are conserved across protist species and have evolved similarly to other phylogenetic marker genes. Conclusion: Our analysis describes for the first time the diatom flagellar gene set, which appears to be more complete and functional than previously reported based on the genome sequence of the model centric diatom, Thalassiosira pseudonana. This first recognition of the whole set of diatom flagellar genes and of their activation pattern paves the way to a wider recognition of the relevance of sexual reproduction in individual species and in the natural environment

An estimate of attributable cases of alzheimer disease and vascular dementia due to modifiable risk factors. the impact of primary prevention in europe and in italy

Background: Up to 53.7% of all cases of dementia are assumed to be due to Alzheimer disease (AD), while 15.8% are considered to be due to vascular dementia (VaD). In Europe, about 3 million cases of AD could be due to 7 potentially modifiable risk factors: diabetes, midlife hypertension and/or obesity, physical inactivity, depression, smoking, and low educational level. Aims: To estimate the number of VaD cases in Europe and the number of AD and VaD cases in Italy attributable to these 7 potentially modifiable risk factors. Methods: Assuming the nonindependence of the 7 risk factors, the adjusted combined population attributable risk (PAR) was estimated for AD and VaD. Results: In Europe, adjusted combined PAR was 31.4% for AD and 37.8% for VaD. The total number of attributable cases was 3,033,000 for AD and 873,000 for VaD. In Italy, assuming a 20% reduction of the prevalence of each risk factor, adjusted combined PAR decreased from 45.2 to 38.9% for AD and from 53.1 to 46.6% for VaD, implying a 6.4 and 6.5% reduction in the prevalence of AD and VaD, respectively. Conclusion: A relevant reduction of AD and VaD cases in Europe and Italy could be obtained through primary prevention

On the Feasibility of Malware Authorship Attribution

There are many occasions in which the security community is interested to discover the authorship of malware binaries, either for digital forensics analysis of malware corpora or for thwarting live threats of malware invasion. Such a discovery of authorship might be possible due to stylistic features inherent to software codes written by human programmers. Existing studies of authorship attribution of general purpose software mainly focus on source code, which is typically based on the style of programs and environment. However, those features critically depend on the availability of the program source code, which is usually not the case when dealing with malware binaries. Such program binaries often do not retain many semantic or stylistic features due to the compilation process. Therefore, authorship attribution in the domain of malware binaries based on features and styles that will survive the compilation process is challenging. This paper provides the state of the art in this literature. Further, we analyze the features involved in those techniques. By using a case study, we identify features that can survive the compilation process. Finally, we analyze existing works on binary authorship attribution and study their applicability to real malware binaries.Comment: FPS 201

New results on pushdown module checking with imperfect information

Model checking of open pushdown systems (OPD) w.r.t. standard branching temporal logics (pushdown module checking or PMC) has been recently investigated in the literature, both in the context of environments with perfect and imperfect information about the system (in the last case, the environment has only a partial view of the system's control states and stack content). For standard CTL, PMC with imperfect information is known to be undecidable. If the stack content is assumed to be visible, then the problem is decidable and 2EXPTIME-complete (matching the complexity of PMC with perfect information against CTL). The decidability status of PMC with imperfect information against CTL restricted to the case where the depth of the stack content is visible is open. In this paper, we show that with this restriction, PMC with imperfect information against CTL remains undecidable. On the other hand, we individuate an interesting subclass of OPDS with visible stack content depth such that PMC with imperfect information against the existential fragment of CTL is decidable and in 2EXPTIME. Moreover, we show that the program complexity of PMC with imperfect information and visible stack content against CTL is 2EXPTIME-complete (hence, exponentially harder than the program complexity of PMC with perfect information, which is known to be EXPTIME-complete).Comment: In Proceedings GandALF 2011, arXiv:1106.081

Tracking the connection between disorder and energy landscape in glasses using geologically hyperaged amber

Fossil amber offers the unique opportunity of investigating an amorphous material which has been exploring its energy landscape for more than 110 Myears of natural aging. By applying different x-ray scattering methods to amber before and after annealing the sample to erase its thermal history, we identify a link between the potential energy landscape and the structural and vibrational properties of glasses. We find that hyperaging induces a depletion of the vibrational density of states in the THz region, also ruling the sound dispersion and attenuation properties of the corresponding acoustic waves. Critically, this is accompanied by a densification with structural implications different in nature from that caused by hydrostatic compression. Our results, rationalized within the framework of fluctuating elasticity theory, reveal how upon approaching the bottom of the potential energy landscape (9% decrease in the fictive temperature $T_f$) the elastic matrix becomes increasingly less disordered (6%) and longer-range correlated (22%).Comment: 9 pages, 10 figure

Age estimation by tooth/pulp ratio in canines by peri-apical X-rays: reliability in age determination of Spanish and Italian medieval skeletal remains

Estimation of age at death is an unavoidable step in the process of human identification, both in forensic practice and in the anthropological and palaeopathological study of skeletal remains. In several cases, in which medical or demographic records are completely lacking, a reliable estimation of the age at death becomes very important. Skeletal remains from archaeological contexts suffer from several biasing factors such as post-mortem changes, taphonomy and various burial practices depending on age, sex and social status of the deceased persons. Currently, anthropological methods of age determination reveal several possibilities of inaccuracy. Of all the body parts used in age estimation, teeth are the least affected by any taphonomic process. Although there are many dental methods for age at death estimation, some of them are very complex and/or destructive and they are not normally used in anthropology. However, study of the apposition of secondary dentine by examining peri-apical X-rays of canines is beginning to supply very interesting results. The aim of this work was to test Cameriere\u2019s method on a large sample of historical subjects from several cemeteries in Spain and Italy. The Spanish sample belongs to the Medieval cemetery of La Torrecilla (Arenas del Rey, Granada) and is housed in the Laboratory of Anthropology, Faculty of Medicine, University of Granada. The Italian samples come from the Medieval cemeteries of Comacchio (Ferrara) and Castel S. Pietro (Bologna). In order to test the reliability of Cameriere\u2019s method, age estimations of canines were compared with the mean ranges of age of the most commonly applied anthropological methods such as tooth wear changes in the pubic symphysis or the metamorphosis of the auricular surface of the ilium. Tests on these Middle Ages cemeteries produced satisfactory results, indicating that Cameriere\u2019s method is a reliable tool in determining age at death in skeletal remains of archaeological context