63 research outputs found
PP-239 Ancylostoma spp. in soil of public recreative areas of Culiacan and Navolato Sinaloa, Mexico
Reshaping the epigenetic landscape during early flower development: induction of attractor transitions by relative differences in gene decay rates
Measurement of -meson production in CuAu at GeV and UU at GeV
The PHENIX experiment reports systematic measurements at the Relativistic
Heavy Ion Collider of -meson production in asymmetric CuAu collisions
at =200 GeV and in UU collisions at =193
GeV. Measurements were performed via the decay
channel at midrapidity . Features of -meson production
measured in CuCu, CuAu, AuAu, and UU collisions were found to not
depend on the collision geometry, which was expected because the yields are
averaged over the azimuthal angle and follow the expected scaling with
nuclear-overlap size. The elliptic flow of the meson in CuAu,
AuAu, and UU collisions scales with second order participant eccentricity
and the length scale of the nuclear overlap region (estimated with the number
of participating nucleons). At moderate , -meson production measured
in CuAu and UU collisions is consistent with coalescence-model
predictions, whereas at high the production is in agreement with
expectations for in-medium energy loss of parent partons prior to their
fragmentation. The elliptic flow for mesons measured in CuAu and
UU collisions is well described by a (2+1)D viscous-hydrodynamic model with
specific-shear viscosity .Comment: 411 authors from 76 institutions, 16 pages, 12 figures, 9 tables,
2012 data. v1 is version submitted to Physical Review C. Plain text data
tables for the points plotted in figures for this and previous PHENIX
publications are (or will be) publicly available at
http://www.phenix.bnl.gov/papers.htm
Barreras de acceso administrativo a los servicios de salud en población Colombiana, 2013
The global abundance of tree palms
Aim: Palms are an iconic, diverse and often abundant component of tropical ecosystems that provide many ecosystem services. Being monocots, tree palms are evolutionarily, morphologically and physiologically distinct from other trees, and these differences have important consequences for ecosystem services (e.g., carbon sequestration and storage) and in terms of responses to climate change. We quantified global patterns of tree palm relative abundance to help improve understanding of tropical forests and reduce uncertainty about these ecosystems under climate change.
Location: Tropical and subtropical moist forests.
Time period: Current.
Major taxa studied: Palms (Arecaceae).
Methods: We assembled a pantropical dataset of 2,548 forest plots (covering 1,191 ha) and quantified tree palm (i.e., ≥10 cm diameter at breast height) abundance relative to co‐occurring non‐palm trees. We compared the relative abundance of tree palms across biogeographical realms and tested for associations with palaeoclimate stability, current climate, edaphic conditions and metrics of forest structure.
Results: On average, the relative abundance of tree palms was more than five times larger between Neotropical locations and other biogeographical realms. Tree palms were absent in most locations outside the Neotropics but present in >80% of Neotropical locations. The relative abundance of tree palms was more strongly associated with local conditions (e.g., higher mean annual precipitation, lower soil fertility, shallower water table and lower plot mean wood density) than metrics of long‐term climate stability. Life‐form diversity also influenced the patterns; palm assemblages outside the Neotropics comprise many non‐tree (e.g., climbing) palms. Finally, we show that tree palms can influence estimates of above‐ground biomass, but the magnitude and direction of the effect require additional work.
Conclusions: Tree palms are not only quintessentially tropical, but they are also overwhelmingly Neotropical. Future work to understand the contributions of tree palms to biomass estimates and carbon cycling will be particularly crucial in Neotropical forests
31st Annual Meeting and Associated Programs of the Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer (SITC 2016) : part two
Background
The immunological escape of tumors represents one of the main ob- stacles to the treatment of malignancies. The blockade of PD-1 or CTLA-4 receptors represented a milestone in the history of immunotherapy. However, immune checkpoint inhibitors seem to be effective in specific cohorts of patients. It has been proposed that their efficacy relies on the presence of an immunological response. Thus, we hypothesized that disruption of the PD-L1/PD-1 axis would synergize with our oncolytic vaccine platform PeptiCRAd.
Methods
We used murine B16OVA in vivo tumor models and flow cytometry analysis to investigate the immunological background.
Results
First, we found that high-burden B16OVA tumors were refractory to combination immunotherapy. However, with a more aggressive schedule, tumors with a lower burden were more susceptible to the combination of PeptiCRAd and PD-L1 blockade. The therapy signifi- cantly increased the median survival of mice (Fig. 7). Interestingly, the reduced growth of contralaterally injected B16F10 cells sug- gested the presence of a long lasting immunological memory also against non-targeted antigens. Concerning the functional state of tumor infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs), we found that all the immune therapies would enhance the percentage of activated (PD-1pos TIM- 3neg) T lymphocytes and reduce the amount of exhausted (PD-1pos TIM-3pos) cells compared to placebo. As expected, we found that PeptiCRAd monotherapy could increase the number of antigen spe- cific CD8+ T cells compared to other treatments. However, only the combination with PD-L1 blockade could significantly increase the ra- tio between activated and exhausted pentamer positive cells (p= 0.0058), suggesting that by disrupting the PD-1/PD-L1 axis we could decrease the amount of dysfunctional antigen specific T cells. We ob- served that the anatomical location deeply influenced the state of CD4+ and CD8+ T lymphocytes. In fact, TIM-3 expression was in- creased by 2 fold on TILs compared to splenic and lymphoid T cells. In the CD8+ compartment, the expression of PD-1 on the surface seemed to be restricted to the tumor micro-environment, while CD4 + T cells had a high expression of PD-1 also in lymphoid organs. Interestingly, we found that the levels of PD-1 were significantly higher on CD8+ T cells than on CD4+ T cells into the tumor micro- environment (p < 0.0001).
Conclusions
In conclusion, we demonstrated that the efficacy of immune check- point inhibitors might be strongly enhanced by their combination with cancer vaccines. PeptiCRAd was able to increase the number of antigen-specific T cells and PD-L1 blockade prevented their exhaus- tion, resulting in long-lasting immunological memory and increased median survival
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