White adipose tissue mitochondrial metabolism in health and in obesity

White adipose tissue is one of the largest organs of the body. It plays a key role in whole-body energy status and metabolism; it not only stores excess energy but also secretes various hormones and metabolites to regulate body energy balance. Healthy adipose tissue capable of expanding is needed for metabolic well-being and to prevent accumulation of triglycerides to other organs. Mitochondria govern several important functions in the adipose tissue. We review the derangements of mitochondrial function in white adipose tissue in the obese state. Downregulation of mitochondrial function or biogenesis in the white adipose tissue is a central driver for obesity-associated metabolic diseases. Mitochondrial functions compromised in obesity include oxidative functions and renewal and enlargement of the adipose tissue through recruitment and differentiation of adipocyte progenitor cells. These changes adversely affect whole-body metabolic health. Dysfunction of the white adipose tissue mitochondria in obesity has long-term consequences for the metabolism of adipose tissue and the whole body. Understanding the pathways behind mitochondrial dysfunction may help reveal targets for pharmacological or nutritional interventions that enhance mitochondrial biogenesis or function in adipose tissue.Peer reviewe

The youth movement Nashi: contentious politics, civil society, and party politics

The youth movement Nashi was established in Russia with the support of the Putin regime in 2005. The success of anti-regime demonstrators in Ukraine's ‘Orange Revolution’ in 2004 had been noted in Moscow, and Nashi's role was to serve as a pro-regime force to be mobilised against the opposition. Its focus was the contentious politics of the street. Nashi represents an interesting theoretical case from the perspective of contentious politics and its relationship with civil society and formal party politics. Nashi's role has developed to include facilitating young people's engagement with party politics and business. Its early centralised control has been ameliorated somewhat by a reorganisation focused on local action. Nonetheless, Nashi exists with state support. Its continued role in contentious politics in support of the Putin regime, for example, countering opposition demonstrations in Moscow in December 2011, makes its identification as a component of democratic civil society problematic

The effects of majority requirements, selectorate composition and uncertainty in indirect presidential elections: The case of Estonia

This article assesses the effects of common features in the indirect election of presidents in parliamentary republics. In particular, it examines the influence of majority requirements, selectorate composition and uncertainty on party strategies, using Estonia (1996-2016) as a crucial case for analysis. The analysis demonstrates that the lack of a plurality run-off effectively eliminated incentives for inter-party cooperation and strategic voting. It furthermore shows that shifts in the partisan composition and control of the selectorate from parliament to electoral college provided considerable opportunities for agenda manipulation. Subsequently, results only rarely reflected the parliamentary balance of power. Last, although overall indicators suggest greater congruence between parliament and electoral college over time, this proliferated rather than reduced parties’ uncertainty over the electoral outcome as non parliamentary electors voted based on local interests and acted independently from national party leaders

An ontology-based framework for describing discoverable data services

Data-services are applications in charge of retrieving certain data when they are called. They are found in different communities such as the Internet Of Things, Cloud Computing, Big Data, etc. So, there is a real need to discover how can an application that requires some data automatically find a data-service which is providing it. To our knowledge, the problem of automatically discovering these data-services is still open. To make a step forward in this direction, we propose an ontology-based framework to address this problem. In our framework, input and output values of the request are mapped into concepts of the domain ontology. Then, data-services specify how to obtain the output from the input by stating the relationship between the mapped concepts of the ontology.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Instability of Alien Chromosome Introgressions in Wheat Associated with Improper Positioning in the Nucleus

Alien introgressions introduce beneficial alleles into existing crops and hence, are widely used in plant breeding. Generally, introgressed alien chromosomes show reduced meiotic pairing relative to the host genome, and may be eliminated over generations. Reduced pairing appears to result from a failure of some telomeres of alien chromosomes to incorporate into the leptotene bouquet at the onset of meiosis, thereby preventing chiasmate pairing. In this study, we analysed somatic nuclei of rye introgressions in wheat using 3D-FISH and found that while introgressed rye chromosomes or chromosome arms occupied discrete positions in the Rabl’s orientation similar to chromosomes of the wheat host, their telomeres frequently occupied positions away from the nuclear periphery. The frequencies of such abnormal telomere positioning were similar to the frequencies of out-of-bouquet telomere positioning at leptotene, and of pairing failure at metaphase I. This study indicates that improper positioning of alien chromosomes that leads to reduced pairing is not a strictly meiotic event but rather a consequence of a more systemic problem. Improper positioning in the nuclei probably impacts the ability of introgressed chromosomes to migrate into the telomere bouquet at the onset of meiosis, preventing synapsis and chiasma establishment, and leading to their gradual elimination over generations

Formalization of semantic annotation for systems interoperability in a PLM environment

International audienceNowadays, the need for systems collaboration across enterprises and through different domains has become more and more ubiquitous. Due to the lack of standardized models or architecture, as well as semantic mismatching and inconsistencies, research works on information and model exchange, trans-formation, discovery and reuse are carried out in recent years. One of the main challenges in these researches is to overcome the semantic gap between enterprise applications along any product lifecycle, involving many distributed and heterogeneous enterprise applications. We propose, in this paper, an approach for semantically annotating different knowledge views (business process models, business rules, conceptual models, and etc.) in the Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) environment. These formal semantic annotations will make explicit the tacit knowledge generally engraved in application models and act as bridges to support all actors in along the product lifecycle. A case study based on a specific manufacturing process will be presented for demonstrating how our semantic annotations can be applied in a Business to Manufacturing (B2M) interoperability contex

Prikaz znanja u internetu stvari: semantičko modeliranje i njegove primjene

Semantic modelling provides a potential basis for interoperating among different systems and applications in the Internet of Things (IoT). However, current work has mostly focused on IoT resource management while not on the access and utilisation of information generated by the “Things”. We present the design of a comprehensive and lightweight semantic description model for knowledge representation in the IoT domain. The design follows the widely recognised best practices in knowledge engineering and ontology modelling. Users are allowed to extend the model by linking to external ontologies, knowledge bases or existing linked data. Scalable access to IoT services and resources is achieved through a distributed, semantic storage design. The usefulness of the model is also illustrated through an IoT service discovery method.Semantičko modeliranje pruža potencijalnu osnovu za me.udjelovanje različitih sustava i aplikacija unutar interneta stvari (IoT). Međutim, postojeći radovi uglavnom su fokusirani na upravljanje IoT resursima, ali ne i pristupu i korištenju informacija koje generira “stvar”. Predstavljamo projektiranje sveobuhvatnog i laganog semantičkog opisnog modela za prikaz znanja u IoT domeni. Projektiranje slijedi široko-priznate najbolje običaje u inženjerstvu znanja i ontološkom modeliranju. Korisnicima se dopušta proširenje modela povezivanjem na eksterne ontologije, baze znanja ili postoje će povezane podatke. Skalabilni pristup IoT uslugama i resursima postiže se kroz distribuirano, semantičko projektiranje pohrane. Upotrebljivost modela tako.er je ilustrirana kroz metodu pronalaska IoT usluga