Short term essential fatty acid deficiency in rats. Influence of dietary carbohydrates.

International audienceThe effects of long term (8-14 wk) essential fatty acid (EFA)-deprived diets in rats are well documented. In the present study, we compared, in weanling rats, the effect of a short term (two wk) hydrogenated coconut oil, EFA-deprived, diet (D) with that of a corn oil, EFA-adequate, diet (A), using either sucrose (SU) or starch (ST) as carbohydrate. After two wk, rats fed the sucrose/hydrogenated coconut oil diet developed some characteristic features of EFA deprivation: slower growth rate, decreases in linoleic and arachidonic acid of plasma phospholipids and an increase in n-9 eicosatrienoic acid of plasma phospholipids. When rats ate the starch/hydrogenated coconut oil diet, there was a similar decrease in linoleic acid of plasma phospholipids, but only a small effect on growth rate and no change in the arachidonic acid content of plasma phospholipids. EFA deprivation and sucrose had opposite effects on plasma triglyceride (TG) levels: deprivation induced a decrease, whereas the sucrose induced an increase in very low density lipoprotein (VLDL) triglycerides. The observed decrease in plasma triglyceride during EFA deprivation might result from an activation of lipoprotein lipase during the early stages of deprivation

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical science. © The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press