Metabolomic approaches to explore chemical diversity of human breast-milk, formula milk and bovine milk

Although many studies have been conducted on the components present in human breast milk (HM), research on the differences of chemical metabolites between HM, bovine milk (BM) and formula milk (FM) is limited. This study was to explore the chemical diversity of HM, BM and FM by metabolomic approaches. GC-TOFMS and UPLC-QTOFMS were applied to investigate the metabolic compositions in 30 HM samples, 20 FM samples and 20 BM samples. Metabolite profiling identified that most of the non-esterified fatty acids, which reflected the hydrolysis of triglycerides, were much more abundant in HM than those in FM and BM, except for palmitic acid and stearic acid. The levels of tricarboxylic acid (TCA) intermediates were much higher in FM and BM than those in HM. Each type of milk also showed its unique composition of free amino acids and free carbohydrates. In conclusion, higher levels of non-esterified saturated fatty acids with aliphatic tails <16 carbons, monounsaturated fatty acids and polyunsaturated fatty acids and lower levels of TCA intermediates are characteristic of HM, as compared with FM and BM. The content of non-esterified fatty acids may reflect the hydrolysis of triglycerides in different milk types

Metabolomic profiling can predict which humans will develop liver dysfunction when deprived of dietary choline

Choline is an essential nutrient, and deficiency causes liver and muscle dysfunction. Common genetic variations alter the risk of developing organ dysfunction when choline deficient, probably by causing metabolic inefficiencies that should be detectable even while ingesting a normal choline-adequate diet. We determined whether metabolomic profiling of plasma at baseline could predict whether humans will develop liver dysfunction when deprived of dietary choline. Fifty-three participants were fed a diet containing 550 mg choline/70 kg/d for 10 d and then fed <50 mg choline/70 kg/d for up to 42 d. Participants who developed organ dysfunction on this diet were repleted with a choline-adequate diet for ≥3 d. Plasma samples, obtained at baseline, end of depletion, and end of repletion, were used for targeted and nontargeted metabolomic profiling. Liver fat was assessed using magnetic resonance spectroscopy. Metabolomic profiling and targeted biochemical analyses were highly correlated for the analytes assessed by both procedures. In addition, we report relative concentration changes of other small molecules detected by the nontargeted metabolomic analysis after choline depletion. Finally, we show that metabolomic profiles of participants when they were consuming a control baseline diet could predict whether they would develop liver dysfunction when deprived of dietary choline

A General Approach for the Exact Solution of the Schrodinger Equation

The Schr\"{o}dinger equation is solved exactly for some well known potentials. Solutions are obtained reducing the Schr\"{o}dinger equation into a second order differential equation by using an appropriate coordinate transformation. The Nikiforov-Uvarov method is used in the calculations to get energy eigenvalues and the corresponding wave functions.Comment: 20 page

PT-symmetric Solutions of Schrodinger Equation with position-dependent mass via Point Canonical Transformation

PT-symmetric solutions of Schrodinger equation are obtained for the Scarf and generalized harmonic oscillator potentials with the position-dependent mass. A general point canonical transformation is applied by using a free parameter. Three different forms of mass distributions are used. A set of the energy eigenvalues of the bound states and corresponding wave functions for target potentials are obtained as a function of the free parameter.Comment: 13 page

Three chromosome-scale Papaver genomes reveal punctuated patchwork evolution of the morphinan and noscapine biosynthesis pathway

Papaver species P. setigerum, P. rhoeas, and P. somniferum accumulates different levels of morphine and noscapine. Here, the authors report the improved genome assembly of P. somniferum and de novo assembly of the other two species, and reveal the evolution of the benzylisoquinoline alkaloids biosynthetic pathway.For millions of years, plants evolve plenty of structurally diverse secondary metabolites (SM) to support their sessile lifestyles through continuous biochemical pathway innovation. While new genes commonly drive the evolution of plant SM pathway, how a full biosynthetic pathway evolves remains poorly understood. The evolution of pathway involves recruiting new genes along the reaction cascade forwardly, backwardly, or in a patchwork manner. With three chromosome-scale Papaver genome assemblies, we here reveal whole-genome duplications (WGDs) apparently accelerate chromosomal rearrangements with a nonrandom distribution towards SM optimization. A burst of structural variants involving fusions, translocations and duplications within 7.7 million years have assembled nine genes into the benzylisoquinoline alkaloids gene cluster, following a punctuated patchwork model. Biosynthetic gene copies and their total expression matter to morphinan production. Our results demonstrate how new genes have been recruited from a WGD-induced repertoire of unregulated enzymes with promiscuous reactivities to innovate efficient metabolic pathways with spatiotemporal constraint.Computer Science

Alteration of bile acid metabolism in the rat induced by chronic ethanol consumption

Our understanding of the bile acid metabolism is limited by the fact that previous analyses have primarily focused on a selected few circulating bile acids; the bile acid profiles of the liver and gastrointestinal tract pools are rarely investigated. Here, we determined how chronic ethanol consumption altered the bile acids in multiple body compartments (liver, gastrointestinal tract, and serum) of rats. Rats were fed a modified Lieber-DeCarli liquid diet with 38% of calories as ethanol (the amount equivalent of 4-5 drinks in humans). While conjugated bile acids predominated in the liver (98.3%), duodenum (97.8%), and ileum (89.7%), unconjugated bile acids comprised the largest proportion of measured bile acids in serum (81.2%), the cecum (97.7%), and the rectum (97.5%). In particular, taurine-conjugated bile acids were significantly decreased in the liver and gastrointestinal tract of ethanol-treated rats, while unconjugated and glycineconjugated species increased. Ethanol consumption caused increased expression of genes involved in bile acid biosynthesis, efflux transport, and reduced expression of genes regulating bile acid influx transport in the liver. These results provide an improved understanding of the systemic modulations of bile acid metabolism in mammals through the gut-liver axis

Multi-response analysis in the material characterisation of electrospun poly (lactic acid)/halloysite nanotube composite fibres based on Taguchi design of experiments: fibre diameter, non-intercalation and nucleation effects

Poly (lactic acid) (PLA)/halloysite nanotube (HNT) composite fibres were prepared by using a simple and versatile electrospinning technique. The systematic approach via Taguchi design of experiments (DoE) was implemented to investigate factorial effects of applied voltage, feed rate of solution, collector distance and HNT concentration on the fibre diameter, HNT non-intercalation and nucleation effects. The HNT intercalation level, composite fibre morphology, their associated fibre diameter and thermal properties were evaluated by means of X-ray diffraction (XRD) analysis, scanning electron microscopy (SEM), imaging analysis and differential scanning calorimetry (DSC), respectively. HNT non-intercalation phenomenon appears to be manifested as reflected by the minimal shift of XRD peaks for all electrospun PLA/HNT composite fibres. The smaller-fibre-diameter characteristic was found to be sequentially associated with the feed rate of solution, collector distance and applied voltage. The glass transition temperature (T g) and melting temperature (T m) are not highly affected by varying the material and electrospinning parameters. However, as the indicator of the nucleation effect, the crystallisation temperature (T c) of PLA/HNT composite fibres is predominantly impacted by HNT concentration and applied voltage. It is evident that HNT’s nucleating agent role is confirmed when embedded with HNTs to accelerate the cold crystallisation of composite fibres. Taguchi DoE method has been found to be an effective approach to statistically optimise critical parameters used in electrospinning in order to effectively tailor the resulting physical features and thermal properties of PLA/HNT composite fibres

Quantifying stratospheric biases and identifying their potential sources in subseasonal forecast systems

The stratosphere can be a source of predictability for surface weather on timescales of several weeks to months. However, the potential predictive skill gained from stratospheric variability can be limited by biases in the representation of stratospheric processes and the coupling of the stratosphere with surface climate in forecast systems. This study provides a first systematic identification of model biases in the stratosphere across a wide range of subseasonal forecast systems. It is found that many of the forecast systems considered exhibit warm global-mean temperature biases from the lower to middle stratosphere, too strong/cold wintertime polar vortices, and too cold extratropical upper-troposphere/lowerstratosphere regions. Furthermore, tropical stratospheric anomalies associated with the Quasi-Biennial Oscillation tend to decay toward each system¿s climatology with lead time. In the Northern Hemisphere (NH), most systems do not capture the seasonal cycle of extreme-vortex-event probabilities, with an underestimation of sudden stratospheric warming events and an overestimation of strong vortex events in January. In the Southern Hemisphere (SH), springtime interannual variability in the polar vortex is generally underestimated, but the timing of the final breakdown of the polar vortex often happens too early in many of the prediction systems. These stratospheric biases tend to be considerably worse in systems with lower model lid heights. In both hemispheres, most systems with low-top atmospheric models also consistently underestimate the upward wave driving that affects the strength of the stratospheric polar vortex. We expect that the biases identified here will help guide model development for subseasonal-to-seasonal forecast systems and further our understanding of the role of the stratosphere in predictive skill in the troposphere.This work uses S2S Project data. S2S is a joint initiative of the World Weather Research Programme (WWRP) and the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP). This work was initiated by the Stratospheric Network for the Assessment of Predictability (SNAP), a joint activity of SPARC (WCRP) and the S2S Project (WWRP–WCRP). The work of Rachel W.-Y. Wu is funded through ETH grant ETH-05 19-1. Support from the Swiss National Science Foundation through projects PP00P2_170523 and PP00P2_198896 to Daniela I. V. Domeisen is gratefully acknowledged. Chaim I. Garfinkel and Chen Schwartz are supported by the ISF–NSFC joint research program (grant no. 3259/19). The work of Marisol Osman was supported by UBACyT20020170100428BA and PICT-2018-03046 projects. The work of Alvaro de la Cámara is funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation through project PID2019-109107GB-I00. Blanca Ayarzagüena and Natalia Calvo acknowledge the support of the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation through the JeDiS (RTI2018-096402-B-I00) project. Froila M. Palmeiro and Javier García-Serrano have been partially supported by the Spanish ATLANTE project (PID2019-110234RB-C21) and Ramón y Cajal program (RYC-2016-21181), respectively. Neil P. Hindley and Corwin J. Wright are supported by UK Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), grant number NE/S00985X/1. Corwin J. Wright is also supported by a Royal Society University Research Fellowship UF160545. Seok-Woo Son and Hera Kim are supported by the Basic Science Research Program through the National Research Foundation of Korea (2017R1E1A1A01074889). This material is based upon work supported by the US Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Biological and Environmental Research (BER), Regional and Global Model Analysis (RGMA) component of the Earth and Environmental System Modeling program under award no. DE-SC0022070 and National Science Foundation (NSF) IA 1947282. This work was also supported by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), which is a major facility sponsored by the NSF under cooperative agreement no. 1852977. Pu Lin is supported by award NA18OAR4320123 from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), U.S. Department of Commerce. Zachary D. Lawrence was partially supported under NOAA award NA20NWS4680051; Zachary D. Lawrence and Judith Perlwitz also acknowledge support from US federally appropriated funds

Measurement of Bottom versus Charm as a Function of Transverse Momentum with Electron-Hadron Correlations in p+p Collisions at sqrt(s)=200 GeV

The momentum distribution of electrons from semi-leptonic decays of charm and bottom for mid-rapidity |y|<0.35 in p+p collisions at sqrt(s)=200 GeV is measured by the PHENIX experiment at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) over the transverse momentum range 2 < p_T < 7 GeV/c. The ratio of the yield of electrons from bottom to that from charm is presented. The ratio is determined using partial D/D^bar --> e^{+/-} K^{-/+} X (K unidentified) reconstruction. It is found that the yield of electrons from bottom becomes significant above 4 GeV/c in p_T. A fixed-order-plus-next-to-leading-log (FONLL) perturbative quantum chromodynamics (pQCD) calculation agrees with the data within the theoretical and experimental uncertainties. The extracted total bottom production cross section at this energy is \sigma_{b\b^bar}= 3.2 ^{+1.2}_{-1.1}(stat) ^{+1.4}_{-1.3}(syst) micro b.Comment: 432 authors, 6 pages text, 3 figures. Submitted to Phys. Rev. Lett. 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

Heavy Quarks and Heavy Quarkonia as Tests of Thermalization

We present here a brief summary of new results on heavy quarks and heavy quarkonia from the PHENIX experiment as presented at the "Quark Gluon Plasma Thermalization" Workshop in Vienna, Austria in August 2005, directly following the International Quark Matter Conference in Hungary.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figures, Quark Gluon Plasma Thermalization Workshop (Vienna August 2005) Proceeding