Death receptor 5 expression is inversely correlated with prostate cancer progression.

Prostate carcinoma (PCa) is one of the most common cancers in men. Prostate-specific antigen (PSA) has been widely used to predict the outcome of PCa and screening with PSA has resulted in a decline in mortality. However, PSA is not an optimal prognostic tool as its sensitivity may be too low to reduce morbidity and mortality. Consequently, there is a demand for additional robust biomarkers for prostate cancer. Death receptor 5 (DR5) has been implicated in the prognosis of several cancers and it has been previously shown that it is negatively regulated by Yin Yang 1 (YY1) in prostate cancer cell lines. The present study investigated the clinical significance of DR5 expression in a prostate cancer patient cohort and its correlation with YY1 expression. Immunohistochemical analysis of protein expression distribution was performed using tissue microarray constructs from 54 primary PCa and 39 prostatic intraepithelial neoplasia (PIN) specimens. DR5 expression was dramatically reduced as a function of higher tumor grade. By contrast, YY1 expression was elevated in PCa tumors as compared with that in PIN, and was increased with higher tumor grade. DR5 had an inverse correlation with YY1 expression. Bioinformatic analyses corroborated these data. The present findings suggested that DR5 and YY1 expression levels may serve as progression biomarkers for prostate cancer

Estimación de tasas de erosión hídrica a partir de Dendrogeomorfología

La senda Schmid es un camino bien conocido dentro de la Sierra de Guadarrama, caracterizándose por presentar un uso recreativo casi exclusivo, generalmente asociado al senderismo. Como resultado, se ha producido un proceso acelerado de erosión hídrica que ha derivado en la exposición de raíces de Pinus sylvestris L. Investigaciones previas llevadas a cabo en esta área, han utilizado técnicas dendrogeomorfológicas para estimar tasas de erosión hídrica basadas en el análisis del cambio del patrón morfológico de las series de anillos de crecimiento. Para ello, se calculó el cociente definido por la profundidad de rebajamiento existente entre la parte superior de la raíz hasta la superficie actual del suelo; y el número de anillos que denotan exposición subaérea, al definir éstos un patrón de crecimiento excéntrico. En este trabajo se han reevaluado, a partir de 18 muestras tomadas a lo largo de la senda, tasas de erosión hídrica sobre la base de la determinación del primer año de exposición mediante el análisis anatómico. Para ello, en laboratorio se obtuvieron imágenes de láminas delgadas de madera de raíz, las cuales fueron adquiridas por medio de un dispositivo digital acoplado a un microscopio óptico. Los parámetros considerados fueron: a) anchura del anillo de crecimiento; b) número de células por anillo; c) porcentaje de madera tardía; y d) diámetro de la luz celular en la madera temprana. Una vez finalizado el estudio anatómico, y con el fin de validar las conclusiones preliminares derivadas de éste, se realizó un análisis ANOVA, verificándose diferencias que han permitido utilizar la fecha de exposición para reevaluar las tasas con una mayor precisión que por medio del simple cambio de patrón excéntrico. Los resultados de tasas de erosión acelerada obtenidos y sus tendencias evolutivas en el tiempo podrían ayudar a la gestión adecuada y regulación del tránsito de excursionistas en áreas de especial fragilidad

Gene expression changes in mononuclear cells from patients with metabolic syndrome after acute intake of phenol-rich virgin olive oil

RIGHTS : This article is licensed under the BioMed Central licence at http://www.biomedcentral.com/about/license which is similar to the 'Creative Commons Attribution Licence'. In brief you may : copy, distribute, and display the work; make derivative works; or make commercial use of the work - under the following conditions: the original author must be given credit; for any reuse or distribution, it must be made clear to others what the license terms of this work are.Abstract Background Previous studies have shown that acute intake of high-phenol virgin olive oil reduces pro-inflammatory, pro-oxidant and pro-thrombotic markers compared with low phenols virgin olive oil, but it still remains unclear whether effects attributed to its phenolic fraction are exerted at transcriptional level in vivo. To achieve this goal, we aimed at identifying expression changes in genes which could be mediated by virgin olive oil phenol compounds in the human. Results Postprandial gene expression microarray analysis was performed on peripheral blood mononuclear cells during postprandial period. Two virgin olive oil-based breakfasts with high (398 ppm) and low (70 ppm) content of phenolic compounds were administered to 20 patients suffering from metabolic syndrome following a double-blinded, randomized, crossover design. To eliminate the potential effect that might exist in their usual dietary habits, all subjects followed a similar low-fat, carbohydrate rich diet during the study period. Microarray analysis identified 98 differentially expressed genes (79 underexpressed and 19 overexpressed) when comparing the intake of phenol-rich olive oil with low-phenol olive oil. Many of these genes seem linked to obesity, dyslipemia and type 2 diabetes mellitus. Among these, several genes seem involved in inflammatory processes mediated by transcription factor NF-κB, activator protein-1 transcription factor complex AP-1, cytokines, mitogen-activated protein kinases MAPKs or arachidonic acid pathways. Conclusion This study shows that intake of virgin olive oil based breakfast, which is rich in phenol compounds is able to repress in vivo expression of several pro-inflammatory genes, thereby switching activity of peripheral blood mononuclear cells to a less deleterious inflammatory profile. These results provide at least a partial molecular basis for reduced risk of cardiovascular disease observed in Mediterranean countries, where virgin olive oil represents a main source of dietary fat. Admittedly, other lifestyle factors are also likely to contribute to lowered risk of cardiovascular disease in this region.Published versio

Chagas Disease in the Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico

American trypanosomiasis or Chagas disease is caused by the protozoan Trypanosoma cruzi, which affects a wide variety of hosts including the man, until now treatment options or vaccines developed are not enough to control or prevent infected cases. The main way of transmission is vectorial, through insects of the Reduviidae family, as well by congenital transmission, blood/organ transplants or oral transmission. Chagas disease are considered as endemic in many areas due to the presence and lack of control of insect vectors. Many touristic places in Latin America are located in endemic areas; however, there is a nonexistence of knowledge by touristic service providers about the theme. For that reason, there is a latent risk that tourists who come to vacation in endemic areas are exposed get the infection. The risk factors are well identified, and this allows that well-defined prevention strategies can be established in order to avoid the presentation of cases in visitors to the tourist zones. This chapter aimed to describe the situation of Chagas disease in touristic areas of the Caribbean of America Latina as and to provide a brief review of information that allows visitors to know about the epidemiology and potential risks of this infection

Metastable Resting State Brain Dynamics

Metastability refers to the fact that the state of a dynamical system spends a large amount of time in a restricted region of its available phase space before a transition takes place, bringing the system into another state from where it might recur into the previous one. beim Graben and Hutt (2013) suggested to use the recurrence plot (RP) technique introduced by Eckmann et al. (1987) for the segmentation of system's trajectories into metastable states using recurrence grammars. Here, we apply this recurrence structure analysis (RSA) for the first time to resting-state brain dynamics obtained from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Brain regions are defined according to the brain hierarchical atlas (BHA) developed by Diez et al. (2015), and as a consequence, regions present high-connectivity in both structure (obtained from diffusion tensor imaging) and function (from the blood-level dependent-oxygenation—BOLD—signal). Remarkably, regions observed by Diez et al. were completely time-invariant. Here, in order to compare this static picture with the metastable systems dynamics obtained from the RSA segmentation, we determine the number of metastable states as a measure of complexity for all subjects and for region numbers varying from 3 to 100. We find RSA convergence toward an optimal segmentation of 40 metastable states for normalized BOLD signals, averaged over BHA modules. Next, we build a bistable dynamics at population level by pooling 30 subjects after Hausdorff clustering. In link with this finding, we reflect on the different modeling frameworks that can allow for such scenarios: heteroclinic dynamics, dynamics with riddled basins of attraction, multiple-timescale dynamics. Finally, we characterize the metastable states both functionally and structurally, using templates for resting state networks (RSNs) and the automated anatomical labeling (AAL) atlas, respectively.SR would like to acknowledge Ikerbasque (The Basque Foundation for Science) and moreover, this research is supported by the Basque Government through the BERC 2018-2021 program and by the Spanish State Research Agency through BCAM Severo Ochoa excellence accreditation SEV2017-0718 and through project RTI2018-093860-B- C21 funded by (AEI/FEDER, UE) and acronym MathNEURO. JC acknowledges financial support from Ikerbasque, Ministerio Economia, Industria y Competitividad (Spain) and FEDER (grant DPI2016-79874-R) and the Department of Economical Development and Infrastructure of the Basque Country (Elkartek Program, KK-2018/00032). Finally, PG acknowledges BCAM’s hospitality during a visiting fellowship in fall 2017

Standalone vertex finding in the ATLAS muon spectrometer

A dedicated reconstruction algorithm to find decay vertices in the ATLAS muon spectrometer is presented. The algorithm searches the region just upstream of or inside the muon spectrometer volume for multi-particle vertices that originate from the decay of particles with long decay paths. The performance of the algorithm is evaluated using both a sample of simulated Higgs boson events, in which the Higgs boson decays to long-lived neutral particles that in turn decay to bbar b final states, and pp collision data at √s = 7 TeV collected with the ATLAS detector at the LHC during 2011

Measurement of the top quark-pair production cross section with ATLAS in pp collisions at \sqrt{s}=7\TeV

A measurement of the production cross-section for top quark pairs(\ttbar) in $pp$ collisions at \sqrt{s}=7 \TeV is presented using data recorded with the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider. Events are selected in two different topologies: single lepton (electron $e$ or muon $\mu$) with large missing transverse energy and at least four jets, and dilepton ($ee$, $\mu\mu$ or $e\mu$) with large missing transverse energy and at least two jets. In a data sample of 2.9 pb-1, 37 candidate events are observed in the single-lepton topology and 9 events in the dilepton topology. The corresponding expected backgrounds from non-\ttbar Standard Model processes are estimated using data-driven methods and determined to be $12.2 \pm 3.9$ events and $2.5 \pm 0.6$ events, respectively. The kinematic properties of the selected events are consistent with SM \ttbar production. The inclusive top quark pair production cross-section is measured to be \sigmattbar=145 \pm 31 ^{+42}_{-27} pb where the first uncertainty is statistical and the second systematic. The measurement agrees with perturbative QCD calculations.Comment: 30 pages plus author list (50 pages total), 9 figures, 11 tables, CERN-PH number and final journal adde

Inclusive search for same-sign dilepton signatures in pp collisions at root s=7 TeV with the ATLAS detector

An inclusive search is presented for new physics in events with two isolated leptons (e or mu) having the same electric charge. The data are selected from events collected from p p collisions at root s = 7 TeV by the ATLAS detector and correspond to an integrated luminosity of 34 pb(-1). The spectra in dilepton invariant mass, missing transverse momentum and jet multiplicity are presented and compared to Standard Model predictions. In this event sample, no evidence is found for contributions beyond those of the Standard Model. Limits are set on the cross-section in a fiducial region for new sources of same-sign high-mass dilepton events in the ee, e mu and mu mu channels. Four models predicting same-sign dilepton signals are constrained: two descriptions of Majorana neutrinos, a cascade topology similar to supersymmetry or universal extra dimensions, and fourth generation d-type quarks. Assuming a new physics scale of 1 TeV, Majorana neutrinos produced by an effective operator V with masses below 460 GeV are excluded at 95% confidence level. A lower limit of 290 GeV is set at 95% confidence level on the mass of fourth generation d-type quarks

Measurement of inclusive two-particle angular correlations in pp collisions with the ATLAS detector at the LHC

We present a measurement of two-particle angular correlations in proton- proton collisions at s√=900 GeV and 7 TeV. The collision events were collected during 2009 and 2010 with the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider using a single-arm minimum bias trigger. Correlations are measured for charged particles produced in the kinematic range of transverse momentum p T  > 100 MeV and pseudorapidity |η| < 2.5. A complex structure in pseudorapidity and azimuth is observed at both collision energies. Results are compared to pythia 8 and herwig++ as well as to the AMBT2B, DW and Perugia 2011 tunes of pythia 6. The data are not satisfactorily described by any of these models