Vascular extracellular vesicles in comorbidities of heart failure with preserved ejection fraction in men and women: The hidden players. A mini review

Left ventricular diastolic dysfunction, the main feature of heart failure with preserved ejection fraction (HFpEF), is thought to be primarily caused by comorbidities affecting the endothelial function of the coronary microvasculature. Circulating extracellular vesicles, released by the endothelium have been postulated to reflect endothelial damage. Therefore, we reviewed the role of extracellular vesicles, in particularly endothelium microparticles, in these comorbidities, including obesity and hypertension, to identify if they may be potential markers of the endothelial dysfunction underlying left ventricular diastolic dysfunction and HFpEF

A Novel Ca2+ Signaling Pathway Coordinates Environmental Phosphorus Sensing and Nitrogen Metabolism in Marine Diatoms

Diatoms are a diverse and globally important phytoplankton group, responsible for an estimated 20% of carbon fixation on Earth. They frequently form spatially extensive phytoplankton blooms, responding rapidly to increased availability of nutrients, including phosphorus (P) and nitrogen (N). Although it is well established that diatoms are common first responders to nutrient influxes in aquatic ecosystems, little is known of the sensory mechanisms that they employ for nutrient perception. Here, we show that P-limited diatoms use a Ca2+-dependentsignaling pathway, notpreviouslydescribed ineukaryotes,tosenseandrespondto thecritical macronutrient P. We demonstrate that P-Ca2+ signaling is conserved between a representative pennate (Phaeodactylum tricornutum) and centric (Thalassiosira pseudonana) diatom. Moreover, this pathway is ecologically relevant, being sensitive to sub-micromolar concentrations of inorganic phosphate and a range of environmentally abundant P forms. Notably, we show that diatom recovery from P limitation requires rapid and substantial increases in N assimilation and demonstrate that this process is dependent on P-Ca2+ signaling. P-Ca2+ signaling thus governs the capacity of diatoms to rapidly sense and respond to P resupply, mediating fundamental cross-talk between the vital nutrients P and N and maximizing diatom resource competition in regions of pulsed nutrient supply

Sex Determination:Why So Many Ways of Doing It?

Sexual reproduction is an ancient feature of life on earth, and the familiar X and Y chromosomes in humans and other model species have led to the impression that sex determination mechanisms are old and conserved. In fact, males and females are determined by diverse mechanisms that evolve rapidly in many taxa. Yet this diversity in primary sex-determining signals is coupled with conserved molecular pathways that trigger male or female development. Conflicting selection on different parts of the genome and on the two sexes may drive many of these transitions, but few systems with rapid turnover of sex determination mechanisms have been rigorously studied. Here we survey our current understanding of how and why sex determination evolves in animals and plants and identify important gaps in our knowledge that present exciting research opportunities to characterize the evolutionary forces and molecular pathways underlying the evolution of sex determination

Novelty detection based on sentence level patterns

The detection of new information in a document stream is an important component of many potential applications. In this paper, a new novelty detection approach based on the identification of sentence level patterns is proposed. Given a user's information need, some patterns in sentences such as combinations of query words, named entities and phrases, may contain more important and relevant information than single words. Therefore, the proposed novelty detection approach focuses on the identification of previously unseen query-related patterns in sentences. Specifically, a query is preprocessed and represented with patterns that include both query words and required answer types. These patterns are used to retrieve sentences, which are then determined to be novel if it is likely that a new answer is present. An analysis of patterns in sentences was performed with data from the TREC 2002 novelty track and experiments on novelty detection were carried out on data from the TREC 2003 and 2004 novelty tracks. The experimental results show that the proposed pattern-based approach significantly outperforms all three baselines in terms of precision at top ranks