Retention of differentiated properties in an established dog kidney epithelial cell line (MDCK).

Madin-Darby canine kidney (MDCK) cells grown in tissue culture have the morphological properties of distal tubular epithelial cells, form tight junctions, and lack several proximal tubular enzyme markers. Adenylate cyclase in these cells was stimulated by vasopressin, oxytocin, prostaglandins E1 and E2, glucagon, and cholera toxin. Hormone-stimulated adenylate cyclase activity in isolated membrane preparations was dependent on low concentrations of GTP and had the MgCl2 and pH optima expected for the kidney enzyme. The results, as well as the demonstration of enhanced hemicyst formation induced by cyclic AMP, suggest that the MDCK cell line has retained the differentiated properties of the kidney epithelial cell of origin. When MDCK cells were injected into baby nude mice, continuous nodule growth was observed until adulthood was attained. Histological studies revealed the presence of two cell types: normal mouse fibroblasts which comprise 80--90% of the solid nodule mass, and MDCK cells, which formed epithelial sheets lining internal fluid-filled glands. Electron microscope analysis showed that the mucosal surfaces of the cells were characterized by microvilli which faced the lumen of the glands, that adjacent MDCK cells were joined by tight junctions, and that the serosal surfaces of the epithelial sheets were characterized by smooth plasma membranes which were lined by a continuous basement membrane. These observations lead to the conclusion that the MDCK cells retain regional differentiation of their plasma membranes and the ability to regenerate kidney tubule-like structures in vivo

Continuous growth of proximal tubular kidney epithelial cells in hormone-supplemented serum-free medium.

An epithelial cell line from pig kidney (LLC-PK1) with properties of proximal tubular cells can be maintained indefinitely in hormone-supplemented serum-free medium. Continuous growth requires the presence of seven factors: transferrin, insulin, selenium, hydrocortisone, triiodothyronine, vasopressin, and cholesterol. The hormone-defined medium (a) supports growth of LLC-PK1 cells at a rate of approaching that observed in serum-supplemented medium; (b) allows vectorial transepithelial salt and fluid transport as measured by hemicyst formation; and (c) influences cell morphology. The vasopressin dependency for growth and morphology can be partially replaced by isobutylmethylxanthine or dibutyryl cyclic AMP. The medium has been used to isolate rabbit proximal tubular kidney epithelial cells free of fibroblasts

High water availability increases the negative impact of a native hemiparasite on its non-native host

Environmental factors alter the impacts of parasitic plants on their hosts. However, there have been no controlled studies on how water availability modulates stem hemiparasites' effects on hosts. A glasshouse experiment was conducted to investigate the association between the Australian native stem hemiparasite Cassytha pubescens and the introduced host Ulex europaeus under high (HW) and low (LW) water supply. Cassytha pubescens had a significant, negative effect on the total biomass of U. europaeus, which was more severe in HW than LW. Regardless of watering treatment, infection significantly decreased shoot and root biomass, nodule biomass, nodule biomass per unit root biomass, F-v/F-m, and nitrogen concentration of U. europaeus. Host spine sodium concentration significantly increased in response to infection in LW but not HW conditions. Host water potential was significantly higher in HW than in LW, which may have allowed the parasite to maintain higher stomatal conductances in HW. In support of this, the delta C-13 of the parasite was significantly lower in HW than in LW (and significantly higher than the host). C. pubescens also had significantly higher F-v/F-m and 66% higher biomass per unit host in the HW compared with the LW treatment. The data suggest that the enhanced performance of C. pubescens in HW resulted in higher parasite growth rates and thus a larger demand for resources from the host, leading to poorer host performance in HW compared with LW. C. pubescens should more negatively affect U. europaeus growth under wet conditions rather than under dry conditions in the field

TGF-β signaling links E-cadherin loss to suppression of nucleotide excision repair.

E-cadherin is a cell adhesion molecule best known for its function in suppressing tumor progression and metastasis. Here we show that E-cadherin promotes nucleotide excision repair through positively regulating the expression of xeroderma pigmentosum complementation group C (XPC) and DNA damage-binding protein 1 (DDB1). Loss of E-cadherin activates the E2F4 and p130/107 transcription repressor complexes to suppress the transcription of both XPC and DDB1 through activating the transforming growth factor-β (TGF-β) pathway. Adding XPC or DDB1, or inhibiting the TGF-β pathway, increases the repair of ultraviolet (UV)-induced DNA damage in E-cadherin-inhibited cells. In the mouse skin and skin tumors, UVB radiation downregulates E-cadherin. In sun-associated premalignant and malignant skin neoplasia, E-cadherin is downregulated in association with reduced XPC and DDB1 levels. These findings demonstrate a crucial role of E-cadherin in efficient DNA repair of UV-induced DNA damage, identify a new link between epithelial adhesion and DNA repair and suggest a mechanistic link of early E-cadherin loss in tumor initiation

The Burundi Heart Centre: From concept to design.

Burundi is one of the worlds poorest nations, which is also reflected in its relative lack of cardiac facilities, particularly those catering to young children and adults. The authors discuss current efforts to build The Burundi Heart Centre to help address this challenge. In particular, they highlight how the project can act as a case study for a sustainable architecture that involves local people and uses locally available materials in a contemporary and innovative way

Statistical Agent Based Modelization of the Phenomenon of Drug Abuse

We introduce a statistical agent based model to describe the phenomenon of drug abuse and its dynamical evolution at the individual and global level. The agents are heterogeneous with respect to their intrinsic inclination to drugs, to their budget attitude and social environment. The various levels of drug use were inspired by the professional description of the phenomenon and this permits a direct comparison with all available data. We show that certain elements have a great importance to start the use of drugs, for example the rare events in the personal experiences which permit to overcame the barrier of drug use occasionally. The analysis of how the system reacts to perturbations is very important to understand its key elements and it provides strategies for effective policy making. The present model represents the first step of a realistic description of this phenomenon and can be easily generalized in various directions.Comment: 12 pages, 5 figure

CAPTCHaStar! A novel CAPTCHA based on interactive shape discovery

Over the last years, most websites on which users can register (e.g., email providers and social networks) adopted CAPTCHAs (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) as a countermeasure against automated attacks. The battle of wits between designers and attackers of CAPTCHAs led to current ones being annoying and hard to solve for users, while still being vulnerable to automated attacks. In this paper, we propose CAPTCHaStar, a new image-based CAPTCHA that relies on user interaction. This novel CAPTCHA leverages the innate human ability to recognize shapes in a confused environment. We assess the effectiveness of our proposal for the two key aspects for CAPTCHAs, i.e., usability, and resiliency to automated attacks. In particular, we evaluated the usability, carrying out a thorough user study, and we tested the resiliency of our proposal against several types of automated attacks: traditional ones; designed ad-hoc for our proposal; and based on machine learning. Compared to the state of the art, our proposal is more user friendly (e.g., only some 35% of the users prefer current solutions, such as text-based CAPTCHAs) and more resilient to automated attacks.Comment: 15 page

Analyzing Digital Image by Deep Learning for Melanoma Diagnosis

Image classi cation is an important task in many medical applications, in order to achieve an adequate diagnostic of di erent le- sions. Melanoma is a frequent kind of skin cancer, which most of them can be detected by visual exploration. Heterogeneity and database size are the most important di culties to overcome in order to obtain a good classi cation performance. In this work, a deep learning based method for accurate classi cation of wound regions is proposed. Raw images are fed into a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) producing a probability of being a melanoma or a non-melanoma. Alexnet and GoogLeNet were used due to their well-known e ectiveness. Moreover, data augmentation was used to increase the number of input images. Experiments show that the compared models can achieve high performance in terms of mean ac- curacy with very few data and without any preprocessing.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

Sound-Induced Flash Illusion is Resistant to Feedback Training

A single flash accompanied by two auditory beeps tends to be perceived as two flashes (Shams et al. Nature 408:788, 2000, Cogn Brain Res 14:147–152, 2002). This phenomenon is known as ‘sound-induced flash illusion.’ Previous neuroimaging studies have shown that this illusion is correlated with modulation of activity in early visual cortical areas (Arden et al. Vision Res 43(23):2469–2478, 2003; Bhattacharya et al. NeuroReport 13:1727–1730, 2002; Shams et al. NeuroReport 12(17):3849–3852, 2001, Neurosci Lett 378(2):76–81, 2005; Watkins et al. Neuroimage 31:1247–1256, 2006, Neuroimage 37:572–578, 2007; Mishra et al. J Neurosci 27(15):4120–4131, 2007). We examined how robust the illusion is by testing whether the frequency of the illusion can be reduced by providing feedback. We found that the sound-induced flash illusion was resistant to feedback training, except when the amount of monetary reward was made dependent on accuracy in performance. However, even in the latter case the participants reported that they still perceived illusory two flashes even though they correctly reported single flash. Moreover, the feedback training effect seemed to disappear once the participants were no longer provided with feedback suggesting a short-lived refinement of discrimination between illusory and physical double flashes rather than vanishing of the illusory percept. These findings indicate that the effect of sound on the perceptual representation of visual stimuli is strong and robust to feedback training, and provide further evidence against decision factors accounting for the sound-induced flash illusion

Individual level covariate adjusted conditional autoregressive (indiCAR) model for disease mapping

© 2016 The Author(s). Background: Mapping disease rates over a region provides a visual illustration of underlying geographical variation of the disease and can be useful to generate new hypotheses on the disease aetiology. However, methods to fit the popular and widely used conditional autoregressive (CAR) models for disease mapping are not feasible in many applications due to memory constraints, particularly when the sample size is large. We propose a new algorithm to fit a CAR model that can accommodate both individual and group level covariates while adjusting for spatial correlation in the disease rates, termed indiCAR. Our method scales well and works in very large datasets where other methods fail. Results: We evaluate the performance of the indiCAR method through simulation studies. Our simulation results indicate that the indiCAR provides reliable estimates of all the regression and random effect parameters. We also apply indiCAR to the analysis of data on neutropenia admissions in New South Wales (NSW), Australia. Our analyses reveal that lower rates of neutropenia admissions are significantly associated with individual level predictors including higher age, male gender, residence in an outer regional area and a group level predictor of social disadvantage, the socio-economic index for areas. A large value for the spatial dependence parameter is estimated after adjusting for individual and area level covariates. This suggests the presence of important variation in the management of cancer patients across NSW. Conclusions: Incorporating individual covariate data in disease mapping studies improves the estimation of fixed and random effect parameters by utilizing information from multiple sources. Health registries routinely collect individual and area level information and thus could benefit by using indiCAR for mapping disease rates. Moreover, the natural applicability of indiCAR in a distributed computing framework enhances its application in the Big Data domain with a large number of individual/group level covariates. CI NSW Study Reference Number: 2012/07/410. Dated: July 2012