Effects of vitamin E supplementation on renal non-enzymatic antioxidants in young rats submitted to exhaustive exercise stress

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Exercise stress was shown to increase oxidative stress in rats. It lacks reports of increased protection afforded by dietary antioxidant supplements against ROS production during exercise stress. We evaluated the effects of vitamin E supplementation on renal non-enzymatic antioxidants in young rats submitted to exhaustive exercise stress.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>Wistar rats were divided into three groups: 1) control group; 2) exercise stress group and; 3) exercise stress + Vitamin E group. Rats from the group 3 were treated with gavage administration of 1 mL of Vitamin E (5 mg/kg) for seven consecutive days. Animals from groups 2 and 3 were submitted to a bout of swimming exhaustive exercise stress. Kidney samples were analyzed for Thiobarbituric Acid Reactive Substances to (TBARS) by malondialdehyde (MDA), reduced glutathione (GSH) and vitamin-E levels.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The group treated with vitamin E and submitted to exercise stress presented the lowest levels of renal MDA (1: 0.16+0.02 mmmol/mgprot vs. 2: 0.34+0.07 mmmol/mgprot vs. 3: 0.1+0.01 mmmol/mgprot; p < 0.0001), the highest levels of renal GSH (1: 23+4 μmol/gprot vs. 2: 23+2 μmol/gprot vs. 3: 58+9 μmol/gprot; p < 0.0001) and the highest levels of renal vitamin E (1: 24+6 μM/gtissue vs. 2: 28+2 μM/gtissue vs. 3: 43+4 μM/gtissue; p < 0.001).</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Vitamin E supplementation improved non-enzymatic antioxidant activity in young rats submitted to exhaustive exercise stress.</p

Impact of Intermediate Hyperglycemia and Diabetes on Immune Dysfunction in Tuberculosis

Supplementary Data: Supplementary materials are available at Clinical Infectious Diseases online at https://academic.oup.com/cid/article/72/1/69/5857148#274319223 . Consisting of data provided by the authors to benefit the reader, the posted materials are not copyedited and are the sole responsibility of the authors, so questions or comments should be addressed to the corresponding author.Copyright © The Author(s) 2020. Background: People with diabetes have an increased risk of developing active tuberculosis (TB) and are more likely to have poor TB-treatment outcomes, which may impact on control of TB as the prevalence of diabetes is increasing worldwide. Blood transcriptomes are altered in patients with active TB relative to healthy individuals. The effects of diabetes and intermediate hyperglycemia (IH) on this transcriptomic signature were investigated to enhance understanding of immunological susceptibility in diabetes-TB comorbidity. Methods: Whole blood samples were collected from active TB patients with diabetes (glycated hemoglobin [HbA1c] ≥6.5%) or IH (HbA1c = 5.7% to <6.5%), TB-only patients, and healthy controls in 4 countries: South Africa, Romania, Indonesia, and Peru. Differential blood gene expression was determined by RNA-seq (n = 249). Results: Diabetes increased the magnitude of gene expression change in the host transcriptome in TB, notably showing an increase in genes associated with innate inflammatory and decrease in adaptive immune responses. Strikingly, patients with IH and TB exhibited blood transcriptomes much more similar to patients with diabetes-TB than to patients with only TB. Both diabetes-TB and IH-TB patients had a decreased type I interferon response relative to TB-only patients. Conclusions: Comorbidity in individuals with both TB and diabetes is associated with altered transcriptomes, with an expected enhanced inflammation in the presence of both conditions, but also reduced type I interferon responses in comorbid patients, suggesting an unexpected uncoupling of the TB transcriptome phenotype. These immunological dysfunctions are also present in individuals with IH, showing that altered immunity to TB may also be present in this group. The TB disease outcomes in individuals with IH diagnosed with TB should be investigated further.European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7 2007-2013 - Health) under grant agreement No 305279

Ontology Based Communications Through Model Driven Tools: Feasibility of the MDA Approach in Urban Engineering Projects

Enterprises today face many challenges related to lack of interoperability. Enterprise applications and software systems need to be interoperable in order to achieve seamless business across organisational boundaries and thus achieve virtual networked organisations. IEEE defines interoperability as “the ability of two or more systems or components to exchange information and to use the information that has been exchanged”. MDA is the OMG instantiation of an approach to software development kown as Model Driven Engineering (MDE) or Model Driven Development (MDD). MDD focuses on Models as the primary artefacts in the development process, with Transformations as the primary operation on models, used to map information from one model to another. There is presently an important paradigm shift in the field of software engineering that may have important consequences on the way information systems are built and maintained. Model-driven development (MDD), and in particular OMG's Model-Driven Architecture ® (MDA®), is emerging as the state of practice for developing modern enterprise applications and software systems. The MDD paradigm improves the way of addressing and solving interoperability issues compared to earlier non-modelling approaches. However, developing correct and useful models is not an easy task. We believe that there is a need for an interoperability framework that provides guidance on how MDD should be applied to address interoperability. A key to the success of MDD is the development of ontologies supporting the mapping from one model to another, either at the same level of abstraction or at different levels. Various approaches have been proposed and tested, starting from common ontologies, shared by all the models, to local ontologies, specific to each software. We propose here to discuss the applicability of MDD to the urban civil engineering (UCE) field. This should help to establish the requirements for ontologies to be applied for interoperability of systems commonly used in this domain. In the first section of this paper, we briefly introduce some key principles of the MDA approach and the role of ontologies in model transformation approaches. The following section describes the Model Driven Development (MDD) interoperability framework. The last part presents a way of applying the MDA techniques to urban civil engineering projects, with the objective of testing the feasibility and relevancy of the approach to this domain