Immunomodulatory effects of human umbilical cord wharton's Jelly-Derived mesenchymal stem cells on differentiation, maturation and endocytosis of monocyte-derived dendritic cells

The Wharton's jelly of the umbilical cord is believed to be a source of mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) which can be therapeutically applied in degenerative diseases. In this study, we investigated the immunomodulatory effect of umbilical cord derivedmesenchymal stem cells (UC-MSCs) and bone marrow-derived-mesenchymal stem cells (BM-MSCs) on differentiation, maturation, and endocytosis of monocyte-derived dendritic cells in a transwell culture system under laboratory conditions. Monocytes were differentiated into immature dendritic cells (iDCs) in the presence of GM-CSF and IL-4 for 6 days and then differentiated into mature dendritic cells (mDCs) in the presence of TNF-for 2 days. In every stage of differentiation, immature and mature dendritic cells were separately cocultured with UC-MSCs and BM-MSCs. The findings showed that UC-MSCs and BM-MSCs inhibited strongly differentiation and maturation of dendritic cells at higher dilution ratios (1:1). The BM-MSCs and UC-MSCs showed more inhibitory effect on CD1a, CD83, CD86 expression, and dendritic cell endocytic activity, respectively. On the other hand, these cells severely up-regulated CD14 marker expression. We concluded that UC-MSCs and BM-MSCs could inhibit differentiation, maturation and endocytosis in monocyte-derived DCs through the secreted factors and free of any cellcell contacts under laboratory conditions. As DCs are believed to be the main antigen presenting cells for naive T cells in triggering immune responses, it would be logical that their inhibitory effect on differentiation, maturation and function can decrease or modulate immune and inflammatory responses. Copyright © Spring 2013, Iran J Allergy Asthma Immunol. All rights reserved

Correlation between sleep quality and blood pressure changes in Iranian children

Background: Hypertension has a growing trend all around the world among children. Evidences imply that inadequate sleep duration and its poor quality are related to hypertension. But there are only few studies to show this relationship in children. Objectives: The aim of this study was to investigate the correlation between sleep quality parameters and blood pressure (BP) changes in children. Patients and Methods: Eighty six patients aged 5-15 years old with the history of urinary tract infection were included in this study. They underwent 24-hour BP monitoring. In addition, the Pittsburg Sleep Quality index questionnaire was filled out and the data were compared with BP records. Results: After excluding duplicate cases and those with insufficient data, 76 children entered into study. Overall sleep quality was good in 48 and poor in 28 children. Mean diastolic BP load (P = 0.019), diastolic load Awake-Time (P = 0.045), mean systolic Sleep-Time (P = 0.022), Non-Dipper state (P = 0.009) were statistically different among groups. By dividing the children into two groups of good and poor sleeper, the parameters of BP were not different. In addition, there was no correlation between BP classifications and sleep latency, duration of sleep, sleep efficiency, sleep disturbance, day dysfunction due to sleepiness, and overall sleep quality score. Conclusions: Our study could not show any correlation between sleep quality and ambulatory BP monitoring parameters in children with abnormal BP. © 2015, Iranian Society of Pediatrics

Demonstration of Optical Nonlinearity in InGaAsP/InP Passive Waveguides

We report on the study of the third-order nonlinear optical interactions in In$_{x}$Ga$_{1-x}$As$_{y}$P$_{1-y}$/InP strip-loaded waveguides. The material composition and waveguide structures were optimized for enhanced nonlinear optical interactions. We performed self-phase modulation, four-wave mixing and nonlinear absorption measurements at the pump wavelength 1568 nm in our waveguides. The nonlinear phase shift of up to $2.5\pi$ has been observed in self-phase modulation experiments. The measured value of the two-photon absorption coefficient $\alpha_2$ was 15 cm/GW. The four-wave mixing conversion range, representing the wavelength difference between maximally separated signal and idler spectral components, was observed to be 45 nm. Our results indicate that InGaAsP has a high potential as a material platform for nonlinear photonic devices, provided that the operation wavelength range outside the two-photon absorption window is selected

Short communication: Population genetic structure studies of Liza aurata based on mtDNA control region sequences analyses in the southern coasts of the Caspian Sea

Nowadays many species are endangered as a result of habitat loss. Decreases in population lead to reduced genetic diversity, which can cause survival crisis in a population (Cecconi et al., 1995). Nowadays optimal management of fish stocks needs information on population structure of species that is provided to researchers through genetic science. Bereavement of science about stock composition will lead to the fracture of fisheries management and unsuitable harvest of stocks (Papasotiropoulos et al., 2007). One of the beneficial methods to demonstrate genetic diversity is haplotype analysis of the D-loop region, an index which is very important and determinant for the preservation of species. Significant genetic variation is found in the D-loop region, even among individuals within a given species. Grey mullets are not endemic species of the Caspian Sea. Juveniles of L. aurata, L. saliens and Mugil cephallus were introduced from the Black Sea into the Caspian Sea during the years 1930-1934. But only the introduction of L. aurata and L. saliens was successful and they adapted well to the ecological conditions of the Caspian Sea (Fazli et al., 2008)

Potential of oak acorn with and without polyethylene glycol as an alternative to corn in broiler diets

This study was conducted to investigate the potential for replacing corn with oak acorn (OA), a tannin-rich feedstuff, and the possible role of polyethylene glycol (PEG) in reducing detrimental effects of OA on broilers. A 3 × 2 factorial arrangement of treatments was used with three levels of OA (0, 150, and 200 g/kg diet), with and without 10 g/kg PEG. A total of 528 one-day-old male and female Cobb 500 broiler chicks were randomly assigned to one of six experimental treatments, with four replicates of 22 birds each. OA was included in the starter (days 1–21) and finisher (days 22–42) diets as a replacement for corn, without changing the dietary levels of other ingredients. The results indicated that dietary inclusion of OA, without PEG, significantly reduced bodyweight gain (BWG) overall (days 1–42) and resulted in worse finisher and overall feed conversion ratios (FCR). PEG had no significant effect on the performance of birds fed diets without OA, but improved overall the BWG of birds receiving 150 and 200 g/kg OA as well as finisher and overall the FCR of birds given 150 g/kg OA. Liver and pancreas weights were not significantly influenced by OA level, PEG or their interaction. Feeding with 200 g/kg OA had deleterious effects on some tibia traits. In conclusion, a significant interaction between OA level and PEG indicates that PEG has the potential to reduce the adverse effects of OA, leading to improved performance. Thus, up to 150 g/kg OA could be included in PEG-supplemented diets, without adverse effects on performance or the tibia traits of broilers.Keywords: High-tannin feedstuff, performance, poultry nutrition, tibia characteristi

Changes in levels of cortisol, glucose and sex hormones during transportation of southern Caspian Kutum (Rutilus frisii kutum) spawners

Physiological changes in cortisol, glucose, testosterone and 17b-estradiol levels were studied in Rutilus frisii kutum spawners during transportation in April, 2006. The fish were held in plastic tanks in two treatments 1fish/2L and 1fish/1L sea water in several replications. Their blood was collected at 0, 10, 20, 30 and 60 min after capture. A significant increase in concentration of cortisol and glucose was found with the transport time. Initial levels of cortisol were similar in the two treatments ranging between 480.7±22.34 and 476.6±18.61 ng/ml respectively

Discovering and understanding community opinions of neighbourhoods expressed in question answering platforms

Humans value the opinions of others. In recent years, people have been using social media platforms to both voice and gather opinions. Looking for relevant pieces of information through the huge amount of expressed opinions across several platforms is an overwhelming task. This is why automatically extracting information from such sources has received a great deal of attention in both academia and industry. However, little work in this field has been dedicated to the domain of city neighbourhoods. One reason is that unlike for many products and services, there are no dedicated review platforms for collecting opinions regarding the neighbourhoods. In the absence of dedicated review sites, a great amount of expressed opinions on neighbourhoods and other domains can be found on community question answering (QA) platforms. So far, this data has not been used. This raises a question as to what the strengths and limitations of QA data are and what challenges does it bring for extracting opinion information expressed about neighbourhoods. In this thesis, we comprehensively investigate these questions, using data from Yahoo! Answers for neighbourhoods of London. First, we investigate how well QA discussions reflect the demographic attributes of neighbourhoods present in census (e.g. age, religion, etc.). Our results show that significant, strong and meaningful correlations exist between text features from QA data and many demographic attributes. For instance, the terms poverty, drug, and rundown are amongst the top correlated terms with the attribute deprivation. We further demonstrate that text features based on Yahoo! Answers discussions can achieve a very good accuracy in predicting a wide range of demographic attributes for neighbourhoods. These predictions outperform predictions that are made using Twitter data, a platform that has been used widely in the past for predicting many real-world attributes. Demographics data provides objective statistics related to the population of neighbourhoods. Many attributes of interest are not reflected in those statistics. For instance, census data does not record statistics regarding whether a neighbourhood is posh, quiet or good for nightlife. Knowing these aspects is complementary to the demographic attributes in forming an understanding of neighbourhoods. We investigate whether text features from QA data can predict such aspects. To do this, we create a dataset of neighbourhoods labeled with these aspects. Our prediction results show that QA data can predict such aspects with a higher performance compared to Twitter data in the presence of these labels. Predicting a single value for a characteristic of a neighbourhood cannot provide a complete picture of people's opinions. To provide a fine-grained summary, a popular approach is to extract the sentiments towards different aspects of a given entity from each expressed opinion. Aspect-based sentiment analysis has been studied extensively, but research has always utilised the text from dedicated review platforms where a user usually writes opinions on a single specified entity. In the absence of a review platform for neighbourhoods, we extend the task to process the text from QA platforms where fewer assumptions can be made and the data is noisy. We construct a human-annotated dataset based on text from Yahoo! Answers discussions with a high inter-annotator agreements of over 70%, a suitable level for this task. To address this task, we propose methods based on representations of text that are learned sequentially using recurrent neural models or representations that are defined using the traditional bag of n-grams features. Our proposed methods can achieve prediction accuracies on similar levels to the less challenging sentiment analysis tasks. In summary, the study in this thesis demonstrates the strengths of QA data in predicting the values of real-world entities and for extracting information from opinions, specifically for the domain of city neighbourhoods