Enabling PhD students to write their own manuscripts

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Direct implementation of intestinal permeability test in nmr metabolomics for simultaneous biomarker discovery:a feasibility study in a preterm piglet model

Measurement of intestinal permeability (IP) is often used in the examination of inflammatory gastrointestinal disorders. IP can be assessed by measurement of urinary recovery of ingested non-metabolizable lactulose (L) and mannitol (M). The present study aimed to examine how measurements of IP can be integrated in a NMR-based metabolomics approach for a simultaneous quantification of L/M ratio and biomarker exploration. For this purpose, plasma and urine samples were collected from five-day-old preterm piglets (n = 20) with gastrointestinal disorders (subjected to intra-amniotic lipopolysaccharide (LPS, 1 mg/fetus)) after they had been administrated a 5% lactulose and 5% mannitol solution (15 mL/kg). The collected plasma and urine samples were analyzed by 1H NMR-based metabolomics. Urine L/M ratio measured by 1H NMR spectroscopy showed high correlation with the standard measurement of the urinary recoveries by enzymatic assays (r = 0.93, p < 0.05). Partial least squares (PLS) regressions and correlation analyses between L/M ratio and NMR metabolomics data revealed that L/M ratio was positively correlated with plasma lactate, acetate and succinate levels and negatively correlated with urinary hippuric acid and glycine. In conclusion, the present study demonstrated that NMR metabolomics enables simultaneous IP testing and discovery of biomarkers associated with an impaired intestinal permeability

Replay detection and multi-stream synchronization in CS:GO game streams using content-based Image retrieval and Image signature matching

In GameStory: The 2019 Video Game Analytics Challenge, two main tasks are nominated to solve in the challenge, which are replay detection - multi-stream synchronization, and game story summarization. In this paper, we propose a data-driven based approach to solve the first task: replay detection - multi-stream synchronization. Our solution aims to determine the replays which lie between two logo-transitional endpoints and synchronize them with their sources by extracting frames from videos, then applying image processing and retrieval remedies. In detail, we use the Bag of Visual Words approach to detect the logo-transitional endpoints, which contains multiple replays in between, then employ an Image Signature Matching algorithm for multi-stream synchronization and replay boundaries refinement. The best configuration of our proposed solution manages to achieve the second-highest scores in all evaluation metrics of the challenge

Protective effects of transforming growth factor β2 in intestinal epithelial cells by regulation of proteins associated with stress and endotoxin responses

Transforming growth factor (TGF)-β2 is an important anti-inflammatory protein in milk and colostrum. TGF-β2 supplementation appears to reduce gut inflammatory diseases in early life, such as necrotizing enterocolitis (NEC) in young mice. However, the molecular mechanisms by which TGF-β2 protects immature intestinal epithelial cells (IECs) remain to be more clearly elucidated before interventions in infants can be considered. Porcine IECs PsIc1 were treated with TGF-β2 and/or lipopolysaccharide (LPS), and changes in the cellular proteome were subsequently analyzed using two-dimensional gel electrophoresis-MS and LC-MS-based proteomics. TGF-β2 alone induced the differential expression of 13 proteins and the majority of the identified proteins were associated with stress responses, TGF-β and Toll-like receptor 4 signaling cascades. In particular, a series of heat shock proteins had similar differential trends as previously shown in the intestine of NEC-resistant preterm pigs and young mice. Furthermore, LC-MS-based proteomics and Western blot analyses revealed 20 differentially expressed proteins following treatment with TGF-β2 in LPS-challenged IECs. Thirteen of these proteins were associated with stress response pathways, among which five proteins were altered by LPS and restored by TGF-β2, whereas six were differentially expressed only by TGF-β2 in LPS-challenged IECs. Based on previously reported biological functions, these patterns indicate the anti-stress and anti-inflammatory effects of TGF-β2 in IECs. We conclude that TGF-β2 of dietary or endogenous origin may regulate the IEC responses against LPS stimuli, thereby supporting cellular homeostasis and innate immunity in response to bacterial colonization, and the first enteral feeding in early life

Delayed development of systemic immunity in preterm pigs as a model for preterm infants

Preterm neonates are highly sensitive to systemic infections in early life but little is known about systemic immune development following preterm birth. We hypothesized that preterm neonates have immature systemic immunity with distinct developmental trajectory for the first several weeks of life, relative to those born at near-term or term. Using pigs as a model, we characterized blood leukocyte subsets, antimicrobial activities and TLR-mediated cytokine production during the first weeks after preterm birth. Relative to near-term and term pigs, newborn preterm pigs had low blood leukocyte counts, poor neutrophil phagocytic rate, and limited cytokine responses to TLR1/2/5/7/9 and NOD1/2 agonists. The preterm systemic responses remained immature during the first postnatal week, but thereafter showed increased blood leukocyte numbers, NK cell proportion, neutrophil phagocytic rate and TLR2-mediated IL-6 and TNF-α production. These immune parameters remained different between preterm and near-term pigs at 2–3 weeks, even when adjusted for post-conceptional age. Our data suggest that systemic immunity follows a distinct developmental trajectory following preterm birth that may be influenced by postnatal age, complications of prematurity and environmental factors. Consequently, the immediate postnatal period may represent a window of opportunity to improve innate immunity in preterm neonates by medical, antimicrobial or dietary interventions

LIFER 2.0: discovering personal lifelog insights using an interactive lifelog retrieval system

This paper describes the participation of the Organiser Team in the ImageCLEFlifelog 2019 Solve My Life Puzzle (Puzzle) and Lifelog Moment Retrieval (LMRT) tasks. We proposed to use LIFER 2.0, an enhanced version of LIFER, which was an interactive retrieval system for personal lifelog data. We utilised LIFER 2.0 with some additional visual features, obtained by using traditional visual bag-of-words, to solve the Puzzle task, while with the LMRT, we applied LIFER 2.0 only with the provided information. The results on both tasks confirmed that by using faceted filter and context browsing, a user can gain insights from their personal lifelog by employing very simple interactions. These results also serve as baselines for other approaches in the ImageCLEFlifelog 2019 challenge to compare with