Differences in venom toxicity and antigenicity between females and males Tityus nororientalis (Buthidae) scorpions

Venom from male and female specimens of the medically important Venezuelan scorpion Tityus nororientalis have been compared. Males showed a significantly higher venom yield (2.39mg/individual) compared to female scorpions (0.98mg/individual). Female venom was significantly more toxic than that of males, with a median lethal dose (LD50) in C57BL/6 mice of 9.46 μg venom protein/gm body weight [95% confidence interval (8.91-9.94)] whereas LD50 for males was 13.36(12.58-14.03) μg/gm. Mass spectral analyses by MALDI-TOF revealed differences in venom composition between males and females. From a clinical standpoint, the time course of toxicity course indicated a tendency, in the case of the female venom, to elicit the earlier occurrence of severe signs such as sialorrhea, dyspnea (bradypnea/apnea) and exophthalmus particularly in the late toxicity phase. Female venom was significantly less efficient than male venom to inhibit the binding of anti-T. discrepans antibodies to immobilized T. discrepans venom in ELISA assays, suggesting sex-related differences in the bioactive surfaces of T. nororientalis toxins. These results indicate that males and females of T. nororientalis produce venoms with different composition and activity which may have epidemiological implications

Protein Content and Oil Composition of Almond from Moroccan Seedlings: Genetic Diversity, Oil Quality and Geographical Origin

The protein and oil content and the fatty acid profile of the kernels of selected almond genotypes from four different Moroccan regions were determined in order to evaluate the kernel quality of the plant material of these different regions. The ranges of oil content (48.7–64.5 % of kernel DW), oleic (61.8–80.2 % of total oil), linoleic (11.4–27.0 %), palmitic (5.6–7.7 %), stearic (1.3–3.1 %), and palmitoleic (0.4–0.9 %) acid percentages agreed with previous results of other almond genotypes, but the protein content (14.1–35.1 % of kernel DW) showed that some genotypes had higher values than any previously recorded in almond. Some genotypes from mountainous regions showed kernels with very high oil content as well as high and consistent oleic and linoleic ratio, establishing a possible differentiation according to the geographical origin. These differences may allow establishing a geographical denomination for almond products. In terms of genetic diversity, oleic and linoleic acids were confirmed to be the most variable components of almond oil chemical composition among genotypes. Additionally, the genotypes with extreme favorable values, such as high protein content, could be incorporated into an almond breeding program aiming at an increase in kernel quality.Peer ReviewedPrunus amygdalusProtein contentOil contentFatty acidsQualityGenetic resourcesBreedingPublishe

Thermorheological and textural behaviour of gluten-free gels obtained from chestnut and rice flours

Nowadays, as celiac disease is becoming more common the consumers’ demand for gluten-free products with high nutritional and taste quality is increasing. This work deals with the study of the impact of four novelty gluten-free sources: chestnut flour (Cf), whole rice flour (Rw), Carolino rice flour (Rc) and Agulha rice flour (Ra). Textural, thermorheological and stability performance of gluten-free gels using different experimental techniques were evaluated. Mixed gels were also produced for comparison. Texture parameters were determined from the texture profile analysis using a texturometer. Thermorheological oscillatory measurements were conducted in a stresscontrolled rheometer in order to clarify the kinetics of gel formation and to characterise the structure of the matured gels. The stability of the gels was evaluated using transmittance profiling of the gels under gravitational fields (LUMiSizer®). Texture studies suggested that gels from mixtures of chestnut flour at 30 % and rice flour at 20 % showed the right texture to develop gel-based new desserts. Rheological results showed that the thermal profiles on heating of Cf gels were similar to those obtained for Rw and Ra, whereas Rc gels exhibited a particular pattern. Once the final gelatinisation temperature was achieved, no significant differences on the viscoelastic properties were noticed for all the tested gels. Stability tests showed that gels with Rc should present an industrial advantage over the other assayed formulations, since the stability of these gels is of the order of four times larger

IgE allergy diagnostics and other relevant tests in allergy, a World Allergy Organization position paper

Currently, testing for immunoglobulin E (IgE) sensitization is the cornerstone of diagnostic evaluation in suspected allergic conditions. This review provides a thorough and updated critical appraisal of the most frequently used diagnostic tests, both in vivo and in vitro. It discusses skin tests, challenges, and serological and cellular in vitro tests, and provides an overview of indications, advantages and disadvantages of each in conditions such as respiratory, food, venom, drug, and occupational allergy. Skin prick testing remains the first line approach in most instances; the added value of serum specific IgE to whole allergen extracts or components, as well as the role of basophil activation tests, is evaluated. Unproven, non-validated, diagnostic tests are also discussed. Throughout the review, the reader must bear in mind the relevance of differentiating between sensitization and allergy; the latter entails not only allergic sensitization, but also clinically relevant symptoms triggered by the culprit allergen.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Inferring the Regulatory Network of the miRNA-mediated Response to Biotic and Abiotic Stress in Melon

[EN] Background: MiRNAs have emerged as key regulators of stress response in plants, suggesting their potential as candidates for knock-in/out to improve stress tolerance in agricultural crops. Although diverse assays have been performed, systematic and detailed studies of miRNA expression and function during exposure to multiple environments in crops are limited. Results: Here, we present such pioneering analysis in melon plants in response to seven biotic and abiotic stress conditions. Deep-sequencing and computational approaches have identified twenty-four known miRNAs whose expression was significantly altered under at least one stress condition, observing that down-regulation was preponderant. Additionally, miRNA function was characterized by high scale degradome assays and quantitative RNA measurements over the intended target mRNAs, providing mechanistic insight. Clustering analysis provided evidence that eight miRNAs showed a broad response range under the stress conditions analyzed, whereas another eight miRNAs displayed a narrow response range. Transcription factors were predominantly targeted by stressresponsive miRNAs in melon. Furthermore, our results show that the miRNAs that are down-regulated upon stress predominantly have as targets genes that are known to participate in the stress response by the plant, whereas the miRNAs that are up-regulated control genes linked to development. Conclusion: Altogether, this high-resolution analysis of miRNA-target interactions, combining experimental and computational work, Illustrates the close interplay between miRNAs and the response to diverse environmental conditions, in melon.The authors thank Dr. A. Monforte for providing melon seeds and Dra. B. Pico (Cucurbits Group - COMAV) for providing melon seeds and Monosporascus isolate respectively. This work was supported by grants AGL2016-79825-R, BIO2014-61826-EXP (GG), and BFU2015-66894-P (GR) from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (co-supported by FEDER). The funders had no role in the experiment design, data analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.Sanz-Carbonell, A.; Marques Romero, MC.; Bustamante-González, AJ.; Fares Riaño, MA.; Rodrigo Tarrega, G.; Gomez, GG. (2019). Inferring the Regulatory Network of the miRNA-mediated Response to Biotic and Abiotic Stress in Melon. BMC Plant Biology. 1-17. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12870-019-1679-0S117Zhang B. MicroRNAs: a new target for improving plant tolerance to abiotic stress. J Exp Bot. 2015;66:1749–61.Zhu JK. Abiotic stress signaling and responses in plants. Cell. 2016;167:313–24.Bielach A, Hrtyan M, Tognetti VB. Plants under stress: involvement of auxin and Cytokinin. Int J Mol Sci. 2017;4(18):7.Zarattini M, Forlani G. Toward unveiling the mechanisms for transcriptional regulation of proline biosynthesis in the plant cell response to biotic and abiotic stress conditions. Front Plant Sci. 2017;2(8):927.Nolan T, Chen J, Yin Y. Cross-talk of Brassinosteroid signaling in controlling growth and stress responses. Biochem J. 2017;474:2641–61.Mittler R. Abiotic stress, the field environment and stress combinations. Trends Plant Sci. 2006;11:15–9.Djami-Tchatchou AT, Sanan-Mishra N, Ntushelo K, Dubery IA. Functional roles of microRNAs in Agronomically important plants—potential as targets for crop improvement and protection. Front Plant Sci. 2017;8:378.Baxter A, Mittler R, Suzuki N. ROS as key players in plant stress signaling. J Exp Bot. 2014;65:1229–40.Golldack D, Li C, Mohan H, Probst N. Tolerance to drought and salt stress in plants: unraveling the signaling networks. Front Plant Sci. 2014;5:151.Lee SH, Li HW, Koh KW, Chuang HY, Chen YR, Lin CS, Chan MT. MSRB7 reverses oxidation of GSTF2/3 to confer tolerance of Arabidopsis thaliana to oxidative stress. J Exp Bot. 2014;65:5049–62.Carrera J, Rodrigo G, Jaramillo A, Elena SF. Reverse-engineering the Arabidopsis thaliana transcriptional network under changing environmental conditions. Genome Biol. 2009;10(9):R96.Shriram V, Kumar V, Devarumath RM, Khare TS, Wani SH. MicroRNAs as potential targets for abiotic stress tolerance in plants. Front Plant Sci. 2016;7:817.Sunkar R, Chinnusamy V, Zhu J, Zhu JH. Small RNAs as big players in plant abiotic stress responses and nutrient deprivation. Trends Plant Sci. 2007;12:301–9.Kumar R. Role of microRNAs in biotic and abiotic stress responses in crop plants. Appl Biochem Biotechnology. 2014;174:93–115.Reis RS, Eamens AL, Waterhouse PM. Missing pieces in the puzzle of plant MicroRNAs. Trends Plant Sci. 2015;20:721–8.Bartel DP. MicroRNAs: genomics, biogenesis, mechanism, and function. Cell. 2004;116:281–97.Borges F, Martienssen RA. The expanding world of small RNAs in plants. Nat Rev Mol Cell Biol. 2015;16:727–41.Axtell MJ, Bartel DP. Antiquity of microRNAs and their targets in land-plants. Plant Cell. 2005;17:1658–73.Cuperus JT, Fahlgren N, Carrington JC. Evolution and functional diversification of MIRNA genes. Plant Cell. 2011;23:431–42.Cui J, You C, Chen X. The evolution of microRNAs in plants. Current Opinions in Plant Biology. 2016;35:61–7.Sunkar R, Li YF, Jagadeeswaran G. Functions of microRNAs in plant stress responses. Trends Plant Sci. 2012;17:196–203.Zhang T, Zhao YL, Zhao JH, Wang S, Jin Y, Chen ZQ, Fang YY, Hua CL, Ding SW, Guo HS. Cotton plants export microRNAs to inhibit virulence gene expression in a fungal pathogen. Nature Plants. 2016;2(10):16153.Chaloner T, vanKan JA, Grant-Downton R. RNA ‘Information Warfare’ in pathogenic and mutualistic interactions. Trends Plant Sci. 2016;9:738–48.Niu D, Wang Z, Wang S, Qiao L Zhao H. Profiling of small RNAs involved in plant-pathogen interactions. Methods Molecular Biology. 2015;1287:61–79.Wei S, Wang L, Zhang Y, Huang D. Identification of early response genes to salt stress in roots of melon (Cucumis melo L.) seedlings. Molecular Biology Report. 2013;40:2915–26.Clepet C, Joobeur T, Zheng Y, Jublot D, Huang M, Truniger V, et al. Analysis of expressed sequence tags generated from full-length enriched cDNA libraries of melon. BMC Genomics. 2011;12:252.González M, Xu M, Esteras C, Roig C, Monforte AJ, Troadec C, et al. Towards a TILLING platform for functional genomics in Piel de Sapo melons. BMC Research Notes. 2011;4:289.García MJ. The genome of melon (Cucumis melo L.). Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2012;109:11872–7.Pollack FG, Uecker FA. Monosporascus cannonballus: an unusual ascomycete in cantaloupe roots. Mycologia. 1974;66:346–9.Kofalvi S, Marcos J, Cañizares MC, Pallas V, Candresse T. Hop stunt viroid (HSVd) sequence variants from Prunus species: evidence for recombination between HSVd isolates. J Gen Virol. 1997;78:3177–86.Sattar S, Song Y, Anstead J, Sunkar R, Thompson G. Cucumis melo expression profile during aphid herbivory in a resistant and susceptible interaction. Mol Plant-Microbe Interact. 2012;25:839–48.Herranz MC, Navarro JA, Sommen E, Pallas V. Comparative analysis among the small RNA populations of source, sink and conductive tissues in two different plant-virus pathosystems. BMC Genomics. 2015;16:117.Jagadeeswaran G, Nimmakayala P, Zheng Y, Gowdu K, Reddy UK, Sunkar R. Characterization of the small RNA component of leaves and fruits from four different cucurbit species. BMC Genomics. 2012;13:329.Kozomara A, Griffiths-Jones S. miRBase: annotating high confidence microRNAs using deep sequencing data. Nucleic Acids Res. 2014;42:D68–73.Barciszewska-Pacak M, Milanowska K, Knop K, Bielewicz D, Nuc P, Plewka P, et al. Arabidopsis microRNA expression regulation in a wide range of abiotic stress responses. Front Plant Sci. 2015;6:410.Zhou L, Liu Y, Liu Z, Kong D, Duan M, Luo L. Genome-wide identification and analysis of drought-responsive microRNAs in Oryza sativa. J Exp Bot. 2010;61:4157–68.Samad A, Sajad M, Nazaruddin N, Fauzi I, Murad A, Zainal Z, Ismanizan Ismail I. MicroRNA and transcription factor: key players in plant regulatory network. Front Plant Sci. 2017;8:565.Danisman S. TCP transcription factors at the Interface between environmental challenges and the Plant’s growth responses. Front Plant Sci. 2016;7:1930.Llave C, Xie Z, Kasschau KD, Carrington JC. Cleavage of scarecrow-like mRNA targets directed by a class of Arabidopsis miRNA. Science. 2002;297:2053–6.Gupta OP, Meena NL, Sharma I, et al. Differential regulation of microRNAs in response to osmotic, salt and cold stresses in wheat. Mol Biol Rep. 2014;41:4623.Wang M, Wang Q, Zhang B. 2013. Response of miRNAs and their targets to salt and drought stresses in cotton (Gossypium hirsutum ). Gene 30: 26–32.Savageau MA. Demand theory of gene regulation. I. Quantitative development of the theory. Genetics. 1998;149:1665–76.Negrão S, Schmöckel SM, Tester M. Evaluating physiological responses of plants to salinity stress. Ann Bot. 2017;119:1–11.Barabasi AL, Oltvai ZN. Network biology: understanding the cell's functional organization. Nat Rev Genet. 2004;5(2):101–13.Megraw M, Cumbie J, Ivanchenko M, Filichkin S. Small genetic circuits and MicroRNAs: big players in polymerase II transcriptional control in plants. Plant Cell. 2016;28:286–303.Wang St, Sun Xl, Hoshino Y, Yu Y, Jia B, et al. 2014. MicroRNA319 Positively Regulates Cold Tolerance by Targeting OsPCF6 and OsTCP21 in Rice (Oryza sativa). PLoS ONE 9(3): e91357.Fang Y, Xie K, Xiong L. Conserved miR164-targeted NAC genes regulate drought resistence in rice. J Exp Bot. 2014;65:2119–35.Goossens A, de la Fuente N, Forment J, Serrano R, Portillo F. Regulation of yeast H+-ATPase by protein kinases belonging to a family dedicated to activation of plasma membrane transporters. Mol Cell Biol. 2000;20:7654–61.Roig C, Fita A, Ríos G, Hammond JP, Nuez F, Picó B. Root transcriptional responses of two melon genotypes with contrasting resistance to Monosporascus cannonballus (Pollack et Uecker) infection. BMC Genomics. 2012;13:601.Martin M. Cutadapt removes adapter sequences from high-throughput sequencing reads. EMBnet Journal. 2011;17:10–2.R Core Team 2013. R: A language and environment for statistical computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria. ISBN 3–900051–07-0, URL http://www.R-project.org /.Tarazona S, Furió-Tarí P, Turrà D, Di Pietro A, Nueda MJ, Ferrer A, Conesa A. Data quality aware analysis of differential expression in RNA-seq with NOISeq R/bioc package. Nucleic Acids Res. 2015;43:e140.Love MI, Huber W, Anders S. Moderated estimation of fold change and dispersion for RNA-seq data with DESeq2. Genome Biol. 2014;15(12):550.Robinson MD, McCarthy DJ, Smyth GK. edgeR: a Bioconductor package for differential expression analysis of digital gene expression data. Bioinformatics. 2010;26:139–40.Czimmerer Z, Hulvely J, Simandi Z, Varallyay E, Havelda Z, Szabo E, Balint BL. A versatile method to design stem-loop primer-based quantitative PCR assays for detecting small regulatory RNA molecules. PLoS One. 2013;8(1):e55168.Zhai J, Arikit S, Simon S, Kingham B, Meyers B. Rapid construction of parallel analysis of RNA end (PARE) libraries for Illumina sequencing. Methods. 2014;67:84–90.Pink S, Vogel S. 2014. D3NETWORK: Stata module to create network visualizations using D3.js http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:boc:bocode:s457844 .Csardi G, Nepusz T. The igraph software package for complex network research. Int J Complex Systems. 2006;1695:1–9

Enriched environment and physical activity reduce microglia and influence the fate of NG2 cells in the amygdala of adult mice

Proliferative cells expressing proteoglycan neuron-glia 2 (NG2) are considered to represent parenchymal precursor cells in the adult brain and are thought to differentiate primarily into oligodendrocytes. We have studied cell genesis in the adult amygdala and found that, up to 1 year after the labeling of proliferating cells with bromodeoxyuridine, most proliferating NG2 cells remain NG2 cells, and only a few slowly differentiate into mature oligodendrocytes, as assessed by the expression of 2',3'-cyclic nucleotide 3'-phosphodiesterase. We have detected no signs of neurogenesis but have confirmed the expression of “neuronal” markers such as Doublecortin in NG2 cells. Nestin-expressing NG2 cells in the amygdala show electrophysiological properties known for oligodendrocyte precursor cells in the corpus callosum. Application of the glutamate agonist kainate elicits a “complex” response consisting of a rapid and long-lasting blockade of the resting K+ conductance, a transient cationic current, and a transient increase of an outwardly directed K+ conductance, suggesting the responsiveness of NG2 cells to excitation. Proliferation of NG2 cells increases in response to behavioral stimuli of activity, voluntary wheel running, and environmental enrichment. In addition to reducing the number of newborn microglia, behavioral activity results in a decrease in S100β-expressing newborn NG2 cells in the amygdala. Because S100β expression in NG2 cells ceases with oligodendrocyte maturation, this finding suggests that NG2 cells in the amygdala undergo activity-dependent functional alterations, without resulting in a measurable increase in new mature oligodendrocytes over the time period covered by the present study. The adult amygdala thus shows signs of mixed activity-dependent plasticity: reduced numbers of microglia and, presumably, an altered fate of NG2 cells