cigarette smoke inhibits the nlrp3 inflammasome and leads to caspase 1 activation via the tlr4 trif caspase 8 axis in human macrophages

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Government failure, opposition success? Electoral performance in Portugal and Italy at the time of the crisis

The costs of the crisis in Southern European countries have not been only economic but political. Economic crises tend to lead to government instability and termination while political challengers are expected to exploit this contingent window of opportunity to gain an advantage over incumbents in national elections. The current crisis seems to make no exception, looking at the results of the general elections recently held in Southern Europe. However, this did not always lead to a clear victory of the main opposition parties. In most of the elections, in fact, the incumbent parties’ loss did not coincide with the official opposition’s gain. The extreme case is represented by Italy, where both the outgoing government coalition led by Silvio Berlusconi – setting aside for the moment the technocratic phase – and its main challenger, the centre left coalition, ended up losing millions of voters and a new political force, the Five Star Movement, obtained about 25 per cent of votes. On the opposite side there is Portugal. Only in Portugal did the vote increase for the centre right PSD, in fact, exceed the incumbent socialists’ loss. The present work aims at exploring the factors which might account for this significant divergence between the two cases.peer-reviewe

Beta defensin-2 is reduced in central but not in distal airways of smoker COPD patients

Background: Altered pulmonary defenses in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) may promote distal airways bacterial colonization. The expression/activation of Toll Like receptors (TLR) and beta 2 defensin (HBD2) release by epithelial cells crucially affect pulmonary defence mechanisms. Methods: The epithelial expression of TLR4 and of HBD2 was assessed in surgical specimens from current smokers COPD (s-COPD; n = 17), ex-smokers COPD (ex-s-COPD; n = 8), smokers without COPD (S; n = 12), and from non-smoker non-COPD subjects (C; n = 13). Results: In distal airways, s-COPD highly expressed TLR4 and HBD2. In central airways, S and s-COPD showed increased TLR4 expression. Lower HBD2 expression was observed in central airways of s-COPD when compared to S and to ex-s-COPD. s-COPD had a reduced HBD2 gene expression as demonstrated by real-time PCR on micro-dissected bronchial epithelial cells. Furthermore, HBD2 expression positively correlated with FEV1/FVC ratio and inversely correlated with the cigarette smoke exposure. In a bronchial epithelial cell line (16 HBE) IL-1β significantly induced the HBD2 mRNA expression and cigarette smoke extracts significantly counteracted this IL-1 mediated effect reducing both the activation of NFkB pathway and the interaction between NFkB and HBD2 promoter. Conclusions: This study provides new insights on the possible mechanisms involved in the alteration of innate immunity mechanisms in COPD. © 2012 Pace et al

Formoterol Exerts Anti-Cancer Effects Modulating Oxidative Stress and Epithelial-Mesenchymal Transition Processes in Cigarette Smoke Extract Exposed Lung Adenocarcinoma Cells

Lung cancer frequently affects patients with Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD). Cigarette smoke (CS) fosters cancer progression by increasing oxidative stress and by modulating epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT) processes in cancer cells. Formoterol (FO), a long-acting β2-agonist widely used for the treatment of COPD, exerts antioxidant activities. This study explored in a lung adenocarcinoma cell line (A549) whether FO counteracted the effects of cigarette smoke extract (CSE) relative to oxidative stress, inflammation, EMT processes, and cell migration and proliferation. A549 was stimulated with CSE and FO, ROS were evaluated by flow-cytometry and by nanostructured electrochemical sensor, EMT markers were evaluated by flow-cytometry and Real-Time PCR, IL-8 was evaluated by ELISA, cell migration was assessed by scratch and phalloidin test, and cell proliferation was assessed by clonogenic assay. CSE significantly increased the production of ROS, IL-8 release, cell migration and proliferation, and SNAIL1 expression but significantly decreased E-cadherin expression. FO reverted all these phenomena in CSE-stimulated A549 cells. The present study provides intriguing evidence that FO may exert anti-cancer effects by reverting oxidative stress, inflammation, and EMT markers induced by CS. These findings must be validated in future clinical studies to support FO as a valuable add-on treatment for lung cancer management

Biophotons: new experimental data and analysis

Article describes how biophotons are an ultra-weak emission of photons in the visible energy range from living matter. The authors study the emission from germinating seeds using an experimental technique designed to detect light of extremely small intensity

Wearable Sensor for Real-time Monitoring of Hydrogen Peroxide in Simulated Exhaled Air

In this work, an innovative and cheap electrochemical sensor for hydrogen peroxide quantification in exhaled breath was developed. H2O2 is the most used biomarker among the Reactive Oxygen Species (ROS) for monitoring the level of oxidative stress in the respiratory system. This is due to its stability and ability to cross biological membranes and also because it is detectable in extracellular space. The electrochemical sensor was obtained using the silver layer of wasted compact discs (CDs). All three electrodes, working (WE), counter (CE), and pseudo-reference electrode (RE), were fabricated using a laser cutter. The working electrode was used directly, while an Ag/AgCl paste and a graphite paste were applied respectively on the RE and the CE. In addition, a chitosan layer was deposited by Electro-Phoretic Deposition (EPD) on the surface of the sensor. This biopolymer improves the wettability of the sensor in presence of a humid atmosphere such as that given by exhaled air. The sensor was tested in both liquid and nebulized solutions containing different concentrations of hydrogen peroxide. The detection of H2O2 was evaluated using Linear Sweep Voltammetry (LSV) as electrochemical technique. The results show that the peak current increases linearly with hydrogen peroxide concentration from 100 to 500 μM with a sensitivity of 0.068 µA µM−1 cm−2 and 0.108 µA µM−1 cm−2, a Limit Of Detection (LOD) of 60 μM and 30 μM respectively for liquid and nebulized solutions. Therefore, the use of the electrochemical sensor can allow the monitoring of hydrogen peroxide in real time with good results

Biophotons: a hard problem

About a hundred years ago, the Russian biologist A. Gurwitsch, based on experiments with onion plants by measuring their growth rate, hypothesized that plants emit a weak electromagnetic field that somehow influences cell growth. This interesting observation remained fundamentally ignored by the scientific community; only in the 1950s the electromagnetic emission from some plants was measured using a photomultiplier used in single counting mode. Later, in the 1980s, several groups around the world started extensive work to understand the origin and role of this ultraweak emission, now called biophotons, coming from living organisms. Biophotons are an endogenous very small production of photons in the visible energy range in and from cells and organisms, and this emission is characteristic of living organisms. Today, there is no doubt that biophotons exist, this emission has been measured by many groups and for many different living organisms, from humans to bacteria. However, the origin of biophotons and whether organisms use them to exchange information is not yet well understood; no model proposed to date is capable of reproducing and interpreting the great variety of experimental data coming from the many different living systems measured so far. In this brief review, we present our experimental work on the biophotons coming from germinating seeds, the main experimental results, and some new methods we are using to analyze the data to open the door for interpretative models of this phenomenon clarifying its function in the regulation and communication between cells and living organisms. We also discuss ideas on how to increase the signal-to-noise ratio of the measured signal to open up new experimental possibilities that allow the measurement and the characterization of currently unmeasurable quantities