Mobile Air Quality Studies (MAQS) - an international project

Due to an increasing awareness of the potential hazardousness of air pollutants, new laws, rules and guidelines have recently been implemented globally. In this respect, numerous studies have addressed traffic-related exposure to particulate matter using stationary technology so far. By contrast, only few studies used the advanced technology of mobile exposure analysis. The Mobile Air Quality Study (MAQS) addresses the issue of air pollutant exposure by combining advanced high-granularity spatial-temporal analysis with vehicle-mounted, person-mounted and roadside sensors. The MAQS-platform will be used by international collaborators in order 1) to assess air pollutant exposure in relation to road structure, 2) to assess air pollutant exposure in relation to traffic density, 3) to assess air pollutant exposure in relation to weather conditions, 4) to compare exposure within vehicles between front and back seat (children) positions, and 5) to evaluate "traffic zone"- exposure in relation to non-"traffic zone"-exposure. Primarily, the MAQS-platform will focus on particulate matter. With the establishment of advanced mobile analysis tools, it is planed to extend the analysis to other pollutants including including NO2, SO2, nanoparticles, and ozone

Of mice and men: the host response to influenza virus infection.

Influenza virus (IV) infections represent a very serious public health problem. At present, no established biomarkers exist to support diagnosis for respiratory viral infections and more importantly for severe IV disease. Studies in animal models are extremely important to understand the biological, genetic, and environmental factors that contribute to severe IV disease and to validate biomarker candidates from human studies. However, mouse human cross-species comparisons are often compromised by the fact that animal studies concentrate on the infected lungs, whereas in humans almost all studies use peripheral blood from patients. In addition, human studies do not consider genetic background as variable although human populations are genetically very diverse. Therefore, in this study, we performed a cross-species gene expression study of the peripheral blood from human patients and from the highly genetically diverse Collaborative Cross (CC) mouse population after IV infection. Our results demonstrate that changes of gene expression in individual genes are highly similar in mice and humans. The top-regulated genes in humans were also differentially regulated in mice. We conclude that the mouse is a highly valuable in vivo model system to validate and to discover gene candidates which can be used as biomarkers in humans. Furthermore, mouse studies allow confirmation of findings in humans in a well-controlled experimental system adding enormous value to the understanding of expression and function of human candidate genes

Impaired beta-oxidation increases vulnerability to influenza A infection.

Influenza A virus (IAV) infection casts a significant burden on society. It has particularly high morbidity and mortality rates in patients suffering from metabolic disorders. The aim of this study was to relate metabolic changes with IAV susceptibility using well-characterized inbred mouse models. We compared the highly susceptible DBA/2J (D2) mouse strain for which IAV infection is lethal with the C57BL/6J (B6) strain, which exhibits a moderate course of disease and survives IAV infection. Previous studies showed that D2 has higher insulin and glucose levels and is predisposed to develop diet-induced type 2 diabetes. Using high-resolution liquid chromatography-coupled MS, the plasma metabolomes of individual animals were repeatedly measured up to 30 days postinfection. The biggest metabolic difference between these strains in healthy and infected states was in the levels of malonylcarnitine, which was consistently increased 5-fold in D2. Other interstrain and intrastrain differences in healthy and infected animals were observed for acylcarnitines, glucose, branched-chain amino acids, and oxidized fatty acids. By mapping metabolic changes to canonical pathways, we found that mitochondrial beta-oxidation is likely disturbed in D2 animals. In noninfected D2 mice, this leads to increased glycerolipid production and reduced acylcarnitine production, whereas in infected D2 animals, peroxisomal beta-oxidation becomes strongly increased. From these studies, we conclude that metabolic changes caused by a distortion of mitochondrial and peroxisomal metabolism might impact the innate immune response in D2, leading to high viral titers and mortality

Looking At Cruelty Toward Animals. The Visual Culture of Activist Presentations of Films Showing Cruelty toward Animals

Post-hoc Tukey-HSD test of differences in viral loads between different groups of susceptible strains at day 3 p.i.. Results from ANOVA analysis (model: lg.viral.ld ~ suscept); lg.viral.ld: log2 viral load on day 3 p.i.; suscept: categories for resistant strains (resist), intermediate susceptible strains (int_susc) and highly susceptible strains (hlg_susc) are shown. Pairwise comparisons: int_susc-hlg_susc: intermediate susceptible versus highly susceptible strains, etc.; diff: difference between means of log2 viral load, p adj: adjusted p-value using Tukey HSD test. n = 36. (DOCX 52 kb

Textual Dynamism in Bibles of Melantrichian Tradition (1549-1613)

The topic of this diploma thesis was an analysis and comparison of the Bibles of Melantrichian tradition. In the first part of the thesis, we briefly described the history of the Bible translations in Europe and in Czech lands and then we outlined the importance of Melantrichian Bibles in Czech history and literature. At the end of this part of the thesis, we summarized the conclusions of previous analyses of this topic. In the main part of the thesis, we analyzed differences between all Melantrichian Bi- bles divided into five sections - graphics and orthography, phonology, morphology, syntax and textual changes. We used textual probes into the Old Testament and the New Testament as the method for our analysis. Subsequently, we compared our results with the previous analyses of the topic

Additional file 11: Table S7. of Influenza H3N2 infection of the collaborative cross founder strains reveals highly divergent host responses and identifies a unique phenotype in CAST/EiJ mice

Marker descriptions of immune cells that were studied in the DCQ analysis. (DOCX 54 kb

Additional file 5: Table S5. of Influenza H3N2 infection of the collaborative cross founder strains reveals highly divergent host responses and identifies a unique phenotype in CAST/EiJ mice

Post-hoc Tukey-HSD test of differences in viral load between different groups of susceptible strains at day 5 p.i. Results from ANOVA analysis (model: lg.viral.ld ~ suscept); lg.viral.ld: log2 viral load on day 5 p.i.; suscept: categories for resistant strains (resist), intermediate susceptible strains (int_susc) and highly susceptible strains (hlg_susc) are shown. Pairwise comparisons: int_susc-hlg_susc: intermediate susceptible versus highly susceptible strains, etc.; diff: difference between means of log2 viral load, p adj: adjusted p-value using Tukey HSD test. n = 41. (DOCX 52 kb

Additional file 2: Table S2. of Influenza H3N2 infection of the collaborative cross founder strains reveals highly divergent host responses and identifies a unique phenotype in CAST/EiJ mice

ANOVA analysis of main effects and interactions on body weight loss. Df: degrees of freedom; Sum Sq: sum of squares, Mean sq: mean sum of squares, Pr: p-value. ANOVA model: body weight loss ~ strain * sex * day; after deleting the non-significant three way interaction strain:day:sex. (DOCX 52 kb

Additional file 7: Figure S1. of Influenza H3N2 infection of the collaborative cross founder strains reveals highly divergent host responses and identifies a unique phenotype in CAST/EiJ mice

Gene expression changes of inflammatory genes induced by influenza infection in 129S1/SvImJ, C56BL/6J, PWK/PhJ and CAST/EiJ lungs. Elevated gene expression levels of selected cytokines and chemokines in 129S1/SvImJ, C56BL/6J, PWK/PhJ and CAST/EiJ reflect influenza A infection. Expression values represent normalized log2 transformed signal intensities at different time points p.i. relative to expression levels in mock-infected control mice. (JPG 713 kb