Surgical Intervention to Rescue Hirschsprung Disease in a Rat Model

BACKGROUND/AIMS: Rats with a spontaneous null mutation in endothelin receptor type B or Ednrb (sl/sl; spotting lethal) lack enteric neurons in the distal bowel and usually die within the first week after birth. This early postnatal lethality limits their use for examining the potential of cell therapy to treat Hirschsprung disease, and for studies of the influence of EDNRB on the mature CNS and vascular systems. METHODS: We have developed a surgical intervention to prolong the life of the spotting lethal sl/sl rat, in which we perform a colostomy on postnatal (P) day 4-6 rats to avoid the fatal obstruction caused by the lack of colonic enteric neurons. RESULTS: The stomas remained patent and functional and the rats matured normally following surgery. Weight gains were comparable between control and Hirschsprung phenotype (sl/sl) rats, which were followed until 4 weeks after surgery (5 weeks old). We confirmed the absence of enteric neurons in the distal colon of rats whose lives were saved by the surgical intervention. CONCLUSIONS: This study provides a novel approach for studying EDNRB signalling in multiple organ systems in mature rats, including an animal model to study the efficacy of cell therapy to treat Hirschsprung disease

Experimental colitis models

Inflammatory Bowel Diseases (IBD) are life-threatening chronic and relapsing disorders of the immune system affecting the lower gastrointestinal tract. Despite the considerable efforts of many researchers, much remains to be learnt of their causes and appropriate treatment options. Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis comprise the majority of clinical IBD cases but differ considerably in terms of clinical representation and likely underlying mechanisms. As such, different animal models have been developed over the last 20 years to best characterize these diseases. It is widely accepted that DSS-induced colitis models ulcerative colitis, while TNBS induced colitis models Crohn’s disease. More recently, these models have been extended to investigate the mechanisms underlying the reciprocal regulation of the neuro-immune axis, both in times of acute inflammation and post-inflammation, with the latter modeling aspects of Irritable Bowel Syndrome. We describe the methodology involved in setting up, maintenance and evaluation of these two models of colitis, both of which are simply and economically achieved in a standard laboratory environment.Patrick A. Hughes, Stuart M. Brierley, Joel Castro, Andrea M. Harrington and L. Ashley Blacksha

The online identity detection via keyboard dynamics

Around 50% of the world population is now active on internet, often subscribing websites, social networks or other online services. In this scenario, the issue of online faked identities is more and more present, with the phenomena of identity alteration, identity theft and identity fraud. To date, there are no systems able to detect people who subscribe or authenticate an online service with faked personal information. Moreover, the existing validated lie detection techniques are not suitable to be applied in the online environment. Starting from a previous study, this paper investigates the possibility to detect faked identities recording keystroke dynamics, while the user is filling an online subscription form with personal \u2013 real or faked, information. Cognitively overloading liars through few unexpected questions, we demonstrated that it is possible to recognize the deceivers with an accuracy of 85%. To automatically detect liars, three machine-learning classifiers were trained on 40 liars and 40 truth-tellers, and tested on 10 unseen liars and 10 truth-tellers. Liars have proved to be distinguishable from truth-tellers as they make more errors and are slower in typing unexpected information about their identity