Isolated Amoebic Abscess of Spleen

Amoebic liver abscess is the most common extraintestinal manifestation of amoebiasis. Extrahepatic amoebic abscesses have occasionally been described in the lung, brain, and skin and presumably result from hematogenous spread. Isolated amoebic abscess of spleen has been reported scarcely in literature. We report here a case of isolated amoebic abscess of spleen

Sustainable Production Systems for Agriculture Development in Mountains of Himachal Pradesh, India

The paper examined the existing production systems in the mountains of Himachal Pradesh and suggested further improvement on the existing, which can help farmers to sustain. The study undertaken in low and mid hills of Himachal Pradesh is based on both primary and secondary data collected from 160 farmers (80 farmers from each zone). Under rainfed farming, maize-wheat was the main cropping system, but returns were better in maize-peas (Rs 71,239/ha). In irrigated areas, tomato-tomato-peas was the most profitable farming (Rs 5, 02,378/ha). Consumption of fat was the biggest gap in all categories of farmers

Blockade of the Programmed Death-1 (PD1) Pathway Undermines Potent Genetic Protection from Type 1 Diabetes

Aims/Hypothesis Inhibition of PD1-PDL1 signaling in NOD mice accelerates onset of type 1 diabetes implicating this pathway in suppressing the emergence of pancreatic beta cell reactive T-cells. However, the molecular mechanism by which PD1 signaling protects from type 1 diabetes is not clear. We hypothesized that differential susceptibility of Idd mouse strains to type 1 diabetes when challenged with anti PDL1 will identify genomic loci that collaborate with PD1 signaling in suppressing type 1 diabetes. Methods: Anti PDL1 was administered to NOD and various Idd mouse strains at 10 weeks of age and onset of disease was monitored by measuring blood glucose levels. Additionally, histological evaluation of the pancreas was performed to determine degree of insulitis. Statistical analysis of the data was performed using Log-Rank and Student's t-test. Results: Blockade of PDL1 rapidly precipitated type 1 diabetes in nearly all NOD Idd congenic strains tested, despite the fact that all are moderately (Idd5, Idd3 and Idd10/18) or highly (Idd3/10/18 and Idd9) protected from spontaneous type 1 diabetes by virtue of their protective Idd genes. Only the Idd3/5 strain, which is nearly 100% protected from spontaneous disease, remained normoglycemic following PDL1 blockade. Conclusions: These results indicate that multiple Idd loci collaborate with PD1 signaling. Anti PDL1 treatment undermines a large portion of the genetic protection mediated by Idd genes in the NOD model of type 1 diabetes. Basal insulitis correlated with higher susceptibility to type 1 diabetes. These findings have important implications since the PD1 pathway is a target for immunotherapy

Morphometry and Geomorphological Investigations of the Neugal Watershed, Beas River Basin, Kangra District, Himachal Pradesh Using GIS Tools

An attempt has been made to study the detailed morphometric and geomorphological characteristics of the Neugal Watershed, which is a part of the Beas River Basin, in Kangra district of Himachal Pradesh, India.  For detailed study of this watershed, geographical information system (GIS) was used in the evaluation of slope, linear stream ordering and relief aspects of morphometric parameters and also in presentation of geomorphological subdivisions of the basin. Surface Tools in ArcGIS-10 software and ASTER (DEM) were used in the preparation of watershed boundary, slope-aspect and different thematic maps like drainage density, slope and relief. More than eight morphometric parameter of different aspects have been computed. It is observed that the stream frequency decreases as the stream order increases and the densities of 1st order streams are higher in the northern, southern and south-eastern part of the Neugal watershed area. Based on the relationship between absolute and relative relief in the study area, it can be indicated that the relative relief increases with the increase in the absolute relief and shows active correlation. In Neugal watershed, the slope is controlled by the structure, and the erosional processes which have resulted in varied landform leading to environmental hazards. Keywords: Morphometric parameters, Geomorphological analysis, Neugal watershed, Relief, Environmental hazard

COMBREX: a project to accelerate the functional annotation of prokaryotic genomes

COMBREX (http://combrex.bu.edu) is a project to increase the speed of the functional annotation of new bacterial and archaeal genomes. It consists of a database of functional predictions produced by computational biologists and a mechanism for experimental biochemists to bid for the validation of those predictions. Small grants are available to support successful bids.National Institute of General Medical Sciences (U.S.) (Go grant 1RC2GM092602-01

Domestic cooking fuel and lung functions in healthy non-smoking women

Objective: The objective of this study was to compare the pulmonary functions in healthy non-smoking women who used either biomass or liquified petroleum gas (LPG) as their sole cooking fuel. The effects of passive smoking, ventilation, over crowding and cooking index were also taken into account. Methodology: The study was conducted over a period of two years from January 1994. One hundred healthy non-smoking women were included 50 cooked solely with biomass and 50 cooked with LPG. A standardised respiratory symptoms questionnaire was administered to all the subjects and spirometry was carried out. Results: Passive smoking showed no significant difference between the two groups. No statistically significant differences was found in lung functions in the two groups except for the PEFR, which was significantly lower (P < 0.01) in women using biomass. No correlation was observed between different variables and pulmonary functions. The step-wise multivariate linear regression analysis showed no correlation between cooking fuel and the pulmonary functions. Conclusion: The absence of the expected adverse effects of biomass on pulmonary functions was possibly due to better ventilation in the kitchens of subjects in the biomass group compared to previous studies

Unique and conserved MicroRNAs in wheat chromosome 5D revealed by next-generation sequencing

MicroRNAs are a class of short, non-coding, single-stranded RNAs that act as post-transcriptional regulators in gene expression. miRNA analysis of Triticum aestivum chromosome 5D was performed on 454 GS FLX Titanium sequences of flow sorted chromosome 5D with a total of 3,208,630 good quality reads representing 1.34x and 1.61x coverage of the short (5DS) and long (5DL) arms of the chromosome respectively. In silico and structural analyses revealed a total of 55 miRNAs; 48 and 42 miRNAs were found to be present on 5DL and 5DS respectively, of which 35 were common to both chromosome arms, while 13 miRNAs were specific to 5DL and 7 miRNAs were specific to 5DS. In total, 14 of the predicted miRNAs were identified in wheat for the first time. Representation (the copy number of each miRNA) was also found to be higher in 5DL (1,949) compared to 5DS (1,191). Targets were predicted for each miRNA, while expression analysis gave evidence of expression for 6 out of 55 miRNAs. Occurrences of the same miRNAs were also found in Brachypodium distachyon and Oryza sativa genome sequences to identify syntenic miRNA coding sequences. Based on this analysis, two other miRNAs: miR1133 and miR167 were detected in B. distachyon syntenic region of wheat 5DS. Five of the predicted miRNA coding regions (miR6220, miR5070, miR169, miR5085, miR2118) were experimentally verified to be located to the 5D chromosome and three of them : miR2118, miR169 and miR5085, were shown to be 5D specific. Furthermore miR2118 was shown to be expressed in Chinese Spring adult leaves. miRNA genes identified in this study will expand our understanding of gene regulation in bread wheat

Adaptive Oblivious Transfer and Generalization

International audienceOblivious Transfer (OT) protocols were introduced in the seminal paper of Rabin, and allow a user to retrieve a given number of lines (usually one) in a database, without revealing which ones to the server. The server is ensured that only this given number of lines can be accessed per interaction, and so the others are protected; while the user is ensured that the server does not learn the numbers of the lines required. This primitive has a huge interest in practice, for example in secure multi-party computation, and directly echoes to Symmetrically Private Information Retrieval (SPIR). Recent Oblivious Transfer instantiations secure in the UC framework suf- fer from a drastic fallback. After the first query, there is no improvement on the global scheme complexity and so subsequent queries each have a global complexity of O(|DB|) meaning that there is no gain compared to running completely independent queries. In this paper, we propose a new protocol solving this issue, and allowing to have subsequent queries with a complexity of O(log(|DB|)), and prove the protocol security in the UC framework with adaptive corruptions and reliable erasures. As a second contribution, we show that the techniques we use for Obliv- ious Transfer can be generalized to a new framework we call Oblivi- ous Language-Based Envelope (OLBE). It is of practical interest since it seems more and more unrealistic to consider a database with uncontrolled access in access control scenarii. Our approach generalizes Oblivious Signature-Based Envelope, to handle more expressive credentials and requests from the user. Naturally, OLBE encompasses both OT and OSBE, but it also allows to achieve Oblivious Transfer with fine grain access over each line. For example, a user can access a line if and only if he possesses a certificate granting him access to such line. We show how to generically and efficiently instantiate such primitive, and prove them secure in the Universal Composability framework, with adaptive corruptions assuming reliable erasures. We provide the new UC ideal functionalities when needed, or we show that the existing ones fit in our new framework. The security of such designs allows to preserve both the secrecy of the database values and the user credentials. This symmetry allows to view our new approach as a generalization of the notion of Symmetrically PIR

The Role of Brain-Derived Neurotrophic Factor in Psychiatric Disorders

Brain derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) is one of the most extensively studied and widespread growth factors in the brain. BDNF and its receptors are the critical factors having multipotent impact on the central nervous system (CNS). The biological function of BDNF primarily mediated by two receptors, tropomyosin receptor kinase B (TrkB) receptor and p75 neurotrophin receptor. BDNF contributes a pivotal role in neuronal and glial development, modulation and maintaining overall synaptic plasticity of the brain; therefore, widely involved in psychiatric diseases. Current hypotheses indicates that abnormal BDNF level, a vital condition for psychiatric and neurodegeneration diseases are mainly due to the disruption of the BDNF-associated signaling cascades. It is, therefore, crucial to understand how BDNF coordinate the psychiatric diseases in the brain. This review begins with the history of BDNF and its biology in brain homeostasis and focuses on several aspects of BDNF signaling. In addition, the review addresses the impact of BDNF level in diverse neuropsychiatric disorders including major depressive disorder, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder and, possible biological mechanisms of BDNF that may shed new insight for future therapeutic use and drug development

COMBREX: a project to accelerate the functional annotation of prokaryotic genomes

COMBREX (http://combrex.bu.edu) is a project to increase the speed of the functional annotation of new bacterial and archaeal genomes. It consists of a database of functional predictions produced by computational biologists and a mechanism for experimental biochemists to bid for the validation of those predictions. Small grants are available to support successful bids.National Institute of General Medical Sciences (U.S.) (Go grant 1RC2GM092602-01