6,964 research outputs found
Lipidomic profiling in Crohn's disease: abnormalities in phosphatidylinositols, with preservation of ceramide, phosphatidylcholine and phosphatidylserine composition.
Crohn's disease is a chronic inflammatory condition largely affecting the terminal ileum and large bowel. A contributing cause is the failure of an adequate acute inflammatory response as a result of impaired secretion of pro-inflammatory cytokines by macrophages. This defective secretion arises from aberrant vesicle trafficking, misdirecting the cytokines to lysosomal degradation. Aberrant intestinal permeability is also well-established in Crohn's disease. Both the disordered vesicle trafficking and increased bowel permeability could result from abnormal lipid composition. We thus measured the sphingo- and phospholipid composition of macrophages, using mass spectrometry and stable isotope labelling approaches. Stimulation of macrophages with heat-killed Escherichia coli resulted in three main changes; a significant reduction in the amount of individual ceramide species, an altered composition of phosphatidylcholine, and an increased rate of phosphatidylcholine synthesis in macrophages. These changes were observed in macrophages from both healthy control individuals and patients with Crohn's disease. The only difference detected between control and Crohn's disease macrophages was a reduced proportion of newly-synthesised phosphatidylinositol 16:0/18:1 over a defined time period. Shotgun lipidomics analysis of macroscopically non-inflamed ileal biopsies showed a significant decrease in this same lipid species with overall preservation of sphingolipid, phospholipid and cholesterol composition
Novel Heating-Induced Reversion during Crystallization of Al-based Glassy Alloys.
Thermal stability and crystallization of three multicomponent glassy alloys, Al86Y7Ni5Co1Fe0.5Pd0.5, Al85Y8Ni5Co1Fe0.5Pd0.5 and Al84Y9Ni4Co1.5Fe0.5Pd1, were examined to assess the ability to form the mixture of amorphous (am) and fcc-aluminum (α-Al) phases. On heating, the glass transition into the supercooled liquid is shown by the 85Al and 84Al glasses. The crystallization sequences are [am] → [am + α-Al] → [α-Al + compounds] for the 86Al and 85Al alloys, and [am] → [am + α-Al + cubic AlxMy (M = Y, Ni, Co, Fe, Pd)] → [am + α-Al] → [α-Al + Al3Y + Al9(Co, Ni)2 + unknown phase] for the 84Al alloy. The glass transition appears even for the 85Al alloy where the primary phase is α-Al. The heating-induced reversion from [am + α-Al + multicomponent AlxMy] to [am + α-Al] for the 84Al alloy is abnormal, not previously observed in crystallization of glassy alloys, and seems to originate from instability of the metastable AlxMy compound, in which significant inhomogeneous strain is caused by the mixture of solute elements. This novel reversion phenomenon is encouraging for obtaining the [am + α-Al] mixture over a wide range of high temperature effective for the formation of Al-based high-strength nanostructured bulk alloys by warm working
Recommended from our members
Novel deformation-induced polymorphic crystallization and softening of Al-based amorphous alloys
© 2018 Acta Materialia Inc. Melt-spun amorphous ribbons of Al 90 Y 10 (at.%) (90Al) and Al 84 Y 8.5 Ni 4 Co 2 Pd 1 Fe 0.5 (84Al) are cold-rolled at near to liquid-nitrogen temperature or at room temperature, inducing partial crystallization to nanoscale fcc-Al (α-Al). The crystallization is characterized and contrasted with the distinct sequences of reactions on annealing 90Al and 84Al amorphous alloys. Rolling-induced crystallization leads to softening, opposite to the effect of nanocrystallization induced by annealing. The origins of the hardness changes are analyzed. The rolling induces novel polymorphic crystallization to α-Al with extended solid solubility. This transformation, which occurs equally in 84Al and 90Al, despite the much greater thermal stability of the former, allows the ribbons to retain good bending ductility, and delays the onset of embrittlement on subsequent annealing. Partial crystallization induced by cold-rolling is useful in avoiding the formation of compound phases associated with brittleness, and is a promising process for high-solute Al-based amorphous alloys to be further developed as structural materials
A Chan dietary intervention enhances executive functions and anterior cingulate activity in autism spectrum disorders : a randomized controlled trial
Author name used in this publication: Mei-chun Cheung2011-2012 > Academic research: refereed > Publication in refereed journalVersion of RecordPublishe
Respiratory specialists working in different ways: development of a GP hotline and respiratory support service during the COVID-19 pandemic
Integration of primary and secondary care for the management of respiratory disease is a long-held ambition. Here, we describe how respiratory specialists at a large NHS trust, working with primary care clinicians in the area, set up a GP hotline and respiratory support service in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, with the aim of enhancing delivery of care to patients in this unprecedented time. Working across traditional organisational boundaries in this way confers benefits to patients and clinicians, illustrating the value of new, integrated models of care
Adaptive Evolution of the Myo6 Gene in Old World Fruit Bats (Family: Pteropodidae)
PMCID: PMC3631194This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited
Higgs Physics: Theory
I review the theoretical aspects of the physics of Higgs bosons, focusing on
the elements that are relevant for the production and detection at present
hadron colliders. After briefly summarizing the basics of electroweak symmetry
breaking in the Standard Model, I discuss Higgs production at the LHC and at
the Tevatron, with some focus on the main production mechanism, the gluon-gluon
fusion process, and summarize the main Higgs decay modes and the experimental
detection channels. I then briefly survey the case of the minimal
supersymmetric extension of the Standard Model. In a last section, I review the
prospects for determining the fundamental properties of the Higgs particles
once they have been experimentally observed.Comment: 21 pages, 15 figures. Talk given at the XXV International Symposium
on Lepton Photon Interactions at High Energies (Lepton Photon 11), 22-27
August 2011, Mumbai, Indi
Anomalous coupling effects in exclusive radiative B-meson decays
The top-quark FCNC processes will be searched for at the CERN LHC, which are
correlated with the B-meson decays. In this paper, we study the effects of
top-quark anomalous interactions in the exclusive radiative and decays. With the current experimental data of
the branching ratios, the direct CP and the isospin asymmetries, bounds on the
coupling from and
from decays are derived,
respectively. The bound on from is generally compatible with that from . However, the isospin asymmetry further
restrict the phase of , and the combined bound results
in the upper limit, , which is lower than the
CDF result. For real , the upper bound on is about of the same order as the discovery
potential of ATLAS with an integrated luminosity of . For
decays, the NP contribution is enhanced by a large CKM factor
, and the constraint on coupling is rather
restrictive, . With refined
measurements to be available at the LHCb and the future super-B factories, we
can get close correlations between and the rare
decays, which will be studied directly at the LHC ATLAS and CMS.Comment: 25 pages, 15 figures, pdflate
Increased entropy of signal transduction in the cancer metastasis phenotype
Studies into the statistical properties of biological networks have led to
important biological insights, such as the presence of hubs and hierarchical
modularity. There is also a growing interest in studying the statistical
properties of networks in the context of cancer genomics. However, relatively
little is known as to what network features differ between the cancer and
normal cell physiologies, or between different cancer cell phenotypes. Based on
the observation that frequent genomic alterations underlie a more aggressive
cancer phenotype, we asked if such an effect could be detectable as an increase
in the randomness of local gene expression patterns. Using a breast cancer gene
expression data set and a model network of protein interactions we derive
constrained weighted networks defined by a stochastic information flux matrix
reflecting expression correlations between interacting proteins. Based on this
stochastic matrix we propose and compute an entropy measure that quantifies the
degree of randomness in the local pattern of information flux around single
genes. By comparing the local entropies in the non-metastatic versus metastatic
breast cancer networks, we here show that breast cancers that metastasize are
characterised by a small yet significant increase in the degree of randomness
of local expression patterns. We validate this result in three additional
breast cancer expression data sets and demonstrate that local entropy better
characterises the metastatic phenotype than other non-entropy based measures.
We show that increases in entropy can be used to identify genes and signalling
pathways implicated in breast cancer metastasis. Further exploration of such
integrated cancer expression and protein interaction networks will therefore be
a fruitful endeavour.Comment: 5 figures, 2 Supplementary Figures and Table
- …