The Dry Puna as an ecological megapatch and the peopling of South America: Technology, mobility, and the development of a late Pleistocene/early Holocene Andean hunter-gatherer tradition in northern Chile

Current scientific evidence shows that humans colonized South America at least 15,000 years ago, but there are still many unknown aspects of this process, including the major and minor migratory routes involved, and the pattern of successive occupation of a diverse continental mosaic of ecosystems. In this context, the role of the Andean highlands (≥3400 meters above sea level) has been neglected, because of the supposedly harsh conditions for humans including hypoxia and cold climate. Nevertheless, the environmental and cultural resources available in the high Andes constitutes an important "megapatch" that should be assessed in terms of human settlement patterns. We review the evidence for late Pleistocene/early Holocene hunter-gatherer occupation of one part of this megapatch, the northern Chilean Dry Puna, in its palaeoecological context. We focus on lithic technology, faunal remains, radiocarbon dates, and other archaeological materials related to different social activities, which allow us to suggest that groups of hunter-gatherers organized and adapted their way of life to highland ecosystems through logistical mobility, and curatorial strategies for lithic tool kits that included projectile points and other formalized tools. The morphology and technological processes involved are recognized over vast territories along the high Andes. We identify this material expression as the high south central Andean Archaic hunter-gatherer tradition, which also featured long distance mobile settlement systems and communication processes over this broad and distinct megapatch. More speculatively, we outline the hypothesis that these highland ecosystems constituted a suitable migratory route that may have been key for the early peopling of the continent, and contrast it with the alternative hypothesis of the initially secondary and seasonally intermittent exploitation of this habitat by hunter-gatherers dispersing along the Pacific coastal corridor

First molecular identification of the zoonotic parasite Anisakis pegreffii (Nematoda: Anisakidae) in a paraffin-embedded granuloma taken from a case of human intestinal anisakiasis in Italy

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Anisakiasis is an important fish-borne zoonosis provoked by larval stages of nematodes belonging to the genus <it>Anisakis</it>. The detection and identification of human infections is difficult. This is due to: a) the low specificity of the clinical features and symptomatology related to human infections; b) the paucity of diagnostic features of larvae found in granulomatous lesions characteristic of "invasive anisakiasis"; and c) the lack morphological characters diagnostic at the specific level when larvae of <it>Anisakis </it>are detected. Thus, molecular-based diagnostic approaches are warranted.</p> <p>Method</p> <p>We have developed a PCR method that amplifies the DNA of <it>Anisakis </it>spp. in fixed paraffin-embedded tissues. This method was applied to a granuloma removed from a human case of intestinal anisakiasis in Italy. Specific primers of the mtDNA <it>cox2 </it>gene were used and sequence analysis was performed according to the procedures already established for species of <it>Anisakis</it>.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The sequence obtained (629 bp) was compared with those of the other species of <it>Anisakis </it>which have so far been genetically characterized and with sequences obtained from larval stages of <it>Anisakis </it>collected from the Mediterranean fish <it>Engraulis encrasicolus</it>. This enabled the genetic identification of the larva in the human tissue as <it>A. pegreffii</it>. This is the first instance of human intestinal anisakiasis diagnosed using PCR of DNA purified from a fixed eosinophilic granuloma embedded in paraffin.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>The case of human anisakiasis presented reinforces the pathological significance of the species <it>A. pegreffii </it>to humans. The molecular/genetic methodological approach based on mtDNA <it>cox2 </it>sequence analysis, described here, can allow easy and rapid identification of <it>Anisakis </it>spp. in formalin-fixed and paraffin embedded tissues removed from cases of either gastric or intestinal human anisakiasis.</p

Prognostic significance of osteopontin expression in early-stage non-small-cell lung cancer

Osteopontin (OPN) is a multifunctional protein, which has recently been shown to be linked to tumorigenesis, progression and metastasis in different malignancies. Since non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC)'s prognosis remains bad, with few predictors of outcome, the purpose of this study was to evaluate if OPN might be involved in NSCLC's biology and therefore represent a prognostic marker and a target for new therapeutic trials. Immunohistochemistry was used to detect OPN expression, evaluated as percentage of neoplastic cells with cytoplasmic immunoreactivity, in a wide cohort of patients with stage I NSCLC (136 cases). The median value of this series (20% of positive cells) was used as the cutoff value to distinguish tumours with low (<20%) from tumours with high (⩾20%) OPN expression. A statistically significant correlation between high levels of OPN and shorter overall (P=0.034) and disease-free (P=0.011) survival in our patients was shown. Our results support the hypothesis that high OPN expression is a significantly unfavourable prognostic factor for the survival of patients with stage I NSCLC. This conclusion has notable importance in terms of the biological characterization of early-stage tumours and therapeutic opportunities

In vitro analysis of the effects on wound healing of high- and low-molecular weight chains of hyaluronan and their hybrid H-HA/L-HA complexes

Abstract Background: Recent studies have reported the roles of Hyaluronic acid (HA) chains of diverse length in wound repair, especially considering the simultaneous occurrence in vivo of both high- (H-HA) and low-molecular weight (L-HA) hyaluronan at an injury site. It has been shown that HA fragments (5 ≤ MW ≤ 20 kDa) usually trigger an inflammatory response that, on one hand, is the first signal in the activation of a repair mechanism but on the other, when it’s overexpressed, it may promote unwanted side effects. The present experimental research has aimed to investigate H-HA, L-HA and of a newly developed complex of the two (H-HA/L-HA) for stability (e.g. hyaluronidases digestion), for their ability to promote wound healing of human keratinocytes in vitro and for their effect on cellular biomarker expression trends. Results: Time-lapse video microscopy studies proved that the diverse HA was capable of restoring the monolayer integrity of HaCat. The H-HA/L-HA complex (0.1 and 1%w/v) proved faster in regeneration also in co-culture scratch test where wound closure was achieved in half the time of H-HA stimulated cells and 2.5-fold faster than the control. Gene expression was evaluated for transformation growth factor beta 1 (TGF-β1) proving that L-HA alone increased its expression at 4 h followed by restoration of similar trends for all the stimuli. Depending on the diverse stimulation (H-HA, L-HA or the complex), metalloproteinases (MMP-2, -9, -13) were also modulated differently. Furthermore, type I collagen expression and production were evaluated. Compared to the others, persistence of a significant higher expression level at 24 h for the H-HA/L-HA complex was found. Conclusions: The outcomes of this research showed that, both at high and low concentrations, hybrid complexes proved to perform better than HA alone thus suggesting their potential as medical devices in aesthetic and regenerative medicine. Keywords: Wound healing, Hyaluronan, MMPs, Hybrid complexe

Observation and study of baryonic B decays: B -> D(*) p pbar, D(*) p pbar pi, and D(*) p pbar pi pi

We present a study of ten B-meson decays to a D(*), a proton-antiproton pair, and a system of up to two pions using BaBar's data set of 455x10^6 BBbar pairs. Four of the modes (B0bar -> D0 p anti-p, B0bar -> D*0 p anti-p, B0bar -> D+ p anti-p pi-, B0bar -> D*+ p anti-p pi-) are studied with improved statistics compared to previous measurements; six of the modes (B- -> D0 p anti-p pi-, B- -> D*0 p anti-p pi-, B0bar -> D0 p anti-p pi- pi+, B0bar -> D*0 p anti-p pi- pi+, B- -> D+ p anti-p pi- pi-, B- -> D*+ p anti-p pi- pi-) are first observations. The branching fractions for 3- and 5-body decays are suppressed compared to 4-body decays. Kinematic distributions for 3-body decays show non-overlapping threshold enhancements in m(p anti-p) and m(D(*)0 p) in the Dalitz plots. For 4-body decays, m(p pi-) mass projections show a narrow peak with mass and full width of (1497.4 +- 3.0 +- 0.9) MeV/c2, and (47 +- 12 +- 4) MeV/c2, respectively, where the first (second) errors are statistical (systematic). For 5-body decays, mass projections are similar to phase space expectations. All results are preliminary.Comment: 28 pages, 90 postscript figures, submitted to LP0