Study of the growth traits relationship of lambs in the postnatal development

Data from the Pirot improved sheep were use to estimate postnatal development and growth traits relationship of lambs from birth to weaning. The experiment included 360 lambs, divided into three groups (I, II, III). Lamb traits included BW at birth and approximately 30d, 60d and 90d (weaning). Lambs managed under conditions typical of the area. Male lambs in-group I had a total gain of 22.97 kg (0.255 kg/d), in group II 25.97 kg (0.286 kg/d) (P (lt) 0.01). Lambs in-group III the total gain was 24.64 kg (0.274 kg/d), which was lower than lambs of group II (P>0.05). On the other side, III group of lambs had a higher gain than the I group (P (lt) 0.01). Development of female lambs in the postnatal period was slightly weaker. Lambs of I group, from birth to weaning had a total gain of 21.27 kg, (0.236 kg/d), II group was 23.32 kg (0.259 kg/d). The difference was statistically very significant (P (lt) 0.01). Lambs of group III had a total gain of 23.54 kg (0.261kg/d) and higher growth rate then lambs of group II, but not significant (P>0.05). From the other side, the difference in comparison with the groups III and I was very significant (P (lt) 0.01). Correlations between BWB and BW30, 60, 90 are ranged from low to moderate among the respective traits and ranged between positive from 0.001 to 0.365 and negative from -0.005 to -0.279. Can conclude that the selection should direct towards producing lambs with intermediate birth weight

Autonomous electrical current monitoring system for aircraft

Aircraft monitoring systems offer enhanced safety, reliability, reduced maintenance cost and improved overall flight efficiency. Advancements in wireless sensor networks (WSN) are enabling unprecedented data acquisition functionalities, but their applicability is restricted by power limitations, as batteries require replacement or recharging and wired power adds weight and detracts from the benefits of wireless technology. In this paper, an energy autonomous WSN is presented for monitoring the structural current in aircraft structures. A hybrid inductive/hall sensing concept is introduced demonstrating 0.5 A resolution, < 2% accuracy and frequency independence, for a 5 A – 100 A RMS, DC-800 Hz current and frequency range, with 35 mW active power consumption. An inductive energy harvesting power supply with magnetic flux funnelling, reactance compensation and supercapacitor storage is demonstrated to provide 0.16 mW of continuous power from the 65 μT RMS field of a 20 A RMS, 360 Hz structural current. A low-power sensor node platform with a custom multi-mode duty cycling network protocol is developed, offering cold starting network association and data acquisition/transmission functionality at 50 μW and 70 μW average power respectively. WSN level operation for 1 minute for every 8 minutes of energy harvesting is demonstrated. The proposed system offers a unique energy autonomous WSN platform for aircraft monitoring

Seasonal Trends of Benzo(A)Pyrene in Suspended Particulate Matter in Urban Areas of Belgrade, Serbia

Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) were identified to be one of the major toxic air pollutants in urban environment PAHs are mostly formed during incomplete combustion or pyrolysis of organic material According to Serbian National Legislation, benzo(a)pyrene (BaP) concentration in total suspended particles (TSP) in ambient air in the Belgrade metropolitan area has been determined in the last ten years, as a part of a local air pollution monitoring program performed by the Public Health Institute of Belgrade and funded by Belgrades Municipality Air samples for analysis of BaP in suspended particles have been collected (as 24 h sample once per month) at selected monitoring sites within the municipal air quality monitoring network At the beginning, according to National Regulation, all samples were taken as total suspended particles (TSP) Since mid-2008, the procedure of sampling methodology was harmonized with EU requirements and solid fraction PM(10) has been collected and analyzed using GC/MS In this study, we have analyzed results of TSP collected between 2005 and 2008 Looking through the results obtained during the period of a whole year, it can be noticed that concentrations of BaP were much higher during winter season at almost all measuring site

Infectious Disease Ontology

Technological developments have resulted in tremendous increases in the volume and diversity of the data and information that must be processed in the course of biomedical and clinical research and practice. Researchers are at the same time under ever greater pressure to share data and to take steps to ensure that data resources are interoperable. The use of ontologies to annotate data has proven successful in supporting these goals and in providing new possibilities for the automated processing of data and information. In this chapter, we describe different types of vocabulary resources and emphasize those features of formal ontologies that make them most useful for computational applications. We describe current uses of ontologies and discuss future goals for ontology-based computing, focusing on its use in the field of infectious diseases. We review the largest and most widely used vocabulary resources relevant to the study of infectious diseases and conclude with a description of the Infectious Disease Ontology (IDO) suite of interoperable ontology modules that together cover the entire infectious disease domain

Neurological Disorders and Publication Abstracts Follow Elements of Social Network Patterns when Indexed Using Ontology Tree-Based Key Term Search

Disorders of the Central Nervous System (CNS) are worldwide causes of morbidity and mortality. In order to further investigate the nature of the CNS research, we generate from an initial reference a controlled vocabulary of CNS disorder-related terms and ontological tree structure for this vocabulary, and then apply the vocabulary in an analysis of the past ten years of abstracts (N = 10,488) from a major neuroscience journal. Using literal search methodology with our terminology tree, we find over 5,200 relationships between abstracts and clinical diagnostic topics. After generating a network graph of these document-topic relationships, we find that this network graph contains characteristics of document-author and other human social networks, including evidence of scale-free and power law-like node distributions. However, we also found qualitative evidence for Z-normal-type (albeit logarithmically skewed) distributions within disorder popularity. Lastly, we discuss potential consumer-centered as well as clinic-centered uses for our ontology and search methodology

Annotation and query of tissue microarray data using the NCI Thesaurus

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>The Stanford Tissue Microarray Database (TMAD) is a repository of data serving a consortium of pathologists and biomedical researchers. The tissue samples in TMAD are annotated with multiple free-text fields, specifying the pathological diagnoses for each sample. These text annotations are not structured according to any ontology, making future integration of this resource with other biological and clinical data difficult.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>We developed methods to map these annotations to the NCI thesaurus. Using the NCI-T we can effectively represent annotations for about 86% of the samples. We demonstrate how this mapping enables ontology driven integration and querying of tissue microarray data. We have deployed the mapping and ontology driven querying tools at the TMAD site for general use.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>We have demonstrated that we can effectively map the diagnosis-related terms describing a sample in TMAD to the NCI-T. The NCI thesaurus terms have a wide coverage and provide terms for about 86% of the samples. In our opinion the NCI thesaurus can facilitate integration of this resource with other biological data.</p

Spatial movement of the Wels catfish (Silurus glanis) in the Danube

Wels catfish (Silurus glanis, Linnaeus, 1758) is one of the most targeted species for recreational and commercial fishing in the Danube River, even though studies of behavior and movement patterns of Wels catfish in the Danube are rare. Wels catfish was caught downstream of Iron Gate II hydropower dam and tagged with an ultrasonic transmitter (Vemco Ltd, V16TP). Nine autonomous receivers (Vemco Ltd, VR 2W) recorded detections of spatial movement downstream of Iron Gate II dam between Serbia and Romania for almost two years, between the years 2015 and 2017. Our telemetry data found that Wels catfish exhibit relatively short movements within a maximum range (≈ 12 km), but as a territorial species most of the time it was recorded by the two receivers, close to the Iron Gate dam and location where it was caught. The longest displacement from the preferable place under Iron Gate II dam was migration to Romanian ship lock and turbines located in the right arm of the Danube River. Location under the river dam is already recognized as a place of aggregation of the fish and thus preference of predatory catfish is strongly connected with food availability. Our data revealed that dam and ship lock blocked further migration of this fish. The last signal received was during the winter 2017, which was a period with extremely low temperature and ice cover on the Danube River. Considering the fact that the ice displaced whole receiver deployment downstream the dam, we might conclude that the tagged catfish disappeared because of ice movement during the winter season. Results can be used for management ensuring habitat requirements and developing of restoration and conservation strategies

OntoFox: web-based support for ontology reuse

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Ontology development is a rapidly growing area of research, especially in the life sciences domain. To promote collaboration and interoperability between different projects, the OBO Foundry principles require that these ontologies be open and non-redundant, avoiding duplication of terms through the re-use of existing resources. As current options to do so present various difficulties, a new approach, MIREOT, allows specifying import of single terms. Initial implementations allow for controlled import of selected annotations and certain classes of related terms.</p> <p>Findings</p> <p>OntoFox <url>http://ontofox.hegroup.org/</url> is a web-based system that allows users to input terms, fetch selected properties, annotations, and certain classes of related terms from the source ontologies and save the results using the RDF/XML serialization of the Web Ontology Language (OWL). Compared to an initial implementation of MIREOT, OntoFox allows additional and more easily configurable options for selecting and rewriting annotation properties, and for inclusion of all or a computed subset of terms between low and top level terms. Additional methods for including related classes include a SPARQL-based ontology term retrieval algorithm that extracts terms related to a given set of signature terms and an option to extract the hierarchy rooted at a specified ontology term. OntoFox's output can be directly imported into a developer's ontology. OntoFox currently supports term retrieval from a selection of 15 ontologies accessible via SPARQL endpoints and allows users to extend this by specifying additional endpoints. An OntoFox application in the development of the Vaccine Ontology (VO) is demonstrated.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>OntoFox provides a timely publicly available service, providing different options for users to collect terms from external ontologies, making them available for reuse by import into client OWL ontologies.</p

Assessment of quality of life in type II diabetic patients using the modified diabetes quality of life (MDQoL)-17 questionnaire

ABSTRACT Diabetic complications, comorbidities, and cost of treatment affect the quality of life (QoL) of an individual. The QoL assessment is considered an important measure of outcome in chronic disease management. The objective of our study was to assess the quality of life in Type II diabetes mellitus patients with and without complications using the modified diabetes quality of life (MDQoL)-17. A prospective descriptive study was conducted over 6 months, after taking ethical committee approval. As per the inclusion criteria from medicine wards of tertiary care hospital, 250 patients were selected. Demographic characteristics were documented in the data collection form and the patients were administered with the MDQoL questionnaire in different languages. The data was analyzed using IBM SPSS version 20. Majority of the patients were male (64.4%). The average age of the study population was 60.34±12.04 years. Most of the patients had a diabetes history of more than 10 years and HbA1c > 8%. The average QoL score was 65.47±15.07. Majority of the diabetic patients had the QoL score between 70 and 50. Patients without complication had a better QoL. As the number of complications increased, there was a decrease in the QoL. The presence of comorbidity also decreased the QoL. There was a statistically significant correlation with various parameters such as age, duration of diabetes history, HbA1c, number of complications and type of complication verses QoL of diabetic patients (p<0.05). The overall QoL in diabetic patients is reduced. Thus, proper management and strict glycemic control is necessary to prevent progression and occurrence of complications to maintain a better QoL in diabetes patients

HFE variants and the expression of iron-related proteins in breast cancer-associated lymphocytes and macrophages

Disponível em: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5264664/The association of HFE (High Iron FE) major variants with breast cancer risk and behavior has been a matter of discussion for a long time. However, their impact on the expression of iron-related proteins in the breast cancer tissue has never been addressed. In the present study, hepcidin, ferroportin 1, transferrin receptor 1 (TfR1), and ferritin expressions, as well as tissue iron deposition were evaluated in a collection of samples from breast cancers patients and analyzed according to the patients’ HFE genotype. Within the group of patients with invasive carcinoma, those carrying the p.Cys282Tyr variant in heterozygosity presented a higher expression of hepcidin in lymphocytes and macrophages than wild-type or p.His63Asp carriers. An increased expression of TfR1 was also observed in all the cell types analyzed but only in p.Cys282Tyr/p.His63Asp compound heterozygous patients. A differential impact of the two HFE variants was further noticed with the observation of a significantly higher percentage of p.Cys282Tyr heterozygous patients presenting tissue iron deposition in comparison to p.His63Asp heterozygous. In the present cohort, no significant associations were found between HFE variants and classical clinicopathological markers of breast cancer behavior and prognosis. Although limited by a low sampling size, our results provide a new possible explanation for the previously reported impact of HFE major variants on breast cancer progression, i.e., not by influencing systemic iron homeostasis but rather by differentially modulating the local cellular expression of iron-related proteins and tissue iron deposition.OM is a recipient of the PhD grant SFRH/BD/2011/78184 from Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (FCT). The authors also acknowledge financial support from ICBAS/AI&NSUMIB and by national funds through FCT and Ministério da Educação e Ciência (MEC) and when applicable co-funded by FEDER funds within the partnership agreement PT2020 related with the research unit number 4293.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio