Produção de morango no Distrito Federal.

O morangueiro no Distrito Federal; Perfil dos produtores; Práticas culturais; Controle fitossanitário; Comercialização; Dificuldades e desafios.bitstream/item/109187/1/CNPH-PROD.-DE-MORAN.-DO-DF.-09.pd

Influence of drugs and comorbidity on serum potassium in 15 000 consecutive hospital admissions

Background. Drug trials often exclude subjects with relevant comorbidity or comedication. Nevertheless, after approval, these drugs will be prescribed to a much broader collective. Our goal was to quantify the impact of drugs and comorbidity on serum potassium in unselected patients admitted to the hospital. Methods. This was a retrospective pharmacoepidemiologic study in 15 000 consecutive patients admitted to the medical department of the Kantonsspital St. Gallen, a 700-bed tertiary hospital in eastern Switzerland. Patients with ‘haemolytic' plasma and patients on dialysis or with an estimated glomerular filtration rate (GFR) <10 mL/min/1.73 m2 were excluded. For the remaining 14 146 patients, drug history on admission, age, sex, body weight, physical findings, comorbidity (ICD-10 diagnoses) and laboratory information (potassium and creatinine) were extracted from electronic sources. Results. Estimated GFR was the strongest predictor of serum potassium (P < 0.0001). Angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitors, cyclosporine, loop diuretics and potassium-sparing diuretics all showed a significant effect modification with decreasing GFR (P < 0.001). Similarly, in patients with liver cirrhosis a significantly stronger effect on potassium was found for angiotensin receptor blockers, betablockers and loop diuretics (P < 0.01). Several significant drug-drug interactions were identified. Diabetes, male sex, older age, lower blood pressure and higher body weight were all independently associated with higher serum potassium levels (P < 0.001). The model explained 14% of the variation of serum potassium. Conclusions. The effects of various drugs on serum potassium are highly influenced by comorbidity and comedication. Although the presented model cannot be used to predict potassium in individual patients, we demonstrate that clinical databases could evolve as a powerful tool for industry-independent analysis of postmarketing drug safet

Treatment of melanoma cells with the synthetic retinoid CD437 induces apoptosis via activation of AP-1 in vitro, and causes growth inhibition in xenografts in vivo

Human malignant melanoma is notoriously resistant to pharmacological modulation. We describe here for the first time that the synthetic retinoid CD437 has a strong dose-dependent antiproliferative effect on human melanoma cells (IC50: 5 x 10(-6) M) via the induction of programmed cell death, as judged by analysis of cell morphology, electron microscopical features, and DNA fragmentation. Programmed cell death was preceded by a strong activation of the AP-1 complex in CD437-treated cells as demonstrated by gel retardation and chloramphenicol transferase (CAT) assays. Northern blot analysis showed a time-dependent increase in the expression of c-fos and c-jun encoding components of AP-1, whereas bcl-2 and p53 mRNA levels remained constant. CD437 also exhibited a strong growth inhibitory effect on MeWo melanoma cells in a xenograft model. In tissue sections of CD437-treated MeWo tumors from these animals, apoptotic melanoma cells and c-fos overexpressing cells were colocalized by TdT-mediated deoxyuridine triphosphate-digoxigenin nick end labeling (TUNEL) staining and in situ hybridization. Taken together, this report identifies CD437 as a retinoid that activates and upregulates the transcription factor AP-1, leading eventually to programmed cell death of exposed human melanoma cells in vitro and in vivo. Further studies are needed to evaluate whether synthetic retinoids such as CD437 represent a new class of retinoids, which may open up new ways to a more effective therapy of malignant melanoma

Search of scaling solutions in scalar-tensor gravity

We write new functional renormalization group equations for a scalar nonminimally coupled to gravity. Thanks to the choice of the parametrization and of the gauge fixing they are simpler than older equations and avoid some of the difficulties that were previously present. In three dimensions these equations admit, at least for sufficiently small fields, a solution that may be interpreted as a gravitationally dressed Wilson-Fisher fixed point. We also find for any dimension d>2 two analytic scaling solutions which we study for d=3 and d=4. One of them corresponds to the fixed point of the Einstein-Hilbert truncation, the others involve a nonvanishing minimal coupling

Social class origin and assortative mating in Britain, 1949-2010

This article examines trends in assortative mating in Britain over the last 60 years. Assortative mating is the tendency for like to form a conjugal partnership with like. Our focus is on the association between the social class origins of the partners. The propensity towards assortative mating is taken as an index of the openness of society which we regard as a macro level aspect of social inequality. There is some evidence that the propensity for partners to come from similar class backgrounds declined during the 1960s. Thereafter, there was a period of 40 years of remarkable stability during which the propensity towards assortative mating fluctuated trendlessly within quite narrow limits. This picture of stability over time in social openness parallels the well-established facts about intergenerational social class mobility in Britain

Genome BLAST distance phylogenies inferred from whole plastid and whole mitochondrion genome sequences

BACKGROUND: Phylogenetic methods which do not rely on multiple sequence alignments are important tools in inferring trees directly from completely sequenced genomes. Here, we extend the recently described Genome BLAST Distance Phylogeny (GBDP) strategy to compute phylogenetic trees from all completely sequenced plastid genomes currently available and from a selection of mitochondrial genomes representing the major eukaryotic lineages. BLASTN, TBLASTX, or combinations of both are used to locate high-scoring segment pairs (HSPs) between two sequences from which pairwise similarities and distances are computed in different ways resulting in a total of 96 GBDP variants. The suitability of these distance formulae for phylogeny reconstruction is directly estimated by computing a recently described measure of "treelikeness", the so-called δ value, from the respective distance matrices. Additionally, we compare the trees inferred from these matrices using UPGMA, NJ, BIONJ, FastME, or STC, respectively, with the NCBI taxonomy tree of the taxa under study. RESULTS: Our results indicate that, at this taxonomic level, plastid genomes are much more valuable for inferring phylogenies than are mitochondrial genomes, and that distances based on breakpoints are of little use. Distances based on the proportion of "matched" HSP length to average genome length were best for tree estimation. Additionally we found that using TBLASTX instead of BLASTN and, particularly, combining TBLASTX and BLASTN leads to a small but significant increase in accuracy. Other factors do not significantly affect the phylogenetic outcome. The BIONJ algorithm results in phylogenies most in accordance with the current NCBI taxonomy, with NJ and FastME performing insignificantly worse, and STC performing as well if applied to high quality distance matrices. δ values are found to be a reliable predictor of phylogenetic accuracy. CONCLUSION: Using the most treelike distance matrices, as judged by their δ values, distance methods are able to recover all major plant lineages, and are more in accordance with Apicomplexa organelles being derived from "green" plastids than from plastids of the "red" type. GBDP-like methods can be used to reliably infer phylogenies from different kinds of genomic data. A framework is established to further develop and improve such methods. δ values are a topology-independent tool of general use for the development and assessment of distance methods for phylogenetic inference