5,134 research outputs found
Detection and Quantification of Grass and Olea Airborne Pollen Allergens in Outdoor Air Samples and its Correlation with Pollen Counts
Detection and Quantification of Grass and Olea Airborne Pollen Allergens in Outdoor Air Samples and its Correlation with Pollen Counts
R Ferro1*, R Ribeiro1*, MR Martins1,2, AT Caldeira1,3, E Caeiro6, CM Antunes1,5
& R BrandĂŁo2,4 and the HIALINE working group7
1Dep. of Chemistry, University of Evora, Portugal;
2Mediterranean Inst. Crop and Environment Sciences, Univ.Evora, Portugal;
3Centro QuĂmica, University of Ăvora, Portugal;
4Dep. Biology, University of Evora;
5Center for NeuroSciences and Cell Biology-University of Coimbra, Portugal;
6Soc.Portuguesa Alergol.Imunologia ClĂnica , Portugal
7 M. Thibaudon, France, M. Smith, United Kingdom, C. Galan, Spain R. Albertini, Italy, L. Grewling, Poland, G. Reese, Germany, A. Rantio-LehtimÀki, Finland, S. JÀger and U. Berger, Austria, M. Sofiev, Finland, I. Sauliene, Lithuania, L. Cecchi, Italy
Presenting author: [email protected] tel: +351 266760889
Introduction: Allergic respiratory diseases broken out after an exposure to airborne pollen, as asthma and allergic rhinitis, are deeply increasing and they represent one of the major public health problems nowadays, affecting about 40% of European population. In Portugal, grass and Olea europaea pollen are certainly one of the main sources of athmospheric aeroallergens and as such, one of the main causes of respiratory allergy.
For these reasons, it is useful the development of new strategies for prevention and treatment of these pathologies. The execution of aerobiological analysis including pollen calendars and/or immunoassays for the detection and quantification of allergens which could forecast the allergenic potential of the athmosphere are quite relevant since they would contribute to develop prevention measures of allergic respiratory diseases. The aim of this study was to evaluate the putative correlation between the concentration of some of the major allergens of and with their pollen counts.
Methodology: On a meteorological platform at the town center of Evora (south Portugal), ambient air was sampled at 800L/min with a Chemvol high-volume cascade impactor equipped with stages PM>10”m, 10 ”m>PM>2.5”m. The polyurethane impacting substrate was extracted with 0.1M NH4HCO3, pH8.1, supplemented with 0.1% BSA. The major pollen allergens from grass Phleum p 5 and olive Ole e 1 were determined with allergen specific ELISAŽs. Airborne pollen of and Olea europaea simultaneously monitored with a Burkard Seven Day Recording Volumetric Spore Trap* , between the 30th of April and the 8th of July of 2009. Both samplers were placed side-by-side with air input at the same level.
Results: During the pollen season of 2009, high values of grass pollen were recorded between May 2th and June 1 th. It was also observed that the air content of Phl p5 or Ole e1 aeroallergens were directly correlated with airborne pollen counts of Poaceae and Oleaceae, respectively.
Conclusions: These results suggest that the directly quantification of aeroallergens may contribute, together with pollen counts of air samples, to define the allergic risk with higher precision.
Acknowledgments: This study is integrated in the european project HIALINE (Executive Agency for Health and Consumers under grant agreement No 2008 11 07
Integrating Species Traits into Species Pools
Despite decades of research on the speciesâpool concept and the recent explosion of interest in traitâbased frameworks in ecology and biogeography, surprisingly little is known about how spatial and temporal changes in speciesâpool functional diversity (SPFD) influence biodiversity and the processes underlying community assembly. Current traitâbased frameworks focus primarily on community assembly from a static regional species pool, without considering how spatial or temporal variation in SPFD alters the relative importance of deterministic and stochastic assembly processes. Likewise, speciesâpool concepts primarily focus on how the number of species in the species pool influences local biodiversity. However, species pools with similar richness can vary substantially in functionalâtrait diversity, which can strongly influence community assembly and biodiversity responses to environmental change. Here, we integrate recent advances in community ecology, traitâbased ecology, and biogeography to provide a more comprehensive framework that explicitly considers how variation in SPFD, among regions and within regions through time, influences the relative importance of community assembly processes and patterns of biodiversity. First, we provide a brief overview of the primary ecological and evolutionary processes that create differences in SPFD among regions and within regions through time. We then illustrate how SPFD may influence fundamental processes of local community assembly (dispersal, ecological drift, niche selection). Higher SPFD may increase the relative importance of deterministic community assembly when greater functional diversity in the species pool increases niche selection across environmental gradients. In contrast, lower SPFD may increase the relative importance of stochastic community assembly when high functional redundancy in the species pool increases the influence of dispersal history or ecological drift. Next, we outline experimental and observational approaches for testing the influence of SPFD on assembly processes and biodiversity. Finally, we highlight applications of this framework for restoration and conservation. This speciesâpool functional diversity framework has the potential to advance our understanding of how localâ and regionalâscale processes jointly influence patterns of biodiversity across biogeographic regions, changes in biodiversity within regions over time, and restoration outcomes and conservation efforts in ecosystems altered by environmental change
Precision tests of the Standard Model with leptonic and semileptonic kaon decays
We present a global analysis of leptonic and semileptonic kaon decays data,
including all recent results by BNL-E865, KLOE, KTeV, ISTRA+, and NA48.
Experimental results are critically reviewed and combined, taking into account
theoretical (both analytical and numerical) constraints on the semileptonic
kaon form factors. This analysis leads to a very accurate determination of Vus
and allows us to perform several stringent tests of the Standard Model
Higgs boson pair production process in the littlest Higgs model at the ILC
The physics prospect at future linear colliders for the study of
the Higgs triple self-coupling via the process of is
investigated. In this paper, we calculate the contribution of the new particles
predicted by the littlest Higgs model to the cross sections of this process in
the future high energy collider(). The results show that, in
the favorable parameter spaces preferred by the electroweak precision, the
deviation of the total cross sections from its value varies from a few
percent to tens percent, which may be detected at the future experiments
with =500GeV.Comment: 13 pages,4 figure
Physics Beyond the Standard Model and Cosmological Connections: A Summary from LCWS 06
The International Linear Collider (ILC) is likely to provide us important
insights into the sector of physics that may supersede our current paradigm
viz., the Standard Model. In anticipation of the possibility that the ILC may
come up in the middle of the next decade, several groups are vigourously
investigating its potential to explore this new sector of physics. The Linear
Collider Workshop in Bangalore (LCWS06) had several presentations of such
studies which looked at supersymmetry, extra dimensions and other exotic
possibilities which the ILC may help us discover or understand. Some papers
also looked at the understanding of cosmology that may emerge from studies at
the ILC. This paper summarises these presentations.Comment: 8 pages (including cover page) LaTeX, Summary talk presented at the
International Linear Collider Workshop in Bangalore, India in March 200
Dark Matter in SuperGUT Unification Models
After a brief update on the prospects for dark matter in the constrained
version of the MSSM (CMSSM) and its differences with models based on minimal
supergravity (mSUGRA), I will consider the effects of unifying the
supersymmetry-breaking parameters at a scale above M_{GUT}. One of the
consequences of superGUT unification, is the ability to take vanishing scalar
masses at the unification scale with a neutralino LSP dark matter candidate.
This allows one to resurrect no-scale supergravity as a viable phenomenological
model.Comment: 12 pages, 16 figures, To be published in the Proceedings of the 6th
DSU Conference, Leon, Mexico, ed. D. Delepin
QCD corrections to the electric dipole moment of the neutron in the MSSM
We consider the QCD corrections to the electric dipole moment of the neutron
in the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model. We provide a master formula for
the Wilson coefficients at the low energy scale including for the first time
the mixing between the electric and chromoelectric operators and correcting
widely used previous LO estimates. We show that, because of the mixing between
the electric and chromoelectric operators, the neutralino contribution is
always strongly suppressed. We find that, in general, the effect of the QCD
corrections is to reduce the amount of CP violation generated at the high
scale. We discuss the perturbative uncertainties of the LO computation, which
are particularly large for the gluino-mediated contribution. This motivates our
Next-to-Leading order analysis. We compute for the first time the order alpha_s
corrections to the Wilson coefficients for the gluino contributions, and
recompute the two-loop anomalous dimension for the dipole operators. We show
that the large LO uncertainty disappears once NLO corrections are taken into
account.Comment: 23 pages, 5 figures, added references, corrected typo
The Higgs Sector and CoGeNT/DAMA-Like Dark Matter in Supersymmetric Models
Recent data from CoGeNT and DAMA are roughly consistent with a very light
dark matter particle with m\sim 4-10\gev and spin-independent cross section
of order \sigma_{SI} \sim (1-3)\times 10^{-4}\pb. An important question is
whether these observations are compatible with supersymmetric models obeying
without violating existing collider constraints and
precision measurements. In this talk, I review the fact the the Minimal
Supersymmetric Model allows insufficient flexibility to achieve such
compatibility, basically because of the highly constrained nature of the MSSM
Higgs sector in relation to LEP limits on Higgs bosons. I then outline the
manner in which the more flexible Higgs sectors of the Next-to-Minimal
Supersymmetric Model and an Extended Next-to-Minimal Supersymmetric Model allow
large and at low LSP mass without violating
LEP, Tevatron, BaBar and other experimental limits. The relationship of the
required Higgs sectors to the NMSSM "ideal-Higgs" scenarios is discussed.Comment: 11 pages, 3 figures. To appear in Proceedings of PASCOS 2010. The
paper is a compilation of talks given at: PASCOS 2010, ORSAY Workshop on
"Higgs Hunting", and SLAC Workshop on "Topologies for Early LHC Searches
Neutrino Masses and Lepton-flavor-violating Decays in the Supersymmetric Left-right Model
In the supersymmetric left-right model, the light neutrino masses are given
by the Type-II seesaw mechanism. A duality property about this mechanism
indicates that there exist eight possible Higgs triplet Yukawa couplings which
result in the same neutrino mass matrix. In this paper, We work out the
one-loop renormalization group equations for the effective neutrino mass matrix
in the supersymmetric left-right model. The stability of the Type-II seesaw
scenario is briefly discussed. We also study the lepton-flavor-violating
processes ( and ) by using the
reconstructed Higgs triplet Yukawa couplings
- âŠ