Double-clad fiber with a tapered end for confocal endomicroscopy

We present a double-clad fiber coupler (DCFC) for use in confocal endomicroscopy to reduce speckle contrast, increase signal collection while preserving optical sectioning. The DCFC is made by incorporating a double-clad tapered fiber (DCTF) to a fused-tapered DCFC for achromatic transmission (from 1265 nm to 1325 nm) of > 95% illumination light trough the single mode (SM) core and collection of > 40% diffuse light through inner cladding modes. Its potential for confocal endomicroscopy is demonstrated in a spectrally-encoded imaging setup which shows a 3 times reduction in speckle contrast as well as 5.5 × increase in signal collection compared to imaging with a SM fiber

Potato (Solanum tuberosum L.) tuber ageing induces changes in the proteome and antioxidants associated with the sprouting pattern

During post-harvest storage, potato tubers age as they undergo an evolution of their physiological state influencing their sprouting pattern. In the present study, physiological and biochemical approaches were combined to provide new insights on potato (Solanum tuberosum L. cv. Désirée) tuber ageing. An increase in the physiological age index (PAI) value from 0.14 to 0.83 occurred during storage at 4 °C over 270 d. Using this reference frame, a proteomic approach was followed based on two-dimensional electrophoresis. In the experimental conditions of this study, a marked proteolysis of patatin occurred after the PAI reached a value of 0.6. In parallel, several glycolytic enzymes were up-regulated and cellular components influencing protein conformation and the response to stress were altered. The equilibrium between the 20S and 26S forms of the proteasome was modified, the 20S form that recycles oxidized proteins being up-regulated. Two proteins belonging to the cytoskeleton were also differentially expressed during ageing. As most of these changes are also observed in an oxidative stress context, an approach focused on antioxidant compounds and enzymes as well as oxidative damage on polyunsaturated fatty acids and proteins was conducted. All the changes observed during ageing seemed to allow the potato tubers to maintain their radical scavenging activity until the end of the storage period as no accumulation of oxidative damage was observed. These data are interpreted considering the impact of reactive oxygen species on the development and the behaviour of other plant systems undergoing ageing or senescence processes

Protective Human Leucocyte Antigen Haplotype, HLA-DRB1*01-B*14, against Chronic Chagas Disease in Bolivia

Chronic Chagas disease consists of four different forms categorized on the basis of their clinical manifestations, namely; cardiac, digestive, cardiodigestive and indeterminate. In Latin America, there are 8–10 million seropositive persons who are at risk of, or have already developed serious clinical complications and who have limited access to effective treatment. The cardiac and digestive forms are characterized by tissue damage caused by persistent infection of Trypanosoma cruzi and are thought to be modulated by host immunity. In our large scale screening for chronic Chagas disease in Santa Cruz, Bolivia, hearts and colons of 229 seropositive patients were examined. We found 31.4% of patients had abnormal electrocardiograms (ECGs), 15.7% presented with megacolon, 5.2% had a combination of abnormal ECG and megacolon, and 58.1% were of indeterminate status. Previously, we attempted to ascertain whether parasite genetic polymorphism might account for the differences in clinical manefestations, by analyzing parasite DNA taken from the same study group (with the addition of a further 62 megacolon post-operational patients). We found no relationships between parasite lineages and clinical disease form. The present study reveals that host HLA polymorphisms associate with clinical manifestations of Chagas

Transcriptional Homeostasis of a Mangrove Species, Ceriops tagal, in Saline Environments, as Revealed by Microarray Analysis

<div><h3>Background</h3><p>Differential responses to the environmental stresses at the level of transcription play a critical role in adaptation. Mangrove species compose a dominant community in intertidal zones and form dense forests at the sea-land interface, and although the anatomical and physiological features associated with their salt-tolerant lifestyles have been well characterized, little is known about the impact of transcriptional phenotypes on their adaptation to these saline environments.</p> <h3>Methodology and Principal findings</h3><p>We report the time-course transcript profiles in the roots of a true mangrove species, <em>Ceriops tagal</em>, as revealed by a series of microarray experiments. The expression of a total of 432 transcripts changed significantly in the roots of <em>C. tagal</em> under salt shock, of which 83 had a more than 2-fold change and were further assembled into 59 unigenes. Global transcription was stable at the early stage of salt stress and then was gradually dysregulated with the increased duration of the stress. Importantly, a pair-wise comparison of predicted homologous gene pairs revealed that the transcriptional regulations of most of the differentially expressed genes were highly divergent in <em>C. tagal</em> from that in salt-sensitive species, <em>Arabidopsis thaliana</em>.</p> <h3>Conclusions/Significance</h3><p>This work suggests that transcriptional homeostasis and specific transcriptional regulation are major events in the roots of <em>C. tagal</em> when subjected to salt shock, which could contribute to the establishment of adaptation to saline environments and, thus, facilitate the salt-tolerant lifestyle of this mangrove species. Furthermore, the candidate genes underlying the adaptation were identified through comparative analyses. This study provides a foundation for dissecting the genetic basis of the adaptation of mangroves to intertidal environments.</p> </div

Using social choice theory and acceptability analysis to measure the value of health systems.

The Future Health Index (FHI) is developed by the Royal Philips to help determine the readiness of countries to address global health challenges and build sustainable, fit-for-purpose national health systems. The FHI 2018 presents the Value Measure to measure the value of 16 health systems, which is formulated by taking the arithmetic average of Access, Satisfaction and Efficiency. However, this scheme is not the Pareto optimal and loses association with weights. For these reasons, this paper proposes to apply the social choice theory and Stochastic Multicriteria Acceptability Analysis for group decision making (SMAA-2) to measure the value of health systems, by means of re-constructing the Value Measure. Specifically, we begin with considering all possible individual preferences among Access, Satisfaction and Efficiency, which is mathematically represented by ranked weights of them; the pessimistic and optimistic outcomes under certain individual preference are derived in a closed-form manner, according to which an interval decision matrix is then formulated; the SMAA-2 is then lastly applied to compute the holistic acceptability index, which is considered as a revised Value Measure. An empirical study using the data of 16 health systems is conducted to show the effectiveness and superiority of our method. It is demonstrated that our method always outperforms the Value Measure, by means of comparing the Spearman's rank correlation coefficients

A Modified Nature Publishing Index via Shannon Entropy

This paper develops a Shannon Entropy approach based only on the number of papers published to propose scientific institution rankings. A simple and efficient approach with weight restrictions is employed to derive the score under specific preferences. The importance degrees for each preference are determined using the concept of Shannon Entropy. Finally, a weighted linear combination of different lexicographic preferences with subjective perceptions between the corrected count and the number of articles criteria is proposed. An application to Asia-Pacific ranking of the Nature Publishing Index is to illustrate the effectiveness of our proposed method

Allocating fixed resources for DMUs with interval data

Conventional DEA models tend to allocate the fixed resources to multiple decision-making units (DMUs) and treat the allocated resource as an extra input for every single DMU. However, the existing DEA resource allocation (DEA-RA) methods are applicable exclusively to the DMUs with exact values of inputs and outputs. A lack of precision for the input or output data of DMUs, such as the interval data, would cause a failure of the existing methods to allocate resources to DMUs. In order to resolve this problem, three DEA-RA models are proposed in this paper for different scenarios of decision-making. All of the proposed DEA-RA models are based on a set of common weights. Finally, the proposed models are empirically tested and validated through three examples. As revealed by the results, our proposed models are capable of providing a more fair and practical initial allocation scheme for decision makers