Comparative ecology of the European eel, Anguilla anguilla (L.1758), in a large Iberian river

A total of 1,816 eels were sampled in 1988, from seven sampling areas. Four areas were located in brackish water and the remaining three were located in freshwater reaches of the Tagus river basin. Eels were more abundant in the middle estuary and decreased both in the upstream and in the downstream directions, with a predominance of males in higher density areas. Smaller individuals preferred more peripheral areas, such as margins and upper reaches in the brackish water zone, and the tributaries of the freshwater habitats. It was assumed that this distribution pattern resulted from three main factors: (i) the dominance of larger specimens; (ii) the need to avoid predators and; (iii) the search for better trophic conditions. The condition of the individuals generally decreased toward the upper reaches, apparently due to a corresponding decrease in feeding intensity. The presence of the Belver dam in the main river, 158 km upstream from the sea, seemed to impose major alterations to the described patterns. The concentration of specimens below this impassable obstacle yielded a reduction in the proportion of females and a decrease in the condition and survival of the eels, contributing to a reduction in the spawning success of this population. Suggestions to diminish the effects of the dam, and to preserve the fishery are also presente

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency–Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research

Resistance Exercise Program: Intervention To Reduce Inflammation And Improve Nutritional Status In Hemodialysis Patients

Exercise programs have been recommended as nutritional interventions in hemodialysis (HD) patients to minimize loss of muscle mass, improve physical and functional capacity, inflammation thus controlling or preventing cardiovascular diseases (CVD), which accounts for 50% of mortality in dialysis patients. Therefore the purpose of this study was to analyze the effects of a resistance exercise (RE) program on biochemical parameters, inflammation markers, and body composition in HD patients. Thirty- six HD patients (61.1% men, mean age 46.7±2.5yrs) were studied. The anthropometric and biochemical parameters are presented in Table. There were significant differences after 6 months of RE in albumin and CRP plasma levels and body composition parameters. The HD patients gained nearly 3kg of lean mass and lost about 3% of body fat. Parameters Before(n=30) After(n=30) BMI (kg/m2) 22.8±4.0 23.3±4.3 Arm muscular area (cm) 30.3±13.7 35.4±13.8* Body Fat (%) 31.5±5.6 28.4±5.9* Lean mass (kg) 42.4±10.0 45.5±11.0* Albumin (g/dL) 3.6±0.3 3.8±0.2* Globulin (g/dL) 3.2±0.3 2.8±0.5** Interleukin-6 (pg/mL) 81.3±9.4 78.7±10.4 TNF-α (pg/mL) 25.7±6.5 24.3±8.7 Creatinine (mg/dL) 12.5±3.6 12.2±3.7 CRP (pg/mL) 2.9±0.4 2.0±0.1* ⁎ p<001. ⁎⁎ p<05. In conclusion, statistically significant improvements were observed in body composition, albumin and CRP levels after 6 months of resistance exercises. Therefore, RE provide better prognosis in HD patients reducing cardiovascular risk, inflammation and loss of muscle mass