High-Mobility Group Box-1 Protein a Potential Inflammatory Biomarker in Diabetic Retinopathy

Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is the leading cause of acquired blindness, which is one of the most feared complications of diabetes among young adults. The cause of vision loss in DR is complex and remains incompletely understood. One of the earliest changes in the development of retinopathy is break down of blood-retinal barrier (BRB) and the formation of acellular capillaries by unknown mechanism. There is an accumulating body of evidence that demonstrated, chronic low-grade subclinical inflammation and retinal leukocyte stasis are responsible for many of the vascular lesions in DR. In the retina, diabetes induced sustained proinflammatory responses by increasing the production of proinflammatory cytokines, chemokines, and other inflammatory mediators leading to damaged vasculature and neovascularization. An emerging issue in DR research is the focus on the mechanistic link between chronic low-grade inflammation and angiogenesis. Recent evidence has revealed that extracellular high-mobility group box-1 (HMGB1) protein acts as a potent proinflammatory cytokine that triggers inflammation and recruits leukocytes to the site of tissue damage, and exhibits angiogenic effects. The expression of HMGB1 is upregulated in epiretinal membranes and vitreous fluid from patients with proliferative DR and in the diabetic retina. HMGB1 mediates inflammation, breakdown of the BRB, and apoptosis in the diabetic retina. The overall objective of this chapter is to provide the up-to-date literature about the crosstalk between extracellular HMGB1 and DR

A Framework for Creating Global Schema Using Global Views from Distributed Heterogeneous Relational Databases in Multidatabase System

oai:ojs2.computerresearch.org:article/10000

Landlessness in Rural Areas of Pakistan and Policy Options: A Preliminary Investigation

The quantification of landlessness is a formidable task. Conceptual ambiguities involved in the classification of landlessness and data limitations compound the difficulties in the estimation. Landlessness, which is an elusive concept, tends to acquire interpretations which vary with the objectives, context and estimation procedures adopted in different research endeavours. The denotation and connotation of the concept of landlessness, the population of interest (or at risk) and the objectives of measurement therefore need to be spell out very clearly for a meaningful and policy-relevant exercise. Identification of the state of landlessness using the criterion of ownership and access to land, has often been made. While the 'ownership' may be clear in certain contexts, that of 'access' needs further explanations in terms of the nature, extent and type of access. A related question, is the demarcation of the population or its subset whose landlessness is to be estimated: are all the inhabitants of an area or the ones who primarily depend on land for their livelihood be regarded as the relevant population. The dependence on land needs to be further specified whether the person is engaged in agricultural operations as worker or not

Wheat Productivity, Efficiency, and Sustainability: A Stochastic Production Frontier Analysis

The agriculture sector plays a crucial role in the overall development of the country. The sector shares about 24 percent of the GDP and employs about 44 percent of the workforce in the country. Crops sub-sector is the major contributor towards agriculture, sharing more than 53 percent of the value-added. Wheat, being the staple food of Pakistanis, carries immense importance: it contributes about 12 percent of sector value-added, is sown on about 37 percent of the total cropped area, and shares 80 percent in consumption of food grains, while its share in food grain production is around 70 percent. As primary diet, wheat alone shares about 50 percent of the total calories’ and proteins intake in Pakistan, and contributes about 8 percent of the total fat consumed [FAO (Various Issues]. Consequently, overall dietary well being of our people especially the urban and rural poor is largely dependent on the performance of wheat economy. Despite serious efforts made by the wheat breeders in developing new highyielding varieties during the past three decades, wheat production in Pakistan remained short of demand and thus import has been the only alternative to fill the gap. The present wheat requirement of the country is more than 20 million tonnes. It has been estimated that by the year 2020 wheat import would rise up to 15 million tones costing 2 billion US dollars [PARC (1996)]. The situation could worsen further if Pakistan fails to achieve a higher level of growth rate in wheat production and sustain it.

A subspace based subspace inclusion graph on vector space

Let $\mathscr{W}$ be a fixed $k$-dimensional subspace of an $n$-dimensi\-onal vector space $\mathscr{V}$ such that $n-k\geq1.$ In this paper, we introduce a graph structure, called the subspace based subspace inclusion graph $\mathscr{I}_{n}^{\mathscr{W}}(\mathscr{V}),$ where the vertex set $\mathscr{V}(\mathscr{I}_{n}^{\mathscr{W}}(\mathscr{V}))$ is the collection of all subspaces $\mathscr{U}$ of $\mathscr{V}$ such that $\mathscr{U}+\mathscr{W}\neq\mathscr{V}$ and $\mathscr{U}\nsubseteq\mathscr{W},$ i.e., $\mathscr{V}(\mathscr{I}_{n}^{\mathscr{W}}(\mathscr{V}))= \{\mathscr{U}\subseteq\mathscr{V}~|~\mathscr{U}+\mathscr{W}\neq\mathscr{V}, \mathscr{U}\nsubseteq\mathscr{W}\}$ and any two distinct vertices $\mathscr{U}_{1}$ and $\mathscr{U}_{1}$ of $\mathscr{I}_{n}^{\mathscr{W}}(\mathscr{V})$ are adjacent if and only if either $\mathscr{U}_{1}+\mathscr{W}\subset\mathscr{U}_{2}+\mathscr{W}$ or $\mathscr{U}_{2}+\mathscr{W}\subset\mathscr{U}_{1}+\mathscr{W}.$ The diameter, girth, clique number, and chromatic number of $\mathscr{I}_{n}^{\mathscr{W}}(\mathscr{V})$ are studied. It is shown that two subspace based subspace inclusion graphs $\mathscr{I}_{n}^{\mathscr{W}_{1}}(\mathscr{V})$ and $\mathscr{I}_{n}^{\mathscr{W}_{2}}(\mathscr{V})$ are isomorphic if and only if $\mathscr{W}_{1}$ and $\mathscr{W}_{2}$ are isomorphic. Further, some properties of $\mathscr{I}_{n}^{\mathscr{W}}(\mathscr{V})$ are obtained when the base field is finite