Germination, emergence and pyrrolizidine-contents of common groundsel (Senecio vulgaris)

Die Aufnahme von Gemeinem Kreuzkraut (Senecio vulgaris) über Lebensmittel kann wegen des Gehalts an Pyrrolizidinalkaloiden (PA) zu gesundheitlichen Schäden führen. Daher werden pflanzenbauliche Ansätze gesucht, um Beimischungen mit S. vulgaris zu vermindern. In Klimaschränken wurde der Einfluss von Temperatur und Lichtverhältnissen sowie einer vorgeschalteten Einwirkung von Frost oder Trockenstress auf das Keimvermögen von S. vulgaris geprüft. Weiterhin wurden im Sommer 2016 vier Sätze von S. vulgaris auf der Versuchsstation Kleinhohenheim, Stuttgart, ausgesät, um den PA-Gehalt in den verschiedenen Pflanzenteilen und zu verschiedenen Jahreszeiten zu analysieren. Bei Licht und ohne Vorbehandlung keimten die Samen bei 5 °C, 10 °C und 20 °C zu 84 bis 87 %, im Dunkeln lagen die Werte etwas darunter. Eine Vorbehandlung mit Frost führte bei anschließender Keimtemperatur von 5 °C zu signifikant mehr ungekeimten, intakten Samen (75 %) gegenüber der Kontrolle (20 %) oder der Variante mit Trockenstress (8 %). Die Blüte von S. vulgaris enthielten bis zu 7600 mg PA/kg in der luftgetrockneten Biomasse und damit signifikant höhere PA-Summengehalte (Σ Retrorsin, Senecionin, Seneciphyllin, Senecivernin sowie deren korrespondierende N-Oxide) als Stängel und Blätter. Mit späterer Saatzeit stieg der Gehalt an PA in Blättern signifikant. PA-Gehalte in Nutzpflanzen durch Kontamination mit S. vulgaris könnten effektiv reduziert werden, wenn keine Blüten in das Erntegut gelangten. Niedrige Temperaturen und Frost scheinen die unerwünschte Samenüberdauerung von S. vulgaris zu fördern. Unter diesem Gesichtspunkt sind Blütenbildung und Aussamen gegen Ende der Vegetationsperiode besonders kritisch. Späte Ernteschnitte von Heil- und Gewürzpflanzen oder Schnittsalaten sind zu vermeiden, um Blüten- und Samenbildung von S. vulgaris kurz vor dem Winter einzuschränken, und um Beimischungen mit saisonal erhöhten PA-Gehalten zu verhindern.The uptake of food contaminated with common groundsel (Senecio vulgaris) is a considerable health risk because of the occurrence of pyrrolizidine alkaloids (PA) in parts of the plant. Agronomical approaches are needed to minimize potential contamination with S. vulgaris. Different temperatures, light conditions and seed pre-treatments were tested during the germination of S. vulgaris to identify the optimum environment for germination. In addition, four sets of S. vulgaris were sown in a field trial at the research station Kleinhoheneim/South West Germany in 2016 to determine the PA pattern and any shift in PA contents in during the year in flowers, leaves and stems. Germination rates were highest (84-87%) when seeds germinated in light without pre-treatment, and a little lower in darkness, at any of the three trial temperatures of 5 °C, 10 °C und 20 °C. Pre-treatment with frost, particularly in combination with cool germination temperatures, lead to significantly higher numbers of intact, ungerminated seeds (75%) compared to the control (20%) or a drought stress pre-treatment (8%). Flowers of S. vulgaris contained up to mg total PA/kg in the air dried plant material (Σ of retrorsine, senecionine, seneciphylline, senecivernine and their corresponding N-oxides) and thus the contents were significantly higher than those in stems or leaves. The PA content in leaves increased significantly during the season. As flowers seem to be the main source of PA, their removal or avoidance in harvested crops is most desired. For avoidance of seed production before winter (with risk of seed persistence due to cold temperatures), herbs and medical plants or lettuce contaminated with S. vulgaris should not be harvested in late summer or autumn. This approach would additionally avoid contamination with S vulgaris with increased PA contents in the harvested product at the end of the season

Obesity Correlates with Chronic Inflammation of the Innate Immune System in Preeclampsia and HELLP Syndrome during Pregnancy

HELLP syndrome is characterized by hemolysis, elevated liver enzymes, and a low platelet count and poses an increased risk to the pregnant woman and the unborn child. Individual risk factors such as obesity may alter immunocompetence and influence the course of preeclampsia (PE) or HELLP syndrome. Blood samples were collected from 21 pregnant women (7 healthy, 6 with PE, and 8 with HELLP syndrome) and polymorphonuclear neutrophils (PMNs) were subsequently isolated. Production of radical oxygen species (ROS), cell movement, and NETosis were assessed by live-cell imaging. Surface protein expression and oxidative burst were analyzed by flow cytometry. PE and HELLP patients had significantly higher BMI compared to the healthy control group. Depending on the expression of CD11b, CD62L, and CD66b on PMNs, a surface protein activation sum scale (SPASS) was calculated. PMNs from patients with high SPASS values showed prolonged and more targeted migration with delayed ROS production and NETosis. Obesity is associated with a chronic inflammatory state, which in combination with immunological triggers during pregnancy could modulate PMN functions. Pregnant women with higher BMI tend to have higher SPASS values, indicating activation of the innate immune system that could co-trigger PE or HELLP syndrome

Searches for transverse momentum dependent flow vector fluctuations in Pb-Pb and p-Pb collisions at the LHC

CONSELHO NACIONAL DE DESENVOLVIMENTO CIENTÍFICO E TECNOLÓGICO - CNPQFINANCIADORA DE ESTUDOS E PROJETOS - FINEPFUNDAÇÃO DE AMPARO À PESQUISA DO ESTADO DE SÃO PAULO - FAPESPThe measurement of azimuthal correlations of charged particles is presented for Pb-Pb collisions at root S-NN 2.76 TeV and p-Pb collisions at root S-NN 5.02 TeV with the ALICE detector at the CERN Large Hadron Collider. These correlations are measured for the second, third and fourth order flow vector in the pseudorapidity region vertical bar eta vertical bar 0.8 as a function of centrality and transverse momentum pT using two observables, to search for evidence of PT-dependent flow vector fluctuations. For Ph-Ph collisions at 2.76 TeV, the measurements indicate that PT-dependent fluctuations are only present for the second order flow vector. Similar results have been found for p-Pb collisions at 5.02 TeV. These measurements are compared to hydrodynamic model calculations with event-by-event geometry fluctuations in the initial state to constrain the initial conditions and transport properties of the matter created in Ph-Ph and p-Pb collisions.9133CONSELHO NACIONAL DE DESENVOLVIMENTO CIENTÍFICO E TECNOLÓGICO - CNPQFINANCIADORA DE ESTUDOS E PROJETOS - FINEPFUNDAÇÃO DE AMPARO À PESQUISA DO ESTADO DE SÃO PAULO - FAPESPCONSELHO NACIONAL DE DESENVOLVIMENTO CIENTÍFICO E TECNOLÓGICO - CNPQFINANCIADORA DE ESTUDOS E PROJETOS - FINEPFUNDAÇÃO DE AMPARO À PESQUISA DO ESTADO DE SÃO PAULO - FAPESPSem informaçãoSem informaçãoSem informaçãoThe ALICE collaboration would like to thank all its engineers and technicians for their invaluable contributions to the construction of the experiment and the CERN accelerator teams for the outstanding performance of the LHC complex. The ALICE collaboration gratefully acknowledges the resources and support provided by all Grid centres and the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG) collaboration. The ALICE collaboration acknowledges the following funding agencies for their support in building and running the ALICE detector: A.I. Alikhanyan National Science Laboratory (Yerevan Physics Institute) Foundation (ANSL), State Committee of Science and World Federation of Scientists (WFS), Armenia; Austrian Academy of Sciences and Nationalstiftung fur Forschung, Technologie und Entwicklung, Austria; Ministry of Communications and High Technologies, National Nuclear Research Center, Azerbaijan; Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Cientifico e Tecnologico (CNPq), Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), Financiadora de Estudos e Projetos (Finep) and Fundacao de Amparo a Pesquisa do Estado de Sao Paulo (FAPESP), Brazil; Ministry of Science & Technology of China (MSTC), National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) and Ministry of Education of China (MOEC), China; Ministry of Science, Education and Sport and Croatian Science Foundation, Croatia; Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports of the Czech Republic, Czech Republic; The Danish Council for Independent Research Natural Sciences, the Carlsberg Foundation and Danish National Research Foundation (DNRF), Denmark; Helsinki Institute of Physics (HIP), Finland; Commissariat a l'Energie Atomique (CEA) and Institut National de Physique Nucleaire et de Physique des Particules (IN2P3) and Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), France; Bundesministerium fur Bildung, Wissenschaft, Forschung und Technologie (BMBF) and GSI Helmholtzzentrum fur Schwerionenforschung GmbH, Germany; General Secretariat for Research and Technology, Ministry of Education, Research and Religions, Greece; National Research, Development and Innovation Office, Hungary; Department of Atomic Energy Government of India (DAE) and Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), New Delhi, India; Indonesian Institute of Science, Indonesia; Centro Fermi Museo Storico della Fisica e Centro Studi e Ricerche Enrico Fermi and Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN), Italy; Institute for Innovative Science and Technology, Nagasaki Institute of Applied Science (IIST), Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) KAKENHI and Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT), Japan; Consejo Nacional de Ciencia (CONACYT) y Tecnologia, through Fondo de Cooperacion Internacional en Ciencia y Tecnologia (FONCICYT) and Direccion General de Asuntos del Personal Academico (DGAPA), Mexico; Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (NWO), Netherlands; The Research Council of Norway, Norway; Commission on Science and Technology for Sustainable Development in the South (COMSATS), Pakistan; Pontificia Universidad Catolica del Peril, Peru; Ministry of Science and Higher Education and National Science Centre, Poland; Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information and National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF), Republic of Korea; Ministry of Education and Scientific Research, Institute of Atomic Physics and Romanian National Agency for Science, Technology and Innovation, Romania; Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR), Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation and National Research Centre Kurchatov Institute, Russia; Ministry of Education, Science, Research and Sport of the Slovak Republic, Slovakia; National Research Foundation of South Africa, South Africa; Centro de Aplicaciones Tecnologicas y Desarrollo Nuclear (CEADEN), Cubaenergia, Cuba, Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovacion and Centro de Investigaciones Energeticas, Medioambientales y Tecnologicas (CIEMAT), Spain; Swedish Research Council (VR) and Knut & Alice Wallenberg Foundation (KAW), Sweden; European Organization for Nuclear Research, Switzerland; National Science and Technology Development Agency (NSDTA), Suranaree University of Technology (SUT) and Office of the Higher Education Commission under NRU project of Thailand, Thailand; Turkish Atomic Energy Agency (TAEK), Turkey; National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, Ukraine; Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), United Kingdom; National Science Foundation of the United States of America (NSF) and United States Department of Energy, Office of Nuclear Physics (DOE NP), United States of America

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.Peer reviewe

Searches for transverse momentum dependent flow vector fluctuations in Pb-Pb and p-Pb collisions at the LHC

The measurement of azimuthal correlations of charged particles is presented for Pb-Pb collisions at sNN=2.76 TeV and p-Pb collisions at sNN=5.02 TeV with the ALICE detector at the CERN Large Hadron Collider. These correlations are measured for the second, third and fourth order flow vector in the pseudorapidity region |η| < 0.8 as a function of centrality and transverse momentum pT using two observables, to search for evidence of pT-dependent flow vector fluctuations. For Pb-Pb collisions at 2.76 TeV, the measurements indicate that pT-dependent fluctuations are only present for the second order flow vector. Similar results have been found for p-Pb collisions at 5.02 TeV. These measurements are compared to hydrodynamic model calculations with event-by-event geometry fluctuations in the initial state to constrain the initial conditions and transport properties of the matter created in Pb–Pb and p–Pb collisions

Challenges of Chemoenzymatic and Biocatalytic Reaction Cascades and Online Monitoring at a Microscale

Microreactors have been established as useful platforms for chemical and biocatalytic reaction cascades. These are often difficult to implement due to substrate, product, solvent, cofactor, or pH-based inhibitions or unfavourable reaction equilibria, but the small dimensions and physical advantages of microreactors allow a cost-effective optimisation of such reactions. The implementation of sensors adds insight into the reaction progress and eases the reaction optimisation process. In this work, reactor designs, sensor integration protocols and reaction optimisation guidelines have been developed for two types of reaction cascades, namely chemoenzymatic and bi-enzymatic cascades. The chemoenzymatic reaction couples a Diels-Alder reaction with transketolase to produce 1-(3',4'-dimethylcyclohex-3'-enyl)-1,3-dihydroxypropan-2-one (DCDHP) and the two-enzyme cascade uses transketolase and transaminase to produce 2-amino-1,3,4-butanetriol. Optimisation of reaction conditions led to a 10 mM 2-amino-1,3,4-butanetriol production in two hours. The implementation of an aluminium chloride packed-bed reactor and use of acetonitrile as a solvent for the Diels-Alder reaction led to the production of 200 mM intermediate in only 50 min and a total process yield of 3.5 mM DCDHP in the coupled Diels-Alder – transketolase reaction after only 200 min. Sensors suitable for monitoring a range of pH 3.5-8.5 were developed to monitor reactions in which pH shifts occur due to product formation. Additionally, a carbon dioxide sensing system has been adapted for implementation into a microfluidic reactor to monitor the transketolase reactions used in both model systems, in which the side-product formation of carbon dioxide is used to drive the reaction. Finally, pH sensors were implemented into a microfluidic side-entry reactor to record a real-time pH profile at eight different locations in the reactor. This made manual adjustment of the pH in the reactor possible and resulted in a higher reaction yield. This shows that online monitoring can be used to improve reaction yields for enzymatic reactions at a microfluidic scale