Activity of neurons in the anterolateral region of the rabbit motor cortex during taking food and nonfood objects in instrumental behavior

We showed earlier that only 2-4% of N-neurons in the rabbit's anterolateral ("masticatory") motor cortex (AC) that are being specialized in relation to Newly formed acts (such as pressing the pedal, approaching the pedal) during the elaboration of instrumental food-acquistion behavior. The majority of neurons in this area are O-neurons that are specialized in relation to the Older acts formed long before the acquisition of instrumental behavior: mostly taking of food. It was shown also that electrical stimulation of this area produced jaw movements. It might seem reasonable to propose that the number of N-neurons may be increased in this area if pedal pressing in substituted with instrumental act like seizure and pulling a ring that is more corresponding to the "projectional property" of the AC. Here we show that the number of N-neurons in rabbit's AC remains constant -3.4%, even is the animals that were trained to pull a ring instead of pressing a pedal. Thus, we assume that the small number of N-neurons is the stable property of the AC. However, the role of the AC in the subserving of the behavior does not remain the same. Much more AC units (O-neurons) were activated in the ring pulling than in the pedal pressing instrumental act.     

Dynamics of local shifts in oscillations and energy metabolism of the rabbit cerebral cortex during formation of a conditioned defensive reflex

Brain energy metabolism in different functional states or activities of humans and animals is characterized by dynamic changes in the degree of coupling between glycolysis and tissue respiration in different cell compartments (Fox et al., 1988; Fox, 1989; Pellerin et Magistretti, 1994; Prichard et al., 1991; Schur et al., 1999). These processes determine variations in the brain redox state (Siesjo, 1978) that can be potentiometrically recorded with implanted platinum electrodes as the brain tissue redox state potential E (Puppi et Fely, 1983). This potential was recorded in rat brain cortex with four pairs of platinum electrodes implanted into different symmetrical cortical region (one electrode of a pair being located in the cortical layers, another being located epidurally). In the course of defensive conditioning (after 5-15 combination of a bulb light and a weak electrodermal stimulation of a ear), E oscillations (6-10 per minute) appeared. In this period, stimuli combinations produced the generalized E shifts. Later on (with accumulation of stimuli combinations), the episodes of E increase were replaced by the episodes of E decrease. To the 200-400th combinations, E oscillations disappeared, and E shifts became local and stable. The findings suggest that conditioning shifts the balance between the main energy-producing systems in the brain tissue: at the initial stages of conditioning brain functions are predominantly supported by the energy obtained from tissue respiration, while during the realization of defensive conditioning glycolysis is the main source of energy.     

Role of structure and pH in cyclization of allene oxide fatty acids: implications for the reaction mechanism

Incubations of allene oxide synthases of flax or maize with the E,E-isomers of the 13- and 9-hydroperoxides of linoleic acid (E,E-13- and E,E-9-HPOD, respectively) at pH 7.5 afforded substantial yields of trans-disubstituted cyclopentenones. Under the conditions used, (Z,E)-HPODs were converted mainly into -ketols and afforded only trace amount of cyclopentenones. These findings indicated that changing the double bond geometry from Z to E dramatically increased the rate of formation of the pericyclic pentadienyl cation intermediate necessary for electrocyclization of 18:2-allene oxides and thus the yield of cyclopentenones. The well-known cyclization of the homoallylic allene oxide (12,13-EOT) derived from -linolenic acid 13-hydroperoxide (E,Z-13-HPOT) into cis-12-oxo-10,15-phytodienoic acid was suppressed at pH below neutral and was not observable at pH 4.5. In contrast, cyclization of the allene oxide ((9E)-12,13-EOD) derived from (E,E)-13-HPOD was slightly favoured at low pH. The finding that the cyclizations of 12,13-EOT and (9E)-12,13-EOD were differently affected by changes in pH suggested that the mechanisms of cyclization of these allene oxides are distinct.     

Sexual dimorphism in lizard body shape: the roles of sexual selection and fecundity selection

Sexual dimorphism is widespread in lizards, with the most consistently dimorphic traits being head size (males have larger heads) and trunk length (the distance between the front and hind legs is greater in females). These dimorphisms have generally been interpreted as follows: (1) large heads in males evolve through male-male rivalry (sexual selection); and (2) larger interlimb lengths in females provide space for more eggs (fecundity selection). In an Australian lizard (the snow skink, Niveoscincus microlepidotus), we found no evidence for ongoing selection on head size. Trunk length, however, was under positive fecundity selection in females and under negative sexual selection in males. Thus, fecundity selection and sexual selection work in concert to drive the evolution of sexual dimorphism in trunk length in snow skinks.     

Crystallinity and morphology in films of starch, amylose and amylopectin blends

Films of potato starch, amylose, and amylopectin and blends thereof were prepared by solution casting and examined using X-ray diffraction, light microscopy, transmission electron microscopy, and differential scanning calorimetry. Amylose films had a relative crystallinity of about 30% whereas amylopectin films were entirely amorphous. Blending of amylose and amylopectin resulted in films with a considerably higher degree of crystallinity than could be predicted. This is explained by cocrystallization between amylose and amylopectin and possibly by crystallization of amylopectin. The crystallized material gave rise to an endotherm detected with differential scanning calorimetry. The enthalpy and peak temperature of the transition also increased as the water content decreased. When the amylose proportion in the blends was low, separate phases of amylose and amylopectin were observed by light microscopy. At higher amylose proportions, however, the phase separation was apparently prevented by amylose gelation and the formation of a continuous amylose network. The amylose network in the films, observed with transmission electron microscopy, consisted of stiff strands and open pores and became less visible as the amylose proportion decreased. The water content of the films was dependent on the microstructure and the crystallinity.     

Prediction of food protein allergenicity: a bioinformatic learning systems approach

Food hypersensitivity is constantly increasing in Western societies with a prevalence of about 1-2% in Europe and in the USA. Among children, the incidence is even higher. Because of the introduction of foods derived from genetically modified crops on the marketplace, the scientific community, regulatory bodies and international associations have intensified discussions on risk assessment procedures to identify potential food allergenicity of the newly introduced proteins. In this work, we present a novel biocomputational methodology for the classification of amino acid sequences with regard to food allergenicity and non-allergenicity. This method relies on a computerised learning system trained using selected excerpts of amino acid sequences. One example of such a successful learning system is presented which consists of feature extraction from sequence alignments performed with the FASTA3 algorithm (employing the BLOSUM50 substitution matrix) combined with the k-Nearest-Neighbour (kNN) classification algorithm. Briefly, the two features extracted are the alignment score and the alignment length and the kNN algorithm assigns the pair of extracted features from an unknown sequence to the prevalent class among its k nearest neighbours in the training (prototype) set available. 91 food allergens from several specialised public repositories of food allergy and the SWALL database were identified, pre-processed, and stored, yielding one of the most extensively characterised repositories of allergenic sequences known today. All allergenic sequences were classified using a standard one-leave-out cross validation procedure yielding about 81% correctly classified allergens and the classification of 367 non-allergens in an independent test set resulted in about 98% correct classifications. The biocomputational approach presented should be regarded as a significant extension and refinement of earlier attempts suggested for in silico food safety assessment. Our results show that the framework described here is powerful enough to become useful as part of a multiple-procedure test scheme that also depicts other evaluation approaches such as solid phase immunoassay and tests for stability to digestions.     

Real-time monitoring of rolling-circle amplification using a modified molecular beacon design

We describe a method to monitor rolling-circle replication of circular oligonucleotides in dual-color and in real-time using molecular beacons. The method can be used to study the kinetics of the polymerization reaction and to amplify and quantify circularized oligonucleotide probes in a rolling-circle amplification (RCA) reaction. Modified molecular beacons were made of 2′-O-Me-RNA to prevent 3′ exonucleolytic degradation by the polymerase used. Moreover, the complement of one of the stem sequences of the molecular beacon was included in the RCA products to avoid fluorescence quenching due to inter-molecular hybridization of neighboring molecular beacons hybridizing to the concatemeric polymerization product. The method allows highly accurate quantification of circularized DNA over a broad concentration range by relating the signal from the test DNA circle to an internal reference DNA circle reporting in a distinct fluorescence color.     

DNA fragmentation and morphological changes in apoptotic human lymphocytes

Cell suspensions enriched in cells at various stages of apoptosis were obtained by separation of irradiated human peripheral blood lymphocytes on density gradients at different post-irradiation times. The state of DNA fragmentation in the cells was determined by comet assay and pulsed field gel electrophoresis. The morphologically distinguishable features of apoptosis such as chromatin condensation and cell shrinkage correlated with discrete stages of DNA fragmentation. It was found that >/=50 kbp fragmentation of DNA occurs already in cells of normal density whereas the subsequent DNA fragmentation onto fragments <50 kbp occurs in parallel with cell shrinkage and simultaneous increase in cell density.The observed stages of DNA fragmentation seem to be separated in time that could allow in case of abortive apoptosis formation of chromosomal aberrations.     

Individual differences in sensitivity to the odor of 4,16-androstadien-3-one

Individual differences in sensitivity to the putative human pheromone androstadienone were investigated in three experiments. In experiment 1, the absolute detection threshold for androstadienone was determined to be 211 micro M using the method of constant stimuli. Detection for the related compound estratetraenol was also investigated but a threshold could not be determined. In experiment 2, using an adaptive threshold test on 100 participants, the sensitivity distribution for androstadienone, but not for the reference odor phenylethyl alcohol, was bimodal, with a smaller group of individuals with a high sensitivity to androstadienone (supersmellers). A lack of correlation between thresholds for androstadienone and phenylethyl alcohol further suggested that the bimodality for androstadienone was not due to individuals with a high general olfactory sensitivity. In line with an earlier observation, there was a statistical tendency for women to be more sensitive to androstadienone than men. Results of experiment 3 preclude the possibility that the bimodal sensitivity distribution for androstadienone would depend on individual differences in trigeminal activation. Altogether, the current study suggests that olfactory sensitivity to androstadienone is bimodally distributed in the population with a subgroup consisting of highly sensitive people.     

Medroxyprogesterone priming and response to the ram effect in Corriedale ewes during the nonbreeding season

The "ram effect" (RE) is an inexpensive technique that allows farmers to obtain out-of-season lambs. Five hundred and ninety-six Corriedale ewes were used in three experiments to determine the effectiveness of different medroxyprogesterone (MAP) treatments associated with the ram effect during the nonbreeding season. The aim of the first experiment was to evaluate the effectiveness of short-term (6-day) MAP priming. We obtained similar results in estrus incidence and fertility after using MAP sponges for 6, 9, and 13 days. In the second experiment, we compared the effect of sponges containing 20, 40, or 60 mg of MAP used in 6-day priming. Estrous behavior and fertility were not affected by dosage. In the third experiment, 2.5mg of MAP was administered in single treatments 0, 1, 3, or 5 days before the introduction of the rams. Medroxyprogesterone administration 1, 3, or 5 days before the introduction of the rams concentrated estrus in ewes 17 to 20 days later.