The evolution of early vertebrate photoreceptors

Meeting the challenge of sampling an ancient aquatic landscape by the early vertebrates was crucial to their survival and would establish a retinal bauplan to be used by all subsequent vertebrate descendents. Image-forming eyes were under tremendous selection pressure and the ability to identify suitable prey and detect potential predators was thought to be one of the major drivers of speciation in the Early Cambrian. Based on the fossil record, we know that hagfishes, lampreys, holocephalans, elasmobranchs and lungfishes occupy critical stages in vertebrate evolution, having remained relatively unchanged over hundreds of millions of years. Now using extant representatives of these ‘living fossils’, we are able to piece together the evolution of vertebrate photoreception. While photoreception in hagfishes appears to be based on light detection and controlling circadian rhythms, rather than image formation, the photoreceptors of lampreys fall into five distinct classes and represent a critical stage in the dichotomy of rods and cones. At least four types of retinal cones sample the visual environment in lampreys mediating photopic (and potentially colour) vision, a sampling strategy retained by lungfishes, some modern teleosts, reptiles and birds. Trichromacy is retained in cartilaginous fishes (at least in batoids and holocephalans), where it is predicted that true scotopic (dim light) vision evolved in the common ancestor of all living gnathostomes. The capacity to discriminate colour and balance the tradeoff between resolution and sensitivity in the early vertebrates was an important driver of eye evolution, where many of the ocular features evolved were retained as vertebrates progressed on to land.     

Tissue-Characteristic Expression of Mouse Proteome

The mouse is a valuable model organism for biomedical research. Here, we established a comprehensive spectral library and the data-independent acquisition–based quantitative proteome maps for 41 mouse organs, including some rarely reported organs such as the cornea, retina, and nine paired organs. The mouse spectral library contained 178,304 peptides from 12,320 proteins, including 1678 proteins not reported in previous mouse spectral libraries. Our data suggested that organs from the nervous system and immune system expressed the most distinct proteome compared with other organs. We also found characteristic protein expression of immune-privileged organs, which may help understanding possible immune rejection after organ transplantation. Each tissue type expressed characteristic high-abundance proteins related to its physiological functions. We also uncovered some tissue-specific proteins which have not been reported previously. The testis expressed highest number of tissue-specific proteins. By comparison of nine paired organs including kidneys, testes, and adrenal glands, we found left organs exhibited higher levels of antioxidant enzymes. We also observed expression asymmetry for proteins related to the apoptotic process, tumor suppression, and organ functions between the left and right sides. This study provides a comprehensive spectral library and a quantitative proteome resource for mouse studies.     

Comparison of dose distribution in IMRT and RapidArc technique in prostate radiotherapy

AimThe aim was to provide a dosimetric comparison between IMRT and RapidArc treatment plans with RPI index with simultaneous comparison of the treatment delivery time.BackgroundIMRT and RapidArc provide highly conformal dose distribution with good sparing of normal tissues. However, a complex spatial dosimetry of IMRT and RapidArc plans hampers the evaluation and comparison between plans calculated for the two modalities. RPI was used in this paper for treatment plan comparisons. The duration of the therapeutic session in RapidArc is reported to be shorter in comparison to therapeutic time of the other dynamic techniques. For this reasons, total treatment delivery time in both techniques was compared and discussed.Materials and methods15 patients with prostate carcinoma were randomly selected for the analysis. Two competitive treatment plans using respectively the IMRT and RapidArc techniques were computed for each patient in Eclipse planning system v. 8.6.15. RPIwin^® application was used for RPI calculations for each treatment plan.Additionally, total treatment time was compared between IMRT and RapidArc plans. Total treatment time was a sum of monitor units (MU) for each treated field.ResultsThe mean values of the RPI indices were insignificantly higher for IMRT plans in comparison to rotational therapy. Comparison of the mean numbers of monitor units confirmed that the use of rotational technique instead of conventional static field IMRT can significantly reduce the treatment time.ConclusionAnalysis presented in this paper, demonstrated that RapidArc can compete with the IMRT technique in the field of treatment plan dosimetry reducing the time required for dose delivery.     

Land surface phenology as an indicator of biodiversity patterns

With the rapid decline in biodiversity worldwide it is imperative to develop procedures for assessing changes in biodiversity across space. The synoptic view provided by imaging remote sensors constitutes a suitable approach for analyzing biodiversity from local to regional scales. A procedure based on the close relationship between floristic similarity and the similarity in land surface phenology was recently developed and successfully applied to assess diversity patterns using time series imagery acquired by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectro-radiometer (MODIS). However, as it depends on high temporal resolution remotely sensed data (e.g., MODIS), the procedure is constrained by the coarse spatial resolution characterizing these high temporal resolution data. Using an optimized technique for image fusion, we combined high temporal resolution data acquired by the MODIS sensor system with moderate spatial resolution data acquired by the Landsat TM/ETM+ sensor systems. Our results show that the MODIS/Landsat data fusion allows the characterization of land surface phenology at higher spatial resolutions, which better corresponded with information acquired within vegetation survey plots established in temperate montane forests located in Wolong Nature Reserve, Sichuan Province, China. As such, the procedure is useful for capturing changes in biodiversity induced by disturbances operating at large spatial scales and constitutes a suitable tool for monitoring and managing biodiversity.     

Rupicolin-A and -B,rupin-A and -B,and cumambrin-B oxide from Artemisia tripartita ssp. Rupicola

Five new sesquiterpene Iactones have been isolated from Artemisia tripartita Rydb. ssp. rupicola Beetle. The compounds, all guaianolides, are structurally related in what appears to be a sequence in which epoxidation plays the principal role.     

Evidence for extracellular localization of activator calcium in dog coronary artery smooth muscle as studied by the pyroantimonate method

Summary Correlated physiological and electron-microscopic studies were made on the source of calcium activating the contractile system (activator calcium) in dog coronary artery smooth muscle fibers. The magnitude of contracture tension induced by 100 mM K⁺ was dependent on external Ca²⁺ concentration and reduced or eliminated by factors known to reduce the Ca²⁺ spike or ca²⁺ influx. Little or no mechanical response was elicited by treatments known to cause release of intracellularly stored calcium. These results indicated that the contractile system is mainly activated by the inward movement of extracellular calcium. In accordance with the physiological experiments, electron-opaque pyroantimonate precipitate containing calcium was found in the lumina of caveolae, but not in any intracellular structures close to the plasma membrane, when the relaxed fibers were fixed in a 1% osmium tetroxide solution containing 2% potassium pyroantimonate. If the contracted fibers were fixed in the same solution, the pyroantimonate precipitate was diffusely distributed in the myoplasm in the form of numerous particles, while the precipitate in the caveolar lumina was scarcely seen. These findings are discussed in connection with the regulation of intracellular Ca²⁺ concentration in dog coronary artery smooth muscle.     

Exploration research on the fusion of multimodal spectrum technology to improve performance of rapid diagnosis scheme for thyroid dysfunction

The spectral fusion by Raman spectroscopy and Fourier infrared spectroscopy combined with pattern recognition algorithms is utilized to diagnose thyroid dysfunction serum, and finds the spectral segment with the highest sensitivity to further advance diagnosis speed. Compared with the single infrared spectroscopy or Raman spectroscopy, the proposal can improve the detection accuracy, and can obtain more spectral features, indicating greater differences between thyroid dysfunction and normal serum samples. For discriminating different samples, principal component analysis (PCA) was first used for feature extraction to reduce the dimension of high‐dimension spectral data and spectral fusion. Then, support vector machine (SVM), back propagation neural network, extreme learning machine and learning vector quantization algorithms were employed to establish the discriminant diagnostic models. The accuracy of spectral fusion of the best analytical model PCA‐SVM, single Raman spectral accuracy and single infrared spectral accuracy is 83.48%, 78.26% and 80%, respectively. The accuracy of spectral fusion is higher than the accuracy of single spectrum in five classifiers. And the diagnostic accuracy of spectral fusion in the range of 2000 to 2500 cm^?1 is 81.74%, which greatly improves the sample measure speed and data analysis speed than analysis of full spectra. The results from our study demonstrate that the serum spectral fusion technique combined with multivariate statistical methods have great potential for the screening of thyroid dysfunction.     

Planktonic indices in the evaluation of the ecological status and the trophic state of the longest lake in Poland

Due to the intensive mixing polymictic lakes should be homogenous. However, morphometric diversity and high water dynamics contribute to the differentiation of many parameters in various areas of the lakes. This study analyzes both phytoplankton and zooplankton to assess differences in water quality along the north–south axis of the longest lake in Poland. New phytoplankton indicators were applied for determining the lake's ecological status: the Q index based on functional groups and the PMPL (Phytoplankton Metric for Polish Lakes) index based on phytoplankton biomass. TSI_ROT index (Rotifer Trophic State Index), which comprises the percentage of species indicating a high trophic state in the indicatory group and the percentage of bacteriovorus in the Rotifera population, was used for zooplankton analysis.TP content was different at different sites – we observed its gradual increase from the south to the north. Spatial variation of phosphorus did not considerably affect plankton diversity. The phytoplankton was dominated by Oscillatoriales, typical of shallow, well-mixed eutrophic lakes. The ecological status of the lake based on the EQR (Ecological Quality Ratio) was poor or moderate. The zooplankton was dominated by rotifers (at almost all sites), which indicates a eutrophic state of the lake. The values of phytoplankton indices at the studied sites did not differ considerably; the differences resulted more from local conditions such as the contaminant inflow and the macrophyte development than water dynamics.We have demonstrated that in the lake dominated by filamentous Cyanobacteria the ecological status should be determined according to the PMPL index or other indices dependent on the dominant Cyanobacteria species. Since the Q index does not include the functional group S1, the results can lead to the false conclusion that water quality improves with an increased amount of phytoplankton. The high abundance of Cyanobacteria in the lake may have contributed to the poor growth of rotifers.     

The Relativistic Quantum Defect Orbital Method and some of its Applications

Justification of a simple and reliable relativistic procedure for the prediction of a large body of transition probability data is made. The main features of the Relativistic Quantum Defect Orbital (RQDO) formalism are described, and several examples of the data yielded by this method are presented in tabular and graph forms.