Zinc-deficient sprouting blight potatoes and their possible relation with neural tube defects

Maternal nutritional zinc deficiency is blamed in the pathogenesis of neural tube defects. In animal and plant domains zinc is required for growth and development. The objective of the present study was to show that sprouting blighted potato tuber is zinc deficient. In five potato varieties, zinc was measured by atomic absorption spectrophotometry in wet-ashed paired slices of edible potato tuber and in its peel, in blighted potato tuber and in its sprout. Zinc contents were measured as the mean (+/- SEM) and the following values were found, 0.388 +/- 0.036, 0.623 +/- 0.059, 0.550 +/- 0.030 and 1.089 +/- 0.181 mg per 100 g wet weight, respectively. In conclusion, we believe that long-term consumption of zinc-depleted, blight potato tuber by pregnant woman could be potentially teratogenic with the consequent birth of a baby with neural tube defects.     

Thermodynamic constraints on neural dimensions,firing rates,brain temperature and size

There have been suggestions that heat caused by cerebral metabolic activity may constrain mammalian brain evolution, architecture, and function. This article investigates physical limits on brain wiring and corresponding changes in brain temperature that are imposed by thermodynamics of heat balance determined mainly by Na⁺/K⁺-ATPase, cerebral blood flow, and heat conduction. It is found that even moderate firing rates cause significant intracellular Na⁺ build-up, and the ATP consumption rate associated with pumping out these ions grows nonlinearly with frequency. Surprisingly, the power dissipated by the Na⁺/K⁺ pump depends biphasically on frequency, which can lead to the biphasic dependence of brain temperature on frequency as well. Both the total power of sodium pumps and brain temperature diverge for very small fiber diameters, indicating that too thin fibers are not beneficial for thermal balance. For very small brains blood flow is not a sufficient cooling mechanism deep in the brain. The theoretical lower bound on fiber diameter above which brain temperature is in the operational regime is strongly frequency dependent but finite due to synaptic depression. For normal neurophysiological conditions this bound is at least an order of magnitude smaller than average values of empirical fiber diameters, suggesting that neuroanatomy of the mammalian brains operates in the thermodynamically safe regime. Analytical formulas presented can be used to estimate average firing rates in mammals, and relate their changes to changes in brain temperature, which can have important practical applications. In general, activity in larger brains is found to be slower than in smaller brains.     

楸树不同无性系枝条萌芽力及催芽条件初探

楸树(Catalpa bungei C.A.Mey.)为紫葳科(Bignoniaceae)梓属(Catalpa Scop.)落叶乔木,生长速度快,其树干通直、材质坚韧,既可观花又能观果,是优质用材、行道树和园林观赏的常用树种之一[1]。近年来,研究者对楸树的耐盐性、品种选育以及繁殖技术等进行研究并获得了一定的成果[2-7]。但是,由于具有自花不育特性,楸树往往只开花不结实[8],且其种子发     

苔藓植物提取液对作物种子萌发的影响

用5种苔藓植物配子体的水提液分别培养5种作物种子．实验结果显示;羊角藓(Herpetipheuron toccoae)、山羽藓(Abietinella abietilla)、塔藓(Hylocomium splendens)、细叶金发藓(Polytrichum longisetum)对小麦(Triticum aestivum)、玉米(Zea mays)、大豆(Glycine max)、落花生(Arachis hypogaea)、菜豆(Phaseolus vulgaris)种子萌发均有不同程度的促进作用。温带光萼苔(Porella platiphylla)则对上述5种作物种子有不同程度的抑制作用。其原因可能是藓类与苔类配子体的主要次生代谢产物或内源激素不同,有待进一步探讨。     

Multicellular sprouting in vitro

Cell motility and its guidance through cell-cell contacts is instrumental in vasculogenesis and in other developmental or pathological processes as well. During vasculogenesis, multicellular sprouts invade rapidly into avascular areas, eventually creating a polygonal pattern. Sprout elongation, in turn, depends on a continuous supply of endothelial cells, streaming along the sprout toward its tip. As long-term videomicroscopy of in vitro cell cultures reveal, cell lines such as C6 gliomas or 3T3 fibroblasts form multicellular linear arrangements in vitro, similar to the multicellular vasculogenic sprouts. We show evidence that close contact with elongated cells enhances and guides cell motility. To model the patterning process we augmented the widely used cellular Potts model with an inherently nonequilibrium interaction whereby surfaces of elongated cells become more preferred adhesion substrates than surfaces of well-spread, isotropic cells.     

Stability and structural constraints of random brain networks with excitatory and inhibitory neural populations

The stability of brain networks with randomly connected excitatory and inhibitory neural populations is investigated using a simplified physiological model of brain electrical activity. Neural populations are randomly assigned to be excitatory or inhibitory and the stability of a brain network is determined by the spectrum of the network’s matrix of connection strengths. The probability that a network is stable is determined from its spectral density which is numerically determined and is approximated by a spectral distribution recently derived by Rajan and Abbott. The probability that a brain network is stable is maximum when the total connection strength into a population is approximately zero and is shown to depend on the arrangement of the excitatory and inhibitory connections and the parameters of the network. The maximum excitatory and inhibitory input into a structure allowed by stability occurs when the net input equals zero and, in contrast to networks with randomly distributed excitatory and inhibitory connections, substantially increases as the number of connections increases. Networks with the largest excitatory and inhibitory input allowed by stability have multiple marginally stable modes, are highly responsive and adaptable to external stimuli, have the same total input into each structure with minimal variance in the excitatory and inhibitory connection strengths, and have a wide range of flexible, adaptable, and complex behavior.     

Regulation of blood vessel sprouting

Blood vessels are essential conduits of nutrients and oxygen throughout the body. The formation of these vessels involves angiogenic sprouting, a complex process entailing highly integrated cell behaviors and signaling pathways. In this review, we discuss how endothelial cells initiate a vessel sprout through interactions with their environment and with one another, particularly through lateral inhibition. We review the composition of the local environment, which contains an initial set of guidance cues to facilitate the proper outward migration of the sprout as it emerges from a parent vessel. The long-range guidance and sprout stability cues provided by soluble molecules, extracellular matrix components, and interactions with other cell types are also discussed. We also examine emerging evidence for mechanisms that govern sprout fusion with its target and lumen formation.     

Effect of vitamins on sprouting of purple nutsedge tubers

Vitamins of the B group and vitamin C were applied to purple nutsedge (Cyperus rotundus L.) tubers to study their effect on the sprouting rate, initiation and establishment of sprouts, growth of plantlets and development of orthotropic rhizomes in comparison with the corresponding effects of kinetin. Ascorbic acid up to 100 mg I^?1 hastened sprouting, whereas vitamins of the B group and kinetin retarded sprouting; 100% tubers sprouted in all treatments within 10 days. Unlike kinetin, none of the vitamins resulted in the establishment of more than one sprout per tuber. Riboflavin and pyridoxine promoted root and shoot growth of the plantlets, whereas kinetin produced short, thick shoots and inhibited root growth, with increasing concentration. Ascorbic acid was only second to kinetin in the induction of orthotropic rhizomes, but the former resulted in an increase in rhizome length.     

胰酶中镉的去除研究

综合对酶活性的影响,研究胰酶中镉的去除条件.在pH为6.0,HCA-1加入量为0.8%,树脂加入量为40 mL(胰脏投料200 g),胰脏活化时用HCA-1络合去除胰酶中的镉,其最高去除率可达54.9%,此时胰蛋白酶、胰脂肪酶、胰淀粉酶的活力几乎没有什么影响.该工艺可以很好地嵌入现有胰酶生产工艺中,几乎不增加生产步骤,具有非常好的工业应用前景.     

Removing the brakes on cell identity

In this issue of Developmental Cell, Dhawan et?al. (2011) show that deletion of the Dnmt1 DNA methyltransferase gene in pancreatic insulin-producing cells makes these cells convert into glucagon-producing cells. This suggests that manipulation of a general epigenetic mechanism may be used to redirect cell fates.     

Syntagmatic constraints on insertion

This paper argues that the availability of exponents for insertion is restricted not only by their morpho-syntactic feature specification but, in addition, by an accessibility relation holding within a marker inventory: The exponent inserted at step n constrains the set of exponents competing for insertion at step n+1. The proposal is applied to a number of phenomena that have previously been dealt with by stipulating designated post-syntactic operations that modify the syntactically determined feature sets before morphological exponence is determined. Apparent mismatches between syntactically motivated feature specifications and morphological exponence are treated as the result of the accessibility relation. The paper contains analyses of multiple exponence in Archi and Dumi, apparent feature insertion in Nimboran, and obligatory co-occurrence of exponents in Spanish clitics.