Health-risk assessment related to the fluoride,nitrate, and nitrite in the drinking water in the Sanandaj,Kurdistan County,Iran

The concentration of fluoride and nitrate in groundwater is usually higher than that of surface water. The main objective of this study was to estimate the health-risk assessment associated with fluoride, nitrate, and nitrite in drinking water in Sanandaj and its villages. The number of samples in the Sanandaj and its rural was 106. The average concentration of fluoride in urban and rural drinking water was 0.22 mg/l and 0.27 mg/l, respectively. Fluoride concentration was also close to urban and rural drinking water. The concentration of nitrate in urban and rural drinking water was in the range between 0.28–27.77 mg/l and 1.28–80 mg/l, respectively. The concentration of nitrate reported in rural samples was higher than that of urban samples. The maximum concentration of nitrate reported in this study was 80 mg/l. The mean CDI for nitrate in the men, women, and children was 0.4258, 0.5110, and 1.1454, respectively. The findings of this study indicated that all three groups studied were exposed to nitrate contact hazards (HQ > 1). Therefore, the HQ in each of the three groups was higher than 1, which should be carefully monitored and necessary measures should be performed.     

Effects of Influenza Derived Peptide on CD8 T Cell Responses to MHC Class I-Restricted Human Telomerase Reverse Transcriptase (hTERT)-Derived Peptide

International Journal of Peptide Research and Therapeutics - Tumor cells in breast cancer are immunogenic and express proteins that can induce immune responses. One important antigen is human...     

Energy-aware routing considering load balancing for SDN: a minimum graph-based Ant Colony Optimization

Software-Defined Network (SDN) technology is a network management approach that facilitates a high level of programmability and centralized manageability. By leveraging the control and data plane separation, an energy-aware routing model could be easily implemented in the networks. In the present paper, we propose a two-phase SDN-based routing mechanism that aims at minimizing energy consumption while providing a certain level of QoS for the users’ flows and realizing the link load balancing. To reduce the network energy consumption, a minimum graph-based Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) approach is used in the first phase. It prunes and optimizes the network tree by turning unnecessary switches off and providing an energy-minimized sub-graph that is responsible for the network existing flows. In the second phase, an innovative weighted routing approach is developed that guarantees the QoS requirements of the incoming flows and routes them so that to balance the loads on the links. We validated our proposed approach by conducting extensive simulations on different traffic patterns and scenarios with different thresholds. The results indicate that the proposed routing method considerably minimizes the network energy consumption, especially for congested traffics with mice-type flows. It can provide effective link load balancing while satisfying the users’ QoS requirements.

     

Potential applications and emerging trends of species of the genus Dietzia: a review

Interest in attractive biological sources with multicriteria applications has been increasing during recent years. This study scrutinized the applications of Dietzia bacteria for future prospects. Apart from such present and well-established applications—as in therapeutic biotreatments for adult paratuberculosis animals, production of carotenoid pigments, and animal feed additives—their uses in biosurfactants and biodemulsifiers production, the pollutants bioremediation, biodegradation of petroleum hydrocarbons and crude oil and also production of extracellular polymeric substances (EPSs) have been exploited. The use of these bacteria as a biotechnological tool may lead to improve the optimization and quality assurance of food ingredients and products, the capability of degradation and remediation of environmental pollutants, and the efficiency of bioconversion systems for energy recovery and bioprocessing of value-added products.     

On the probability of extinction in a periodic environment

For a certain class of multi-type branching processes in a continuous-time periodic environment, we show that the extinction probability is equal to (resp. less than) 1 if the basic reproduction number $R_0$ is less than (resp. bigger than) 1. The proof uses results concerning the asymptotic behavior of cooperative systems of differential equations. In epidemiology the extinction probability may be used as a time-periodic measure of the epidemic risk. As an example we consider a linearized SEIR epidemic model and data from the recent measles epidemic in France. Discrete-time models with potential applications in conservation biology are also discussed.     

Diosgenin attenuates inflammatory response induced by myocardial reperfusion injury: role of mitochondrial ATP-sensitive potassium channels

Reperfusion injury is one of the main reasons of cardiac disease morbidity. Phytopharmaceuticals are gaining importance in modern medicine of cardioprotection because of their multiplex capacity. The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of diosgenin on the inflammatory response induced by myocardial ischemia and reperfusion injury and the role of mitochondrial ATP-sensitive potassium (mitoKATP) channels in this regard. Wistar rats (250–300 g) were used in this study. The Langendorff-perfused hearts of animals were subjected to a 30-min global ischemia followed by a 90-min reperfusion. The lactate dehydrogenase (LDH) release was measured by spectrophotometry. The levels of inflammatory mediators tumor necrosis factor-alpha (TNF-α), interleukin-1beta (IL-1β), and IL-6 in the supernatant of heart’s left ventricle were measured using an enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay rat specific ELISA kit. The LDH release into the coronary effluent during reperfusion was significantly decreased, and cardiac contractility significantly improved by diosgenin preadministration as compared with those of control or Cremophor-EL (solvent of diosgenin) groups (398?±?48 vs. 665?±?65 or 650?±?73 ml/min) (P?<?0.01). Administration of diosgenin before the main ischemia significantly reduced the levels of IL-6 (P?<?0.05), IL-1β, and TNF-α (P?<?0.01) in the reperfusion phase of diosgenin-treated hearts as compared with untreated control hearts. Inhibition of mitoKATP channels by 5-hydroxydecanoate significantly reverses the cardioprotective effects of diosgenin (P?<?0.05). The findings of the present study indicate that preconditioning with diosgenin may induce cardioprotective effect against reperfusion injury through reducing the production of inflammatory mediators and activating the mitoKATP channels.     

Phytic acid in green leaves

Phytic acid or phytate, the free‐acid form of myo‐inositolhexakiphosphate, is abundant in many seeds and fruits, where it represents the major storage form of phosphorus. Although also known from other plant tissues, available reports on the occurrence of phytic acid, e.g. in leaves, have never been compiled, nor have they been critically reviewed. We found 45 published studies with information on phytic acid content in leaves. Phytic acid was almost always detected when studies specifically tried to detect it, and accounted for up to 98% of total P. However, we argue that such extreme values, which rival findings from storage organs, are dubious and probably result from measurement errors. Excluding these high values from further quantitative analysis, foliar phytic acid‐P averaged 2.3 mg·g^?1, and represented, on average, 7.6% of total P. Remarkably, the ratio of phytic acid‐P to total P did not increase with total P, we even detected a negative correlation of the two variables within one species, Manihot esculenta. This enigmatic finding warrants further attention.     

Convergent Functional Genomics of Oligodendrocyte Differentiation Identifies Multiple Autoinhibitory Signaling Circuits

Inadequate remyelination of brain white matter lesions has been associated with a failure of oligodendrocyte precursors to differentiate into mature, myelin-producing cells. In order to better understand which genes play a critical role in oligodendrocyte differentiation, we performed time-dependent, genome-wide gene expression studies of mouse Oli-neu cells as they differentiate into process-forming and myelin basic protein-producing cells, following treatment with three different agents. Our data indicate that different inducers activate distinct pathways that ultimately converge into the completely differentiated state, where regulated gene sets overlap maximally. In order to also gain insight into the functional role of genes that are regulated in this process, we silenced 88 of these genes using small interfering RNA and identified multiple repressors of spontaneous differentiation of Oli-neu, most of which were confirmed in rat primary oligodendrocyte precursors cells. Among these repressors were CNP, a well-known myelin constituent, and three phosphatases, each known to negatively control mitogen-activated protein kinase cascades. We show that a novel inhibitor for one of the identified genes, dual-specificity phosphatase DUSP10/MKP5, was also capable of inducing oligodendrocyte differentiation in primary oligodendrocyte precursors. Oligodendrocytic differentiation feedback loops may therefore yield pharmacological targets to treat disease related to dysfunctional myelin deposition.Demyelination and/or incomplete remyelination, followed by axonal loss and neuronal death, is associated with several neurodegenerative disorders, including multiple sclerosis (37), Pelizaeus-Merzbacher disease, and spastic paraplegia type 2 (16), while myelin abnormalities are also seen for psychiatric disorders, including major depression (2), schizophrenia, and autism (reviewed in reference 10). In humans, the central neural system consists of an unusually high proportion (50%) of white matter, which is normally maintained by proliferating, migrating, and remyelinating oligodendrocytes (10). However, in, for instance, secondary progressive multiple sclerosis, at a stage where the autoimmune insult has abated, myelin degeneration continues. This insufficiency of myelin repair has been attributed to a failure of oligodendrocyte precursors to differentiate (11, 20).In order to better understand which genes play a role in multiple sclerosis, a number of proteomic (13), genomic (25, 29), and genetic (35) approaches have been utilized. However, diseased lesions consist of different admixtures (e.g., contain immune and glia infiltrates) of cell types compared to controls, so such postmortem samples may present differential cell, rather than gene or protein, expression. Therefore, understanding how such genes fit into pathophysiological processes (and in which) is problematic. From population genetic surveys thus far, only a few genes have been found to be associated with multiple sclerosis (31).Based on these considerations, we chose to examine genome-wide gene expression changes in a murine oligodendroglial precursor cell line, Oli-neu (18), as these cells underwent differentiation into myelin basic protein (MBP)-producing cells. Even for a pure cell line, this type of transition is typically associated with changes in the expression of thousands of genes, by itself providing little meaningful information. We therefore decided to look at oligodendrocyte differentiation as induced by different agents, in the hope that from this combined data set one might extract “core genes” whose modulation is closely linked to the differentiation process. The enriched set of genes was further evaluated for their functional involvement in the differentiation process.