Role of Zinc in Zinc-α2-Glycoprotein Metabolism in Obesity: a Review of Literature

Biological Trace Element Research - Excessive adipose tissue promotes the manifestation of endocrine disorders such as reduction of the secretion of zinc-α2-glycoprotein (ZAG), an adipokine...     

Damming reduced the functional richness and caused the shift to a new functional state of the phytoplankton in a subtropical region

Hydrobiologia - We analyzed the effect of damming on the temporal patterns of the composition and richness of phytoplankton Reynolds functional groups (RFG) from a subtropical floodplain, together...     

Cytotoxic Effect of Prodigiosin,Natural Red Pigment,Isolated from Serratia marcescens UFPEDA 398

Prodigiosin is a secondary metabolite, with red pigmentation, produced by Serratia marcescens. Red pigment is a natural alkaloid whose chemical structure has three pyrrole rings. Prodigiosin has been described for several biological activities, including antitumor, inducing apotosis in T and B lymphocytes. This work aimed to evaluate the cytotoxic activity of prodigiosin in NCHI-292, HEp-2, MCF-7 and HL-60 tumor cell lines. The red pigment was isolated from Serratia marcescens UFPEDA 398 biomass whose fractions were previously separated by column chromatography, purified, identified and further characterized by GC–MS and compared with the computerized library of m/z values. The pigment corresponded to prodigiosin with maximum absorption at 534 nm, molecular weight 323 and structural formula C20H25N3O. During the prodigiosin purification process a purple absorbance fraction at 272.65 nm was also observed. Significant cytotoxic effects of prodigiosin were evidenced for NCHI-292, Hep-2, MCF-7 and HL-60 tumor cell lines. The isolated purple fraction had no cytotoxic effect (IC50 11.3 µg/mL) when compared to prodigiosin (IC50 3.4 µg/mL) for the tumor cell lines studied. The MCF-7 strain was slightly more pigment resistant (IC50 5.1 µg/mL). Therefore, further studies will be needed to elucidate the antitumor mechanisms of prodigiosin action against tumor strains from flow cytometry tests. However, although these data are preliminary, it was evidenced that prodigiosin showed cytotoxic activity in tumor cell lines suggesting promising antitumor properties. In this sense, future studies on the cytotoxic and genotoxic effects of prodigiosin produced by S. marcecsens UFPEDA 398 are suggested.     

Intravoxel Incoherent Motion Diffusion Weighted MR Imaging at 3.0 T: Assessment of Steatohepatitis and Fibrosis Compared with Liver Biopsy in Type 2 Diabetic Patients

ObjectiveTo evaluate the capability of intravoxel incoherent motion (IVIM) diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI) to assess steatohepatitis and fibrosis determined by histopathology in type 2 diabetic patients.MethodsFifty-nine type 2 diabetic patients (49 women, 10 men; mean age, 54 ± 9 years) were submitted to liver biopsy for the evaluation of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) and underwent DWI on a 3.0T MR system using 10 b values. Institutional approval and patient consent were obtained. Pure molecular-based (D), perfusion-related (D*), and vascular fraction (f) were calculated using a double exponential model and least squares curve fitting. D, D*, and f were compared between patients with and without steatohepatitis and between patients with and without fibrosis. The variables were compared by using the Ranksum test and Student t-test.ResultsSteatohepatitis was observed in 22 patients and fibrosis in 16 patients. A lower D median (0.70 s/mm² vs. 0.83 s/mm², p<0.05) and a lower D* median (34.39 s/mm² vs. 45.23 s/mm², p<0.05) were observed among those with steatohepatitis. A lower D median (0.70 s/mm² vs. 0.82 s/mm², p<0.05) and a lower D* median (35.01 s/mm² vs. 44.76 s/mm², p=0.05) were also observed among those with fibrosis.ConclusionIVIM-DWI has the potential to aid in the characterization of steatohepatitis and fibrosis.     

Biofuel and energy crops: high-yield Saccharinae take center stage in the post-genomics era

The Saccharinae, especially sugarcane, Miscanthus and sorghum, present remarkable characteristics for bioenergy production. Biotechnology of these plants will be important for a sustainable feedstock supply. Herein, we review knowledge useful for their improvement and synergies gained by their parallel study.     

Performance of LBSap Vaccine after Intradermal Challenge with L. infantum and Saliva of Lu. longipalpis: Immunogenicity and Parasitological Evaluation

In the last decade, the search for new vaccines against canine visceral leishmaniasis has intensified. However, the pattern related to immune protection during long periods after experimental infection in vaccine trials is still not fully understood. Herein, we investigated the immunogenicity and parasitological levels after intradermal challenge with Leishmania infantum plus salivary gland extract in dogs immunized with a vaccine composed of L. braziliensis antigens plus saponin as an adjuvant (LBSap vaccine). The LBSap vaccine elicited higher levels of total anti-Leishmania IgG as well as both IgG1 and IgG2. Furthermore, dogs vaccinated had increased levels of lymphocytes, particularly circulating B cells (CD21⁺) and both CD4⁺ and CD8⁺ T lymphocytes. LBSap also elicited an intense in vitro cell proliferation associated with higher levels of CD4⁺ T lymphocytes specific for vaccine soluble antigen and soluble lysate of L. infantum antigen even 885 days after experimental challenge. Furthermore, LBSap vaccinated dogs presented high IFN-γ and low IL-10 and TGF-β1 expression in spleen with significant reduction of parasite load in this tissue. Overall, our results validate the potential of LBSap vaccine to protect against L. infantum experimental infection and strongly support further evaluation of efficiency of LBSap against CVL in natural infection conditions.     

Accurate,Fully-Automated NMR Spectral Profiling for Metabolomics

Many diseases cause significant changes to the concentrations of small molecules (a.k.a. metabolites) that appear in a person’s biofluids, which means such diseases can often be readily detected from a person’s “metabolic profile"—i.e., the list of concentrations of those metabolites. This information can be extracted from a biofluids Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectrum. However, due to its complexity, NMR spectral profiling has remained manual, resulting in slow, expensive and error-prone procedures that have hindered clinical and industrial adoption of metabolomics via NMR. This paper presents a system, BAYESIL, which can quickly, accurately, and autonomously produce a person’s metabolic profile. Given a 1D ¹H NMR spectrum of a complex biofluid (specifically serum or cerebrospinal fluid), BAYESIL can automatically determine the metabolic profile. This requires first performing several spectral processing steps, then matching the resulting spectrum against a reference compound library, which contains the “signatures” of each relevant metabolite. BAYESIL views spectral matching as an inference problem within a probabilistic graphical model that rapidly approximates the most probable metabolic profile. Our extensive studies on a diverse set of complex mixtures including real biological samples (serum and CSF), defined mixtures and realistic computer generated spectra; involving > 50 compounds, show that BAYESIL can autonomously find the concentration of NMR-detectable metabolites accurately (~ 90% correct identification and ~ 10% quantification error), in less than 5 minutes on a single CPU. These results demonstrate that BAYESIL is the first fully-automatic publicly-accessible system that provides quantitative NMR spectral profiling effectively—with an accuracy on these biofluids that meets or exceeds the performance of trained experts. We anticipate this tool will usher in high-throughput metabolomics and enable a wealth of new applications of NMR in clinical settings. BAYESIL is accessible at http://www.bayesil.ca.