Salivary and Urinary Total Antioxidant Capacity as Biomarkers of Oxidative Stress in Humans

Total Antioxidant Capacity (TAC) is a biomarker often used in order to investigate oxidative stress in many pathological conditions. Saliva and urine can be collected noninvasively and represent attractive diagnostic fluids for detecting biomarkers of various pathological conditions. The reviewed case-control and intervention studies that measured salivary or urinary TAC revealed that diseases, antioxidant foods, or supplements and age, gender, and lifestyle factors influenced salivary or urinary TAC. Salivary and urinary TAC were particularly affected by oral or renal status, respectively, as well as by infection; therefore these factors must be taken into account in both case-control and intervention studies. Furthermore, some considerations on sample collection and normalization strategies could be made. In particular, unstimulated saliva could be the better approach to measure salivary TAC, whereas 24 h or spontaneous urine collection should be chosen on the basis of the study outcome and of the creatinine clearance. Finally, the uric acid-independent TAC could be the better approach to evaluate red-ox status of body, in particular after nutritional interventions and in diseases associated with hyperuricaemia.

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A Prediction Model for Membrane Proteins Using Moments Based Features

The most expedient unit of the human body is its cell. Encapsulated within the cell are many infinitesimal entities and molecules which are protected by a cell membrane. The proteins that are associated with this lipid based bilayer cell membrane are known as membrane proteins and are considered to play a significant role. These membrane proteins exhibit their effect in cellular activities inside and outside of the cell. According to the scientists in pharmaceutical organizations, these membrane proteins perform key task in drug interactions. In this study, a technique is presented that is based on various computationally intelligent methods used for the prediction of membrane protein without the experimental use of mass spectrometry. Statistical moments were used to extract features and furthermore a Multilayer Neural Network was trained using backpropagation for the prediction of membrane proteins. Results show that the proposed technique performs better than existing methodologies.

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Chewing efficiency and occlusal functional morphology in modern humans

Publication date: April 2016
Source:Journal of Human Evolution, Volume 93
Author(s): Myra F. Laird, Erin R. Vogel, Herman Pontzer
The reduction of occlusal dimensions in early Homo is often proposed to be a functional adaptation to diet. With their smaller occlusal surfaces, species of early Homo are suggested to have reduced food-processing abilities, particularly for foods with high material properties (e.g., increased toughness). Here, we employ chewing efficiency as a measure of masticatory performance to test the relationships between masticatory function and food properties. We predicted that humans are more efficient when processing foods of lower toughness and Young's modulus values, and that subjects with larger occlusal surfaces will be less efficient when processing foods with higher toughness and Young's modulus, as the greater area spreads out the overall bite force applied to food particles. Chewing efficiency was measured in 26 adults using high-speed motion capture and surface electromyography. The dentition of each subject was cast and the occlusal surface was quantified using dental topographic analysis. Toughness and displacement-limited index were negatively correlated with chewing efficiency, but Young's modulus was not. Increased occlusal two-dimensional area and surface area were positively correlated with chewing efficiency for all foods. Thus, larger occlusal surface areas were more efficient when processing foods of greater toughness. These results suggest that the reduction in occlusal area in early Homo was associated with a reduction in chewing efficiency, particularly for foods with greater toughness. Further, the larger occlusal surfaces of earlier hominins such as Australopithecus would have likely increased chewing efficiency and increased the probability of fracture when processing tough foods.



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Assessing Sentence Similarity through Lexical, Syntactic and Semantic Analysis

Publication date: Available online 6 February 2016
Source:Computer Speech & Language
Author(s): Rafael Ferreira, Rafael Dueire Lins, Steven J. Simske, Fred Freitas, Marcelo Riss
The degree of similarity between sentences is assessed by sentence similarity methods. Sentence similarity methods play an important role in areas such as summarization, search, and categorization of texts, machine translation, etc. The current methods for assessing sentence similarity are based only on the similarity between the words in the sentences. Such methods either represent sentences as bag of words vectors or are restricted to the syntactic information of the sentences. Two important problems in language understanding are not addressed by such strategies: the word order and the meaning of the sentence as a whole. The new sentence similarity assessment measure presented here largely improves and refines a recently published method that takes into account the lexical, syntactic and semantic components of sentences. The new method was benchmarked using Li-McLean, showing that it outperforms the state of the art systems and achieves results comparable to the evaluation made by humans. Besides that, the method proposed was extensively tested using the SemEval 2012 sentence similarity test set and in the evaluation of the degree of similarity between summaries using the CNN-corpus. In both cases, the measure proposed here was proved effective and useful.



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Pre-leukemic Phase of Chronic Myelogenous Leukemia: Morphologic, and Immunohistochemical Characterization of Seven Cases

Publication date: Available online 6 February 2016
Source:Annals of Diagnostic Pathology
Author(s): Le Le Aye, Sanam Loghavi, Ken H. Young, Imran Siddiqi, C. Cameron Yin, Mark J. Routbort, Mei Liang, Keith Eilerman, L. Jeffrey Medeiros, Russell K. Brynes, Carlos Bueso-Ramos




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Hepatocyte nuclear factor 1 coordinates multiple processes in a model of intestinal epithelial cell function

Publication date: Available online 6 February 2016
Source:Biochimica et Biophysica Acta (BBA) - Gene Regulatory Mechanisms
Author(s): Rui Yang, Jenny L. Kerschner, Ann Harris
Mutations in hepatocyte nuclear factor 1 transcription factors (HNF1α/β) are associated with diabetes. These factors are well studied in the liver, pancreas and kidney, where they direct tissue-specific gene regulation. However, they also have an important role in the biology of many other tissues, including the intestine. We investigated the transcriptional network governed by HNF1 in an intestinal epithelial cell line (Caco2). We used chromatin immunoprecipitation followed by direct sequencing (ChIP-seq) to identify HNF1 binding sites genome-wide. Direct targets of HNF1 were validated using conventional ChIP assays and confirmed by siRNA-mediated depletion of HNF1, followed by RT-qPCR. Gene ontology process enrichment analysis of the HNF1 targets identified multiple processes with a role in intestinal epithelial cell function, including properties of the cell membrane, cellular response to hormones, and regulation of biosynthetic processes. Approximately 50% of HNF1 binding sites were also occupied by other members of the intestinal transcriptional network, including hepatocyte nuclear factor 4A (HNF4A), caudal type homeobox 2 (CDX2), and forkhead box A2 (FOXA2). Depletion of HNF1 in Caco2 cells increases FOXA2 abundance and decreases levels of CDX2, illustrating the coordinated activities of the network. These data suggest that HNF1 plays an important role in regulating intestinal epithelial cell function, both directly and through interactions with other intestinal transcription factors.



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VEMPs in central neurological disorders

Publication date: Available online 6 February 2016
Source:Clinical Neurophysiology
Author(s): Franca Deriu, Edoardo R. de Natale, Immacolata Magnano, Francesca Ginatempo




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