Implication of the NLRP3 Inflammasome in Bovine Age-Related Sarcopenia

Sarcopenia is defined as the age-related loss of skeletal muscle mass, quality, and strength. The pathophysiological mechanisms underlying sarcopenia are still not completely understood. The aim of this work was to evaluate, for the first time, the expression of NLRP3 inflammasome in bovine skeletal muscle in order to investigate the hypothesis that inflammasome activation may trigger and sustain a pro-inflammatory environment leading to sarcopenia. Samples of skeletal muscle were collected from 60 cattle belonging to three age-based groups. Morphologic, immunohistochemical and molecular analysis were performed to assess the presence of age-related pathologic changes and chronic inflammation, the expression of NLRP3 inflammasome and to determine the levels of interleukin-1β, interleukin-18 and tumor necrosis factor alpha in muscle tissue. Our results revealed the presence of morphologic sarcopenia hallmark, chronic lymphocytic inflammation and a type II fibers-selective NLRP3 expression associated to a significant decreased number of immunolabeled-fibers in aged animals. Moreover, we found a statistically significant age-related increase of pro-inflammatory cytokines such as interleukin-1β and interleukin-18 suggesting the activation of NLRP3 inflammasome. Taken together, our data suggest that NLRP3 inflammasome components may be normally expressed in skeletal muscle, but its priming and activation during aging may contribute to enhance a pro-inflammatory environment altering normal muscular anabolism and metabolism.     

A Relational Model of Workplace Victimization: Social Roles and Patterns of Victimization in Dyadic Relationships.

This article proposes a model of the ways in which dyadic interactions between employees who occupy 1 of 4 archetypal social roles in organizations can lead to either episodic or institutionalized patterns of victimization. The model shows how the occurrence of victimization involving these 4 role types is influenced by organizational variables such as power differences, culture, and access to social capital. The model integrates behavioral and social structural antecedents of victimization to develop a relational perspective on the dynamics of harmful behavior in the workplace. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Bioavailability and Toxicity of Metal Nutrients during Anaerobic Digestion

This paper investigates the effect of chelating agents on the bioavailability of Fe and Cu during anaerobic digestion. The results on metal speciation and methane production in anaerobic serum bottles showed that biomass was able to grow in the presence of citrate 1?mM and nitrilotriacetic acid (NTA) 1?mM, suggesting that the binding sites at the cell surface competed efficiently for the metals with the chelating agents added. The presence of free ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid 1?mM inhibited methanogenesis, and this seemed to be related to a loss in metal uptake capacity. Although the addition of soluble microbial products (SMP) did not change metal distribution in anaerobic systems, it caused an increase in the rate of methane production, and it is believed that direct uptake of Cu-SMP complexes was responsible for this increase. The best protection against Cu toxicity occurred when stoichiometric amounts of NTA, which should complex and solubilize most of the Cu, was added, and it is likely that NTA prevented lethal concentrations of Cu from being adsorbed onto the cell and hence internalized.     

Overt Anger in Response to Victimization: Attributional Style and Organizational Norms as Moderators.

Prior theory and research suggests a positive relation between perceived victimization and overt anger. The authors proposed and tested a theoretical extension of this link by investigating possible moderating effects of individual and contextual variables. A sample of 158 employees of a municipality was used to test hypotheses that the relationship between perceived victimization and overt anger is moderated by hostile attributional style and perceptions of organizational norms. The results showed that the relation between perceptions of direct victimization and overt anger was stronger when the employee had a more rather than less hostile attributional style and when the employee perceived the organizational norms as more rather than less oppositional. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Natural polysaccharides platforms for oral controlled release of ketoprofen lysine salt

Context: Ketoprofen lysinate (KL) is one of the most widely used non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs in the symptomatic treatment of some chronic inflammatory diseases. Compared to ketoprofen, KL shows better pharmacokinetics and tolerability. However, due to its short half-life of 1–2?h, a multiple dose regimen is required for oral administration. Thus, the present work deals with its encapsulation in a hydrogel-based system by prilling in order to prolong its activity.

Objective: In this paper, we propose alginate and pectin as carriers and release tailoring agent for the development of hydrogel-based beads for KL retarded and sustained release.

Materials and methods: Beads were produced by a Nisco Encapsulator® using alginate or pectin. Operative variables were optimized to produce beads with desired morphology and size. Solid state properties were analyzed by SEM and DSC. Drug release performance was studied by Pharmacopeia pH-change assay to simulate gastrointestinal environment.

Results and discussion: Prilling technique was successfully used to encapsulate high soluble drugs as KL in polysaccharides-based hydrogels. Pectin proved to be a proper polymer able to encapsulate ketoprofen lysine salt. Formulation (F8) showed good morphological properties and size, high drug content (15.6%) and encapsulation efficiency (93.5%) and promising drug release profiles. Hosting F8 in an acid-resistant capsule (DR^®caps) a delivery platform has been developed to control KL release in a delayed (90?min lag time) and prolonged way (270?min complete release).

Conclusion: The platform may be proposed as potentially useful in the oral administration of NSAIDs in chronic inflammatory diseases affected by circadian rhythm.     

Response of Corn Seedlings (Zea mays L.) to Different Concentrations of Nitrogen in Absence and Presence of Silicon

Silicon - Corn plants are highly demanding of nitrogen and the application of silicon has been studied because it minimizes stress from different natures, and for the better utilization of some...     

Inverse material identification in coupled acoustic-structure interaction using a modified error in constitutive equation functional

This work focuses on the identification of heterogeneous linear elastic moduli in the context of frequency-domain, coupled acoustic-structure interaction (ASI), using either solid displacement or fluid pressure measurement data. The approach postulates the inverse problem as an optimization problem where the solution is obtained by minimizing a modified error in constitutive equation (MECE) functional. The latter measures the discrepancy in the constitutive equations that connect kinematically admissible strains and dynamically admissible stresses, while incorporating the measurement data as additional quadratic error terms. We demonstrate two strategies for selecting the MECE weighting coefficient to produce regularized solutions to the ill-posed identification problem: 1) the discrepancy principle of Morozov, and 2) an error-balance approach that selects the weight parameter as the minimizer of another functional involving the ECE and the data misfit. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed methodology can successfully recover elastic parameters in 2D and 3D ASI systems from response measurements taken in either the solid or fluid subdomains. Furthermore, both regularization strategies are shown to produce accurate reconstructions when the measurement data is polluted with noise. The discrepancy principle is shown to produce nearly optimal solutions, while the error-balance approach, although not optimal, remains effective and does not need a priori information on the noise level.     

An Improved NER Methodology to the Portuguese Language

Mobile Networks and Applications - The text mining process typically involves the application of natural language processing (NLP) techniques, in order to obtain important information and extract...     

Synthesis of higher alcohols with cobalt and copper based model catalysts: effect of the alkaline metals

The synthesis of higher alcohols, obtained from CO hydrogenation over transition metals, is an alternative for the production of chemical commodities and less pollutant renewable fuels nowadays. In this work, the influence of different alkali metals (Li, Na, K, Cs) over the formation of active phases of supported catalysts, based on cobalt and copper, as well as the performance of these solids in the reaction of CO hydrogenation under a 50 bar pressure were studied. The solids were prepared by continuous coprecipitation of sodium carbonate with metal nitrate solutions (Al–Co, Al–Cu or Al–Co–Cu) promoted with the alkali metals with dry impregnation. Characterization studies by atomic absorption spectrophotometry, BET, XPS and also the results of catalytic tests show that physico-chemical properties of the obtained catalyst are similar to those of the industrial catalyst used as reference (I).     

A Spectral Finite Element Approach to Modeling Soft Solids Excited with High-Frequency Harmonic Loads

An approach for efficient and accurate finite element analysis of harmonically excited soft solids using high-order spectral finite elements is presented and evaluated. The Helmholtz-type equations used to model such systems suffer from additional numerical error known as pollution when excitation frequency becomes high relative to stiffness (i.e. high wave number), which is the case, for example, for soft tissues subject to ultrasound excitations. The use of high-order polynomial elements allows for a reduction in this pollution error, but requires additional consideration to counteract Runge's phenomenon and/or poor linear system conditioning, which has led to the use of spectral element approaches. This work examines in detail the computational benefits and practical applicability of high-order spectral elements for such problems. The spectral elements examined are tensor product elements (i.e. quad or brick elements) of high-order Lagrangian polynomials with non-uniformly distributed Gauss-Lobatto-Legendre nodal points. A shear plane wave example is presented to show the dependence of the accuracy and computational expense of high-order elements on wave number. Then, a convergence study for a viscoelastic acoustic-structure interaction finite element model of an actual ultrasound driven vibroacoustic experiment is shown. The number of degrees of freedom required for a given accuracy level was found to consistently decrease with increasing element order. However, the computationally optimal element order was found to strongly depend on the wave number.