Glia in Neurodegeneration: The Housekeeper,the Defender and the Perpetrator

Over the past decade, research has unveiled the intimate relationship between neuroinflammation and neurodegeneration. Microglia and astrocytes react to brain insult by setting up a multimodal inflammatory state and act as the primary defenders and executioners of neuroinflammatory structural and functional changes. Microglia and astrocytes also play critical roles in the maintenance of normal brain function. This intricate balance of homeostatic and neuroinflammatory functions can influence the onset and the course of neurodegenerative diseases. The emergent role of the microglial-astrocytic axis in neurodegenerative disease presents many druggable targets that may have broad therapeutic benefits across neurodegenerative disease. Here, we provide a brief review of the basal function of both microglia and astrocytes, how they are changed in disease states, the significant differences between mouse and human glia, and use of human induced pluripotent stem cells derived from patients to study cell autonomous changes in human astrocytes and microglia.     

CP3: Robust, Output-sensitive Display of Convex Polyhedra in Scanline Mode

A new technique is developed for displaying disjoint convex polyhedra. The method has the following properties: It is output-sensitive, displays the objects in scanline mode, and it is naturally robust. There is no complex data structure uniting the different polyhedra, so dynamic insertions and deletions are simple. Its robustnes is based on a novel method of comparing depths by representative "axes" of objects instead of surfaces. The method is based on two extensions of the "critical-points" method for polygon scan conversion: One extension allows the efficient display of planar graphs in scanline mode, and another extension is into the third dimension. Test runs indicate that it compares extremely favorably with other methods that operate in scanline mode, as well as with standard software and hardware techniques of medium-level workstations.     

ENZYMATIC MACERATION OF APPLE PARENCHYMA TISSUE. I. MODELLING OF THE KINETICS OF HYDROLYSIS

During the maceration of apple parenchyma with polygalacturonase (PG), three fractions were obtained (residual tissue, free cells or pulp, juice) in which the cell wall material was measured as alcohol-insoluble solids (AIS). A model is proposed to describe the distribution of cell wall material in these three fractions during the course of the enzymatic maceration process, which fitted the experimental data with a determination coefficient r² superior to 0.99. Two processes of maceration were shown to be involved. A first, fast process, degraded a small part of the tissue while the second process slowly degraded the remaining tissue. The maceration products were principally non degradable cells and non degradable soluble pectins. The degradable cells and the degradable pectins accumulated only at the beginning of the maceration. The rate constants followed the Arrhenius law. The initial rate of maceration increased with the amount of PG or the surface area to reach a limit value at high enzyme concentrations or high surface areas, respectively.     

Thermal conductivity mapping of oxidized SiC/SiC composites by time-domain thermoreflectance with heterodyne detection

Silicon carbide/silicon carbide (SiC/SiC) composites are often used in oxidizing environments at high temperatures. Measurements of the thermal conductance of the oxide layer provide a way to better understand the oxidation process with high spatial resolution. We use time-domain thermoreflectance (TDTR) to map the thermal conductance of the oxide layer and the thermal conductivity of the SiC/SiC composite with a spatial resolution of 3 μm. Heterodyne detection using a 50-kHz-modulated probe beam and a 10-MHz-modulated pump suppresses the coherent pick-up and enables faster data acquisition than what has previously been possible using sequential demodulation. By analyzing the noise of the measured signals, we find that in the limit of small integration time constants or low laser powers, the dominant source of noise is the input noise of the preamplifier. The thermal conductance of the oxide that forms on the fiber region is lower than the oxide on the matrix due to small differences in thickness and thermal conductivity.     

Citrate Starch — Application as Resistant Starch in Different Food Systems

Chemically modified starch was used as resistant starch (RS) to enhance the dietary fibre content in foods. Citrate starch was produced by esterification of starches of various origins and added to toast bread, wafers, pasta and extruded products. The RS content as well as relevant product features were determined and results compared to those of products without any citrate starch addition. The results show that the RS content in toast bread could be increased by approximately 3%, when 7.5% citrate starch was added, compared to non-fortified bread. Changes in product features due to addition of citrate starch could be compensated for by variation in the recipe, such as increasing the amount of water. Thus, appealing products could be obtained with an enriched dietary fibre content. The extend of the RS enhancement depends highly on the food system chosen.     

Direct Enzymatic Synthesis of a Deep-Blue Fluorescent Noncanonical Amino Acid from Azulene and Serine

We report a simple, one-step enzymatic synthesis of the blue fluorescent noncanonical amino acid β-(1-azulenyl)-l -alanine (AzAla). By using an engineered tryptophan synthase β-subunit (TrpB), stereochemically pure AzAla can be synthesized at scale starting from commercially available azulene and l -serine. Mutation of a universally conserved catalytic glutamate in the active site to glycine has only a modest effect on native activity with indole but abolishes activity on azulene, suggesting that this glutamate activates azulene for nucleophilic attack by stabilization of the aromatic ion.     

Multi swarms for neighbor selection in peer-to-peer overlay networks

Peer-to-peer (P2P) topology has a significant influence on the performance, search efficiency and functionality, and scalability of the application. In this paper, we investigate a multi-swarm approach to the problem of neighbor selection (NS) in P2P networks. Particle swarm share some common characteristics with P2P in the dynamic socially environment. Each particle encodes the upper half of the peer-connection matrix through the undirected graph, which reduces the search space dimension. The portion of the adjustment to the velocity influenced by the individual’s cognition, the group cognition from multi-swarms, and the social cognition from the whole swarm, makes an important influence on the particles’ ergodic and synergetic performance. We also attempt to theoretically prove that the multi-swarm optimization algorithm converges with a probability of 1 towards the global optima. The performance of our approach is evaluated and compared with other two different algorithms. The results indicate that it usually required shorter time to obtain better results than the other considered methods, specially for large scale problems.