Dolichol levels in younger and older rat hearts heterotopically transplanted in younger recipients

Dolichol (D) levels increase dramatically in older tissue. An understanding of the exchangeability of D between tissues may be essential in order to understand the mechanism of the abnormal accumulation associated with aging. The question was investigated by the use of organ transplantation. D-poor hearts donated by 3-mon-old and D-rich by 22-mon-old male Lewis rats were transplanted heterotopically in 3-mon-old syngenic recipients, whose peripheral tissues and liver were poor in D. Native and transplanted hearts were taken 7 and 21 d after surgery. Native hearts of 3-mon- and 22-mon-old male Lewis rats served as control. D concentration and quantity were higher in older than in younger native hearts as expected. In the transplanted hearts, the quantity of D was unchanged, irrespective of the age of the donor and of the time of transplantation, whereas D concentration increased because of the remarkable disuse atrophy. No changes in D were observed in recipients’ tissues. It is concluded that dolichol is not redistributed via circulation from the transplanted heart to the tissues and liver of the younger recipient.     

Biomarkers in Prostate Cancer Diagnosis: From Current Knowledge to the Role of Metabolomics and Exosomes

Early detection of prostate cancer (PC) is largely carried out using assessment of prostate-specific antigen (PSA) level; yet it cannot reliably discriminate between benign pathologies and clinically significant forms of PC. To overcome the current limitations of PSA, new urinary and serum biomarkers have been developed in recent years. Although several biomarkers have been explored in various scenarios and patient settings, to date, specific guidelines with a high level of evidence on the use of these markers are lacking. Recent advances in metabolomic, genomics, and proteomics have made new potential biomarkers available. A number of studies focused on the characterization of the specific PC metabolic phenotype using different experimental approaches has been recently reported; yet, to date, research on metabolomic application for PC has focused on a small group of metabolites that have been known to be related to the prostate gland. Exosomes are extracellular vesicles that are secreted from all mammalian cells and virtually detected in all bio-fluids, thus allowing their use as tumor biomarkers. Thanks to a general improvement of the technical equipment to analyze exosomes, we are able to obtain reliable quantitative and qualitative information useful for clinical application. Although some pilot clinical investigations have proposed potential PC biomarkers, data are still preliminary and non-conclusive.     

Contamination of vegetable oils marketed in Italy by phthalic acid esters

More than 90% of the phthalic acid esters (PAEs) produced in Europe is used to plasticize polyvinyl chloride (PVC). Animal studies have shown that some PAEs can damage the liver and interfere with the endocrine system, whereas data on the toxic effects on humans are inconsistent. For the general population, the diet is believed to be the main source of PAEs. Food can be contaminated from environmental pollution, industrial food processing (PVC tubing) and certain storage containers. The present study evaluates the contamination levels of the four main PAEs named Di(2-ethylhexyl) phthalate (DEHP), dibutyl phthalate (DBP), diisobutyl phthalate (DIBP), diisononyl phthalate (DINP), in 172 samples of vegetable oils marketed in Italy. Diluted oils were directly analysed by GC–MS. PAEs concentrations in vegetable oils were lower than those reported in other studies. Olive-derived oils showed the highest levels. Considering their high consumption in Italy, this finding is significant and some hypotheses on environmental or technological causes have been made. In the case of extravirgin olive oil, the higher levels of PAEs can be ascribed to the absence of the refining process since it has been verified that this technological treatment partially decontaminates the final product while for olive and olive pomace oils, both refined oils, the reasons for a higher contamination are less clear. Probably, a different plant uptake of PAEs from the air, water and soil could give account of this finding. Finally, the percentage Italian intake of PAEs due to the various types of vegetable oils analysed has been calculated.     

Intermetallic compounds in the M–Cu–Sn systems with M = Eu,Sr, Ba

Several samples were prepared in the title systems, starting from the elements sealed under argon in Ta crucibles, melting in an induction fornace and annealing at 823 K. Six ternary phases were found: EuCu₂Sn₂, a = 11.100 (3), b = 4.307 (1), c = 4.824 (1) Å, β = 108.88 (1)°, and SrCu₂Sn₂, a = 11.197 (4), b = 4.322 (2), c = 4.859 (1) Å, β = 108.43 (1)°, C2/m, CaCu₂Sn₂-type, closely related to the BaAl₄ structure; Sr₃Cu₈Sn₄, a = 9.3280 (2), c = 7.8826 (4) Å, P6₃mc, Nd₃Co₈Sn₄-type, ordered variant of the BaLi₄-type; SrCu₄Sn₂, a = 8.176 (1), c = 7.799 (1) Å, I4/mcm, CaNi₄Sn₂-type; SrCu₉Sn₄, a = 8.663 (1), c = 12.457 (2) Å, and BaCu₉Sn₄, a = 8.717 (1), c = 12.545 (2) Å, I4/mcm, LaFe₉Si₄-type, ordered variant of the NaZn₁₃ structure. The structure of the first compound was refined by the Rietveld method, while single crystal data were used for the others. Some remarks are given on the crystal chemistry of the encountered and related structure types.     

A fast object-oriented Matlab implementation of the Reproducing Kernel Particle Method

Novel numerical methods, known as Meshless Methods or Meshfree Methods and, in a wider perspective, Partition of Unity Methods, promise to overcome most of disadvantages of the traditional finite element techniques. The absence of a mesh makes meshfree methods very attractive for those problems involving large deformations, moving boundaries and crack propagation. However, meshfree methods still have significant limitations that prevent their acceptance among researchers and engineers, namely the computational costs. This paper presents an in-depth analysis of computational techniques to speed-up the computation of the shape functions in the Reproducing Kernel Particle Method and Moving Least Squares, with particular focus on their bottlenecks, like the neighbour search, the inversion of the moment matrix and the assembly of the stiffness matrix. The paper presents numerous computational solutions aimed at a considerable reduction of the computational times: the use of kd-trees for the neighbour search, sparse indexing of the nodes-points connectivity and, most importantly, the explicit and vectorized inversion of the moment matrix without using loops and numerical routines.