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Testate amoebae are a polyphyletic group of unicellular eukaryotic organisms that are characterised by a rigid shell and inhabit mostly freshwater and terrestrial ecosystems. They are particularly abundant in peatlands, especially in Sphagnum-dominated biotopes. Peatland hydrology is the most important influence on testate amoebae communities. The good preservation of the shells in peat deposits and their response to hydrological regime changes are the principles for palaeohydrological reconstructions. Any changes in the water balance of mires should be expected to have far-reaching effects on biogeochemical cycles, productivity, carbon dioxide and methane exchange.This paper presents a dataset (Darwin Core Archive – DwC-A) on the distribution of Sphagnum-dwelling testate amoebae in nine mires located in the forest-steppe subzone of the East European Plane. The dataset includes information about 86 taxa belonging to 29 genera and contains 3,123 occurrences of 49,874 individuals. The following environmental variables are provided: microtopography, oxidising and reducing potential, total mineralisation, substrate temperature, acidity, substrate wetness and water table depth. These data might be used for biogeographical and palaeoecological studies, including quantitative reconstructions.

Mycoplasma bovis (M. bovis) is one of the worldwide most important infectious agents involved in respiratory complex diseases (RCD). In Spain, the endemic presence of subtypes ST-2 and ST-3 with phenotypic differences linked to their susceptibility to fluoroquinolones opened the way to develop control strategies focused on previous diagnosis of the subtype and the use of directed therapies when M. bovis were involved in RCD. Surprisingly, microbiological studies conducted during 2023 evidenced for the first time the presence of Spanish isolates of a new polC-subtype, previously classified as ST-1, recovered from calves with respiratory symptoms and pneumonia in different areas of the country (n = 16). Curiously, the minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) to a panel of antimicrobials revealed phenotypic differences between these ST-1 isolates when using fluoroquinolones (FLQ). There is no geographical correlation between MIC profiles even for a set of 8 isolates recovered from different animals in the same flock. Sequencing of 4 genes (gyrA, gyrB, parC and parE) encoding quinolone resistance-determining regions (QRDR) evidenced the presence of accumulate mutations in 2 ST-1 isolates with high FLQ MICs, but not in all them (n = 3), thus suggesting that, as previously recorded for ST-2 isolates, other mechanisms should be involved in the acquisition of resistence to these antimicrobials. Additionally, as previously detected in the Spanish ST-2 and ST-3, subtype ST-1 isolates are also resistant to macrolides or lincosamides.

The paper describes a dataset, comprising 236 surface moss samples and 143 testate amoeba taxa. The samples were collected in 11 Sphagnum-dominated bogs during frost-free seasons of 2004, 2007, 2009, 2017, and 2022. For the whole dataset, the sampling effort was sufficient in terms of observed species richness (143 species in total), though a regional species pool is deemed to be discovered incompletely (143 species is its lower 95 % confidence limit using Chao’s estimator). The local community composition demonstrated high heterogeneity in a reduced ordination space. It supports the opinion that the high versatility of bog ecosystems should be taken into account during ecological studies.

Testate amoebae are unicellular eukaryotic organisms covered with an external skeleton called a shell. They are an important component of many terrestrial ecosystems, especially peatlands, where they can be preserved in peat deposits and used as a proxy of surface wetness in paleoecological reconstructions. Here, we represent a database from a vast but poorly studied region of the Western Siberia Lowland containing information on TA occurrences in relation to substrate moisture and WTD. The dataset includes 88 species from 32 genera, with 2181 incidences and 21,562 counted individuals. All samples were collected in oligotrophic peatlands and prepared using the method of wet sieving with a subsequent sedimentation of aqueous suspensions. This database contributes to the understanding of the distribution of testate amoebae and can be further used in large-scale investigations.

Las políticas públicas en materia sanitaria dirigidas a los adultos mayores, representan una acción destinada a garantizar sus derechos vitales. El presente trabajo tiene como objetivo establecer las características del gasto en salud para el segmento de adultos mayores en Argentina y Chile, se seleccionaron estos países puesto que han experimentado tasas de envejecimiento acelerado en los últimos años, así como datos distintos, en morbilidad, mortalidad, expectativa de vida y causas de muerte en estos segmentos, se incluyeron indicadores de expectativa de vida y jerarquización de causa de muerte dispuestos en sistemas de libre acceso para ser comparados respecto a los datos mencionados. Como resultados disímiles a pesar de ser países con índices altos de envejecimiento, no existe una estadística de seguimiento para hacer evaluaciones ni políticas basadas en evidencia para los datos y periodos estudiados (2014-2017). En conclusión, se observa multiplicidad de modelos de políticas públicas, así como criterios diferenciados por parte de organismos internaciones que construyen sus bases de información a partir de datos producidos por los gobiernos, con retardo cronológico e insuficiencia en la desagregación de los mismos para temas específicos de salud en adultos mayores vinculados de manera específica a los porcentajes del Producto Interno Bruto.

The article is a personal review of the scientific work of Eugen Wirth. It briefly highlights the essential aspects of the role of Eugen Wirth in the German community of geographers during the last decades of the 20th century. The text focuses on his scientific work concerning the “Oriental City”. Eugen Wirth’s publications on the Oriental City consist of empirical work and mapping in innumerous old quarters of Islamic cities. Also, this close-up documents his influence on scientists in various disciplines, not only geographers.

Tens of thousands of chemicals with poorly understood biological properties are released into the environment each day. High-throughput screening (HTS) is potentially a more efficient and cost-effective alternative to traditional toxicity tests. Using HTS, one can profile chemicals for potential adverse effects and prioritize a manageable number for more in-depth testing. Importantly, it can provide clues to mechanism of toxicity. The Tox21 program has generated >50 million quantitative high-throughput screening (qHTS) data points. A library of several thousands of compounds, including environmental chemicals and drugs, is screened against a panel of nuclear receptor and stress response pathway assays. The National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) has organized an International data challenge in order to crowd-source data and build predictive toxicity models. This Challenge asks a crowd of researchers to use these data to elucidate the extent to which the interference of biochemical and cellular pathways by compounds can be inferred from chemical structure data. The data generated against the Tox21 library served as the training set for this modeling Challenge. The competition attracted participants from 18 different countries to develop computational models aimed at better predicting chemical toxicity. The winning models from nearly 400 model submissions all achieved >80% accuracy. Several models exceeded 90% accuracy, which was measured by area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC-ROC). Combining the winning models with the knowledge already gained from Tox21 screening data are expected to improve the community’s ability to prioritize novel chemicals with respect to potential human health concern.

It has been previously reported that N-terminus of mutant huntingtin (product of the 1st exon) is sufficient to cause a Huntington’s disease (HD) pathological phenotype. In view of recent data suggesting that improper regulation of store-operated calcium (SOC) channels is involved in neurodegenerative processes, we investigated influence of expression of the mutant huntingtin N-terminal fragment (Htt138Q-1exon) on SOC entry (SOCE) in mouse neuroblastoma cells (Neuro-2a) and in primary culture of medium spiny neurons (MSNs) isolated from mice. The results show that SOCE in these cells is enhanced upon lentiviral expression of the Htt138Q-1exon. Moreover we demonstrated that RNAi-mediated knockdown of TRPC1, Orai1 or STIM1 proteins leads to dramatic reduction of abnormal SOCE in both Neuro-2a and MSNs, expressing Htt138Q-1exon. Thus we concluded that abnormal SOCE in these cells is maintained by both TRPC1- and Orai1-containing channels and required STIM1 for its activation. Furthermore, EVP4593 compound previously tested as a potential anti-HD drug in a Drosophila screening system has proved to be capable of reducing SOCE to the normal level in MSNs expressing the Htt138Q-1exon.

El artículo analiza la presencia de Petrarca en la lírica catalana medieval, que se detecta en fecha notablemente temprana. Los poetas catalanes parecen interesados en aquellos textos que se ajustan con mayor facilidad a la tradición autóctona. Se sugiere la cancillería y círculos afines como principal centro difusor de los RVF y de los Triumphi, que no tardan en ser leídos como un complemento de su obra filosófica y moral.

To any model of brain function, the variability of neuronal spike firing is a problem that needs to be taken into account. Whereas the synaptic integration can be described in terms of the original Hodgkin-Huxley (H-H) formulations of conductance-based electrical signaling, the transformation of the resulting membrane potential into patterns of spike output is subjected to stochasticity that may not be captured with standard single neuron H-H models. The dynamics of the spike output is dependent on the normal background synaptic noise present in vivo, but the neuronal spike firing variability in vivo is not well studied. In the present study, we made long-term whole cell patch clamp recordings of stationary spike firing states across a range of membrane potentials from a variety of subcortical neurons in the non-anesthetized, decerebrated state in vivo. Based on the data, we formulated a simple, phenomenological model of the properties of the spike generation in each neuron that accurately captured the stationary spike firing statistics across all membrane potentials. The model consists of a parametric relationship between the mean and standard deviation of the inter-spike intervals, where the parameter is linearly related to the injected current over the membrane. This enabled it to generate accurate approximations of spike firing also under inhomogeneous conditions with input that varies over time. The parameters describing the spike firing statistics for different neuron types overlapped extensively, suggesting that the spike generation had similar properties across neurons.

Spinocerebellar systems are likely to be crucial for cerebellar hallmark functions such as coordination. However, in terms of cerebellar functional analyses, these are perhaps among the least explored systems. The aim of the present study is to achieve activation of a single component of the spinocerebellar systems and to explore to what extent it can influence the spike output of granule cells, Golgi cells, molecular layer interneurons (stellate and basket cells) and Purkinje cells. For this purpose, we took advantage of a unique arrangement discovered in neuroanatomical studies, in which the spinal border cell component of the ventral spinocerebellar system was found to be the only the only spinocerebellar tract which ascends in the contralateral lateral funiculus and have terminations in sublobulus C1 of the paramedian lobule in the posterior cerebellum. Using electrical stimulation of this tract, we find a subset of the cerebellar cortical neurons in this region to be moderately or powerfully activated. For example, some of our granule cells displayed high intensity responses whereas the majority of the granule cells displayed no response at all. The finding that more than half of the Purkinje cells were activated by stimulation of the spinal border cell tract indicated that this system is capable of directly influencing cerebellar cortical output. The implications of these findings for the view of the integrative functions of the cerebellar cortex are discussed.

Abstract Low-Copy Repeats predispose the 15q11-q13 region to non-allelic homologous recombination. We have already demonstrated that a significant percentage of Prader-Willi syndrome (PWS) fathers have an increased susceptibility to generate 15q11q13 deletions in spermatozoa, suggesting the participation of intrachromatid exchanges. This work has been focused on assessing the incidence of de novo 15q11q13 inversions in spermatozoa of control donors and PWS fathers in order to determine the basal rates of inversions and to confirm the intrachromatid mechanism as the main cause of 15q11q13 anomalies. Semen samples from 10 control donors and 16 PWS fathers were processed and analyzed by triple-color FISH. Three differentially labeled BAC-clones were used: one proximal and two distal of the 15q11-q13 region. Signal associations allowed the discrimination between normal and inverted haplotypes, which were confirmed by laser-scanning confocal microscopy. Two types of inversions were detected which correspond to the segments involved in Class I and II PWS deletions. No significant differences were observed in the mean frequencies of inversions between controls and PWS fathers (3.59% ± 0.46 and 9.51% ± 0.87 vs 3.06% ± 0.33 and 10.07% ± 0.74). Individual comparisons showed significant increases of inversions in four PWS fathers (P < 0.05) previously reported as patients with increases of 15q11q13 deletions. Results suggest that the incidence of heterozygous inversion carriers in the general population could reach significant values. This situation could have important implications, as they have been described as predisposing haplotypes for genomic disorders. As a whole, results confirm the high instability of the 15q11-q13 region, which is prone to different types of de novo reorganizations by intrachromatid NAHR.

Nowadays, it is possible to encounter people who are able to trace their roots back to Arab countries in almost every nation of the “New World.” That also includes approximately four million citizens of the United States, who live primarily in large metropolitan areas and in the eastern part of the country. Taking a large family and the associated clan of this group as an example, it is possible to show how Arab migrants, dispersed all over the globe, associate the different underlying conditions in countries of democratic America.

Abstract Background Over the last years, the mean age of subjects with HIV infection and AIDS is increasing. Moreover, some epidemiological and clinical differences between younger and older HIV-infected individuals have been observed. However, since introduction of HAART therapy, there are controversial results regarding their response to HAART. The aim of the present study is to evaluate epidemiological and clinical features, response to HAART, and survival in elderly HIV-infected patients with regard to younger HIV-infected patients. Methods A prospective cohort study (1998–2003) was performed on patients from Sabadell Hospital, in Northeast of Spain. The cohort includes newly attended HIV-infected patients since January 1, 1998. For the purpose of this analysis, data was censured at December 31, 2003. Taking into account age at time of diagnosis, it was considered 36 HIV-positive people aged 50 years or more (Group 1, G1) and 419 HIV-positive people aged 13–40 years (Group 2, G2). Epidemiological, clinical, biological and therapy data are recorded. Statistical analysis was performed using Chi-squared test and Fisher exact test, Mann-Whitney U test, Kaplan-Meier, Log Rank test, and Two-Way ANOVA from random factors. Results G1 showed higher proportion of men than G2. The most common risk factors in G1 were heterosexual transmission (P = 0.01) and having sex with men or women (P < 0.001). G1 and G2 show parallel profiles through the time regarding immunological response (P = 0.989) and virological response (P = 0.074). However, older people showed lower CD4 cell counts at first clinic visit (P < 0.001) and, eventually, they did not achieve the same counts as G2. G1 presented faster progression to AIDS (P < 0.001) and shorter survival (P < 0.001). Conclusion Older patients have different epidemiological features. Their immunological and virological responses are good. However, older patients do not achieve the same CD4 cell counts likely due to they have lower counts at first clinic visit. Thus, it is essential physicians know older HIV-infected patients features to consider the possibility of HIV infection in these patients with the aim of treatment would not be delayed.