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Helena Forsslund,1 Mingxing Yang,1 Mikael Mikko,1 Reza Karimi,1 Sven Nyrén,2 Benita Engvall,1 Johan Grunewald,1 Heta Merikallio,1,3 Riitta Kaarteenaho,3–5 Jan Wahlström,1 Åsa M Wheelock,1 C Magnus Sköld1 1Department of Medicine Solna and Centre for Molecular Medicine, Respiratory Medicine Unit, 2Department of Molecular Medicine and Surgery, Karolinska Institutet and Karolinska University Hospital Solna, Stockholm, Sweden; 3Respiratory Research Unit and Medical Research Center Oulu, University of Oulu and Oulu University Hospital, Oulu, Finland; 4Unit of Medicine and Clinical Research, Pulmonary Division, University of Eastern Finland, 5Center for Medicine and Clinical Research, Division of Respiratory Medicine, Kuopio University Hospital, Kuopio, Finland Abstract: T lymphocytes are believed to play an important role in the pathogenesis of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). How T cells are recruited to the lungs and contribute to the inflammatory process is largely unknown. COPD is a heterogeneous disease, and discriminating disease phenotypes based on distinct molecular and cellular pathways may provide new approaches for individualized diagnosis and therapies. Bronchoalveolar lavage (BAL) and blood samples were obtained from 40 never-smokers, 40 smokers with normal lung function, and 38 COPD patients. T-cell chemokine receptor expression was analyzed with flow cytometry, and soluble BAL cytokines and chemokines were measured using a cytokine multiplex assay. Correlations with gender and clinical characteristics including lung imaging were investigated using multivariate modeling. Th1/Tc1- and Th2/Tc2-associated soluble analytes and T-cell chemokine receptors were analyzed as cumulative Th1/Tc1 and Th2/Tc2 immune responses. A higher expression of chemokine receptor CCR5 on CD8+ T cells in BAL and higher percentage of CXCR3+CD8+ T cells in blood was found in female smokers with COPD compared to those without COPD. CCR5 expression on CD4+ and CD8+ T cells was lower in BAL from male smokers with COPD compared to those without COPD. Among female smokers with COPD, Th1/Tc1 immune response was linked to BAL macrophage numbers and goblet cell density, and Th2/Tc2 response was associated with the measures of emphysema on high-resolution computed tomography. The highly gender-dependent T-cell profile in COPD indicates different links between cellular events and clinical manifestations in females compared to males. Our findings may reveal mechanisms of importance for the difference in clinical course in female COPD patients compared to males. Keywords: bronchoalveolar lavage, chemokines, cytokines, Th1/Th2

Reza KarimiPacific University School of Pharmacy, Hillsboro, OR, USABackground: Problem-based learning (PBL) has made a major shift in support of student learning for many medical school curricula around the world. Since curricular development of PBL in the early 1970s and its growth in the 1980s and 1990s, there have been growing numbers of publications providing positive and negative data in regard to the curricular effectiveness of PBL. The purpose of this study was to explore supportive data for the four core objectives of PBL and to identify an interface between the objectives of PBL and a learner-centered paradigm.Methods: The four core PBL objectives, ie, structuring of knowledge and clinical context, clinical reasoning, self-directed learning, and intrinsic motivation, were used to search MEDLINE, the Education Resources Information Center, the Educator’s Reference Complete, and PsycINFO from January 1969 to January 2011. The literature search was facilitated and narrowed if the published study included the following terms: “problem-based learning”, “medical education”, “traditional curriculum”, and one of the above four PBL objectives.Results: Through a comprehensive search analysis, one can find supportive data for the effectiveness of a PBL curriculum in achieving the four core objectives of PBL. A further analysis of these four objectives suggests that there is an interface between PBL objectives and criteria from a learner-centered paradigm. In addition, this review indicates that promotion of teamwork among students is another interface that exists between PBL and a learner-centered paradigm.Conclusion: The desire of medical schools to enhance student learning and a need to provide an environment where students construct knowledge rather than receive knowledge have encouraged many medical schools to move into a learner-centered paradigm. Implementation of a PBL curriculum can be used as a prevailing starting point to develop not only a learner-centered paradigm, but also to facilitate a smooth curricular transition from a teacher-centered paradigm to a learner-centered paradigm.Keywords: problem-based learning, teamwork, learner-centered paradigm

This paper proposes a new strategy based on introducing the molecules as a replacement alternative to the well-known OMP method for a sparse representation of the time series of vegetation indices. This method, by preventing the occurrence of leakage problems, has led to improving the accuracy of the soft classification of agricultural products. To do so, a library of molecules (combination of atoms) is firstly generated by the representative ground truth data as the probable cultivation patterns, and then each time series of vegetation index is decomposed based on molecules. The efficiency of each molecule is measured through three different criteria 1- Maximizing the accuracy of reconstructing the input signal, 2- Minimizing the number of contributed atoms in the molecule, and 3- Minimizing the estimated negative abundances. Then, considering the uncertainties of representative atoms, an iterative imposition of constraints has been used to balance the estimated abundances. The proposed method has improved by 25.21% compared to the common OMP method in the soft classification of temporal signals of vegetation indices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Altimetry satellites of the TOPEX/Poseidon, Jason-1, Jason-2, and Jason-3 missions have provided the ocean study community with an unprecedented long-term time series of sea level observations from space. In this paper, we aim to investigate the mean sea surface (MSS) data given by the GDR files of the mentioned missions starting from the 1992 TOPEX/Poseidon mission to the latest GDR files of Jason-3. Due to climate change, it is expected that there be changes in the MSS value and furthermore, its trend is detectable in the time series of thirty years of mentioned altimetry observations. More specifically, we would like to know within long-term altimetry observations how the effect of sea level change is handled in the GDR files of TOPEX/Poseidon, Jason-1, 2, and 3 missions, and whether there are cares to be considered when using the MSS data given in the GDR files of these missions? Answer to this question and other related issues are discussed in the paper. Our benchmark for verifications of MSS data in the GDR files is the time series of the sea level heights (SSH) at 30 passes of the mentioned missions over the Baltic Sea. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Global geopotential models (GGMs) are widely used in earth sciences, especially in geodesy and geophysics. In this paper, we aim at studying GGMs' capability in the geoidal height estimation at the geographical region of Iran. This will include verification of both satellite-only and combined GGMs. To compute the geoidal height at a point, keeping the longitude and latitude constant, we change its ellipsoidal height until the GGM-derived gravity potential at the resulting height equals the geoid's potential value. In this process, we consider the topographic bias effect once the computation of the potential is inside the topographic masses. As the benchmark for the performance analysis of GGMs, we use the known geoidal heights of 841GPS/Levelling stations with a country-wide distribution. The results indicate that the XGM2019e_2159 (n_max=2190) GGM is the best combined and the GO_CONS_GCF_2_DIR_R5 (n_max=330) GGM is the best satellite-only model for the computation of geoidal heights in the study area, Iran. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Noedays, seaweeds have many uses in food industry, weaving, pharmacy, medicine, biotechnology and so on. Many efforts has been made to regenerate seaweeds in artificial media in order to carry out genetic engineering process since 1970. In this study we have tried to establish a proper method for sterilization and tissue culture of brown seaweed, Sargasopsis zanardinii, in 1/2PES, PES and 2PES media. After sterilization, the explants of the seaweed were cultured in liquid and solid media. consequently turgidity in margin of explants, longitudinal cell divission and formation of hairy strands, and microcallous formation were showed by explants which cultured in PES and 2PES solid media. After transporting from liquid to solid media, juglike bodies were formed on the surface of solid PES media and then some brown strands were grown from these bodies that finally were flattened. None of these results was obtained from 1/2PES media.