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Exposure to excessive formaldehyde (FA) has harmful effects on mammalian tissues. The aim was to investigate levels of oxidative stress in rat kidney due to chronic mild FA exposure. Sixteen female adult albino Wistar rats divided into control and experimental groups. The experimental animals were exposed to FA by inhalation to 10 ppm FA for 12 weeks, subchronic exposure. Kidney tissue Thioredoxin Interacting Protein and Nuclear factor-?B p105 levels were examined by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay kit. The glutathione, malondialdehyde and advanced oxidation protein products levels were measured with the spectrophotometric methods. Serum albumin, creatinine, and urea concentrations were measured with enzymatic colorimetric assay. Compared to the control group, kidney GSH concentrations were significantly decreased in the FA group (P=0.015), while serum MDA concentration showed a significant increase (P=0.002). There was also a statistically insignificant decrease in tissue TXNIP and MDA and insignificant increase in tissue NF-кB p105 and AOPPs concentrations. Moreover, there was a strong positive correlation between tissue MDA and NF-кB p105 (r=0.841, P=0.001). Formaldehyde appears to cause cellular toxicity through oxidative damage because of disruption to oxidant/antioxidant system homeostasis. Subchronic administration of mild dose FA via inhalation to rats does not affect particular parameters on the apoptotic pathway. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study was conducted to analyze the physio-biochemical responses of two sorghum-sudangrass (Sorghum bicolor × Sorghum Sudanese Stapf.) hybrid (“Aneto” and “Sugar Graze”) seedlings exposed to salt stress.

Aim: Measurement of blood bilirubin levels is a crucial analysis because of the toxic effects of bilirubin on brain tissue, particularly in preterm neonates. The aim of this study was to investigate the consistency of the total bilirubin values obtained by the blood gas analyzer and the autoanalyzer.

Background: The aim of the study was to investigate the association of paraoxonase 1 (PON1) polymorphism, PON1/ arylesterase (ARE) activity and oxidative stress index (OSI) in breast cancer (BC) patients with type 2 diabetes (DM). Methods: Our study group consisted of 30 healthy women (HV group) and 66 female BC patients. The BC patients were divided into two groups: those with (n= 37) and without DM (n = 29) (BDM and NBDM group). Genotyping of PON1 Q192R and L55M polymorphisms were done by polymerase chain reaction (PCR) - restriction fragment length polymorphism (RFLP) method. Serum PON1/ARE enzyme activities, total oxidant status (TOS) and total antioxidant status (TAS) were analysed by spectrophotometric method. The ratio of TOS to TAS was accepted as the oxidative stress index (OSI). Results: PON1 Q192R genotype frequency distribution was significantly different in the BDM group compared to the NBDM group (p=0.021). When alleles distribution was examined, R and L alleles were significantly lower, Q and M alleles were significantly higher in the BDM group than in the NBDM group (p

The objectives of this study were (1) to identify and analyse the competencies required by the graduates of the Department of Automotive Engineering Education, Faculty of Engineering, Yogyakarta State University (YSU) in the workforce in accordance with the Indonesian National Qualification Framework (2) to develop the curriculum design that meets the needs of the workforce and the Indonesian National Qualification Framework, and (3) to develop the curriculum and the distribution of each competency in each course held at the Department. This study consists of the following stages: the evaluation of the existing curriculum through literature studies and workshops as well as the development of a new curriculum design. The workshop was conducted by presenting two practitioners from industry and 5 education practitioners and lecturers from the Department of Automotive Engineering Education, Faculty of Engineering, YSU. The results of the study were (1) the identification and the analysis results of the required competencies (2) the draft of the curriculum, and (3) the curriculum networking and the distribution of each competency in each course.

Penelitian ini bertujuan menemukan kesulitan-kesulitan mahasiswa dalam menyelesaikan proyek akhir (PA), yang meliputi: menentukan judul/topik, proses bimbingan, prosespengerjaan, menulis laporan, serta menemukan solusi permasalahannya.Penelitian ini termasuk penelitian deskriptif kualitatif. Populasi penelitian adalah mahasiswa yang telah dan sedang mengerjakan Proyek Akhir pada tahun perkuliahan 2009/2010 dan Dosen Pembimbing PA jurusan Teknik Otomotif. Teknik sampling menggunakan ’incidental sampling’ yang didapat 55 mahasiswa dan 15 dosen pembimbing. Teknik pengambilan data menggunakan kuesioner dan wawancara sebagai pelengkap. Teknik analisis data menggunakan analisis deskriptif kualitatif.Hasil penelitian menunjukkan bahwa: Kesulitan terbesar mahasiswa datang dari faktor internal, khususnya kejiwaan mereka yang meliputi aspek motivasi dan tanggung jawab mahasiswa menyelesaikan proyek akhir. Hambatan berikutnya berturut-turut: faktor instrumental, lingkungan dan kejasmanian; Hambatan mahasiswa dalam pelaksanaan Proyek Akhir adalah dalam menentukan judul, melakukan perhitungan dan pembuktian dan masalah plagiat. Solusi yang disampaikan adalah mahasiswa perlu memilih dan menentukan judul yang feasibel, menambah wawasan pengetahuan teknik dan aplikasi otomotif, melatih kreativitas dan inovasi, memperdalam materi metodologi dan proaktif terhadap kegiatan bimbingan, membuat jadwal penggunaan bengkel dan dosen pembimbing di bengkel.

Characterizing cellular diversity at different levels of biological organization and across data modalities is a prerequisite to understanding the function of cell types in the brain. Classification of neurons is also essential to manipulate cell types in controlled ways and to understand their variation and vulnerability in brain disorders. The BRAIN Initiative Cell Census Network (BICCN) is an integrated network of data-generating centers, data archives, and data standards developers, with the goal of systematic multimodal brain cell type profiling and characterization. Emphasis of the BICCN is on the whole mouse brain with demonstration of prototype feasibility for human and nonhuman primate (NHP) brains. Here, we provide a guide to the cellular and spatial approaches employed by the BICCN, and to accessing and using these data and extensive resources, including the BRAIN Cell Data Center (BCDC), which serves to manage and integrate data across the ecosystem. We illustrate the power of the BICCN data ecosystem through vignettes highlighting several BICCN analysis and visualization tools. Finally, we present emerging standards that have been developed or adopted toward Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR) neuroscience. The combined BICCN ecosystem provides a comprehensive resource for the exploration and analysis of cell types in the brain., Competing Interests: I have read the journal’s policy and the authors of this manuscript have the following competing interests: AR is a co-founder and equity holder of Celsius Therapeutics, an equity holder in Immunitas Therapeutics and, until 31 July 2020, was a scientific advisory board member of Thermo Fisher Scientific, Syros Pharmaceuticals, Asimov, and Neogene Therapeutics. From 1 August 2020, AR is an employee of Genentech and has equity in Roche. AR is a named inventor on multiple patents related to single cell and spatial genomics filed by or issued to the Broad Institute., (Copyright: © 2023 Hawrylycz et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.)

As a model organism, Drosophila is uniquely placed to contribute to our understanding of how brains control complex behavior. Not only does it have complex adaptive behaviors, but also a uniquely powerful genetic toolkit, increasingly complete dense connectomic maps of the central nervous system and a rapidly growing set of transcriptomic profiles of cell types. But this also poses a challenge: Given the massive amounts of available data, how are researchers to Find, Access, Integrate and Reuse (FAIR) relevant data in order to develop an integrated anatomical and molecular picture of circuits, inform hypothesis generation, and find reagents for experiments to test these hypotheses? The Virtual Fly Brain (virtualflybrain.org) web application & API provide a solution to this problem, using FAIR principles to integrate 3D images of neurons and brain regions, connectomics, transcriptomics and reagent expression data covering the whole CNS in both larva and adult. Users can search for neurons, neuroanatomy and reagents by name, location, or connectivity, via text search, clicking on 3D images, search-by-image, and queries by type (e.g., dopaminergic neuron) or properties (e.g., synaptic input in the antennal lobe). Returned results include cross-registered 3D images that can be explored in linked 2D and 3D browsers or downloaded under open licenses, and extensive descriptions of cell types and regions curated from the literature. These solutions are potentially extensible to cover similar atlasing and data integration challenges in vertebrates., Competing Interests: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2023 Court, Costa, Pilgrim, Millburn, Holmes, McLachlan, Larkin, Matentzoglu, Kir, Parkinson, Brown, O’Kane, Armstrong, Jefferis and Osumi-Sutherland.)

Large-scale single-cell 'omics profiling is being used to define a complete catalogue of brain cell types, something that traditional methods struggle with due to the diversity and complexity of the brain. But this poses a problem: How do we organise such a catalogue - providing a standard way to refer to the cell types discovered, linking their classification and properties to supporting data? Cell ontologies provide a partial solution to these problems, but no existing ontology schemas support the definition of cell types by direct reference to supporting data, classification of cell types using classifications derived directly from data, or links from cell types to marker sets along with confidence scores. Here we describe a generally applicable schema that solves these problems and its application in a semi-automated pipeline to build a data-linked extension to the Cell Ontology representing cell types in the Primary Motor Cortex of humans, mice and marmosets. The methods and resulting ontology are designed to be scalable and applicable to similar whole-brain atlases currently in preparation., (© 2023. The Author(s).)

Similar to managing software packages, managing the ontology life cycle involves multiple complex workflows such as preparing releases, continuous quality control checking and dependency management. To manage these processes, a diverse set of tools is required, from command-line utilities to powerful ontology-engineering environmentsr. Particularly in the biomedical domain, which has developed a set of highly diverse yet inter-dependent ontologies, standardizing release practices and metadata and establishing shared quality standards are crucial to enable interoperability. The Ontology Development Kit (ODK) provides a set of standardized, customizable and automatically executable workflows, and packages all required tooling in a single Docker image. In this paper, we provide an overview of how the ODK works, show how it is used in practice and describe how we envision it driving standardization efforts in our community. Database URL: https://github.com/INCATools/ontology-development-kit., (© The Author(s) 2022. Published by Oxford University Press.)

This study aimed to evaluate the effects of leptin, ghrelin and neuropeptide-Y on the development of nonconvulsive seizure activity and their role on combating oxidative stress and cytokines produced by the systemic immune response in the WAG/Rij rat model for genetic absence epilepsy. Current study showed that all three peptides aggravated spike wave discharges activity and affected the oxidative stress in WAG/Rij rats without any significant changes in the levels of IL-1β, IL-6 and TNF-α except leptin that only induced an increment in the concentration of IL-1β. Our results support the modulatory role of these endogenous peptides on absence epilepsy., (Copyright © 2020 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

The objective of this study is to examine the effects of the endogenous ligands leptin, ghrelin, and neuropeptide Y (NPY) on seizure generation, the oxidant/antioxidant balance, and cytokine levels, which are a result of immune response in a convulsive seizure model. With this goal, Wistar rats were divided into 5 groups-Group 1: Saline, Group 2: Saline+PTZ (65mg/kg), Group 3: leptin (4mg/kg)+PTZ, Group 4: ghrelin (80μg/kg)+PTZ, and Group 5: NPY (60μg/kg)+PTZ. All injections were delivered intraperitoneally, and simultaneous electroencephalography (EEG) records were obtained. Seizure activity was scored by observing seizure behavior, and the onset time, latency, and seizure duration were determined according to the EEG records. At the end of the experiments, blood samples were obtained in all groups to assess the serum TNF-α, IL-1β, IL-6, FGF-2, galanin, nitric oxide (NOֹ), malondialdehyde (MDA), and glutathione (GSH) levels. The electrophysiological and biochemical findings (p<0.05) of this study show that all three peptides have anticonvulsant effects in the pentylenetetrazol (PTZ)-induced generalized tonic-clonic convulsive seizure model. The reduction of the levels of the pro-inflammatory cytokines TNF-α, IL-1β, and IL-6 caused by leptin, ghrelin, and NPY shows that these peptides may have anti-inflammatory effects in epileptic seizures. Also, leptin significantly increases the serum levels of the endogenous anticonvulsive agent galanin. The fact that each one of these endogenous peptides reduces the levels of MDA and increases the serum levels of GSH leads to the belief that they may have protective effects against oxidative damage that is thought to play a role in the pathogenesis of epilepsy. Our study contributes to the clarification of the role of these peptides in the brain in seizure-induced oxidative stress and immune system physiology and also presents new approaches to the etiology and treatment of tendency to epileptic seizures., (Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

Background: Depression is one of the most commonly encountered psychiatric problems in peritoneal dialysis (PD) patients. Our aim was to investigate the associations between oxidative and nitrosative stress (O&NS) and brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) in PD patients with elevated depressive symptoms (EDS)., Methods: Eighty-three patients with PD and 84 healthy controls were enrolled in this study. In PD patients, two subgroups were formed: 28 with and 55 without EDS. EDS were defined as a Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) score ≥17 in patients. Serum malondialdehyde (MDA) erythrocyte, glutathione (GSH) levels measured spectrophotometrically. Serum superoxide dismutase (SOD) activity, nitric oxide (NO) and BDNF levels were determined by ELISA., Results: While MDA and NO levels were higher, levels of SOD, GSH and BDNF were lower in PD patients compared to controls (p < 0.001). The patients with EDS had higher levels of MDA and lower levels of BDNF as compared to those without EDS (p < 0.005). In linear regression analysis, the BDNF levels were dependently associated with SOD levels in PD patients (B: 0.274, p: 0.043). In addition, while a negative correlation existed between BDI scores with BDNF levels (r = -0.312, p = 0.004), a positive correlation was present between BDI scores and MDA levels (r = 0.320, p = 0.005) in PD patients., Conclusion: Our results suggest the presence of high O&NS and low antioxidant capacity accompanied with decreased levels of BDNF in PD patients, especially those with EDS were deeper. These may represent the risk factors for cellular injury and might reveal part of the mechanism causing the depressive state in PD patients.

Objective: Cisplatin (DDP, cis-diamminedichloroplatinium II) is one of the most potent chemotherapeutic antitumor drugs, but is able to generate reactive oxygen species (ROS) and it also inhibits the activity of antioxidant enzymes in renal tissue. In the present study, we investigated the preventive effect of 100, 200 and 400 mg/kg b.w. doses of vitamin E (VE), and 25, 50, and 100 mg/kg b.w. doses of vitamin A (VA) combination on malondialdehyde (MDA), nitric oxide (NO), and glutathione (GSH) levels and superoxide dismutase (SOD) activity in cisplatin-induced toxicity in rat kidneys. Our literature survey indicated a lack of any experimental study showing the beneficial effect of VA on cisplatin-induced MDA, NO, GSH and SOD changes. For this reason, we hoped that this study would provide a unique contribution in that respect., Materials and Methods: 59 Wistar rats (11 to replace prematurely lost animals) were used. 48 evaluable rats were divided into 8 groups (n = 6 in each group): control group, DDP alone (5 mg/kg b.w.) group, 3 VE combination treatment groups of VE100+DDP, VE200+DDP, and VE400+DDP, and 3 VA combination treatment groups of VA25+DDP, VA50+DDP, and VA100+DDP. Kidney MDA, GSH, NO levels and SOD activities were determined for the assessment of oxidant-antioxidant balance., Results: While in the DDP group the tissue levels of MDA and NO were found to be significantly higher than in the control group, GSH levels and SOD activities were significantly lower. MDA and NO levels were found to be significantly lower and GSH levels and SOD activities significantly higher in the VE200+DDP and VE400+ DDP groups when compared with the DDP alone group. MDA and NO levels were found to be significantly lower in the VA50+DDP and VA100+DDP groups when compared with the DDP alone group. However, identical comparisons with the DDP alone group showed significantly higher GSH levels and SOD activities in the VA25+DDP, VA50+DDP, and VA100+DDP groups. Among the VE100+ DDP, VE200+DDP, and VE400+DDP groups, and VA25+ DDP, VA50+DDP, and VA100+DDP groups, MDA and NO levels decreased and GSH levels and SOD activities increased steadily and significantly as the doses of VE and VA increased., Conclusion: These vitamins would be effective in protecting against cisplatin-induced tissue damage in rat kidneys. It is possible that the toxic effect of cisplatin is somehow minimized by a compensatory mechanism involving VE and VA via induction of antioxidant enzyme activities following intraperitoneal injection of DDP.