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Carotid-jugular fistula is an abnormal connection between the carotid artery and/or its branches and jugular vein. It can develop either because of trauma or spontaneous causes. Traumatic fistula may occur after head injuries and can range from minor falls to severe penetrating wounds. Traumatic fistula may also result from endovascular therapy; however, these fistulas may be congenital arteriovenous connections that open spontaneously in the setting of collagen vascular disease, atherosclerotic disease, hypertension, or childbirth. Spontaneous fistulas between internal carotid artery and internal jugular vein are very exceptional diseases; therefore, this case is presented for its rare incidence in literature.

The tadpole larvae prosencephalon of the ascidian Ciona intestinalis contains a single large ventricle, along the inner walls of which lie two sensory organs: the otolith (a gravity-sensing organ) and the ocellus (a photo-sensing organ composed of a single cup-shaped pigment cell, about 20 photoreceptor cells, and three lens cells). Comparison has been drawn between the morphology and physiology of photoreceptor cells in the ascidian ocellus and the vertebrate eye. The development of vertebrate and invertebrate eyes requires the activity of several conserved genes and it is regulated by precise expression patterns and cell fate decisions common to several species. We have isolated a Ciona homeobox gene (Ci-Rx) that belongs to the paired-like class of homeobox genes. Rx genes have been identified from a variety of organisms and have been demonstrated to have a role in vertebrate eye formation. Ci-Rx is expressed in the anterior neural plate in the middle tailbud stage and subsequently in the larval stage in the sensory vesicle around the ocellus. Loss of Ci-Rx function leads to an ocellus-less phenotype that shows a loss of photosensitive swimming behavior, suggesting the important role played by Ci-Rx in basal chordate photoreceptor cell differentiation and ocellus formation. Furthermore, studies on Ci-Rx regulatory elements electroporated into Ciona embryos using LacZ or GFP as reporter genes indicate the presence of Ci-Rx in pigment cells, photoreceptors, and neurons surrounding the sensory vesicle. In Ci-Rx knocked-down larvae, neither basal swimming activity nor shadow responses develop. Thus, Rx has a role not only in pigment cells and photoreceptor formation but also in the correct development of the neuronal circuit that controls larval photosensitivity and swimming behavior. The results suggest that a Ci-Rx "retinal" territory exists, which consists of pigment cells, photoreceptors, and neurons involved in transducing the photoreceptor signals.

In an attempt to understand more directly the molecular mechanisms involved in the cellular response of endothelial cells to Interleukin-1 (IL-1), we have made several cDNA libraries from human umbilical vein endothelial cells (HUVEC) stimulated for 1 h with IL-1 in the presence of cycloheximide. The cDNA libraries were differentially screened with labelled cDNA derived from mRNA isolated from untreated or IL-1 treated HUVEC. Forty cDNA clones induced by IL-1 were isolated and partially sequenced. Thirty-eight of these corresponded to known genes, that is IL-8, ELAM-1, GRO-alpha, GRO-beta, PA-I and I-kB. The last two clones contained an identical insert belonging to a previously unknown gene. The full length cDNA of this new gene was isolated and called PTX3. It encodes for a 42 kD, 381 amino-acid long protein which shows in its 3' half a high degree of homology to all the known members of the pentaxin gene family, including C-reactive protein (CRP) and serum amyloid P component (SAP). PTX3 may represent a novel marker of inflammatory reactions, particularly those involving the vessel wall.

In Linear Dynamics, the most studied class of linear operators is certainly that of weighted shifts, on the separable Banach spaces $$c_0$$ c 0 and $$\ell ^p$$ ℓ p , $$1 \le p < \infty $$ 1 ≤ p < ∞ . Over the last decades, the intensive study of such operators has produced an incredible number of versatile, deep and beautiful results that are applicable in various areas of Mathematics; and the relationships between various important notions, especially concerning chaos and hyperbolic properties, as well as spectrum of weighted shifts, have been investigated. In this paper, we investigate the point spectrum of weighted shifts and, under some regularity hypotheses on the weight sequence, we deduce the spectrum.

We introduce the notion of Perron capacity of a set of slopes Ω ⊂ R \Omega \subset \mathbb {R} . Precisely, we prove that if the Perron capacity of Ω \Omega is finite then the directional maximal operator associated M Ω M_\Omega is not bounded on L p ( R 2 ) L^p(\mathbb {R}^2) for any 1 > p > ∞ 1 > p > \infty . This allows us to prove that the set Ω c = { cos ⁡ n n : n ∈ N ∗ } \begin{equation*} {\Omega _c} =\left \{ \frac {\cos n}{n}: n\in \mathbb {N}^* \right \} \end{equation*} is not finitely lacunary which answers a question raised by A. Stokolos in private communications to the authors.

In the current paper, we study how the speed of convergence of a sequence of angles decreasing to zero influences the possibility of constructing a rare differentiation basis of rectangles in the plane, one side of which makes with the horizontal axis an angle belonging to the given sequence, that differentiates precisely a fixed Orlicz space.

Cigarette smokers with brain damage involving the insular cortex display cessation of tobacco smoking, suggesting that this region may contribute to nicotine addiction. In the present study, we speculated that molecules in the insular cortex that are sensitive to experimental traumatic brain injury (TBI) in mice might provide leads to ameliorate nicotine addiction. Using targeted lipidomics, we found that TBI elicited substantial increases of a largely uncharacterized lipid, N-acyl-glycine, N-oleoyl-glycine (OlGly), in the insular cortex of mice. We then evaluated whether intraperitoneal administration of OlGly would alter withdrawal responses in nicotine-dependent mice as well as the rewarding effects of nicotine, as assessed in the conditioned place preference paradigm (CPP). Systemic administration of OlGly reduced mecamylamine-precipitated withdrawal responses in nicotine-dependent mice and prevented nicotine CPP. However, OlGly did not affect morphine CPP, demonstrating a degree of selectivity. Our respective in vitro and in vivo observations that OlGly activated peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor alpha (PPAR-α) and the PPAR-α antagonist GW6471 prevented the OlGly-induced reduction of nicotine CPP in mice suggests that this lipid acts as a functional PPAR-α agonist to attenuate nicotine reward. These findings raise the possibility that the long chain fatty acid amide OlGly may possess efficacy in treating nicotine addiction.

Fish have proven to be valuable models in the study of the endocrine control of appetite in response to peripheral signals of energetic and nutritional status. In parallel, a growing body of literature points to the importance of sensory experiences as factors affecting food choice in fish, with a special focus on visual and chemical signals allowing discrimination of potential foods within a 3D environment. Accordingly, waterborne compounds, such as monosaccharides or amino acids, are regarded as the main "olfactory" cues driving fish alimentary behavior. However, we recently suggested that hydrophobic molecules also allow food identification in aquatic environments and that fish actually explore a larger variety of chemosensory cues, including the olfactory/volatile compounds, when determining food palatability. In this study, we show that both homeostatic and chemosensory mechanisms involved in food intake are highly conserved in vertebrates and that the chemosensory world of fish is less different from that of terrestrial mammals than commonly thought. As a result, we support a more integrated and synthetic view of the mechanisms of chemical communication in both terrestrial and aquatic systems, which could help to ensure greater translatability of the fish models, such as the zebrafish (Danio rerio), the turquoise killifish (Nothobranchius furzeri), the goldfish (Carassius auratus), or the Japanese medaka fish (Oryzias latipes) to terrestrial vertebrates when approaching complex dynamic patterns in alimentary behavior.