182 research outputs found
Curcumin ameliorates skeletal muscle atrophy in type 1 diabetic mice by inhibiting protein ubiquitination
No full textNew Findings: "What is the central question of this study?: We sought to examine whether curcumin could ameliorate skeletal muscle atrophy in diabetic mice by inhibiting protein ubiquitination, inflammatory cytokines and oxidative stress. What is the main finding and its importance?: We found that curcumin ameliorated skeletal muscle atrophy in streptozotocin-induced diabetic mice by inhibiting protein ubiquitination without affecting protein synthesis. This favourable effect of curcumin was possibly due to the inhibition of inflammatory cytokines and oxidative stress. Curcumin may be beneficial for the treatment of muscle atrophy in type 1 diabetes mellitus."Skeletal muscle atrophy develops in patients with diabetes mellitus (DM), especially in type 1 DM, which is associated with chronic inflammation. Curcumin, the active ingredient of turmeric, has various biological actions, including anti-inflammatory and antioxidant properties. We hypothesized that curcumin could ameliorate skeletal muscle atrophy in mice with streptozotocin-induced type 1 DM. C57BL/6 J mice were injected with streptozotocin (200 mg kg^-1 i.p.; DM group) or vehicle (control group). Each group of mice was randomly subdivided into two groups of 10 mice each and fed a diet with or without curcumin (1500 mg kg^-1 day^-1) for 2 weeks. There were significant decreases in body weight, skeletal muscle weight and cellular cross-sectional area of the skeletal muscle in DM mice compared with control mice, and these changes were significantly attenuated in DM+Curcumin mice without affecting plasma glucose and insulin concentrations. Ubiquitination of protein was increased in skeletal muscle from DM mice and decreased in DM+Curcumin mice. Gene expressions of muscle-specific ubiquitin E3 ligase atrogin-1/MAFbx and MuRF1 were increased in DM and inhibited in DM+Curcumin mice. Moreover, nuclear factor-κB activation, concentrations of the inflammatory cytokines tumour necrosis factor-α and interleukin-1β and oxidative stress were increased in the skeletal muscle from DM mice and inhibited in DM+Curcumin mice. Curcumin ameliorated skeletal muscle atrophy in DM mice by inhibiting protein ubiquitination, inflammatory cytokines and oxidative stress. Curcumin may be beneficial for the treatment of muscle atrophy in type 1 DM.There has been a change to the Author listing and Acknowledgements from the Accepted Article version. Tadashi Suga, Mochamad A Sobirin, Kagami Hirabayashi, Masashige Takahashi, Arata Fukushima, Tsuneaki Homma, Takashi Yokota, Shouji Matsushima were erroneously listed as authors and are now all listed in the acknowledgments with their full agreement
Pursuing the Sociological Study of Environmental Governance in Japan: An Introduction to the Special Issue
No full textThe Historical Thought of Chang Hsűeh-Ch' ȇng (章學誠)
No full textChang Hsueh-ch'eng (1738-1801) belongs to the so-called Che-tung school which may be called a historical school in the trend of neo-Confucanism, but he elaborated a phase of the historical school further so as to develop his own philosophy of history. In his theory a kind of pure continuous nature as found in Bergsonian phylosophy is given to the traditional Chinese concept of "tao" upon which his world conception and his idea of history is founded. History is regarded as the very learning of accomplishing man by this great scholar who believed in free will and creative spirit. He thinks that history is the only criterion to judge the value of thought, and criticizes the then flourishing school of textual criticism from his own point of view of universal evolutionary historicism. According to his theory the Confucian Canons are the very records where we find the accomplishments of ancient Chiness civilization, while the ancient sages, the authors of the Canons, were moral as well as cultural genii with creative spirit and the Great Master, Confucius, was the author of ancients Chinese thought and culture. In such a sense Chang Hsueh-ch'eng must be regarded as the one who opened a new field in the history of Chinese histbriography
Narratives of an Artificial Agent
No full textIn this chapter, the author develops a computational model of the narrative ability for artificial agents. To illustrate an overview of this study, the author addresses an architectural and conceptual systematization of the narrative ability. The proposed model consists of two essential elements: the “mental world” as the internal representation of the world that is formed from many stories, and the mechanism of “narrating” as the act of expressing part of the mental world. In this chapter, the basic concepts and system frameworks of the narrative ability, mental world, and narrating are presented. </jats:p
Development of an anatomical technique for visualizing the mode of climbing fiber innervation in Purkinje cells and its application to mutant mice lacking GluRδ2 and Cav2.1
No full textIn the adult cerebellum, a single climbing fiber (CF) innervates proximal dendrites of Purkinje cells (PCs). This mono-innervation is established by developmental elimination of surplus CFs through homosynaptic competition among multiply-innervating CFs and heterosynaptic competition between CFs and parallel fibers, i.e., granule cell axons innervating distal PC dendrites. Although developmental process of CF mono-innervation and its defects in mutant and experimental animal models have been extensively studied by electrophysiological techniques, relevant morphological information had been poorly understood, because of the lack of neuroanatomical methods to distinguish CFs of different neuronal origins. Soon after the identification of type 2 vesicular glutamate transporter (VGluT2) that selectively detects CF terminals in the molecular layer, we developed a novel method of combined anterograde tracer labeling and VGluT2 immunohistochemistry. This method enables us to identify the mode (mono-innervation vs. multiple innervation) of CF innervation and the site of multiple innervation. Since then, we have applied this method to various kinds of gene-manipulated mice manifesting ataxia and other cerebellar phenotypes. In this review, we summarize experimental procedures for the combined tracer/VGluT2 labeling method, and then introduce what we learned with this method when applied to studies on the role of GluRδ2 and Cav2.1 in CF mono-innervation. This method has provided informative anatomical correlates to electrophysiological data and vice versa, and will extend our knowledge on the molecular and cellular mechanisms for development, plasticity, degeneration, and repair of the CF-PC projection system
Recovery of time-dependent dielectric breakdown lifetime of thin oxide films by thermal annealing
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Subgraph domatic problem and writing capacity of memory devices with restricted state transitions
No full textNarrative Forest: An automatic narrative generation system with a visual narrative operation mechanism
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