1,720,955 research outputs found
Abscisic Acid: A Novel Nutraceutical for Glycemic Control
Full text linkAbscisic acid is naturally present in fruits and vegetables, and it plays an important role in managing glucose homeostasis in humans. According to the latest U.S. dietary survey, about 92% of the population might have a deficient intake of ABA due to their deficient intake of fruits and vegetables. This review summarizes the in vitro, preclinical, mechanistic, and human translational findings obtained over the past 15 years in the study of the role of ABA in glycemic control. In 2007, dietary ABA was first reported to ameliorate glucose tolerance and obesity-related inflammation in mice. The most recent findings regarding the topic of ABA and its proposed receptor lanthionine synthetase C-like 2 in glycemic control and their interplay with insulin and glucagon-like peptide-1 suggest a major role for ABA in the physiological response to a glucose load in humans. Moreover, emerging evidence suggests that the ABA response might be dysfunctional in diabetic subjects. Follow on intervention studies in healthy individuals show that low-dose dietary ABA administration exerts a beneficial effect on the glycemia and insulinemia profiles after oral glucose load. These recent findings showing benefits in humans, together with extensive efficacy data in mouse models of diabetes and inflammatory disease, suggest the need for reference ABA values and its possible exploitation of the glycemia-lowering effects of ABA for preventative purposes. Larger clinical studies on healthy, prediabetic, and diabetic subjects are needed to determine whether addressing the widespread dietary ABA deficiency improves glucose control in humans
Metabolic Regulation of Plasma Cell Function
No full textIgA+ plasma cells (PCs) provide robust humoral immunity against pathogenic and commensal bacteria. These cells supply critical antibodies for barrier function at mucosal surfaces. IgA+ PCs are found in large numbers in the gut lamina propria and systemic sites such as the bone marrow (BM). In this thesis, we found that IgA+ PCs in the gut secrete significantly fewer antibodies compared to IgA+ PCs in BM. While the cell-intrinsic and -extrinsic signals responsible for regulating BM PC function have been extensively studied, the regulatory signals in the gut remain largely unknown. Understanding how antibody secretion is regulated in tissue-resident PCs can be leveraged to optimize better antibody responses. Recent findings have determined that the metabolic environment in the BM niche determines efficiency of antibody secretion. Thus, we sought to determine if decreased gut IgA+ PC antibody secretion could be due to differential metabolism. Utilizing a single cell flow cytometry-based metabolism assay (SCENITH), we found that gut IgA+ PCs have an increased glycolytic capacity, compared to increased mitochondrial dependence in BM IgA+ PCs. Gut IgA+ PCs have cellular phenotype consistent with a cell undergoing glycolysis. Furthermore, when key bioenergetic pathways were inhibited both ex vivo and in vivo, we found that glycolytic activity regulates antibody secretion in the gut. We hypothesized that nutrient availability could be a determining extrinsic governor of regulating PC metabolism and subsequent antibody secretion in the gut. Therefore, we introduced a high fat, no carbohydrate ketogenic diet that promotes fatty acid oxidation metabolism and limits glycolytic activity. We saw a significant increase in antibody secretion in gut IgA+ PCs. Exploring microbiome and nutrient effects on this diet induced antibody secretion in the gut led us to determine that ketogenic diet induced a metabolic phenotype in gut IgA+ PCs consistent with oxidative phosphorylation. Herein, we observed that metabolism regulates PC function in the gut. We aim to further investigate the direct and indirect contributing factors that determine the gut IgA+ plasma cell glycolytic program. Ultimately, understanding extrinsic and intrinsic regulators of antibody secretion in the gut will provide tools for sustaining intestinal homeostasis and targeting mucosal pathogen responses.Upstate Medical UniversityMicrobiology & ImmunologyPh
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist
No full textWe have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
Author-wise bibliometric analysis based on entropy.
No full textAuthor-wise bibliometric analysis based on entropy.</p
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