The aim of the study was to ascertain whether the A-204C polymorphism in the cholesterol 7alfa-hydroxylase (CYP7A1) gene plays any role in determining LDL-cholesterol (LDL-C) concentration responsiveness to a high-fat diet. The concentrations of total cholesterol and LDL-cholesterol were measured in eleven healthy men (age: 30.9±3.2 years; BMI: 24.9±2.7 kg/m2) who were homozygous for either the -204A or -204C allele, after 3 weeks on a low-fat (LF) diet and 3 weeks on a high-fat (HF) diet. During both dietary regimens, the isocaloric amount of food was provided to volunteers; LF diet contained 22 % of energy as a fat and 2.2 mg of cholesterol/kg of body weight a day, HF diet 40 % of fat and 9.7 mg of cholesterol/kg of body weight a day. In six subjects homozygous for the -204C allele, the concentrations of cholesterol and LDL-cholesterol were significantly higher on HF than on LF diet (cholesterol: 4.62 vs. 4.00 mmol/l, p<0.05; LDL-C: 2.15 vs. 1.63 mmol/l, p<0.01, respectively); no significant change was observed in five subjects homozygous for the -204A allele. There were no other differences in lipid and lipoprotein-lipid concentrations. Therefore, the polymorphism in the cholesterol 7α-hydroxylase promotor region seems to be involved in the determination of cholesterol and LDL-C responsiveness to a dietary fat challenge.
The ACL RD-TEC 2.0 has been developed with the aim of providing a benchmark for the evaluation of methods for terminology extraction and classification as well as entity recognition tasks based on specialised text from the computational linguistics domain. This release of the corpus consists of 300 abstracts from articles in the ACL Anthology Reference Corpus, published between 1978--2006. In these abstracts, terms (i.e., single or multi-word lexical units with a specialised meaning) are manually annotated. In addition to their boundaries in running text, annotated terms are classified into one of the seven categories method, tool, language resource (LR), LR product, model, measures and measurements, and other. To assess the quality of the annotations and to determine the difficulty of this task, more than 171 of the abstracts are annotated twice, independently, by each of the two annotators. In total, 6,818 terms are identified and annotated, resulting in a specialised vocabulary made of 3,318 lexical forms, mapped to 3,471 concepts.
The possible protective action of pramiracetam, a pyrrolidinone nootropic drug, against hypobaric hypoxia was studied in two age groups of immature rats with implanted electrodes. Epileptic afterdischarges induced by hippocampal stimulation were used as a measure of hypoxic damage. Pramiracetam did not substantially change these afterdischarges in 12- and 18-day-old rat pups which were not exposed to hypoxia. Hypobaric hypoxia (simulated altitude of 7000 m for one hour) led to prolongation of the first afterdischarge in both age groups. Pramiracetam did not influence this prolongation in 12-day-old rats. The first afterdischarge was shortened significantly in 18-day-old animals but not to the level of rats not exposed to hypoxia. The afterdischarges elicited by repeated stimulations (four times at 10 min intervals) did not differ in pramiracetam-treatcd and control rats.
The active magnetic bearing control through analytically designed linear PD regulator, with parallel nonlinear compensation represented by automatic approximator is described in this contribution. Coefficient (parameter) values come from actions of Continuous Action Reinforcement Learning Automata (CARLAs). Modified algorithm for automata implementation is used which continuously updates learning parameters according to former learning process. The goal of this on-line training is formulated as achievement of minimum mean square of control error. Described concept of control is proved by simulation study. It is shown that the significant improvement of whole system behavior can be achieved. and Obsahuje seznam literatury
The goldfish (Carassius auratus gibelio Bloch.) were exposed to cadmium in the concentration of 20 mg Cd/1 water under aquarium conditions for 1, 4, 7 and 15 days. After exposure to cadmium, the activities of superoxide dismutase (SOD) and catalase (CAT) were significantly decreased. At the same time, the liver ascorbic acid (AsA) content was increased.
The carboxylating activity and content of ribulose-1,5-bisphosphate carboxylase/oxygenase (RuBPCO, EC 4.1.1.39), and other soluble proteins in young seedlings and mature leaves of Lutescens-758, a drought-sensitive cultivar of soft spring wheat Triticum aestivum L., were studied under the conditions of drought and subsequent rehydration. Seedlings and mature plants preliminarily treated with the cytokinin-like compound kartolin-4 were compared to untreated plants. Drought-induced decrease in RuBPCO activity should be attributed not only to proteolytic decomposition of the enzyme protein itself but also to a partial inhibition of its catalytic activity. The decrease in RuBPCO activity was larger than that in RuBPCO content. Water stress induced a marked decrease in the soluble protein content. Kartolin-4 increased the resistance to drought. and I. I. Chernyad'ev, O. F. Monakhova.
The activity of antioxidant enzymes, copper-zinc superoxide dismutase (CuZnSOD), manganese superoxide dismutase (MnSOD) and catalase (CAT), as well as that of the mitochondrial FAD-dependent a-glycerophosphate dehydrogenase (a-GPD) in the rat interscapular brown adipose tissue (IBAT) were studied after the treatment with methimazole (MMI) for three weeks or with iopanoic acid (IOP) for five days. Besides, the mitochondrial concentration of uncoupling protein-1 (UCP-1) and the activity of catecholamine degrading enzyme monoamine oxidase (MAO) in the IBAT as well as the activity of the catecholamine synthesizing enzyme, dopamine b-hydroxylase (DBH) in rat serum were examined. Judging by the significantly enhanced level of serum DBH, which is an index of sympathetic activity, and that of IBAT MAO, the increase in MnSOD and CAT activities in the IBAT of hypothyroid (MMI-treated) rats seems to be due to elevated activity of sympathetic nervous system (SNS). However, CuZnSOD activity is not affected by SNS. On the contrary, IOP, which is a potent inhibitor of T4 deiodination into T3 producing "local" hypothyroidism, did not change either SNS activity or activities of IBAT antioxidant enzyme. However, both treatments significantly decreased IBAT UCP-1 content and a-GPD activity suggesting that the optimal T3 concentration in the IBAT is necessary for maintaining basal levels of these key mitochondrial parameters., N. Petrović, G. Cvijić V. Davidović., and Obsahuje bibliografii