Search

During coal mining activities, many compounds are released into the environment that can negatively impact human health. Particulate matter, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), metals, and oxides are part of the complex mixture that can affect nearby populations. Therefore, we designed this study to evaluate the potential cytotoxic and genotoxic effects in individuals chronically exposed to coal residues from peripheral blood lymphocytes and buccal cells. We recruited 150 individuals who lived more than 20 years in La Loma-Colombia and 120 control individuals from the city of Barranquilla without a history of exposure to coal mining. In the cytokinesis-block micronucleus cytome (CBMN-Cyt) assay, significant differences in the frequency of micronucleus (MN), nucleoplasmic bridge (NPB), nuclear bud (NBUD), and apoptotic cells (APOP) were observed between the two groups. In the buccal micronucleus cytome (BM-Cyt) assay, a significant formation of NBUD, karyorrhexis (KRX), karyolysis (KRL), condensed chromatin (CC), and binucleated (BN) cells was observed in the exposed group. Considering the characteristics of the study group, a significant correlation for CBMN-Cyt was found between NBUD and vitamin consumption, between MN or APOP and meat consumption, and between MN and age. Moreover, a significant correlation for BM-Cyt was found between KRL and vitamin consumption or age, and BN versus alcohol consumption. Using Raman spectroscopy, a significant increase in the concentration of DNA/RNA bases, creatinine, polysaccharides, and fatty acids was detected in the urine of individuals exposed to coal mining compared to the control group. These results contribute to the discussion on the effects of coal mining on nearby populations and the development of diseases due to chronic exposure to these residues.

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a neurodegenerative disorder clinically manifested by a gradual cognitive decline. Intracerebroventricular injection (ICV) of streptozotocin (STZ), a model of Sporadic AD (sAD), shows many aspects of sAD abnormalities (i.e., neuroinflammation, oxidative stress, protein aggregation) resulting in memory impairment. Andrographolide (ANDRO), a natural diterpene lactone, has numerous bioactivities including anti-inflammatory and antioxidant properties. Studies in rodents revealed that ANDRO has neuroprotective properties and restores cognitive impairment. In the present study, we investigated the effects of ANDRO in the ICV-STZ model relative to short-term spatial memory (Object location test (OLT) and Y maze test), short-term recognition memory (Object recognition test (ORT)), locomotor activity (Open field test (OFT)), expression of amyloid precursor protein (APP), and activation of astrocytes (glial fibrillary acidic protein (GFAP) expression) and microglia (ionized calcium-binding adapter molecule-1 (Iba-1) immunohistochemistry) in the prefrontal cortex (PFC) and hippocampus (HIP). Wistar rats were injected ICV with STZ (3 mg/kg) or vehicle and treated with ANDRO (2 mg/kg, i.p.; three times per week). After four weeks, ANDRO attenuated the impairments of the Y maze and ORT performances, and the increase of the astrocyte activation in the PFC induced by the ICV-STZ model. In addition, ANDRO decreased the number of activated microglia cells in the HIP of STZ-injected rats. The APP expression was not altered, neither by the STZ nor ANDRO. ANDRO showed a beneficial effect on memory impairment and neuroinflammation in the STZ model of AD.

Cross-habitat spillover may be the outcome of a process of habitat loss or degradation where the receiving habitat serves as a refuge for organisms. Once surface habitats are lost or degraded, animals can find underground refuge in caves. This paper is focused on testing whether taxonomic order richness inside caves is positively affected by the loss of the native vegetation cover surrounding caves; whether degradation of native vegetation cover predicts cave community composition; and whether there is a pattern of cave community clusters delimited by similarity in the effects of habitat degradation on animal communities. We gathered a comprehensive speleological dataset consisting of occurrence data of thousands of invertebrates and vertebrates sampled in 864 iron caves in the Amazon, to test the effects of both variables measured inside caves and surrounding landscapes on spatial variation in richness and composition of animal communities. We show that caves can work as refuges for the fauna in landscapes where the native vegetation cover surrounding them was degraded, which was evidenced by landcover change increasing the richness of cave communities and clustering caves by similarity in community composition. Therefore, habitat degradation on the surface should be a key variable when characterizing cave ecosystems for conservation prioritization and offset planning. Habitat degradation causing a cross-habitat spillover effect highlights the importance of maintaining the connection between caves by the surface, especially large caves. Our study can help guide industry and stakeholders working on the complex conciliation between land use and biodiversity conservation.

We prove a `motivic' analogue of the Weyl character formula, computing the Euler characteristic of a line bundle on a generalized flag manifold $G/B$ multiplied either by a motivic Chern class of a Schubert cell, or a Segre analogue of it. The result, given in terms of Demazure-Lusztig (D-L) operators, recovers formulas found by Brubaker, Bump and Licata for the Iwahori-Whittaker functions of the principal series representation of a $p$-adic group. In particular, we obtain a new proof of the classical Casselman-Shalika formula for the spherical Whittaker function. The proofs are based on localization in equivariant K theory, and require a geometric interpretation of how the Hecke dual (or inverse) of a D-L operator acts on the class of a point. We prove that the Hecke dual operators give Grothendieck-Serre dual classes of the motivic classes, a result which might be of independent interest. In an Appendix joint with Dave Anderson we show that if the line bundle is trivial, we recover a generalization of a classical formula by Kostant, Macdonald, Shapiro and Steinberg for the Poincar{\'e} polynomial of $G/B$; the generalization we consider is due to Aky{\i}ld{\i}z and Carrell and replaces $G/B$ by any smooth Schubert variety., Comment: 17 pages

Many properties of complex porous media such as reservoir rocks are strongly affected by heterogeneity at different scales. Complex depositional and diagenetic processes have a strong control on the pore structures, leading to systems with a wide range of pore sizes covering many orders of magnitude in length scales. This poses a significant challenge for digital rock analysis since a single resolution image and associated simulation model cannot capture all the relevant length scales in sufficient detail due to limitations in computer memory and speed. The scale-transgressive effects of heterogeneity must therefore be accounted for through a multiscale digital rock workflow. We introduce a generalized multiscale imaging and pore-scale modelling workflow to derive transport properties of complex rocks having broad pore size distributions. A dry/wet micro-CT imaging sequence is used to spatially map the porosity and the connectivity of resolved and unresolved porous regions. The unresolved porosity regions are classified into different porosity classes or rock types. The resulting 3D rock-type map and the porosity map are combined and transformed into a multiscale pore network model. Resolved pores are treated in a conventional pore network manner while unresolved network elements are treated as a continuum Darcy-type porous medium. Similar to conventional continuum models, each Darcy pore is populated with single and multiphase flow properties. These properties are derived from high-resolution rock-type models constructed from backscatter SEM images and/or high-resolution micro-CT images of sub-samples. The multiscale digital rock workflow is applied to two heterogeneous rock samples: a mixed wet thinly laminated reservoir sandstone and an oil wet reservoir carbonate. Experimentally measured mercury–air primary drainage and oil–water imbibition capillary pressure curves (after ageing to restore wettability) are used to anchor the multiscale pore network model. Waterflood relative permeability is calculated in a blind test and compared with high-quality experimental data. A very encouraging agreement between computed and measured properties is found.

The motivation of this study was the need to decrease the permeability without compromising the others properties of nanocellulose-starch films. For this, we produced films with untreated cassava starch and hydroxypropylated cassava starch in combination with nanocellulose submitted to four fibrillation levels and compared with the films made with the same starches and cellulose. The films were submitted to physical, morphological, mechanical and thermal tests. All films are low permeability to air regardless of starch type and level of nanocellulose fibrillation. Films produced using nanocellulose with a higher degree of fibrillation absorbed more water, had the higher contact angles for glycerol and lower contact angles for water. The apparent density was not affected by starch type and level of nanocellulose fibrillation, with an average density of 0.98 g m−3. Films produced using more fibrillated nanocellulose had smaller crystallinity. The best mechanical properties were obtained with films made with untreated cassava starch. The greatest increase in the mechanical properties of cassava starch films was 146% for the burst index using nanocellulose N300, and 244% for the tensile index using nanocellulose N540. Thermal stability increased with increasing crystallinity.

Volunteer plants are a problem for agriculture because they compete for nutrients and can be the inoculum sources of many diseases. We investigated the contribution of crop rotation in the control of volunteer plants in commercial fields of processing tomato in the Central-West Region of Brazil and the occurrence of tomato diseases in these plants. The number of volunteer plants per hectare was estimated and compared between commercial fields with 1 and 2 years of crop rotation or without crop rotation. The rotation of processing tomato crops with soybean, maize, sweet corn and bean crops was able to significantly reduce numbers of volunteer plants. Consecutive tomato cultivation promoted a higher number of volunteer plants for the next crop. Samples of volunteer plants symptomatic for bacterial spot were collected for identification of the causal agent. Thirty-nine isolates were obtained from two areas. These isolates were pathogenic when inoculated in tomato plants. All isolates were identified as Xanthomonas perforans by specifics primers. We concluded that crop rotation is an efficient practice to reduce volunteer plants in processing tomato crops. This method can reduce the inoculum sources of disease transmitted by seeds, like bacterial spot.

Obtaining an accurate segmentation of images obtained by computed microtomography (micro-CT) techniques is a non-trivial process due to the wide range of noise types and artifacts present in these images. Current methodologies are often time-consuming, sensitive to noise and artifacts, and require skilled people to give accurate results. Motivated by the rapid advancement of deep learning-based segmentation techniques in recent years, we have developed a tool that aims to fully automate the segmentation process in one step, without the need for any extra image processing steps such as noise filtering or artifact removal. To get a general model, we train our network using a dataset made of high-quality three-dimensional micro-CT images from different scanners, rock types, and resolutions. In addition, we use a domain-specific augmented training pipeline with various types of noise, synthetic artifacts, and image transformation/distortion. For validation, we use a synthetic dataset to measure accuracy and analyze noise/artifact sensitivity. The results show a robust and accurate segmentation performance for the most common types of noises present in real micro-CT images. We also compared the segmentation of our method and five expert users, using commercial and open software packages on real rock images. We found that most of the current tools fail to reduce the impact of local and global noises and artifacts. We quantified the variation on human-assisted segmentation results in terms of physical properties and observed a large variation. In comparison, the new method is more robust to local noises and artifacts, outperforming the human segmentation and giving consistent results. Finally, we compared the porosity of our model segmented images with experimental porosity measured in the laboratory for ten different untrained samples, finding very encouraging results.

The rapid additive manufacturing (AM) of highly viscous elastomers such as silicone has recently become possible due to the advancements in the fluid dispensing mechanism of material jetting systems leading to jetting of inks with a viscosity of 106 mPa.s under the shear stress of the nozzle. The drop-on-demand material delivery, which is the key to rapid AM of silicone prepolymers in these systems, can be the source of an inferior mechanical performance of AM-made parts compared to the bulk material because of their increased level of porosity as a result of jet printing. In this paper, the rheological properties of silicone have been tuned to maximize the density of AM-made silicone parts (99.6%) and reduce the difference between the mechanical properties of AM-made and cast parts. Parts that were printed and molded using the optimized ink demonstrate statistically insignificant differences between their ultimate tensile strength and strain, tearing resistance, and hardness.

A number of physiological responses in the central nervous system (CNS) are regulated by the endocannabinoid system (ECS). Inhibition of neuronal excitability via activation of cannabinoid receptors (CBr) constitutes a potential protective response against neurotoxic insults. Oleamide (ODA) is a fatty acid amide with endocannabinoid profile exerting several effects in the CNS, though its neuroprotective properties remain unknown. The tryptophan metabolite quinolinic acid (QUIN) elicits toxic effects via overactivation of N-methyl-D-aspartate receptors (NMDAr) after its accumulation in the CNS under pathological conditions. Here, we investigated the protective properties of ODA against the excitotoxic damage induced by QUIN in rat brain synaptosomes and cortical slices, and whether these effects are linked to the stimulation of the endocannabinoid system via CB1 and/or CB2 receptor activation. ODA (1-50 μM) prevented the QUIN (100 μM)-induced loss of mitochondrial reductive capacity in synaptosomes in a mechanism partially mediated by CB1 receptor, as evidenced by the recovery of mitochondrial dysfunction induced by co-incubation with the CB1 receptor antagonist/inverse agonist AM281 (1 μM). In cortical slices, ODA prevented the short-term QUIN-induced loss of cell viability and the cell damage in a partial CB1 and CB2 receptor-dependent manner. Altogether, these findings demonstrate the neuroprotective and modulatory properties of ODA in biological brain preparations exposed to excitotoxic insults and the partial role that the stimulation of CB1 and CB2 receptors exerts in these effects.

One of the most important virus diseases in tomatoes in Brazil is caused by isolates of tomato chlorosis virus (ToCV, Tomato chlorosis virus, genus Crinivirus, family Closteroviridae). ToCV has a bipartite genome which is encapsidated in filamentous particles. RNA1 encodes an RNA silencing suppressor, the protein p22, that has been described as a highly variable region for members of the family. Here, we examined the genetic variability of the p22 gene in ToCV isolates from tomato plants collected from three different geographical regions of Brazil and compared them with other data sets representing the ToCV p22 population from South Korea and Spain. A low genetic diversity was found for the ToCV p22 gene, and negative selection was likely predominant in all analyzed populations. In a phylogenetic analysis, the Brazilian isolates form a monophyletic group with strong evidence of population structuring based on sampling location. Our results indicate a possibility, in the future, for the emergence of ToCV subpopulations with specific genetic characteristics that reflect the conditions of the ecological niche where they are inserted.

Federal University of Piaui State. Campus Professora Cinobelina Elvas. Bom Jesus, PI, Brazil / Minist?rio da Sa?de. Secretaria de Vigil?ncia em Sa?de. Instituto Evandro Chagas. Programa de P?s-Gradua??o em Virologia. Ananindeua, PA, Brasil / Centre for Research and ConservationRoyal Zoological Society of Antwerp. Antwerp, Belgium / Saint Louis Zoo Institute for Conservation Medicine. Saint Louis, USA. Minist?rio da Sa?de. Secretaria de Vigil?ncia em Sa?de. Instituto Evandro Chagas. Programa de P?s-Gradua??o em Virologia. Ananindeua, PA, Brasil Minist?rio da Sa?de. Secretaria de Vigil?ncia em Sa?de. Instituto Evandro Chagas. Programa de P?s-Gradua??o em Virologia. Ananindeua, PA, Brasil Centre for Research and Conservation Royal Zoological Society of Antwerp. Antwerp, Belgium / Bicho do Mato Instituto de Pesquisa. Belo Horizonte, BH, Brazil. State University of Santa Cruz. Ilh?us, BA, Brazil. Bicho do Mato Instituto de Pesquisa. Belo Horizonte, BH, Brazil / State University of Rio de Janeiro. Faculdade de Forma??o de Professores. Rio de Janeiro, RJ, Brazil. Federal University of Mato Grosso - Campus Sinop. Instituto de Ci?ncias Naturais, Humanas e Sociais. N?cleo de Estudos da Biodiversidade da Amaz?nia Mato-Grossense. Cuiab?, MT, Brazil. Saint Louis Zoo Institute for Conservation Medicine. Saint Louis USA / University of Missouri-St Louis. St. Louis USA. Missouri Botanical Garden. Center for Conservation and Sustainable Development. St. Louis USA. University of Missouri-St Louis. St. Louis USA. Minist?rio da Sa?de. Secretaria de Vigil?ncia em Sa?de. Instituto Evandro Chagas. Ananindeua, PA, Brasil. Minist?rio da Sa?de. Secretaria de Vigil?ncia em Sa?de. Instituto Evandro Chagas. Ananindeua, PA, Brasil. From 2006 through 2014, we conducted seroepidemiological surveys on non-human primates and sloths to investigate the possible circulation of arboviruses in Bahia Atlantic Forest, Brazil. We collected a total of 196 samples from 103 Leontopithecus chrysomelas, 7 Sapajus xanthosternos, 22 Bradypus torquatus and 7 Bradypus variegatus. Serum samples were tested using neutralization test and hemagglutination inhibition test to detect total antibodies against 26 different arboviruses. The overall prevalence of arboviruses was 36.6% (51/139), with the genus Flavivirus having the highest prevalence (33.1%; 46/139), followed by Phlebovirus (5.0%; 7/139), Orthobunyavirus (4.3%; 6/139) and Alphavirus (0.7%; 1/139). Monotypic reactions suggest that the wild animals were exposed naturally to at least twelve arboviruses. Added results from the neutralization test, animals were exposed to thirteen arboviruses. Most of these viruses are maintained in transmission cycles independent of human hosts, although antibodies against dengue virus serotypes 1, 2 and 3 were found in this study. To our knowledge, this is the first study reporting exposure to arboviruses in L. chrysomelas, S. xanthosternos and B. torquatus. Our results also highlight that the Southern Bahia Atlantic Forest has a variety of vertebrate hosts and potential vectors, which may support the emergence or re-emergence of arboviruses, including those pathogenic to humans.

The odd symplectic Grassmannian $\mathrm{IG}:=\mathrm{IG}(k, 2n+1)$ parametrizes $k$ dimensional subspaces of $\mathbb{C}^{2n+1}$ which are isotropic with respect to a general (necessarily degenerate) symplectic form. The odd symplectic group acts on $\mathrm{IG}$ with two orbits, and $\mathrm{IG}$ is itself a smooth Schubert variety in the submaximal isotropic Grassmannian $\mathrm{IG}(k, 2n+2)$. We use the technique of curve neighborhoods to prove a Chevalley formula in the equivariant quantum cohomology of $\mathrm{IG}$, i.e. a formula to multiply a Schubert class by the Schubert divisor class. This generalizes a formula of Pech in the case $k=2$, and it gives an algorithm to calculate any multiplication in the equivariant quantum cohomology ring., 33 pages; 2 figures; includes 2 multiplication tables for quantum products

A major reduction in global deforestation is needed to mitigate climate change and biodiversity loss. Recent private sector commitments aim to eliminate deforestation from a company’s operations or supply chain, but they fall short on several fronts. Company pledges vary in the degree to which they include time-bound interventions with clear definitions and criteria to achieve verifiable outcomes. Zero-deforestation policies by companies may be insufficient to achieve broader impact on their own due to leakage, lack of transparency and traceability, selective adoption and smallholder marginalization. Public–private policy mixes are needed to increase the effectiveness of supply-chain initiatives that aim to reduce deforestation. We review current supply-chain initiatives, their effectiveness, and the challenges they face, and go on to identify knowledge gaps for complementary public–private policies.