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Few studies have evaluated risk factors among stroke patients in our population. This study is aimed at exploring risk factors among black stroke patients. A total of 524 stroke patients seen at University of Maiduguri Teaching Hospital between January 2005 and June 2011 were evaluated to ascertain risk factors. Prestroke risk factors were obtained from patient’s medical history and hospital records. Risk factors such as hypertension were gotten from case history, with hypertension defined as blood pressure (BP) of ≥ 140/90 mmHg or features of long standing hypertension. History of smoking, alcohol intake, transient ischaemic attack (TIA) were also noted. Hypertension was the commonest risk factor, found in 87% of patients, followed by hypercholesterolaemia 15.1%, past history of stroke 11.5%, diabetes 10.1%, alcohol 8.8%, smoking 6.8%, TIA 5.3%, heart failure 2.4% and preeclampsia-eclampsia 2.0%, while 19.7% had more than one risk factor. About 53% had no prior knowledge of being hypertensive, and only about 10% had treatment for hypertension prior to having a stroke. Males had higher systolic BP. Alcohol consumption and smoking were commoner in males and the young. The younger patients were more likely to acquire basic education, nephrotic syndrome and HIV infection. Hypertension and hypercholesterolaemia were common among the middle age group, while past history of stroke and multiple risk factors were commoner among the elderly. Thirty-day fatality was 17.7% and higher in older patients. Hypertension was found to be the most important risk factor for stroke among our study population. Public enlightenment on the importance of early detection of hypertension and adherence to antihypertensive medications will go a long way in reducing the morbidity and mortality associated with stroke in our environment. Key words: Risk factors, hypertension, stroke, blacks, Nigerians.

Although ascidians belong to a key group in chordate phylogenesis, amino acid sequences of Ciona intestinalis galectin-CRDs (CiLgals-a and -b) have been retained too divergent from vertebrate galectins. In the present paper, to contribute in disclosing Bi-CRD galectin evolution a novel attempt was carried out on CiLgals-a and -b CRDs phylogenetic analysis, and their involvement in ascidian inflammatory responses was shown. CiLgals resulted aligned with Bi-CRD galectins from vertebrates (Xenopus tropicalis, Gallus gallus, Mus musculus, Homo sapiens), cephalochordates (Branchiostoma floridae), echinoderms (Strongylocentrotus purpuratus) and a mono-CRD galectin from the ascidian Clavelina picta. The CiLgals-a N-terminal and C-terminal CRDs contain the signature sequence involved in carbohydrate binding, whereas the CiLgals-b C-CRD presents only three out of seven key aminoacids and it could not be suitable as sugar binding motif. Sequence similarity between clusters suggests an evolutionary model based on CRD domain gene duplication and sequence diversification. In particular CiLgals-b N-CRD and C-CRD were similar to each other and both grouped with the ascidian C. picta mono-CRD. Homology modeling process shows a CiLgals molecular structure superimposed to chicken and mouse galectins. The CiLgals-a and CiLgals-b genes were upregulated by LPS inoculation suggesting that they are inducible and expressed in the inflamed pharynx as revealed by real-time PCR analysis. Finally, in situ hybridization and immunohistochemical assays showed their localization in the inflamed tissues, while immunoblotting analysis indicated that CiLgals can form oligomers.

Interest is increasing in biological scaffolds for tissue regeneration such as extracellular matrix membranes, developed through soft tissue decellularization. Extracellular matrix membranes were developed to heal different tendon and soft tissue lesions that are very frequent in the general population with high health-care costs and patient morbidity. The aim of this research was to evaluate a human dermal matrix (HDM) decellularized by a chemico-physical method. A primary culture of rat tenocytes was performed: tenocytes were seeded on HDM samples and on polystyrene wells as controls (CTR). Cell viability and synthetic activity were evaluated at 3 and 7 days. An in vitro microwound model was used to evaluate HDM bioactivity: after tenocyte expansion, artificial wounds were created, HDM extracts were added, and closure time and decorin synthesis were monitored histomorphometrically at 1, 4, 24, and 72 hr. A significant higher amount of collagen I was observed when cells were cultured on HDM in comparison with that on CTR (3 days: p < 0.0001; 7 days: p < 0.05). In HDM group, fibronectin synthesis was significantly higher at both experimental times (p < 0.0001). At 3 days, proteoglycans and transforming growth factor-β1 releases were significantly higher on HDM (p < 0.0001 and p < 0.005, respectively). The artificial microwound closure time and decorin expression were significantly enhanced by the addition of 50% HDM extract (p < 0.05). In vitro data showed that the decellularization technique enabled the development of a matrix with adequate biological and biomechanical properties.

Hemocytes from the ascidian Ciona intestinalis exert in vitro Ca 2+ -dependent cytotoxic activity toward mammalian erythrocytes and K562 cells. To examine the lytic mechanism, hemocyte populations were separated (B1–B6 bands) through a Percoll discontinuous density gradient, the hemocyte cytotoxic activity (HCA) and the lytic activity of the hemocyte lysate supernatant (HLS) were assayed. In addition the separated hemocytes were cultured and the cell-free culture medium (CFM) assayed after 3 h culture. Results support that unilocular refractile hemocytes (URGs), enriched in B5, are cytotoxic. The B5-HLS contains lysins and the activity of B5-CFM shows that lysins can be released into a culture medium. The B5 activity was blocked by d -Galactose, α-Lactose, Lactulose, LacNAc, thiodigalactoside (TDG), l -Fucose, d -Mannose, d -Glucose, sphingomyelin (SM), and soluble phospholipase A2 (sPLA2) inhibitors (dibucain, quinacrine). Accordingly, HLS chemico-physical properties (alkaline medium, high thermostability, Ca 2+ -dependence, trypsin treatment, protease inhibitors) and SEM observations of the affected targets suggested that sPLA2 could be responsible for changes and large alterations of the target cell membrane. An apoptotic activity, as recorded by a caspase 3, 7 assay, was found by treating K562 cells with very diluted HLS. A lytic mechanism involving sPLA2 and lectins promptly released by URGs and morula cells respectively is suggested, whereas target cell membrane SM could be a modulator of the enzyme activity.

The CAP superfamily is a group of proteins that have been linked to several biological functions such as reproduction, cancer, and immune defense. A differential screening between lipopolysaccharide (LPS)-challenged and naive Ciona intestinalis has been performed to identify LPS-induced genes. This strategy has allowed the isolation of a full-length 1471-bp cDNA encoding for a 413-amino-acid protein (CiCAP). In silico analysis has shown that this polypeptide displays a modular structure with similarities to vertebrate CAP-superfamily proteins and to a collagen-binding adhesin of Streptococcus mutans. Domain organization analysis and alignment of CiCAP to other vertebrate CAP proteins have revealed a novel structure suggesting that this protein originated from a common ancestor gene that gave rise to many subfamilies of mosaic proteins with novel functions. Quantitative mRNA expression performed by real-time polymerase chain reaction analysis has demonstrated that this gene is rapidly activated in the pharynx of C. intestinalis a few hours after LPS injection. Moreover, in situ hybridization has shown that CiCAP mRNA is highly expressed by hemocytes with large granules contained inside the pharynx vessels. Thus, CiCAP represents a protein with novel structural domains involved in ascidian immune responses.

Stressful conditions include a prompt release of corticosteroid hormones which can mediate gene expression through glucocorticoid receptors (GR). Since two seabass (Dicentrarchus labrax) GRs have been cloned and sequenced from peritoneal cavity cells (DlGR1) and liver (DlGR2), a comparative amino acid sequence analysis that included Haplochromis burtoni HbGRs, was carried out and homologies disclosed. The DlGR1 and DlGR2 deduced aminoacid sequences showed 61% identity (I) and 70% similarity (S). Moreover, DlGR2 was similar to HbGR2b (69% I, 73% S), and the DlGR1 to HbGR1 (72% I, 78% S). In addition, we examined the expression of the DlGRs after exogeneous cortisol inoculation into the peritoneal cavity, mimicking stress effects. At various times after the administration (3 h, 24 h, 1 week), gene expressions was evaluated in head kidney by real-time PCR. In addition, immunoblotting and densitometry analyses were performed with anti- DlGR1 antibodies. Although sea bass head kidney expressed both DlGR1 and DlGR2 they were differentially modulated by intraperitoneal implant of exogeneous cortisol.

In situ hybridisation and immunohistochemistry analyses have shown that the Ciona intestinalis tumour necrosis factor alpha gene (CiTNFalpha), which has been previously cloned and sequenced, is expressed either during the inflammatory pharynx response to lipopolysaccharide (LPS) or during the swimming larval phase of development. Granulocytes with large granules and compartment/morula cells are CiTNFalpha-producing cells in both inflamed pharynx and larvae. Pharynx vessel endothelium also takes part in the inflammatory response. Haemocyte nodules in the vessel lumen or associated with the endothelium suggest the involvement of CiTNFalpha in recruiting lymphocyte-like cells and promoting the differentiation of inflammatory haemocytes. Specific antibodies against a CiTNFalpha peptide have identified a 43-kDa cell-bound form of the protein. Observations of pharynx histological sections (at 4 and 8 h post-LPS inoculation) from naive and medium-inoculated ascidians have confirmed the CiTNFalpha-positive tissue response. Larval histological sections and whole-mount preparations have revealed that CiTNFalpha is expressed by trunk mesenchyme, preoral lobe and tunic cells, indicating CiTNFalpha-expressing cell immigration events and an ontogenetic role.

The purification, cloning, sequencing, molecular properties and expression of a fucose-binding lectin from the serum of Dicentrarchus labrax (DlFBL) have been previously reported. We now describe the distribution and expression of DlFBL during fish ontogeny. Immunohistochemistry and in situ hybridization assays were carried out at various developmental stages (from 10 days posthatching larvae to juveniles). Another fucose-binding lectin, similar to DlFBL in biochemical, immunochemical and agglutinating properties, was extracted and purified from eggs and appeared to be localized in the embryo yolk sack residual. DlFBL was found in columnar and goblet cells of the intestinal epithelium of larvae (from 20 days post-hatching) and juveniles and in parenchymal tissue of juveniles. DlFBL mRNA and protein were detected in the intestinal epithelium and in hepatocytes. An amplification product from degenerate primers indicates that lectin isotypes with DlFBL epitopes are expressed in eggs and embryos. Whether the lectin fraction isolated from eggs and embryos includes DlFBL of maternal origin remains unclear.

Syntactic analysis influences the way in which the source sentence is translated. Previous efforts add syntactic constraints to phrase-based translation by directly rewarding/punishing a hypothesis whenever it matches/violates source-side constituents. We present a new model that automatically learns syntactic constraints, including but not limited to constituent matching/violation, from training corpus. The model brackets a source phrase as to whether it satisfies the learnt syntactic constraints. The bracketed phrases are then translated as a whole unit by the decoder. Experimental results and analysis show that the new model outperforms other previous methods and achieves a substantial improvement over the baseline which is not syntactically informed.

Recently confusion network decoding shows the best performance in combining outputs from multiple machine translation (MT) systems. However, overcoming different word orders presented in multiple MT systems during hypothesis alignment still remains the biggest challenge to confusion network-based MT system combination. In this paper, we compare four commonly used word alignment methods, namely GIZA++, TER, CLA and IHMM, for hypothesis alignment. Then we propose a method to build the confusion network from intersection word alignment, which utilizes both direct and inverse word alignment between the backbone and hypothesis to improve the reliability of hypothesis alignment. Experimental results demonstrate that the intersection word alignment yields consistent performance improvement for all four word alignment methods on both Chinese-to-English spoken and written language tasks.

In this paper, we present a feature-based method to align documents with similar content across two sets of bilingual comparable corpora from daily news texts. We evaluate the contribution of each individual feature and investigate the incorporation of these diverse statistical and heuristic features for the task of bilingual document alignment. Experimental results on the English-Chinese and English-Malay comparable news corpora show that our proposed Discrete Fourier Transform-based term frequency distribution feature is very effective. It contributes 4.1% and 8% to performance improvement over Pearson's correlation method on the two comparable corpora. In addition, when more heuristic and statistical features as well as a bilingual dictionary are utilized, our method shows an absolute performance improvement of 23.2% and 15.3% on the two sets of bilingual corpora when comparing with a prior information retrieval-based method.

Blood cells freshly collected from sea bass (Dicentrarchus labrax) were exposed in vitro to different concentrations of cadmium (Cd) and copper (Cu) at 10-7 M, 10-5 M, 10-3 M, and exam- ined for neutral red retention capacity and for cell vitality with MTT assay. A relationship between heavy metal exposure and alteration in responses of blood cells in a dose-time-dependent was found. Our results showed that fish blood cells may constitute an interesting biological model for experimen- tal and applied toxicology, especially in the case of environmental pollution.

Recently described biochemical and structural aspects of fucose-binding lectins from the European eel (Anguilla anguilla) and striped bass (Morone saxatilis) led to the identification of a novel lectin family ("F-type" lectins) characterized by a unique sequence motif and a characteristic structural fold. The F-type fold is shared not only with other members of this lectin family, but also with apparently unrelated proteins ranging from prokaryotes to vertebrates. Here we describe the purification, biochemical and molecular properties, and the opsonic activity of an F-type lectin (DlFBL) isolated from sea bass (Dicentrarchus labrax) serum. DlFBL exhibits two tandemly arranged carbohydrate-recognition domains that display the F-type sequence motif. In situ hybridization and immunohistochemical analysis revealed that DlFBL is specifically expressed and localized in hepatocytes and intestinal cells. Exposure of formalin-killed Escherichia coli to DlFBL enhanced their phagocytosis by D. labrax peritoneal macrophages relative to the unexposed controls, suggesting that DlFBL may function as an opsonin in plasma and intestinal mucus.

This paper studies three techniques that improve the quality of N-best hypotheses through additional regeneration process. Unlike the multi-system consensus approach where multiple translation systems are used, our improvement is achieved through the expansion of the N-best hypotheses from a single system. We explore three different methods to implement the regeneration process: redecoding, n-gram expansion, and confusion network-based regeneration. Experiments on Chinese-to-English NIST and IWSLT tasks show that all three methods obtain consistent improvements. Moreover, the combination of the three strategies achieves further improvements and outperforms the baseline by 0.81 BLEU-score on IWSLT'06, 0.57 on NIST'03, 0.61 on NIST'05 test set respectively.

A tumor necrosis factor-alpha (TNFalpha)-like gene from Ciona intestinalis (CiTNF alpha-like) body wall challenged with bacterial lipopolysaccharide (LPS) was cloned and sequenced 4 h after LPS inoculation. An open reading frame of 936 bp encoding a propeptide of 312 amino acids (35.4 kDa) displaying a transmembrane domain from positions 7 to 29, a TACE cleavage site, and a mature peptide domain of 185 amino acids (20.9 kDa), was determined with a predicted isoelectric point of 9.4. The phylogenetic tree based on deduced amino acid sequences of invertebrate TNF-like protein and vertebrate TNFs supported the divergence between the ascidian and vertebrate TNF families, whereas D. melanogaster Eiger A and B TNF-like sequences were distinctly separated from the chordate TNFs. Thus, the ascidian TNFalpha-like cytokine was upregulated by in vivo LPS challenge supporting its pro-inflammatory role. In the pharynx, increased expression levels were found following analysis by real-time polymerase chain reaction, whereas in situ hybridization assay showed positive hemocytes both in the tissue and in circulating hemocytes. Finally, Western blot with monoclonal antibodies disclosed human TNFalpha epitopes in a 15-kDa protein component of the hemolymph serum and in a 43-kDa protein contained in the hemocyte lysate supernatant prepared in the presence of detergents. Both soluble and hemocyte-bound CiTNF alpha-like protein therefore appeared to be modulated by the LPS challenge.

Since glucocorticoids have a role in maintaining the homeostatic status in fish, in the present paper mRNA expression (in situ hybridization) and tissue immunohistochemical localization of a glucocorticoid receptor (DlGR1) in several Dicentrarchus labrax organs are reported. Riboprobe and specific antibodies were prepared by using the DlGR1 that has been previously cloned and sequenced from peritoneal cavity leukocytes. Both mRNA and receptor were identified in head kidney, spleen, gills, intestine, heart and liver tissues. The functional roles of DlGR1 localization are discussed.

Glucocorticoid hormone receptors (GR), members of the nuclear hormone receptor superfamily, are ligand-dependent transcription factors expressed in various tissues by binding to specific DNA sequences. Since glucocorticoids have a role in maintaining the homeostatic status in fish, we previously cloned and sequenced a GR (DlGR1) of adult Dicentrarchus labrax; we also showed mRNA expression (in situ hybridization) and tissue immunohistochemical localization of DlGR1 in several organs. This work has now been extended to the examination of the expression, tissue distribution, and cytolocalization of DlGR1 in larval developmental stages by similar methods to those used for the adult organs. The riboprobe included the DlGR1 cDNA transcriptional activation domain (1.0–1,300 nucleotide sequence) showing no significant similarity with a known second GR cDNA sequence of sea bass. The antibody was specific for an opportunely selected peptide sequence of the DlGR1 transcriptional domain. In histological sections of brain, head kidney, gills, liver, anterior intestine, and spleen cells, the riboprobe was mainly located in the cell nucleus. The antibody identified DlGR1 in the head kidney, gills, liver, and anterior intestine, mainly located in the cytosol. These results are in agreement with the receptor location in adult tissues. The greater presence of both the transcript and protein of DlGR1 in the late developmental stages suggests an increasing expression of this receptor. The cytolocalization (nuclear-cytosolic) and presumptive roles of DlGR1-containing tissues are discussed.