Notes

Community views along with behavioral replies on the first COVID-19 outbreak wave in Italy: Is a result of the particular iCARE examine.
MaltOBP10 appears to play a role in the fundamental olfactory recognition process of female adults according to its broad binding ability. These findings suggest that OBPs may have various physiological functions in insects, thereby providing novel insights into the olfactory receptive mechanism. Copyright © 2020 Li, Huang, Yang, Chen and Wang.Hazardous anatoxin-a (ANTX-a) is produced by freshwater algal blooms worldwide, which greatly increases the risk of consumer exposure. Although ANTX-a shows widespread neurotoxicity in aquatic animals, little is known about its mechanism of action and biotransformation in biological systems, especially in immunobiological models. In this study, transmission electron microscopy results showed that ANTX-a can destroy lymphocytes of Carassius auratus in vitro by inducing cytoplasmic concentration, vacuolation, and swollen mitochondria. DNA fragmentations clearly showed a ladder pattern in agarose gel electrophoresis, which demonstrated that the apoptosis of fish lymphocytes was caused by exposure to ANTX-a. Flow cytometry results showed that the apoptotic percentage of fish lymphocytes exposed to 0.01, 0.1, 1, and 10 mg/L of ANTX-a for 12 h reached 18.89, 22.89, 39.23, and 35.58%, respectively. ANTX-a exposure induced a significant increase in reactive oxygen species (ROS) and malonaldehyde (MDA) in lymphocytes. The activities of superoxide dismutase (SOD), catalase (CAT), glutathione reductase (GR), glutathione peroxidase (GPx), and the glutathione (GSH) content of the 0.01 mg/L ANTX-a-treated group decreased significantly by about 41, 46, 67, and 54% compared with that of the control group (p less then 0.01), respectively. Although these observations were dose-dependent, these results suggested that ANTX-a can induce lymphocyte apoptosis via intracellular oxidative stress and destroy the antioxidant system after a short exposure time of only 12 h. Besides neurotoxicity, ANTX-a may also be toxic to the immune system of fish, even when the fish are exposed to environmentally relevant concentrations, which clearly demonstrated that the potential health risks induced by ANTX-a in aquatic organisms requires attention. Copyright © 2020 Zhong, Shen, Ye, Zhou, He, Li, Ding, Zhu, Ding and Zhang.The importance of electrolyte concentrations for cardiac function is well established. Electrolyte variations can lead to arrhythmias onset, due to their important role in the action potential (AP) genesis and in maintaining cell homeostasis. However, most of the human AP computer models available in literature were developed with constant electrolyte concentrations, and fail to simulate physiological changes induced by electrolyte variations. This is especially true for Ca2+, even in the O'Hara-Rudy model (ORd), one of the most widely used models in cardiac electrophysiology. Therefore, the present work develops a new human ventricular model (BPS2020), based on ORd, able to simulate the inverse dependence of AP duration (APD) on extracellular Ca2+ concentration ([Ca2+]o), and APD rate dependence at 4 mM extracellular K+. The main changes needed with respect to ORd are (i) an increased sensitivity of L-type Ca2+ current inactivation to [Ca2+]o; (ii) a single compartment description of the sarcoplasmic reticulum; iii) the replacement of Ca2+ release. BPS2020 is able to simulate the physiological APD-[Ca2+]o relationship, while also retaining the well-reproduced properties of ORd (APD rate dependence, restitution, accommodation and current block effects). We also used BPS2020 to generate an experimentally-calibrated population of models to investigate (i) the occurrence of repolarization abnormalities in response to hERG current block; (ii) the rate adaptation variability; (iii) the occurrence of alternans and delayed after-depolarizations at fast pacing. Our results indicate that we successfully developed an improved version of ORd, which can be used to investigate electrophysiological changes and pro-arrhythmic abnormalities induced by electrolyte variations and current block at multiple rates and at the population level. Copyright © 2020 Bartolucci, Passini, Hyttinen, Paci and Severi.The molecular organization of the membrane of the red blood cell controls cell morphology and function and is thereby a main determinant of red blood cell homeostasis in the circulation. The role of membrane organization is prominently reflected in red blood cell deformation and aggregation. However, there is little knowledge on whether they are controlled by the same membrane property and if so, to what extent. To address the potential interdependence of these two parameters, we measured deformation and aggregation in a variety of physiological as well as pathological conditions. As a first step, we correlated a number of deformability and aggregation parameters in red blood cells from healthy donors, which we obtained in the course of our studies on red blood cell homeostasis in health and disease. This analysis yielded some statistically significant correlations. Also, we found that most of these correlations were absent in misshapen red blood cells that have an inborn defect in the interaction between the membrane and the cytoskeleton. The observations suggest that deformability and aggregation share at least one common, membrane-related molecular mechanism. Together with data obtained after treatment with various agents known to affect membrane organization in vitro, our findings suggest that a phosphorylation-controlled interaction between the cytoskeleton and the integral membrane protein band 3 is part of the membrane-centered mechanism that plays a role in deformability as well as aggregation. Selleck TAK 165 Copyright © 2020 Lazari, Freitas Leal, Brock and Bosman.Apolygus lucorum (Hemiptera Miridae), one of the main insect pests, causes severe damage in cotton and many other economic crops. As is well-known, legs play important roles in the chemoreception of insects. In this study, the putative chemosensory proteins in legs of A. lucorum involved in close or contact chemical communication of adult bugs were investigated using RNA transcriptome sequencing and qPCR methods. Transcriptome data of forelegs, middle legs and hind legs of adult bugs demonstrated that 20 odorant binding protein (OBP) genes, eight chemosensory protein (CSP) genes, one odorant receptor (OR) gene, one ionotropic receptor (IR) gene and one sensory neuron membrane protein (SNMP) gene were identified in legs of A. lucorum. Compared to the previous antennae transcriptome data, five CSPs, IR21a and SNMP2a were newly identified in legs. Results of qPCR analysis indicated that all these putative chemosensory genes were ubiquitously expressed in forelegs, middle legs and hind legs of bugs. Furthermore, four types of sensilla on legs of A.
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