• Marquez Linnet posted an update 1 week, 4 days ago

    Light and nutrient are important factors for vegetable production in plant factory or greenhouse. The total 12 treatments which contained the combination of four light intensity (150, 250, 350 and 450 μmol · m-2 · s-1) and three nutrient solution concentration (NSC) (1/4, 1/2, 3/4 strength NSC) were established for investigation of lettuce growth and quality in a growth chamber. The combination of light intensity and NSC exhibited significant effects on photosynthetic pigment, nutritional quality, mineral content and antioxidant capacity. That a higher light intensity were readily accessible to higher chlorophyll a/b showed in lettuce of treatment of 350 μmol · m-2 · s-1 × 3/4NSC and 450 μmol · m-2 · s-1 × 1/4NSC. Lower total N contents, higher content of soluble protein, vitamin C, soluble sugar and free amino acid exhibited in lettuce under treatment of 250 and 350 μmol · m-2 · s-1 × 1/4NSC or 3/4NSC. With increasing NSC and LED irradiance, the content of total P and K in lettuce increased and decreased, respectively. The highest and lowest total Ca content were found in treatment of 150 μmol · m-2 · s-1 × 1/4NSC and 450 μmol · m-2 · s-1 × 1/4NSC, respectively, and higher content of total Mg and Zn was observed under 250 μmol m-2 s-1 × 1/4NSC and 150 μmol · m-2 · s-1 × 3/4NSC, respectively. The antioxidant contents generally decreased with increasing NSC level. The higher antioxidant content and capacity occurred in lettuce of 350 μmol · m-2 · s-1 × 1/4NSC treatment. The interaction of 350 μmol · m-2 · s-1 × 1/4NSC might be the optimal condition for lettuce growth in plant factory.An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.The strengths and limits of isotopically labelled Engineered Nanoparticles (spiked ENPs) spread in biological media have been assessed. Multi-spiked CdSe/ZnS quantum dots (QDs), measuring 7 nm and coated with thioglycolic acid (TGA), were synthesized and enriched in 68Zn, 77Se and 111Cd. These QDs were dispersed at very low concentrations (0.1 to 5000 ppt) in diverse biological matrices (synthetic saliva, synthetic urine, plasma and Dulbecco’s phosphate buffered saline – DPBS growth medium) and the isotopic compositions were determined by HR-ICP-MS. The initial QDs concentrations were calculated to assess the limit of quantification (QD-LOQ) according to the matrix and the isotopically enriched element. The obtained results demonstrated the advantages of the isotopic labelling method in order to work at very low concentrations the QD-LOQ values for the spiked Zn, Cd and Se originated from the QDs were 10, 0.3 and 6 ppt, respectively, which is below the conventional LOQ of the HR-ICP-MS used (30, 3 and 60 ppt for Zn, Cd and Se, respectively). Conversely, in complex matrices such as saliva, urine, plasma and DPBS growth medium, the QD-LOQ values increased significantly, with values ranging from 16 to 32 ppt for Cd, 446 to 10598 ppt for Zn and 1618 to 8317 ppt for Se. These QD-LOQs are dependent on factors as the elemental background concentration already present in the matrices, and the dilution factor. In this study, the QD-LOQs are expressed for the first time with respect to the background concentration in biological media (QD-RLOQ), which can be used to better assess and then predict the efficiency of the spiking method.A large proportion of cases with chronic conditions including diabetes or pre-diabetes, hypertension and dyslipidemia remain undiagnosed. To include reproductive factors (RF) might be able to improve current screening guidelines by providing extra effectiveness. The objective is to study the relationships between RFs and chronic conditions’ biomarkers. check details A cross-sectional study was conducted. Demographics, RFs and metabolic biomarkers were collected. The relationship of the metabolic biomarkers were shown by correlation analysis. Principal component analysis (PCA) and autoencoder were compared by cross-validation. The better one was adopted to extract a single marker, the general chronic condition (GCC), to represent the body’s chronic conditions. Multivariate linear regression was performed to explore the relationship between GCC and RFs. In total, 1,656 postmenopausal females were included. A multi-layer autoencoder outperformed PCA in the dimensionality reduction performance. The extracted variable by autoencoder, GCC, was verified to be representative of three chronic conditions (AUC for patoglycemia, hypertension and dyslipidemia were 0.844, 0.824 and 0.805 respectively). Linear regression showed that earlier age at menarche (OR = 0.9976) and shorter reproductive life span (OR = 0.9895) were associated with higher GCC. Autoencoder performed well in the dimensionality reduction of clinical metabolic biomarkers. Due to high accessibility and effectiveness, RFs have potential to be included in screening tools for general chronic conditions and could enhance current screening guidelines.Although, antibiotics are effective in the treatment of bovine mastitis, they do not address the regeneration of mammary glandular tissue and have been associated to the increment in antimicrobial resistance worldwide. Considering the necessity of alternative therapies for this disease of high economic impact and the reported regenerative and antibacterial effects of mesenchymal stem cell (MSCs), we evaluated the safety and efficacy of an allogenic MSC-based intramammary therapy in dairy cows with experimentally induced Staphylococcus aureus clinical mastitis. In a safety trial, heifers were inoculated intramammarily with a 2.5 × 107-suspension of bovine fetal AT-MSCs on experimental days 1 and 10. Animals were evaluated clinically on a daily basis during a 20-day experimental period and blood samples were collected for hemogram determination and peripheral blood leukocytes (PBLs) isolation. In an efficacy trial, Holstein Friesian cows were inoculated with S. aureus and treated intramammarily with vehicle (NEG; days 4 and 10), antibiotics (ATB; days 4 and 5) or a suspension of 2.