Our objective was to test a single dose of the phosphatidylinositol 3-kinase (PI3K) inhibitor alpelisib as a tool for acute modeling of insulin resistance in healthy volunteers. This single-center double-blind phase 1 clinical trial randomly assigned healthy adults to a single oral dose of 300 mg alpelisib (n = 5) or placebo (n = 6) at bedtime, followed by measurement of glucose, insulin, and C-peptide levels after an overnight fast and during a 3-h 75-g oral glucose tolerance test (OGTT). Fasting plasma glucose trended higher with alpelisib (mean ± SD 93 ± 11 mg/dL) versus placebo (84 ± 5 mg/dL); mean fasting serum insulin increased nearly fivefold (23 ± 12 vs.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFTick vectors and tick-borne disease are increasingly impacting human populations globally. An important challenge is to understand tick movement patterns, as this information can be used to improve management and predictive modelling of tick population dynamics. Evolutionary analysis of genetic divergence, gene flow and local adaptation provides insight on movement patterns at large spatiotemporal scales.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: LCAT (lecithin cholesterol acyl transferase) catalyzes the conversion of unesterified, or free cholesterol, to cholesteryl ester, which moves from the surface of HDL (high-density lipoprotein) into the neutral lipid core. As this iterative process continues, nascent lipid-poor HDL is converted to a series of larger, spherical cholesteryl ester-enriched HDL particles that can be cleared by the liver in a process that has been termed reverse cholesterol transport.
Methods: We conducted a randomized, placebocontrolled, crossover study in 5 volunteers with atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease, to examine the effects of an acute increase of recombinant human (rh) LCAT via intravenous administration (300-mg loading dose followed by 150 mg at 48 hours) on the in vivo metabolism of HDL APO (apolipoprotein)A1 and APOA2, and the APOB100-lipoproteins, very low density, intermediate density, and low-density lipoproteins.
While untargeted analysis of biological tissues with ambient mass spectrometry analysis probes has been widely reported in the literature, there are currently no guidelines to standardize the workflows for the experimental design, creation, and validation of molecular models that are utilized in these methods to perform class predictions. By drawing parallels with hurdles that are faced in the field of food fraud detection with untargeted mass spectrometry, we provide a stepwise workflow for the creation, refinement, evaluation, and assessment of the robustness of molecular models, aimed at meaningful interpretation of mass spectrometry-based tissue classification results. We propose strategies to obtain a sufficient number of samples for the creation of molecular models and discuss the potential overfitting of data, emphasizing both the need for model validation using an independent cohort of test samples, as well as the use of a fully characterized feature-based approach that verifies the biological relevance of the features that are used to avoid false discoveries.
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