The nutritional environment during fetal and early postnatal life has a long-term impact on growth, development, and metabolic health of the offspring, a process termed "nutritional programming." Rodent models studying programming effects of nutritional interventions use either purified or grain-based rodent diets as background diets. However, the impact of these diets on phenotypic outcomes in these models has not been comprehensively investigated.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWhy does the growth of most life forms exhibit a narrow range of optimal temperatures below 40°C? We hypothesize that the recently identified stable range of oceanic temperatures of ~5 to 37°C for more than two billion years of Earth history tightly constrained the evolution of prokaryotic thermal performance curves to optimal temperatures for growth to less than 40°C. We tested whether competitive mechanisms reproduced the observed upper limits of life's temperature optima using simple Lotka-Volterra models of interspecific competition between organisms with different temperature optima. Model results supported our proposition whereby organisms with temperature optima up to 37°C were most competitive.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Hemolytic uremic syndrome (HUS) is the most common cause of acute kidney injury in children. It is mainly caused by Shiga toxin-producing enterohemorrhagic (EHEC; STEC-HUS) and is more rarely caused by uncontrolled complement activation (cHUS). Renal replacement therapy is frequently required and kidney function recovers in the majority of patients.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEnvironmental warming is thought to alter food web stability and functioning, but whether warming reduces food web resistance and resilience to further climatic events remains surprisingly unexplored. Warming experiments that superimpose acute disturbances are urgently needed to understand how extreme events further threaten the stability and multifunctionality of ecological networks.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjectives: To compare inflammatory and structural differences in active Psoriatic Arthritis (PsA) between disease-modifying antirheumatic drug (DMARD)-naive and DMARD-failure patients using diverse imaging approaches for future analyses. Additionally, to explore the influence of patient characteristics (clinical and demographic variables) on imaging findings.
Methods: Of the 80 patients included from the first cohort of the ongoing multicentre TOFA-PREDICT trial, 40 were DMARD-naive and 40 were DMARD-failure (csDMARD failure; 1 prior bDMARD excluding etanercept was allowed), all meeting classification criteria for PsA with a minimum disease duration of eight weeks.