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Liver transplantation is the most effective treatment for end-stage liver disease. Transplant indications have been progressively increasing, with a huge discrepancy between the supply and demand of optimal organs. In this context, the use of extended criteria donor grafts has gained importance, even though these grafts are more susceptible to ischemic reperfusion injury (IRI). Hepatic IRI is an inherent and inevitable consequence of all liver transplants; it involves ischemia-mediated cellular damage exacerbated upon reperfusion and its severity directly affects graft function and post-transplant complications. Strategies for organ preservation have been constantly improving since they first emerged. The current gold standard for preservation is perfusion solutions and static cold storage. However, novel approaches that allow extended preservation times, organ evaluation, and their treatment, which could increase the number of viable organs for transplantation, are currently under investigation. This review discusses the mechanisms associated with IRI, describes existing strategies for liver preservation, and emphasizes novel developments and challenges for effective organ preservation and optimization.

The size dependent reduced melting point and hydrogen enhanced surface diffusion effect on silicon nanostructures was explored experimentally. SOI and silicon wafers were patterned using nanimprint lithography and dry etching to explore the reduced melting point effect; and patterned with photolithography and dry etching to explore the hydrogen enhanced surface diffusion. The nanotextured samples were annealed in a wide variety of furnaces with nitrogen, forming gas, and argon atmospheres. Nitrogen was found to block the reshaping effect while argon was found to cause extensive pitting damage in the setup used. Micropatterned samples were annealed in a low pressure hydrogen enabled tube furnace with nitrogen, hydrogen, and mixture atmospheres. Lastly, a custom heating chamber was proposed to address the issues that were demonstrated in other annealing configurations.

Uruguay ha cumplido tres décadas desde la creación de una política ambiental explícita, cuando a la temática se le asignó rango ministerial en una secretaría de Estado con competencias compartidas. Ocurrió en 1990, en los prolegómenos de la Cumbre de la Tierra de Río de Janeiro. En 2020 se concretó la creación de un Ministerio de Ambiente, con la reasignación de algunas atribuciones de reparticiones ministeriales anteriores. En el mismo período, el país ha concretado una vocación productivista, basada en el impulso de cultivos agrícolas y forestales. En este artículo se recopilan algunas políticas ambientales —en particular, de impacto ambiental y protección de la naturaleza— y se describen las principales características del marco institucional ambiental y su relación con las políticas productivas en una región y un sector de actividad específicos (el riego agrícola en el este del país). Se analiza el reciente debate legislativo sobre el marco regulatorio del uso del agua para riego, que extiende la frontera hídrica mediante la financiarización de esta actividad. Las discusiones finales se enfocan en la relación entre políticas públicas, ambiente y producción desde la noción de intensificación sostenible.

Environmental factors interact with the genome throughout life to determine gene expression and, consequently, tissue function and disease risk. One such factor that is known to play an important role in determining long-term metabolic health is diet during critical periods of development. Epigenetic regulation of gene expression has been implicated in mediating'these programming effects of early diet. The precise epigenetic mechanisms that underlie these effects remain largely unknown. Here, we show that the transcription factor Hnf4a, which has been implicated in the etiology of type 2 diabetes (T2D), is epigenetically regulated by maternal diet and aging in rat islets. Transcriptional activity of Hnf4a in islets is restricted to the distal P2 promoter through its open chromatin configuration and an islet-specific interaction between the P2 promoter and a downstream enhancer. Exposure to suboptimal nutrition during early development leads to epigenetic silencing at the enhancer region, which weakens the P2 promoter-enhancer interaction and results in a permanent reduction in Hnf4a expression. Aging leads to progressive epigenetic silencing of the entire Hnf4a locus in islets, an effect that is more pronounced in rats exposed to a poor maternal diet. Our findings provide evidence for environmentally induced epigenetic changes at the Hnf4a enhancer that alter its interaction with the P2 promoter, and consequently determine T2D risk. We therefore propose that environmentally induced changes in promoter-enhancer interactions represent a fundamental epigenetic mechanism by which nutrition and aging can influence long-term health.

Notwithstanding the wide adoption of the OECD principles (or best practices) for QSAR modeling, disparities between in silico predictions and experimental results are frequent, suggesting that model predictions are often too optimistic. Of these OECD principles, the applicability domain (AD) estimation has been recognized in several reports in the literature to be one of the most challenging, implying that the actual reliability measures of model predictions are often unreliable. Applying tree-based error analysis workflows on 5 QSAR models reported in the literature and available in the QsarDB repository, i.e., androgen receptor bioactivity (agonists, antagonists, and binders, respectively) and membrane permeability (highest membrane permeability and the intrinsic permeability), we demonstrate that predictions erroneously tagged as reliable (AD prediction errors) overwhelmingly correspond to instances in subspaces (cohorts) with the highest prediction error rates, highlighting the inhomogeneity of the AD space. In this sense, we call for more stringent AD analysis guidelines which require the incorporation of model error analysis schemes, to provide critical insight on the reliability of underlying AD algorithms. Additionally, any selected AD method should be rigorously validated to demonstrate its suitability for the model space over which it is applied. These steps will ultimately contribute to more accurate estimations of the reliability of model predictions. Finally, error analysis may also be useful in “rational” model refinement in that data expansion efforts and model retraining are focused on cohorts with the highest error rates.

Evaluating health information system (HIS) quality is strategically advantageous for improving the quality of patient care. Nevertheless, few systematic studies have reported what methods, such as standards, processes, and tools, were proposed to evaluate HIS quality. This study aimed to identify and discuss the existing literature that describes standards, processes, and tools used to evaluate HIS quality. We conducted a systematic literature review using review guidelines focused on software and systems. We examined seven electronic databases-Scopus, ACM (Association for Computing Machinery), ScienceDirect, Google Scholar, IEEE Xplore, Web of Science, and PubMed-to search for and select primary studies. Out of 782 papers, we identified 17 (2.2%) primary studies. We found that most of the primary studies addressed quality evaluation from a management perspective. On the other hand, there was little explicit and pragmatic evidence on the processes and tools that allowed for the evaluation of HIS quality. To promote quality evaluation of HISs, it is necessary to define mechanisms and methods that operationalize the standards in HISs. Additionally, it is necessary to create metrics that measure the quality of the most critical components and processes of HISs.

Primary hyperoxaluria type 1 (PHT1) treatment is mainly focused on inhibiting the enzyme glycolate oxidase, which plays a pivotal role in the production of glyoxylate, which undergoes oxidation to produce oxalate. When the renal secretion capacity exceeds, calcium oxalate forms stones that accumulate in the kidneys. In this respect, detailed QSAR analysis, molecular docking, and dynamics simulations of a series of inhibitors containing glycolic, glyoxylic, and salicylic acid groups have been performed employing different regression machine learning techniques. Three robust models with less than 9 descriptors—based on a tenfold cross (Q 2 CV ) and external (Q 2 EXT ) validation—were found i.e., MLR1 (Q 2 CV  = 0.893, Q 2 EXT  = 0.897), RF1 (Q 2 CV  = 0.889, Q 2 EXT  = 0.907), and IBK1 (Q 2 CV  = 0.891, Q 2 EXT  = 0.907). An ensemble model was built by averaging the predicted pIC 50 of the three models, obtaining a Q 2 EXT  = 0.933. Physicochemical properties such as charge, electronegativity, hardness, softness, van der Waals volume, and polarizability were considered as attributes to build the models. To get more insight into the potential biological activity of the compouds studied herein, docking and dynamic analysis were carried out, finding the hydrophobic and polar residues show important interactions with the ligands. A screening of the DrugBank database V.5.1.7 was performed, leading to the proposal of seven commercial drugs within the applicability domain of the models, that can be suggested as possible PHT1 treatment.

Latin America’s economic performance is mediocre at best, despite abundant natural resources and flourishing neighbors to the north. The perplexing question of how some of the wealthiest nations in the world in the nineteenth century are now the most crisis-prone has long puzzled economists and historians. The Decline of Latin American Economies examines the reality behind the struggling economies of Argentina, Chile, and Mexico. A distinguished panel of experts argues here that slow growth, rampant protectionism, and rising inflation plagued Latin America for years, where corrupt institutions and political unrest undermined the financial outlook of already besieged economies. Tracing Latin America’s growth and decline through two centuries, this volume illustrates how a once-prosperous continent now lags behind. Of interest to scholars and policymakers alike, it offers new insight into the relationship between political systems and economic development.

Although tropical peatlands are huge carbon reservoirs, they are threatened by climate change and anthropogenic disturbances. Here, we assessed two contrasting peatland sites in the Philippines in terms of aboveground biomass and carbon content, soil carbon stock, and CO2 fluxes in the soils. The Caimpugan peatland in Agusan del Sur was considered the ‘undisturbed’ site, while the Bambanin peatland in Mindoro Oriental was the ‘disturbed’ site. The aboveground biomass at the undisturbed site was 35.8 ± 30.0 Mg ha−1) while at the disturbed site, it was 2.0 Mg ha−1 ± 1.9 Mg ha−1. The aboveground C content at the undisturbed site varied from 1.29 Mg C ha−1 to 37.2 Mg C ha−1, while the disturbed site only ranged from 0.1 Mg C ha−1 to 2.1 Mg C ha−1. A trend of increasing soil carbon content as the soil gets deeper was observed in both sites. At the undisturbed site, the average soil carbon content was 750 ± 710 Mg ha−1 and 595 ± 406 Mg ha−1 at the disturbed site. In terms of soil carbon emission, the undisturbed site had 3.6 ± 3.0 g C m−2d−1 and was only one-third the emission rate at the disturbed site (11.2 ± 6.4 g C m−2d−1). Our study highlights the dire condition of a disturbed peatland in terms of vegetation/soil carbon dynamics. We underscored the need to address the pressing issues on peatland drainage, agricultural activities, and human settlement within the peatland sites geared towards effectively managing this important carbon reservoir in the Philippines.

The La Plata River basin, the second largest drainage basin in South America, supports important fisheries, in which the sabalo Prochilodus lineatus is the leading species measured as extracted volumes. To characterize the population structure of the sabalo in the middle and lower regions of the La Plata River basin, cytochrome b DNA sequences of 121 samples collected in La Plata, Parana and Uruguay rivers were used. Results suggest the presence of at least two populations: one that we called \"southern population\" uses the La Plata River and the lower sections of the Parana and Uruguay rivers and another population (called here \"northern population\") in the middle section of the Uruguay and Parana rivers. The southern population would have a larger effective population size and coalescence-based analyses reveal an asymmetric gene flow, mainly from north to south. A striking result is that samples from the middle sections of the Parana and Uruguay rivers are more alike to each other than they are to the other samples of their respective rivers. This similarity could be explained by historical reasons, probably as a consequence of the proximity that both rivers had until 100,000 years ago. The presence of different management units being exploited by the continental fisheries of three countries demands coordination at a regional level in order to maintain a sustainable fishery.