Report of the Special-purpose Committee on Names of Fungi with the Same Epithet, established at the XIX International Botanical Congress in Shenzhen, China.

A Special-purpose Committee on Fungal Names with the Same Epithet was established at the XIX International Botanical Congress (IBC) in Shenzhen, China in 2017, with a mandate to report to the 12th International Mycological Congress (IMC) with recommendations on a preferred course of action with respect to names of pleomorphic fungi sharing the same epithet under the International Code of Nomenclature for algae, fungi, and plants. This report provides a synthesis of the deliberations from the Special-purpose Committee. We discuss the arguments for and against the proposed solution to the problems that have arisen regarding the nomenclature of fungi described in multiple morphs using the same epithet. We also propose a gentler method of addressing the problem using existing procedures.

Correspondence on "Beyond the Dimer and Trimer: Tetraspiro[2.1.25.1.29.1.213.13]hexadecane-1,3,5,7-tetraone - the Cyclic Tetramer of Carbonylcyclopropane".

The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) name given in the title is incorrect. The correct IUPAC name for this molecule is tetraspiro[2.1.25.1.29.1.213.13]hexadecane-4,8,12,16-tetraone. The incorrect name given in the title, unfortunately, makes the carbon atom hexavalent at two different (3 and 5) positions. In addition, the two other keto groups (at positions 1 and 7) would appear on two of the cyclopropane rings if one adopts to the incorrect name. Nevertheless, this wrong name is a good example to discuss the importance of IUPAC nomenclature in the classroom with students.

GLDADec: marker-gene guided LDA modeling for bulk gene expression deconvolution.

Inferring cell type proportions from bulk transcriptome data is crucial in immunology and oncology. Here, we introduce guided LDA deconvolution (GLDADec), a bulk deconvolution method that guides topics using cell type-specific marker gene names to estimate topic distributions for each sample. Through benchmarking using blood-derived datasets, we demonstrate its high estimation performance and robustness. Moreover, we apply GLDADec to heterogeneous tissue bulk data and perform comprehensive cell type analysis in a data-driven manner. We show that GLDADec outperforms existing methods in estimation performance and evaluate its biological interpretability by examining enrichment of biological processes for topics. Finally, we apply GLDADec to The Cancer Genome Atlas tumor samples, enabling subtype stratification and survival analysis based on estimated cell type proportions, thus proving its practical utility in clinical settings. This approach, utilizing marker gene names as partial prior information, can be applied to various scenarios for bulk data deconvolution. GLDADec is available as an open-source Python package at https://github.com/mizuno-group/GLDADec.

Urine metabolic profile in rats with arterial hypertension of different genesis.

The diversity of pathogenetic mechanisms underlying arterial hypertension leads to the necessity to devise a personalized approach to the diagnosis and treatment of the disease. Metabolomics is one of the promising methods for personalized medicine, as it provides a comprehensive understanding of the physiological processes occurring in the body. The metabolome is a set of low-molecular substances available for detection in a sample and representing intermediate and final products of cell metabolism. Changes in the content and ratio of metabolites in the sample mark the corresponding pathogenetic mechanisms by highlighting them, which is especially important for such a multifactorial disease as arterial hypertension. To identify metabolomic markers for hypertensive conditions of different origins, three forms of arterial hypertension (AH) were studied: rats with hereditary AH (ISIAH rat strain); rats with AH induced by L-NAME administration (a model of endothelial dysfunction with impaired NO production); rats with AH caused by the administration of deoxycorticosterone in combination with salt loading (hormone-dependent form - DOCA-salt AH). WAG rats were used as normotensive controls. 24-hour urine samples were collected from all animals and analyzed by quantitative NMR spectroscopy for metabolic profiling. Then, potential metabolomic markers for the studied forms of hypertensive conditions were identified using multivariate statistics. Analysis of the data obtained showed that hereditary stress-induced arterial hypertension in ISIAH rats was characterized by a decrease in the following urine metabolites: nicotinamide and 1-methylnicotinamide (markers of inflammatory processes), N- acetylglutamate (nitric oxide cycle), isobutyrate and methyl acetoacetate (gut microbiota). Pharmacologically induced forms of hypertension (the L-NAME and DOCA+NaCl groups) do not share metabolomic markers with hereditary AH. They are differentiated by N,N-dimethylglycine (both groups), choline (the L-NAME group) and 1-methylnicotinamide (the group of rats with DOCA-salt hypertension).

Case commentary: a 'merciful approach' to discipline for a New Zealand lawyer's misconduct.

A recent decision reveals how a New Zealand's disciplinary tribunal promoted justice for an unwell lawyer in a case of professional misconduct. In 2023, the Lawyers and Conveyancers Disciplinary Tribunal (LCDT) applied a 'merciful approach' when assessing the lawyer's misconduct and health issues. In Auckland Standards Committee 3 v Ms W [2023], the LCDT discussed the impacts of reproductive treatment in relation to the practitioner's conduct. This decision is the foundation to compare the disciplinary regime for legal and health practitioners in New Zealand. The article outlines New Zealand's framework for discipline of lawyers, noting the absence of a health pathway. The article discusses opportunities to resolve cases involving impaired lawyers outside the disciplinary system, including benefits and disadvantages of mandatory reporting. While focusing on the legal profession, the discussion is relevant to other professions and examines health-promoting regulatory strategies from other jurisdictions.

PubChem synonym filtering process using crowdsourcing.

PubChem ( https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov ) is a public chemical information resource containing more than 100 million unique chemical structures. One of the most requested tasks in PubChem and other chemical databases is to search chemicals by name (also commonly called a "chemical synonym"). PubChem performs this task by looking up chemical synonym-structure associations provided by individual depositors to PubChem. In addition, these synonyms are used for many purposes, including creating links between chemicals and PubMed articles (using Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) terms). However, these depositor-provided name-structure associations are subject to substantial discrepancies within and between depositors, making it difficult to unambiguously map a chemical name to a specific chemical structure. The present paper describes PubChem's crowdsourcing-based synonym filtering strategy, which resolves inter- and intra-depositor discrepancies in synonym-structure associations as well as in the chemical-MeSH associations. The PubChem synonym filtering process was developed based on the analysis of four crowd-voting strategies, which differ in the consistency threshold value employed (60% vs 70%) and how to resolve intra-depositor discrepancies (a single vote vs. multiple votes per depositor) prior to inter-depositor crowd-voting. The agreement of voting was determined at six levels of chemical equivalency, which considers varying isotopic composition, stereochemistry, and connectivity of chemical structures and their primary components. While all four strategies showed comparable results, Strategy I (one vote per depositor with a 60% consistency threshold) resulted in the most synonyms assigned to a single chemical structure as well as the most synonym-structure associations disambiguated at the six chemical equivalency contexts. Based on the results of this study, Strategy I was implemented in PubChem's filtering process that cleans up synonym-structure associations as well as chemical-MeSH associations. This consistency-based filtering process is designed to look for a consensus in name-structure associations but cannot attest to their correctness. As a result, it can fail to recognize correct name-structure associations (or incorrect ones), for example, when a synonym is provided by only one depositor or when many contributors are incorrect. However, this filtering process is an important starting point for quality control in name-structure associations in large chemical databases like PubChem.

Bridging the gap in author names: building an enhanced author name dataset for biomedical literature system.

OBJECTIVE: Author name incompleteness, referring to only first initial available instead of full first name, is a long-standing problem in MEDLINE and has a negative impact on biomedical literature systems. The purpose of this study is to create an Enhanced Author Names (EAN) dataset for MEDLINE that maximizes the number of complete author names. MATERIALS AND METHODS: The EAN dataset is built based on a large-scale name comparison and restoration with author names collected from multiple literature databases such as MEDLINE, Microsoft Academic Graph, and Semantic Scholar. We assess the impact of EAN on biomedical literature systems by conducting comparative and statistical analyses between EAN and MEDLINE's author names dataset (MAN) on 2 important tasks, author name search and author name disambiguation. RESULTS: Evaluation results show that EAN improves the number of full author names in MEDLINE from 69.73 million to 110.9 million. EAN not only restores a substantial number of abbreviated names prior to the year 2002 when the NLM changed its author name indexing policy but also improves the availability of full author names in articles published afterward. The evaluation of the author name search and author name disambiguation tasks reveal that EAN is able to significantly enhance both tasks compared to MAN. CONCLUSION: The extensive coverage of full names in EAN suggests that the name incompleteness issue can be largely mitigated. This has significant implications for the development of an improved biomedical literature system. EAN is available at https://zenodo.org/record/10251358, and an updated version is available at https://zenodo.org/records/10663234.

Streamlining social media information retrieval for public health research with deep learning.

OBJECTIVE: Social media-based public health research is crucial for epidemic surveillance, but most studies identify relevant corpora with keyword-matching. This study develops a system to streamline the process of curating colloquial medical dictionaries. We demonstrate the pipeline by curating a Unified Medical Language System (UMLS)-colloquial symptom dictionary from COVID-19-related tweets as proof of concept. METHODS: COVID-19-related tweets from February 1, 2020, to April 30, 2022 were used. The pipeline includes three modules: a named entity recognition module to detect symptoms in tweets; an entity normalization module to aggregate detected entities; and a mapping module that iteratively maps entities to Unified Medical Language System concepts. A random 500 entity samples were drawn from the final dictionary for accuracy validation. Additionally, we conducted a symptom frequency distribution analysis to compare our dictionary to a pre-defined lexicon from previous research. RESULTS: We identified 498 480 unique symptom entity expressions from the tweets. Pre-processing reduces the number to 18 226. The final dictionary contains 38 175 unique expressions of symptoms that can be mapped to 966 UMLS concepts (accuracy = 95%). Symptom distribution analysis found that our dictionary detects more symptoms and is effective at identifying psychiatric disorders like anxiety and depression, often missed by pre-defined lexicons. CONCLUSIONS: This study advances public health research by implementing a novel, systematic pipeline for curating symptom lexicons from social media data. The final lexicon's high accuracy, validated by medical professionals, underscores the potential of this methodology to reliably interpret, and categorize vast amounts of unstructured social media data into actionable medical insights across diverse linguistic and regional landscapes.

Analysis of science journalism reveals gender and regional disparities in coverage.

Science journalism is a critical way for the public to learn about and benefit from scientific findings. Such journalism shapes the public's view of the current state of science and legitimizes experts. Journalists can only cite and quote a limited number of sources, who they may discover in their research, including recommendations by other scientists. Biases in either process may influence who is identified and ultimately included as a source. To examine potential biases in science journalism, we analyzed 22,001 non-research articles published by Nature and compared these with Nature-published research articles with respect to predicted gender and name origin. We extracted cited authors' names and those of quoted speakers. While citations and quotations within a piece do not reflect the entire information-gathering process, they can provide insight into the demographics of visible sources. We then predicted gender and name origin of the cited authors and speakers. We compared articles with a comparator set made up of first and last authors within primary research articles in Nature and a subset of Springer Nature articles in the same time period. In our analysis, we found a skew toward quoting men in Nature science journalism. However, quotation is trending toward equal representation at a faster rate than authorship rates in academic publishing. Gender disparity in Nature quotes was dependent on the article type. We found a significant over-representation of names with predicted Celtic/English origin and under-representation of names with a predicted East Asian origin in both in extracted quotes and journal citations but dampened in citations.

Rethinking the author name ambiguity problem and beyond: The case of the Chinese context.

The perennial problem of author name ambiguity has attracted increasing attention in the academic community. Drawing on the literature, this article first highlights the pervasiveness of the problem and discusses its adverse consequences. It then analyzes the behavioral causes of the problem in the Chinese context and attributes them to personal, cultural, and institutional factors. Informed by this analysis and recognizing ORCID as a promising solution, we propose an ORCID-based "Prevention plus Cure" campaign against author name ambiguity. The prevention objective relies on researchers' consistent use of ORCID, while the cure objective involves retrospectively integrating ORCIDs into backfile publications. We also outline the responsibilities of various stakeholders to ensure the success of the campaign. Furthermore, we argue that universal adoption of ORCID can help curb authorship-related misconduct, discern predatory journals and publishers, and track researchers' undesirable records of academic publishing. We then analyze the current status of ORCID adoption in China, identify potential challenges, propose tentative solutions to address them, and highlight ORCID as a tool that can be utilized to empower China's combat against research misconduct. In conclusion, we emphasize the importance of conducting empirical research to inform more effective promotion of ORCID adoption in China.

Current insights and future perspectives of flavonoids: A promising antihypertensive approach.

Hypertension, or high blood pressure (BP), is a complex disease influenced by various risk factors. It is characterized by persistent elevation of BP levels, typically exceeding 140/90 mmHg. Endothelial dysfunction and reduced nitric oxide (NO) bioavailability play crucial roles in hypertension development. L-NG-nitro arginine methyl ester (L-NAME), an analog of L-arginine, inhibits endothelial NO synthase (eNOS) enzymes, leading to decreased NO production and increased BP. Animal models exposed to L-NAME manifest hypertension, making it a useful design for studying the hypertension condition. Natural products have gained interest as alternative approaches for managing hypertension. Flavonoids, abundant in fruits, vegetables, and other plant sources, have potential cardiovascular benefits, including antihypertensive effects. Flavonoids have been extensively studied in cell cultures, animal models, and, to lesser extent, in human trials to evaluate their effectiveness against L-NAME-induced hypertension. This comprehensive review summarizes the antihypertensive activity of specific flavonoids, including quercetin, luteolin, rutin, troxerutin, apigenin, and chrysin, in L-NAME-induced hypertension models. Flavonoids possess antioxidant properties that mitigate oxidative stress, a major contributor to endothelial dysfunction and hypertension. They enhance endothelial function by promoting NO bioavailability, vasodilation, and the preservation of vascular homeostasis. Flavonoids also modulate vasoactive factors involved in BP regulation, such as angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE) and endothelin-1. Moreover, they exhibit anti-inflammatory effects, attenuating inflammation-mediated hypertension. This review provides compelling evidence for the antihypertensive potential of flavonoids against L-NAME-induced hypertension. Their multifaceted mechanisms of action suggest their ability to target multiple pathways involved in hypertension development. Nonetheless, the reviewed studies contribute to the evidence supporting the useful of flavonoids for hypertension prevention and treatment. In conclusion, flavonoids represent a promising class of natural compounds for combating hypertension. This comprehensive review serves as a valuable resource summarizing the current knowledge on the antihypertensive effects of specific flavonoids, facilitating further investigation and guiding the development of novel therapeutic strategies for hypertension management.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) Reveals Ethnic Disparities in Cataract Detection and Treatment.

INTRODUCTION: The aim of this work is to identify patients at risk of limited access to healthcare through artificial intelligence using a name-ethnicity classifier (NEC) analyzing the clinical stage of cataract at diagnosis and preoperative visual acuity. METHODS: This retrospective, cross-sectional study includes patients seen in the cataract clinic of a tertiary care hospital between September 2017 and February 2020 with subsequent cataract surgery in at least one eye. We analyzed 4971 patients and 8542 eyes undergoing surgery. RESULTS: The NEC identified 360 patients with names classified as 'non-German' compared to 4611 classified as 'German'. Advanced cataract (7 vs. 5%; p = 0.025) was significantly associated with group 'non-German'. Mean best-corrected visual acuity in group 'non-German' was 0.464 ± 0.406 (LogMAR), and in group 'German' was 0.420 ± 0.334 (p = 0.009). This difference remained significant after exclusion of patients with non-lenticular ocular comorbidities. Surgical time and intraoperative complications did not differ between the groups. Retrobulbar or general anesthesia was chosen significantly more frequently over topical anesthesia in group 'non-German' compared to group 'German' (24 vs. 18% respectively; p < 0.001). CONCLUSIONS: This study shows that artificial intelligence is able to uncover health disparities between people with German compared to non-German names using NECs. Patients with non-German names, possibly facing various social barriers to healthcare access such as language barriers, have more advanced cataracts and worse visual acuity upon presentation. Artificial intelligence may prove useful for healthcare providers to discover and counteract such inequalities and establish tailored preventive measures to decrease morbidity in vulnerable population subgroups.

Variable characteristics overlooked in human K-562 leukemia cell lines with a common signature.

K-562 is a well-known in vitro cellular model that represents human leukemia cell lines. Although the K-562 cells have been extensively characterized, there are inconsistencies in the data across publications, showing the presence of multiple K-562 cell lines. This suggests that analyzing a single K-562 cell line is insufficient to provide reliable reference data. In this study, we compared three K-562 cell lines with different IDs (RCB0027, RCB1635, and RCB1897) to investigate the fundamental characteristics of K-562 cells. Amplifications of the BCR-ABL1 fusion gene and at 13q31 were detected in all three cell lines, whereas each genome exhibited distinctive features of sequence variants and loss of heterozygosity. This implies that each K-562 cell line can be characterized by common and unique features through a comparison of multiple K-562 cell lines. Variations in transcriptome profiles and hemoglobin synthesis were also observed among the three cell lines, indicating that they should be considered sublines that have diverged from the common ancestral K-562 despite no changes from the original cell name. This leads to unintentional differences in genotypes and/or phenotypes among cell lines that share the same name. These data show that characterizing a single K-562 cell line does not necessarily provide data that are applicable to other K-562 cells. In this context, it is essential to modify cell names in accordance with changes in characteristics during cell culture. Furthermore, our data could serve as a reference for evaluating other K-562 sublines, facilitating the discovery of new K-562 sublines with distinct characteristics. This approach results in the accumulation of K-562 sublines with diverged characteristics and expands the options available, which may help in selecting the most suitable K-562 subline for each experiment.

Sulodexide Inhibits Arterial Contraction via the Endothelium-Dependent Nitric Oxide Pathway.

Background/Objectives: Sulodexide (SDX) is a drug known for restoring the glycocalyx, thereby offering endothelial protection and regulating permeability. Additionally, it has antithrombotic and anti-inflammatory properties and has shown arterial vasodilatory effects. Endothelial cells play a crucial role in maintaining homeostasis, with their dysfunction being a key contributor to loss in vasodilatory response, especially in arterial pathologies. The aim of this study was to investigate the effects of SDX on stimulated vascular tonus in human arterial samples and to assess the function of the endothelial layer as a source of nitric oxide (NO). Methods: A total of 16 internal mammary artery remnants from coronary artery bypass graft surgeries were dissected into endothelium-intact and endothelium-denuded groups (n = 8 each). The arterial rings were equilibrated under tension, with their basal tonus recorded before and after phenylephrine stimulation. SDX's impact on arterial contraction was assessed through cumulative dose-response curves. NO synthase inhibitor (Nω-nitro-L-arginine methyl ester) was used to assess SDX's vasodilatory effect over the NO pathway. Results: SDX application resulted in concentration-dependent vasorelaxation in both endothelium-intact and endothelium-denuded groups at certain doses. However, the inhibitory effect of SDX was more pronounced in endothelium-intact rings at higher doses compared to endothelium-denuded rings (p < 0.05). Similar inhibition of contraction curves was achieved for both endothelium-intact and endothelium-denuded rings after L-NAME pre-incubation, suggesting a necessity for NO-related endothelial pathways. Conclusions: SDX exerts a concentration-dependent inhibition on arterial contraction, emphasizing the critical role of an intact endothelium and NO-mediated pathways in this process. This underscores SDX's potential in treating endothelial dysfunction-related pathologies.

Comparative Study of the Efficacy and Side Effects of Brand-Name and Generic Clozapine for Long-Term Maintenance Treatment Among Korean Patients With Schizophrenia: A Retrospective Naturalistic Mirror-Image Study.

OBJECTIVE: Clozapine is considered the most reliable drug for treatment-resistant schizophrenia. In 2014, a generic formulation of clozapine (Clzapine) was introduced in Korea. This study was performed to provide clinical information regarding the use of clozapine and to compare efficacy and tolerability when converting from the brand-name formulation (Clozaril) to the generic formulation during longterm maintenance treatment among Korean patients with schizophrenia. METHODS: This mirror-image study retrospectively investigated the electronic medical records of patients who had switched from Clozaril to Clzapine with a ≥1-year duration for each formulation. Clinical data were collected, including information regarding clozapine use, psychiatric hospitalization, co-medications, and blood test findings. Data before and after the switch were compared using paired t-tests. RESULTS: Among 332 patients, the mean 1-year dosages were 233.32±149.35 mg/day for Clozaril and 217.36±136.66 mg/day for Clzapine. The mean clozapine concentration-to-dose ratios were similar before and after the switch (Clozaril, 1.33±0.68; Clzapine, 1.26±0.80). Switching from Clozaril to Clzapine resulted in no significant differences in the hospitalization rate, hospitalization duration, or laboratory findings (liver function parameters, serum cholesterol level, and serum glucose level). Equivalent doses of co-prescribed antidepressants were decreased, but concomitant medications otherwise showed no significant differences. CONCLUSION: Clinical efficacy and tolerability appear comparable when switching to Clzapine during clozapine maintenance treatment. This study offers descriptive real-world clinical insights into clozapine maintenance treatment in Korea, thereby providing patients with more treatment options and contributing to the development of maintenance guidelines tailored to the Korean population.

Sacubitril/Valsartan Alleviates Cardiac Remodeling and Dysfunction in L-NAME-Induced Hypertension and Hypertensive Heart Disease.

There is ample evidence on the benefit of angiotensin receptor-neprilysin inhibitors (ARNIs) in heart failure, yet data regarding the potential protective action of ARNIs in hypertensive heart disease are sparse. The aim of this study was to show whether an ARNI exerts a protective effect in a model of Nω-nitro-L-arginine methyl ester (L-NAME)-induced hypertension with a hypertensive heart and to compare this potential benefit with an angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitor, captopril. Five groups of adult male Wistar rats were studied (14 per group) for four weeks: untreated controls; ARNI (68 mg/kg/day); L-NAME (40 mg/kg/day); L-NAME treated with ARNI; and L-NAME treated with captopril (100 mg/kg/day). L-NAME administration induced hypertension, accompanied by increased left ventricular (LV) weight and fibrotic rebuilding of the LV in terms of increased concentration and content of hydroxyproline in insoluble collagen and in total collagen and with a histological finding of fibrosis. These alterations were associated with a compromised systolic and diastolic LV function. Treatment with either an ARNI or captopril reduced systolic blood pressure (SBP), alleviated LV hypertrophy and fibrosis, and prevented the development of both systolic and diastolic LV dysfunction. Moreover, the serum levels of prolactin and prolactin receptor were reduced significantly by ARNI and slightly by captopril. In conclusion, in L-NAME-induced hypertension, the dual inhibition of neprilysin and AT1 receptors by ARNI reduced SBP and prevented the development of LV hypertrophy, fibrosis, and systolic and diastolic dysfunction. These data suggest that ARNI could provide protection against LV structural remodeling and functional disorders in hypertensive heart disease.

MilkOligoThesaurus, a dataset of mammalian milk oligosaccharide synonyms.

There is a growing interest in milk oligosaccharides (MOs) because of their numerous benefits for newborns' and long-term health. A large number of MO structures have been identified in mammalian milk. Mostly described in human milk, the oligosaccharide richness, although less broad, has also been reported for a wide range of mammalian species. The structure of MOs is particularly difficult to report as it results from the combination of 5 monosaccharides linked by various glycosidic bonds forming structurally diverse and complex matrices of linear and branched oligosaccharides. Exploring the literature and extracting relevant information on MO diversity within or across species appears promising to elucidate structure-function role of MOs. Currently, given the complexity of these molecules, the main issues in exploring literature to extract relevant information on MO diversity within or across species relate to the heterogeneity in the way authors refer to these molecules. Herein, we provide a thesaurus (MilkOligoThesaurus) including the names and synonyms of MOs collected from key selected articles on mammalian milk analyses. MilkOligoThesaurus gathers the names of the MOs with a complete description of their monosaccharide composition and structures. When available, each unique MO molecule is linked to its ID from the NCBI PubChem and ChEBI databases. MilkOligoThesaurus is provided in a tabular format. It gathers 245 unique oligosaccharide structures described by 22 features (columns) including the name of the molecule, its abbreviation, the chemical database IDs if available, the monosaccharide composition, chemical information (molecular formula, monoisotopic mass), synonyms, its formula in condensed form, and in abbreviated condensed form, the abbreviated systematic name, the systematic name, the isomer group, and scientific article sources. MilkOligoThesaurus is also provided in the SKOS (Simple Knowledge Organization System) format. This thesaurus is a valuable resource gathering MO naming variations that are not found elsewhere for (i) Text and Data Mining to enable automatic annotation and rapid extraction of milk oligosaccharide data from scientific papers; (ii) biology researchers aiming to search for or decipher the structure of milk oligosaccharides based on any of their names, abbreviations or monosaccharide compositions and linkages.

Exploring the therapeutic potential of pomegranate juice for uterine relaxation.

BACKGROUND: The effects of pomegranate juice (PJ) and its components on uterine smooth muscle are unknown. Hence, this study unequivocally demonstrates that pomegranate juice (PJ) significantly impacts myometrial function, providing crucial insights into its relaxant properties and their potential therapeutic applications for uterine-related disorders. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS: Rat uterine smooth muscle horn strips were suspended in Krebs solution organ baths. Contractions were measured isometrically using a transducer (AD instrument Australia). The effects of PJ were evaluated on contractile activity elicited by potassium chloride (KCl 60 Mm) depolarization. Inhibitors of nitric oxide (L-NAME 3 X 10-4), guanylate cyclase (methylene blue 1 X 10-5), and Prostaglandin I2 (indomethacin 3 X 10-5), as well as Potassium Channels blockers, were determined. RESULTS: The juice at concentrations from 1.5-5 mg/ml significantly decreased the rat uterine horn contraction induced by KCl. The NO, cGMP, and PGI2 inhibitors did not block the relaxation response. Furthermore, the PGI2 inhibitor significantly enhanced the relaxation effects; K+ channel blockers had no inhibitory effects on the relaxation responses. Contrarily, GLIB improved considerably relaxation. CONCLUSION: Research suggests pomegranate juice's active ingredient may reduce uterine contractions and treat uterotonic disorders, potentially preventing preterm birth and dysmenorrhea. Further research is needed to determine its mechanism of action. TRIAL REGISTRATION: Code: AEC-013.

Microalbuminuria in Rats Treated with D-Nitroarginine Methyl Ether.

Microalbuminuria is an early symptom and prognostic marker of the progression of renal pathology. The analysis of the role of anionic components of the renal glomeruli in the albumin retention and the development of a model of minimal changes in the glomerular filter leading to the appearance of microalbuminuria are relevant. The effect of organic cations D-arginine methyl esters (D-AME) and D-nitroarginine (D-NAME) on the excretion of albumin by the kidneys in rats was studied. D-AME had no effect on urinary albumin excretion in rats. D-NAME caused microalbuminuria, which persisted for more than a day and sharply increased after injection of vasopressin. The number of anionic sites labeled with polyethyleneimine decreased in the structures of the glomerular filter. D-NAME-induced microalbuminuria can later serve as a model for studying nephroprotective or damaging factors.