Giant cell tubulointerstitial nephritis in the kidney allograft caused by infection is rare, and donor‐transmitted infection in transplanted kidneys is also rare. In this case report, we describe an ...unusual histological manifestation of Candida albicans in the graft biopsy of a 53‐year‐old male kidney transplant recipient with decreased renal function 12 days post transplant. Several giant cells were present in the tubulointerstitial inflammation, as well as yeasts, with no evidence of rejection, and the histological diagnosis was confirmed by urine culture. Donor urine culture was positive for C. albicans, suggestive of a possible donor‐transmitted infection. Prompt antifungal treatment eradicated the infection, and averted systemic spread. To our knowledge, there are no previous reports of Candida infection with giant cell tubulointerstitial nephritis in human renal allograft.
Urea transport in the kidney is important for the production of concentrated urine and is mediated by a family of transporter proteins, identified from erythropoietic tissue (UT-B) and from kidney ...(UT-A). Two isoforms of the renal urea transporter (UT-A) have been cloned so far: UT-A1 and UT-A2. We used rapid amplification of cDNA ends to clone two new isoforms of the rat UT-A transporter: UT-A3 and UT-A4. UT-A3 and UT-A4 are 87% homologous. The UT-A3 cDNA encodes a peptide of 460 amino acids, which corresponds to the amino-terminal half of the UT-A1 peptide and is 62% identical to UT-A2. The UT-A4 cDNA encodes a peptide of 466 amino acids, which is 84% identical to UT-A2. Transient transfection of HEK-293 cells with the UT-A3 or UT-A4 cDNA results in phloretin-inhibitable urea uptake, which is increased by forskolin. Thus, both new isoforms encode functional urea transporters that may be vasopressin-regulated. UT-A3 and UT-A4 mRNA are expressed in the renal outer and inner medulla but not in the cortex; unidentified UT-A isoforms similar to UT-A3 may also be expressed in the testis. It is concluded that there are at least four different rat UT-A urea transporters.
AliEn: ALICE environment on the GRID Bagnasco, S; Betev, L; Buncic, P ...
Journal of physics. Conference series,
07/2008, Letnik:
119, Številka:
6
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Starting from mid-2008, the ALICE detector at CERN LHC will collect data at a rate of 4PB per year. ALICE will use exclusively distributed Grid resources to store, process and analyse this data. The ...top-level management of the Grid resources is done through the AliEn (ALICE Environment) system, which is in continuous development since year 2000. AliEn presents several original solutions, which have shown their viability in a number of large exercises of increasing complexity called Data Challenges. This paper describes the AliEn architecture: Job Management, Data Management and UI. The current status of AliEn will be illustrated, as well as the performance of the system during the data challenges. The paper also describes the future AliEn development roadmap.
The present work aims at optimizing the use of computing resources available at the grid Italian Tier-2 sites of the ALICE experiment at CERN LHC by making them accessible to interactive distributed ...analysis, thanks to modern solutions based on cloud computing. The scalability and elasticity of the computing resources via dynamic ("on-demand") provisioning is essentially limited by the size of the computing site, reaching the theoretical optimum only in the asymptotic case of infinite resources. The main challenge of the project is to overcome this limitation by federating different sites through a distributed cloud facility. Storage capacities of the participating sites are seen as a single federated storage area, preventing the need of mirroring data across them: high data access efficiency is guaranteed by location-aware analysis software and storage interfaces, in a transparent way from an end-user perspective. Moreover, the interactive analysis on the federated cloud reduces the execution time with respect to grid batch jobs. The tests of the investigated solutions for both cloud computing and distributed storage on wide area network will be presented.
The rat renal urea transporter UT-A includes four isoforms. UT-A1, UT-A3, and UT-A4 are transcribed from a single initiation
site at the 5â²-end of the gene; a distinct internal initiation site is ...used for UT-A2 transcription. We cloned 1.3 kilobases
(kb) of the 5â²-flanking region upstream of the transcription start site of UT-A1, UT-A3, and UT-A4. This region contains three
CCAAT sequences but lacks a TATA motif. A tonicity-responsive enhancer (TonE) was identified at â377bp. The 1.3-kb full fragment
subcloned into pGL3 vector induced luciferase activity in Madin-Darby canine kidney cells and in mouse inner medullary collecting
duct cells in isotonic medium. Luciferase activity was increased significantly in hypertonic medium, whereas deletion or mutation
of the TonE sequence abolished this response. Electrophoretic mobility shift assay using the 5â² UT-A TonE sequence as DNA
probe showed formation of a specific DNA-protein complex with nuclear extracts from cells exposed to hypertonic medium and
was weakly detectable in isotonic controls. A supershift in the mobility of the DNA-protein complex was observed with antiserum
targeted to the TonE-binding protein (TonEBP). Co-transfection with dominant-negative TonEBP abolished the luciferase activity
induced by the UT-A 1.3-kb construct under hypertonic and isotonic conditions. These data suggest that the TonE/TonEBP pathway
mediates tonicity-responsive transcriptional regulation of UT-A1, UT-A3, and UT-A4 expression.
Current Grid deployments for LHC computing (namely the WLCG infrastructure) do not allow efficient parallel interactive processing of data. In order to allow physicists to interactively access ...subsets of data (e.g. for algorithm tuning and debugging before running over a full dataset) parallel analysis facilities based on PROOF have been deployed by the ALICE experiment at CERN and elsewhere. Whereas large Tier-1 centres may afford to build such facilities at the expense of their Grid farms, or exploit the large number of jobs finishing at any given time to quickly collect a number of nodes to temporarily allocate for interactive work, this is likely not to be true for smaller Tier-2 centres. Leveraging on the virtualization of highly performant multi-core machines it is possible to build a fully virtual analysis facility on the same Worker Nodes that compose an existing LCG Grid Farm. Using the Xen paravirtualization hypervisor, it is then possible to dynamically move resources from the batch instance to the interactive one when needed, minimizing latencies and wasted resources. We present the status of the prototype being developed, and some experience from the very first users.
Fermilab experiment E835 has measured the cross section for the reaction p̄p→e+e− at s=11.63, 12.43, 14.40 and 18.22 GeV2. From the analysis of the 66 observed events new high-precision measurements ...of the proton magnetic form factor are obtained.
In 2012, 14 Italian institutions participating in LHC Experiments won a grant from the Italian Ministry of Research (MIUR), with the aim of optimising analysis activities, and in general the Tier2 ...Tier3 infrastructure. We report on the activities being researched upon, on the considerable improvement in the ease of access to resources by physicists, also those with no specific computing interests. We focused on items like distributed storage federations, access to batch-like facilities, provisioning of user interfaces on demand and cloud systems. R&D on next-generation databases, distributed analysis interfaces, and new computing architectures was also carried on. The project, ending in the first months of 2016, will produce a white paper with recommendations on best practices for data-analysis support by computing centers.
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