Janus-faced microglia: beneficial and detrimental consequences of microglial phagocytosis

Microglia are the resident brain macrophages and they have been traditionally studied as orchestrators of the brain inflammatory response during infections and disease. In addition, microglia has a more benign, less explored role as the brain professional phagocytes. Phagocytosis is a term coined from the Greek to describe the receptor-mediated engulfment and degradation of dead cells and microbes. In addition, microglia phagocytoses brain-specific cargo, such as axonal and myelin debris in spinal cord injury or multiple sclerosis, amyloid-beta deposits in Alzheimer's disease, and supernumerary synapses in postnatal development. Common mechanisms of recognition, engulfment, and degradation of the different types of cargo are assumed, but very little is known about the shared and specific molecules involved in the phagocytosis of each target by microglia. More importantly, the functional consequences of microglial phagocytosis remain largely unexplored. Overall, phagocytosis is considered a beneficial phenomenon, since it eliminates dead cells and induces an anti-inflammatory response. However, phagocytosis can also activate the respiratory burst, which produces toxic reactive oxygen species (ROS). Phagocytosis has been traditionally studied in pathological conditions, leading to the assumption that microglia have to be activated inorder to become efficient phagocytes. Recent data, however, has shown that unchallenged microglia phagocytose apoptotic cells during development and in adult neurogenic niches, suggesting an overlooked role in brain remodeling throughout the normal lifespan. The present review will summarize the current state of the literature regarding the role of microglial phagocytosis in maintaining tissue homeostasis in health as in disease.

La gastronomía como recurso cómico en la literatura griega

Presentado en las Jornadas sobre "El humor (y los humores) en el mundo antiguo", organizado por el Departamento de Estudios Clásicos y el Instituto de Ciencias de la Antigüedad de la UPV y celebrado en Vitoria-Gasteiz los días 16 y 17 de octubre de 2007.

A review of length-weight relationships of fishes from Greek marine waters

This paper presents 649 length-weight relationships gathered from literature pertaining to 83 fish species, belonging to 34 families, throughout Greek marine waters. The value of the slope b ranged from 1.667 for Cepola macrophthalma to 3.707 for Mullus barbatus. The mean value of b was 2.989 (SD=0.339) and did not differ significantly from 3(t-test, p<0.05). The median value of b was 3.058 and 50% of the b values ranged between 2.900 and 3.186.

Biological parameters, body length-weight and length-height relationships for various species in Greek waters

Biological/fisheries parameters (L sub(oo) M, F) are presented for four fish species (Gadiculus argenteus; Gaidropsarus mediterraneous; Symphurus ligulatus; Lepidorhombus boscii) as well as body length-weight and length-height relationships for 11 and 12 fish species, respectively, estimated from trawl samples collected using three different cod-ends (stretched mesh size: 14 mm and 20 mm diamond-shaped and 20 mm square-shaped) during 1993-1994, in the western Aegean and North Euboikos Gulf, Greece. The fisheries paramaters, estimated from length-frequency using the ELEFAN approach and software, are discussed in the light of recent information on the selectivity of the presently used trawl cod-end (14 mm diamond shaped)

Rule-based grapheme-to-phoneme method for the Greek

This paper describes a trainable method for generating letter to sound rules for the Greek language, for producing the pronunciation of out-of-vocabulary words. Several approaches have been adopted over the years for grapheme-to-phoneme conversion, such as hand-seeded rules, finite state transducers, neural networks, HMMs etc, nevertheless it has been proved that the most reliable method is a rule-based one. Our approach is based on a semi-automatically pre-transcribed lexicon, from which we derived rules for automatic transcription. The efficiency and robustness of our method are proved by experiments on out-of-vocabulary words which resulted in over than 98% accuracy on a word-base criterion.

IPLR: An online resource for Greek word-level and sublexical information

We present a new online psycholinguistic resource for Greek based on analyses of written corpora combined with text processing technologies developed at the Institute for Language & Speech Processing (ILSP), Greece. The "ILSP PsychoLinguistic Resource" (IPLR) is a freely accessible service via a dedicated web page, at http://speech.ilsp.gr/iplr. IPLR provides analyses of user-submitted letter strings (words and nonwords) as well as frequency tables for important units and conditions such as syllables, bigrams, and neighbors, calculated over two word lists based on printed text corpora and their phonetic transcription. Online tools allow retrieval of words matching user-specified orthographic or phonetic patterns. All results and processing code (in the Python programming language) are freely available for noncommercial educational or research use. © 2010 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.