To investigate the relationship between early nutritional experience, ontogeny of the small intestinal functions and predisposition to obesity development, the following experimental models of male Sprague-Dawley rats were used: 1) rats in which the quantity of nutrition was manipulated from birth to weaning (day 30) by adjusting the number of pups in the nest to 4 (SL), 10 (NL) and 16 pups (LL) and 2) littermates of SL, NL and LL rats fed either a standard or a hypercaloric diet from days 80 to 135 of age. The overfed SL pups were overweight after day 15 and became permanently obese, whereas the underfed smaller LL pups, due to accelerated growth and enhanced food intake from day 30 to day 35, attained a body fat level that did not differ from normally fed NL rats. Moreover, a significantly increased duodenal and jejunal alkaline phosphatase (AP) activity was found in SL and LL rats and these acquired somatic and intestinal characteristics persisted from weaning throughout life. Eight weeks of high-energy diet feeding elicited a similar pattern of intestinal response in SL and LL rats that was clearly different from NL rats. Despite energy overconsumption in these three groups, both SL and LL rats still displayed enhanced AP activity and showed a significant increase in protein/DNA ratio accompanied with a significant body fat accretion. These results indicate that the postnatally acquired small intestinal changes induced by over- and undernutrition could be involved in the similar predisposition to obesity risk in later life when caloric density of the diet is raised., Š. Možeš, Z. Šefčíková, Ľ. Lenhardt., and Obsahuje bibliografii a bibliografické odkazy
Coccidiosis is a parasitic disease caused by protists (apicomplexans) of the genus Eimeria Schneider, 1875 and is considered to be the most important disease faced by rabbit breeders due to its high morbidity. In the present study, the antioxidant status and changes in apoptosis and in the expression of some genes were quantified in rabbits' ilea following infection with Eimeria intestinalis Cheissin, 1948. Rabbits, orally infected with 1 × 105 sporulated oocysts of E. intestinalis, started to shed oocysts in their faeces on 8 days post infection (dpi) and reached maximum excretion on 10 dpi, with approximately 5 million oocysts. This was accompanied by a significant decrease in the live body weight of infected rabbits. Also, malondialdehyde and nitric oxide were significantly increased while catalase and glutathione were significantly decreased in the ileum tissues of the infected rabbits. In addition, a significant increase was observed in the percentages of apoptotic cells in the ilea of the infected rabbits. Furthermore, interleukin-1β and interleukin-2 mRNA levels were significantly down-regulated and mRNA levels of interleukin-6, interferon gamma and inducible nitric oxide synthase were significantly up-regulated, while those of C-reactive protein remained unchanged. We conclude that infection with E. intestinalis induces oxidative stress, a significant increase in the percentage of apoptotic cells and a diverse and robust Th1 and Th1-related cytokine response in the ileum tissues., Heba M. Abdel-Haleem, Shawky M. Aboelhadid, Thabet Sakran, Gamal El-Shahawy, Huda El-Fayoumi, Saleh Al-Quraishy, Abdel-Azeem S. Abdel-Baki., and Obsahuje bibliografii
Myxobolus taibaiensis sp. n. was found in the inner intestinal wall of common carp, Cyprinus carpio Linnaeus, during the investigation of fish parasite fauna in Lake Taibai, located in the middle reach of the Yangtze River, China. The whitish ellipsoidal plasmodia, up to 2.9 mm long and 1.7 mm wide, developed in the circular muscle layer of the intestinal wall and produced significant compression into adjacent tissues, but no significant inflammatory responses were observed against this infection. Mature spores are oval in frontal view and lemon-like in lateral and apical view, averaging 10.2-11.2 µm (10.8 ± 0.2 µm) in length, 9.1-9.9 µm (9.6 ± 0.2 µm) in width and 6.1-6.6 µm (6.3 ± 0.1 µm) in thickness. Polar capsules are pyriform, equal in size, slightly converging anteriorly, measuring 4.4-5.4 µm (5.0 ± 0.2 µm) in length by 3.2-3.6 µm (3.4 ± 0.1 µm) in width. Polar filaments coiled with four to five turns and arranged perpendicular to the polar capsule length, measuring up to 106 µm. Myxobolus taibaiensis sp. n. is morphologically similar to Myxobolus rotundatus Achmerov, 1956 which also infects the inner wall of the intestine of common carp. However, the small subunit ribosomal DNA sequence identity was only 94%, generally beyond the intraspecies variation in the genus. Phylogenetically, this new species is sister to M. rotundatus and then clusters with M. shantungensis Hu, 1965 to form an independent common carp-infecting cluster within the Henneguya-Myxobolus clade., Xinhua Liu, Congjie Hua, Qianqian Zhang, Yuanli Zhao, Dong Zhang, Jinyong Zhang., and Obsahuje bibliografii