y y ntil recently, the only examples of Karen Blixen's juvenile works vJ were to be found in ... more y y ntil recently, the only examples of Karen Blixen's juvenile works vJ were to be found in the little known collection Osceola, in the marionette comedy Sandhedens haevn, and in the Karen Blixen Archives at the Royal Library in Copenhagen. In 1977, however, "The De Cats Family" and "Uncle Theodore" appeared, and in 1981 and 1983, several other stories in greater or lesser degrees of completion were made available through the pages of Blixeniana. Unfortunately, the newest material remains in its original Danish. And still more incomplete but lengthy fragments such as "Doris Alvarez. En spogelseshistorie" remain in manuscript form. The relative obscurity and inaccessibility of these materials for American readers and scholars has served to effectively block a firsthand evaluation of their worth and their relevance to the rest of Blixen's authorship. Osceola was a teller of ghost stories, thrillers, and love stories. These tales are not opaque but straightforward, and they are mainly either ironic and humorous or more serious and rather frightening. But the streak of supernaturalism that runs through them all and the sheer fun of Osceola's authorship links it to a curious quality about Karen Blixen's authorship that has either been quietly ignored or taken for granted. Karen Blixen herself acknowledged that her production was made up of essentially two kinds of works: those she considered serious literature and those told for the sake of entertainment.1 That Karen Blixen's readers derive a great deal of pleasure from Seven Gothic Tales, Out of Africa, Winter's Tales, or the stories collected in Last Tales does not detract from the fact that she saw a fundamental qualitative difference between these works and the stories she wrote for the Ladies' Home Journal. It is a sad irony that the Baroness was dismayed when the sensational Gothic thriller The Angelic Avengers, which she had dictated off the cuff and published under the new pseudonym Pierre Andrezal, was accepted as a book of the month along with her serious contributions.2 In a newspaper article, Blixen, without acknowledging Gengcedelsens veje as her own, wrote that Pierre Andrezal perhaps wrote his book:
Background: The colonic microbiome is remarkable in that it is amongst the most densely populated... more Background: The colonic microbiome is remarkable in that it is amongst the most densely populated microbial habitats on Earth. The study of gut microbial ecology and its interplay with the host metabolome has emerged as a critical frontier in contemporary nutritional and metabolic research. Classic studies in physiology have shown that the gut microbiome plays an important role in nitrogen balance of the host. Urea, produced by the host, is hydrolyzed in the colon by urease-producing gut bacteria and the resultant ammonia is absorbed by the host and utilized for protein metabolism. In this study, we determined the effect of the gut microbiome on the metabolic alterations induced by a low protein diet (LPD). Methods and Results: Female C57B/6J mice were fed either a normal chow (20% kcal protein) or low protein diet (3% kcal protein) for 1 month. Metabolic phenotyping revealed that mice fed a low protein diet failed to gain weight despite a 40% increase in food intake. Compared to mice fed a normal chow diet, mice fed a LPD also showed significant alterations in body composition, as assessed by MRI, with a decrease in lean mass and a proportional increase in fat mass as well as a significant increase in energy expenditure, as determined by indirect calorimetry. In addition, LPD fed mice suffered a profound defect of water conservation manifested as severe polydypsia and polyuria. Remarkably, except for growth retardation, the administration of oral antibiotics to mice fed a LPD dramatically prevented all of these adverse metabolic sequelae. GC-MS of urinary samples revealed that oral antibiotics did not lead to profound alterations in urinary amino acid excretion suggesting that gut bacteria were not competing with the host for dietary nitrogen sources in a significant way. This notion is supported by the failure of LPD mice to increase serum IGF-1 levels and normalize body weight when placed on oral antibiotics. Preliminary determination of gut microbiome composition, by 16S rDNA sequencing using the 454/Roche method and taxonomic group assignment at the genus level using RDPclassifier, revealed modest alterations induced by a LPD. Conclusions: These results suggest that the gut microbiome evokes deleterious metabolic consequences in the host in the setting of a low protein diet that are independent of competition for dietary nitrogen. The gut microbiome may, therefore, play an important role in the regulation of host metabolic physiology in settings where the consumption of dietary protein is severely limited.
American Journal of Physiology-Gastrointestinal and Liver Physiology, 2010
Apolipoprotein (apo) A-IV overexpression enhances chylomicron (CM) assembly and secretion in newb... more Apolipoprotein (apo) A-IV overexpression enhances chylomicron (CM) assembly and secretion in newborn swine intestinal epithelial cells by producing larger particles (Lu S, Yao Y, Cheng X, Mitchell S, Leng S, Meng S, Gallagher JW, Shelness GS, Morris GS, Mahan J, Frase S, Mansbach CM, Weinberg RB, Black DD. J Biol Chem 281: 3473–3483, 2006). To determine the impact of apo A-IV on microsomal triglyceride transfer protein (MTTP), IPEC-1 cell lines containing a tetracycline-regulatable expression system were used to overexpress native swine apo A-IV and “piglike” human apo A-IV, a mutant human apo A-IV with deletion of the EQQQ-rich COOH-terminus, previously shown to upregulate basolateral triglyceride (TG) secretion 5-fold and 25-fold, respectively. Cells were incubated 24 h with and without doxycycline and oleic acid (OA, 0.8 mM). Overexpression of the native swine apo A-IV and piglike human apo A-IV increased MTTP lipid transfer activity by 39.7% ( P = 0.006) and 53.6% ( P = 0.0001),...
y y ntil recently, the only examples of Karen Blixen's juvenile works vJ were to be found in ... more y y ntil recently, the only examples of Karen Blixen's juvenile works vJ were to be found in the little known collection Osceola, in the marionette comedy Sandhedens haevn, and in the Karen Blixen Archives at the Royal Library in Copenhagen. In 1977, however, "The De Cats Family" and "Uncle Theodore" appeared, and in 1981 and 1983, several other stories in greater or lesser degrees of completion were made available through the pages of Blixeniana. Unfortunately, the newest material remains in its original Danish. And still more incomplete but lengthy fragments such as "Doris Alvarez. En spogelseshistorie" remain in manuscript form. The relative obscurity and inaccessibility of these materials for American readers and scholars has served to effectively block a firsthand evaluation of their worth and their relevance to the rest of Blixen's authorship. Osceola was a teller of ghost stories, thrillers, and love stories. These tales are not opaque but straightforward, and they are mainly either ironic and humorous or more serious and rather frightening. But the streak of supernaturalism that runs through them all and the sheer fun of Osceola's authorship links it to a curious quality about Karen Blixen's authorship that has either been quietly ignored or taken for granted. Karen Blixen herself acknowledged that her production was made up of essentially two kinds of works: those she considered serious literature and those told for the sake of entertainment.1 That Karen Blixen's readers derive a great deal of pleasure from Seven Gothic Tales, Out of Africa, Winter's Tales, or the stories collected in Last Tales does not detract from the fact that she saw a fundamental qualitative difference between these works and the stories she wrote for the Ladies' Home Journal. It is a sad irony that the Baroness was dismayed when the sensational Gothic thriller The Angelic Avengers, which she had dictated off the cuff and published under the new pseudonym Pierre Andrezal, was accepted as a book of the month along with her serious contributions.2 In a newspaper article, Blixen, without acknowledging Gengcedelsens veje as her own, wrote that Pierre Andrezal perhaps wrote his book:
Background: The colonic microbiome is remarkable in that it is amongst the most densely populated... more Background: The colonic microbiome is remarkable in that it is amongst the most densely populated microbial habitats on Earth. The study of gut microbial ecology and its interplay with the host metabolome has emerged as a critical frontier in contemporary nutritional and metabolic research. Classic studies in physiology have shown that the gut microbiome plays an important role in nitrogen balance of the host. Urea, produced by the host, is hydrolyzed in the colon by urease-producing gut bacteria and the resultant ammonia is absorbed by the host and utilized for protein metabolism. In this study, we determined the effect of the gut microbiome on the metabolic alterations induced by a low protein diet (LPD). Methods and Results: Female C57B/6J mice were fed either a normal chow (20% kcal protein) or low protein diet (3% kcal protein) for 1 month. Metabolic phenotyping revealed that mice fed a low protein diet failed to gain weight despite a 40% increase in food intake. Compared to mice fed a normal chow diet, mice fed a LPD also showed significant alterations in body composition, as assessed by MRI, with a decrease in lean mass and a proportional increase in fat mass as well as a significant increase in energy expenditure, as determined by indirect calorimetry. In addition, LPD fed mice suffered a profound defect of water conservation manifested as severe polydypsia and polyuria. Remarkably, except for growth retardation, the administration of oral antibiotics to mice fed a LPD dramatically prevented all of these adverse metabolic sequelae. GC-MS of urinary samples revealed that oral antibiotics did not lead to profound alterations in urinary amino acid excretion suggesting that gut bacteria were not competing with the host for dietary nitrogen sources in a significant way. This notion is supported by the failure of LPD mice to increase serum IGF-1 levels and normalize body weight when placed on oral antibiotics. Preliminary determination of gut microbiome composition, by 16S rDNA sequencing using the 454/Roche method and taxonomic group assignment at the genus level using RDPclassifier, revealed modest alterations induced by a LPD. Conclusions: These results suggest that the gut microbiome evokes deleterious metabolic consequences in the host in the setting of a low protein diet that are independent of competition for dietary nitrogen. The gut microbiome may, therefore, play an important role in the regulation of host metabolic physiology in settings where the consumption of dietary protein is severely limited.
American Journal of Physiology-Gastrointestinal and Liver Physiology, 2010
Apolipoprotein (apo) A-IV overexpression enhances chylomicron (CM) assembly and secretion in newb... more Apolipoprotein (apo) A-IV overexpression enhances chylomicron (CM) assembly and secretion in newborn swine intestinal epithelial cells by producing larger particles (Lu S, Yao Y, Cheng X, Mitchell S, Leng S, Meng S, Gallagher JW, Shelness GS, Morris GS, Mahan J, Frase S, Mansbach CM, Weinberg RB, Black DD. J Biol Chem 281: 3473–3483, 2006). To determine the impact of apo A-IV on microsomal triglyceride transfer protein (MTTP), IPEC-1 cell lines containing a tetracycline-regulatable expression system were used to overexpress native swine apo A-IV and “piglike” human apo A-IV, a mutant human apo A-IV with deletion of the EQQQ-rich COOH-terminus, previously shown to upregulate basolateral triglyceride (TG) secretion 5-fold and 25-fold, respectively. Cells were incubated 24 h with and without doxycycline and oleic acid (OA, 0.8 mM). Overexpression of the native swine apo A-IV and piglike human apo A-IV increased MTTP lipid transfer activity by 39.7% ( P = 0.006) and 53.6% ( P = 0.0001),...
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