Pre- and post-fire pollutant loads in an urban fringe watershed in Southern California.

Post-fire runoff has the potential to be a large source of contaminants to downstream areas. However, the magnitude of this effect in urban fringe watersheds adjacent to large sources of airborne contaminants is not well documented. The current study investigates the impacts of wildfire on stormwater contaminant loading from the upper Arroyo Seco watershed, burned in 2009. This watershed is adjacent to the Greater Los Angeles, CA, USA area and has not burned in over 60 years. Consequently, it acts as a sink for regional urban pollutants and presents an opportunity to study the impacts of wildfire. Pre- and post-fire storm samples were collected and analyzed for basic cations, trace metals, and total suspended solids. The loss of vegetation and changes in soil properties from the fire greatly increased the magnitude of storm runoff, resulting in sediment-laden floods carrying high concentrations of particulate-bound constituents. Post-fire concentrations and loads were up to three orders of magnitude greater than pre-fire values for many trace metals, including lead and cadmium. A shift was also observed in the timing of chemical delivery, where maximum suspended sediment, trace metal, and cation concentrations coincided with, rather than preceded, peak discharge in the post-fire runoff, amplifying the fire's impacts on mass loading. The results emphasize the importance of sediment delivery as a primary mechanism for post-fire contaminant transport and suggest that traditional management practices that focus on treating only the early portion of storm runoff may be less effective following wildfire. We also advocate that watersheds impacted by regional urban pollutants have the potential to pose significant risk for downstream communities and ecosystems after fire.

Rapid upregulation of snake intestine in response to feeding: a new model of intestinal adaptation.

Mammalian guts exhibit numerous adaptive responses to feeding. However, response magnitudes are often inconveniently modest for experimental analysis, because mammals feed often and their intestines are rarely empty. We anticipated larger responses in sit-and-wait foraging snakes, because they consume huge meals at long intervals. Hence, we studied metabolic rates, brush-border nutrient transport, and intestinal morphometrics in the rattlesnake, Crotalus cerastes, as a function of time since feeding. O2 consumption by the whole snake, a reflection of the cost of digestion and of rebuilding the starved gut, peaked after 2 days at eight times fasting values. Activities of brush-border glucose, leucine, and proline transporters peaked after 1-3 days at 5-22 times fasting values. Ratios of amino acid to glucose uptake rates peaked at 104, reflecting snakes' extreme adaptation to carnivory (a high-protein low-carbohydrate diet). Intestinal mass increased more than twofold within 1 day, primarily because of mucosal growth. After defecation, the intestine atrophied, brush-border transporters were downregulated, and O2 consumption returned to basal. These rapid and large responses reduce costs of gut maintenance during long bouts of quiescence between meals. Hence sit-and-wait foraging snakes may furnish advantageous model species for studying gut regulation and adaptation.

Do dietary levels of pantothenic acid regulate its intestinal uptake in mice?

While regulation of intestinal transporters is established for other nutrients, evidence concerning regulation of intestinal vitamin transport is scanty. Hence, we compared intestinal pantothenic acid (PA) uptake in mice fed diets with high, normal and deficient PA levels. PA uptake is distributed along the small intestine, Na(+)-dependent and saturable. Signs of PA deficiency were weight loss or reduced growth, then hair loss and exudation around the eyes, then diarrhea and hindleg paralysis and splenomegaly, and finally death. Treatment of mice with an antibiotic was found to be necessary to elicit severe signs of PA deficiency, probably because mice normally can obtain PA synthesized by intestinal bacteria. Dietary PA levels had no effect on intestinal PA uptake at 5 microM. A small increase in the Vmax of uptake, observed in late-stage deficiency, is probably too small to be physiologically significant. Comparison with published results for other water-soluble vitamins suggests that intestinal transporters may be regulated only for vitamins absorbed predominantly by carrier-mediated transport and subject to natural deficiency states.

Comparison of different dietary amino acids as inducers of intestinal amino acid transport.

Intestinal amino acid (AA) transporters are known to be induced by raised levels of dietary protein or free AA mixtures, but little is known about whether certain AAs are more potent inducers than others. Hence we compared, in mouse jejunum, the inductive effects of seven different AAs (given to mice as dietary supplements) on the brush-border uptake of five solutes predominantly taken up via different transporters. The AAs tested as dietary supplements included one imino acid, two acidic AAs, two basic AAs, and two neutral AAs. The solutes whose uptakes we studied were D-glucose plus preferential substrates for the acidic AA, basic AA, neutral AA, and imino acid transporter. Mouse growth rates were consistently higher for dietary supplementation with nonessential than essential AAs, but there were no ration-related differences in intestinal morphometric parameters and almost none in active D-glucose uptake. AA transport is regulated independently of D-glucose transport. The four AA transporters are regulated semi-independently on each other: e.g., aspartate is a good inducer for only two of the four transporters, arginine for one or two, lysine for just one. Different AAs differ in their potencies at inducing the same AA transporter. In a few cases good substrates make good inducers (e.g., aspartate of the acidic AA transporter, valine of the neutral AA transporter). But often this is not true: the acidic AA aspartate is the best inducer of the basic AA transporter; the basic AA arginine but not lysine is a good inducer of the acidic AA transporter; and the imino acid proline is not a good inducer of the imino acid transporter. The adaptive significance of these discrepancies between inducers and transported substrates is unclear. Thus the differing dietary values of different AAs may be related to their differing values as inducers of AA transport, in addition to their well-known differing biosynthetic values as essential or nonessential nutrients.

Is intestinal transport of sugars and amino acids subject to critical-period programming?

Physiological responses include three sorts: reversible within an individual's lifetime, fixed irreversibly at some critical period in life, and genetic. Examples of the first and third but not the second sort have been demonstrated for intestinal nutrient transport. Hence, we searched for critical-period programming of sugar and amino acid transport by mouse small intestine. Mice were maintained on either of two rations from gestation through birth, lactation, and weaning until adulthood: a high-carbohydrate, maintenance-protein ration and a carbohydrate-free, high-protein ration. The two groups of mice were then compared in adulthood while both groups were on the former or the latter ration. Early diet has irreversible effects on gut and body size; because of higher growth rates until weaning mice receiving high-carbohydrate diets achieved and maintained higher weights, longer guts, and heavier proximal guts than the mice receiving carbohydrate free diets. This difference increased with litter size and may have arisen from limitations on nursing mothers' ability to convert dietary protein into milk carbohydrate or fat. Early diet appears to exert some general effects on adult intestinal transport as a result of these differences in body and gut size but does not appear to exert specific irreversible effects on transport of D-glucose, L-proline, L-leucine, L-lysine, or L-aspartate or on passive glucose permeability. Active and passive glucose transport increases reversibly on a high-carbohydrate diet, whereas amino acid transport increases reversibly on a high-protein diet.

Safe transfer of civilian burn casualties.

The advisability of transporting severely burned civilian patients to a definitive burn-care facility during the first hours following injury is discussed and methods providing safe transport for 353 civilian burn patients are described. Feasibility of and methods for transporting patients over various distances are outlined and the problems of jet transportation presented. Adequate communication between referring and receiving physicians is imperative, as are adequate preparation before evacuation and maintenance of intravenous fluid resuscitation, intake and output records, and sterile technique during transport.