Beyond the Bark: An Overview of the Chemistry and Biological Activities of Selected Bark Essential Oils.

Essential oils have been used by indigenous peoples for medicinal purposes since ancient times. Their easy availability played an important role. Even today, essential oils are used in various fields­be it as aromatic substances in the food industry, as an aid in antibiotic therapy, in aromatherapy, in various household products or in cosmetics. The benefits they bring to the body and health are proven by many sources. Due to their complex composition, they offer properties that will be used more and more in the future. Synergistic effects of various components in an essential oil are also part of the reason for their effectiveness. Infectious diseases will always recur, so it is important to find active ingredients for different therapies or new research approaches. Essential oils extracted from the bark of trees have not been researched as extensively as from other plant components. Therefore, this review will focus on bringing together previous research on selected bark oils to provide an overview of barks that are economically, medicinally, and ethnopharmaceutically relevant. The bark oils described are Cinnamomum verum, Cedrelopsis grevei, Drypetes gossweileri, Cryptocarya massoy, Vanillosmopsis arborea and Cedrus deodara. Literature from various databases, such as Scifinder, Scopus, Google Scholar, and PubMed, among others, were used.

Mosaic genome-wide maternal isodiploidy: an extreme form of imprinting disorder presenting as prenatal diagnostic challenge.

BACKGROUND: Uniparental disomy of certain chromosomes are associated with a group of well-known genetic syndromes referred to as imprinting disorders. However, the extreme form of uniparental disomy affecting the whole genome is usually not compatible with life, with the exception of very rare cases of patients with mosaic genome-wide uniparental disomy reported in the literature. RESULTS: We here report on a fetus with intrauterine growth retardation and malformations observed on prenatal ultrasound leading to invasive prenatal testing. By cytogenetic (conventional karyotyping), molecular cytogenetic (QF-PCR, FISH, array), and methylation (MS-MLPA) analyses of amniotic fluid, we detected mosaicism for one cell line with genome-wide maternal uniparental disomy and a second diploid cell line of biparental inheritance with trisomy X due to paternal isodisomy X. As expected for this constellation, we observed DNA methylation changes at all imprinted loci investigated. CONCLUSIONS: This report adds new information on phenotypic outcome of mosaic genome-wide maternal uniparental disomy leading to an extreme form of multilocus imprinting disturbance. Moreover, the findings highlight the technical challenges of detecting these rare chromosome disorders prenatally.

Charge attachment induced transport - bulk and grain boundary diffusion of potassium in PrMnO3.

The transport of potassium through praseodymium-manganese oxide (PrMnO3; PMO) has been investigated by means of the charge attachment induced transport (CAIT) technique. To this end, potassium ions have been attached to the front side of a 250 nm thick sample of PMO. The majority of the potassium ions become neutralized at the surface of the PMO, while some of the potassium ions diffuse through. Ex situ analysis of the sample by time-of-flight secondary ion mass spectrometry (ToF-SIMS) reveals pronounced concentration profiles of the potassium, which is indicative of diffusion. Two diffusion coefficients have been obtained, namely, the bulk diffusion coefficient and the diffusion coefficient associated with the grain boundaries. The latter conclusion is supported by transmission electron microscopy of thin lamella cut out from the sample, which reveals twin grain boundaries reaching throughout the entire sample as well as model calculations.

Volume comparison for C 1 , 1 -metrics.

The aim of this paper is to generalize certain volume comparison theorems (Bishop-Gromov and a recent result of Treude and Grant, Ann Global Anal Geom, 43:233-251, 2013) for smooth Riemannian or Lorentzian manifolds to metrics that are only C 1 , 1 (differentiable with Lipschitz continuous derivatives). In particular we establish (using approximation methods) a volume monotonicity result for the evolution of a compact subset of a spacelike, acausal, future causally complete (i.e., the intersection of any past causal cone with the hypersurface is relatively compact) hypersurface with an upper bound on the mean curvature in a globally hyperbolic spacetime with a C 1 , 1 -metric with a lower bound on the timelike Ricci curvature, provided all timelike geodesics starting in this compact set exist long enough. As an intermediate step, we also show that the cut locus of such a hypersurface still has measure zero in this regularity-generalizing the well-known result for smooth metrics. To show that these volume comparison results have some very nice applications, we then give a proof of Myers' theorem, of a simple singularity theorem for globally hyperbolic spacetimes, and of Hawking's singularity theorem directly in this regularity.

Does an aerobic endurance programme have an influence on information processing in migraineurs?

BACKGROUND: Migraine is a disorder of central information processing which is characterized by a reduced habituation of event-related potentials. There might be positive effects of aerobic exercise on brain function and pain. The aim of this study was to investigate the influence of exercise on information processing and clinical course of migraine. METHODS: 33 patients completed a ten-week aerobic exercise programme. To examine the influence of the treatment on information processing and attention, Trail Making Test (TMT) A and B, d2-Letter Cancellation Test (LCT) and recordings of the Contingent Negative Variation (CNV) were performed before and after the training. RESULTS: Patients showed a significant reduction of the migraine attack frequency, the iCNV-amplitude and the processing time for TMT-A and TMT-B after treatment. Moreover, there was a significant increase of the habituation and positive changes in parameters of attention (d2-LCT) after the training. CONCLUSIONS: This study demonstrates that aerobic exercise programme influences central information processing and leads to clinical effects on the migraine symptomatology. The results can be interpreted in terms of an improvement of a dysfunctional information processing and a stimulus selection under aerobic exercise.