Data on natural radionuclide's activity concentration of cement-based materials.

Cement based materials may contain varying levels of radionuclides, mainly 226Ra (from the 238U series), 232Th and 40K, which are used to determine the Activity Concentration Index ("ACI"). According to the European directive Euratom 2013/59 in these materials, the "ACI" must be < 1 to be suitable for their use in construction. In this paper, data on the activity concentration of natural radionuclides in cement-based materials (i.e. cements, additions, pigments and aggregates) as well as their chemical composition are presented. Radioactivity measurements have been determined by using gamma spectroscopy the chemical compositions have been determined by X-Ray Fluorescence. Data for cements measured shown that white cements present a lower concentration of activity than conventional CEM I. In addition, the CAC (Calcium aluminate cements) present high activity concentration in the 232Th series. Regarding additions, FA (Fly Ash) are those that present the highest concentration of activity in the 238U and 232Th series, while olive biomass ashes are those supplementary cementitious materials that show the highest concentration of activity for 40K. Some pigments used in mortar and concrete technology were also characterized. Granitic and volcanic rocks, potentially used as aggregates present much higher activity concentration than the siliceous aggregate.

Use of Genie 2000 and Excel VBA to correct for γ-ray interference in the determination of NORM building material activity concentrations.

The γ-radiation emitted by building materials is calculated from the activity indices for 232Th, 226Ra and 40K and expressed as the activity concentration index (ACI). Gamma spectroscopy is a non-destructive technique frequently used to simultaneously determine the indices for several radionuclides. Spectral interpretation poses a number of challenges, including identification of γ-lines subject to summing-in effects, interference from other γ-ray emitting radionuclides and the time required to reach secular equilibrium. These challenges are not fully addressed by Canberra Industries' Genie 2000, the software used by many laboratories to analyse samples. This article describes a Microsoft Excel workbook that exploits Genie 2000 flexibility to program applications with Visual Basic using Canberra's Nuclear Data Access Library and batch procedure tools. The workbook determines 40K activity concentration after correcting for 228Ac interference and 226Ra activity directly from the γ-peak at 186.5 keV. The method proposed was tested by participating in 13 national and international scale inter-comparison exercises. The results were statistically indistinguishable from the reference values at a coverage factor of k = 3 and no statistically significant differences were identified between the respective means by a Student's t pairwise comparison.

Human bone marrow- and adipose-mesenchymal stem cells secrete exosomes enriched in distinctive miRNA and tRNA species.

INTRODUCTION: Administration of mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) represents a promising treatment option for patients suffering from immunological and degenerative disorders. Accumulating evidence indicates that the healing effects of MSCs are mainly related to unique paracrine properties, opening opportunities for secretome-based therapies. Apart from soluble factors, MSCs release functional small RNAs via extracellular vesicles (EVs) that seem to convey essential features of MSCs. Here we set out to characterize the full small RNAome of MSC-produced exosomes. METHODS: We set up a protocol for isolating exosomes released by early passage adipose- (ASC) and bone marrow-MSCs (BMSC) and characterized them via electron microscopy, protein analysis and small RNA-sequencing. We developed a bioinformatics pipeline to define the exosome-enclosed RNA species and performed the first complete small RNA characterization of BMSCs and ASCs and their corresponding exosomes in biological replicates. RESULTS: Our analysis revealed that primary ASCs and BMSCs have highly similar small RNA expression profiles dominated by miRNAs and snoRNAs (together 64-71 %), of which 150-200 miRNAs are present at physiological levels. In contrast, the miRNA pool in MSC exosomes is only 2-5 % of the total small RNAome and is dominated by a minor subset of miRNAs. Nevertheless, the miRNAs in exosomes do not merely reflect the cellular content and a defined set of miRNAs are overrepresented in exosomes compared to the cell of origin. Moreover, multiple highly expressed miRNAs are precluded from exosomal sorting, consistent with the notion that these miRNAs are involved in functional repression of RNA targets. While ASC and BMSC exosomes are similar in RNA class distribution and composition, we observed striking differences in the sorting of evolutionary conserved tRNA species that seems associated with the differentiation status of MSCs, as defined by Sox2, POU5F1A/B and Nanog expression. CONCLUSIONS: We demonstrate that primary MSCs release small RNAs via exosomes, which are increasingly implicated in intercellular communications. tRNAs species, and in particular tRNA halves, are preferentially released and their specific sorting into exosomes is related to MSC tissue origin and stemness. These findings may help to understand how MSCs impact neighboring or distant cells with possible consequences for their therapeutic usage.