Vascular dysfunction is one of the major causes of cardiovascular (CV) mortality and increases with age. Epidemiological studies suggest that Mediterranean diets and high nut consumption reduce CV disease risk and mortality while increasing plasma α-tocopherol. Therefore, we have investigated whether almond supplementation can improve oxidative stress markers and CV risk factors over 4 weeks in young and middle-aged men.Healthy middle-aged men (56+5.8years), healthy young men (22.1+2.9years) and young men with two or more CV risk factors (27.3+5years) consumed 50g almond /day for 4 weeks. A control group maintained habitual diets over the same period.Plasma α-tocopherol/cholesterol ratios were not different between groups at baseline and were significantly elevated by almond intervention with 50g almond/day for four weeks (p<0.05). Plasma protein oxidation and nitrite levels were not different between groups whereas total, HDL and LDL cholesterols and triglycerides were significantly higher in healthy middle-aged and young men with CV risk factors but were not affected by almond intake. In the almond consuming groups, flow mediated dilatation (FMD) was improved and diastolic blood pressure was reduced significantly after 4 weeks, but systolic blood pressure was only reduced in healthy men.In conclusion, a short-term almond-enriched diet can increase plasma α-tocopherol and improve vascular function in asymptomatic healthy mean men aged between 20 and 70 without effect on plasma lipids or markers of oxidative stress.3

A novel biosensing system based on a micromachined rectangular silicon membrane is proposed and investigated in this paper. Distributive sensing scheme is designed to monitor the dynamics of the sensing structure.An artificial neural network is used to process the measured data and to identify cell presence and density. Without specifying any particular bio-application, the investigation is mainly concentrated on the performance testing of this kind of biosensor as a general biosensing platform. The biosensing experiments on the microfabricated membranes involve seeding different cell densities onto the sensing surface of membrane, and measuring the corresponding dynamics information of each tested silicon membrane in the form of a series of frequency response functions (FRFs). All of those experiments are carried out in a cell culture medium to simulate a practical working environment. The EA.hy 926 endothelial cell lines are chosen in this paper for the bio-experiments. The EA.hy 926 endothelial cell lines represent a particular class of biological particles that have unregular shapes, non-uniform density and uncertain growth behaviour, which are difficult to monitor using the traditional biosensors. The final predicted results reveal that the methodology of a neural-network based algorithm to perform the feature identification of cells from distributive sensory measurement, has great potential in biosensing applications.

Humans undergo biological ageing at different rates. This associates with functional decline in a number of physiological systems and increasing incidence of age-related pathologies. The discovery of robust biomarkers of ageing could be used to identify early divergence from a path of healthy ageing towards age-related disease. In the present study, we undertook proteomic analysis of plasma from healthy young men (mean age = 21.4 ± 1.5 years) and healthy midlife men (mean age = 57.0 ± 1.6 years). We identified 12 spots including transferrin, complement C3b and transthyretin that differed in abundance between the age groups. Transferrin spots showed an acidic pI shift in older males. Sandwich ELISAs were used to investigate the changes further. C3b levels were below the level of detection by ELISA and plasma concentrations of total transferrin or transthyretin were not different between the age groups studied here. However, analysis of transferrin N-glycan structures showed an increase in terminal galactose residues in older men, suggesting that the loss of terminal N-acetyl neuraminic acid residues contributes to the more acid pI of transferrin spots observed with age. Terminal galactosylation of transferrin may be a biomarker of healthy ageing and is now under investigation in the MARK-AGE study.