Osaka University

About: Osaka University is a education organization based out in Osaka, Japan. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Laser & Catalysis. The organization has 83778 authors who have published 185669 publications receiving 5158122 citations. The organization is also known as: Ōsaka daigaku.

Contribution of intra-abdominal fat accumulation to the impairment of glucose and lipid metabolism in human obesity

Abstract: The casual relationship between intraabdominal visceral fat accumulation and metabolic disorders was analyzed in 46 obese subjects (15 males, 31 females) having 34.1 +/- 5.5 of body mass index (BMI). The distribution of fat was determined by our CT scanning technique (Int J Obesity 7:437, 1983). The total cross-cut area, subcutaneous fat area, and intra-abdominal fat area was measured at the umbilical level. The fasting plasma glucose level, area under the plasma glucose concentration curve after oral glucose loading (plasma glucose area), fasting serum triglyceride level, and serum total cholesterol level were all significantly higher or otherwise greater in the group with intraabdominal visceral fat to subcutaneous fat ratio (V/S ratio) of not less than 0.4 than in the group with a lower V/S ratio, when either all or sex-matched obese subjects were examined, though BMI or the duration of obesity was not different between the two groups. The V/S ratio was significantly correlated with the level of plasma glucose area (r = 0.45, P less than .001) under the curve of 75 g oral glucose tolerance test and also with the serum triglyceride (r = 0.65, P less than .001) and total cholesterol levels (r = 0.61, P less than .001). These relationships were also observed when examined in each sex separately and found to be significant after adjustment for BMI and age by multiple regression analyses.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)

TRAM couples endocytosis of Toll-like receptor 4 to the induction of interferon-beta.

Abstract: Toll-like receptor 4 (TLR4) induces two distinct signaling pathways controlled by the TIRAP-MyD88 and TRAM-TRIF pairs of adaptor proteins, which elicit the production of proinflammatory cytokines and type I interferons, respectively. How TLR4 coordinates the activation of these two pathways is unknown. Here we show that TLR4 activated these two signaling pathways sequentially in a process organized around endocytosis of the TLR4 complex. We propose that TLR4 first induces TIRAP-MyD88 signaling at the plasma membrane and is then endocytosed and activates TRAM-TRIF signaling from early endosomes. Our data emphasize a unifying theme in innate immune recognition whereby all type I interferon–inducing receptors signal from an intracellular location.

A Linear Non-Gaussian Acyclic Model for Causal Discovery

Abstract: In recent years, several methods have been proposed for the discovery of causal structure from non-experimental data. Such methods make various assumptions on the data generating process to facilitate its identification from purely observational data. Continuing this line of research, we show how to discover the complete causal structure of continuous-valued data, under the assumptions that (a) the data generating process is linear, (b) there are no unobserved confounders, and (c) disturbance variables have non-Gaussian distributions of non-zero variances. The solution relies on the use of the statistical method known as independent component analysis, and does not require any pre-specified time-ordering of the variables. We provide a complete Matlab package for performing this LiNGAM analysis (short for Linear Non-Gaussian Acyclic Model), and demonstrate the effectiveness of the method using artificially generated data and real-world data.