The association between gut microbiota and circulating zonulin level, a marker of intestinal permeability, has not been studied yet. The aim of the study is the assessment of plasma zonulin, haptoglobin and proinflammatory cytokines (TNF-α and IL-6) levels in relation to composition of gut microbiota in obese and normal weight subjects. Circulating inflammation markers, such as TNF-α, sTNFR1, sTNFR2, IL-6, zonulin, and haptoglobin levels were measured and semiquantitative analysis of gut microbiota composition was carried out in 50 obese and 30 normal weight subjects without concomitant diseases. Higher circulating zonulin, TNF-α, sTNFR1, sTNFR2, and IL-6 levels were found in the obese subjects. Plasma zonulin level correlated positively with age (r = 0.43, P < 0.001), body mass (r = 0.30, P < 0.01), BMI (r = 0.33, P < 0.01), fat mass and fat percentage (r = 0.31, P < 0.01 and r = 0.23, P < 0.05, resp.). Positive correlations between bacterial colony count and sTNFR1 (r = 0.33, P < 0.01) and plasma zonulin (r = 0.26, P < 0.05) but not haptoglobin levels were found. Additionally, plasma zonulin level was proportional to daily energy intake (r = 0.27, P < 0.05) and serum glucose concentration (r = 0.18, P < 0.05) and inversely proportional to diet protein percentage (r = −0.23, P < 0.05). Gut microbiota-related systemic microinflammation in the obese is reflected by circulating zonulin level, a potential marker of interstitial permeability.

In complex emergency scenarios, teams from various emergency-response organizations must collaborate. These teams include both first responders, such as police and fire departments, and those operators who coordinate the effort from operational centers. The Workpad architecture consists of a front-and a back-end layer. The front-end layer is composed of several front-end teams of first responders, and the back-end layer is an integrated peer-to-peer network that lets front-end teams collaborate through information exchange and coordination. Team members at the front end carry PDAs, with team leaders' PDAs equipped with gateway communication technologies that let them communicate with the back-end centers

Abstract-This paper addresses one of the major problems of SOA software development: the lack of support for testing complex service-oriented systems. The research community has developed various means for checking individual Web services but has not come up with satisfactory solutions for testing systems that operate in service-based environments and, therefore, need realistic testbeds for evaluating their quality. We regard this as an unnecessary burden for SOA engineers. As a proposed solution for this issue, we present the Genesis2 testbed generator framework. Genesis2 supports engineers in modeling testbeds and programming their behavior. Out of these models it generates running instances of Web services, clients, registries, and other entities in order to emulate realistic SOA environments. By generating real testbeds, our approach assists engineers in performing runtime tests of their systems and particular focus has been put on the framework's extensibility to allow the emulation of arbitrarily complex environments. Furthermore, by exploiting the advantages of the Groovy language, Genesis2 provides an intuitive yet powerful scripting interface for testbed control.

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Nowadays, the importance of Web services is steadily increasing in domains where interoperability is of paramount importance. This trend is especially observable in complex computer systems which consist of a large number of interacting distributed components, often implemented using Web services. Large-scale systems and high complexity usually result in higher error-proneness in the development process. This should be addressed as early as possible during the development of complex service-oriented systems, ideally before they are actually deployed on a distributed infrastructure. In this paper we present GENESISa software framework for solving this problem. Our framework allows automatic generation and steering of testbeds of complex Web services, thereby empowering developers to specify functional and non-functional properties of Web services, to generate and deploy Web service instances on remote hosting environments, to enhance the functionality of the framework with plug-ins, and to control the behavior of the testbed during runtime.

Web services are gaining high popularity and importance on mobile devices. Connected to ad-hoc networks, they provide the possibility to establish spontaneously even complex service-based workflows and architectures. However, usually these architectures are only as stable and reliable as the underlying network infrastructure. Since topologies of mobile ad-hoc networks behave unpredictably, dependability within them can be only achieved with a dynamic replication mechanism. In this paper we present a highly flexible solution for replication and synchronization of stateful Web services and discuss the behavior of the implemented prototype in large-scale simulations.

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