Abordagem da história da ciência na construção de um terrário, numa perspetiva de educação para o desenvolvimento sustentável

Mestrado em Ensino de Biologia e Geologia no 3º Ciclo do Ensino Básico e no Ensino SecundárioEm Portugal, avanços têm-se feito notar no que toca à tecnologia, o que leva a que novas aptidões e competências sejam desenvolvidas pelos cidadãos de forma a adaptarem-se à Era da informação. Para tal, é necessário que os alunos saiam já bem preparados das escolas de modo a que as suas aprendizagens atendam a essas mudanças, pois o ensino também implica mudança, evolução e crescimento, não só por parte dos estudantes mas também dos professores, das escolas e de todos os órgãos associados. Desta forma, vários métodos poderão ser implementados nas salas de aulas e um deles é a abordagem à História da Ciência. O presente trabalho investigativo procurou conhecer quais as aprendizagens, comportamentos e atitudes que os alunos desenvolveram ao longo das aulas, dando a conhecer os contributos que a construção de um terrário, através da História da Ciência, pode levar à educação de cidadãos informados, numa perspetiva de Educação para o Desenvolvimento Sustentável. A abordagem foi aplicada a alunos do 8.º ano, na disciplina de Ciências Naturais, utilizando várias técnicas e instrumentos de recolha de dados, nomeadamente, a observação, a análise documental e questionário. O recurso à construção e utilização de um material didático-pedagógico e a abordagem à História da Ciência, permitiram cativar o interesse dos alunos e centraliza-los no processo de ensino e de aprendizagem, no qual o aluno tem o principal papel. Dessa forma, foi possível averiguar como se contextualizam as aprendizagens através da abordagem utilizada, recolher e descrever as perspetivas dos alunos e em desenvolver as aprendizagens, comportamentos e atitudes, numa perspetiva de Educação para o Desenvolvimento Sustentável.In Portugal, advances have been made when it comes to Technology, which leads to new skills and competences to be developed by citizens in order to adapt to the Information age. To this end, it is necessary that students need to be well prepared when they conclude their studies, so that their acquired knowledge could meet these changes, for the teaching also implies changes, evolution and growth, not only by students but also by teachers, schools and all the associated teaching groups. This way, various methods can be implemented in the classroom and one of them is the approach to the History of Science. This research work was aimed to know which learnings, behaviors and attitudes that students developed during the lessons, so that it could be possible to publish the contribution of the construction of a terrarium, based in the History of Science, leading to the education of informed citizens, in a perspective of an Education for Sustainable Development. The approach was applied to 8th grade students, in the discipline of Natural Sciences, using various techniques and data collection instruments, like observation, documental analysis and a questionnaire. Building and using didactic-pedagogic material and applying History of Science knowledge, allowed to captivate the students' interest and it helped centralizing them in the process of teaching and learning, in which the student has the main role. Thus, it was possible to find out how to contextualize the learning through the used approaches, to collect and describe the perspectives of the students and developing the learning subject, behaviors and attitudes on a perspective of Education for the Sustainable Development

Gap-Δenergy, a New Metric of the Bond Energy State, Assisting to Predict Molecular Toxicity

Molecular toxicity is a critical feature of drug development. It is thus very important to develop computational models to evaluate the toxicity of small molecules. The accuracy of toxicity prediction largely depends on the quality of molecular representation; however, current methods for this purpose do not address this issue well. Here, we introduce a new metric, gap-Δenergy, which is designed to quantify the intermolecular bond energy difference with atom distance. We next find significant variations in the gap-Δenergy distribution among different types of molecules. Moreover, we show that this metric is able to distinguish the toxic small molecules. We collected data sets of toxic and exogenous small molecules and presented a novel index, namely, global toxicity, to evaluate the overall toxicity of molecules. Based on molecular descriptors and the proposed gap-Δenergy metric, we further constructed machine learning models that were trained with 7816 small molecules. The XGBoost-based model achieved the best performance with an AUC score of 0.965 and an F1 score of 0.849 on the test set (1954 small molecules), which outperformed the model that did not use gap-Δenergy features, with a sensitivity score increase of 3.2%

Conserved miRNAs and their expression levels among different tissues.

<p>Note: *: New conserved miRNA in known miRBase in other species. The loci on genome were identified for six miRNAs newly identified in this study. rco-miR167d, 29883∶144402:144497:+; homologue: <i>Arabidopsis thaliana</i> miR167a; rco-miR394a,b, 30170∶3866594:3866721:+; 30116∶128336:128443:+; homologue: <i>Arabidopsis thaliana</i> miR394a,b; rco-miR482, 29586∶144986:145094:-; homologue: <i>Malus domestica</i> miR482a; rco-miR827, 28266∶68399:68502:+; homologue: <i>Gossypium hirsutum</i> miR827a; rco-miR2111, 29973∶58727:58830:+; homologue: <i>Arabidopsis thaliana</i> miR2111a; rco-miR4414, 29729∶702439:702549:+; homologue: <i>Medicago truncatula</i> miR4414b.</p

miRNA isoforms identified from castor bean.

<p>miRNA isoforms identified from castor bean.</p

The length size distribution of small RNAs in root, leaf, seed1, seed2 and endosperm libraries in castor bean.

<p>The length size distribution of small RNAs in root, leaf, seed1, seed2 and endosperm libraries in castor bean.</p

Comparative analysis of genes frequently regulated by drugs based on connectivity map transcriptome data

<div><p>Gene expression is perturbated by drugs to different extent. Analyzing genes whose expression is frequently regulated by drugs would be useful for the screening of candidate therapeutic targets and genes implicated in side effect. Here, we obtained the differential expression number (DEN) for genes profiled in Affymetrix microarrays from the Connectivity Map project, and conducted systemic comparative computational analysis between high DEN genes and other genes. Results indicated that genes with higher down-/up-regulation number (down_h/up_h) tended to be clustered in genome, and have lower homologous gene number, higher SNP density and more disease-related SNP. Down_h and up_h were significantly enriched in cancer related pathways, while genes with lower down-/up-regulation number (down_l/up_l) were mainly involved in the development of nervous system diseases. Besides, up_h had lower interaction network degree, later developmental stage to express, higher tissue expression specificity than up_l, while down_h showed reversed tendency in comparison with down_l. Together, our analysis suggests that genes frequently regulated by drugs are more likely to be associated with disease-related functions, but the extensive activation of conserved and widely expressed genes by drugs is disfavored.</p></div

Validation of the 20 miRNAs newly identified using the RT-PCR method.

<p>The numbers 1, 2 and 3 showed that the bands amplified using cDNAs as templates obtained from developing seeds, root tips and leaves, respectively. The number 4 showed a negative control (NTC, i.e., no template in PCR reaction). M denoted markers. The amplified bands were separated in 1.5% agarose gel.</p

The comparison of baseline expression.

<p>(A) Comparison of earliest expression stage between down_l versus down_h (left) and up_l versus up_h (right). (B) The correlation between tissue expression specificity and up/down-regulation number. The correlation curve is plotted by using the LOESS smoothing techniques and the shade indicates the confidence interval.</p

Conserved mature-star miRNAs from castor bean.

<p>Conserved mature-star miRNAs from castor bean.</p

A combinational feature selection and ensemble neural network method for classification of gene expression data-1

<p><b>Copyright information:</b></p><p>Taken from "A combinational feature selection and ensemble neural network method for classification of gene expression data"</p><p>BMC Bioinformatics 2004;5():136-136.</p><p>Published online 27 Sep 2004</p><p>PMCID:PMC522806.</p><p>Copyright © 2004 Liu et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd.</p