Two Decades of Maude

This paper is a tribute to José Meseguer, from the rest of us in the Maude team, reviewing the past, the present, and the future of the language and system with which we have been working for around two decades under his leadership. After reviewing the origins and the language's main features, we present the latest additions to the language and some features currently under development. This paper is not an introduction to Maude, and some familiarity with it and with rewriting logic are indeed assumed.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

Towards a Maude tool for model checking temporal graph properties

We present our prototypical tool for the verification of graph transformation systems. The major novelty of our tool is that it provides a model checker for temporal graph properties based on counterpart semantics for quantified m-calculi. Our tool can be considered as an instantiation of our approach to counterpart semantics which allows for a neat handling of creation, deletion and merging in systems with dynamic structure. Our implementation is based on the object-based machinery of Maude, which provides the basics to deal with attributed graphs. Graph transformation systems are specified with term rewrite rules. The model checker evaluates logical formulae of second-order modal m-calculus in the automatically generated CounterpartModel (a sort of unfolded graph transition system) of the graph transformation system under study. The result of evaluating a formula is a set of assignments for each state, associating node variables to actual nodes

From parents to offspring: Influence of approaching/avoidance parental phenotypes on progeny

Individuals are hardwired to approach pleasure and to avoid negative stimuli. Nonetheless, Approach/Avoidance (A/A) conflict arises when a situation elicits these two opposite drives, simultaneously. I selected three sub-populations of male and female mice based on their withdrawing, balanced or advancing response to an A/A conflict task (i.e., avoiding (AV), balancing (BA) and approaching (AP) mice). The neuronal substrates sustaining the selected phenotypes were investigated by immunofluorescence methods, focusing on the oxytocinergic modulation (OXT) of dopamine (DA) neurons via oxytocin receptors (OTR), in the ventral tegmental area (VTA). The behavioral consequences of parental phenotypes on the progenies were evaluated. I found that AP male mice were characterized by a greater number of VTA-DA neurons, enriched in OTR, compared to controls and the AP paternal phenotype was able to bias descendants’ behaviors. Indeed, the offspring of AP fathers were more approaching and faster at the A/A conflict task, more prone towards novel stimuli compared to the offspring of AV fathers, and less anxious compared to controls. Conversely, AV females were characterized by lower VTA-DA cell density compared to controls, but maternal phenotype did not impact offspring’s response to A/A conflict. Maternal phenotype effects on progenies were sex-specific, affecting response to novelty only in female offspring and anxiety levels only in males. Finally, no phenotype effect on spontaneous parental care was observed. On the contrary, AV paternal phenotype influenced pup-retrieval behaviors of fathers and, indirectly, of their female mates, when separated from their pups. Given abnormal A/A motivation has been recognized in several psychological and psychiatric diseases, investigations on the mechanisms involved in A/A phenotype transmission and the development of transgenerational animal preclinical models are coveted