Ion channel expression in human melanoma samples. in silico identification and experimental validation of molecular targets

Expression of 328 ion channel genes was investigated, by in silico analysis, in 170 human melanoma samples and controls. Ninety-one members of this gene-family (i.e., about 28%) show a significant (p 0.90 and p 90% in most cases). Such five genes (namely, SCNN1A, GJB3, KCNK7, GJB1, KCNN2) are novel potential melanoma markers or molecular targets, never previously related to melanoma. The “druggable genome” analysis was then carried out. Miconazole, an antifungal drug commonly used in clinics, is known to target KCNN2, the best candidate among the five identified genes. Miconazole was then tested in vitro in proliferation assays; it dose-dependently inhibited proliferation up to 90% and potently induced cell-death in A-375 and SKMEL-28 melanoma cells, while it showed no effect in control cells. Moreover, specific silencing of KCNN2 ion channel was achieved by siRNA transfection; under such condition miconazole strongly increases its anti-proliferative effect. In conclusion, the present study identified five ion channels that can potentially serve as sensitive and specific markers in human melanoma specimens and demonstrates that the antifungal drug miconazole, known to target one of the five identified ion channels, exerts strong and specific anti-melanoma effects in vitro

CVD nano-coating of carbon composites for space materials atomic oxygen shielding

The present work analyzes the possibility to employ carbon nanostructures as a basic material to prevent the erosion effects of atomic oxygen suffered by the carbon fiber reinforced polymeric material used in low earth orbit space environment. The application of thin protecting coatings to base materials is a widely used method for preventing the atomic oxygen induced erosion, and thus degradation. The generic purpose is to integrate carbon nanostructures onto carbon composites surface in order to develop the basic substrate of advanced nanocomposite for atomic oxygen protection. The final goal is the characterization of carbon nanostructures-reinforced carbon composites by means of on-ground atomic oxygen simulation facility, with the future objective to assess and optimize the process of carbon-multiscale advanced composites production. With such an aim, a wide investigation on the methane chemical vapor deposition (CVD) over catalyzed carbon fiber-based substrates has been carried out. The as grown nanostructures have been analyzed in terms of morphology, as well as regarding the main features of the resulting growth (yield, purity, homogeneity, coating uniformity, etc.) and the influence of the deposition route operating parameters (catalyst typology, gas flowing rate, growth time/temperature, etc.). A high degree of reproducibility in terms of the relationship between the carbon deposit type/yield and the main process variables (catalyst and protocol) has been thus obtained. Finally, atomic oxygen ground tests have been conducted in order to evaluate the coating process effectiveness. The on-ground test in atomic oxygen environment, with respect to the performances of the reference carbon composites (in terms of total mass loss and atomic oxygen rate of erosion), showed a worsening for the disordered carbon deposit, while an intriguing improvement was achieved by the high-yield carbon nano-filaments deposition

Alcheni policiclici a ponte fenilsolfonilsostituiti: versatili intermedi nella sintesi di molecole biologicamente attive

Nel campo della sintesi totale di molecole biologicamente attive, risultano di interesse, da un punto di vista sintetico-stereochimico, molecole policicliche a struttura pontata che, negli ultimi anni, sono state largamente studiate, sia come principi attivi che come intermedi sintetici. La ricerca di base si è quindi orientata verso lo studio della reattività di tali substrati e dei meccanismi che la regolano. In questi ambiti, il nostro interesse si rivolge verso lo studio della reattività di alcheni policiclici a ponte fenilsolfonilsostituiti

Composti policiclici bridged fenilsolfonilsostituiti: caratterizzazione mediante tecniche NMR e cromatografia liquida ad alte prestazioni (<i>HPLC</i>)

Da alcuni anni, il nostro gruppo di ricerca svolge studi che hanno portato alla definizione di protocolli sintetici asimmetrici per la preparazione di chetoni policiclici enantiopuri e di nuove preparazioni di alcheni, bromoderivati e aldeidi policiclici. In particolare, i nostri studi si rivolgono verso sistemi [2.2.1]biciclici, costituendo questi lo scheletro carbonioso di base in composti biologicamente attivi, di interesse in campo farmacologico e nell’industria profumiera

A new advanced railgun system for debris impact study

The growing quantity of debris in Earth orbit poses a danger to users of the orbital environment, such as spacecraft. It also increases the risk that humans or manmade structures could be impacted when objects reenter Earth's atmosphere. During the design of a spacecraft, a requirement may be specified for the surviv-ability of the spacecraft against Meteoroid / Orbital Debris (M/OD) impacts throughout the mission; further-more, the structure of a spacecraft is designed to insure its integrity during the launch and, if it is reusable, during descent, re-entry and landing. In addition, the structure has to provide required stiffness in order to allow for exact positioning of experiments and antennas, and it has to protect the payload against the space environment. In order to decrease the probability of spacecraft failure caused by M/OD, space maneuver is needed to avoid M/OD if the M/OD has dimensions larger than 10cm, but for M/OD with dimensions less than 1cm M/OD shields are needed for spacecrafts. It is therefore necessary to determine the impact-related failure mechanisms and associated ballistic limit equations (BLEs) for typical spacecraft components and subsys-tems. The methods that are used to obtain the ballistic limit equations are numerical simulations and la-borato-ry experiments. In order to perform an high energy ballistic characterization of layered structures, a new ad-vanced electromagnetic accelerator, called railgun, has been assembled and tuned. A railgun is an electrically powered electromagnetic projectile launcher. Such device is made up of a pair of parallel conducting rails, which a sliding metallic armature is accelerated along by the electromagnetic effect (Lorentz force) of a cur-rent that flows down one rail, into the armature and then back along the other rail, thanks to a high power pulse given by a bank of capacitors. A tunable power supplier is used to set the capacitors charging voltage at the desired level: in this way the Rail Gun energy can be tuned as a function of the desired bullet velocity. This facility is able to analyze both low and high velocity impacts. A numerical simulation is also performed by using the Ansys Autodyn code in order to analyze the damage. The experimental results and numerical simulations show that the railgun-device is a good candidate to perform impact testing of materials in the space debris energy range

Influence of different drying parameters on the composition of volatile compounds of thyme and rosemary cultivated in Sardinia

The shelf life of spices is traditionally extended by drying. Fresh herbs, due to their high water content, undergo microorganism growth and adverse biochemical reactions. On the other hand drying may result in a lot of physical and chemical alterations. Air and oven-dehydration are the main methods used to stabilize spices. During oven drying, in general, losses of volatile compounds are directly dependent on the temperature and time used. This paper deals with the effect of different drying temperatures and air fluxes on the volatiles in rosemary (Rosmarinus officinalis L.) and thyme (Thymus officinalis L.) cultivated in Sardinia. Fresh leaves were collected and soon divided in two batches, which were subjected to hydro distillation and GC-MS analysis, the first batch as fresh, the second one after drying in a laboratory pilot dryer. Three drying temperatures were used, 30, 38 and 45°C, and for each one two airflow rates were set. The fresh and dried plant material were hydro distilled for 4 hours using a Clevenger-type apparatus (Italian Official Pharmacopeias X). The oils (liquid and light yellow) were recovered directly from above the distillate without adding any solvent and stored at –20°C before analyses, which were carried out on two replicates of each sample by gas chromatography, using a flame ionization detector. The diluted samples were injected using a split/splitless automatic injector (using 2,6-dimethylphenol as internal standard). Qualitative analysis was done by GC/Mass and mass units were monitored from 10 to 450 at 70 eV. Results of the influence of the different drying conditions on volatile compounds of the two herbs will be reported

Fully Configurable Electromagnetic Wave Absorbers by Using Carbon Nanostructures

The configurable electromagnetic wave absorber (CEMA) defines a new method for the full design of layered carbon-based nanocomposites able to quasi-perfectly reproduce any kind of EM reflection coefficient (RC) profile. The method involves three main factors: (a) nanofillers-like carbon nanotube (CNT), carbon nanofiber (CNF), graphene nanoplatelet (GNP), and polyaniline (PANI) in different concentration versus the matrix; (b) the dielectric parameters of the nanoreinforced materials in the microwave range 2–18 GHz; (c) a numerical technique based on particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm within the MATLAB code of the EM propagation engine. Output is the layering of the wave absorber, that is, number of layers and material/thickness of each layer and the reflection/transmission simulated profiles. The frequency selective behavior is due to the multilayered composition, thanks to the direct/reflected wave combination tuning at interfaces. The dielectric characterization of the employed nanocomposites is presented in details: these materials constitute the database for the optimization code running toward the multilayer optimal solution. A FEM analysis is further proposed to highlight the EM propagation within the material’s bulk at different frequencies. The mathematical model of layered materials, the PSO objective function used for RC target fitting, and some results are reported in the text

3d crs analysis: a new data-driven optimization strategy for the simultaneous estimate of the eight stacking parameters

We devised a data-driven strategy for the simultaneous estimate of the eight CRS traveltime attributes, solving a global non-linear minimization problem without the need of computing gradients. The essential elements in this Eni research and development activity are the following: a conjugate-direction method supported by well known convergence properties and an iterative line-search implementing the strong Wolfe-Powell rule for the control of the steplength. The resulting algorithm can reach very good solutions in presence of many local minima.3284-329

Frequency Estimation in OFDM Direct-Conversion Receivers Using a Repeated Preamble

This paper investigates the problem of carrier frequency offset (CFO) recovery in an OFDM receiver affected by frequency-selective in-phase/quadrature (I/Q) imbalances. The analysis is based on maximum-likelihood (ML) methods and relies on the transmission of a training preamble with a repetitive structure in the time domain. After assessing the accuracy of the conventional ML (CML) scheme in a scenario characterized by I/Q impairments, we review the joint ML (JML) estimator of all unknown parameters and evaluate its theoretical performance. In order to improve the estimation accuracy, we also present a novel CFO recovery method that exploits some side-information about the signal-to-interference ratio. It turns out that both CML and JML can be derived from this scheme by properly adjusting the value of a design parameter. The accuracy of the investigated methods are compared with the relevant Cramer-Rao bound. Our results can be used to check whether conventional CFO recovery algorithms can work properly or not in the presence of I/Q imbalances and also to evaluate the potential gain attainable by more sophisticated schemes