Identification of cork characters for phenotypic selection

Global change effects can determine major changes in species distribution and productivity. In the Mediterranean region of the severity of hot and dry periods is growing and an increased frequency of extreme events and a major vulnerability of natural ecosystems is evident. Cork oak (Quercus suber L.) is widely spread in the West Mediterranean region and its economic and social is important

Contaminazione ambientale e risposta della comunità

Il capitolo analizza la forme di protesta che le comunità locali mettono in atto di fronte a fenomeni di contaminazione ambientale utilizzando la letteratura relativa alle minoranze attivi e al grassroots moviment

Genere e cittadinanza ecologica

Il capitolo analizza il ruolo del genere femminile nel caso di disastri ambientali, facendo specifico riferimento alla vicenda PFAS in Veneto. Vengono pertanto analizzate le strategie sociali e le azioni comunicative del movimento Mamme-NoPfas sia online che offline

Designing of sequencing assay assisted by capillary electrophoresis based on DNA folding analysis. An application to the VCAM1 gene

In this work, we describe a fast standardized molecular method for DNA sequencing assisted by capillary electrophoresis with a particular emphasis on bioinformatic approaches to avoid sequencing errors due to complex DNA regions. In this case, the method was applied on the human vascular adhesion molecule 1 (VCAM1) gene. VCAM1 sequence, in fact, shows many thermodynamically critical parameters such as very low GC content (30-40%), many nucleotide stack areas, i.e. hairpins, self-complementary regions. With a traditional primer design approach it was difficult to design correct PCR oligonucleotides, thus sometimes, the chromatogram showed an illegible profile. By a strategy involving various bioinformatic tools (Mfold, Oligo, Highter), we investigated the role of the DNA-folding analysis in the assistance of primer design for the DNA sequencing of fragments with high -ΔG stem-loop regions. This new approach allowed us to sequence nine different VCAM1 regions each containing the respective exon. Our results, based on different DNA samples recruited from oral brushes taken from ten different subjects, identified four different SNPs (c.662-7C/T, c.1793-79A>G, c.2079C/T, c.2208A>G) with high reproducibilit

A Forward Regridding Method with Minimal Oversampling for Accurate and Efficient Iterative Tomographic Algorithms

Reconstruction of underconstrained tomographic data sets remains a major challenge. Standard analytical techniques frequently lead to unsatisfactory results due to insufficient information. Several iterative algorithms, which can easily integrate a priori knowledge, have been developed to tackle this problem during the last few decades. Most of these iterative algorithms are based on an implementation of the Radon transform that acts as forward projector. This operator and its adjoint, the backprojector, are typically called few times per iteration and represent the computational bottleneck of the reconstruction process. Here, we present a Fourier-based forward projector, founded on the regridding method with minimal oversampling. We show that this implementation of the Radon transform significantly outperforms in efficiency other state-of-the-art operators with O(N 2 log 2 N) complexity. Despite its reduced computational cost, this regridding method provides comparable accuracy to more sophisticated projectors and can, therefore, be exploited in iterative algorithms to substantially decrease the time required for the reconstruction of underconstrained tomographic data sets without loss in the quality of the results