The role of dendritic cells in tertiary lymphoid structures: implications in cancer and autoimmune diseases

Tertiary Lymphoid Structures (TLS) are organized aggregates of immune cells such as T cells, B cells, and Dendritic Cells (DCs), as well as fibroblasts, formed postnatally in response to signals from cytokines and chemokines. Central to the function of TLS are DCs, professional antigen-presenting cells (APCs) that coordinate the adaptive immune response, and which can be classified into different subsets, with specific functions, and markers. In this article, we review current data on the contribution of different DC subsets to TLS function in cancer and autoimmunity, two opposite sides of the immune response. Different DC subsets can be found in different tumor types, correlating with cancer prognosis. Moreover, DCs are also present in TLS found in autoimmune and inflammatory conditions, contributing to disease development. Broadly, the presence of DCs in TLS appears to be associated with favorable clinical outcomes in cancer while in autoimmune pathologies these cells are associated with unfavorable prognosis. Therefore, it is important to analyze the complex functions of DCs within TLS in order to enhance our fundamental understanding of immune regulation but also as a possible route to create innovative clinical interventions designed for the specific needs of patients with diverse pathological diseases.This work was developed within the scope of projects with references UIDB/04501/2020 and https://doi.org/10.54499/UIDB/04501/2020, UIDP/04501/2020 and https://doi.org/10.54499/UIDP/04501/2020, 2022.03217.PTDC and DOI 10.54499/2022.03217.PTDC, financially supported by national funds (OE), through FCT - Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia, I.P. /MCTES. This work was also supported by the World Scleroderma Foundation and Edit Busch Stiftung (MAPFib). This work has been supported by Ministry of Science, Technological Development and Innovation, Republic of Serbia through Grant Agreement with University of Belgrade, Faculty of Medicine No: 451-03-66/2024-03/200110. This work was funded by the Ministry of Science, Technological Development and Innovation, Republic of Serbia through Grant Agreement with University of Belgrade-Faculty of Pharmacy No: 451-03-47/2023-01/200161. This work was supported by the Wellcome Trust (225021/Z/22/Z). This work was supported by the Swedish Cancer Society (22 2221.Pj.01.H) and Mrs. Berta Kamprad’s Cancer Foundation (FBKS-2022-8-368). This work was supported by the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey- TUBITAK (119S447 and 22AG077). This work was also supported by European Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST) Action CA20117 Mye-InfoBank (www.mye-infobank.eu); COST is supported by the EU Framework Program Horizon 2020

Development of a new bench for puncturing of irradiated fuel rods in STAR hot laboratory

A new device for puncturing of irradiated fuel rods in commercial power plants has been designed by Fuel Research Department of CEA Cadarache in order to provide experimental data of high precision on fuel pins with various designs. It will replace the current set-up that has been used since 1998 in hot cell 2 of STAR facility with more than 200 rod puncturing experiments. Based on this consistent experimental feedback, the heavy-duty technique of rod perforation by clad punching has been preserved for the new bench. The method of double expansion of rod gases is also retained since it allows upgrading the confidence interval of volumetric results obtained from rod puncturing. Furthermore, many evolutions have been introduced in the new design in order to improve its reliability, to make the maintenance easier by remote handling and to reduce experimental uncertainties. Tightness components have been studied with Sealing Laboratory Maestral at Pierrelatte so as to make them able to work under mixed pressure conditions (from vacuum at 10-5 mbar up to pressure at 50 bars) and to lengthen their lifetime under permanent gamma irradiation in hot cell. Bench ergonomics has been optimized to make its operating by remote handling easier and to secure the critical phases of a puncturing experiment. A high pressure gas line equipped with high precision pressure sensors out of cell can be connected to the bench in cell for calibration purposes. Uncertainty analyses using Monte Carlo calculations have been performed in order to optimize capacity of the different volumes of the apparatus according to volumetric characteristics of the rod to be punctured. At last this device is composed of independent modules which allow puncturing fuel pins out of different geometries (PWR, BWR, VVER). After leak tests of the device and remote handling simulation in a mock-up cell, several punctures of calibrated specimens have been performed in 2016. The bench will be implemented soon in hot cell 2 of STAR facility for final qualification tests. PWR rod punctures are already planned for 2018

1D and 2D analyses of the IFA-610 lift-off experiments with the fuel code ALCYONE

International audienceThis paper presents finite elements analyses of the lift-off experiments performed in the HALDEN reactor: IFA-610.3/.5 for UO$_2$-Zy4 fuel rods, IFA-610.2/.4 and IFA610.7 for MOX-Zy4 fuel rods. The 1D and 2D($r$,$\theta$) schemes of the multi-dimensional fuel performance code ALCYONE are both used to study the overpressure conditions leading to the onset of temperature increase in the experiments. The 1D scheme is based on a rather standard axisymmetric description of the complete fuel rod discretized axially in slices. The 2D($r$,$\theta$) scheme allows one to study the plane strain thermo-mechanical behaviour of a pellet fragment (usually 1/8 th of the complete pellet) and its contact with the overlying cladding bore. It accounts explicitly for the additional free surface associated to pellet radial fractures and provides an estimation of the evolving pellet crack opening during loading sequences. In the proposed application to lift-off experiments, the impact of overpressure applied on the radial pellet crack borders has been studied. In the first part of this paper, the main features of ALCYONE 1D and 2D($r$,$\theta$) modelling schemes are presented. In the second part, simulations of the lift-off experiments performed with the ALCYONE 1.4 release are presented (in particular this release allows changing the nature of the filling gas in order to assess its impact on the fuel thermal behaviour). Generally, for the lift-off experiments simulated with ALCYONE code 1D scheme, a rather good agreement is obtained between predicted and measured temperature evolutions and rod axial elongations, especially when a clad-pellet bonding hypothesis is retained. Since the same material models are used in 1D and 2D, a good agreement with the measured temperature is also obtained from the 2D simulations. It is however shown that the application of the overpressure on the radial pellet crack borders has a strong impact on the onset of pellet-clad gap reopening. The resulting tangential stressing of the pellet fragment leads to radial fuel creep which tends to increase the external radius of the pellet and hence delay reopening with respect to 1D simulations results. The "mechanical lift-off" is thus better estimated when the pellet fragmentation is considered in the simulations

UERE Analysis for Static Single Frequency Positioning Using Data of IGS Stations

This work analyses the measurements of major errors (ephemeris error, satellite clock error, ionosphere error, troposphere error, multipath and receiver noise error), their correlation laws and their amplitude function depending on time and elevation angle for a static single frequency positioning receiver. The objective is double, first to give a better comprehension of the law of behaviour of error sources in a Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) and second to provide a measurement method of the User Equivalent Range Error (UERE)

Development of a new bench for puncturing irradiated fuel rods in the STAR hot laboratory

International audienceA new device for puncturing of irradiated fuel rods in commercial power plants has been designed by Fuel Research Department of CEA Cadarache in order to provide experimental data of high precision on fuel pins with various designs. It will replace the current set-up that has been used since 1998 in hot cell 2 of STAR facility with more than 200 rod puncturing experiments. Based on this consistent experimental feedback, the heavy-duty technique of rod perforation by clad punching has been preserved for the new bench. The method of double expansion of rod gases is also retained since it allows upgrading the confidence interval of volumetric results obtained from rod puncturing. Furthermore, many evolutions have been introduced in the new design in order to improve its reliability, to make the maintenance easier by remote handling and to reduce experimental uncertainties. Tightness components have been studied with Sealing Laboratory Maestral at Pierrelatte so as to make them able to work under mixed pressure conditions (from vacuum at 10$^{-5}$ mbar up to pressure at 50 bars) and to lengthen their lifetime under permanent gamma irradiation in hot cell. Bench ergonomics has been optimized to make its operating by remote handling easier and to secure the critical phases of a puncturing experiment. A high pressure gas line equipped with high precision pressure sensors out of cell can be connected to the bench in cell for calibration purposes. Uncertainty analyses using Monte Carlo calculations have been performed in order to optimize capacity of the different volumes of the apparatus according to volumetric characteristics of the rod to be punctured. At last this device is composed of independent modules which allow puncturing fuel pins out of different geometries (PWR, BWR, VVER). After leak tests of the device and remote handling simulation in a mock-up cell, several punctures of calibrated specimens have been performed in 2016. The bench will be implemented soon in hot cell 2 of STAR facility for final qualification tests. PWR rod punctures are already planned for 2018

Development of a new bench for puncturing of irradiated fuel rods in STAR hot laboratory

A new device for puncturing of irradiated fuel rods in commercial power plants has been designed by Fuel Research Department of CEA Cadarache in order to provide experimental data of high precision on fuel pins with various designs. It will replace the current set-up that has been used since 1998 in hot cell 2 of STAR facility with more than 200 rod puncturing experiments. Based on this consistent experimental feedback, the heavy-duty technique of rod perforation by clad punching has been preserved for the new bench. The method of double expansion of rod gases is also retained since it allows upgrading the confidence interval of volumetric results obtained from rod puncturing. Furthermore, many evolutions have been introduced in the new design in order to improve its reliability, to make the maintenance easier by remote handling and to reduce experimental uncertainties. Tightness components have been studied with Sealing Laboratory Maestral at Pierrelatte so as to make them able to work under mixed pressure conditions (from vacuum at 10-5 mbar up to pressure at 50 bars) and to lengthen their lifetime under permanent gamma irradiation in hot cell. Bench ergonomics has been optimized to make its operating by remote handling easier and to secure the critical phases of a puncturing experiment. A high pressure gas line equipped with high precision pressure sensors out of cell can be connected to the bench in cell for calibration purposes. Uncertainty analyses using Monte Carlo calculations have been performed in order to optimize capacity of the different volumes of the apparatus according to volumetric characteristics of the rod to be punctured. At last this device is composed of independent modules which allow puncturing fuel pins out of different geometries (PWR, BWR, VVER). After leak tests of the device and remote handling simulation in a mock-up cell, several punctures of calibrated specimens have been performed in 2016. The bench will be implemented soon in hot cell 2 of STAR facility for final qualification tests. PWR rod punctures are already planned for 2018

Analytical ab initio-Based Modeling of the Adsorption Isotherm

International audienceAn analytical ab initio-based model for adsorption isotherm is presented. As input data, this model takes the adsorption Gibbs free energies of different possible coverages within a reasonably large unit cell. In this way, the lateral interactions between adsorbates and their dependence on temperature are included. The self-dependence of surface coverage is taken into account via the introduction of heterogeneity of adsorption and the use of an appropriate configurational partition function. The model reproduces the isotherm and selectivity (for binary gas mixtures) of ab initio-based grand-canonical Monte Carlo simulations. The presented isotherm has a moderated dependence on the width of the chosen ab initio unit cell, particularly for high surface loading. This isotherm seems to be a very good approximation for the grand-canonical solution, depending on the accuracy and completeness of the ab initio data. © 2018 American Chemical Society

Development of a new bench for puncturing of irradiated fuel rods in STAR hot laboratory

A new device for puncturing of irradiated fuel rods in commercial power plants has been designed by Fuel Research Department of CEA Cadarache in order to provide experimental data of high precision on fuel pins with various designs. It will replace the current set-up that has been used since 1998 in hot cell 2 of STAR facility with more than 200 rod puncturing experiments. Based on this consistent experimental feedback, the heavy-duty technique of rod perforation by clad punching has been preserved for the new bench. The method of double expansion of rod gases is also retained since it allows upgrading the confidence interval of volumetric results obtained from rod puncturing. Furthermore, many evolutions have been introduced in the new design in order to improve its reliability, to make the maintenance easier by remote handling and to reduce experimental uncertainties. Tightness components have been studied with Sealing Laboratory Maestral at Pierrelatte so as to make them able to work under mixed pressure conditions (from vacuum at 10-5 mbar up to pressure at 50 bars) and to lengthen their lifetime under permanent gamma irradiation in hot cell. Bench ergonomics has been optimized to make its operating by remote handling easier and to secure the critical phases of a puncturing experiment. A high pressure gas line equipped with high precision pressure sensors out of cell can be connected to the bench in cell for calibration purposes. Uncertainty analyses using Monte Carlo calculations have been performed in order to optimize capacity of the different volumes of the apparatus according to volumetric characteristics of the rod to be punctured. At last this device is composed of independent modules which allow puncturing fuel pins out of different geometries (PWR, BWR, VVER). After leak tests of the device and remote handling simulation in a mock-up cell, several punctures of calibrated specimens have been performed in 2016. The bench will be implemented soon in hot cell 2 of STAR facility for final qualification tests. PWR rod punctures are already planned for 2018