Testing an Attachment-Based Parenting Intervention-VIPP-FC/A in Adoptive Families with Post-institutionalized Children: Do Maternal Sensitivity and Genetic Markers Count?

This study investigated the effectiveness of a newly integrated version of an intervention targeting adoptive mothers' positive parenting for promoting children's emotional availability, by testing the moderating role of both two maternal genetic polymorphisms (i.e., 5HTTLPR and DRD4-VNTR) and emotional availability-EA on intervention outcomes. Mothers with their children (N = 80; Mage = 42.73 years, SD = 3.79; Mage = 33.18 months, SD = 16.83 months) participated in a RCT testing the Video-Feedback Intervention to Promote Positive Parenting and Sensitive Discipline-VIPP-FC/A effectiveness. Mixed effects regression models showed a significant improvement in mother-child EA for the VIPP-intervention vs. the dummy intervention condition, with a moderating role of maternal EA on children's outcomes. No significant moderating effect was found for the two genetic polymorphisms inquired. Children's and mother's outcomes obtained are discussed

Testing an Attachment-Based Parenting Intervention-VIPP-FC/A in Adoptive Families with Post-institutionalized Children: Do Maternal Sensitivity and Genetic Markers Count?

This study investigated the effectiveness of a newly integrated version of an intervention targeting adoptive mothers' positive parenting for promoting children's emotional availability, by testing the moderating role of both two maternal genetic polymorphisms (i.e., 5HTTLPR and DRD4-VNTR) and emotional availability-EA on intervention outcomes. Mothers with their children (N = 80; Mage = 42.73 years, SD = 3.79; Mage = 33.18 months, SD = 16.83 months) participated in a RCT testing the Video-Feedback Intervention to Promote Positive Parenting and Sensitive Discipline-VIPP-FC/A effectiveness. Mixed effects regression models showed a significant improvement in mother-child EA for the VIPP-intervention vs. the dummy intervention condition, with a moderating role of maternal EA on children's outcomes. No significant moderating effect was found for the two genetic polymorphisms inquired. Children's and mother's outcomes obtained are discussed

Glucose intolerance and hepatocellular carcinoma: recent findings for old diseases

In the last years, an increasing number of evidences on the influence of metabolic syndrome on the occurrence of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) have been developed. Type 2 mellitus diabetes (T2MD) has been found to increase the occurrence of primary liver tumors and to define a more aggressive carcinogenetic process. Furthermore, several preclinical and observational studies and a recent meta-analysis have shown that anti-diabetic drugs can modify the risk of HCC development in patients with T2DM. However, despite these evidences, underlying molecular mechanisms linking both pathological conditions have to be completely cleared yet. The study published by Gao et al. has found a possible molecular link between the two conditions, describing the predisposition to T2DM and HCC given by the haploinsufficiency of nuclear receptor coactivator 5 (NCOA5) in murine models. The authors have generated Ncoa5+/– (haploinsufficient) male mice and shown that 94% of male mutant mice developed HCC within 18 months of age, this in contrast with Ncoa5+/+ and Ncoa5+/– female mice. These results suggest that NCOA5 haploinsufficiency is linked to HCC development in male mice. Moreover, mutant male mice showed significantly elevated levels of fasting blood glucose and markedly decreased glucose tolerance and insulin sensitivity compared to Ncoa5+/+ littermates. This well-constructed work sheds light on the molecular link between T2DM and HCC and opens the way to further biological and clinical studies in the field of liver tumor prevention and treatment

Effect of electrical stimulation and others genetic and environmental factors on colour of lamb meat

The research aimed to assess the effect of breed, sex, age at slaughter, rearing system and electrical stimulation on some colorimetric characteristics measured on the muscles Longissimus dorsi (LD), Gluteobiceps (Gb), Semimembranosus (Sm) and Rectus femoris (RF) of lambs belonging to the genetic types Gentile di Puglia (GP), Ile de France (IF) and the cross-breeds F1, F2 and F3. The IF lambs provided meat with the highest value of hue and lightness and the lowest chroma and redness. The F1 lambs showed the highest values of redness while the F2 crossbreed significantly differed from the other three genetic types only in pH, which was always the lowest. The F3 crossbreed revealed similar behaviour to the other genetic types, except for the pH which was always higher than in GP, F1 and F2. The differences between sexes were restricted to L* and pH values, being higher in the male. The lambs slaughtered at 56 days showed high a* values, while b* and hue were on average higher in younger lambs (35 days). The lambs reared with maternal milk in comparison with the artificially reared ones provided meat with the highest a* chroma and b* and the lowest hue values. Electrical stimulation of the carcass seems to have produced the same effects as the usual ageing time in cold store. The RF muscle provided the brightest meat; Sm showed the highest values of b* and chroma; LD provided the “darkest” meat and the lowest values of b* and hue; Gb produced a lower a* value than muscles LD, RF and Sm

A parallel corpus of Python functions and documentation strings for automated code documentation and code generation

Automated documentation of programming source code and automated code generation from natural language are challenging tasks of both practical and scientific interest. Progress in these areas has been limited by the low availability of parallel corpora of code and natural language descriptions, which tend to be small and constrained to specific domains. In this work we introduce a large and diverse parallel corpus of a hundred thousands Python functions with their documentation strings ("docstrings") generated by scraping open source repositories on GitHub. We describe baseline results for the code documentation and code generation tasks obtained by neural machine translation. We also experiment with data augmentation techniques to further increase the amount of training data. We release our datasets and processing scripts in order to stimulate research in these areas.Comment: 5 pages, 1 figure, 3 table

Resistance to Ralstonia Solanacearum of sexual hybrids between Solanum commersonii and S. tuberosum

This research was carried out to study the levels of bacterial wilt resistance and genetic diversity of (near) pentaploid sexual hybrids between S. commersonii (2n = 2x = 24, 1EBN) and cultivated S. tuberosum. Following artificial inoculations with Ralstonia solanacearum, wilting degree was estimated on a scale from 0 to 4, and seven genotypes of 26 (27%) displaying a S. commersonii like behavior were identified. Latent bacterial colonizations were detected in roots of symptomless S. commersonii and hybrids, whereas no bacterial populations were detected within stems. This suggests that the movement and/or growth of the bacterium in the aerial part were strongly inhibited. A molecular study with AFLP markers clustered hybrids into nine groups and provided evidence that resistant hybrids were slightly more similar to cultivated S. tuberosum than to the wild parent. This is important in view of the re-establishment of the cultivated genetic background through backcrosses. Hybrids displayed good fertility and are being used for further breeding efforts