Multicomponent Synthesis of Polyphenols and Their In Vitro Evaluation as Potential \u3b2-Amyloid Aggregation Inhibitors

While plant polyphenols possess a variety of biological properties, exploration of chemical diversity around them is still problematic. Here, an example of application of the Ugi multicomponent reaction to the combinatorial assembly of artificial, yet \u201cnatural-like\u201d, polyphenols is presented. The synthesized compounds represent a second-generation library directed to the inhibition of \u3b2-amyloid protein aggregation. Chiral enantiopure compounds, and polyphenol-\u3b2-lactam hybrids have been prepared too. The biochemical assays have highlighted the importance of the key pharmacophores in these compounds. A lead for inhibition of aggregation of truncated protein A\u3b2pE3-42 was selected

Optimizing PCR primers targeting the bacterial 16S ribosomal RNA gene

Abstract Background Targeted amplicon sequencing of the 16S ribosomal RNA gene is one of the key tools for studying microbial diversity. The accuracy of this approach strongly depends on the choice of primer pairs and, in particular, on the balance between efficiency, specificity and sensitivity in the amplification of the different bacterial 16S sequences contained in a sample. There is thus the need for computational methods to design optimal bacterial 16S primers able to take into account the knowledge provided by the new sequencing technologies. Results We propose here a computational method for optimizing the choice of primer sets, based on multi-objective optimization, which simultaneously: 1) maximizes efficiency and specificity of target amplification; 2) maximizes the number of different bacterial 16S sequences matched by at least one primer; 3) minimizes the differences in the number of primers matching each bacterial 16S sequence. Our algorithm can be applied to any desired amplicon length without affecting computational performance. The source code of the developed algorithm is released as the mopo16S software tool (Multi-Objective Primer Optimization for 16S experiments) under the GNU General Public License and is available at http://sysbiobig.dei.unipd.it/?q=Software#mopo16S. Conclusions Results show that our strategy is able to find better primer pairs than the ones available in the literature according to all three optimization criteria. We also experimentally validated three of the primer pairs identified by our method on multiple bacterial species, belonging to different genera and phyla. Results confirm the predicted efficiency and the ability to maximize the number of different bacterial 16S sequences matched by primers

SMART WORKING DURING COVID-19

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Rapporti verticali nel mercato della raccolta pubblicitaria

L’obiettivo di questa tesi è quello di studiare le caratteristiche dei mezzi di comunicazione analizzando, in particolar modo, come essi gestiscano la creazione dei contenuti pubblicitari e i rapporti con gli inserzionisti. In particolare, si analizzeranno i rapporti verticali all’interno dell’industria mediale, indispensabili per comprendere la struttura del mercato dell’informazione. Questo scopo sarà raggiunto in quattro fasi. Nella prima fase, si studieranno i mezzi di comunicazione e il funzionamento dell’industria mediale nel suo complesso. Nella seconda fase, si analizzerà dettagliatamente la teoria economica dell’integrazione verticale. Nella terza fase, si cercherà di intrecciare i concetti presentati nella prima e nella seconda fase, analizzando in maniera molto capillare l’attività pubblicitaria del mercato televisivo, radiofonico, giornalistico e di Internet sia nell'ambito nazionale che nell'ambito locale (provincia di Massa Carrara). Infine, nella quarta fase, si stileranno le conclusioni di questo dettagliato elaborato, analizzando l’assetto dell’industria mediale a livello nazionale e locale, mostrando l’inefficienza del mercato mediale a livello nazionale e l’efficienza di quello a livello locale. Tali conclusioni saranno tratte facendo ricorso sia a quanto illustrato tramite la teoria economica dell’integrazione verticale e i principi economici ad essa collegati, sia a dati rilevati recentemente e riportati nel corso di questo lavoro

Identify, quantify and characterize cellular communication from single cell RNA sequencing data with scSeqComm

Motivation: Recently, single cell RNA-seq (scRNA-seq) data have been used to study cellular communication. Most bioinformatics methods infer only the intercellular signaling between groups of cells, mainly exploiting ligand-receptor expression levels. Only few methods consider the entire intercellular+intracellular signaling, mainly inferring lists/networks of signaling involved genes. Results: Here we present scSeqComm, a computational method to identify and quantify the evidence of ongoing intercellular and intracellular signaling from scRNA-seq data, and at the same time providing a functional characterization of the inferred cellular communication.The possibility to quantify the evidence of ongoing communication assists the prioritization of the results, while the combined evidence of both intercellular and intracellular signaling increase the reliability of inferred communication.The application to a scRNA-seq dataset of tumor microenvironment, the agreement with independent bioinformatics analysis, the validation using spatial transcriptomics data and the comparison with state-of-the-art intercellular scoring schemes confirmed the robustness and reliability of the proposed method. Availability: scSeqComm R package is freely available at https://gitlab.com/sysbiobig/scseqcomm and https://sysbiobig.dei.unipd.it/software/#scSeqComm. Submitted software version and test data are available in Zenodo, at https://dx.doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5833298. Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online