Nobility and Agricultural Innovation : agribusiness, management and investments in Northern Italy (1815-1861)

Traditionally, scholars have underlined how, for much of the 19th century, the endurance, or the survival, of the nobility\u2019s social and economic power was still based on large-scale land ownership, which usually represented the majority of the nobility\u2019s assets and in many cases was extended or reinforced (e.g. thanks to public sales of former common properties or of expropriated Catholic Church estates). Nevertheless, the contribution of nobility to the improvement of land and production has been undervalued, as \ue9lites mostly tried to maintain the old agrarian structure exploiting peasant work and conserving their social power as long as possible. By contrast, according to our research results, it seems that until Unification, in the northern area, a large proportion of capital, investments and improvements in the agricultural sector and agro-food production (as well as, increasingly, in railways and infrastructures, industrial and financial sectors) \u2013 came from noblemen. Many of them aimed to expand Italy\u2019s trade, fostering the economic progress and applying scientific and technical innovations to agriculture. Some played a natural leading economic role, as they were the richest, heirs to large properties and estates and to complex administration systems originating from early modern times and updated to meet the new managerial necessities. Finally, they all belonged to wide, national and international social (and political) networks which could be useful for their business and which still deserve an in-depth attention and a broader investigation. The main objective of the paper is to reassess the contribution of nobility in 19th century Northern Italy economic transformation (particularly, but not only, in Lombardy), focusing on their investments in land and innovation and their involvement in agri-business. The aim is to propose new evidence that noblemen followed an entrepreneurial behaviour, supported the progress of science and techniques and influenced the foundation of new enterprises and economic institutions. Through an ongoing wide and long research on primary sources as fiscal sources, notarial deeds and family archives (part of a research project led by Silvia Conca Messina and jointly funded by Cariplo Foundation and Lombardy Region), the paper addresses the question whether nobility involvement in the agri-business was only a mean to achieve rents with the less effort, maintaining their social status, or was instead\u2013 as we affirm - the result of an entrepreneurial behaviour laying on a sort of class-expertise. The essay first focuses on the management of properties and large estates, where noblemen acted as a sort of \u2018chief manager\u2019, governing a complex structured enterprise. Then the paper concentrates on the role and type of investments aiming at the improvement of land and cultivation, livestock and production. Moreover, the contribution enlightens how and why landlords introduced agriculture innovations and experimentation (silk, wine, especially), according to the transformation of the local and international demand and markets

Agri-business and nobility in Northern Italy : land, investments and markets (1815-1861)

Traditionally, the contribution of nobility to the enhancement of northern Italy\u2019s land and agro food production during the 19th century has been undervalued. The paper aims to address the question of whether the nobility considered land mainly as a means to collect rents with the least effort, maintaining their social status, or rather \u2013 as we affirm \u2013 they also developed entrepreneurial behaviour founded on a sort of class-expertise. Indeed, in a considerable number of cases, they owned and invested capital in large estates with a well-structured administration which they inherited from the past and improved upon; they organised complex production systems, introducing technical innovation; they were directly interested in market trends; they could take advantage of their local and international social networks. Finally, they acted as models for many of the bourgeoisie who became richer and became landowners themselves. Through ongoing extensive research using primary sources (fiscal sources, notarial deeds and family archives), the essay will first focus on the general features of the noblemen\u2019s involvement in the management and improvement of lands, through agrarian innovation and experimentation (e.g. in silk or wine production), according to the circumstances of the markets. The second part will illustrate the case of the Lombardy noble family Lucini Passalacqua, who seems to exemplify the tendency towards innovation which was widespread among the region\u2019s noble landowners. The third part of the paper will shed light upon the business strategies of Genoese noblemen, traditionally tied to financial businesses, and who, during the 19th century, largely invested in land development, also acquiring vast estates in Piedmont and Lombardy

Peptidoglycan in obligate intracellular bacteria

Peptidoglycan is the predominant stress-bearing structure in the cell envelope of most bacteria, and also a potent stimulator of the eukaryotic immune system. Obligate intracellular bacteria replicate exclusively within the interior of living cells, an osmotically protected niche. Under these conditions peptidoglycan is not necessarily needed to maintain the integrity of the bacterial cell. Moreover, the presence of peptidoglycan puts bacteria at risk of detection and destruction by host peptidoglycan recognition factors and downstream effectors. This has resulted in a selective pressure and opportunity to reduce the levels of peptidoglycan. In this review we have analysed the occurrence of genes involved in peptidoglycan metabolism across the major obligate intracellular bacterial species. From this comparative analysis, we have identified a group of predicted \u2018peptidoglycan-intermediate\u2019 organisms that includes the Chlamydiae, Orientia tsutsugamushi, Wolbachia and Anaplasma marginale. This grouping is likely to reflect biological differences in their infection cycle compared with peptidoglycan-negative obligate intracellular bacteria such as Ehrlichia and Anaplasma phagocytophilum, as well as obligate intracellular bacteria with classical peptidoglycan such as Coxiella, Buchnera and members of the Rickettsia genus. The signature gene set of the peptidoglycan-intermediate group reveals insights into minimal enzymatic requirements for building a peptidoglycan-like sacculus and/or division septum

Baseline serum TSH levels predict the absence of thyroid dysfunction in cancer patients treated with immunotherapy

Purpose Immunotherapy against immune checkpoints has significantly improved survival both in metastatic and adjuvant setting in several types of cancers. Thyroid dysfunction is the most common endocrine adverse event reported. Patients who are at risk of developing thyroid dysfunction remain to be defined. We aimed to identify predictive factors for the develop- ment of thyroid dysfunction during immunotherapy. Methods This is a retrospective study including a total of 68 patients who were treated with immune checkpoint inhibi- tors (ICIs) for metastatic or unresectable advanced cancers. The majority of patients were treated with anti-PD1 drugs in monotherapy or in combination with anti-CTLA4 inhibitors. Thyroid function and anti-thyroid antibodies, before starting immunotherapy and during treatment, were evaluated. Thyroid ultrasound was also performed in a subgroup of patients at the time of enrolment in the study. Results Eleven out of 68 patients (16.1%) developed immune-related overt thyroid dysfunction. By ROC curve analysis, we found that a serum TSH cut-off of 1.72 mUI/l, at baseline, had a good diagnostic accuracy in identifying patients without overt thyroid dysfunction (NPV = 100%, p = 0.0029). At multivariate analysis, both TSH and positive anti-thyroid antibod- ies (ATAbs) levels, before ICIs treatment, were independently associated with the development of overt thyroid dysfunction during immunotherapy (p = 0.0001 and p = 0.009, respectively). Conclusions Pre-treatment serum TSH and ATAbs levels may help to identify patients at high risk for primary thyroid dysfunction. Our study suggests guidance for an appropriate timely screening and for a tailored management of thyroid dysfunctions in patients treated with ICIs

SeqDeχ : a sequence deconvolution tool for genome separation of endosymbionts from mixed sequencing samples

In recent years, the advent of NGS technology has made genome sequencing much cheaper than in the past; the high parallelization capability and the possibility to sequence more than one organism at once have opened the door to processing whole symbiotic consortia. However, this approach needs the development of specific bioinformatics tools able to analyze these data. In this work, we describe SeqDex, a tool that starts from a preliminary assembly obtained from sequencing a mixture of DNA from different organisms, to identify the contigs coming from one organism of interest. SeqDex is a fully automated machine learning-based tool exploiting partial taxonomic affiliations and compositional analysis to predict the taxonomic affiliations of contigs in an assembly. In literature, there are few methods able to deconvolve host-symbiont datasets, and most of them heavily rely on user curation and are therefore time consuming. The problem has strong similarities with metagenomic studies, where mixed samples are sequenced and the bioinformatics challenge is trying to separate contigs on the basis of their source organism; however, in symbiotic systems, additional information can be exploited to improve the output. To assess the ability of SeqDex to deconvolve host-symbiont datasets, we compared it to state-of-the-art methods for metagenomic binning and for host-symbiont deconvolution on three study cases. The results point out the good performances of the presented tool that, in addition to the ease of use and customization potential, make SeqDex a useful tool for rapid identification of endosymbiont sequences