Risk Assessment and Collaborative Information Awareness for Plan Execution

Joint organizational planning and plan execution in risk-prone environment, has seen renewed research interest given its potential for agility and cost reduction. The participants are often asked to quickly plan and execute tasks in partially known or hostile environments. This requires advanced decision support systems for situational response whereby state-of-the-art technologies can be used to handle issues such as plan risk assessment, appropriate information exchange, asset localization and adaptive planning with risk mitigation. Toward this end, this thesis contributes innovative approaches to address these issues, focusing on logistic support over risk-prone transport network as many organizational plans have key logistic components. Plan risk assessment involves property evaluation for vehicle risk exposure, cost bounds and contingency options assessment. Appropriate information exchange involves participant specific shared information awareness under unreliable communication. Asset localization mandates efficient sensor network management. Adaptive planning with risk mitigation entails limited risk exposure replanning, factoring potential vehicle and cargo loss. In this pursuit, this thesis first investigates risk assessment for asset movement and contingency valuation using probabilistic model-checking and decision trees, followed by elaborating a gossip based protocol for hierarchy-aware shared information awareness, also assessed via probabilistic model-checking. Then, the thesis proposes an evolutionary learning heuristic for efficiently managing sensor networks constrained in terms of sensor range, capacity and energy use. Finally, the thesis presents a learning based heuristic for cost effective adaptive logistic planning with risk mitigation. Instructive case studies are also provided for each contribution along with benchmark results evaluating the performance of the proposed heuristic techniques

Desempeño docente y su influencia en el rendimiento escolar de matemática en estudiantes de una unidad educativa, Guayaquil, 2022

En la actual tesis mediante el objetivo de se determina el desempeño docente y la influencia en el rendimiento escolar de matemática. Así también se utilizó un enfoque cuantitativo de método hipotético deductivo de tipo básica, diseño no experimental y nivel descriptivo correlacional por que se determina el procedimiento de las variables acorde a su argumento existente se indagó determinar la relación entre dos variables: Desempeño docente y rendimiento escolar en el área de matemática. Durante el proceso de la investigación se considera una institución educativa José de la Cuadra y Vargas, Recolectando los datos mediante la encuesta aplicando como instrumento el cuestionario de preguntas direccionadas para dar respuestas a las interrogantes de este estudio. En cuanto a los resultados, estos muestran que existen relación entre el desempeño docente y el rendimiento escolar en el área de matemática en la institución educativa de José de la Cuadra V. 2022. En vista que se observa que el valor de la prueba estadística es Rho de Spearman tiene un valor 1,000, concluyendo que, existe una correlación positiva muy alta entre las variables analizadas

Charting the Proteoform Landscape of Serum Proteins in Individual Donors by High-Resolution Native Mass Spectrometry

Most proteins in serum are glycosylated, with several annotated as biomarkers and thus diagnostically important and of interest for their role in disease. Most methods for analyzing serum glycoproteins employ either glycan release or glycopeptide centric mass spectrometry-based approaches, which provide excellent tools for analyzing known glycans but neglect previously undefined or unknown glycosylation and/or other co-occurring modifications. High-resolution native mass spectrometry is a relatively new technique for the analysis of intact glycoproteins, providing a "what you see is what you get"mass profile of a protein, allowing the qualitative and quantitative observation of all modifications present. So far, a disadvantage of this approach has been that it centers mostly on just one specific serum glycoprotein at the time. To address this issue, we introduce an ion-exchange chromatography-based fractionation method capable of isolating and analyzing, in parallel, over 20 serum (glyco)proteins, covering a mass range between 30 and 190 kDa, from 150 μL of serum. Although generating data in parallel for all these 20 proteins, we focus the discussion on the very complex proteoform profiles of four selected proteins, i.e., α-1-antitrypsin, ceruloplasmin, hemopexin, and complement protein C3. Our analyses provide an insight into the extensive proteoform landscape of serum proteins in individual donors, caused by the occurrence of various N- and O-glycans, protein cysteinylation, and co-occurring genetic variants. Moreover, native mass intact mass profiling also provided an edge over alternative approaches revealing the presence of apo- and holo-forms of ceruloplasmin and the endogenous proteolytic processing in plasma of among others complement protein C3. We also applied our approach to a small cohort of serum samples from healthy and diseased individuals. In these, we qualitatively and quantitatively monitored the changes in proteoform profiles of ceruloplasmin and revealed a substantial increase in fucosylation and glycan occupancy in patients with late-stage hepatocellular carcinoma and pancreatic cancer as compared to healthy donor samples

Intraosseous foreign-body granuloma in the mandible subsequent to a 20-year-old work-related accident

Abstract The purpose of this article was to describe the clinical and microscopic features of an intraosseous foreign-body granuloma in the mandible that developed after the traumatic implantation of metal fragments during a work-related accident. A 65-year-old male patient had a severe pain in the body of mandible. Clinical examination showed facial asymmetry and a scar, extending to the left mental region. Intraoral examination revealed a soft mass involving the left alveolar bone with normal appearance of the mucosa surface. Panoramic radiographs showed a radiolucent lesion along the mandible extending from the central incisive to the first molar. Computed tomography revealed an osteolytic mass in the same area. His medical history included a work-related accident twenty years prior to evaluation. During the biopsy an important amount of bright metal-like pieces surrounded by soft tissue were found. A microscopic examination showed a foreign body associated with an aggregation of multinucleated giant cells. The final diagnosis was a foreign body granuloma. Even though foreign-body granulomas in the mandible are rare lesions, dentists should be familiar with their features and include them in the differential diagnosis of tissue masses

Proteoform-resolved profiling of plasminogen activation reveals novel abundant phosphorylation site and primary N-terminal cleavage site

Plasminogen (Plg), the zymogen of plasmin (Plm), is a glycoprotein involved in fibrinolysis and a wide variety of other physiological processes. Plg dysregulation has been implicated in a range of diseases. Classically, human Plg is categorized into two types, supposedly having different functional features, based on the presence (type I) or absence (type II) of a single N-linked glycan. Using high-resolution native mass spectrometry, we uncovered that the proteoform profiles of human Plg (and Plm) are substantially more extensive than this simple binary classification. In samples derived from human plasma, we identified up to 14 distinct proteoforms of Plg, including a novel highly stoichiometric phosphorylation site at Ser339. To elucidate the potential functional effects of these post-translational modifications, we performed proteoform-resolved kinetic analyses of the Plg-to-Plm conversion using several canonical activators. This conversion is thought to involve at least two independent cleavage events: one to remove the N-terminal peptide and another to release the active catalytic site. Our analyses reveal that these processes are not independent but are instead tightly regulated and occur in a step-wise manner. Notably, N-terminal cleavage at the canonical site (Lys77) does not occur directly from intact Plg. Instead, an activation intermediate corresponding to cleavage at Arg68 is initially produced, which only then is further processed to the canonical Lys77 product. Based on our results, we propose a refined categorization for human Plg proteoforms. In addition, we reveal that the proteoform profile of human Plg is more extensive than that of rat Plg, which lacks, for instance, the here-described phosphorylation at Ser339

Bridging reproductive and microbial ecology: a case study in arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi

Offspring size is a key trait for understanding the reproductive ecology of species, yet studies addressing the ecological meaning of offspring size have so far been limited to macro-organisms. We consider this a missed opportunity in microbial ecology and provide what we believe is the first formal study of offspring-size variation in microbes using reproductive models developed for macro-organisms. We mapped the entire distribution of fungal spore size in the arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungi (subphylum Glomeromycotina) and tested allometric expectations of this trait to offspring (spore) output and body size. Our results reveal a potential paradox in the reproductive ecology of AM fungi: while large spore-size variation is maintained through evolutionary time (independent of body size), increases in spore size trade off with spore output. That is, parental mycelia of large-spored species produce fewer spores and thus may have a fitness disadvantage compared to small-spored species. The persistence of the large-spore strategy, despite this apparent fitness disadvantage, suggests the existence of advantages to large-spored species that could manifest later in fungal life history. Thus, we consider that solving this paradox opens the door to fruitful future research establishing the relationship between offspring size and other AM life history traits

APOBEC3 genes: retroviral restriction factors to cancer drivers

The APOBEC3 cytosine deaminases play key roles in innate immunity through their ability to mutagenize viral DNA and restrict viral replication. Recent advances in cancer genomics, together with biochemical characterization of the APOBEC3 enzymes, have now implicated at least two family members in somatic mutagenesis during tumor development. We review the evidence linking these enzymes to carcinogenesis and highlight key questions, including the potential mechanisms that misdirect APOBEC3 activity to the host genome, the links to viral infection, and the association between a common APOBEC3 polymorphism and cancer risk