The effect of residential urban greenness on allergic respiratory diseases in youth: A narrative review

Background: Environmental exposures across the life course may be a contributor to the increased worldwide prevalence of respiratory and allergic diseases occurring in the last decades. Asthma and rhinoconjunctivitis especially contribute to the global burden of disease. Greenness has been suggested to have beneficial effects in terms of reduction of occurrence of allergic respiratory diseases. However, the available evidence of a relationship between urban greenness and childhood health outcomes is not yet conclusive. The current review aimed at investigating the current state of evidence, exploring the relationship between children's exposure to residential urban greenness and development of allergic respiratory diseases, jointly considering health outcomes and study design. Methods: The search strategy was designed to identify studies linking urban greenness exposure to asthma, rhinoconjunctivitis, and lung function in children and adolescents. This was a narrative review of literature following PRISMA guidelines performed using electronic search in databases of PubMed and Embase (Ovid) from the date of inception to December 2018. Results: Our search strategy identified 2315 articles; after exclusion of duplicates (n = 701), 1614 articles were screened. Following review of titles and abstracts, 162 articles were identified as potentially eligible. Of these, 148 were excluded following full-text evaluation, and 14 were included in this review. Different methods for assessing greenness exposure were found; the most used was Normalized Difference Vegetation Index. Asthma, wheezing, bronchitis, rhinoconjunctivitis, allergic symptoms, lung function, and allergic sensitization were the outcomes assessed in the identified studies; among them, asthma was the one most frequently investigated. Conclusions: The present review showed inconsistencies in the results mainly due to differences in study design, population, exposure assessment, geographic region, and ascertainment of outcome. Overall, there is a suggestion of an association between urban greenness in early life and the occurrence of allergic respiratory diseases during childhood, although the evidence is still inconsistent. It is therefore hard to draw a conclusive interpretation, so that the understanding of the impact of greenness on allergic respiratory diseases in children and adolescents remains difficult

Aquaculture of emerging species in North-Eastern Atlantic and Mediterranean Sea: a systematic review on sea cucumber farming and potential development

Sea cucumbers are considered a traditional food delicacy in Asian countries. In last decades high market demand, uncontrolled exploitation and inadequate management have led to stock overexploitation, driving commercial interest in new target species and new areas. In recent years, Mediterranean and North-East Atlantic sea cucumbers have become fishing targets, and, due to overfishing, a significant decline of wild populations have been observed, with detrimental effects on benthic communities and ecosystems. Indeed, in addition to being an important economic resource, sea cucumbers play a key ecological role in benthic dynamics where they are involved as ecosystem engineers in the processing of organic matter in the detrital food web pathway. In this context, aquaculture can play a crucial role in supporting the conservation of natural stocks by reducing harvesting pressure on wild populations and enabling restoration programmes for depleted stocks. Commercial sea cucumber farming is already an established reality in the Indo-Pacific region, where it has become one of the most profitable sectors of aquaculture production. In Europe, on the other hand, sea cucumber aquaculture is still an emerging sector, whose development is hampered by poor and fragmented information on the farming requirements of native species. In this context, this systematic review was carried out with the aim of providing a comprehensive summary of the state of the art of farming practices of the European sea cucumbers considered as a target of commercial fisheries. A total of 34 original articles were included in this review, after title, abstract and full-text screening. The results highlighted a sharp increase in the number of studies over the last six years. Portugal, Turkey and Italy are the countries where most research has been carried out. Among the selected species, Holothuria tubulosa was the most studied, while only one article was found on Parastichopus regalis. The main aims of this review were i) to gather all available literature on the farming practices of North-East Atlantic and Mediterranean sea cucumber species, ii) to outline the most common farming practices, iii) to identify gaps and future directions in this emerging aquaculture sector

Coexisting with the alien: Evidence for environmental control on trophic interactions between a native (Atherina boyeri) and a non-indigenous fish species (Gambusia holbrooki) in a Mediterranean coastal ecosystem

Biological invasions are a widespread problem worldwide, as invasive non-indigenous species (NIS) may affect native populations through direct (e. g., predation) or indirect (e.g., competition) trophic interactions, leading to changes in the food web structure. The trophic relationships of the invasive eastern mosquitofish Gambusia holbrooki and the native big-scale sand smelt Atherina boyeri coexisting in three Mediterranean coastal ponds characterized by different trophic statuses (from oligotrophic to hypereutrophic) were assessed in spring through isotopic niche analysis and Bayesian mixing models. The two fish relied on the distinctive trophic pathways in the different ponds, with the evidence of minimal interspecific niche overlap indicating site-specific niche divergence mechanisms. In more detail, under hypereutrophic and mesotrophic conditions, the two species occupied different trophic positions but relying on a single trophic pathway, whereas, under oligotrophic conditions, both occupied a similar trophic position but belonging to distinct trophic pathways. Furthermore, the invaders showed the widest niche breadth while the native species showed a niche compression and displacement in the ponds at a higher trophic status compared to the oligotrophic pond. We argue that this may be the result of an asymmetric competition arising between the two species because of the higher competitive ability of G. holbrooki and may have been further shaped by the trophic status of the ponds, through a conjoint effect of prey availability and habitat complexity. While the high trophic plasticity and adaptability of both species to different environmental features and resource availability may have favored their coexistence through site-specific mechanisms of niche segregation, we provide also empirical evidence of the importance of environmental control in invaded food webs, calling for greater attention to this aspect in future studies

DNA demethylation caused By 5-Aza-2'-Deoxycytidine induces mitotic alterations and aneuploidy

Aneuploidy, the unbalanced number of chromosomes in a cell, is considered a prevalent form of genetic instability and is largely acknowledged as a condition implicated in tumorigenesis. Epigenetic alterations like DNA hypomethylation have been correlated with cancer initiation/progression. Furthermore, a growing body of evidence suggests the involvement of epigenome-wide disruption as a cause of global DNA hypomethylation in aneuploidy generation. Here, we report that the DNA hypomethylating drug 5-aza-2'-deoxycytidine (DAC), affects the correct ploidy of nearly diploid HCT-116 human cells by altering the methylation pattern of the chromosomes. Specifically, we show that a DACinduced reduction of 5-Methyl Cytosine at the pericentromeric region of chromosomes correlates with aneuploidy and mitotic defects. Our results suggest that DNA hypomethylation leads to aneuploidy by altering the DNA methylation landscape at the centromere that is necessary to ensure proper chromosomes segregation by recruiting the proteins necessary to build up a functional kinetochore

Pharmacogenomics: A Step forward Precision Medicine in Childhood Asthma

Personalized medicine, an approach to care in which individual characteristics are used for targeting interventions and maximizing health outcomes, is rapidly becoming a reality for many diseases. Childhood asthma is a heterogeneous disease and many children have uncontrolled symptoms. Therefore, an individualized approach is needed for improving asthma outcomes in children. The rapidly evolving fields of genomics and pharmacogenomics may provide a way to achieve asthma control and reduce future risks in children with asthma. In particular, pharmacogenomics can provide tools for identifying novel molecular mechanisms and biomarkers to guide treatment. Emergent high-throughput technologies, along with patient pheno-endotypization, will increase our knowledge of several molecular mechanisms involved in asthma pathophysiology and contribute to selecting and stratifying appropriate treatment for each patient

Utilizzo di nitrati come inibitori di corrosione per le armature nel calcestruzzo

Corrosion inhibitors have been long considered as an effective preventative technique to slow down the onset and/or propagation of corrosion phenomena in reinforced concrete. Several substances have been evaluated as possible candidates, and great interest has been dedicated to nitrite ion. When investigating how these substances slow down corrosion related processes – chlorides diffusion, critical chloride threshold, CO2 penetration and corrosion propagation –interactions between inhibitor and concrete are also vital. Recently, nitrate based compounds have been proposed as corrosion inhibitors, as they present lower cost than nitrites and are already used in concrete as set accelerators. Some studies have shown that nitrates inhibiting mechanism is similar to that of nitrites. This work proposes the evaluation of a nitrate based substance as possible corrosion inhibitor in concrete, and compares its performance with a nitrite based inhibitor

A Methodological Framework to Discover Pharmacogenomic Interactions Based on Random Forests

The identification of genomic alterations in tumor tissues, including somatic mutations, deletions, and gene amplifications, produces large amounts of data, which can be correlated with a diversity of therapeutic responses. We aimed to provide a methodological framework to discover pharmacogenomic interactions based on Random Forests. We matched two databases from the Cancer Cell Line Encyclopaedia (CCLE) project, and the Genomics of Drug Sensitivity in Cancer (GDSC) project. For a total of 648 shared cell lines, we considered 48,270 gene alterations from CCLE as input features and the area under the dose-response curve (AUC) for 265 drugs from GDSC as the outcomes. A three-step reduction to 501 alterations was performed, selecting known driver genes and excluding very frequent/infrequent alterations and redundant ones. For each model, we used the concordance correlation coefficient (CCC) for assessing the predictive performance, and permutation importance for assessing the contribution of each alteration. In a reasonable computational time (56 min), we identified 12 compounds whose response was at least fairly sensitive (CCC > 20) to the alteration profiles. Some diversities were found in the sets of influential alterations, providing clues to discover significant drug-gene interactions. The proposed methodological framework can be helpful for mining pharmacogenomic interactions

Association between Asthma Control and Exposure to Greenness and Other Outdoor and Indoor Environmental Factors: A Longitudinal Study on a Cohort of Asthmatic Children

Achieving and maintaining asthma control (AC) is the main goal of asthma management. Indoor and outdoor environmental factors may play an important role on AC. The aim of this longitudinal study was to evaluate the association between AC and exposure to greenness and other outdoor or indoor environmental factors in a cohort of asthmatic children. This study involved 179 asthmatic children (5–16 years). Parents were interviewed through a modified version of the SIDRIA questionnaire. AC was assessed at each visit. Exposure to greenness was measured using the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI). A logistic regression model was applied for assessing risk factors for uncontrolled asthma (UA). Low NDVI exposure was a risk factor for UA (OR: 2.662, 95% CI (1.043–6.799)); children exposed to passive smoke during pregnancy had a higher risk of UA than those non-exposed to passive smoke during pregnancy (OR: 3.816, 95% CI (1.114–13.064)); and a unit increase in the crowding index was associated with an increased risk of UA (OR: 3.376, 95% CI (1.294–8.808)). In conclusion, the current study provided a comprehensive assessment of urban-related environmental exposures on asthma control in children, using multiple indicators of greenness and other outdoor or indoor environmental factors

An operational definition of quantum information scrambling

Quantum information scrambling (QIS) is a characteristic feature of several quantum systems, ranging from black holes to quantum communication networks. While accurately quantifying QIS is crucial to understanding many such phenomena, common approaches based on the tripartite information have limitations due to the accessibility issues of quantum mutual information, and do not always properly take into consideration the dependence on the encoding input basis. To address these issues, we propose a novel and computationally efficient QIS quantifier, based on a formulation of QIS in terms of quantum state discrimination. We show that the optimal guessing probability, which reflects the degree of QIS induced by an isometric quantum evolution, is directly connected to the accessible min-information, a generalized channel capacity based on conditional min-entropy, which can be cast as a convex program and thus computed efficiently. By applying our proposal to a range of examples with increasing complexity, we illustrate its ability to capture the multifaceted nature of QIS in all its intricacy.Comment: 7 pages, 4 figures. Comments are welcome