The Athena X-ray Integral Field Unit: a consolidated design for the system requirement review of the preliminary definition phase

Instrumentatio

A new cell for the study of in situ chemical reactions using X-ray absorption spectroscopy.

An in situ cell for reductive and oxidative treatments at different temperatures that allows the possibility of recording data as a function of temperature has been designed and constructed for X-ray absorption experiments at the GILDA beamline BM08 of ESRF. The cell is linked to a mass quadrupole spectrometer providing control of the reaction gases and monitoring of the products. The apparatus allows measurements to be performed both in transmission and fluorescence geometry. The cell was tested by studying the CO oxidation reaction promoted by a Pt/ceria-zirconia-supported catalyst. The CO(2) yield is correlated with the structural results confirming the existence of a strong metal-support interaction between the Pt metal clusters and the ceria-zirconia support

Buccolingual Inclination Control of Upper Central Incisors of Aligners: A Comparison with Conventional and Self-Ligating Brackets

Objective. The upper incisorstorque expression is essential for the orthodontic treatment accuracy.Various orthodontic devices areclaimedtohavedifferentinclinationcontrolcapacity.Thepurposeofthisretrospectivestudywastocomparetheradiographic buccolingualinclinationof upperincisorsinpatientstreatedwith three differentorthodontictechniques.Material andMethods. Conventional brackets (Victory, 3M), self-ligating appliances (Damon Q, Ormco), and aligners (Invisalign, Align Technology) were tested. Cephalometric data of 25 patients with similar skeletal and dental pretreatment parameters were collected for each technique.Position changesof upper centralincisorswere assessed with radiographic evaluationbefore and after therapy.Three different parameters were considered: 11∧SnaSnp, 11∧Ocl and I+ TVL. All variables were measured before (T0) and after (T1) treatmentandtheirvariationovertreatmentwasassessed.Results.Whenevaluatingangularmeasurements,11∧SnaSnpand11∧Ocl anglesshowedthehighestnumericvariationwithconventionalbrackets.Lowestvalueswerereportedwithaligners.However,the differences among various techniques were not significant for both angles (P>0.05). Also I+ TVL linear value variation did not showsignificantdifferencesamongthedifferentgroupstested(P>0.05).Conclusion.Conventionalmultibracketsapplianceshowed thehighestincisalpositionvariationsovertreatment,butthedifferencesamongvariousgroupswerenotsignificantlydifferent

The filter and calibration wheel for the ATHENA wide field imager

The planned filter and calibration wheel for the Wide Field Imager (WFI) instrument on Athena is presented. With four selectable positions it provides the necessary functions, in particular an UV/VIS blocking filter for the WFI detectors and a calibration source. Challenges for the filter wheel design are the large volume and mass of the subsystem, the implementation of a robust mechanism and the protection of the ultra-thin filter with an area of 160 mm square. This paper describes performed trade-offs based on simulation results and describes the baseline design in detail. Reliable solutions are envisaged for the conceptual design of the filter and calibration wheel. Four different variant with different position of the filter are presented. Risk mitigation and the compliance to design requirements are demonstrated

Structural modelling and mechanical tests supporting the design of the ATHENA X-IFU thermal filters and WFI optical blocking filter

ATHENA is a Large high energy astrophysics space mission selected by ESA in the Cosmic Vision 2015-2025 Science Program. It will be equipped with two interchangeable focal plane detectors: the X-Ray Integral Field Unit (X-IFU) and the Wide Field Imager (WFI). Both detectors require x-ray transparent filters to fully exploit their sensitivity. In order to maximize the X-ray transparency, filters must be very thin, from a few tens to few hundreds of nm, on the other hand, they must be strong enough to survive the severe launch stresses. In particular, the WFI OBF, being launched in atmospheric pressure, shall also survive acoustic loads. In this paper, we present a review of the structural modeling performed to assist the ATHENA filters design, the preliminary results from vibration and acoustic tests, and we discuss future activities necessary to consolidate the filters design, before the preliminary requirement review of the ATHENA instruments, scheduled before the end of 2018

C9ORF72 repeat expansion affects the proteome of primary skin fibroblasts in ALS

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a neurodegenerative disease characterized by pro-gressive degeneration of the corticospinal motor neurons, which ultimately leads to death. The repeat expansion in chromosome 9 open reading frame 72 (C9ORF72) represents the most common genetic cause of ALS and it is also involved in the pathogenesis of other neurodegenerative disorders. To offer insights into C9ORF72-mediated pathogenesis, we quantitatively analyzed the proteome of patient-derived primary skin fibroblasts from ALS patients carrying the C9ORF72 mutation compared with ALS patients who tested negative for it. Differentially expressed proteins were identified, used to generate a protein-protein interaction network and subjected to a functional enrichment analysis to unveil altered molecular pathways. ALS patients were also compared with patients affected by frontotemporal dementia carrying the C9ORF72 repeat expansion. As a result, we demonstrated that the molecular pathways mainly altered in fibroblasts (e.g., protein homeostasis) mirror the alterations observed in C9ORF72-mutated neurons. Moreover, we highlighted novel molecular pathways (nuclear and mitochondrial transports, vesicle trafficking, mitochondrial bioenergetics, glucose metabolism, ER-phagosome crosstalk and Slit/Robo signaling pathway) which might be further investigated as C9ORF72-specific pathogenetic mechanisms. Data are available via ProteomeXchange with the identifier PXD023866

MiRNA Profiling in Plasma Neural-Derived Small Extracellular Vesicles from Patients with Alzheimer's Disease

Small extracellular vesicles (EVs) are able to pass from the central nervous system (CNS) into peripheral blood and contain molecule markers of their parental origin. The aim of our study was to isolate and characterize total and neural-derived small EVs (NDEVs) and their micro RNA (miRNA) cargo in Alzheimer's disease (AD) patients. Small NDEVs were isolated from plasma in a population consisting of 40 AD patients and 40 healthy subjects (CTRLs) using high throughput Advanced TaqMan miRNA OpenArrays®, which enables the simultaneous determination of 754 miRNAs. MiR-23a-3p, miR-223-3p, miR-100-3p and miR-190-5p showed a significant dysregulation in small NDEVs from AD patients as compared with controls (1.16 ± 0.49 versus 7.54 ± 2.5, p = 0.026; 9.32 ± 2.27 versus 0.66 ± 0.18, p <0.0001; 0.069 ± 0.01 versus 0.5 ± 0.1, p < 0.0001 and 2.9 ± 1.2 versus 1.93 ± 0.9, p < 0.05, respectively). A further validation analysis confirmed that miR-23a-3p, miR-223-3p and miR-190a-5p levels in small NDEVs from AD patients were significantly upregulated as compared with controls (p = 0.008; p = 0.016; p = 0.003, respectively) whereas miR-100-3p levels were significantly downregulated (p = 0.008). This is the first study that carries out the comparison between total plasma small EV population and NDEVs, demonstrating the presence of a specific AD NDEV miRNA signature

Big data analytics for climate change and biodiversity in the EUBrazilCC federated cloud infrastructure

The analysis of large volumes of data is key for knowledge discovery in several scientific domains such as climate, astrophysics, life sciences among others. It requires a large set of computational and storage resources, as well as flexible and efficient software solutions able to dynamically exploit the available infrastructure and address issues related to data volume, distribution, velocity and heterogeneity. This paper presents a data-driven and cloud-based use case implemented in the context of the EUBrazilCC project for the analysis of climate change and biodiversity data. The use case architecture and main components, as well as a Platform as a Service (PaaS) framework for big data analytics named PDAS, together with its elastic deployment in the EUBrazilCC federated cloud infrastructure are presented and discussed in detail