Identification and validation of microsatellite markers in strawberry tree (Arbutusunedo L.)

Strawberry tree (Arbutus unedo L.), an evergreen shrub/small tree of the family Ericaceae, is a main constituent of the Mediterranean basin flora; although it is also found in southwestern Prance, Macaronesia, and Ireland. The small fruits are edible but mostly used for preparation of preserves and jams, and for liquors such as the Portuguese traditional "aguardente de medronho". Traditionally cultivated by small farmers, often in consociation with Quercus sp., strawberry tree is presently emerging as a new important fruit crop cultivated in large orchards by modern export-oriented enterprises. This change of paradigm requires a growing role of plant breeding, upstream of the production process. Genomic tools for this species are mostly limited to the chloroplast genome sequence and to genomic data described in this work. In order to identify strawberry tree microsatellite (SSR) loci we performed partial genome next-generation sequencing using the Ion Torrent technology. The sequenced similar to 24.6M nucleotides resulted in the identification of 1185 microsatellite markers mostly constituted by dinucleotide motifs. The relative amount of microsatellite dinucleotide motifs (AG/CT - 71.7%, AC/GT - 20.5%, AT/AT - 2.9%, and CG/CG - 0.3%) is similar to the one observed in other Ericaceae species. Among a tested sample of 40 SSR primer pairs, 20 amplified well-defined PCR products, 12 (30%) were validated as polymorphic. Used in our collaborative project for molecular identification of selected and improved clones, the identified SSR loci constitute a strong tool for a large panoply of applied and fundamental studies of this emerging fruit crop.Pluriannual Funding Program of the Portuguese National Foundation for Science and Technologyinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Darwin em Portugal (1910-1974). O darwinismo e a evolução na produção científica de botânicos portugueses

Tese de doutoramento em Altos Estudos em História, na especialidade de Época Contemporânea, apresentada ao Departamento de História, Estudos Europeus, Arqueologia e Artes da Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de CoimbraO presente trabalho visa analisar a influência do darwinismo na botânica portuguesa, no período compreendido entre 1910 e 1974, procurando averiguar a originalidade portuguesa quanto ao acolhimento da teoria darwiniana e a influência de conceitos darwinistas na investigação científica. Num primeiro momento, procurar-se-á contextualizar a problemática central do nosso estudo no quadro geral da história internacional do darwinismo, com base numa consulta que privilegiou os trabalhos assinados por autoridades consagradas na área e estudos de natureza idêntica. Em sintonia com algumas das últimas tendências dos estudos sobre a receção e a história do darwinismo, procurar-se-á ainda mostrar como em Portugal se traduziu, representou e comemorou Charles Darwin. Num segundo momento, proceder-se-á à avaliação da influência do darwinismo na produção científica de doze botânicos portugueses que exerceram a sua atividade na Universidade de Coimbra (Júlio Augusto Henriques, Luís Wittnich Carrisso, Aurélio Quintanilha e Abílio Fernandes), na Universidade de Lisboa (António Xavier Pereira Coutinho, Rui Teles Palhinha, Flávio Resende e Carlos das Neves Tavares) e na Universidade do Porto (Gonçalo Sampaio, Américo Pires de Lima, Manuel Joaquim Ferreira e Arnaldo Roseira). Através da análise, procurar-se-á averiguar se as investigações científicas dos botânicos portugueses referidos foram influenciadas pelo darwinismo. Procurar-se-á também verificar se os seus trabalhos pedagógicos e programas das disciplinas que lecionaram incluíram tópicos relacionados com a evolução, se se dedicaram à divulgação de ideias evolucionistas em Portugal, se procederam à tradução de trabalhos relevantes sob o ponto de vista dos estudos da evolução, se se mantiveram informados sobre os acontecimentos mais relevantes ao nível da história da evolução e se algum dos seus respetivos discípulos se dedicou aos estudos de evolução. Teoria da evolução que se tornou com celeridade um dos tópicos de discussão prediletos da comunidade científica, sendo amplamente debatida no plano teórico, o darwinismo não teve, contudo, uma influência imediata nas investigações conduzidas ao nível das ciências biológicas de finais do século XIX e inícios do século XX.Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia - SFRH/BD/48796/200

Evaluation of condylar position by CBCT after static and dynamic registration in edentulous patients

AbstractObjectivesThe aims of this study are to: compare the condylar position in articular fossa after static and dynamic registration; analyze symmetry between right and left condyles and examine the relationship between articular eminence and condylar position.MethodsTwenty completely edentulous patients were included in this study, after signing a written informed consent. Static registration was obtained by mandibular manipulation and dynamic registration was performed by Gothic Arch Tracing. Patients were submitted to one cone beam in static registration, followed by another with dynamic registration. Radiographic image measurements in lateral and frontal cuts were made.ResultsNo statistically significant differences between the two methods were found. In dynamic registration all the distances were smaller, more consistent and equidistant. Condyles stayed in a closer position to the articular fossa and in a centred position. For this registration a higher symmetry between left and right condyle exists, revealed by homogeneous results. Static registration had a higher heterogeneity of results, due to the fact that it is dependent upon a number of factors.ConclusionsDynamic registration seems a reliable and an accurate method to use. With the higher condylar symmetry and the centred position in articular fossa, it seems that this registration reproduces a physiologic condylar position

Acordo inter-juízes: O caso do coeficiente kappa

Sempre que é preciso classificar um conjunto de dados num dado número de categorias, vários tipos de enviesamentos podem ocorrer. Com vista à sua minimização é frequente o recurso a mais do que um juiz para categorizar os mesmos dados, analisando-se posteriormente o seu grau de acordo e consequentemente a fiabilidade da classificação. Entre os vários índices de acordo inter-juízes mencionados na literatura, o coeficiente kappa (Cohen, 1960) é referido como o mais frequentemente utilizado quando as variáveis em estudo são nominais. Neste artigo, procuramos descrever este coeficiente, apresentando a sua definição, pressupostos, fórmula, e ilustrando os passos para o seu cálculo. Exploramos também o seu desenvolvimento para kappa ponderado (Cohen, 1968). Por fim, algumas críticas feitas a este coeficiente de acordo inter- -juízes são sumariamente discutidas.

Momento Económico (40)

Temas de hoy, 2/ Hipótesis para la investigación sobre reconversión industrial, Ricardo Javier Martínez Atala, 3/ Reconversión automotriz y resistencia obrera en Volkswagen de México, Rogelio Palafox, Pedro Monroy y Yolanda Montiel, 6/ Estrategia del movimiento obrero ante la reconversión productiva, Socorro Fonseca Córdoba, 10/ Las operadoras del departamento de tráfico de Teléfonos de México ante la tecnología digital, Ma. Elena del Villar, 15

The necessity of a reduced version of the psychomotor battery to screen for learning difficulties in preschool children

Psychomotor development is important for effective learning. Therefore, psychomotor observation is essential beginning in preschool education; however, observational instruments require practice, experience and time-consuming procedures. Psychomotor Battery (PBM) is useful to observe children’s psychomotor profile but needs 30 to 40 min per child to be applied. Therefore, the main objective of this study was to justify the need of a reduced version of the PBM to enable more frequent psychomotor observations at this level of education. A total of 70 preschool students with typical development were observed over 4 months in a school context, among which 31 were males and 39 were females (4- and 5-year-old). PBM is composed by seven psychomotor factors (PMF) distributed across three neuropsychological functional units. The total average of points for psychomotor observations was obtained using multiple linear regression (MLR) with a Stepwise method. For associations, Pearson’s correlation coefficient (r) was used. The results of this study showed that it is possible to reduce the average time of psychomotor observation by 43.7% (13 min and 31 s), maintaining a very strong association with the total average of points obtained. This reduction in observation time may contribute to the increase in psychomotor observations of preschool children using PMB.This research is supported by Higher Institute of Educational Sciences of the Douro and by national funding through the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology, I.P., under the project UID04045/2020.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

El césped del vecino es más verde: Flora de patios a través de un gradiente social

Urban backyards have considerable potential for biodiversity conservation and the enhancement of food security. However, these spaces are poorly planned, there is little information on the diversity of flora present in the backyards of different social clases. We quantified and compared plant diversity of the backyards of two neighborhoods in the metropolitan area of Maringa, by calculating diversity indices, bivariate correlations, the planting potencial, and outline planning guidelines, with the goal of increasing the presence of woody vegetation, strengthen the food security and contribute to the conservation of biological diversity, including the preservation of endangered plant speciesAgradecemos al Ministerio de Agricultura, Alimentación y Medio Ambiente del gobierno español, por la financiación al Proyecto Ecología Urbana en Regiones Metropolitanas de Brasil: Paisaje, Calidad de Vida y Desarrollo Humano [Plan Nacional de I+D+i (CSO2009-12689)

Optimizing Electroactive Organisms: The Effect of Orthologous Proteins

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Suicidal behaviour after first-episode psychosis: results from a 1-year longitudinal study in Portugal

© The Author(s) 2021. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http:// creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.Background: Suicide is one of the main causes of excess of premature death in psychotic patients. Published studies found that suicide risk begins in ultra-high risk of psychosis and continues in early years of the disease. Previous studies identifying predictive and risk factors associated with suicidality in first-episode psychosis (FEP) are highly inconsistent. Also, there are relatively few longitudinal studies on suicidal behaviour in FEP. The aim of this study was to examine prevalence, evolution and predictors of suicidal behaviour at baseline and the 12-month follow-up in patients presenting with FEP. Methods: One hundred and eighteen patients presenting with FEP were recruited from two early psychosis units in Portugal. A comprehensive assessment examining socio-demographic and clinical characteristics was administered at baseline and the 12-month follow-up. Odds ratio were calculated using logistic regression analyses. McNemar test was used to evaluate the evolution of suicidal behaviour and depression prevalence from baseline to 12 months of follow-up. Results: Follow-up data were available for 60 participants from the 118 recruited. Approximately 25.4% of the patients had suicidal behaviour at the baseline evaluation, with a significant reduction during the follow-up period to 13.3% (p = 0.035). A multivariate binary logistic regression showed that a history of suicidal behaviour and depression at baseline independently predicted suicidal behaviour at baseline, and a history of suicidal behaviour and low levels of total cholesterol predicted suicidal behaviour at the 12-month follow-up. A significant proportion of patients also had depression at the baseline evaluation (43.3%), with the last month of suicidal behaviour at baseline independently predicting depression at this time. Conclusions: The findings of our study indicate that suicidal behaviour was prevalent on the year after FEP. Patients with a history of suicidal behaviour, depression at baseline and low levels of cholesterol should undergo close evaluation, monitoring and possible intervention in order to reduce suicide risk in the early phases of psychosis.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Particle-In-Cell Simulation using Asynchronous Tasking

Recently, task-based programming models have emerged as a prominent alternative among shared-memory parallel programming paradigms. Inherently asynchronous, these models provide native support for dynamic load balancing and incorporate data flow concepts to selectively synchronize the tasks. However, tasking models are yet to be widely adopted by the HPC community and their effective advantages when applied to non-trivial, real-world HPC applications are still not well comprehended. In this paper, we study the parallelization of a production electromagnetic particle-in-cell (EM-PIC) code for kinetic plasma simulations exploring different strategies using asynchronous task-based models. Our fully asynchronous implementation not only significantly outperforms a conventional, synchronous approach but also achieves near perfect scaling for 48 cores.Comment: To be published on the 27th European Conference on Parallel and Distributed Computing (Euro-Par 2021