Novel strategy to disrupt the nuclear pore barrier reversibly: Implications for nanomedicine

Several thousands of nuclear pore complexes (NPCs) perforate the nuclear envelope of each eukaryotic cell. These elaborate proteinaceous assemblies mediate all nucleocytoplasmic transport highly selectively through a central channel residing within a rigid and well-structured NPC scaffold. The selectivity of the NPCs is the major obstacle for non-viral gene therapy due to the prevention of exogenously applied therapeutic macromolecules from nuclear entry. Selectivity is attributed to highly dynamic and disordered Phenylalanine-Glycine rich proteins within the NPC central channel. The NPC scaffold poses an additional barrier-albeit ignored so far. We designed two distinct strategies to reversibly disrupt the NPC channel and scaffold in a separate fashion. Disruption of either is found to result in a significant increase of the NPC permeability and a combination of the two further intensifies the individual effects. The induced breakdown of the NPC permeability barrier may be exploited for gene therapeutic purposes

Creativity and education in China: Some ideas on current debate

Throughout the first decade of the century, the Chinese government has shown its intention to encourage creativity among young people in several education reforms. However, is it possible to preserve the meritocratic model and encourage creativity? Another issue is what do Chinese people understand for creativity and what social changes are necessary to achieve it. Through this article we will analyze the opinions of several experts in learning and politics about the development of the teaching of creativity in ChinaEn las sucesivas reformas educativas acontecidas a lo largo de la primera década del siglo XXI, el gobierno chino ha expresado su intención de fomentar la creatividad entre los jóvenes. Pero, ¿es posible mantener el modelo meritocrático y fomentar la creatividad? Otra cuestión es qué entienden los chinos por creatividad y qué cambios sociales son necesarios para alcanzarla. A lo largo de este artículo analizaremos las opiniones de expertos en enseñanza y política educativa relacionada con la evolución de la enseñanza de la creatividad en Chin

IberLEF 2021 Overview: Natural Language Processing for Iberian Languages

[EN] IberLEF is a comparative evaluation campaign for Natural Language Processing Systems in Spanish and other Iberian languages. Its goal is to encourage the research community to organize competitive text processing, understanding and generation tasks in order to define new research challenges and set new state-of-the-art results in those languages. This paper summarizes the evaluation activities carried out in IberLEF 2021, which included twelve tasks dealing with emotions, stance and opinions, harmful information, health-related information extraction and discovery, humor and irony, and lexical acquisition. Overall, IberLEF activities were a remarkable collective effort involving 359 researchers from 22 countries in Europe, Asia and the Americas.The authors of this overview have been supported by the Spanish Government, Ministry of Science and Innovation, via research grants MISMIS (PGC2018- 096212-B), MISMIS-BIAS (PGC2018-096212-B-C32) and MISMISFAKEnHATE (PGC2018-096212-B-C31); and by CONACyT-Mexico project CB-2015-01- 257383 and the thematic networks program (Language Technologies Thematic Network).Gonzalo, J.; Montes-Y-Gómez, M.; Rosso, P. (2021). IberLEF 2021 Overview: Natural Language Processing for Iberian Languages. CEUR Workshop. 1-15. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/19056211

Colloidal crystals of compliant microgel beads to study cell migration and mechanosensitivity in 3D

Tissues are defined not only by their biochemical composition, but also by their distinct mechanical properties. It is now widely accepted that cells sense their mechanical environment and respond to it. However, studying the effects of mechanics in in vitro 3D environments is challenging since current 3D hydrogel assays convolve mechanics with gel porosity and adhesion. Here, we present novel colloidal crystals as modular 3D scaffolds where these parameters are principally decoupled by using monodisperse, protein-coated PAAm microgel beads as building blocks, so that variable stiffness regions can be achieved within one 3D colloidal crystal. Characterization of the colloidal crystal and oxygen diffusion simulations suggested the suitability of the scaffold to support cell survival and growth. This was confirmed by live-cell imaging and fibroblast culture over a period of four days. Moreover, we demonstrate unambiguous durotactic fibroblast migration and mechanosensitive neurite outgrowth of dorsal root ganglion neurons in 3D. This modular approach of assembling 3D scaffolds from mechanically and biochemically well-defined building blocks allows the spatial patterning of stiffness decoupled from porosity and adhesion sites in principle and provides a platform to investigate mechanosensitivity in 3D environments approximating tissues in vitro

Implications of the nuclear pore barrier for non-small cell lung cancer malignancy and therapy

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Curcumin and Ethanol Effects in Trembler-J Schwann Cell Culture.

Charcot-Marie-Tooth (CMT) syndrome is the most common progressive human motor and sensory peripheral neuropathy. CMT type 1E is a demyelinating neuropathy affecting Schwann cells due to peripheral-myelin-protein-22 (PMP22) mutations, modelized by Trembler-J mice. Curcumin, a natural polyphenol compound obtained from turmeric (Curcuma longa), exhibits dose- and time-varying antitumor, antioxidant and neuroprotective properties, however, the neurotherapeutic actions of curcumin remain elusive. Here, we propose curcumin as a possible natural treatment capable of enhancing cellular detoxification mechanisms, resulting in an improvement of the neurodegenerative Trembler-J phenotype. Using a refined method for obtaining enriched Schwann cell cultures, we evaluated the neurotherapeutic action of low dose curcumin treatment on the PMP22 expression, and on the chaperones and autophagy/mammalian target of rapamycin (mTOR) pathways in Trembler-J and wild-type genotypes. In wild-type Schwann cells, the action of curcumin resulted in strong stimulation of the chaperone and macroautophagy pathway, whereas the modulation of ribophagy showed a mild effect. However, despite the promising neuroprotective effects for the treatment of neurological diseases, we demonstrate that the action of curcumin in Trembler-J Schwann cells could be impaired due to the irreversible impact of ethanol used as a common curcumin vehicle necessary for administration. These results contribute to expanding our still limited understanding of PMP22 biology in neurobiology and expose the intrinsic lability of the neurodegenerative Trembler-J genotype. Furthermore, they unravel interesting physiological mechanisms of cellular resilience relevant to the pharmacological treatment of the neurodegenerative Tremble J phenotype with curcumin and ethanol. We conclude that the analysis of the effects of the vehicle itself is an essential and inescapable step to comprehensibly assess the effects and full potential of curcumin treatment for therapeutic purposes.TThis research was funded by the Comisión Sectorial de Investigación Científica de la Universidad de la República (CSIC I+D, 2013), Agencia Nacional de Investigación e Innovación (ANII, FCE_1_2019_1_155539) and Programa de Desarrollo de Ciencias Básicas (PEDECIBA, CCA-Bio/Res. 6.1-2/4/2019). This work was also supported by a grant PID2019-110401RB-100 from the Spanish, Ministry of Science and Innovation and the Spanish CIBERNED network (M.C.).S

MISMIS: Desinformación y agresividad en los medios de comunicación social: agregando información y analizando el lenguaje

[EN] The general objectives of the project are to address and monitor misinformation (biased and fake news) and miscommunication (aggressive language and hate speech) in social media, as well as to establish a high quality methodological standard for the whole research community (i) by developing rich annotated datasets, a data repository and online evaluation services; (ii) by proposing suitable evaluation metrics; and (iii) by organizing evaluation campaigns to foster research on the above issues.[ES] Los objetivos generales del proyecto son abordar y monitorizar la desinformación (noticias sesgadas y falsas) y la mala comunicación (lenguaje agresivo y mensajes de odio) en los medios de comunicación social, así como establecer un estándar metodológico de calidad para toda la comunidad investigadora mediante: i) el desarrollo de datasets anotados, un repositorio de datos y servicios de evaluación online; ii) la propuesta de métricas de evaluación adecuadas; y iii) la organización de campañas de evaluación para fomentar la investigación sobre las cuestiones mencionadas.The MISMIS project (PGC2018-096212-B) is funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities.Rosso, P.; Casacuberta Nolla, F.; Gonzalo, J.; Plaza, L.; Carrillo, J.; Amigó, E.; Verdejo, MF.... (2020). MISMIS: Misinformation and Miscommunication in social media: aggregating information and analysing language. Procesamiento del Lenguaje Natural. (65):101-104. https://doi.org/10.26342/2020-65-13S1011046

Rosso, María José

Trabajo final integrador. (Área de Consolidación Métodos Cuantitativos para la Investigación Agropecuaria) -- UNC- Facultad de Ciencias Agropecuarias, 2017La floricultura en Argentina está creciendo en los últimos años y ocupa un importante lugar dentro del mercado interno, el consumo va en aumento 2 . Una de las flores más buscadas es la de la planta de Gerbera. Existen muchas variedades comercializadas a nivel mundial y solo algunas se las comercializa en el país, este es el motivo por el cual se propuso estudiar el comportamiento de diferentes variedades de Gerbera jamesonii, evaluando la producción y la calidad comercial. Las variables para calidad fueron largo y peso de la vara y el diámetro del capítulo, mientras que para productividad fue el número de varas. De esta manera se podrá determinar si están adaptadas a la plantación en invernaderos y cuáles son las que mejor se comportan