Systems biology in inflammatory bowel diseases

Purpose of review: Ulcerative colitis (UC) and Crohn’s Disease (CD) are the two predominant types of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), affecting over 1.4 million individuals in the US. IBD results from complex interactions between pathogenic components, including genetic and epigenetic factors, the immune response and the microbiome through an unknown sequence of events. The purpose of this review is to describe a system biology approach to IBD as a novel and exciting methodology aiming at developing novel IBD therapeutics based on the integration of molecular and cellular "omics" data. Recent Findings: Recent evidence suggested the presence of genetic, epigenetic, transcriptomic, proteomic and metabolomic alterations in IBD patients. Furthermore, several studies have shown that different cell types, including fibroblasts, epithelial, immune and endothelial cells together with the intestinal microbiota are involved in IBD pathogenesis. Novel computational methodologies have been developed aiming to integrate high - throughput molecular data. Summary: A systems biology approach could potentially identify the central regulators (hubs) in the IBD interactome and improve our understanding of the molecular mechanisms involved in IBD pathogenesis. The future IBD therapeutics should be developed on the basis of targeting the central hubs in the IBD network

Financialization and the rise of atypical work

The current literature on financialization and the labour process focuses disproportionately on how corporate financialization induces the use of atypical work and largely overlooks the role of household financialization. This paper presents several mechanisms through which household debt and pension fund financialization increase the financial insecurity of employees, which, in turn, can curb their resistance to accepting such work contracts. To assess our arguments, we estimate the effects of corporate and household financialization on involuntary part-time and temporary employment, using a panel dataset of OECD economies. Our findings provide robust support that financialization increases significantly non-standard employment rates for the total workforce and women, but less for older employees.status: publishe

A NEW LATE PLEISTOCENE MAMMAL LOCALITY FROM WESTERN CRETE

During the last five years systematic explorations of the Natural History Museum of Crete have added more than 20 Pleistocene fossil localities around Crete to the catalogue of the over 70 already known on the Island. The new localities are distributed in all four prefectures of Crete. The most important of these is the newly discovered site of Koutalas at Cape Drepano in Western Crete. The fossil remains are found in two levels and in red cemented clays of a collapsed cave. In the upper level a rich assemblage of micromammal, bird and large mammal remains has been discovered. The large mammals consist of dwarf hippopotamus (Hippopotamus creutzburgi) and elephants (Elephas sp.). A partly articulated skeleton (vertebral column, mandible and few long bones) of a dwarf hippo has been found next to a deciduous molar of an elephantid, indicating that the two taxa probably coexisted. The micromammal remains belong to the giant Cretan mouse Kritimys catreus. Therefore, the age of the assemblage is dated to the Kritimys catreus zone and thus to the late Middle Pleistocene. In the lower level scattered remains of deers, birds and micromammals have been identified, and their age is most likely younger than that of the upper level

A new notion of commutativity for the algorithmic Lov\'{a}sz Local Lemma

The Lov\'{a}sz Local Lemma (LLL) is a powerful tool in probabilistic combinatorics which can be used to establish the existence of objects that satisfy certain properties. The breakthrough paper of Moser and Tardos and follow-up works revealed that the LLL has intimate connections with a class of stochastic local search algorithms for finding such desirable objects. In particular, it can be seen as a sufficient condition for this type of algorithms to converge fast. Besides conditions for existence of and fast convergence to desirable objects, one may naturally ask further questions regarding properties of these algorithms. For instance, "are they parallelizable?", "how many solutions can they output?", "what is the expected "weight" of a solution?", etc. These questions and more have been answered for a class of LLL-inspired algorithms called commutative. In this paper we introduce a new, very natural and more general notion of commutativity (essentially matrix commutativity) which allows us to show a number of new refined properties of LLL-inspired local search algorithms with significantly simpler proofs

LIPIcs

The Lovász Local Lemma (LLL) is a powerful tool in probabilistic combinatorics which can be used to establish the existence of objects that satisfy certain properties. The breakthrough paper of Moser and Tardos and follow-up works revealed that the LLL has intimate connections with a class of stochastic local search algorithms for finding such desirable objects. In particular, it can be seen as a sufficient condition for this type of algorithms to converge fast. Besides conditions for existence of and fast convergence to desirable objects, one may naturally ask further questions regarding properties of these algorithms. For instance, "are they parallelizable?", "how many solutions can they output?", "what is the expected "weight" of a solution?", etc. These questions and more have been answered for a class of LLL-inspired algorithms called commutative. In this paper we introduce a new, very natural and more general notion of commutativity (essentially matrix commutativity) which allows us to show a number of new refined properties of LLL-inspired local search algorithms with significantly simpler proofs