Fingering instability in spreading epithelial monolayers: roles of cell polarisation, substrate friction and contractile stresses

Collective cell migration plays a crucial role in many developmental processes that underlie morphogenesis, wound healing, or cancer progression. In such coordinated behaviours, cells are organised in coherent structures and actively migrate to serve different biological purposes. In some contexts, namely during epithelial wound healing, it is well known that a migrating free-edge monolayer develops finger-like instabilities, yet the onset is still under debate. Here, by means of theory and numerical simulations, we shed light on the main mechanisms driving the instability process, analysing the linear and nonlinear dynamics of a continuum compressible polar fluid. In particular, we assess the role of cell polarisation, substrate friction, and contractile stresses. Linear theory shows that it is crucial to analyse the perturbation transient dynamics, since we unravel a plethora of crossovers between different exponential growth rates during the linear regime. Numerical simulations suggest that cell-substrate friction could be the mechanism responsible for the formation of complex finger-like structures at the edge, since it triggers secondary fingering instabilities and tip-splitting phenomena. Finally, we obtain a critical contractile stress that depends on cell-substrate friction and the initial-to-nematic length ratio, characterising an active wetting-dewetting transition. In the dewetting scenario, the monolayer retracts and becomes stable without developing finger-like structures.Comment: 15 pages, 9 figures, 1 table, submitted to Soft Matte

Academic literacy and student diversity: evaluating a curriculum-integrated inclusive practice intervention in the United Kingdom

The sustainability of universities is based, among other aspects, on their ability to adapt to changes and the needs of students, an increasingly diverse population. In this sense, Academic literacy provision at universities tends to be centralized and to offer language support for general academic literacy purposes rather than language development that responds in a more nuanced way to the particular literacy needs of students’ disciplines. Yet, in recent years, several studies have supported the integration of academic literacy into subject teaching outlining the principles of an inclusive model of academic literacy instruction. This paper draws on a theoretical framework developed by Wingate to evaluate a curriculum-integrated inclusive practice intervention in the United Kingdom with students from a first-year credit-bearing module at Middlesex University Business School. The study used a mixed methods approach that includes a literature review, secondary data, feedback questionnaire and a focus group to evaluate our teaching method and reflect on the collaboration of the team members to develop this inclusive pedagogical approach. The findings suggest that, on the whole, this intervention was perceived by both the module teaching team and students as positive, welcoming and often crucial for supporting undergraduate students into the disciplinary discourse of their subject of study. Yet, recommendations were made with respect to developing better guidelines for subject lecturers on how to deliver the integrated academic literacy as well as the importance of the participation of students, student learning assistants and graduate teaching assistants in the design of the intervention. This study contributes to the literature on inclusive practice intervention and pedagogical approaches to integrating academic literacy into subject teaching for a diverse student population, contributing to the social sustainability of the universities

Holographic Fabry-Perot spectrometer

We propose a spectrum analyzer based on the properties of a hologram recorded with the field transmitted by a Fabry-Perot etalon. The spectral response of this holographic Fabry-Perot spectrometer (HFPS) is analytically investigated in the paraxial approximation and compared with a conventional Fabry-Perot etalon of similar characteristics. We demonstrate that the resolving power is twice increased and the free spectral range (FSR) is reduced to one-half. The proposed spectrometer could improve the operational performance of the etalon because it can exhibit high efficiency and it would be insensible to environmental conditions such as temperature and vibrations. Our analysis also extends to another variant of the HFPS based on holographic multiplexing of the transmitted field of a Fabry-Perot etalon. This device increases the FSR, keeping the same HFPS performance. © 2011 Optical Society of America.We thank A. Cámara Iglesias for valuable discussions and advice. Financial support from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation under project TEC 2008-04105 is acknowledged.Peer Reviewe

Ordinal and nominal classication of wind speed from synoptic pressure patterns

Wind speed reconstruction is a challenging problem in areas (mainly wind farms) where there are not direct wind measures available. Di erent approaches have been applied to this reconstruction, such as measure-correlatepredict algorithms, approaches based on physical models such as reanalysis methods, or more recently, indirect measures such as pressure, and its relation to wind speed. This paper adopts the latter method, and deals with wind speed estimation in wind farms from pressure measures, but including different novelties in the problem treatment. Existing synoptic pressure-based indirect approaches for wind speed estimation are based on considering the wind speed as a continuous target variable, estimating then the corresponding wind series of continuous values. However, the exact wind speed is not always needed by wind farms managers, and a general idea of the level of speed is, in the majority of cases, enough to set functional operations for the farm (such as wind turbines stop, for example). Moreover, the accuracy of the models obtained is usually improved for the classi cation task, given that the problem is simpli ed. Thus, this paper tackles the problem of wind speed prediction from synoptic pressure patterns by considering wind speed as a discrete variable and, consequently, wind speed prediction as a classi cation problem, with four wind level categories: low, moderate, high or very high. Moreover, taking into account that these four di erent classes are associated to four values in an ordinal scale, the problem can be considered as an ordinal regression problem. The performance of several ordinal and nominal classi- ers and the improvement achieved by considering the ordering information are evaluated. The results obtained in this paper present the Support Vector Machine as the best tested classi er for this task. In addition, the use of the intrinsic ordering information of the problem is shown to signi cantly improve ranks with respect to nominal classi cation, although di erences in accuracy are smal

Intracellular deprotection reactions mediated by palladium complexes equipped with designed phosphine ligands

Discrete palladium(II) complexes featuring purposely designed phosphine ligands can promote depropargylation and deallylation reactions in cell lysates. These complexes perform better than other palladium sources, which apparently are rapidly deactivated in such hostile complex media. This good balance between reactivity and stability allows the use of these discrete phosphine palladium complexes in living mammalian cells, whereby they can mediate similar transformations. The presence of a phosphine ligand in the coordination sphere of palladium also provides for the introduction of targeting groups, such as hydrophobic phosphonium moieties, which facilitate the accumulation of the complexes in mitochondria

Resultados de la Experimentación con Nueve Preselecciones de Híbridos de Albaricoquero Resistentes al Virus de la Sharka

En 1993 se inició en el IVIA un programa de mejora genética del albaricoquero con el fin de obtener nuevas variedades resistentes al virus de la sharka y con buena adaptación a muestras condiciones agronómicas y comerciales. En este trabajo se presentan los resultados de 9 híbridos preseleccionados que han destacado hasta el momento. Algunos de ellos podrán convertirse en breve en variedades comerciales para sustituir a las variedades tradicionales valencianas susceptibles a la sharka

Descripción de Variedades de Níspero Japonés

En todos los países de la cuenca mediterránea existe un interés creciente por los frutales llamados “menores”: higuera, caqui, granado, níspero, etc (Bellini y Giordani, 1999), llamados así por tener menores volúmenes de producción y consumo que los frutales “mayores” (manzano, peral, melocotonero,etc). Los frutales menores empiezan a ser en muchos casos una alternativa interesante de cultivo para áreas concretas del Mediterráneo y, además, constituyen un patrimonio genético importantísimo en esta zona del mundo. En las comarcas mediterráneas españolas, y concretamente en la Comunidad Valenciana (CV), el níspero japonés es una de las especies menores más interesantes (Martínez-Calvo y col., 2000). En esta publicación se presenta la descripción de las principales variedades de una colección reunida en el IVIA que, actualmente, constituye el banco de germoplasma español de esta especie. La descripción de variedades va precedida de una breve introducción donde se realiza la descripción botánica de la especie y se revisa su origen, su importancia económica y las características de la producción y de las técnicas de cultivo en la CV. Después de la descripción de variedades se ha incluido un capítulo sobre la identificación de los estados de crecimiento del níspero japonés (escala BBCH extendida)