Cell wall proteins: a new insight through proteomics

Cell wall proteins are essential constituents of plant cell walls; they are involved in modifications of cell wall components, wall structure, signaling and interactions with plasma membrane proteins at the cell surface. The application of proteomic approaches to the cell wall compartment raises important questions: are there technical problems specific to cell wall proteomics? What kinds of proteins can be found in Arabidopsis walls? Are some of them unexpected? What sort of post-translational modifications have been characterized in cell wall proteins to date? The purpose of this review is to discuss the experimental results obtained to date using proteomics, as well as some of the new questions challenging future research

Enzyme Promiscuity in Enolase Superfamily. Theoretical Study of o-Succinylbenzoate Synthase Using QM/MM Methods

The promiscuous activity of the enzyme o-succinylbenzoate synthase (OSBS) from the actinobacteria Amycolatopsis is investigated by means of QM/MM methods, using both density functional theory and semiempirical Hamiltonians. This enzyme catalyzes not only the dehydration of 2-succinyl-6R-hydroxy-2,4-cyclohexadiene-1R-carboxylate but also catalyzes racemization of different acylamino acids, with N-succinyl-R-phenylglycine being the best substrate. We investigated the molecular mechanisms for both reactions exploring the potential energy surface. Then, molecular dynamics simulations were performed to obtain the free energy profiles and the averaged interaction energies of enzymatic residues with the reacting system. Our results confirm the plausibility of the reaction mechanisms proposed in the literature, with a good agreement between theoretical and experimentally derived activation free energies. Our simulations unravel the role played by the different residues in each of the two possible reactions. The presence of flexible loops in the active site and the selection of structural modifications in the substrate seem to be key elements to promote the promiscuity of this enzyme.This work was supported by the Spanish Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad project CTQ2012-36253-C03-03 ́ and FEDER funds. K.S. thanks the Polish National Science Center (NCN) for Grant 2011/02/A/ST4/00246. The authors acknowledge computational facilities of the Servei d’Informatica ̀ de la Universitat de Valencia in the ̀ “Tirant” supercomputer, which is part of the Spanish Supercomputing Network

Eficacia de las maniobras de reposicionamiento canalicular en el vértigo posicional paroxístico benigno: revisión de 176 casos tratados en un centro hospitalario de tercer nivel.

[spa] Introducción y objetivos El vértigo posicional paroxístico benigno es la entidad más frecuente dentro de los vértigos de origen periférico. El objetivo del siguiente trabajo es revisar los resultados obtenidos con las diferentes maniobras de reposicionamiento canalicular específicas para cada tipo de canal semicircular afectado, evaluando posibles factores de riesgo relacionados con un peor pronóstico. Métodos Se han revisado retrospectivamente 176 pacientes diagnosticados de vértigo posicional paroxístico benigno en nuestro centro, de los cuales 150 tenían vértigo del canal semicircular posterior, 20 del horizontal, 3 del superior y 3 multicanal. Se ha usado la maniobra de Epley para el tratamiento del canal posterior y del superior y la maniobra de Lempert para el tratamiento del horizontal. En los casos refractarios se ha realizado siempre un estudio de imagen cerebral con resonancia. Resultados La maniobra de Epley ha mostrado una eficacia al primer intento del 74,6% para el canal posterior y del 100% para el superior. La eficacia de la maniobra de Lempert para el canal horizontal ha sido del 72,72% en los casos de canalolitiasis y del 58,33% en los de cupulolitiasis. Más complicado ha sido el tratamiento de los pacientes con más de un canal afectado y con antecedente quirúrgico en el mes previo. Conclusiones Las maniobras de reposicionamiento canalicular permiten alcanzar una tasa de éxito muy alta, obteniendo mejores resultados en el tratamiento del canal posterior. Hacen falta más estudios para confirmar la sospecha de que la cirugía previa pueda ser un factor de peor pronóstico

Building a gold standard dataset to identify articles about geographic information science

To know the overall regional or international scientific production is of vital importance to many areas of knowledge. Nevertheless, in interdisciplinary areas such as Geographic Information Science (GISc) it is not enough to just count papers published in specific journals. Most of them, as is the case of the International Journal of Remote Sensing (IJRS), welcome GISc papers but are not exclusive to that area so the production assignable to authors in the region must consider not only affiliation but also whether or not each paper falls into the theme of GISc. IJRS publishes far more papers than any other GISc journal, so it is important to assess quantitatively how many of them are of GISc. In this work, a representative sample of IJRS articles published over a period of almost 30 years was analyzed using a specific GISc definition. With these data, a manual classification methodology through a set of experts was carried out, and a dataset was built, analyzed, and statistically tested. As a result we estimate that between 47 and 76% of the IJRS articles can be considered from GISc, with a confidence level of 95%. Aside from the primary goal, this set could be used as a gold standard for future classification tasks. It constitutes the first GISc dataset of this kind, that may be used to train artificial intelligence systems capable of performing the same classification automatically and in a massive way. A similar procedure could be applied to other interdisciplinary fields of knowledge as well