Elaboración de un sistema de evaluación e innovación de actividades educativas fuera del aula escolar

Esta investigación elabora un sistema de evaluación e innovación de actividades educativas fuera del aula escolar, partiendo de las necesidades de un contexto institucional específico: el Museu Agbar de les Aigües. Sin embargo, es exportable a otras instituciones. Se puntualiza el concepto de evaluación considerado, los estudios sobre la enseñanza y el aprendizaje que pueden favorecer la construcción de conocimientos y el camino hacia la educación mediante las emociones en el ámbito no formal. Utilizando encuestas y observaciones de las actividades se detectan los aspectos a mejorar. Seguidamente, con la participación de todo el equipo educativo, se priorizan líneas de mejora, y se toman decisiones para elaborar nuevas propuestas didácticas. Para facilitar estos cambios se diseña el instrumento TIRPE: Tabla de Innovación Resultado del Proceso de Evaluación

Protective effect of glutathione on Escherichia coli cells upon lethal heat stress

Heat treatments are widely used by the food industry to obtain safe and stable products, therefore a deeper knowledge of its mode of action on microorganisms would allow a better profit of this technology. Heat shows a multitarget mechanism of action on bacteria, affecting various cellular structures, and causing unbalances in several homeostatic parameters. The aim of this work was to study the effect of glutathione on bacterial survival against heat treatments, in order to acquire knowledge about the mode of action of heat on bacterial cells. Cells were treated in presence or absence of added glutathione and the level of inactivation, soluble protein concentration, enzymatic activities, intracellular ROS level and membrane damages were studied. Results showed that glutathione protected microorganisms against heat inactivation. Moreover, glutathione in the treatment medium preserved intracellular enzyme activity, membrane structure and reduced ROS detection. Besides, glutathione decreased sublethal injury in E. coli. Data presented in this work add new knowledge about bacterial inactivation and survival by heat

New approach to managing COVID-19 pandemic in a complex tertiary care medical centre in Madrid, Spain

The COVID-19 pandemic is putting healthcare systems under unprecedented stress to accommodate unexpected numbers of patients forcing a quick re-organization. This article describes the staff management experience of a third level referral hospital in the city of Madrid, Spain, one of the cities and hospitals with the largest number of COVID19 cases. A newly created COVID-19-specific Clinical Management Unit (CMU) coordinated all clinical departments and conducted real-time assessments of the availability and needs of medical staff, alongside the hospital's general management board. The Unit was able to (i) redeploy up to 285 physicians every week to bolster medical care in COVID-19 wards and forecast medical staff requirements for the upcoming week so all departments could organize their work while coping with COVID-19 needs, (ii) overview all clinical activities conducted in a medicalized hotel, and (iii) recruit a team of roughly 90 volunteer medical students to accelerate data collection and evidence generation. The main advantage of a clinical management unit composed by a member of every job category - its ability to generate rapid, locally-adapted responses to unexpected challenges - made it perfect for the unprecedented increase in healthcare need generated by the COVID-19 pandemic

Live 5D hyper-spectral fluorescence imaging of developing zebrafish

The advent of fluorescent proteins (FP) has revolutionized the use of fluorescence microscopy in biology. The color palette of fluorescent proteins has grown over the years covering the entire spectrum from blue to near infra‐red. The use of multiple FPs has enabled studies of spatio‐temporal interaction of proteins, cells and tissues in vivo within living cells or developing embryos. Multiple labels have been imaged within the same sample, however, timelapse imaging of multiple labels remains challenging. Limiting factors such as noise, photo‐bleaching and ‐toxicity greatly compromise signal quality and throughput can be limited by the time required to unmix multiple labels. In this work, we report a method for rapidly denoising and unmixing multiple spectrally overlapping fluorophores while maintaining reduced negative photo‐effects, in a low signal‐to‐noise regime. We successfully applied the method to 4D datasets of Zebrafish embryos co‐expressing multiple labels, separating a total of 7 different FPs and intrinsic tissues autofluorescences, unmixing. Taking advantage of the technique’s enhanced signal collection and fast processing, we expanded the multi‐dimensionality to include time, obtaining 5D datasets (XYZ,time,label), which often fails in other techniques due to the challenges of photo‐damage and bleaching. We successfully performed long‐term imaging vessel sprouts transgenically labeled zebrafish embryos(Tg(ubiq: membrane‐Cerulean‐2a‐H2B‐ tdTomato);Tg(kdrl:eGFP), expressing fusion proteins of two endosome components, Rab9 and Rab11 (YFP and mCherry respectively). The rapid processing and denoising properties of our approach permitted the clean separation of the FP signals from one‐another and from autofluorescence, using low laser power that allowed for unaffected development, permitting 5D imaging of 7 clearly distinctive components

Natural Polysaccharides for siRNA Delivery: Nanocarriers Based on Chitosan, Hyaluronic Acid, and Their Derivatives

Natural polysaccharides are frequently used in the design of drug delivery systems due to their biocompatibility, biodegradability, and low toxicity. Moreover, they are diverse in structure, size, and charge, and their chemical functional groups can be easily modified to match the needs of the final application and mode of administration. This review focuses on polysaccharidic nanocarriers based on chitosan and hyaluronic acid for small interfering RNA (siRNA) delivery, which are highly positively and negatively charged, respectively. The key properties, strengths, and drawbacks of each polysaccharide are discussed. In addition, their use as efficient nanodelivery systems for gene silencing applications is put into context using the most recent examples from the literature. The latest advances in this field illustrate effectively how chitosan and hyaluronic acid can be modified or associated with other molecules in order to overcome their limitations to produce optimized siRNA delivery systems with promising in vitro and in vivo result

Surfactant-free synthesis and scalable purification of triangular gold nanoprisms with low non-specific cellular uptake

Gold nanoprisms possess remarkable optical properties that make them useful for medical biotechnology applications such as diagnosis and photothermal therapy. However, shape-selective synthesis of gold nanoprisms is not trivial and typically requires either toxic surfactants or time-consuming purification protocols, which can limit their applicability. Here, we show how triangular gold nanoprisms of different sizes can be purified by precipitation using the non-toxic glutathione ligand, thereby removing the need for toxic surfactants and bottleneck purification techniques. The protocol is amenable for direct scaling up as no instrumentation is required in the critical purification step. The new purification method provides a two-fold increased yield in gold nanoprisms compared to electrophoretic filtration, while providing nanoprisms of similar localized surface plasmon resonance wavelength. Crucially, the gold nanoprisms isolated using this methodology show fewer non-specific interactions with cells and lower cellular internalization, which paves the way for a higher selectivity in therapeutic applications

Gold nanoprism-nanorod face off: comparing the heating efficiency, cellular internalization and thermoablation capacity

[Aim]: This work compares the synthesis, heating capability, cellular internalization and thermoablation capacity of two different types of anisotropic gold nanoparticles: gold nanorods (NRs) and nanoprisms (NPrs). [Methods]: Both particles possess surface plasmon resonance absorption bands in the near-IR, and their heating efficiency upon irradiation with a continuous near-IR laser (1064 nm) was evaluated. The cellular internalization, location and toxicity of these PEG-stabilized NPrs and NRs were then assessed in the Vero cell line by transmission electron microscopy and inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry analysis, and their ability to induce cell death upon laser irradiation was then evaluated and compared. [Results & conclusion]: Although both nanoparticles are highly efficient photothermal converters, NRs possessed a more efficient heating capability, yet the in vitro thermoablation studies clearly demonstrated that NPrs were more effective at inducing cell death through photothermal ablation due to their greater cellular internalization.This work was supported by Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Fondo Social de la DGA (grupos DGA), Ministerio de la Economía y Competitividad del Gobierno de España for the public funding of Proyectos I+D+I – Programa Estatal de Investigación, Desarrollo e Innovación Orientada a los Retos de la Sociedad (project no. SAF2014–54763-C2–2-R) and the ERC-Starting grant 239931-NANOPUZZLE. For financial support SG Mitchell acknowledges the Fundación General CSIC (Programa ComFuturo); A Artiga acknowledges the Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deportes for an FPU grant (FPU014/06249); G Alfranca acknowledges the Ministry of Education for a China Scholarship Council (CSC) grant; and M Moros acknowledges the European Commission for an MCSA Fellowship (grant agreement no. 660228). TPeer Reviewe

Avaliação de genótipos de grão de bico em cultivo de sequeiro nas condições de cerrado.

O presente trabalho teve o objetivo de estimar o potencial de cultivo de grão de bico quando submetido a regime de baixa umidade no solo (sequeiro) e identificar genótipos com melhores características morfoagronômicas e de rendimento

Functions, organization and etiology. A reply to Artiga and Martinez

International audienceWe reply to Artiga and Martinez's claim according to which the organizational account of cross-generation functions implies a backward looking interpretation of etiology, just as standard etiological theories of function do. We argue that Artiga and Martinez's claim stems from a fundamental misunderstanding about the notion of " closure " , on which the organizational account relies. In particular, they incorrectly assume that the system, which is relevant for ascribing cross-generation organizational function, is the lineage. In contrast, we recall that organizational closure refers to a relational description of a network of mutual dependencies, abstracted from time, in which production relations are irrelevant. From an organizational perspective, ascribing a function to an entity means locating it in the abstract system that realizes closure. In particular, the position of each entity within the relational system conveys an etiological explanation of its existence, because of its dependence on the effects exerted by other entities subject to closure. Because of the abstract relational nature of closure, we maintain that the organizational account of functions does not endorse a backward looking interpretation of etiology. As a consequence, it does not fall prey of epiphenomenalism