Praziquantel: its use in control of schistosomiasis in sub-Saharan Africa and current research needs

Treatment with praziquantel (PZQ) has become virtually the sole basis of schistosomiasis control in sub-Saharan Africa and elsewhere, and the drug is reviewed here in the context of the increasing rate that it is being used for this purpose. Attention is drawn to our relative lack of knowledge about the mechanisms of action of PZQ at the molecular level, the need for more work to be done on schistosome isolates that have been collected recently from endemic areas rather than those maintained in laboratory conditions for long periods, and our reliance for experimental work mainly on Schistosoma mansoni, little work having been done on S. haematobium. There is no evidence that resistance to PZQ has been induced in African schistosomes as a result of its large-scale use on that continent to date, but there is also no assurance that PZQ and/or schistosomes are in any way unique and that resistant organisms will not be selected as a result of widespread drug usage. The failure of PZQ to produce complete cures in populations given a routine treatment should therefore solicit considerable concern. With few alternatives to PZQ currently available and/or on the horizon, methods to monitor drug-susceptibility in African schistosomes need to be devised and used to help ensure that this drug remains effective for as long a time as possibl

A complete fos approach for indoor crowdsourced mapping. Case study on Sapienza University of Rome faculties

Indoor mapping is an essential process in several applications such as the visualization of space and its utilization, security and resource planning, emergency planning and location-based alerts and, last but not least, indoor navigation. In this work, a completely free and open-source (FOS) approach to map indoor environments, and to navigate through them, is presented. Our tests were carried out within Sapienza University of Rome public buildings; in detail, Letters and Philosophy faculty and Engineering faculty indoor environments were mapped. To reach this goal, only open source software such as Quantum GIS (QGIS) and open-source platforms like Open Street Map (OSM) and its indoor viewer, Open Level Up (OLU) were adopted. A database of indoor environments of the two faculties, completely compatible with OLU, was created through QGIS. In this way, a public territorial information system of classrooms, offices and laboratories is accessible to everyone who can, hence, add or modify the information, following the principle of crowdsourcing and of Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI). The developed procedure is now standard and its outputs accepted by the OSM community. Hence, the long-term developments of this project are the proposal for the volunteered and cooperative indoor mapping and design of strategic buildings and infrastructures (hospitals, schools, public offices, shopping centers, stations, airports etc.), starting from the available information (indoor layouts) and knowledge acquired through experience of people who normally work inside them and/or visit them frequently. In this context it is possible to state that the development of VGI for internal maps for strategic buildings, infrastructures and denied GNSS environments, not only supports and improves internal and external navigation without interruption, but can also have a significant positive impact on security and emergency management

Enabling monocular depth perception at the very edge

Depth estimation is crucial in several computer vision applications, and a recent trend aims at inferring such a cue from a single camera through computationally demanding CNNs - precluding their practical deployment in several application contexts characterized by low-power constraints. Purposely, we develop a tiny network tailored to microcontrollers, processing low-resolution images to obtain a coarse depth map of the observed scene. Our solution enables depth perception with minimal power requirements (a few hundreds of mW), accurately enough to pave the way to several high-level applications at-the-edge

Praziquantel: its use in control of schistosomiasis in sub-Saharan Africa and current research needs

Treatment with praziquantel (PZQ) has become virtually the sole basis of schistosomiasis control in sub-Saharan Africa and elsewhere, and the drug is reviewed here in the context of the increasing rate that it is being used for this purpose. Attention is drawn to our relative lack of knowledge about the mechanisms of action of PZQ at the molecular level, the need for more work to be done on schistosome isolates that have been collected recently from endemic areas rather than those maintained in laboratory conditions for long periods, and our reliance for experimental work mainly on Schistosoma mansoni, little work having been done on S. haematobium. There is no evidence that resistance to PZQ has been induced in African schistosomes as a result of its large-scale use on that continent to date, but there is also no assurance that PZQ and/or schistosomes are in any way unique and that resistant organisms will not be selected as a result of widespread drug usage. The failure of PZQ to produce complete cures in populations given a routine treatment should therefore solicit considerable concern. With few alternatives to PZQ currently available and/or on the horizon, methods to monitor drug-susceptibility in African schistosomes need to be devised and used to help ensure that this drug remains effective for as long a time as possibl

Smart Dairy Farming: Innovative Solutions to Improve Herd Productivity

Among the most straining trends that farmers have to face there are: on one side, to guarantee welfare and adequate life conditions for animals and to reduce the environmental footprint, on the other side, to develop new strategies to improve farm management reducing costs. The current conditions and the expected developments of the dairy sector highlight a strong need for more efficient and sustainable farming systems. Studying heat stress, herd management and housing and animals\u2019 productive and reproductive performances is fundamental for the economic and environmental sustainability of the dairy chain. New and effective tools to cope with these challenges have been provided by Precision Livestock Farming (PLF), which is nowadays increasingly applied and makes possible to control quali-quantitative parameters related to production, health, behaviour, and real-time locomotion per animal. The research key challenge is to turn these data into knowledge to provide real-time support in farming optimisation. This research focuses specifically on different systems to collect, process and derive useful information from data on animal welfare and productivity. A multi-disciplinary approach has been adopted to generate a decision support system for farmers

SchistoDB: a Schistosoma mansoni genome resource

SchistoDB (http://schistoDB.net/) is a genomic database for the parasitic organism Schistosoma mansoni, one of the major causative agents of schistosomiasis worldwide. It currently incorporates sequences and annotation for S. mansoni in a single user-friendly database. Several genomic scale analyses are available as well as ESTs, oligonucleotides, metabolic pathways and drugs. In this article, we describe the data sets and its analyses, how to query the database and tools available in the website

Oxamniquine resistance alleles are widespread in Old World Schistosoma mansoni and predate drug deployment

Do mutations required for adaptation occur de novo, or are they segregating within populations as standing genetic variation? This question is key to understanding adaptive change in nature, and has important practical consequences for the evolution of drug resistance. We provide evidence that alleles conferring resistance to oxamniquine (OXA), an antischistosomal drug, are widespread in natural parasite populations under minimal drug pressure and predate OXA deployment. OXA has been used since the 1970s to treat Schistosoma mansoni infections in the New World where S. mansoni established during the slave trade. Recessive loss-of-function mutations within a parasite sulfotransferase (SmSULT-OR) underlie resistance, and several verified resistance mutations, including a deletion (p.E142del), have been identified in the New World. Here we investigate sequence variation in SmSULT-OR in S. mansoni from the Old World, where OXA has seen minimal usage. We sequenced exomes of 204 S. mansoni parasites from West Africa, East Africa and the Middle East, and scored variants in SmSULT-OR and flanking regions. We identified 39 non-synonymous SNPs, 4 deletions, 1 duplication and 1 premature stop codon in the SmSULT-OR coding sequence, including one confirmed resistance deletion (p.E142del). We expressed recombinant proteins and used an in vitro OXA activation assay to functionally validate the OXA-resistance phenotype for four predicted OXA-resistance mutations. Three aspects of the data are of particular interest: (i) segregating OXA-resistance alleles are widespread in Old World populations (4.29–14.91% frequency), despite minimal OXA usage, (ii) two OXA-resistance mutations (p.W120R, p.N171IfsX28) are particularly common (>5%) in East African and Middle-Eastern populations, (iii) the p.E142del allele has identical flanking SNPs in both West Africa and Puerto Rico, suggesting that parasites bearing this allele colonized the New World during the slave trade and therefore predate OXA deployment. We conclude that standing variation for OXA resistance is widespread in S. mansoni