Il DNA ambientale: un nuovo strumento molecolare per il monitoraggio della biodiversità presente e passata

Studiare la biodiversità di una località è un’operazione molto dispendiosa sia in termini di tempo che da un punto di vista economico. Può inoltre non essere semplice campionare tutte le specie presenti e da monitorare. Da alcuni anni è stato osservato che il DNA permane nell’ambiente sotto forma di frammenti brevi, ma di dimensioni comunque utili per studiare, attraverso metodiche molecolari, la biodiversità di un dato luogo, oltre che monitorare specie di interesse e evidenziarne in modo celere l’arrivo di nuove.The study of biodiversity can be extremely costing considering both time and financial support of traveling and sampling. Furthermore, it is possible to lack some species, whose monitoring can be relevant since they are specific biomarkers. Since some years, several laboratories assessed that it is possible to collect sample of environmental DNA that can be used for the identification of the species that live (or lived) in a specific location

Tastes of the Parents: epigenetics and its role in evolutionary aesthetics

Evolutionary Aesthetics is a bourgeoning and thriving sub-field of Aesthetics, the main aim of which is “the importation of aesthetics into natural sciences, and especially its integration into the heuristic of Darwin’s evolutionary theory.” Scholars working in the field attempt to determine through the adoption of an interdisciplinary research methodology whether and to what extent Darwinian evolution can shed light on our capacity to have aesthetic experiences, make aesthetic judgments (both of art and natural beauty), and produce literary, visual, musical artworks. Notwithstanding Evolutionary Aesthetics’ growing popularity in the past two decades, a look into the state of current research suggests a significant degree of haziness in the field from both epistemological-methodological and theoretical points of view. The main aim of the present paper is to make a first step towards a revision and extension of the discipline by assessing the role and potential of epigenetics in evolutionarily inspired aesthetic research. Epigenetics is among the youngest and most fascinating research fields in contemporary biology. But one of the most significant occurrences of the word “epigenesis” (the closest “ancestor” of contemporary “epigenetics”) is in Immanuel Kant’s third Critique, his aesthetic masterpiece. What might be the relationship between epigenetics and aesthetics? What is the role of epigenetic mechanisms in the development and functioning of aesthetic behavior in humans

Programming Languages shouldn't be "too Natural"

Despite much research on programming language principles, most often the design of modern languages ignores such principles which results in cumbersome, hard to understand, and error-prone code. We substantiate our claim through a short sampling of the features of some widely used languages and by referring to other criticisms widely publicized in the literature. We argue that a major reason of such an unpleasant state of the art is that programming languages evolve in a way that too much resembles that of natural languages. We advocate a different attitude in programming language design, going back to essentiality and rigorous application of few basic, well-chosen principles

ArchiTRIO: a UML-compatible language for architectural description and its formal semantics

ArchiTRIO [14] is a formal language, which complements UML 2.0 concepts with a formal, logic-based notation that allows users to state system-wide properties, both static and dynamic, including real- time constraints. In this paper we present the semantics of the core con- cepts of the ArchiTRIO language. As the core elements of ArchiTRIO coincide with those of UML 2.0 (operation, interface, port, class), the semantics of ArchiTRIO provides also a formal definition for the basic concepts on which UML 2.0 is built

Presence and conservation of the immunoglobulin superfamily in insects: current perspective and future challenges

Numerous proteins that contain a bona fide immunoglobulin domain have been identified in the last decade showing that immunoglobulin-like proteins are quite common in metazoans. In particular, recent surveys identified more than 140 immunoglobulin-like proteins in Drosophila melanogaster, Anopheles gambiae and Bombyx mori. A well-studied example of immunoglobulin-like protein is the Drosophila Down syndrome cell adhesion molecule (Dscam) that, accordingly to comparative molecular analyses, showed a high conservation in Diptera, Hymenoptera and Coleoptera, together with a conserved presence of alternative splicing that permitted insects to possess an unsuspected molecular complexity of their innate immune system. At a functional level, immunoglobulin-like proteins seem to be capable of reacting to pathogen challenges and may contribute to the defense against infection so that they are candidates as immune effector molecules in insects. Preliminary findings on insect-borne plant and animal diseases suggest a possible role of the immunoglobulin-like proteins in the vectorial capacity

Preliminary study: Comparison of antioxidant activity of cannabidiol (CBD) and α-tocopherol added to refined olive and sunflower oils

This study evaluates the antioxidant activity of cannabidiol (CBD), added to model systems of refined olive (ROO) and sunflower (SO) oils, by measuring the peroxide value, oxidative stability index (OSI), electron spin resonance (ESR) forced oxidation, and DPPH• assays. Free acidity, a parameter of hydrolytic rancidity, was also examined. CBD was compared using the same analytical scheme with α-tocopherol. CBD, compared to α-tocopherol, showed a higher scavenging capacity, measured by DPPH• assay, but not better oxidative stability (OSI) of the oily systems considered. In particular, α-tocopherol (0.5%) showed an antioxidant activity only in SO, registered by an increase of more than 30% of the OSI (from 4.15 ± 0.07 to 6.28 ± 0.11 h). By ESR-forced oxidation assay, the concentration of free radicals (μM) in ROO decreased from 83.33 ± 4.56 to 11.23 ± 0.28 and in SO from 19.21 ± 1.39 to 6.90 ± 0.53 by adding 0.5% α-tocopherol. On the contrary, the addition of 0.5% CBD caused a worsening of the oxidative stability of ROO (from 23.58 ± 0.32 to 17.28 ± 0.18 h) and SO (from 4.93 ± 0.04 to 3.98 ± 0.04 h). Furthermore, 0.5% of CBD did not lower dramatically the concentration of free radicals (μM) as for α-tocopherol, which passed from 76.94 ± 9.04 to 72.25 ± 4.13 in ROO and from 17.91 ± 0.95 to 16.84 ± 0.25 in SO

A Model Checker for Operator Precedence Languages

The problem of extending model checking from finite state machines to procedural programs has fostered much research toward the definition of temporal logics for reasoning on context-free structures. The most notable of such results are temporal logics on Nested Words, such as CaRet and NWTL. Recently, Precedence Oriented Temporal Logic (POTL) has been introduced to specify and prove properties of programs coded trough an Operator Precedence Language (OPL). POTL is complete w.r.t. the FO restriction of the MSO logic previously defined as a logic fully equivalent to OPL. POTL increases NWTL's expressive power in a perfectly parallel way as OPLs are more powerful that nested words.In this article, we produce a model checker, named POMC, for OPL programs to prove properties expressed in POTL. To the best of our knowledge, POMC is the first implemented and openly available model checker for proving tree-structured properties of recursive procedural programs. We also report on the experimental evaluation we performed on POMC on a nontrivial benchmark