Foundations of Theoretical Approaches in Systems Biology

AM-S was funded by the German Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) projects OpHeLiA (0316197) and HOBBIT (031B0363A). RA funded by Generalitat de Catalunya Consolidated Group SGR133 (2017). JV was funded by the German Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) projects e:Med-CAPSyS (01ZX1604F and 01ZX1304F) and e:Bio-MelEVIR (031L0073A)

An algebraic characterization of affine manifolds with g-stucture satisfying a homogeneity condition

We give an algebraic characterization of the possible characteristic tensors of an infinitesimally homogeneous affine manifold with G-structure.Comment: 15 page

Meio Ambiente, tutelas de urgência e processo coletivo

A problemática ambiental vem assumindo grande importância na sociedade atual. A utilização demasiada dos recursos serve como base para grandes discussões. Ao mesmo tempo em que se reconhece ao cidadão o direito de usufruir do ambiente que o cerca, impõe deveres, no sentido de garantir-se a utilização racional dos recursos ambientais. Apesar da existência de uma vasta legislação ambiental, o tema exige maiores mecanismos de controle, visando a proteção e garantia dos recursos naturais. Assim, faz-se necessária uma nova interpretação dos princípios processuais que vigoram no ordenamento, no sentido de melhorar a tutela do bem ambiental

SMEs and barriers to eco-innovation in EU: A diverse palette of greens

Ingenio Working Paper SeriesEco-innovation is an explicit aim of major EU policy strategies. Many environmental policy de facto require firms to eco-innovate to comply with policy requirements, while the overlap between policy-driven and market-driven eco-innovation strategies is increasingly important for many firms. Barriers to eco-innovation can then emerge as a critical factor in either preventing or stimulating EU strategies, policy implementation, and 'green strategies' by firms. In this paper, we propose a taxonomy of EU SMEs in terms of barriers to eco-innovation. The aim is to discriminate among SMEs on how they differ in terms of perception of barriers and engagement in environmental innovation, thus highlighting the need to look at eco-innovation barriers in relation to firms' attitudes, technological and organizational capabilities, and strategies. We identify six clusters of SMEs. These clusters include firms facing 'Revealed barriers', 'Deterring barriers', 'Cost deterred' firms, 'Market deterred' firms, 'Non eco-innovators' and 'Green champions'. The clusters show substantial differences in terms of ecoinnovation adoption. We show that our proposed taxonomy has little overlap with sector classifications. This diversity should be taken into account for successful environmental innovation policies.Peer reviewe

Litigation for health technology accessibility: A tool for inequality? Reflections based on case study analysis

INTRODUCTION: The objective of this work is to analyze the characteristics of litigation for access to health’s goods and services in the Social Health Insurance (SHI) of Buenos Aires, Argentina. METHOD: Descriptive study with analytical stage, performed in SHI, analyzing litigation done by beneficiaries along 15-years period to obtain goods or service from health managers. Variables explored were: Reason for litigation, delay time in case resolution, final result of judicial sentence, judges, lawyers and intervening professionals, income level of beneficiaries who started the litigation. RESULT: 825 cases were analyzed during the study period according the method described. Demands increased 29.2 ±% per year. Medicines were the goods that most requested legal protection resources (32.5%). 51.9% of these litigations were due to medicines that have less than 24 months of registration by the National Regulatory Agency. The average delay for the final resolution of the procedure was 3.7 months. Judge's sentence was favorable to the beneficiaries in 97.4%. Although there are 27 judicial departments and many courts in each one; cases were concentrated in 47.4% only 2 very few courts. Litigation cases promoted by 112 out of the 15000 doctors that provides services to the SHI. In 73.7% of the cases, beneficiaries that litigated had a salary that exceed 4 times the minimum wage, and only 3.2% of them had low income. CONCLUSION: We show how legal appeals might be working as an inverse strategy to the one desired, transferring collective resources belonging to the entire population, towards an specific demand from the most economically wealthy sector of society. As long as access to health care litigation maintains its current individualistic pattern, it will hardly be able to develop its full potential to guarantee effective respect for the collective right to access to goods that beneficiary the whole community.Fil: Marin, Gustavo Horacio. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - La Plata; Argentina. Universidad Nacional de La Plata. Facultad de Ciencias Médicas; ArgentinaFil: Marin, Lupe. Universidad Nacional de La Plata. Facultad de Ciencias Médicas; Argentina. Provincia de Buenos Aires. Gobernación. Comisión de Investigaciones Científicas; ArgentinaFil: Aguero, Daniel Alberto. Universidad Nacional Arturo Jauretche; ArgentinaFil: Marin, Gina. Universidad Nacional de La Plata. Facultad de Ciencias Médicas; ArgentinaFil: Pagnotta, Mariana. Universidad Nacional de La Plata. Facultad de Ciencias Médicas; ArgentinaFil: Blanco, Luis. Universidad Nacional de La Plata. Facultad de Ciencias Médicas; Argentin

Resíduos de aflatoxina B1 em fígado de codornas japonesas (Coturnix japonica) expostas a alimentos contaminados e à corticosterona exógena

The combined effect of aflatoxin B1 (AFB1 ) exposition and stress induced by corticosterone (CORT) upon the residual aflatoxin levels in livers of Japanese quail was examined. A total of 144 Japanese quail (Coturnix japonica) were divided into 6 treatments with 6 replicates per treatment, each containing 2 males and 2 females. The different treatments resulted from the combination of the presence or absence of CORT in drinking water (5 mg/L) with the presence or absence of AFB1 supplementation (100 or 500 ng/g). Dietary treatments were offered from 5 to 11 weeks of age. The different diets were: Treatment (T) 1: basal diet (B) AFB1 (15 ng/g); T2: B plus AFB1 (100 ng/g); T3: B plus AFB1 (500 ng/g); T4: B plus CORT (5 mg/L); T5: B plus AFB1 (100 ng/g) and CORT (5 mg/L); and T6: B plus AFB1 (500 ng/g) and CORT (5 mg/L). The residual levels of AFB1 were remarkably higher in livers of birds fed with AFB1 in comparison with those belonging to the group that received a combination of AFB1 and CORT (P< 0.05). A plausible explanation about the facts that could be responsible for observed reduction in the toxin carryover in liver was suggested. These results are very striking and may constitute the start point for a series of studies that aim to elucidate the precise influence of hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis (HPA) response to stress in birds exposed to AFB.Estudou-se o efeito combinado da exposição à aflatoxina B1 (AFB1 ) e o estresse induzido por corticosterona (CORT) sobre os níveis de residuais de AFB1 em fígados de codornas japonesas. Um total de 144 codornas japonesas (Coturnix japonica) foram divididas em 6 tratamentos com 6 repetições por tratamento, cada uma contendo 2 machos e 2 fêmeas. As dietas dos tratamentos foram oferecidas da 5ª até a 11ª semana de idade. Os diferentes tratamentos resultaram da combinação da presença ou ausência de CORT na água de beber (5 mg / L), com a presença ou ausência de suplementação AFB1 (100 ou 500 ng /g) As dietas diferentes foram: Tratamento (T) 1: dieta basal (B) AFB1 (15 ng/g); T2: B mais AFB1 (100 ng / g); T3: B mais AFB1 (500 ng / g); T4: B mais CORT (5 mg / L); T5: B mais AFB1 (100 ng / g) e CORT (5 mg / L), e T6: B mais AFB1 (500 ng / g) e CORT (5 mg / L). Os níveis residuais de AFB1 foram significativamente mais elevados em fígados de aves alimentadas com AFB1 em comparação com os que pertencem ao grupo que recebeu uma combinação de AFB1 e CORT (P< 0,05). Sugere-se uma possível explicação para a redução dos níveis da toxina observada naqueles animais submetidos a dieta com CORT. Estes resultados constituem-se de um ponto de início para uma série de estudos que visam a elucidar a influência da resposta do eixo hipotalâmico-hipofisário-adrenais (HPA) ao stress em aves expostas a AFB.Fil: Magnoli, Alejandra Paola. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Córdoba. Instituto de Investigaciones Biológicas y Tecnológicas. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas, Físicas y Naturales. Instituto de Investigaciones Biológicas y Tecnológicas; ArgentinaFil: Chiacchiera, Stella Maris. Universidad Nacional de Río Cuarto. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas Fisicoquímicas y Naturales. Departamento de Química; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; ArgentinaFil: Rosa, Carlos Alberto da Rocha. Universidade Federal Rural de Rio de Janeiro; BrasilFil: Dalcero, Ana Maria. Universidad Nacional de Río Cuarto. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas, Fisicoquímicas y Naturales. Departamento de Microbiología e Inmunología; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; ArgentinaFil: Marin, Raul Hector. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas, Físicas y Naturales; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentin

The skill-content of green technologies

Trabajo presentado a la EU-SPRI Conference: "Science and Innovation Policy: Dynamics, Challenges, Responsibility and Practice", celebrada en Manchester (UK) del 18 al 20 de junio de 2014.In the wide spectrum of expected impacts of the transition towards environmentally sustainable economies, those that affect employment are among the most relevant due to their societal importance. We believe that the persistent lack of detailed analyses on the skill content of the jobs created, modified (or destructed) by ‘green technological change’ is a significant shortcoming of the literature that, ultimately, limits the capacity to define problems and identify possible solutions for the educational and training system. The present paper seeks to fill this gap by proposing a framework that analyses in detail the task- and skill-content of green occupations. The case of green technologies represents an interesting application for this approach. Not only green technologies are the most direct way to address climate change problems and resource scarcity, but they also involve fundamental changes in the way products are designed, processed and disposed off. Given the scant of literature on green skills, the main goal of our empirical analysis is to identify the skill profile of green occupation and, as a second step, to explain differences in the skill content using our measure of technology exposure. More in detail, our empirical strategy is designed to compare green and non-green occupations along the four skill dimensions defined above.Peer Reviewe

DMAP: a Distributed Morphological Attention Policy for Learning to Locomote with a Changing Body

Biological and artificial agents need to deal with constant changes in the real world. We study this problem in four classical continuous control environments, augmented with morphological perturbations. Learning to locomote when the length and the thickness of different body parts vary is challenging, as the control policy is required to adapt to the morphology to successfully balance and advance the agent. We show that a control policy based on the proprioceptive state performs poorly with highly variable body configurations, while an (oracle) agent with access to a learned encoding of the perturbation performs significantly better. We introduce DMAP, a biologically-inspired, attention-based policy network architecture. DMAP combines independent proprioceptive processing, a distributed policy with individual controllers for each joint, and an attention mechanism, to dynamically gate sensory information from different body parts to different controllers. Despite not having access to the (hidden) morphology information, DMAP can be trained end-to-end in all the considered environments, overall matching or surpassing the performance of an oracle agent. Thus DMAP, implementing principles from biological motor control, provides a strong inductive bias for learning challenging sensorimotor tasks. Overall, our work corroborates the power of these principles in challenging locomotion tasks

An individually fitted physical barrier device as a tool to restrict the birds’spatial access: can their use alter behavioral responses?

In this work we introduce an hp finite element method for two-dimensional Poisson problems on curved domains using curved elements. We obtain a priori  error estimates and define a local a posteriori error estimator of residual type.We show,  under appropriate assumptions about the curved domain, the globalreliability and the local efficiency of the esimator. More precisely, we prove that theestimator is equivalent to the energy norm of the error up to higher order terms. The equivalence constant of the efficiency estimate depends on the polynomial degree.We also present an hp adaptive algorithm and several numerical tests which show the performance of the adaptive strategy.Fil: Pellegrini, Stefanía. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Córdoba. Instituto de Investigaciones Biológicas y Tecnológicas. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas, Físicas y Naturales. Instituto de Investigaciones Biológicas y Tecnológicas; ArgentinaFil: Marin, Raul Hector. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Córdoba. Instituto de Investigaciones Biológicas y Tecnológicas. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas, Físicas y Naturales. Instituto de Investigaciones Biológicas y Tecnológicas; ArgentinaFil: Guzmán, Diego Alberto. Aarhus University. Aarhus Institute Of Advanced Studies.; Dinamarca. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Córdoba. Instituto de Investigaciones Biológicas y Tecnológicas. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas, Físicas y Naturales. Instituto de Investigaciones Biológicas y Tecnológicas; Argentin

Japanese quail classified by their permanence in proximity to a high or low density of conspecifics: a search for underpinning variables

Test of sociality in poultry is mainly based on the bird's individual ability to make quick social discriminations. In recent years, a density-related permanence (DRP) test has been developed that enables us to classify young birds (while in groups) according to their individual permanence in proximity to either a high or low density of conspecifics (HD or LD, respectively). Thus, the result of the classification depends not only on the bird's individual response but also on the outcome of the social interactions within the whole group. The birds' performance in DRP was associated with underlying differences in social responses of their individuals. Quails in homogeneous groups of LD residents responded with less compact groups and higher levels of agonistic interactions to the presence of an intruder and showed higher levels of agonistic interactions among cage-mates than the homogeneous groups of HD birds. An acute stressor also induced a higher corticosterone response in the LD birds than in their HD counterparts. The present study addressed the question of whether contrasting DRP performance by Japanese quail can also reflect underlying differences in fearfulness and social reinstatement responses. Thus, LD and HD categorized juvenile birds underwent one of the following tests: tonic immobility (TI), open-field (OF), or a one-way runway. Results showed that HD birds required more inductions and developed shorter responses (P ≤ 0.05) in the TI test and walked more, faster, and greater distances in the OF (P ≤ 0.05) than their LD counterparts. No differences between groups were found in short social reinstatement responses. The present findings suggest that underlying fearfulness is lower in the HD than in the LD birds. A reduced fearfulness could be regarded as an additional favorable trait of the HD-classified quail to cope with environmental challenging situations.Fil: Guzmán, Diego Alberto. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Córdoba. Instituto de Investigaciones Biológicas y Tecnológicas. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas, Físicas y Naturales. Instituto de Investigaciones Biológicas y Tecnológicas; Argentina. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas Físicas y Naturales. Instituto de Ciencias y Tecnología de los Alimentos; ArgentinaFil: Kembro, Jackelyn Melissa. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Córdoba. Instituto de Investigaciones Biológicas y Tecnológicas. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas, Físicas y Naturales. Instituto de Investigaciones Biológicas y Tecnológicas; Argentina. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas Físicas y Naturales. Instituto de Ciencias y Tecnología de los Alimentos; ArgentinaFil: Marin, Raul Hector. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Córdoba. Instituto de Investigaciones Biológicas y Tecnológicas. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas, Físicas y Naturales. Instituto de Investigaciones Biológicas y Tecnológicas; Argentina. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas Físicas y Naturales. Instituto de Ciencias y Tecnología de los Alimentos; Argentin