Intrinsically Disordered Protein Regions in Human Evolution and as Therapeutic Targets

Intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs) and IDP regions (IDPRs) fail to form stable structures but have important biological functions via interacting with various molecular partners (proteins, DNA, RNA, glycosaminoglycans). We hypothesized that IDPRs are potential targets for therapeutics development because they are reservoirs of evolutionary innovation, and they play crucial roles in adaptation to pathogens. We first studied the evolution of IDPRs in the human proteome and compared it with the proteome of non-human primates. We have found that evolutionary young protein-coding genes have included low conserved regions in the N-terminal part of proteins, and such regions are linked to high disorder scores. Although humans share high genomic similarities with their closest relatives such as chimpanzees and other non-human primates, we are more susceptible to diseases. It has been shown that humans respond differently to infectious diseases when compared to primates, the study of structural differences in evolutionary young human proteins could potentially help to discover new therapeutic targets that are linked to human-specific pathologies. In addition, we propose that disordered regions are important targets in vaccine development. Pathogens incorporate disordered regions on their proteomes to interact more efficiently with their host. We chose several IDPRs of the spike protein of the SARS CoV-2 virus to demonstrate in vivo that these regions are antigenic. Our Chimeric Qβ virus-like particles displaying disordered segments of SARS CoV-2 spike protein-induced robust antibody responses in BALB/c mice. We demonstrate evidence that IDPRs can be efficient epitopes for the development of efficacious vaccines

Prevención del Síndrome de Burnout en estudiantes de enfermería: intervenciones y rasgos de personalidad.

[ES] Introducción: El Síndrome de Burnout (SB) se origina por una respuesta prolongada al estrés en el trabajo. Y hay evidencia de la presencia de este síndrome psicológico durante la educación de enfermería, ya que esta conlleva una alta exigencia académica tanto teórica como práctica. Se produce cuando el alumnado no consigue dirigir estrategias de afrontamiento adecuadas, lo que se traduce en síntomas físicos y mentales, pudiendo generar el temprano padecimiento del agotamiento, y obstaculizar la función de las estudiantes en el futuro desarrollo de la profesión. Objetivo: Identificar factores de personalidad relacionados con el Síndrome de Burnout en estudiantes de enfermería, y evaluar intervenciones dirigidas a prevenirlo. Método: Se realizaron 2 estrategias de búsquedas conforme a las bases de datos utilizadas, Pubmed, Science Direct, Science Database y Psychology Database, además se seleccionaron varias investigaciones por búsqueda inversa. Para la realización de la revisión bibliográfica se seleccionaron 11 artículos. Resultados: Las terapias psicosociales estudiadas, entre ellas Mindfulness, Compromiso y Aceptación y el entrenamiento de Resistencia, han conseguido la disminución estadísticamente significativa del nivel de estrés percibido y/o del síndrome de burnout, así como mejorar diferentes rasgos de la personalidad, que a su vez son relevantes en la prevención del agotamiento. Conclusión: Las intervenciones podrían tener el potencial adecuado para contribuir a prevenir el desarrollo del estrés y Síndrome de Burnout durante la educación de enfermería. Por lo tanto, es un imperativo la disminución del estrés, para que no dé lugar a la presencia del síndrome de burnout en las estudiantes, y de esta manera conseguir una enfermería sana en el futuro

MINKOWSKI-ADDITIVE MULTIMEASURES, MONOTONICITY AND SELF-SIMILARITY

We discuss the main properties of positive multimeasures and we show how to define a notion of self-similarity based on a generalized Markov operator

"Desarrollo del Sistema de Mensajería de Texto para Telefonía Fija"

Proyecto de Graduación (Licenciatura en Ingeniería Electrónica) Instituto Tecnológico de Costa Rica. Escuela de Ingeniería Electrónica, 2006.The technological innovation and search of new services is an ideal of the Instituto Costarricense de Electricidad (ICE), which makes the necessity to offer and to enlarge the communication services among its clients. The phone communication is divided in the cellular telephony and fixed telephony. At the moment, the main income of ICE it is given by means of the fixed telephony services. The cellular telephony is taking preference among the clients, therefore it’s necessary to offer new services for fixed telephony. The objective of the project is to develop a new service for the clients of the fixed telephony network, which consists in providing the short text message service (SMS) for fixed lines. In order to standardize the service, in the development of the system, protocols and norms defined by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) have been taken as a reference. The importance of using an international standard resides in the possibility of using commercial terminals (telephones) designed for the SMS. This way, the project is focused in developing the center of messages (SM-SC) and to create the application that manages the protocol. The center of messages was developed in an APEX platform of added value, under a Windows 2000 environment. This platform is connected to the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) through a channel E1 with signaling ISDN. In the future, one of ICE’s goal is to allow the integration of the different services in all technologies (mobile and fixed telephony). With this project the SMS is allowed between fixed telephones, the use of the standard leaves a door open to be able to develop the exchange of text messages with the cellular telephony.Instituto Tecnológico de Costa Rica. Escuela de Ingeniería en Electrónica

A Compact Representation of Histopathology Images using Digital Stain Separation & Frequency-Based Encoded Local Projections

In recent years, histopathology images have been increasingly used as a diagnostic tool in the medical field. The process of accurately diagnosing a biopsy sample requires significant expertise in the field, and as such can be time-consuming and is prone to uncertainty and error. With the advent of digital pathology, using image recognition systems to highlight problem areas or locate similar images can aid pathologists in making quick and accurate diagnoses. In this paper, we specifically consider the encoded local projections (ELP) algorithm, which has previously shown some success as a tool for classification and recognition of histopathology images. We build on the success of the ELP algorithm as a means for image classification and recognition by proposing a modified algorithm which captures the local frequency information of the image. The proposed algorithm estimates local frequencies by quantifying the changes in multiple projections in local windows of greyscale images. By doing so we remove the need to store the full projections, thus significantly reducing the histogram size, and decreasing computation time for image retrieval and classification tasks. Furthermore, we investigate the effectiveness of applying our method to histopathology images which have been digitally separated into their hematoxylin and eosin stain components. The proposed algorithm is tested on the publicly available invasive ductal carcinoma (IDC) data set. The histograms are used to train an SVM to classify the data. The experiments showed that the proposed method outperforms the original ELP algorithm in image retrieval tasks. On classification tasks, the results are found to be comparable to state-of-the-art deep learning methods and better than many handcrafted features from the literature.Comment: Accepted for publication in the International Conference on Image Analysis and Recognition (ICIAR 2019