Limited proteolysis in the investigation of beta2-microglobulin amyloidogenic and fibrillar states.

Amyloid fibrils of patients treated with regular haemodialysis essentially consists of β2-microglobulin (β2-m) and its truncated species ΔN6β2-m lacking six residues at the amino terminus. The truncated fragment shows a higher propensity to self-aggregate and constitutes an excellent candidate for the analysis of a protein in the amyloidogenic conformation. The surface topology and the conformational analysis of native β2-m and the truncated ΔN6β2-m species both in the soluble and in the fibrillar forms were investigated by the limited proteolysis/mass spectrometry strategy. The conformation in solution of a further truncated mutant ΔN3β2-m lacking three residues at the N-terminus was also examined. This approach appeared particularly suited to investigate the regions that are solvent-exposed, or flexible enough to be accessible to protein-protein interactions and to describe the conformation of transient intermediates. Moreover, proteolysis experiments can also be tailored to investigate amyloid fibrils by discriminating the protein regions constituting the unaccessible core of the fibrils and those still flexible and exposed to the solvent. Although native β2-m and ΔN3β2-m shared essentially the same conformation, significative structural differences exist between the native and the ΔN6β2-m proteins in solution with major differences located at the end moiety of strand V and subsequent loop with strand VI and at both the N- and C-termini of the proteins. On the contrary, an identical distribution of preferential proteolytic sites was observed in both proteins in the fibrillar state, which was nearly superimposible to that observed for the soluble form of ΔN6β2-m. These data revealed that synthetic fibrils essentially consists of an unaccessible core comprising residues 20-87 of the β2-m protein with exposed and flexible N- and C-terminal ends. Moreover, proteolytic cleavages observed in vitro at Lys 6 and Lys 19 reproduce specific cleavages that have to take place in vivo to generate the truncated forms of β2-m occurring in natural fibrils. On the basis of these results, a molecular mechanism for fibril formation has been propose

The use of ultrasound in clinical setting for children affected by NAFLD. is it safe and accurate?

Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) has become over the last decade the most common form of chronic liver disease in children and adults. Thus, establishing the diagnosis of NAFLD is of utmost importance and represents a major challenge as the disease is generally silent and the current gold standard for diagnosis is an invasive liver biopsy, a procedure that is not suitable for screening purposes. Many non-invasive diagnostic tools have been evaluated so far. Recently the utility of ultrasonography for non-invasive diagnosis and estimation of hepatic steatosis has been demonstrated in a large prospective pediatric study

Implementing optimal control in cointegrated I(1) structural VAR models

JEL Classification: C32, C61, E52optimal control, VAR models

Orthorectification of prisma images

Orthorectification is one of the most important satellite imagery pre-processing applications, as it allows to use data, for example, in geographic information systems, making the most of high or medium resolution. Since May 2020, PRISMA (PRecursore IperSpettrale della Missione Applicativa) mission, a project of the Italian Space Agency, has become fully accessible to the community. PRISMA satellite integrates a hyperspectral sensor and a medium-resolution panchromatic sensor. The products are currently available with a declared geolocation accuracy of 200 m, which ASI plans to increase to half pixel in the near future by introducing geometric treatment of the images with Ground Control Points (GCPs). However, the orthorectification of PRISMA images is not a proven and validated procedure, due to the uncertainty of satellite orbital and internal orientation data provided in the metadata file and to the lack of contributions on the subject in literature. In the present work, our contribution on possible strategies for the geometric treatment of PRISMA images is shown. The results obtained by applying the Rational Polynomial Coefficients (RPC) provided with some panchromatic images show coarse rototranslations. For this reason, a procedure was developed to restore conformity between RPCs and the panchromatic image. The best results in terms of accuracy were obtained with the rational polynomials using RPF approach, achieving residuals calculated on the Check Points (CP) in the order of one pixel, better than those supposed by ASI using GCPs. Probably even better results could be obtained with more rigorous information on RPCs or orbital and orientation parameters

Intensive archaeological survey at Piscina Torta: use of a low-cost RTK portable kit to materialise a UTM grid on the ground

We tested the use of a low-cost GPS RTK to set up a grid during the intensive archaeological survey of the Piscina Torta site, in the framework of the Salt and Power project of the University of Groningen. We also suggest not using a local grid but the WGS84 UTM grid and naming the single cells with the coordinates of one of its vertices. This would facilitate the use and exchange of the data (e.g. about the potsherds collected in the cell) among the scientific community

CMC Spheres in the Heisenberg Group

We study a family of spheres with constant mean curvature (CMC) in the Riemannian Heisenberg group H1. These spheres are conjectured to be the isoperimetric sets of H1. We prove several results supporting this conjecture. We also focus our attention on the sub-Riemannian limit

Monitoring urban heat island through google earth engine. Potentialities and difficulties in different cities of the United States

The aim of this work is to exploit the large-scale analysis capabilities of the innovative Google Earth Engine platform in order to investigate the temporal variations of the Urban Heat Island phenomenon as a whole. A intuitive methodology implementing a large-scale correlation analysis between the Land Surface Temperature and Land Cover alterations was thus developed. The results obtained for the Phoenix MA are promising and show how the urbanization heavily affects the magnitude of the UHI effects with significant increases in LST. The proposed methodology is therefore able to efficiently monitor the UHI phenomenon

Unexpected Metastasis of High Grade Serous Ovarian Cancer to Breast: Case Report and Literature Review

Introduction: Metastasis of ovarian serous carcinoma to breast and/or axillary lymph nodes represents an unusual event. Nevertheless, their detection and distinction from mammary carcinoma are of huge clinical importance because the treatment and prognosis diverge significantly. Case presentation: We report a case of a 47 year-old Caucasian female patient with unforeseen metastasis to the breast and to axillary lymph nodes due to ovarian serous carcinoma. Conclusion: In patients with history of OSC who present with axillary or breast mass, an accurate histological diagnosis should be obtained since this has a great impact on treatment outcomes