Functional proteomics.

Background: With the increase in the number of genome sequencing projects, there is a concomitant exponential growth in the number of protein sequences whose function is still unknown. Functional proteomics constitutes an emerging research area in the proteomic field whose approaches are addressed towards two major targets: the elucidation of the biological function of unknown proteins and the definition of cellular mechanisms at the molecular level. Methods: The identification of interacting proteins in stable complexes in vivo is essentially achieved by affinity-based procedures. The basic idea is to express the protein of interest with a suitable tag to be used as a bait to fish its specific partners out from a cellular extract. Individual components within the multi-protein complex can then be identified by mass spectrometric methodologies. Results and conclusions: The association of an unknown protein with partners belonging to a specific protein complex involved in a particular mechanism is strongly suggestive of the biological function of the protein. Moreover, the identification of protein partners interacting with a given protein will lead to the description of cellular mechanisms at the molecular level. The next goal will be to generate animal models bearing a tagged form of the bait protein

Continuity and change in Italian discourse on migration: A focus on mainstream television documentaries

LBK

Vulvovaginal atrophy during menopause

Objective: To present a basic clinical research based on current evidence about advanced treatment methods for vulvovaginal atrophy during menopause.And on principles of management of patients with vulvovaginal atrophy.Vulvovaginal atrophy (VVA) is a common and underreported condition associated with decreased estrogenization of the vaginal tissue. Symptoms include dryness, irritation, soreness, and dyspareunia with urinary frequency, urgency, and urge incontinence. It can occur at any time in a woman's life cycle, although more commonly in the postmenopausal phase, during which the prevalence is close to 50%. Clinical findings include the presence of pale and dry vulvovaginal mucosa with petechiae. Vaginal rugae disappear, and the cervix may become flush with the vaginal wal

Template update algorithms and their application to face recognition systems in the deep learning era

Biometric technologies and facial recognition systems are reaching a very high diffusion for authentication in personal devices and public and private security systems, thanks to their intrinsic reliability and user-friendliness. However, although deep learning-based facial features reached a significant level of compactness and expressive power, the facial recognition performance still suffers from intra-class variations such as ageing, different facial expressions, different poses and lighting changes. In the last decade, several "adaptive" biometric systems have been proposed to deal with this problem. Unfortunately, adaptive methods usually lead to a growth of the system in terms of memory and computational complexity and involve the risk of inserting impostors among the templates. The first goal of this PhD thesis is the presentation of a novel template-based self-update algorithm, able to keep over time the expressive power of a limited set of templates. This classification-selection approach overcomes the problem of manual updating and stringent computational requirements. In the second part of the thesis, we analyzed if and to what extent this "optimized" self-updating strategy improves the facial recognition performance, especially in application contexts where the facial biometric trait undergoes great changes due to the passage of time. In contexts of long-term use, in fact, the high representativeness of the deep features may not be enough and this is usually overcome with a re-enrollment phase. For this reason, one of our goals was to evaluate how much an automatic template updating system could compete with human-in-the-loop in terms of performance. To simulate situations of long-term use in which the temporal variability of biometric data is high, we acquired a new dataset collected by using frames of some videos in YouTube related to Daily Photo Projects: people take a picture every day for a certain period of time, usually to show how their appearance is changing. The temporal information present in this new dataset allowed us to evaluate how long a facial feature can remain representative depending on the context and the recognition system. Extensive experiments on different datasets and using different facial features are conducted to define the contexts of applicability and the usefulness of adaptive systems in the deep learning era

Direct and constructivist approaches for the design of instruction in well-structured domains: a comparison of efficiency via mental workload and performance.

This doctoral research investigates the efficiency of two instructional designs: a design based on the direct-instruction approach to learning and its extension with a collaborative activity based upon the community of inquiry approach to learning. This is motivated by the educational challenge associated with the improvement of the learning phase. The goal is to investigate the extent to which highly guided communities of inquiry, when added to direct-instruction teaching methods, can actually improve the efficiency of learners. A total of 577 students participated in the experiments across 24 third-level classes that were divided into two groups. A control group of learners attended a delivery based on direct instructional guidelines only, while an experimental group received the same delivery (in equal conditions) extended through a collaborative and inquiring design. Subsequently, learners of each group individually answered a multiple-choice questionnaire (MCQ), from which a performance measure was extracted for the evaluation of the acquired factual, conceptual and procedural knowledge. Two measures of cognitive load (CL) were acquired through self-reporting questionnaires: one unidimensional and one multidimensional. These, in conjunction with the performance measure, contributed to the definition of three measures of efficiency. Statistical evidence shows a positive impact of the experimental layout on the efficiency scores of students, as a consequence of its improvement across three phases: tuning, experimental and refined. The minor contribution to the body of knowledge is a replicable primary research that requalifies an inquiry activity technique, usually employed at primary and secondary levels, as well as other ill-structured domains, in better-structured domains within thirdlevel education. This contribution is connected to a major one that lies in the example of the complementarity between cognitivist direct instructional techniques and social constructivist approaches to teaching and to learning, rather than in the example of their individual, distinct and competitive uses

Analysis of HPV-16 Late Gene Expression

Human papillomaviruses (HPVs) are present in 99.7% of all cervical cancers and HPV type 16 (HPV-16) is the major cause of cervical cancer. Expression of the viral capsid gene L1 and L2 can be detected only in the terminally epithelial cells and we speculate that inhibition of HPV-16 late gene expression in the early stage of the life cycle is probably a prerequisite for persistence of infection. The products of the late genes, L1 and L2, are highly immunogenic and expression of these proteins in the lower layers of the cervical epithelium could lead to clearance of the virus. Therefore, it is of interest to understand how HPV late gene expression is regulated. The goal of this thesis was to examine the regulation of late genes in HPV-16. To this end we wished to generate reporter plasmids based on the HPV-16 genome with the L1 gene replaced by an easily measurable reporter gene, such as chloramphenicol acetyltransferase (CAT), green fluorescent protein (GFP), secreted alkaline phosphatase (SEAP) or luciferase, and to establish reporter stable cell lines useful for large scale screening of small molecules or cellular factors that influence RNA processing events during late gene expression. CAT and GFP proved to be functional surrogate markers of late gene expression and their expression was dependent on the levels of known inducers of HPV-16 late gene expression such as adenovirus E4orf4 protein (E4orf4), polypyrimidine tract binding protein (PTB), arginine/serine-rich SRp30c protein (SRp30c) or alternative splicing factor/splicing factor 2 (ASF/SF2). Functional stable cell lines with CAT reporter plasmids, separately integrated into the HeLa cellular genome, were also generated allowing the identification of a number of small molecules capable of modulating CAT expression. Phorbol 12-myristate 13-acetate (TPA), valproic acid and tannic acid were identified as inducers of HPV-16 late gene expression. Further experiments identified the TPA inducible, hnRNP A2/B1 protein as a novel regulator of HPV-16 late gene expression. Immunohistochemical analysis of this protein in cervical epithelium at the different stages of the development of cervical cancer demonstrated that hnRNP A2/B1 is highly expressed in normal cervical epithelium and low-grade squamous intraepithelial lesion (LSIL) and decreased in highgrade squamous intraepithelial lesion (HSIL) and squamous cell carcinoma (SCC). In conclusion, the HPV-16 reporter plasmids and reporter cell lines described herein are functional and can be used for the investigations of HPV-16 late gene expression

Õhusaaste linnades ja selle mõju inimeste tervisele

Viimastel aastakümnetel on linnaõhu saastumisest saanud rahvatervise probleem üle maailma. Kütteallikate arvu ja liiklustiheduse kiirest kasvust tingituna on ka Eesti linnades õhusaaste suurenemas. On teada, et õhusaaste avaldab mõju eelkõige inimese hingamisteedele ja südamele-veresoonkonnale. Seetõttu võib sellega seostada linlaste tervise halvenemist ja ravikulutuste suurenemist tulevikus. Terviseriski vähendamiseks on kehtestatud piirnormid SO2, NO2, CO, peente osakeste ja teiste atmosfääriõhu saastekomponentide sisaldusele. Linnaelanike tervist ohustavad eelkõige peente osakestega seotud raskmetallid ja orgaanilised ühendid, seda ka piirväärtustest väiksemate kontsentratsioonide juures. Eesti Arst 2007; 86 (6): 401–40

How librarians can engage citizens to use open access contents and open data as source for fact-checking

This paper describes the BiblioVerifica blog, which is an attempt by librarians to fight misinformation by using media and data literacy, engaging citizens as awareness users of the social networks, chats and blogs. Biblioverifica aims to be a public engagement project based on information literacy practices, implementing tips and tricks about search tools, reliable sources, verification strategies. This non-profit initiative promotes fact-checking based on open resources as data, journals, tools, etc