Nature or Nurture in Finger Counting: A Review on the Determinants of the Direction of Number–Finger Mapping

The spontaneous use of finger counting has been for long recognized as critical to the acquisition of number skills. Recently, the great interest on space–number associations shifted attention to the practice of finger counting itself, and specifically, to its spatial components. Besides general cross-cultural differences in mapping numbers onto fingers, contrasting results have been reported with regard to the directional features of this mapping. The key issue we address is to what extent directionality is culturally mediated, i.e., linked to the conventional reading–writing system direction, and/or biologically determined, i.e., linked to hand dominance. Although the preferred starting-hand for counting seems to depend on the surveyed population, even within the same population high inter-individual variability minimizes the role of cultural factors. Even if so far largely overlooked, handedness represents a sound candidate for shaping finger counting direction. Here we discuss adults and developmental evidence in support of this view and we reconsider the plausibility of multiple and coexistent number–space mapping in physical and representational space

MALVA: Genotyping by Mapping-free ALlele Detection of Known VAriants

The amount of genetic variation discovered in human populations is growing rapidly leading to challenging computational tasks, such as variant calling. Standard methods for addressing this problem include read mapping, a computationally expensive procedure; thus, mapping-free tools have been proposed in recent years. These tools focus on isolated, biallelic SNPs, providing limited support for multi-allelic SNPs and short insertions and deletions of nucleotides (indels). Here we introduce MALVA, a mapping-free method to genotype an individual from a sample of reads. MALVA is the first mapping-free tool able to genotype multi-allelic SNPs and indels, even in high-density genomic regions, and to effectively handle a huge number of variants. MALVA requires one order of magnitude less time to genotype a donor than alignment-based pipelines, providing similar accuracy. Remarkably, on indels, MALVA provides even better results than the most widely adopted variant discovery tools. Biological Sciences; Genetics; Genomics; Bioinformatic

Aportes extensionistas al fortalecimiento del Sistema de Protección de Derechos

Durante el año 2011, se desarrolló un convenio específico entre la Municipalidad de Córdoba y la UNC, con el objetivo de fortalecer el proceso de institucionalidad del Sistema Municipal de Protección Integral de Derechos de Niñas, Niños y Adolescentes. Este proyecto surge a partir de la propuesta del Consejo Municipal de Niñez, en el que participa la Secretaría de Extensión Universitaria como miembro activo. La propuesta original fue discutida y re-elaborada en forma conjunta entre representantes municipales y de distintos espacios académicos de la UNC, para llegar finalmente a la elaboración del Proyecto de Capacitación y Diagnóstico participativo con Consejos Comunitarios de Niñez y Adolescencia, que se llevó a cabo entre los meses de agosto de 2011 a enero de 2012, con los siguientes objetivos: aportar al fortalecimiento de los consejos comunitarios de niñez; propiciar la construcción interinstitucional de herramientas de capacitación y diagnóstico para la promoción y apropiación del enfoque de derechos de niños, niñas y adolescentes; favorecer espacios de participación organizada de niños/as y adolescentes. La propuesta de trabajo fue coordinada por el Programa Niñez y Juventud de la SEU-UNC y docentes de diez cátedras de las siguientes unidades académicas: Facultad de Psicología, Facultad de Derecho, Escuela de Trabajo Social, Escuela de Ciencias de la Información y CEA. El proyecto buscó un fuerte trabajo de articulación entre los miembros de la UNC y los equipos técnicos y profesionales de la Sub-Dirección de Niñez y Adolescencia y de la Sub-Dirección de Familia y Comunidad. Esto se reflejó tanto en la conformación de una coordinación general integrada por miembros de ambas instituciones, así como en la búsqueda de un trabajo permanente de co-construcción, planificación, evaluación y reflexión conjunta entre los miembros docentes de la UNC y los miembros consejeros de los Consejos Comunitarios. Se avanzó también en el consenso de que los niños y adolescentes son un pilar fundamental en la construcción del diagnóstico de su situación dentro del espacio local, por lo que el convenio finalmente contempló un espacio diferenciado y protagonista de los mismos. La presente ponencia presenta las propuestas metodológicas que se llevaron a cabo en dicho proyecto, para invitar a la reflexión sobre los siguientes ejes: implicancias teórico-metodológicas y estratégicas en proyectos de articulación entre diferentes instituciones; el diagnóstico participativo como desafío para los actores implicados; y la coordinación de perspectivas diversas en trabajos que abogan por la pluralidad y los acuerdos construidos

Role of serial ultrasound screening of venous thrombosis in oncologic children with central lines

Objective: Pediatric oncology patients are more likely to develop venous thromboembolic events related to central venous catheter (CVC). Study aim was to determine the incidence of catheter related thrombosis (CRT) in a cohort of pediatric oncology patients using vascular ultrasound (US). Methods: Consecutive children of a single cancer referral center, requiring medium to long term CVC implantation, were screened for CRT, using serial ultrasound exams. Measurements and main results: US examinations were taken 15, 30 and 90 days after CVC implantation. A total of 113 catheters were studied in 103 patients (median age 10.5 years old). Ultrasound screening was completed in 80.5% patients. Apart from three subjects, US investigations were well tolerated. Patients were followed for a median of 87 days. No symptomatic CRT was recorded throughout. Three cases of asymptomatic thrombosis were identified with early US screening; incidence of CRT events for 1000 catheter-days was 0.11. The presence of previous catheter-related infection and an history of one or more previous CVC placement were identified as risk factors. Conclusions: In our pediatric patients the incidence of CRT is low. Ultrasound monitoring is well tolerated and allows detecting asymptomatic CRT. Patients with previous CVC infection or insertion seem to have a higher risk of CRT (p =0.003 and p = 0.043 respectively). Keywords: Central venous catheters, Venous thrombosis, Vascular ultrasound, Vascular catheter infections, Childre

An enzymatic flow-based preparative route to vidarabine

The bi-enzymatic synthesis of the antiviral drug vidarabine (arabinosyladenine, ara-A), catalyzed by uridine phosphorylase from Clostridium perfringens (CpUP) and a purine nucleoside phosphorylase from Aeromonas hydrophila (AhPNP), was re-designed under continuous-flow conditions. Glyoxyl–agarose and EziGTM1 (Opal) were used as immobilization carriers for carrying out this preparative biotransformation. Upon setting-up reaction parameters (substrate concentration and molar ratio, temperature, pressure, residence time), 1 g of vidarabine was obtained in 55% isolated yield and >99% purity by simply running the flow reactor for 1 week and then collecting (by filtration) the nucleoside precipitated out of the exiting flow. Taking into account the substrate specificity of CpUP and AhPNP, the results obtained pave the way to the use of the CpUP/AhPNP-based bioreactor for the preparation of other purine nucleosides

Triplet-based similarity score for fully multilabeled trees with poly-occurring labels

Motivation: The latest advances in cancer sequencing, and the availability of a wide range of methods to infer the evolutionary history of tumors, have made it important to evaluate, reconcile and cluster different tumor phylogenies. Recently, several notions of distance or similarities have been proposed in the literature, but none of them has emerged as the golden standard. Moreover, none of the known similarity measures is able to manage mutations occurring multiple times in the tree, a circumstance often occurring in real cases. Results: To overcome these limitations, in this article, we propose MP3, the first similarity measure for tumor phylogenies able to effectively manage cases where multiple mutations can occur at the same time and mutations can occur multiple times. Moreover, a comparison of MP3 with other measures shows that it is able to classify correctly similar and dissimilar trees, both on simulated and on real data