Santu Wistin studjat bħala kittieb

Billi fl-1955 ħabat is-sittax-il ċentinarju mit-twelid ta’ Santu Wistin, kien bix-xieraq li f’din ir-rivista titfakkar din il-ġrajja. L-awtur juri kif Santu Wistin kien ukoll letterat.N/

Coping with imprisonment on the outside: The perspectives of the children and their mothers

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.This thesis is concerned primarily with the children's perception of the father's imprisonment and how they cope with this experience. In particular, the study has focused on the meaning children give to the father's imprisonment, the strategies they adopt to cope with the change to his moral status, and on the possible association between this type of separation and children's moral development and self-esteem. The mother's perception of the event, and the nature of the relationship between family members have also been investigated to determine the extent to which these factors influence the development of the children's strategies, and their adjustment to the father's absence. Twenty-three children, 13 boys and 10 girls between 8 and 15 years of age, together with their mothers from 19 households were interviewed twice, one year apart, in the family home. The data have been analysed by using the constant comparative method, whereby the recordings of the interviews, informal observations and diary notes have been transcribed and coded according to a series of general themes and categories. Characteristic illustrations from the data are used to facilitate the understanding of concepts and themes presented. Results indicate that children attempt to cope with the change to the father's moral status by developing mechanisms that dissociate the notion of culpability from his action, without denying the wrongfulness of the act itself, thereby maintaining the father's moral integrity, and by extension, their own self-esteem. The results also reveal that children's moral reasoning is a significant factor in the maintenance of self-esteem. In this process, developmental stage, gender, the mother's perception of the event, and the quality of the father/child relationship are important mediating factors. Also suggested is that the experience of moral reasoning about the father's punishment has an influence on children's moral reasoning in general. Finally, a broad framework has been proposed for investigating children's experience of the imprisonment process. This includes the phases of imprisonment, within which are located a series of tasks that children are confronted

Phase-Field Reaction-Pathway Kinetics of Martensitic Transformations in a Model Fe3Ni Alloy

A three-dimensional phase-field approach to martensitic transformations that uses reaction pathways in place of a Landau potential is introduced and applied to a model of Fe3Ni. Pathway branching involves an unbounded set of variants through duplication and rotations by the rotation point groups of the austenite and martensite phases. Path properties, including potential energy and elastic tensors, are calibrated by molecular statics. Acoustic waves are dealt with via a splitting technique between elastic and dissipative behaviors in a large-deformation framework. The sole free parameter of the model is the damping coefficient associated to transformations, tuned by comparisons with molecular dynamics simulations. Good quantitative agreement is then obtained between both methods.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figure

Optimal concentration of organic solvents to be used in the broth microdilution method to determine the antimicrobial activity of natural products against Paenibacillus larvae

American Foulbrood (AFB) is a bacterial disease, caused by Paenibacillus larvae, that affects honeybees (Apis mellifera). Alternative strategies to control AFB are based on the treatment of the beehives with antimicrobial natural substances such as extracts, essential oils and/or pure compounds from plants, honey by-products, bacteria and moulds. The broth microdilution method is currently one of the most widely used methods to determine the minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) of a substance. In this regard, the fact that most natural products, due to their lipophilic nature, must be dissolved in organic solvents or their aqueous mixtures is an issue of major concern because the organic solvent becomes part of the dilution in the incubation medium, and therefore, can interfere with bacterial viability depending on its nature and concentration. A systematic study was carried out to determine by the broth microdilution method the MIC and the maximum non inhibitory concentration (MNIC) against P. larvae of the most common organic solvents used to extract or dissolve natural products, i.e. ethanol, methanol, acetonitrile, n-butanol, dimethylsulfoxide, and acidified hydromethanolic solutions. From the MIC and MNIC for each organic solvent, recommended maximum concentrations in contact with P. larvae were established: DMSO 5% (v/v), acetonitrile 7.5% (v/v), ethanol 7.5% (v/v), methanol 12% (v/v), n-butanol 1% (v/v), and methanol-water-acetic acid (1.25:98.71:0.04, v/v/v).Fil: Cugnata, Noelia Melina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Mar del Plata; Argentina. Universidad Nacional de Mar del Plata. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Departamento de Biología; ArgentinaFil: Guaspari, Elisa. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Mar del Plata; Argentina. Universidad Nacional de Mar del Plata. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Departamento de Biología; ArgentinaFil: Pellegrini, María Celeste. Provincia de Buenos Aires. Gobernación. Comisión de Investigaciones Científicas; Argentina. Universidad Nacional de Mar del Plata. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Departamento de Biología; ArgentinaFil: Fuselli, Sandra Rosa. Provincia de Buenos Aires. Gobernación. Comisión de Investigaciones Científicas; Argentina. Universidad Nacional de Mar del Plata. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Departamento de Biología; ArgentinaFil: Alonso Salces, Rosa Maria. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Mar del Plata; Argentina. Universidad Nacional de Mar del Plata. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Departamento de Biología; Argentin

Tandem repeats discovery service (TReaDS) applied to finding novel cis-acting factors in repeat expansion diseases

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Tandem repeats are multiple duplications of substrings in the DNA that occur contiguously, or at a short distance, and may involve some mutations (such as substitutions, insertions, and deletions). Tandem repeats have been extensively studied also for their association with the class of repeat expansion diseases (mostly affecting the nervous system). Comparative studies on the output of different tools for finding tandem repeats highlighted significant differences among the sets of detected tandem repeats, while many authors pointed up how critical it is the right choice of parameters.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>In this paper we present <it>TReaDS - Tandem Repeats Discovery Service</it>, a <it>tandem repeat meta search engine</it>. <it>TReaDS </it>forwards user requests to several state of the art tools for finding tandem repeats and merges their outcome into a single report, providing a global, synthetic, and comparative view of the results. In particular, <it>TReaDS </it>allows the user to (<it>i</it>) simultaneously run different algorithms on the same data set, (<it>ii</it>) choose for each algorithm a different setting of parameters, and (<it>iii</it>) obtain a report that can be downloaded for further, off-line, investigations. We used <it>TReaDS </it>to investigate sequences associated with repeat expansion diseases.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>By using the tool <it>TReaDS </it>we discover that, for 27 repeat expansion diseases out of a currently known set of 29, <it>long fuzzy tandem repeats </it>are covering the expansion loci. Tests with control sets confirm the specificity of this association. This finding suggests that long fuzzy tandem repeats can be a new class of cis-acting elements involved in the mechanisms leading to the expansion instability.</p> <p>We strongly believe that biologists can be interested in a tool that, not only gives them the possibility of using multiple search algorithm at the same time, with the same effort exerted in using just one of the systems, but also simplifies the burden of comparing and merging the results, thus expanding our capabilities in detecting important phenomena related to tandem repeats.</p

A meta-analysis of brain DNA methylation across sex, age and Alzheimer’s disease points for accelerated epigenetic aging in neurodegeneration [preprint]

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is characterized by specific alterations of brain DNA methylation (DNAm) patterns. Age and sex, two major risk factors for AD, are also known to largely affect the epigenetic profiles in the brain, but their contribution to AD-associated DNAm changes has been poorly investigated. In this study we considered publicly available DNAm datasets of 4 brain regions (temporal, frontal, entorhinal cortex and cerebellum) from healthy adult subjects and AD patients, and performed a meta-analysis to identify sex-, age- and AD-associated epigenetic profiles. We showed that DNAm differences between males and females tend to be shared between the 4 brain regions, while aging differently affects cortical regions compared to cerebellum. We found that the proportion of sex-dependent probes whose methylation changes also during aging is higher than expected, but that differences between males and females tend to be maintained, with only few probes showing sex-by-age interaction. We did not find significant overlaps between AD- and sex-associated probes, nor disease-by-sex interaction effects. On the contrary, we found that AD-related epigenetic modifications are significantly enriched in probes whose DNAm changes with age and that there is a high concordance between the direction of changes (hyper or hypo-methylation) in aging and AD, supporting accelerated epigenetic aging in the disease. In conclusion, we demonstrated that age-associated, but not sex-associated DNAm concurs to the epigenetic deregulation observed in AD, providing new insight on how advanced age enables neurodegeneration