Itv as a community-to-community collaborative system

Web-forums and Instant Messengers provide a unique opportunity for the users to create and support spontaneous communities. However, such systems tend to focus on the one-to-one and one-to-many approaches. Community-to- Community interaction, described as two groups of people which communicate by means of a network, is still missing. This work describes early implementation of an interactive television (iTV) chat system, which dynamically creates chat rooms where users can discuss, share their TV experience and access web resources.337-33

Building the Web of Things with WS-BPEL and Visual Tags. Web of Things using Service-oriented Architecture standards

The Web of things is an emerging scenario in which everyday objects are connected to the Internet and can answer to HTTP queries with structured data. This paper presents a system that allows users to build networks of everyday objects using visual tags as proximity technology. The system backend is based on Service-oriented Architecture languages and tools for the runtime composition of “things” establishing connections we call hyperpipes.357-36

Inhibition of RNA helicases of ssRNA⁺ virus belonging to <i>Flaviviridae</i>, <i>Coronaviridae</i> and <i>Picornaviridae</i> families

Many viral pathogens encode the motor proteins named RNA helicases which display various functions in genome replication. General strategies to design specific and selective drugs targeting helicase for the treatment of viral infections could act via one or more of the following mechanisms: inhibition of the NTPase activity, by interferences with ATP binding and therefore by limiting the energy required for the unwinding and translocation, or by allosteric mechanism and therefore by stabilizing the conformation of the enzyme in low helicase activity state; inhibition of nucleic acids binding to the helicase; inhibition of coupling of ATP hydrolysis to unwinding; inhibition of unwinding by sterically blocking helicase translocation. Recently, by in vitro screening studies, it has been reported that several benzotriazole, imidazole, imidazodiazepine, phenothiazine, quinoline, anthracycline, triphenylmethane, tropolone, pyrrole, acridone, small peptide, and Bananin derivatives are endowed with helicase inhibition of pathogen viruses belonging to Flaviviridae, Coronaviridae, and Picornaviridae families

Nuovi derivati chinossalinici inibitori della Diidrofolato Reduttasi (DHFR) e della Timidilato Sintetasi (TS) della <i>Leishmania major</i>: risultati preliminari

L’incidenza delle malattie protozoarie imputate al genere Leishmania è aumentata enormemente con la diffusione dell’AIDS. In particolare la forma viscerale della Leishmaniosi sta emergendo come malattia nuova e sempre più frequente. Oltre gli antimoniali altri farmaci importanti sono le pentammidine e l’amfotericina B. Un approccio abbondantemente esplorato in passato è stato lo sviluppo di farmaci antifolici antiprotozoari che bloccano il ciclo dell’acido folico, che, previa attivazione metabolica di enzimi folato dipendenti, attraverso il trasporto di unità carboniose, è responsabile della sintesi de novo degli acidi nucleici e degli amminoacidi. In questo senso sono stati usati il trimetoprim e la pirimetamina che sono attivi contro i plasmodi e i toxoplasmi, ma non contro le Leishmanie e i tripanosomi. Questi due protozoi appartenenti alla classe dei Kinetoplastidae sono sensibili agli antifolici antitumorali come il metotrexato (MTX), ma sviluppano immediatamente una chemioresistenza in quanto riattivano l’autoproduzione di acido folico mediante una via di salvataggio che impiega l’enzima Pteridina riduttasi, recentemente scoperto, appunto, nelle Leishmanie major e nel tripanosoma cruzi. Sulla base di queste premesse ci è sembrato che le nostre molecole a struttura chinossalinica, analoghe al metotrexato, potessero essere impiegate come inibitori enzimatici di questa famiglia di folato

Expression of muscle-specific MiRNA 206 in the progression of disease in a murine SMA model

Spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) is a severe neuromuscular disease, the most common in infancy, and the third one among young people under 18 years. The major pathological landmark of SMA is a selective degeneration of lower motor neurons, resulting in progressive skeletal muscle denervation, atrophy, and paralysis. Recently, it has been shown that specific or general changes in the activity of ribonucleoprotein containing micro RNAs (miRNAs) play a role in the development of SMA. Additionally miRNA-206 has been shown to be required for efficient regeneration of neuromuscular synapses after acute nerve injury in an ALS mouse model. Therefore, we correlated the morphology and the architecture of the neuromuscular junctions (NMJs) of quadriceps, a muscle affected in the early stage of the disease, with the expression levels of miRNA-206 in a mouse model of intermediate SMA (SMAII), one of the most frequently used experimental model. Our results showed a decrease in the percentage of type II fibers, an increase in atrophic muscle fibers and a remarkable accumulation of neurofilament (NF) in the pre-synaptic terminal of the NMJs in the quadriceps of SMAII mice. Furthermore, molecular investigation showed a direct link between miRNA-206-HDAC4-FGFBP1, and in particular, a strong up-regulation of this pathway in the late phase of the disease. We propose that miRNA-206 is activated as survival endogenous mechanism, although not sufficient to rescue the integrity of motor neurons. We speculate that early modulation of miRNA-206 expression might delay SMA neurodegenerative pathway and that miRNA-206 could be an innovative, still relatively unexplored, therapeutic target for SMA

[1,2,3]triazolo[4,5-<i>H</i>]chinoloni: una nuova classe di promettenti chemioterapici antitubercolari

Alcuni acidi triazolo[4,5-h] e [4,5-f]chinoloncarbossilici angolari, sintetizzati in precedenza come antiinfettivi del tratto urinario, hanno mostrato interessanti valori di MIC90 nei confronti di M. tuberculosis H37Rv. Allo scopo di approfondire le nostre conoscenze sui rapporti struttura-attività di questa classe, abbiamo pertanto preparato una nuove serie di derivati

Metabolomic patterns associated to QTc interval in shiftworkers: an explorative analysis

Objectives: 1H NMR-metabolomic approach was used to investigate QTc interval correlation with plasma metabolic profiles in shiftworkers. Methods: Socio-demographic data, electrocardiographic QTc interval and plasma metabolic profiles from 32 male shiftworkers, were correlated by multivariate regression analysis. Results: We found a positive correlation between QTc interval values, body mass index, glycemia and lactate level and a negative correlation between QTc interval and both pyroglutamate and 3-hydroxybutyrate plasma level. Conclusions: Our analysis provides evidence of the association between clinical, metabolic profiles and QTc interval values. This could be used to identify markers of early effects and/or susceptibility in shiftworker

Rheumatoid arthritis patient antibodies highly recognize IL-2 in the immune response pathway involving IRF5 and EBV antigens

Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is a chronic autoimmune disease characterized by a progressive joint damage due to largely unknown environmental factors acting in concert with risk alleles conferring genetic susceptibility. A major role has been attributed to viral infections that include past contacts with Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) and, more recently, to non-protein coding sequences of human endogenous retrovirus K (HERV-K) integrated in the human genome. Molecular mimicry between viral and self proteins is supposed to cause the loss of immune tolerance in predisposed hosts. There are evidences that anti-IL-2 antibodies (Abs) are present in subjects affected by autoimmune diseases and may be responsible for alterations in regulatory T cell responses. In this study, we evaluated the levels of Abs against IL-2, viral epitopes and interferon regulatory factor 5 (IRF5) in 140 RA patients and 137 healthy controls (HCs). Ab reactivity reached the highest levels for IRF5, EBV and IL-2 (56%, 44% and 39%, respectively) in RA with significantly lower values among HCs (7–9%, p &lt;  0.0001), which suggests a possible cross-reaction between IRF5/EBV homologous antigens and shifts in T cell balance disrupted by anti-IL-2 Abs

DART: the distributed agent based retrieval toolkit

The technology of search engines is evolving from indexing and classification of web resources based on keywords to more sophisticated techniques which take into account the meaning and the context of textual information and usage. Replying to query, commercial search engines face the user requests with a large amount of results, mostly useless or only partially related to the request; the subsequent refinement, operated downloading and examining as much pages as possible and simply ignoring whatever stays behind the first few pages, is left up to the user. Furthermore, architectures based on centralized indexes, allow commercial search engines to control the advertisement of online information, in contrast to P2P architectures that focus the attention on user requirements involving the end user in search engine maintenance and operation. To address such wishes, new search engines should focus on three key aspects: semantics, geo-referencing, collaboration/distribution. Semantic analysis lets to increase the results relevance. The geo-referencing of catalogued resources allows contextualisation based on user position. Collaboration distributes storage, processing, and trust on a world-wide network of nodes running on users’ computers, getting rid of bottlenecks and central points of failures. In this paper, we describe the studies, the concepts and the solutions developed in the DART project to introduce these three key features in a novel search engine architecture