The specific role of neutrophil- and epithelial cell-derived extracellular vesicles in antifungal defence against Aspergillus fumigatus

oai:www.db-thueringen.de:dbt_mods_00055686In this work I contributed to the elucidation of the role and physiological meaning of extracellular vesicles (EVs) released from epithelial cells and neutrophils after interaction with the pathogenic fungus Aspergillus fumigatus. With my work I untangled more aspects of the interaction between neutrophils and this fungus and came to the finding that EVs generated from neutrophils infected with A. fumigatus are highly specific in the killing of A. fumigatus. Evaluation of the hyphal damage induced by EVs was performed with extensive imaging, based on confocal laser scanning microscopy, bioinformatic 3D reconstruction and quantification of signals, and a metabolic assay. In the course of my research on extracellular vesicles I also characterized EVs from epithelial cells. I evaluated the cell response after confrontation with different conidia morphotypes of A. fumigatus. Analysing the EVs after these different co-incubations revealed that their protein and cytokine contents are changed. This proves that the cells can sense different stimuli and modify their EV content

Paraconsistent Modal Logics

AbstractWe introduce a modal expansion of paraconsistent Nelson logic that is also as a generalization of the Belnapian modal logic recently introduced by Odintsov and Wansing. We prove algebraic completeness theorems for both logics, defining and axiomatizing the corresponding algebraic semantics. We provide a representation for these algebras in terms of twist-structures, generalizing a known result on the representation of the algebraic counterpart of paraconsistent Nelson logic

Factor copulas through a vine structure

Copula functions have been widely used in actuarial science, nance andeconometrics. Though multivariate copulas allow for a flexible specication of the dependence structure of economic variables, they are not particularly tempting in high dimensional contexts. A factor model which involves copula functions has already proved to be a powerful tool in credit risk applications.We exploit a recent approach to obtain a factor copula model based on a vine structure, which enables to model the dependence and conditional dependence of variables through a representation of a cascade of arbitrary bivariate copulas. The contribution of this paper consists into applying the vine copula model in order to derive a non linear three factor model. In particular, we draw the three factor model of Fama and French (1992). According to the Inference for Margins (IFM) method, we have computed, separately, the margins and the copula parameters via maximum likelihood estimation. Finally, tail dependence measures are given for the implied estimated copula

Quasi-Nelson Algebras

Abstract We introduce a generalization of Nelson algebras having a not-necessarily involutive negation; we suggest to dub this class quasi-Nelson algebras in analogy with quasi-De Morgan lattices, these being a non-involutive generalization of De Morgan lattices. We show that, similarly to the involutive case (and perhaps surprisingly), our new class of algebras can be equivalently presented as (1) quasi-Nelson residuated lattices, i.e. models of the well-known Full Lambek calculus with exchange and weakening, extended with the Nelson axiom; (2) non-involutive twist-structures, i.e. special products of Heyting algebras, which generalize the well-known construction for representing algebraic models of Nelson's constructive logic with strong negation; (3) quasi-Nelson algebras, i.e. models of non-involutive Nelson logic viewed as a conservative expansion of the negation-free fragment of intuitionistic logic. The equivalence of the three presentations, and in particular the extension of the twist-structure representation to the non-involutive case, is the main technical result of the paper. We hope, however, that the main impact may be the possibility of opening new ways to (i) obtain deeper insights into the distinguishing feature of Nelson's logic (the Nelson axiom) and its algebraic counterpart; (ii) be able to investigate certain purely algebraic properties (such as 3-potency and (0,1)-congruence orderability) in a more general setting