Methods & Techniques for the Anti-erosion and anti-flooding protection in mountainous drainage basins in evrytania (Greece)

The object of this study is to depict and evaluate the methods and techniques implemented or scheduled for the anti-erosion - anti-flooding protection in mountainous drainage basins in Evrytania, which exhibit intense erosion phenomena and constitute a danger of flooding for the downstream areas. Among these areas are also inhabited areas, such the town of Karpenisi, and for this reason the optimum way of management of these drainage basins constitutes an important element for the development of the town and also for the "sustainability" of the greater area (Evrytania, Greece)

HUMAN INTERVENTIONS AND ALTERATIONS OF THE GEOMORPHOLOGICAL CHARACTERISTICS IN PARTS OF THE COASTAL AREA IN THE IONIAN COAST (IPIROS - GREECE)

non disponibil

Toponymic phraseological unit, linguistic thinking and discourse: Russia, France and Italy

Studies phraseological units with a toponymic component on the material of linguistic and discursive manifestations in Russian, French and Italian linguistic cultures. National discourse in correlation with linguistic thinking is studied based on interpretative analysis of phraseology. In the context of the anthropocentric paradigm, the authors carry out a linguistic interpretation of systemic toponymic phraseological mean

Transfer function restoration in 3D electron microscopy via iterative data refinement

Three-dimensional electron microscopy (3D-EM) is a powerful tool for visualizing complex biological systems. As with any other imaging device, the electron microscope introduces a transfer function (called in this field the contrast transfer function, CTF) into the image acquisition process that modulates the various frequencies of the signal. Thus, the 3D reconstructions performed with these CTF-affected projections are also affected by an implicit 3D transfer function. For high-resolution electron microscopy, the effect of the CTF is quite dramatic and limits severely the achievable resolution. In this work we make use of the iterative data refinement (IDR) technique to ameliorate the effect of the CTF. It is demonstrated that the approach can be successfully applied to noisy data.Partial support is acknowledged to the Comisión Interministerial de Ciencia y Tecnología of Spain through projects BIO98-0761 and BIO2001-1237 and to National Institutes of Health through grant HL70472. The work of Y. Censor was done in part at the Center for Computational Mathematics and Scientific Computation (CCMSC) at the University of Haifa and supported by Research Grant 592/00 from the Israel Science Foundation founded by the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities

Rhus coriaria l. Fruit extract prevents UV-A-induced genotoxicity and oxidative injury in human microvascular endothelial cells

Rhus coriaria L. (sumac) is a small plant widely diffused in the Mediterranean region. Its fruit are often consumed as a spice but are also present in traditional medicine of several countries. Recently, interest in this plant has increased and many scientific works reported its beneficial effects including antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties. Plant extracts can be successfully used against ultraviolet rays, which are able to reach and damage the human skin; however, sumac extracts were never applied to this usage. Thus, in this study, we used a macerated ethanol extract of Rhus coriaria L. dried fruit (mERC) to demonstrate its preventive role against the damage induced by ultraviolet-A rays (UV-A) on microvascular endothelial cells (HMEC-1). In vitro effects of the extract pre-treatment and UV-A exposure were evaluated in detail. The antioxidant capacity was assessed by reactive oxygen species (ROS) formation and cellular antioxidant activity measurement. Genoprotective effects of mERC were investigated as well. Our findings indicate that the extract acts as a cell cycle inhibitor or apoptosis inducer, according to the level of damage. The present work provides new insights into the usage of Rhus coriaria extracts against skin injuries

Optimization problems in electron microscopy of single particles

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10479-006-0078-8Electron Microscopy is a valuable tool for the elucidation of the three-dimensional structure of macromolecular complexes. Knowledge about the macromolecular structure provides important information about its function and how it is carried out. This work addresses the issue of three-dimensional reconstruction of biological macromolecules from electron microscopy images. In particular, it focuses on a methodology known as “single-particles” and makes a thorough review of all those steps that can be expressed as an optimization problem. In spite of important advances in recent years, there are still unresolved challenges in the field that offer an excellent testbed for new and more powerful optimization techniques.We acknowledge partial support from the “Comunidad Autónoma de Madrid” through grants CAM-07B-0032-2002, GR/SAL/0653/2004 and GR/SAL/0342/2004, the “Comisión Interministerial de Ciencia yTecnologia” of Spain through grants BIO2001-1237, BIO2001-4253-E, BIO2001-4339-E, BIO2002- 10855-E, BFU2004-00217/BMC, the Spanish FIS grant (G03/185), the European Union through grants QLK2- 2000-00634, QLRI-2000-31237, QLRT-2000-0136, QLRI-2001-00015, FP6-502828 and the NIH through grant HL70472. Alberto Pascual and Roberto Marabini acknowledge support by the Spanish Ramon y Cajal Program

On the development of three new tools for organizing and sharing information in three-dimensional electron microscopy

This work was funded by the Spanish Ministerio de Economía y Competividad through grants BFU2009-09331, BIO2010-16566, ACI2009-1022, ACI2010-1088 and AIC-A- 2011-0638, by the Comunidad Autonoma de Madrid through grant S2010/BMD-2305, by NFS grant No. 1114901 and by the Spanish National Institute of Bioinformatics (a project funded by the Instituto de Salud Carlos III). This work was conducted using the Protégé resource, which is supported by grant LM007885 from the United States National Library of Medicine. COSS is a Ramón y Cajal researcher financed by the European Social Fund and the Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad. JV is a Juan de la Cierva Postdoctoral Fellow (JCI-2011-10185). This work was funded by Instruct, which is part of the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI) and is supported by national member subscriptions

Consistent and elastic registration of histological sections using vector-spline regularization

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/11889762_8Revised Papers on Second International ECCV Workshop, CVAMIA 2006 Graz, Austria, May 12, 2006Here we present a new image registration algorithm for the alignment of histological sections that combines the ideas of B-spline based elastic registration and consistent image registration, to allow simultaneous registration of images in two directions (direct and inverse). In principle, deformations based on B-splines are not invertible. The consistency term overcomes this limitation and allows registration of two images in a completely symmetric way. This extension of the elastic registration method simplifies the search for the optimum deformation and allows registering with no information about landmarks or deformation regularization. This approach can also be used as the first step to solve the problem of group-wise registration.Ignacio Arganda-Carreras is being supported by a predoctoral FPI-CAM fellow- ship since October 2003. Carlos Ortiz-de-Solorzano is supported by a Ramon y Cajal (Spanish Ministry of Education and Science ryc-2004-002353) and a Marie Curie International Reintegration Grant (FP6-518688). Jan Kybic was sponsored by the Czech Ministery of Education under project number MSM210000012. Par- tial support is acknowledged to Comunidad de Madrid through grant GR/SAL/0234, to Instituto de Salud Carlos III-Fondo de Investigaciones Sanitarias (FIS) through the IM3 Network and grant 040683 and to the Plan Nacional de Investigación Científica, Desarrollo e Innovación Tecnológica (I+D+I)

FSC-Q: a CryoEM map-to-atomic model quality validation based on the local Fourier shell correlation

In recent years, advances in cryoEM have dramatically increased the resolution of reconstructions and, with it, the number of solved atomic models. It is widely accepted that the quality of cryoEM maps varies locally; therefore, the evaluation of the maps-derived structural models must be done locally as well. In this article, a method for the local analysis of the map-to-model fit is presented. The algorithm uses a comparison of two local resolution maps. The first is the local FSC (Fourier shell correlation) between the full map and the model, while the second is calculated between the half maps normally used in typical single particle analysis workflows. We call the quality measure “FSC-Q”, and it is a quantitative estimation of how much of the model is supported by the signal content of the map. Furthermore, we show that FSC-Q may be helpful to detect overfitting. It can be used to complement other methods, such as the Q-score method that estimates the resolvability of atomsWe thank Prof. David Veesler for providing us the half maps of the spike glycoprotein of SARS-CoV-2. The authors would like to acknowledge financial support from: the Comunidad de Madrid through grant CAM (S2017/BMD-3817), the Spanish National Research Council (PIE/COVID-19 number 202020E079), the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness through grants SEV 2017-0712, PID2019-104757RB-I00/AEI/10.13039/501100011033, the Instituto de Salud Carlos III through grant PT17/0009/0010 (ISCIII-GEFI/ERDF-). Instruct-ULTRA (Grant 731005), an EU H2020 project to further develop the services of Instruct-ERIC. UE H2020 grant HighResCells (ERC-2018-SyG, Proposal: 810057). This work was supported by the Intramural Research Program of the National Institute for Arthritis, musculoskeletal, and Skin Diseases, NIH. The authors acknowledge the support and the use of resources of Instruct, a Landmark ESFRI projec

Structure and uncoating of immature adenovirus

Maturation via proteolytical processing is a common trait in the viral world, and is often accompanied by large conformational changes and rearrangements in the capsid. The adenovirus protease has been shown to play a dual role in the viral infectious cycle: (a) in maturation, as viral assembly starts with precursors to several of the structural proteins, but ends with proteolytically processed versions in the mature virion; and (b) in entry, because protease-impaired viruses have difficulties in endosome escape and uncoating. Indeed, viruses that have not undergone proteolytical processing are not infectious. We present the 3D structure of immature adenovirus particles, as represented by the thermosensitive mutant Ad2 ts1 grown under nonpermissive conditions, and compare it with the mature capsid. Our 3DEM maps at subnanometer resolution indicate that adenovirus maturation does not involve large scale conformational changes in the capsid. Difference maps reveal the location of unprocessed peptides pIIIa and pVI and help to define their role in capsid assembly and maturation. An intriguing difference appears in the core, indicating a more compact organization and increased stability of the immature cores. We have further investigated these properties by in vitro disassembly assays. Fluorescence and electron microscopy experiments reveal differences in the stability and uncoating of immature viruses, both at the capsid and core levels, as well as disassembly intermediates not previously imaged.This work was supported by grants from the Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación of Spain (BFU2007-60228 to C.S.M. and BIO2007-67150-C03-03 to R.M.), the Comunidad Autónoma de Madrid and Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CCG08-CSIC/SAL-3442 to C.S.M.) and the National Institutes of Health (5R01CA111569 to D.T.C., R0141599 to W.F.M. and GM037705 to S.J.F.). R.M.-C. is a recipient of a PFIS fellowship from the Instituto de Salud Carlos III of Spain. A.J.P.-B. holds a CSIC JAE-Doc postdoctoral position, partially funded by the European Social FundPeer reviewe