Immune phenotype of chronic liver disease

Immune disorders in chronic liver disease may reflect common host propensities or disease-specific factors. Our aim was to determine the principal bases for these expressions. Four hundred fifty-one patients with various chronic liver diseases were assessed prospectively for concurrent immune disorders. Individuals with immune diseases were more frequently women (73% vs 60%, P = 0.02) and they had HLA DR4 more often than counterparts with other HLA (46% vs 23%, P = 0.000008). The association between HLA DR4 and immune disease was apparent within individual liver diseases and within different categories of liver disease. Women with HLA DR4 had a higher frequency of immune disease than women without HLA DR4 (52% vs 22%, P < or = 0.000001), and they also had immune diseases more commonly than DR4-positive men (52% vs 31%, P = 0.03). DR4-positive men, however, had higher frequencies of immune disease than DR4-negative men, especially in the nonimmune types of liver disease (26% vs 4%, P = 0.002). We conclude that HLA DR4 and female gender constitute an immune phenotype that is an important basis for autoimmune expression in chronic liver disease

Strategies to obtain designer polymers based on cyanobacterial extracellular polymeric substances (EPS)

Biopolymers derived from polysaccharides are a sustainable and environmentally friendly alternative to the synthetic counterparts available in the market. Due to their distinctive properties, the cyanobacterial extracellular polymeric substances (EPS), mainly composed of heteropolysaccharides, emerge as a valid alternative to address several biotechnological and biomedical challenges. Nevertheless, biotechnological/biomedical applications based on cyanobacterial EPS have only recently started to emerge. For the successful exploitation of cyanobacterial EPS, it is important to strategically design the polymers, either by genetic engineering of the producing strains or by chemical modification of the polymers. This requires a better understanding of the EPS biosynthetic pathways and their relationship with central metabolism, as well as to exploit the available polymer functionalization chemistries. Considering all this, we provide an overview of the characteristics and biological activities of cyanobacterial EPS, discuss the challenges and opportunities to improve the amount and/or characteristics of the polymers, and report the most relevant advances on the use of cyanobacterial EPS as scaffolds, coatings, and vehicles for drug delivery.This work was financed by FEDER—Fundo Europeu de Desenvolvimento Regional funds through the COMPETE 2020 - Operacional Programme for Competitiveness and Internationalisation (POCI), Portugal 2020, and by Portuguese funds through FCT—Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia/Ministério da Ciência, Tecnologia e Ensino Superior in the framework of the project POCI-01-0145-FEDER-028779, contract DL57/2016/CP1327/CT0007 and fellowship SFRH/BD/119920/2016

Species Composition, Distribution, Biomass Trends and Exploitation of Dominant Fish Species in Manila Bay using Experimental Trawl Survey

An experimental trawl fishing survey was conducted in Manila Bay from March 2014 to October 2015 at sixteen (16) pre-established dragging stations adapted from an earlier study (MADECOR, 1995). Using a commercial otter trawl, the average trawling speed during fishing operations was 6-7 km/hour. Analysis of catches focused on biomass trends, species composition, distribution and exploitation of dominant species. A total of 146 fish and invertebrate species belonging to 48 families were recorded during the survey period wherein most of the catches were dominated by small pelagic species such as anchovies and sardines. Exploitation rates (E) for the six (6) dominant species (Sardinella gibbosa, Sardinella fimbriata, Valamugil seheli, Mugil cephalus, Encrasicholina devisi and Stolephorous commersonnii) shows signs of overfishing. The estimated demersal fish biomass of the bay revealed that the relative decline was about 90% from the 1947 baseline study

Reproductive Biology of Common Small Pelagic Fishes in Manila Bay, Philippines

Reproductive biology of the three dominant species (Sardinella gibbosa, Sardinella fimbriata, and Rastrelliger kanagurta) were studied in Manila Bay from January 2014 to December 2015. The data were collected from landed catch (coming from gillnet, lift net, purse seine, ringnet, and trawl) and during the actual trawl fishing survey. A total of 2,383 Sardinella gibbosa, 2,334 Sardinella fimbriata, and 549 Rastrelliger kanagurta were analyzed by pooling the two years data. The overall female to male ratio conformed to the expected 1:1 sex ratio. These species spawn throughout the year with major peak in March and April and minor peak in October to December for Sardinella gibbosa; with major peak in February to May and minor peak in October to December for Sardinella fimbriata; and for Rastrelliger kanagurta, with major peak in October to December and minor peak in May and June. The GSI values correlate with the maturation of the gonads of these species. The length at maturity (Lm50) was calculated at 12.75 cm in males and 13.25 cm in females for S. gibbosa; 12.25 cm in males and 12.75 cm in females for S. fimbriata; and 25.5 cm in males and 24.5 cm in females for R. kanagurta

Integrating new memories into the hippocampal network activity space

By investigating the topology of neuronal co-activity, we found that mnemonic information spans multiple operational axes in the mouse hippocampus network. High-activity principal cells form the core of each memory along a first axis, segregating spatial contexts and novelty. Low-activity cells join co-activity motifs across behavioral events and enable their crosstalk along two other axes. This reveals an organizational principle for continuous integration and interaction of hippocampal memories

Ethics of AI in Education: Towards a Community-Wide Framework

While Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIED) research has at its core the desire to support student learning, experience from other AI domains suggest that such ethical intentions are not by themselves sufficient. There is also the need to consider explicitly issues such as fairness, accountability, transparency, bias, autonomy, agency, and inclusion. At a more general level, there is also a need to differentiate between doing ethical things and doing things ethically, to understand and to make pedagogical choices that are ethical, and to account for the ever-present possibility of unintended consequences. However, addressing these and related questions is far from trivial. As a first step towards addressing this critical gap, we invited 60 of the AIED community’s leading researchers to respond to a survey of questions about ethics and the application of AI in educational contexts. In this paper, we first introduce issues around the ethics of AI in education. Next, we summarise the contributions of the 17 respondents, and discuss the complex issues that they raised. Specific outcomes include the recognition that most AIED researchers are not trained to tackle the emerging ethical questions. A well-designed framework for engaging with ethics of AIED that combined a multidisciplinary approach and a set of robust guidelines seems vital in this context

Light propagation and Anderson localization in disordered superlattices containing dispersive metamaterials: Effects of correlated disorder

Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq)Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES)Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP)We have investigated the effects of disorder correlations on light propagation and Anderson localization in one-dimensional dispersive metamaterials. We consider and compare the cases where disorder is uncorrelated to situations where it is totally correlated and anticorrelated. The photonic gaps of the corresponding periodic structure are not completely destroyed by the presence of disorder, which leads to minima in the localization length. In the vicinities of a gap, the behavior of the localization length depends crucially on the physical origin of the gap (Bragg or non-Bragg gaps). Within a Bragg gap, the localization length increases as the degree of disorder increases, an anomalous behavior that only occurs for the uncorrelated and completely correlated cases. In these cases, minima of the localization length at the positions of Bragg gaps are shifted by increasing disorder, which does not occur for the anticorrelated case, where the positions of the minima remain unaltered. Minima in the localization length corresponding to non-Bragg gaps are not shifted by increasing disorder, albeit the widths of these minima are changed. We have found that the asymptotic behavior for the localization length xi proportional to lambda(6) for disordered metamaterials is not affected by correlations. Finally, we have investigated the role of absorption on the delocalized Brewster modes and argue that it could be mitigated in light of the state-of-the-art of metamaterials research.849Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq)Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES)Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado do Rio de Janeiro (FAPERJ)Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP)Brazilian Agency FUJBConselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq)Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES)Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP