Functional Analysis of Transcriptional Promoters of Macaque Lymph Node Chemokines

Inflammation has been shown to play a part in the disease processes of human immunodeficiency virus type-1 (HIV-1) and simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) infections. The chemokines CCL20, CCL21, and CXCL13 all play important roles in the immune response and have each been, in some manner, linked to HIV-1 and SIV infection. Expression of these chemokine genes has been shown to affect disease state and it is, therefore, important to study the transcriptional regulation of these genes as a possible mechanism of controlling their expression. Transcriptional regulation occurs primarily via the promoter region of a gene. This promoter is the target for binding by transcription factors that can either activate or repress the expression of that specific gene. In this study, the promoter regions of the macaque chemokines CCL20, CCL21, and CXCL13 were analyzed. These promoter regions were characterized via sequence alignments and analyses, as well as by mapping putative transcription factor binding sites. Not only were differences between multiple clones of each chemokine promoter identified, but the homology between the rhesus macaque, cynomolgus macaque, and human promoter regions were explored. By cloning the three promoters into the pGL2-Basic vector, a promoterless luciferase expression plasmid, transcriptional control was measured from each promoter via levels of luciferase expression. A dual-luciferase reporter assay was designed and optimized as a method of quantitating transcriptional control from macaque chemokine promoters. After stimulation, an increase in CCL20 transcriptional levels, but no change in CCL21 and CXCL13 transcriptional levels, was observed. Possible methods of inhibiting transcription from the CCL20 promoter were explored by testing the effects of glycerol monolaurate (GML), (-)-epigallocatechin gallate (EGCG), and ethyl gallate (EG) on transcriptional levels. In summary, we have amplified three macaque chemokine promoters, characterized their basal and induced transcriptional control of the luciferase gene, and have identified potential inhibitors of their upregulation. The public health relevance of this study is its ability to potentially pave the way for additional approaches to modulating chemokine expression as a method of combating the inflammation associated with HIV-1-driven disease

WoTwins: Automatic Digital Twin Generator for the Web of Things

Digital Twins are crucial in Industry 4.0 IoT scenarios, as they replicate physical assets and enable important tasks such as predictive analytics, what-if scenarios and real time monitoring. The heterogeneity of IoT use cases usually makes the development of digital twins extremely application-specific as well as prone to interoperability issues. To overcome these two challenges, we propose WoTwins, a framework that, on one side, leverages the W3C Web of Things (WoT) standard to model data and entities, and, on the other side, generates automatically Digital Twins of existing Web Things by modeling their state space through a Markov Decision Process (MDP) graph and by predicting its behavior though Machine Learning techniques. We conduct experiments on a simulated use cases related to IoT robotics to evaluate our proposa

A Survey on the Web of Things

The Web of Things (WoT) paradigm was proposed first in the late 2000s, with the idea of leveraging Web standards to interconnect all types of embedded devices. More than ten years later, the fragmentation of the IoT landscape has dramatically increased as a consequence of the exponential growth of connected devices, making interoperability one of the key issues for most IoT deployments. Contextually, many studies have demonstrated the applicability of Web technologies on IoT scenarios, while the joint efforts from the academia and the industry have led to the proposals of standard specifications for developing WoT systems. Through a systematic review of the literature, we provide a detailed illustration of the WoT paradigm for both researchers and newcomers, by reconstructing the temporal evolution of key concepts and the historical trends, providing an in-depth taxonomy of software architectures and enabling technologies of WoT deployments and, finally, discussing the maturity of WoT vertical markets. Moreover, we identify some future research directions that may open the way to further innovation on WoT systems

Interoperability in Open IoT Platforms: WoT-FIWARE Comparison and Integration

The rapid and exponential growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) has been generating a new breed of technologies that introduce several different protocols and interfaces. The Web of Things (WoT) architecture stands out as an emerging and poten- tial solution to improve interoperability across IoT platforms by describing well-defined software interfaces. However, few studies analyze and compare WoT to other interoperability solutions proposed in the IoT literature. In this paper, we attempt to bridge the gap by three main contributions. First, we qualitative compare the WoT approach with the well-known FIWARE- based interoperability solution.Second, based on the previous analysis, we design and implement a connector to bridge the WoT architecture to the FIWARE ecosystem. Third, we conduct a performance analysis emulating a real IoT-based environment to understand scalability, response time, and computer resource usage of the two interoperability solutions. The results reveal that conceptual design choices impact the applications’ performance: the WoT architecture effectively enables interoperability across IoT Platforms, though it incorporates several characteristics that hinder the implementation of applications. On the other hand, the FIWARE IoT Agent solution is platform-specific. Hence new implementations are needed for each different IoT data model

Legal provisions and market conditions for energy communities in austria, germany, greece, italy, spain, and turkey: A comparative assessment

The Climate Pact and the European Green Deal constitute the main components of the European Union (EU)’s climate change policy. Energy transition, that is, transformation to a zero-carbon global energy system, is one of the main pillars of climate change mitigation policies. This transformation, coupled with the empowerment of individuals within the energy system, shifts citizens from their roles as customers towards a more active role. Within this framework, energy communities stand out as significant facilitators for the participation of individuals and communities in the energy system, promoting self-consumption and contributing to the social acceptance of renewable energy initiatives, among other direct and indirect benefits. The main directives introducing energy communities into the EU legal system are RED II and ED 2019. This study, conducted as a part of a Horizon 2020-funded eCREW project, assessed the adaptability and implementability of these two directives within national legislation, along with the associated legal and administrative frameworks, utilizing evidence from Austria, Germany, Greece, Italy, Spain, and Turkey. The comparative analysis also enhances the understanding of the concept of renewable energy communities and citizen energy communities, both in the EU and in nonmember countries. The results of the analysis revealed that none of the countries studied had yet completed the process of harmonizing their legislation concerning energy communities

A Pluralistic Theory of Wordhood

What are words and how should we individuate them? There are two main answers on the philosophical market. For some, words are bundles of structural-functional features defining a unique performance profile. For others, words are non-eternal continuants individuated by their causal-historical ancestry. These conceptions offer competing views of the nature of words, and it seems natural to assume that at most one of them can capture the essence of wordhood. This paper makes a case for pluralism about wordhood: the view that there is a plurality of acceptable conceptions of the nature of words, none of which is uniquely entitled to inform us as to what wordhood consists in