TEAD and YAP regulate the enhancer network of human embryonic pancreatic progenitors

PMCID: PMC4434585.-- et al.The genomic regulatory programmes that underlie human organogenesis are poorly understood. Pancreas development, in particular, has pivotal implications for pancreatic regeneration, cancer and diabetes. We have now characterized the regulatory landscape of embryonic multipotent progenitor cells that give rise to all pancreatic epithelial lineages. Using human embryonic pancreas and embryonic-stem-cell-derived progenitors we identify stage-specific transcripts and associated enhancers, many of which are co-occupied by transcription factors that are essential for pancreas development. We further show that TEAD1, a Hippo signalling effector, is an integral component of the transcription factor combinatorial code of pancreatic progenitor enhancers. TEAD and its coactivator YAP activate key pancreatic signalling mediators and transcription factors, and regulate the expansion of pancreatic progenitors. This work therefore uncovers a central role for TEAD and YAP as signal-responsive regulators of multipotent pancreatic progenitors, and provides a resource for the study of embryonic development of the human pancreas.The research was supported by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Imperial Biomedical Research Centre. Work was funded by grants from the Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (CB07/08/0021, SAF2011-27086, PLE2009-0162 to J.F., BFU2013-41322-P to J.L.G-S.), the Andalusian Government (BIO-396 to J.L.G-S.), the Wellcome Trust (WT088566 and WT097820 to N.A.H., WT101033 to J.F.), the Manchester Biomedical Research Centre, ERC advanced starting grant IMDs (C.H-H.C. and L.V.) and the Cambridge Hospitals National Institute for Health Research Biomedical Research Centre (L.V.). R.E.J. is a Medical Research Council clinical training fellow. The authors are grateful to C. Wright (Vanderbilt University) for zebrafish Pdx1 antiserum, J. Postlethwait (Purdue University) for a Sox9b clone, H. Sasaki (Kumamoto University) for a TEAD–EnR clone, C. Vinod and L. Abi for research nurse assistance, and clinical colleagues at Central Manchester University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust. The authors thank J. Garcia-Hurtado for technical assistance (IDIBAPS).Peer Reviewe

Smart farming IoT platform based on edge and cloud computing

Precision Agriculture (PA), as the integration of information, communication and control technologies in agriculture, is growing day by day. The Internet of Things (IoT) and cloud computing paradigms offer advances to enhance PA connectivity. Nevertheless, their usage in this field is usually limited to specific scenarios of high cost, and they are not adapted to semi-arid conditions, or do not cover all PA management in an efficient way. For this reason, we propose a flexible platform able to cope with soilless culture needs in full recirculation greenhouses using moderately saline water. It is based on exchangeable low-cost hardware and supported by a three-tier open source software platform at local, edge and cloud planes. At the local plane, Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) interact with crop devices to gather data and perform real-time atomic control actions. The edge plane of the platform is in charge of monitoring and managing main PA tasks near the access network to increase system reliability against network access failures. Finally, the cloud platform collects current and past records and hosts data analytics modules in a FIWARE deployment. IoT protocols like Message Queue Telemetry Transport (MQTT) or Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) are used to communicate with CPS, while Next Generation Service Interface (NGSI) is employed for southbound and northbound access to the cloud. The system has been completely instantiated in a real prototype in frames of the EU DrainUse project, allowing the control of a real hydroponic closed system through managing software for final farmers connected to the platform.This work has been sponsored by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, through the HIDROLEAF project (ref. RTC-2016-4827-2) and the Torres Quevedo program (grant TQ-15-08073), and the European Commission, through the DrainUse (ref. LIFE14 ENV/ES/000538) and ANASTACIA (contract 731558) projects. The authors would also like to thank the colleagues from OdinS company for their support in the prototype deployment

Una propuesta de adaptación al EEES en el diseño de sistemas embebidos

El Espacio Europeo de Educación Superior (EEES) está suponiendo un cambio importante en la filosofía docente en todas las universidades españolas. Dentro de este ámbito, el aprendizaje colaborativo y, más específicamente, el aprendizaje basado en proyectos (ABP) están siendo considerados como metodologías docentes apropiada en enseñanzas técnicas. En el presente trabajo se describe el proceso llevado a cabo en la incorporación de dicho sistema en el área de tecnología electrónica en la Universidad de Murcia. El estudio se centra en una asignatura concreta orientada al diseño mediante microcontroladores, mostrando la metodología docente empleada, y haciendo énfasis en el trabajo en grupo mediante la realización de un proyecto. Se considera, además, la inclusión de un becario predoctoral FPU en las labores docentes, lo cual complementa la experiencia piloto. Los resultados muestran que la introducción de la nueva metodología es aceptada correctamente.Los autores agradecen al Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia la financiación ofrecida dentro del programa FPU, con la beca AP2005-1437

An analysis of communication and navigation issues in collision avoidance support systems

Collision avoidance support systems (CASS) are nowadays one of the main fields of interest in the area of road transportation. Among the different approaches, those systems based on vehicle cooperation to avoid collisions present the most promising perspectives. Works available in the current literature have in common that the performance of such solutions strongly relies on the operation of two on-board subsystems: navigation and communications. However, the performance of these two subsystems is usually underestimated when the whole solution is evaluated. Collision avoidance support applications can be considered among the most critical vehicular services, and this is the reason why this paper focuses on the performance issues of these two subsystems. Main issues regarding navigation and communication performance are discussed along the paper, and a study of the literature in the field is completed with the evaluation of different system prototypes. Communication and navigation tests in real environments yield further conclusions discussed in the paper.The Authors would like to thank the Spanish Ministerio de Fomento and the Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovacion for sponsoring these research activities under the grants FOM/2454/2007, TIN2008-06441-C02-02 and AP2005-1437. Last one in frames of the FPU program. This work has been carried out inside the Intelligent Systems group of the University of Murcia, awarded as an excellence researching group in frames of the Spanish Plan de Ciencia y Tecnologıa de la Region de Murcia (04552/GERM/06)

Defining the Behavior of IoT Devices through the MUD Standard: Review, Challenges, and Research Directions

With the strong development of the Internet of Things (IoT), the definition of IoT devices' intended behavior is key for an effective detection of potential cybersecurity attacks and threats in an increasingly connected environment. In 2019, the Manufacturer Usage Description (MUD) was standardized within the IETF as a data model and architecture for defining, obtaining and deploying MUD files, which describe the network behavioral profiles of IoT devices. While it has attracted a strong interest from academia, industry, and Standards Developing Organizations (SDOs), MUD is not yet widely deployed in real-world scenarios. In this work, we analyze the current research landscape around this standard, and describe some of the main challenges to be considered in the coming years to foster its adoption and deployment. Based on the literature analysis and our own experience in this area, we further describe potential research directions exploiting the MUD standard to encourage the development of secure IoT-enabled scenarios

METALA: a J2EE technology based framework for web mining

In this paper, we discuss the most important aspects of METALA, a software tool for meta-learning that we have developed to perform inductive learning in a distributed and component based fashion. The distribution comes from the use of a well posed distributed application development standard as is J2EE, and the component basis comes from the methodology we developed to integrate new learning algorithms and other software utilities into the system.Keywords: Software architecture, web usage mining, inductive learning, knowledge models, J2EE, XML

PhenoLinker: Phenotype-Gene Link Prediction and Explanation using Heterogeneous Graph Neural Networks

The association of a given human phenotype to a genetic variant remains a critical challenge for biology. We present a novel system called PhenoLinker capable of associating a score to a phenotype-gene relationship by using heterogeneous information networks and a convolutional neural network-based model for graphs, which can provide an explanation for the predictions. This system can aid in the discovery of new associations and in the understanding of the consequences of human genetic variation.Comment: 22 pages, 6 figure