Unraveling the Mechanisms of Cutaneous Graft-Versus-Host Disease

The skin is the most common target organ affected by graft-versus-host disease (GVHD), with severity and response to therapy representing important predictors of patient survival. Although many of the initiating events in GVHD pathogenesis have been defined, less is known about why treatment resistance occurs or why there is often a permanent failure to restore tissue homeostasis. Emerging data suggest that the unique immune microenvironment in the skin is responsible for defining location- and context-specific mechanisms of injury that are distinct from those involved in other target organs. In this review, we address recent advances in our understanding of GVHD biology in the skin and outline the new research themes that will ultimately enable design of precision therapies

Introduction: global challenges for sociology

With the 50th anniversary of the journal, this special issue takes stock of the progress that has been made within sociology to become a more globally oriented discipline and discusses the new challenges for the future that emerge as a consequence. From its inception, classical sociology was primarily concerned with the European origins of processes of modernity that were to become global. There was little discussion of how the global might be understood in terms of structures, processes and social movements not directly identified as European but nonetheless contributing to modernity. The challenge for sociology has been to take into account these other phenomena and to rethink its core categories and concepts in light of newly understood alternative formations of the global and the social movements that bring them about

Hop by-products: pharmacological activities and potential application as cosmetics

Hops (Humulus lupulus L.) are known worldwide as a raw material in beer production due their flavor and preservative values. The beneficial properties of the plant have been mostly associated with the female hop inflorescences (cones), which is also the part used in the brewing industry. However, some studies indicate the presence of compounds associated with health benefits in the vegetative parts of hops or small-caliber cones, which discarded in hop collection. Moreover, large quantities of by-products remain in the forms of spent grains and spent hops/hot trub and are produced by breweries raising environmental and economic sustainability concerns. This review focuses on the phytochemicals and biological and pharmacological activities of hop and their potential use in skin care products and also intends to explore the potential of the hop’ discarded parts and brewery industry by-products for production in the cosmetics industry.The authors are grateful to the Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT, Portugal) for financial support through national funds FCT/MCTES (PIDDAC) to CIMO (UIDB/00690/2020, UIDP/00690/2020 and EXPL2021CIMO_06) and SusTEC (LA/P/0007/2020).info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Rickettsial Infection Caused by Accidental Conjunctival Inoculation

The most common transmission route of tick-borne Rickettsia is through tick bite; nevertheless, other transmission routes should also be considered. We report a case of rickettsial infection in a 15-year-old boy caused by accidental contamination of the conjunctiva through the infected fluid of a crushed engorged tick removed from a dog. Right eye pain, conjunctival hyperaemia with mucopurulent exudate, chemosis and eyelid oedema were the first signs and symptoms. Two days later, the boy developed fever, myalgia, headache, abdominal pain and was vomiting; physical examination showed multiple cervical adenopathies but no rash. He was treated with doxycycline (200 mg/day) for 7 days with progressive resolution of clinical signs. Rickettsial infection was confirmed by immunofluorescence assay with serological seroconversion in two consecutive samples. Rickettsia conorii or Rickettsia massiliae were the possible causal agents since they are the Rickettsia spp found in the Rhipicephalus sanguineus dog tick in Portugal

Stepwise API usage assistance using n-gram language models

Reusing software involves learning third-party APIs, a process that is often time-consuming and error-prone. Recommendation systems for API usage assistance based on statistical models built from source code corpora are capable of assisting API users through code completion mechanisms in IDEs. A valid sequence of API calls involving different types may be regarded as a well-formed sentence of tokens from the API vocabulary. In this article we describe an approach for recommending subsequent tokens to complete API sentences using n-gram language models built from source code corpora. The provided system was integrated in the code completion facilities of the Eclipse IDE, providing contextualized completion proposals for Java taking into account the nearest lines of code. The approach was evaluated against existing client code of four widely used APIs, revealing that in more than 90% of the cases the expected subsequent token is within the 10-top-most proposals of our models. The high score provides evidence that the recommendations could help on API learning and exploration, namely through the assistance on writing valid API sentences.info:eu-repo/semantics/submittedVersio

Light elements in stars with exoplanets

It is well known that stars orbited by giant planets have higher abundances of heavy elements when compared with average field dwarfs. A number of studies have also addressed the possibility that light element abundances are different in these stars. In this paper we will review the present status of these studies. The most significant trends will be discussed.Comment: 10 pages, 6 figures. Submitted to the proceedings of IAU symposium 268: Light elements in the universe

Implementação da NBR ISO/IEC 17025 estudo de caso: a experiência do laboratório de fitopatologia ? Embrapa ? CNPMF.

No Brasil, a avaliação da competência de laboratórios de ensaios é feita pela CRE/Inmetro, em um processo denominado acreditação, e auditorias são realizadas para determinar a conformidade do sistema de gestão com a NBR ISO/IEC 17025. A acreditação dá ao laboratório reconhecimento nacional/internacional, já que o habilita a fazer parte de uma rede de Laboratórios. Atualmente o Laboratório de Fitopatologia da Embrapa Mandioca e Fruticultura (LFITO) é credenciado pelo Ministério da Agricultura e Pecuária (MAPA) e está pleiteando à acreditação junto ao Inmetro, sendo necessário a implementação de alguns requisitos para atender plenamente a NBR ISO IEC/17025