O conto de José, filho de Jacó: realizando a vontade de Deus para além das fronteiras

Este conto do Gênesis, lido numa ótica de teologia da missão, aponta para o temor a Deus como uma atitude missionária que, num contexto alheio ao judaicocristão, leva à condição de profundo respeito e consideração pelas manifestações culturais e religiosas do outro, sem nenhum desprezo das próprias. Em conseqüência, a/o temente a Deus participa da realização das missões divinas concretas para com o seu povo e o mundo. Olhando para a realidade brasileira, o texto associa impulsos do conto à atuação missionária cristã entre povos indígenas, como também à leitura da sua história recente.Este cuento de Génesis, leído en una perspectiva de teología de la misión, remite para el temor a Dios como una actitud misionaria que, en un contexto ajeno al judio-cristiano, lleva a la condición de un profundo respeto y consideración por las manifestaciones culturales y religiosas del otro, sin ningún desprecio a las propias. En consecuencia, la persona temerosa de Dios participa de la realización de las concretas misiones divinas para su pueblo y el mundo. Mirando la realidad brasilera, el texto, va a asociar impulsos del cuento a la actuación misionaria cristiana entre pueblos indígenas, así como también, a la lectura de su historia reciente.This tale from Genesis, read in a perspective of mission theology, points to the fear of God as a missionary attitude which, in a context foreign to the Judeo Christian context, leads to the condition of deep respect and consideration for the cultural and religious manifestations of the other without despising one’s own. As a consequence the person who fears God participates in the fulfillment of the divine concrete missions for His people and world. Looking at the Brazilian reality the text associates impulses from the tale with Christian missionary action among indigenous peoples, as well as with the reading of their recent history

Effect of Hypoxia on Cerebrovascular and Cognitive Function During Exercise

Please refer to the pdf version of the abstract located adjacent to the title

Safeguarding cork’s beauty and longevity: innovations in deposition of protective thin films

Cork is a sustainable natural material widely used as a wine stopper. However, some other uses, such as wall coverings, flooring, bags and shoes, face UV damage. To mitigate this issue, we explored the deposition of TiO2 and ZnO thin films via magnetron sputtering on glass and cork substrates. Both films displayed uniformity and the lack of any discernible cracks or voids, remained transparent in the visible region, and offered UV protection. Thus, TiO2 and ZnO blocked UV light with a wavelength of up to 310 nm (Eg = 4 eV) and 370 nm (Eg = 3.3 eV), respectively. Exposure tests, under a sun simulator lamp, revealed that the uncoated cork showed noticeable color changes, even when located under a glass substrate. The TiO2 coating did not prevent cork discoloration, while ZnO prevented it. This study highlights ZnO thin films as a durable solution to safeguard cork materials from UV damage and extend their usability.This research was funded by “the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) in the framework of the project PTDC/CTM-REF/0155/2020

Highly accurate detection of ovarian cancer using CA125 but limited improvement with serum matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization time-of-flight mass spectrometry profiling

Objectives: Our objective was to test the performance of CA125 in classifying serum samples from a cohort of malignant and benign ovarian cancers and age-matched healthy controls and to assess whether combining information from matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization (MALDI) time-of-flight profiling could improve diagnostic performance. Materials and Methods: Serum samples from women with ovarian neoplasms and healthy volunteers were subjected to CA125 assay and MALDI time-of-flight mass spectrometry (MS) profiling. Models were built from training data sets using discriminatory MALDI MS peaks in combination with CA125 values and tested their ability to classify blinded test samples. These were compared with models using CA125 threshold levels from 193 patients with ovarian cancer, 290 with benign neoplasm, and 2236 postmenopausal healthy controls. Results: Using a CA125 cutoff of 30 U/mL, an overall sensitivity of 94.8% (96.6% specificity) was obtained when comparing malignancies versus healthy postmenopausal controls, whereas a cutoff of 65 U/mL provided a sensitivity of 83.9% (99.6% specificity). High classification accuracies were obtained for early-stage cancers (93.5% sensitivity). Reasons for high accuracies include recruitment bias, restriction to postmenopausal women, and inclusion of only primary invasive epithelial ovarian cancer cases. The combination of MS profiling information with CA125 did not significantly improve the specificity/accuracy compared with classifications on the basis of CA125 alone. Conclusions: We report unexpectedly good performance of serum CA125 using threshold classification in discriminating healthy controls and women with benign masses from those with invasive ovarian cancer. This highlights the dependence of diagnostic tests on the characteristics of the study population and the crucial need for authors to provide sufficient relevant details to allow comparison. Our study also shows that MS profiling information adds little to diagnostic accuracy. This finding is in contrast with other reports and shows the limitations of serum MS profiling for biomarker discovery and as a diagnostic too

Posterior Estimation for Dynamic PET imaging using Conditional Variational Inference

This work aims efficiently estimating the posterior distribution of kinetic parameters for dynamic positron emission tomography (PET) imaging given a measurement of time of activity curve. Considering the inherent information loss from parametric imaging to measurement space with the forward kinetic model, the inverse mapping is ambiguous. The conventional (but expensive) solution can be the Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling, which is known to produce unbiased asymptotical estimation. We propose a deep-learning-based framework for efficient posterior estimation. Specifically, we counteract the information loss in the forward process by introducing latent variables. Then, we use a conditional variational autoencoder (CVAE) and optimize its evidence lower bound. The well-trained decoder is able to infer the posterior with a given measurement and the sampled latent variables following a simple multivariate Gaussian distribution. We validate our CVAE-based method using unbiased MCMC as the reference for low-dimensional data (a single brain region) with the simplified reference tissue model.Comment: Published on IEEE NSS&MI

Proteomic Analysis and Virulence Assessment of Granulicatella adiacens Secretome

Despite reports on the occurrence of Granulicatella adiacens in infective endocarditis, few mechanistic studies on its virulence characteristics or pathogenicity are available. Proteins secreted by this species may act as determinants of host-microbe interaction and play a role in virulence. Our aim in this study was to investigate and functionally characterize the secretome of G. adiacens. Proteins in the secretome preparation were digested by trypsin and applied to nanoLC-ESI-MS/MS. By using a combined mass spectrometry and bioinformatics approach, we identified 101 proteins. Bioinformatics tools predicting subcellular localization revealed that 18 of the secreted proteins possessed signal sequence. More than 20% of the secretome proteins were putative virulence proteins including serine protease, superoxide dismutase, aminopeptidase, molecular chaperone DnaK, and thioredoxin. Ribosomal proteins, molecular chaperones, and glycolytic enzymes, together known as “moonlighting proteins,” comprised fifth of the secretome proteins. By Gene Ontology analysis, more than 60 proteins of the secretome were grouped in biological processes or molecular functions. KEGG pathway analysis disclosed that the secretome consisted of enzymes involved in biosynthesis of antibiotics. Cytokine profiling revealed that secreted proteins stimulated key cytokines, such as IL-1β, MCP-1, TNF-α, and RANTES from human PBMCs. In summary, the results from the current investigation of the G. adiacens secretome provide a basis for understanding possible pathogenic mechanisms of G. adiacens

Urocortin 3 overexpression reduces ER stress and heat shock response in 3T3-L1 adipocytes

The neuropeptide urocortin 3 (UCN3) has a beneficial effect on metabolic disorders, such as obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease. It has been reported that UCN3 regulates insulin secretion and is dysregulated with increasing severity of obesity and diabetes. However, its function in the adipose tissue is unclear. We investigated the overexpression of UCN3 in 3T3-L1 preadipocytes and differentiated adipocytes and its effects on heat shock response, ER stress, inflammatory markers, and glucose uptake in the presence of stress-inducing concentrations of palmitic acid (PA). UCN3 overexpression significantly downregulated heat shock proteins (HSP60, HSP72 and HSP90) and ER stress response markers (GRP78, PERK, ATF6, and IRE1 alpha) and attenuated inflammation (TNF alpha) and apoptosis (CHOP). Moreover, enhanced glucose uptake was observed in both preadipocytes and mature adipocytes, which is associated with upregulated phosphorylation of AKT and ERK but reduced p-JNK. Moderate effects of UCN3 overexpression were also observed in the presence of 400 mu M of PA, and macrophage conditioned medium dramatically decreased the UCN3 mRNA levels in differentiated 3T3-L1 cells. In conclusion, the beneficial effects of UCN3 in adipocytes are reflected, at least partially, by the improvement in cellular stress response and glucose uptake and attenuation of inflammation and apoptosis.Peer reviewe

Biomarker discovery and redundancy reduction towards classification using a multi-factorial MALDI-TOF MS T2DM mouse model dataset

Diabetes like many diseases and biological processes is not mono-causal. On the one hand multifactorial studies with complex experimental design are required for its comprehensive analysis. On the other hand, the data from these studies often include a substantial amount of redundancy such as proteins that are typically represented by a multitude of peptides. Coping simultaneously with both complexities (experimental and technological) makes data analysis a challenge for Bioinformatics

Protective films on complex substrates of thermoplastic and cellular elastomers:Prospective applications to rubber, nylon and cork

Deposition of thin films is an appropriate methodology to enhance the performance of a material by modification of its surface, while keeping the properties of the bulk largely unaffected. However, a practical implementation becomes less straightforward when dealing with sensitive or complex substrates, for instance, those which cannot be subjected to harsh treatments, such as cleaning and etching, or extreme deposition conditions, like high temperatures, and ion impingement et cetera. This paper concentrates on deposition processing of complex substrates. In particular, it discusses the deposition of two types of protective coatings (diamond-like carbon (DLC) films against friction and wear, and TiO2 films against UV light) on three types of thermoplastic and cellular elastomers (rubber, nylon and cork). It is demonstrated that a successful protection of thermoplastic elastomers against wear with DLC films can be attained, after a thorough adaptation of the procedure to the characteristics of the specific substrate. In addition, the paper reports the very first depositions on a cellular elastomer like cork by vapor deposition methods, including Atomic Layer Deposition (ALD)

Influence of the physical properties on the antibacterial and photocatalytic behavior of Ag-doped indium sulfide film deposited by spray pyrolysis

Spray pyrolysis was used to deposit indium sulfide (In2S3) films, with or without silver doping. The films are polycrystalline, and the inclusion of Ag in the In2S3 structure leads to the formation of a solid solution, with the crystallite size of the order of tens of nanometers. In2S3 films exhibit a semiconductive behavior, and the incorporation of Ag leads to an increase of the charge carrier concentration, enhancing the electrical conductivity of the films. The small polaron hopping mechanism, deduced by the fittings according to the double Jonscher variation, explains the evolution of the direct current (dc) conductivity at high temperature of the Ag-doped indium sulfide. From impedance spectroscopy, it was found that the doped film presents dielectric relaxation, and Nyquist diagrams indicate the importance of the grain and the grain boundaries’ contributions to the transport phenomena. The physical characteristics of the films have an influence on the photocatalytic performance, achieving photodegradation efficiency above 80% (85.5% in the case of Ag doping), and on the antibacterial activity. The obtained results indicate that indium sulfide films are good candidates for environmental and biological applications, confirming a multifunctional nature.Part of this work was supported by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) in the framework of the Strategic Funding UIDB/04650/2020”. D.C. and I.G. acknowledge the structural funds project PRO-DD (POS-CCE, O.2.2.1., ID123, SMIS 2637, ctr. no 11/2009) for providing some of the infrastructure used in this work. Part of this work was supported by a grant of the Romanian Ministry of Education and Research, CNCS - UEFISCDI, project number PN-III-P1-1.1-TE-2019-1209, within PNCDI III