Crianças e jovens e a preparação do “craque”

Os dirigentes do futebol brasileiro nunca se preocuparam com a formação dos treinadores das categorias de base. Para treinar crianças e adolescentes, a opção preferida era aproveitar ex-jogadores que precisavam continuar trabalhando para sobreviver. Entretanto, a grande experiência adquirida como profissional de futebol foi, e continua sendo, insuficiente para compreender o processo de crescimento e desenvolvimento nessa fase da vida. A frágil arquitetura que sustenta empresários ambiciosos, comissão técnica leiga e mal remunerada e garotos sonhadores, mas sem embasamento físico, técnico e emocional, nasce fadada ao insucesso. Estamos vinte anos atrasados em relação ao modelo europeu, em que a formação especializada de treinadores com competência para identificar e formar talentos é uma preocupação permanente das federações de futebol.The managers of Brazilian football have never bothered to train coaches for the grassroots leagues. To train children and teenagers, they have preferred to use former players needing to keep working to survive. However, possessing a vast experience as a professional football player has never been enough for one to understand the process of growth and development at this stage of life. The fragile architecture that supports ambitious agents, non-professional and underpaidstaff and dreaming boys, and which has no physical, technical or emotional support, is born doomed to failure. We are twenty years behind the European model, in which the specialized training of coaches capable of identifying and training new talents is a permanent concern of football federations

Guidelines for the use and interpretation of assays for monitoring autophagy (4th edition)

In 2008, we published the first set of guidelines for standardizing research in autophagy. Since then, this topic has received increasing attention, and many scientists have entered the field. Our knowledge base and relevant new technologies have also been expanding. Thus, it is important to formulate on a regular basis updated guidelines for monitoring autophagy in different organisms. Despite numerous reviews, there continues to be confusion regarding acceptable methods to evaluate autophagy, especially in multicellular eukaryotes. Here, we present a set of guidelines for investigators to select and interpret methods to examine autophagy and related processes, and for reviewers to provide realistic and reasonable critiques of reports that are focused on these processes. These guidelines are not meant to be a dogmatic set of rules, because the appropriateness of any assay largely depends on the question being asked and the system being used. Moreover, no individual assay is perfect for every situation, calling for the use of multiple techniques to properly monitor autophagy in each experimental setting. Finally, several core components of the autophagy machinery have been implicated in distinct autophagic processes (canonical and noncanonical autophagy), implying that genetic approaches to block autophagy should rely on targeting two or more autophagy-related genes that ideally participate in distinct steps of the pathway. Along similar lines, because multiple proteins involved in autophagy also regulate other cellular pathways including apoptosis, not all of them can be used as a specific marker for bona fide autophagic responses. Here, we critically discuss current methods of assessing autophagy and the information they can, or cannot, provide. Our ultimate goal is to encourage intellectual and technical innovation in the field