Impact of Marine Drugs on Cytoskeleton-Mediated Reproductive Events

Marine organisms represent an important source of novel bioactive compounds, often showing unique modes of action. Such drugs may be useful tools to study complex processes such as reproduction; which is characterized by many crucial steps that start at gamete maturation and activation and virtually end at the first developmental stages. During these processes cytoskeletal elements such as microfilaments and microtubules play a key-role. In this review we describe: (i) the involvement of such structures in both cellular and in vitro processes; (ii) the toxins that target the cytoskeletal elements and dynamics; (iii) the main steps of reproduction and the marine drugs that interfere with these cytoskeleton-mediated processes. We show that marine drugs, acting on microfilaments and microtubules, exert a wide range of impacts on reproductive events including sperm maturation and motility, oocyte maturation, fertilization, and early embryo development

A Management Architecture for IoT Smart Solutions:Design and Implementation

none7siThe management of IoT solutions is a complex task due to their inherent distribution and heterogeneity. IoT management approaches focus on devices and connectivity, thus lacking a comprehensive understanding of the different software, hardware, and communication components that comprise an IoT-based solution. This paper pro- poses a novel four-layer IoT Management Architecture (IoTManA) that encompasses various aspects of a distributed infrastructure for managing, controlling, and moni- toring software, hardware, and communication components, as well as dataflows and data quality. Our architecture provides a cross-layer graph-based view of the end-to- end path between devices and the cloud. IoTManA has been implemented in a set of software components named IoT management system (IoTManS) and tested in two scenarios—Smart Agriculture and Smart Cities—showing that it can significantly contribute to harnessing the complexity of managing IoT solutions. The cross-layer graph-based modeling of IoTManA facilitates the implemented management system (IoTManS) to detect and identify root causes of typically distributed failures occur- ring in IoT solutions. We conducted a performance analysis of IoTManS focusing on two aspects—failure detection time and scalability—to demonstrate application sce- narios and capabilities. The results show that IoTManS can detect and identify the root cause of failures in 806ms to 90,036ms depending on its operation mode, adapt- ing to different IoT needs. Also, the IoTManS scalability is directly proportional to the scalability of the underlying IoT Platform, managing up to 5,000 components simultaneously.mixedSilva, Dener; Heideker, Alexandre; Zyrianoff, Ivan D.; Kleinschmidt, João H.; Roffia, Luca; Soininen, Juha-Pekka; Kamienski, Carlos A.Silva, Dener; Heideker, Alexandre; Zyrianoff, Ivan D.; Kleinschmidt, João H.; Roffia, Luca; Soininen, Juha-Pekka; Kamienski, Carlos A