Adaptability of buildings: a critical review on the concept evolution

Our ever-evolving built environment is continuously facing emerging needs for housing, work, health, and mobility, among others. Yet, buildings are usually designed and set up as finished permanent objects, reflecting the one constant scenario in mind of defined form, function, and performance. Since change is increasingly inevitable in our life, enlarging buildings’ adaptive capacities in response to arising variables and changing conditions over their lifecycle becomes a necessity in seeking global sustainability demands. The concept of building adaptability has been a notable subject in this respect, increasingly stimulating and proposing regenerative alternatives to today’s often obsolete buildings. This paper critically reviews the existing body of knowledge on the concept of adaptability in building research. The main focus is made on the evolution of the concept interpretations and related paradigms, and on the development of its applications and strategies in the light of promoting models and trends. Drawing on the literature as a source of evidence, the paper analyzes and classifies the content of existing studies published in scientific journals and gray literature, focusing on a timeframe from 2015 up-to-date. Moreover, the paper aims to build a constructive discussion to identify potential gaps between the actual state of the art and emerging needs, which should be addressed by further research.This research was funded by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology, grant number PD/BD/150400/201

Epigenetic activation of the FLT3 gene by ZNF384 fusion confers a therapeutic susceptibility in acute lymphoblastic leukemia.

FLT3 is an attractive therapeutic target in acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) but the mechanism for its activation in this cancer is incompletely understood. Profiling global gene expression in large ALL cohorts, we identify over-expression of FLT3 in ZNF384-rearranged ALL, consistently across cases harboring different fusion partners with ZNF384. Mechanistically, we discover an intergenic enhancer element at the FLT3 locus that is exclusively activated in ZNF384-rearranged ALL, with the enhancer-promoter looping directly mediated by the fusion protein. There is also a global enrichment of active enhancers within ZNF384 binding sites across the genome in ZNF384-rearranged ALL cells. Downregulation of ZNF384 blunts FLT3 activation and decreases ALL cell sensitivity to FLT3 inhibitor gilteritinib in vitro. In patient-derived xenograft models of ZNF384-rearranged ALL, gilteritinib exhibits significant anti-leukemia efficacy as a monotherapy in vivo. Collectively, our results provide insights into FLT3 regulation in ALL and point to potential genomics-guided targeted therapy for this patient population

Deregulation of DUX4 and ERG in acute lymphoblastic leukemia

Chromosomal rearrangements deregulating hematopoietic transcription factors are common in acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL).1,2 Here, we show that deregulation of the homeobox transcription factor gene DUX4 and the ETS transcription factor gene ERG are hallmarks of a subtype of B-progenitor ALL that comprises up to 7% of B-ALL. DUX4 rearrangement and overexpression was present in all cases, and was accompanied by transcriptional deregulation of ERG, expression of a novel ERG isoform, ERGalt, and frequent ERG deletion. ERGalt utilizes a non-canonical first exon whose transcription was initiated by DUX4 binding. ERGalt retains the DNA-binding and transactivating domains of ERG, but inhibits wild-type ERG transcriptional activity and is transforming. These results illustrate a unique paradigm of transcription factor deregulation in leukemia, in which DUX4 deregulation results in loss-of-function of ERG, either by deletion or induction of expression of an isoform that is a dominant negative inhibitor of wild type ERG function

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Adaptable housing or adaptable people? Experience in Switzerland gives a new answer to the questions of housing adaptability

Although many adaptable housing examples have been realized, the reactions of the dwellers to their adaptable surroundings have seldom been adequately evaluated. In this article the user reactions from four completed housing projects in Switzerland are analyzed giving consideration to the potential qualities of adaptability, the exchange of information among architects, owners and tenants, and the management methods to achieve adaptable housing. It will be demonstrated that adaptable housing is much more than a matter of design. It will be shown that consideration should be given to user instructions and the distribution of knowledge in conjunction with skilful design. -Authorlink_to_subscribed_fulltex

A comparative longevity study of traditional buildings between rural and urban areas in Pearl River Delta, China

The rapid economic development and urbanization in Pearl River Delta of China, have changed the physical environment dramatically but also led to a crisis of the short life span of contemporary housing. When the green building concept cannot help provide the appropriate answer, many scholars turn to traditional buildings. Unlike in rural cases, traditional buildings in urban area obviously exhibit diversity and long-term usage. However, most of current studies focus on the preservation of historical features but do not analyze why and how such buildings can last a such long time. Historical cases in both two areas might have a certain number of common sustainable factors because they evolved from a similar prototype in history. For a better understanding of their common features and why they have different performances, theories closely related to the longevity and the “level” strategy will be introduced. These theories aimed to increase the life span of buildings and pay more attention to the interrelation between people and built environment in the temporal dimension. Within this framework, several historical cases from the urban area and a traditional village will be compared and studied by using the “level” division method, and abundant longevity evidence will be revealed and analyzed. As part of a complex and consistent research aimed at constructing an evaluation system, the results of this investigation will initially evaluate their long-lasting performances qualitatively under the two different contexts

Flexibility of traditional buildings and craftsmanship in China

Although an important facet of modernist architecture in which function plays a prominent role, building flexibility is not entirely a new concept. Its relevance transcends generations, allowing space and structure to evolve through time. This paper investigates the relationship among main building structures, infill elements, and space by studying examples in ancient Chinese architecture. It reveals the role of building owners, users, and craftsmen from a survey of historical documentation. In studying these examples, it is concluded that craftsmen in ancient China were involved not only during the construction phase but throughout the period of use as well. Thus, in select cases, the relationship between craftsmen and owners or users had been preserved for generations. Finally, this paper suggests potential strategies for the building industry and technology in the move towards sustainable development.link_to_subscribed_fulltex