PEGylated cationic liposome - DNA nanoparticle assembly in cell culture media: pathway effects and clues to enhanced control and transfection efficiency optimization

XII Spanish-Portuguese Conference on Controlled Drug DeliveryCationic Liposome – DNA nanoparticles constitute a promising approach for safe and efficient delivery of genes for therapeutic applications. In order to be used in vivo, these particles can be coated with an inert and hydrophilic polymer, such as polyethylene-glycol (PEG), which improves blood circulation time by providing steric stabilization against removal by the immune system. In this work we study the influence of the initial salt concentration, which controls the electrostatic atraction between cationic liposomes and anionic DNA, on the structure of PEGylated CL–DNA nanoparticles.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Structural MRI texture analysis for detecting Alzheimer's disease

Purpose:: Alzheimer’s disease (AD) has the highest worldwide prevalence of all neurodegenerative disorders, no cure, and low ratios of diagnosis accuracy at its early stage where treatments have some effect and can give some years of life quality to patients. This work aims to develop an automatic method to detect AD in 3 different stages, namely, control (CN), mild-cognitive impairment (MCI), and AD itself, using structural magnetic resonance imaging (sMRI). Methods:: A set of co-occurrence matrix and texture statistical measures (contrast, correlation, energy, homogeneity, entropy, variance, and standard deviation) were extracted from a two-level discrete wavelet transform decomposition of sMRI images. The discriminant capacity of the measures was analyzed and the most discriminant ones were selected to be used as features for feeding classical machine learning (cML) algorithms and a convolution neural network (CNN). Results:: The cML algorithms achieved the following classification accuracies: 93.3% for AD vs CN, 87.7% for AD vs MCI, 88.2% for CN vs MCI, and 75.3% for All vs All. The CNN achieved the following classification accuracies: 82.2% for AD vs CN, 75.4% for AD vs MCI, 83.8% for CN vs MCI, and 64% for All vs All. Conclusion:: In the evaluated cases, cML provided higher discrimination results than CNN. For the All vs All comparison, the proposedmethod surpasses by 4% the discrimination accuracy of the state-of-the-art methods that use structural MRI.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

MP-Collaborator: a mobile collaboration tool in pervasive environment

“Copyright © [2009] IEEE. Reprinted from 5th International Conference on Wireless and Mobile Computing, Networking and Communications. WIMOB 2009. ISBN: 978-0-7695-3841-9 . This material is posted here with permission of the IEEE. Internal or personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution must be obtained from the IEEE by writing to [email protected]. By choosing to view this document, you agree to all provisions of the copyright laws protecting it.”In modern organizations, the communication between collaborators is essential to improve productivity. There is a need for mobile collaboration tools that allow efficient collaboration among staff in organization which may be located in different geographical areas and time zones. Mobile and pervasive computing provides easy and convenient access to information, enabling effective collaboration. This paper describes a context and location-aware mobile application, called MP-Collaborator, created to improve and optimize the communication between collaborators in any organization. MP- Collaborator draws information from location, user status and Pocket Outlook Calendar to create a user availability profile, which is published to any other user in the network. Based on availability status, the user can be reached using a simple phone call or a message. Through the opportunistic use of available mobile technologies MP-Collaborator provides a simple but critical service - user presence service. The proposed solution is validated both in terms of features and communication through a series of experiments on real devices through Wi-Fi network

Antibodies Against M-Type Phospholipase A2 Receptor (PLA2R) in Patients with Primary Membranous Nephropathy and Lupus Nephritis Class V: A Review

Membranous nephropathy (MN) is a very common disease of male adults with nephrotic syndrome. The disease can be primary, when the cause is not known, or secondary associated with infections, drugs, neoplasias and autoimmune systemic diseases, such as systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE). The primary form accounts for 70–80% of the cases. SLE is a common cause of secondary MN affecting young women. The differential diagnosis from primary and lupus MN by clinical and morphological findings can be difficult. The search for autoantibodies against podocyte antigen M-type phospholipase A2 receptor (PLA2R) has demonstrated high positivity in the serum and renal biopsies in the primary MN and negativity in lupus MN (WHO class V). There is a large literature on the role of anti-PLA2R antibody in the diagnosis and follow-up of patients with membranous nephropathy. The aim of this review is to summarize the literature data on the etiopathogenesis of MN and the value of anti-PLA2R antibody screening for the diagnosis and management of patients

Impact of content storage and retrieval mechanisms on the performance of vehicular delay-tolerant networks

“Copyright © [2010] IEEE. Reprinted from 18th International Conference on Software, Telecommunications and Computer Networks (SoftCOM 2010). ISBN: 978-1-4244-8663-2 . This material is posted here with permission of the IEEE. Internal or personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution must be obtained from the IEEE by writing to [email protected]. By choosing to view this document, you agree to all provisions of the copyright laws protecting it.”Vehicular Delay-Tolerant Networking (VDTN) is a new disruptive network architecture based on the concept of delay tolerant networks (DTNs). VDTNs handle non-real time applications using vehicles to carry messages on their buffers, relaying them only when a proper contact opportunity occurs. Therefore, the network performance is directly affected by the storage capacity and message retrieving of intermediate nodes. This paper proposes a suitable content storage and retrieval (CSR) mechanism for VDTN networks. This CSR solution adds additional information on control labels of the setup message associated to the corresponding data bundle (aggregated traffic) that defines and applies caching and forwarding restrictions on network traffic (data bundles). Furthermore, this work presents a performance analysis and evaluation of CSR mechanisms over a VDTN application scenario, using a VDTN testbed. This work presents the comparison of the network behavior and performance using two DTN routing protocols, Epidemic and Spray and Wait, with and without CSR mechanisms. The results show that CSR mechanisms improve the performance of VDTN networks significantly.Part of this work has been supported by the Instituto de Telecomunicações, Next Generation Networks and Applications Group (NetGNA), Portugal in the framework of the Project VDTN@Lab, and by the Euro-NF Network of Excellence from the Seventh Framework Programme of EU, in the framework of the Specific Joint Research Project VDTN

Formation of Ceramide/Sphingomyelin Gel Domains in the Presence of an Unsaturated Phospholipid: A Quantitative Multiprobe Approach

AbstractTo better understand how ceramide modulates the biophysical properties of the membrane, the interactions between palmitoyl-ceramide (PCer) and palmitoyl-sphingomyelin (PSM) were studied in the presence of the fluid phospholipid palmitoyl-oleoyl-phosphatidylcholine (POPC) in membrane model systems. The use of two fluorescent membrane probes distinctly sensitive to lipid phases allowed a thorough biophysical characterization of the ternary system. In these mixtures, PCer recruits POPC and PSM in the fluid phase to form extremely ordered and compact gel domains. Gel domain formation by low PCer mol fraction (up to 12mol %) is enhanced by physiological PSM levels (∼20–30mol % total lipid). For higher PSM content, a three-phase situation, consisting of fluid (POPC-rich)/gel (PSM-rich)/gel (PCer-rich) coexistence, is clearly shown. To determine the fraction of each phase a quantitative method was developed. This allowed establishing the complete ternary phase diagram, which helps to predict PCer-rich gel domain formation and explains its enhancement through PSM/PCer interactions