PowerAqua: supporting users in querying and exploring the semantic web

With the continued growth of online semantic information, the processes of searching and managing this massive scale and heterogeneous content have become increasingly challenging. In this work, we present PowerAqua, an ontology basedcQuestion Answering system that is able to answer queries by locating and integrating information, which can be massively distributed across heterogeneous semantic resources. We provide a complete overview of the system including: the research challenges that it addresses, its architecture, the evaluations that have been conducted to test it and a deep discussion showing how PowerAqua effectively supports users in querying and exploring the Semantic Web content

Novel Protein Kinase Inhibitors Related to Tau Pathology Modulate Tau Protein-Self Interaction Using a Luciferase Complementation Assay

The current number of drugs available for the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is strongly limited and their benefit for therapy is given only in the early state of the disease. An effective therapy should affect those processes which mainly contribute to the neuronal decay. There have been many approaches for a reduction of toxic Aβ peptides which mostly failed to halt cognitive deterioration in patients. The formation of neurofibrillary tangles (NFT) and its precursor tau oligomers have been suggested as main cause of neuronal degeneration because of a direct correlation of their density to the degree of dementia. Reducing of tau aggregation may be a viable approach for the treatment of AD. NFT consist of hyperphosphorylated tau protein and tau hyperphosphorylation reduces microtubule binding. Several protein kinases are discussed to be involved in tau hyperphosphorylation. We developed novel inhibitors of three protein kinases (gsk-3β, cdk5, and cdk1) and discussed their activity in relation to tau phosphorylation and on tau–tau interaction as a nucleation stage of a tau aggregation in cells. Strongest effects were observed for those inhibitors with effects on all the three kinases with emphasis on gsk-3β in nanomolar ranges