Metabolism and conidiation in Neurospora crassa

Metabolism and conidiation in Neurospora crass

The hexosemonophosphate shunt as an alternate metabolic pathway for conidial differentiation in Neurospora

The hexosemonophosphate shunt as an alternate metabolic pathway for conidial differentiation in Neurospor

Tumor Dynamics under Immunotherapy: A Time-Delay Revised Predator-Prey Model

Cancer remains a leading cause of death worldwide and traditional treatments such as surgical resection, chemotherapy, and radiotherapy may have limited benefits depending on the type of cancer and the stage at which it is diagnosed. Immunity is the state of protection against foreign pathogens or substances (i.e., antigens). Recent research into novel approaches to treatment has suggested that immunotherapy, which aims to optimize the body’s own natural responses to combating disease through various mechanisms, may be a promising strategy that can improve prognosis for certain cancer types that are refractory to other treatment options. Quantitative models simulating the dynamics of tumor-immune system interaction, can facilitate both basic and clinical research efforts aimed at better understanding the impact of immunotherapy in the management of the disease. The presence of tumor cells stimulates the response of the natural killer (NK) cells. To destroy cancer cells, the NK cells must have the ability to bind to the cancerous cells through proteins. The binding process is successful only if the surfaces of the two cells types have features which make them compatible. Thus, there exists a time delay until immunotherapeutic effects are felt by the human body. Previous studies of these dynamics have been described by various versions of predator-prey models. The goal of this study is to expand on previous work by proposing an evolutionary revised predator-prey mathematical model that employs discrete delays. The discrete delay is incorporated in a logistic type rate-limiting recruitment term from the effector cell evolution equation. This model suggests that tumor cells decline sharply according to the effects of these characteristic delays. We analyze the system of differential equations using the steady state, stability techniques, and critical values relevant to explaining the impact of therapy on tumor reduction. A comparison between Michaelis-Menten and our modified logistic dynamics suggests that conclusions can be drawn from the oscillatory behavior of the latter model. Through sensitivity analysis, we determine that the most influential parameters that describe the model are the ones belonging to the effector cells evolution equation. Thus, our analysis suggests that under certain conditions it is possible not only to control tumor growth but also to reduce its size through the administration of immunotherapy

Conidiation antigen and malate dehydrogenase isoenzyme activities

Conidiation antigen and malate dehydrogenase isoenzyme activitie

Initiating a Translational Bio-Mathematics Research Seminar for Undergraduate Students

[EN] The aim of this paper is to illustrate the benefits and the drawbacks of an experimental process on how to develop and teach an interdisciplinary applied math course. The analysis comes from our experience gained during the development and teaching of a temporary seminar called: Mathematical Modeling for Cancer Risk Assessment, implemented at our University. The need for the initiation of such an interdisciplinary course came from an increasing national effort started by Mathematical Association of America’s “Curriculum Foundations Project: Voices of the Partner Disciplines”. Their study found that research in biology and health-related fields has become more quantitatively oriented than in the past, therefore mathematical curricula should incorporate interdisciplinary modulation. Our seminar instruction included: writing and mathematical software skills, content lecture, project development and presentation. Results showed that students best interact with each other if work is performed during class time; mainly if a large project with possible variations is developed in class, so students or groups of students follow using the same pace. Implementing such interdisciplinary course that provided students with appropriate tools and methodologies, contributed to student retention, and increased students’ enthusiasm towards future research programs, carriers, and graduate schools.http://ocs.editorial.upv.es/index.php/HEAD/HEAD18Turian, E.; Filus, L. (2018). Initiating a Translational Bio-Mathematics Research Seminar for Undergraduate Students. Editorial Universitat Politècnica de València. 1341-1348. https://doi.org/10.4995/HEAD18.2018.8199OCS1341134

Isocitratase studies in Neurospora

Isocitratase studies in Neurospor

Supervised Typing of Big Graphs using Semantic Embeddings

We propose a supervised algorithm for generating type embeddings in the same semantic vector space as a given set of entity embeddings. The algorithm is agnostic to the derivation of the underlying entity embeddings. It does not require any manual feature engineering, generalizes well to hundreds of types and achieves near-linear scaling on Big Graphs containing many millions of triples and instances by virtue of an incremental execution. We demonstrate the utility of the embeddings on a type recommendation task, outperforming a non-parametric feature-agnostic baseline while achieving 15x speedup and near-constant memory usage on a full partition of DBpedia. Using state-of-the-art visualization, we illustrate the agreement of our extensionally derived DBpedia type embeddings with the manually curated domain ontology. Finally, we use the embeddings to probabilistically cluster about 4 million DBpedia instances into 415 types in the DBpedia ontology.Comment: 6 pages, to be published in Semantic Big Data Workshop at ACM, SIGMOD 2017; extended version in preparation for Open Journal of Semantic Web (OJSW

Further studies on the metabolic control of conidiation of N.crassa

Metabolic control of conidiatio