Isolation of differentially expressed transcripts after treatment of Platanus acerifolia leaves with cerato-platanin, a multi-functional protein from Ceratocystis fimbriata f. sp. platani

The Ascomycete Ceratocystis platani (Walter) Engelbrecht et Harrington comb. et stat. nov. (Cep) is the causal agent of the canker stain of the plane trees that causes severe consequents on plane trees growing in many European areas. In consequence of the absence of control methods it is very important to improve the knowledge of the factors involved in the pathogen-host interaction. A 120 amino acids protein (cerato-platanin, CP), isolated from Cep culture filtrates, has been hypothesised as a signal molecule involved in the induction of plant defence mechanisms. Pre-treatments of leaves with CP and subsequent inoculation with Cep showed the inhibition of Cep conidia germination and hyphal lengthening, showing the ability of CP in the induction of localized resistance. We have applied the suppression-subtractive hybridisation (SSH) methodology for the isolation and characterisation of genes induced after a 48 hours CP treatment and for the constitution of reverse and forward clones. Sequence analysis of forward clones showed that many genes are positively regulated, the most part of which code for DNA/RNA synthesis and metabolism, and for proteins involved in: i) the protein synthesis/turnover, ii) cell primary metabolism, iii) energy, iv) signalling pathways and v) defence and/or stress related. We have analysed some of them by relative PCR using total RNA from leaves treated with CP and Cep conidia at different times after the treatment. The results showed the involvement of CP in the stimulation of plant defence response

Heterozygous deletion of both sclerostin (Sost) and connexin43 (Gja1) genes in mice is not sufficient to impair cortical bone modeling

Connexin43 (Cx43) is the main gap junction protein expressed in bone forming cells, where it modulates peak bone mass acquisition and cortical modeling. Genetic ablation of the Cx43 gene (Gja1) results in cortical expansion with accentuated periosteal bone formation associated with decreased expression of the Wnt inhibitor sclerostin. To determine whether sclerostin (Sost) down-regulation might contribute to periosteal expansion in Gja1 deficient bones, we took a gene interaction approach and crossed mice harboring germline null alleles for Gja1 or Sost to generate single Gja1+/-and Sost+/-and double Gja1+/-;Sost+/-heterozygous mice. In vivo μCT analysis of cortical bone at age 1 and 3 months confirmed increased thickness in Sost-/-mice, but revealed no cortical abnormalities in single Gja1+/-or Sost+/-mice. Double heterozygous Gja1+/-Sost+/-also showed no differences in mineral density, cortical thickness, width or geometry relative to wild type control mice. Likewise, 3-point bending measurement of bone strength revealed no significant differences between double Gja1+/-;Sost+/-or single heterozygous and wild type mice. Although these data do not exclude a contribution of reduced sclerostin in the cortical expansion seen in Gja1 deficient bones, they are not consistent with a strong genetic interaction between Sost and Gja1 dictating cortical modeling

Jede Menge ladierte Typen: piccoli grandi uomini nella narrativa di Clemens Meyer. Traduzione in italiano di sei short stories da Die Nacht, die Lichter

La tesi è strutturata partendo da un'analisi della short story come genere letterario americano e della sua successiva diffusione in Germania. Individuati i tratti costituenti questo genere letterario, si è passati allo studio dell'autore contemporaneo tedesco Clemens Meyer, scrittore della raccolta di short stories "Die Nacht, die Lichter"

Technical Debt Prioritization: State of the Art. A Systematic Literature Review

Background. Software companies need to manage and refactor Technical Debt issues. Therefore, it is necessary to understand if and when refactoring Technical Debt should be prioritized with respect to developing features or fixing bugs. Objective. The goal of this study is to investigate the existing body of knowledge in software engineering to understand what Technical Debt prioritization approaches have been proposed in research and industry. Method. We conducted a Systematic Literature Review among 384 unique papers published until 2018, following a consolidated methodology applied in Software Engineering. We included 38 primary studies. Results. Different approaches have been proposed for Technical Debt prioritization, all having different goals and optimizing on different criteria. The proposed measures capture only a small part of the plethora of factors used to prioritize Technical Debt qualitatively in practice. We report an impact map of such factors. However, there is a lack of empirical and validated set of tools. Conclusion. We observed that technical Debt prioritization research is preliminary and there is no consensus on what are the important factors and how to measure them. Consequently, we cannot consider current research conclusive and in this paper, we outline different directions for necessary future investigations

Comparison of conditional tests on Poisson data

Abstract We compare four conditional tests for Poisson data through a simulation study: the exact binomial test, its asymptotic approximation, a Markov Chain Monte Carlo test and the standard permutation test. Despite being non-parametric, we observe that permutation tests are as effective as the others. From a theoretical point of view we justify this result by observing that the orbits of permutations form a good partition of the conditional space

A Study on Architectural Smells Prediction

Architectural smells can be detrimental to the system maintainability, evolvability and represent a source of architectural debt. Thus, it is very important to be able to understand how they evolved in the past and to predict their future evolution. In this paper, we evaluate if the existence of architectural smells in the past versions of a project can be used to predict their presence in the future. We analyzed four Java projects in 295 Github releases and we applied for the prediction four different supervised learning models in a repeated cross-validation setting. We found that historical architectural smell information can be used to predict the presence of architectural smells in the future. Hence, practitioners should carefully monitor the evolution of architectural smells and take preventative actions to avoid introducing them and stave off their progressive growth.</p