In silico and in vivo analysis reveal a novel gene in Saccharomyces cerevisiae trehalose metabolism

BACKGROUND: The ability to respond rapidly to fluctuations in environmental changes is decisive for cell survival. Under these conditions trehalose has an essential protective function and its concentration increases in response to enhanced expression of trehalose synthase genes, TPS1, TPS2, TPS3 and TSL1. Intriguingly, the NTH1 gene, which encodes neutral trehalase, is highly expressed at the same time. We have previously shown that trehalase remains in its inactive non-phosphorylated form by the action of an endogenous inhibitor. Recently, a comprehensive two-hybrid analysis revealed a 41-kDa protein encoded by the YLR270w ORF, which interacts with NTH1p. RESULTS: In this work we investigate the correlation of this Trehalase Associated Protein, in trehalase activity regulation. The neutral trehalase activity in the ylr270w mutant strain was about 4-fold higher than in the control strain. After in vitro activation by PKA the ylr270w mutant total trehalase activity increased 3-fold when compared to a control strain. The expression of the NTH1 gene promoter fused to the heterologous reporter lacZ gene was evaluated. The mutant strain lacking YLR270w exhibited a 2-fold increase in the NTH1-lacZ basal expression when compared to the wild type strain. CONCLUSIONS: These results strongly indicate a central role for Ylr270p in inhibiting trehalase activity, as well as in the regulation of its expression preventing a wasteful futile cycle of synthesis-degradation of trehalose

Larval anatomy of Dendropsophus decipiens (A. Lutz 1925) (Anura: Hylidae: Dendropsophini) with considerations to larvae of this genus

The Dendropsophus decipiens clade comprises four species: D. berthalutzae, D. decipiens, D. haddadi, and D. oliveirai. Tadpoles of these species were described, but data on their internal morphology are lacking. We provide the first description of the buccopharyngeal anatomy, chondrocranial morphology, and cranial, hyoid and hyobranchial musculature of the tadpole of D. decipiens. Larvae of D. decipiens are characterized by the absence of lingual papillae, presence of fan-like papilla on the buccal floor, presence of a single-element suprarostral cartilage, presence of a small triangular process at the basis of the processus muscularis, m. levator mandibulae lateralis inserted on the nasal sac, and m. subarcualis rectus II-IV with a single, continuous slip. Tadpoles are likely macrophagous, although not as specialized as those of other species of the genus, suggesting some degree of diversification on the feeding habits within Dendropsophus.Fil: Dias, Pedro H. S.. Universidade de Sao Paulo; BrasilFil: de Araujo Vieira, Katyuscia. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Parque Centenario. Museo Argentino de Ciencias Naturales "Bernardino Rivadavia"; ArgentinaFil: de Carvalho-e-Silva, Ana Maria P. T.. Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro; BrasilFil: Orrico, Victor G. D.. Universidade Estadual de Santa Cruz; Brasi

Sequence-aware multimodal page classification of Brazilian legal documents

The Brazilian Supreme Court receives tens of thousands of cases each semester. Court employees spend thousands of hours to execute the initial analysis and classification of those cases -- which takes effort away from posterior, more complex stages of the case management workflow. In this paper, we explore multimodal classification of documents from Brazil's Supreme Court. We train and evaluate our methods on a novel multimodal dataset of 6,510 lawsuits (339,478 pages) with manual annotation assigning each page to one of six classes. Each lawsuit is an ordered sequence of pages, which are stored both as an image and as a corresponding text extracted through optical character recognition. We first train two unimodal classifiers: a ResNet pre-trained on ImageNet is fine-tuned on the images, and a convolutional network with filters of multiple kernel sizes is trained from scratch on document texts. We use them as extractors of visual and textual features, which are then combined through our proposed Fusion Module. Our Fusion Module can handle missing textual or visual input by using learned embeddings for missing data. Moreover, we experiment with bi-directional Long Short-Term Memory (biLSTM) networks and linear-chain conditional random fields to model the sequential nature of the pages. The multimodal approaches outperform both textual and visual classifiers, especially when leveraging the sequential nature of the pages.Comment: 11 pages, 6 figures. This preprint, which was originally written on 8 April 2021, has not undergone peer review or any post-submission improvements or corrections. The Version of Record of this article is published in the International Journal on Document Analysis and Recognition, and is available online at https://doi.org/10.1007/s10032-022-00406-7 and https://rdcu.be/cRvv

Transtorno disforico interictal: uma comorbidade psiquiatrica frequente entre pacientes com epilepsia acompanhados em dois servicos terciarios

Psychiatric disorders are frequent among patients with epilepsy. Data in the literature have shown a heterogeneous clinical presentation of psychiatric disorders in patients with epilepsy. Interictal dysphoric disorder could be a specific psychiatric comorbidity associated with epilepsy, primarily in patients treated in tertiary centers.Objective The present study aimed to determine the prevalence of interictal dysphoric disorder among patients with epilepsy who were followed in two tertiary epilepsy services in Brazil. Method Sixty-five patients with epilepsy completed the Portuguese version of the Interictal Dysphoric Disorder Inventory. Results Thirty-three (50.7%) patients fulfilled the diagnostic criteria for interictal dysphoric disorder, although all participants answered positively to having at least one key symptom. Conclusion The high rate of patients with epilepsy who fulfilled the diagnosis of interictal dysphoric disorder confirms an association between epilepsy and psychiatric disorders. However, there is clearly a need to improve diagnostic tools to allow better differentiation between interictal dysphoric disorder and other psychiatric disorders.Transtornos psiquiátricos são frequentes entre pacientes com epilepsia. Estudos evidenciam apresentações clínicas heterogêneas neste grupo. O transtorno disfórico interictal pode um transtorno específico destes pacientes, particularmente naqueles acompanhados em centros terciários.Objetivo Determinar a prevalência de transtorno disfórico interictal entre pacientes com epilepsia atendidos em dois serviços terciários de epilepsia do Brasil. Método Sessenta e cinco pacientes foram convidados a responder a versão brasileira do Interictal Dysphoric Disorder Inventory adaptado e validado para o Português. Resultados Trinta e três pacientes (50,7%) preencheram critérios para transtorno disfórico interictal, embora todos os entrevistados tenham afirmado que são acometidos por ao menos um dos sintomas-chave. Conclusão A alta prevalência de transtorno disfórico interictal em pacientes com epilepsia pode ser um indício da associação entre epilepsia e transtornos psiquiátricos. No entanto, é necessário melhorar a acurácia dos instrumentos de diagnóstico para poder diferenciar casos de transtorno disfórico interictal de outros transtornos psiquiátricos.Universidade Federal de São Paulo (UNIFESP) Department of Neurology and NeurosurgeryUniversidade Federal de Pernambuco Department of Neurology and NeurosurgeryUniversidade Federal de São Paulo (UNIFESP) Department of PsychiatryUNIFESP, Department of Neurology and NeurosurgeryUNIFESP, Department of PsychiatrySciEL

Genetic comparison of sickle cell anaemia cohorts from Brazil and the United States reveals high levels of divergence

Genetic analysis of admixed populations raises special concerns with regard to study design and data processing, particularly to avoid population stratification biases. The point mutation responsible for sickle cell anaemia codes for a variant hemoglobin, sickle hemoglobin or HbS, whose presence drives the pathophysiology of disease. Here we propose to explore ancestry and population structure in a genome-wide study with particular emphasis on chromosome 11 in two SCA admixed cohorts obtained from urban populations of Brazil (Pernambuco and Sao Paulo) and the United States (Pennsylvania). Ancestry inference showed different proportions of European, African and American backgrounds in the composition of our samples. Brazilians were more admixed, had a lower African background (43% vs. 78% on the genomic level and 44% vs. 76% on chromosome 11) and presented a signature of positive selection and Iberian introgression in the HbS region, driving a high differentiation of this locus between the two cohorts. The genetic structures of the SCA cohorts from Brazil and US differ considerably on the genome-wide, chromosome 11 and HbS mutation locus levels9CONSELHO NACIONAL DE DESENVOLVIMENTO CIENTÍFICO E TECNOLÓGICO - CNPQCOORDENAÇÃO DE APERFEIÇOAMENTO DE PESSOAL DE NÍVEL SUPERIOR - CAPESFUNDAÇÃO DE AMPARO À PESQUISA DO ESTADO DE SÃO PAULO - FAPESP8367/2011-1; 150398/2013-1; 304455/2012-1; 310938/2014-7; 305218/2017-48367/2011-1; 150398/2013-1; 304455/2012-1; 310938/2014-7; 305218/2017-42008/57441-0; 2014/00984-3; 2012/06438-5; 2015/13152-9; 2008/10596-

A magnanimidade da teoria: interpretar a ética em teoria da literatura

Tese de doutoramento, Teoria da Literatura, Universidade de Lisboa, Faculdade de Letras, 2003Um dos pressupostos desta tese consiste na ideia segundo a qual o pensamento ético só adquire propriedade conceptual se preliminarmente pudermos definir ‘acção’. Como se procura demonstrar no capítulo I, saber o que é uma acção não se constitui, no entanto, como tarefa que descobre e estabelece propriedades intrínsecas e estáveis, mas como descrição de certas ocorrências, nos termos das pessoas que procuram explicar e descrever acções. Assim, o pensamento ético é algo que se constitui a partir da coerência e racionalidade de certas descrições de acções particulares e não um sistema de regras ou prescrições. Defende-se que a coerência estrutural destas descrições determina não apenas a consideração moral das acções, mas também a possibilidade do conhecimento entre as pessoas e a certeza, mais poética do que epistemológica, da sua existência. Se uma certa estabilidade do texto ético e uma certeza suficiente acerca do conhecimento humano dependem da configuração mais ou menos padronizada das acções humanas e do funcionamento mental, assumem especial relevância cognitiva e ética os casos e fenómenos de irracionalidade na realização de acções e formação de crenças. De facto, como se sugere no capítulo II, estes casos suscitam perplexidades éticas e cognitivas e assinalam o carácter provisório e conceptualmente circunscrito das nossas descrições sobre acções e pessoas, no contexto restrito do pensamento filosófico e ético. Importa por isso considerar outros textos em que a acção se constitui como motivo de estrutura argumentativa e objecto de análise. A consideração da tragédia e, sobretudo, a análise da teorização poética de Aristóteles acerca do texto trágico formam o capítulo III desta tese. A determinação ética da argumentação técnica da Poética é tão relevante para o entendimento da tragédia quanto, para a ética, conduta moral e compreensão da irracionalidade, é de absoluta pertinência uma particular descrição da acção trágica e da peculiaridade de certas actividades interpretativas exigidas não só por esse entendimento trágico de acção, mas por qualquer texto.ABSTRACT - One of the central ideas of this thesis is that ethical thinking acquires conceptual accuracy only when we can define ‘action’. As it is suggested in chapter I, to know what an action is is not, nevertheless, an activity which finds and establishes intrinsic and stable properties, but a description of some phenomena, in the vocabulary of those who seek to explain and to describe actions. Thus, ethical thinking is derived from the coherence and rationality of descriptions of particular actions and is not, therefore, a system of rules and prescriptions. It is argued that the structural coherence of these descriptions determines not only the moral apprehension of actions, but also the possibility of knowledge of persons and the assurance, more poetical than epistemological, of their existence. If a certain stability of the ethical text and a sufficient certainty about human knowledge depend on a more or less standard configuration of human actions and of mental functioning, then irrational episodes and phenomena in action and belief assume a particular cognitive and ethical relevance. As proposed in chapter II, these cases excite some ethical and cognitive perplexities and show the provisional and conceptually circumscribed character of our descriptions of actions and persons, in the strict realm of philosophy and ethics. It is necessary, therefore, to consider other texts in which action is constituted as the cause for the argumentative structure and object of analysis. The consideration of tragedy and, mostly, of the treatment of the tragic text in Aristotle’s Poetics constitutes an important part of this task and is sketched in chapter III. The ethical influence of the technical arguments of the Poetics is therefore relevant to the understanding of tragedy. A particular description of tragic action and of the specificity of interpretative activities is required not only by the understanding of action in tragedy as by the description of ethical patterns of moral behaviour and the comprehension of irrationality in any text.Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian: Bolsa de Curta Duraçã

An unusual case of bacillary angiomatosis in the oral cavity of an AIDS patient who had no concomitant tegumentary lesions – case report and review

ABSTRACT Bacillary angiomatosis (BA) is an angioproliferative disease of immunocompromised patients that usually presents as vascular tumors in the skin and subcutaneous tissues. It is caused by chronic infections with either Bartonella henselae or B. quintana. Oral cavity BA is exceedingly rare and even rarer without simultaneous cutaneous disease. We report herein the case of a 51-year-old HIV-infected man who presented severe odynophagia and an eroded lesion on the hard palate that progressed to an oronasal fistula. No cutaneous lesions were recorded. Doxycycline led to complete resolution. To the best of our knowledge, only six previous cases of oral BA without tegumentary disease have been previously reported and none of them progressed to fistula

A new interministerial strategy for the promotion of healthy eating in Portugal: implementation and initial results

ObjectiveTo describe the implementation, main intervention areas and initial results of the Integrated Strategy for the Promotion of Healthy Eating (EIPAS) in Portugal.MethodsEIPAS was published as a Law, in December of 2017, as a result of a collaboration between several ministries, including the Finance, Internal Affairs, Education, Health, Economy, Agriculture, and Sea Ministries, aiming at improving the dietary habits of the Portuguese population. The working group, led by the Ministry of Health, developed this strategy for over a year. The framework produced was based on WHO and European Commission recommendations as well as on relevant data from the last Portuguese dietary intake survey (2015/2016). EIPAS also reflects the results of a public hearing, including the food industry, among others, and the experience gathered, since 2012, through the National Programme for the Promotion of Healthy Eating. It considers the health in all policies' challenge set by WHO and has four different strategic areas, namely (1) creation of healthier food environments, (2) improvement of the quality and accessibility of healthy food choices for consumers, (3) promotion and development of literacy, in order to encourage healthy food choices, and (4) promotion of innovation and entrepreneurship. In order to achieve these goals, a set of 51 actions was established and assigned to the seven ministries involved.ResultsUnder the scope of this strategy, Portugal has already implemented several actions, including (1) definition of standards for food availability at all public healthcare institutions; (2) implementation of a sugar tax on sweetened beverages; (3) implementation of a voluntary agreement with the food industry sector for food reformulation (work in progress); (4) design of a proposal for an interpretative model of front-of-pack food labelling; (5) improvement of the nutritional quality of food aid programmes for low-income groups; and (6) regulation of marketing of unhealthy foods to children.ConclusionsFor the first time, Portugal has a nutrition policy based on the WHO concept of health in all policies' and on the national data on food intake. The implementing process of all 51 actions and the inherent complexities and difficulties found so far have made this process be an authentic political and social laboratory that deserves to be followed