O impacto das perceções de liderança servidora nos níveis de job burnout dos colaboradores

In the current work context, constantly changing and increasingly demanding, in which employees’ well-being is often at risk, leaders have become increasingly important. In this context, a positive leadership style, such as servant leadership, which postulates that the leader is a source of resources and support, and that the main priority are employees’ needs, might contribute to decreasing the negative effects of job burnout, both on the individual and organisational levels. Therefore, this research aims at studying the impact that servant leadership perceptions have on employees’ job burnout levels. The sample is composed of 79 participants from different organisations and sectors. The results show that servant leadership perceptions have a negative impact on employees’ job burnout levels, being that impact stronger when the leader is male. The results not only confirm the importance of leadership within the organisational environment and to employees’ well-being, but also add to the literature about the impact of servant leadership on employees’ well-being and the influence of the gender of the leader in such relationship.No atual contexto laboral, fortemente sujeito a mudanças e de exigência crescente, onde o bem-estar dos colaboradores é, muitas vezes, posto em causa, os líderes assumem um papel cada vez mais importante. Nesta conjuntura, um estilo de liderança positiva, como o de liderança servidora, na qual o/a líder é fonte de recursos e suporte, colocando as necessidades das suas pessoas em primeiro lugar, poderá contribuir para mitigar os efeitos negativos do job burnout, a nível pessoal e organizacional. Assim, esta investigação tem como objetivo estudar o impacto das perceções de liderança servidora nos níveis de job burnout dos colaboradores. A amostra é constituída por 79 participantes de diversas organizações e setores. Os resultados mostram que as perceções de liderança servidora têm um impacto negativo nos níveis de job burnout dos colaboradores, sendo que esse impacto é mais forte quando o líder é do género masculino. Os resultados obtidos corroboram a importância da liderança na vida organizacional e no bem-estar dos colaboradores, e contribuem para a literatura sobre o impacto que a liderança servidora tem no bem-estar dos colaboradores e a influência do género do líder nessa relação.Mestrado em Gestã

Positional Amino acid frquency patterns for automatic protein annotation

Tese de mestrado, Bioinformática e Biologia computacional (Bioinformática), Universidade de Lisboa, Faculdade de Ciências, 2015Today most proteins contained in protein data bases have been annotated through electronic inference. Due to the amount of data being generated by high throughput methods, electronic inference remains the only viable path to understand proteins’ biochemical functions(s), cellular location(s), participation in cellular processes, as well as, its structure and interactions. The feature learning model here proposed aims to introduce a new perspective on protein function annotation problem at a positional amino acid level. Initially, the probabilistic scores for each amino acid at each protein position is acquired, via a traditional PSI-BLAST search; this generates a PSSM with said information. Each protein’s positional amino acid frequency pattern (PAFP) is sieved through a threshold to decrease the number of PAFPs irrelevant to the protein’s function. Afterwards, these are clustered to their Euclidean closer relatives, via k-means algorithm; identifying, in this manner, s sort of fingerprint of amino acid score patterns. These are then associated to Gene Ontology terms retrieved for the training proteins, using arules package from R, i. e., establish association rules between the resulting K-means clusters of PAFPs and the Go terms. The 300 threshold for the sum of PAFPs generated 280 GO terms, with a support of 0.0005, about 30 proteins, and a confidence of 40%. These terms were used to describe 516591 proteins out of 549008 in Swiss-Prot the release of July 2015. Most GO terms were, not leaf level, but higher. The model infers far more proteins to each Go term than the ones annotated to it, however it also fails to allocate proteins annotated with the GO term, resulting in high recall levels, but not equivalently high precision. However, note that these results do not mean the inference is incorrect but in fact that there is no evidence to support it one way or the other. Also, in the training set there are 7271 GO terms with a support of at least 30 proteins, it would be expectable for the model to return a similar number of identified GO terms. Despite, falling short of what was expected, the results strongly suggest that the existence of certain PAFPs within proteins may be important for their function. It is also interesting that the strongest signal was found on terms for which the positive ratio is very low, which are typically very difficult classification problems. Results strongly suggest that it may be possible to find annotation clues by looking on amino acids substitution patterns alone. The results however were not perfect and more work will certainly be required to further validate the initial findings

Overexpression of RAC1b in follicular cell derived thyroid cancers: An activator of NF-κB pathway that contributes to thyroid tumorigenesis?

Papillary and Follicular thyroid carcinomas (PTC and FTC) are lesions derived from follicular cells. The standard therapy includes surgery and radioiodine treatment. Despite being usually associated with a good prognosis the rate of recurrence is high and a subset of patients present radioiodine refractory and non-responsive neoplasia. So, the search for new therapeutic alternatives, as well as new diagnostic/prognostic markers is highly relevant. Our group at IPOLFG has previously shown RAC1b to be overexpressed in PTCs, being this overexpression significantly associated with poorer outcomes. RAC1b is a variant of the small GTPase RAC1 that was shown to have the ability to stimulate the canonical NF-κB regulatory pathway in colorectal cancer. NF-κB activation is associated with the tumorigenic process in several types of cancer, mainly due to its role in apoptosis evasion. Here, we aimed to extend the study of the role of RAC1b to FTCs and further investigate the molecular mechanisms associated with RAC1b overexpression and downstream signalling in thyroid tumorigenesis. Using the human papillary thyroid carcinoma derived cell line as in vitro model, we observed that both RAC1 and RAC1b were able to induce a significant increase on NF-κB and cyclin D1 reporter activity. A clear p65 nuclear localization was found in cells transfected with RAC1b-WT, confirming NF-κB canonical pathway activation. Consistently, we were able to observe a RAC1b-mediated decrease in IκBα (NF-κB inhibitor) protein levels. These findings prompted us to further assess the cellular consequences of RAC1b-mediated NF-κB activation in a thyroid biological system. Our results indicated that RAC1b protected cells against apoptosis and stimulated G1/S progression, through a process involving the NF-κB pathway. Summing up, presented findings suggest an important role of RAC1b in the progression of follicular cell derived thyroid carcinomas and point out NF-κB activation as one of the molecular mechanisms associated with RAC1b overexpression and downstream signalling in thyroid tumorigenesis

from bioprocess development to final formulation

Viral products, including viral vaccines and viral vectors, are important tools for disease prevention and therapy. Viral vaccines, such as attenuated or inactivated rabies virus, influenza virus or hepatitis virus vaccines are powerful tools to limit the number of serious viral infections and pandemics. This type of biopharmaceuticals are used to improve human quality of life with vaccination being the most cost-effective method available for preventing economic losses and increasing the lifespan of both people and livestock. On the other hand, adenoviruses, adeno-associated viruses and retroviruses are among the viral vectors currently being developed for delivering genetic material to the target cell in a growing number of gene therapy clinical applications(...

Bilinguismo e cognição numérica

The present study aimed to investigate the relationship between bilingualism and numerical cognition, more specifically, the way English-Portuguese bilinguals solve simple mathematical problems when these are presented in different formats (digits, English, and Portuguese) and whether their language history background has any effect on such behavior. The main results suggest that bilinguals are faster and more accurate in solving mathematical problems presented in digit format and in solving those problems presented in the written format when the language of the stimuli was the one in which they learned basic arithmetic. Also, the participants’ language background experience did not have any significance in their task performance.O presente estudo visou investigar a relação entre bilinguismo e cognição numérica, mais especificamente, a maneira como pessoas bilíngues (português-inglês) resolvem problemas matemáticos simples quando eles são apresentados de diferentes maneiras (dígitos, inglês e português) e se o histórico de linguagem exerce algum efeito nesse comportamento. Os principais resultados deste estudo sugerem que os bilíngues são mais rápidos na resolução de problemas matemáticos apresentados em dígito, e mais precisos ao resolver problemas apresentados em forma escrita na língua em que aprenderam aritmética básica. Por fim, a experiência de língua dos participantes não teve significância quanto à acurácia e o tempo de resposta dos mesmos

Effects of a weight loss program on cardiovascular risk in adults with obesity : the WLM3P study

Background: Obesity increases cardiovascular risk through factors such as increased fasting plasma triglycerides and low high-density lipoprotein cholesterol, which represents metabolic manifestations of adiposopathy. Commercial weight loss programs that include interventions with evidence of efficacy in clinical trials have been considered effective alternatives for body weight management and to reduce the cardiovascular risk associated with obesity. In this regard, the Weight Loss Maintenance 3 Phases Program is a protocol treatment for overweight adults, which assumes a high-protein and low-carbohydrate diet, weekly consultations with a nutritionist, use of food supplements, motivational support, time-restricted eating, high-protein specific food and online platform monitoring, which makes it different from the standard low-carbohydrate approach. Objective: The aims were to evaluate the impact of the Weight Loss Maintenance 3 Phases Program on lipid profile (triglycerides, high-density lipoprotein cholesterol, and triglycerides/high-density lipoprotein cholesterol ratio), blood pressure, the cardiovascular risk with Systematic COronary Risk Evaluation2 and the correlation between nutritional intake and lipid profile at baseline and at 6 months, compared to a low-carbohydrate diet. Methodology: A total of 112 participants with obesity (Body Mass Index ≥ 30 kg/m2 and ≤ 39.9 kg/m2) were randomly assigned to the Weight Loss Maintenance 3 Phases Program or low-carbohydrate diet. Results: At 6 months the Weight Loss Maintenance 3 Phases Program resulted in a more pronounced increase in high-density lipoprotein cholesterol (mg/dL) compared to the low-carbohydrate diet [+7.9 (8.2) vs +4.9 (6.2); p=0.046]. The triglycerides/high-density lipoprotein cholesterol ratio at 6 months improved in both groups compared to baseline but without a statistical difference (p=0.267). No statistical differences were found in other outcomes between groups except weight loss and diastolic blood pressure (p<0.001 and p<0.021 respectively). The Weight Loss Maintenance 3 Phases Program had a lower total energy intake (kcal per day) [1313.8 (1167.5|1406.8) vs 1444.4 (1304.6|1573.6); p<0.001], a lower carbohydrate intake (% of total energy intake) [16.7 (14.4|24.6) vs 25.1 (22.1|28.6); p<0.001], a higher protein intake (% of total energy intake) [31.8 (28.6|34.2) vs 27.0 (24.6|29.4); p<0.001] and also higher fiber intake (g per day) [19.2 (15.5|21.3) vs 15.1 (12.9 to 18.8); p=0.040], compared to low-carbohydrate diet at 6 months. A positive correlation between triglycerides (r=0.38; p=0.011) and protein intake at 6 months in the low-carbohydrate diet and a positive correlation between triglycerides (r=0.53; p<0.001) and fiber intake at 6 months in the Weight Loss Maintenance 3 Phases Program were found. Conclusion: Our data showed that the Weight Loss Maintenance 3 Phases Program was more effective in increasing high-density lipoprotein cholesterol than a low-carbohydrate diet after 6 months of intervention for weight loss

Dense Circulant Lattices From Nonlinear Systems

Circulant lattices are those with a circulant generator matrix. They can be described by a basis containing a vector and its circular shifts. In this paper, we present certain conditions under which the norm expression of an arbitrary vector of a circulant lattice is substantially simplified, and then investigate some of the lattices obtained under these conditions. We exhibit systems of nonlinear equations whose solutions yield lattices as dense as $D_n$ in odd dimensions.Comment: preprint, 21 pages, 5 figure