ECOFISIOLOGIA DE Erythroxylum pauferrense EM UMA FLORESTA DE BREJO DE ALTITUDE, NORDESTE DO BRASIL

There are few studies dedicated to understanding the ecophysiological behavior of native species of the Atlantic Forest. The Guarda-orvalho (Erythroxylum pauferrense) is a species found only in Paraíba in the highland marsh with remnants of native vegetation, so it is at risk of extinction. Therefore, the present research had the purpose of evaluating the ecophysiological behavior of Erythroxylum pauferrense plants in the Brazilian highland brejo forest during the diurnal period. For this, it was carried out in the preserved forest belonging to the Agrarian Sciences Center of the Federal University of Paraíba (CCA-UFPB), located in the city of Areia, PB. Which is inserted in the mesoregion of the Brejo of altitude Paraibano, with the climate of the type Rainy Tropical, with dry summer. The rainy season begins in January/February with end in September, and may extend until October. Thus, on August 26, 2016, readings were performed on 8 individuals of dew, in a completely randomized design composed of 5 evaluation schedules (07:00, 09:00, 12:00, 15:00, 17:00h), where the values of liquid photosynthesis (A), stomatal conductance (gs), transpiration (E), CO2 internal concentration (Ci), foliar temperature and vapor pressure deficit (DPV) were measured with an infrared gas analyzer (Li 6400, Li-Color, Lincoln, USA) under conditions varying with the environment. There was a difference in all the physiological variables during the day in the dew-tree (Erythroxylum pauferrense) and the variation of the photosynthetic rate (A) throughout the day, indicated a greater relation with the variation of the internal carbon (ci) of the plant. The stomatal conductance (gs) had a higher correlation with Vapor Pressure Deficit (VPD) and it was observed that it is necessary to increase researches that evaluate the physiological behavior of the native species in the remnants of the Atlantic Forest.Existem poucos trabalhos dedicados a entender o comportamento ecofisiológico de espécies nativas da Mata Atlântica. O Guarda-orvalho (Erythroxylum pauferrense) é uma espécie encontrada somente na Paraíba no brejo de altitude com resquícios de vegetação nativa, por isso corre risco eminente de extinção. Diante disso, a presente pesquisa teve por finalidade, avaliar o comportamento ecofisiológico em plantas de Erythroxylum pauferrense em floresta de brejo de altitude do nordeste do Brasil em curso diurno. Para isto, foi realizado na mata preservada pertencente ao Centro de Ciências Agrarias da Universidade Federal da Paraíba (CCA-UFPB), localizado no município de Areia, PB. A qual está inserida na mesorregião do Brejo de altitude paraibano, com o clima do tipo Tropical Chuvoso, com verão seco. A estação chuvosa se inicia em janeiro/fevereiro com término em setembro, podendo se estender até outubro. Assim, em 26 de Agosto de 2016, foi realizada leituras em 8 indivíduos de guarda-orvalho, em delineamento inteiramente casualizado composto por 5 horários de avaliação (07:00, 09:00, 12:00, 15:00, 17:00h), onde os valores de fotossíntese líquida (A), condutância estomática (gs), transpiração (E), concentração interna de CO2 (Ci), temperatura foliar e déficit de pressão de vapor (DPV) foram medidas com um analisador de gás infravermelho (Li 6400, Li-Cor, Lincoln, EUA) em condições variando conforme o ambiente. Houve diferença em todas as variáveis fisiológicas ao longo do dia na guarda-orvalho (Erythroxylum pauferrense) e a variação da taxa fotossintética (A) ao longo do dia, indicou relação maior com a variação do carbono interno (ci) da planta. A condutância estomática (gs) teve maior correlação com Déficit de Pressão de Vapor (DPV) e observou-se que se faz necessário o aumento de pesquisas que avaliem o comportamento fisiológico das espécies nativas nos resquícios de Mata Atlântica

Effect of enriched substrate on the growth of the sea cucumber Holothuria arguinensis Koehler and Vaney, 1906 juveniles

The authors acknowledge the Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (FCT), through the strategic project LA/P/0069/2020 granted to the Associate Laboratory ARNET and UIDB/04292/2020 and UIDP/04292/2020 awarded to MARE-Marine and Environmental Sciences Centre. FAS is supported by a PhD fellowship granted by the FCT (reference SFRH/BD/09563/2020) and AP under the Scientific Employment Stimulus (CEECINST/00051/2018) granted by the FCT.The sea cucumber Holothuria arguinensis (Koehler and Vaney, 1906) presents an increasing commercial value in Asian markets and its exportation depends exclusively on wild stock harvesting. Production through aquaculture has been acknowledged as an alternative to supply demand and reduce pressure on natural stocks, but there are still bottlenecks to overcome, such as low growth rate and survival. This study focuses on the evaluation of the growth of juveniles of H. arguinensis through substrate enrichment—direct mixing of Sargassum vulgare with sediment—in recirculating aquaculture systems (RAS), for 4 months, with a baseline diet of Saccorhiza polyschides. Compared to the control (no enrichment), sea cucumbers fed with enriched sediment showed the highest specific growth rate (SGR), the highest growth rate (GR) and the lowest size heterogeneity. The results obtained in this study showed a favorable growth of sea cucumbers when in the presence of a substrate enriched with Sargassum vulgare, representing an important step towards the viability of large-scale sea cucumber rearing in Europe.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Engineering of AceTr membrane transporters to improve organic acid production in yeast

Organic acids are industrially relevant chemicals obtainable from renewable feedstocks via microbial cell factories. Microbially produced organic acids have a wide variety of applications, including bioplastic synthesis. Thus, they possess the potential to replace petroleum-derived commodity chemicals that are obtained through unsustainable production processes. Yeasts commonly represent the organisms of choice for microbial production of organic acids, namely due to their tolerance of low pH environments. Such production conditions allow for direct formation of the desired protonated form of the acid and thus cut downstream processing costs. Efficient product export over the plasma membrane in low pH conditions is particularly demanding, therefore expression of membrane transporters with adequate substrate specificity and transport mechanism is often the determining factor at acquiring competitive product titres. Our current objective is to deepen the knowledge on organic acid transporters from the AceTR family (1,2,3). We performed functional characterization by studying transporter kinetics, energetics and specificity as well as site-directed mutagenesis to acquire insight into the structural features of transporters. Finally, we aim to improve organic acid production in S. cerevisiae cell factories via expression of engineered AceTR transporters with altered activity and substrate specificity.UID/BIA/04050/2013(POCI-01-0145-FEDER-007569) and TransAcids(PTDC/BIAMIC/5184/2014) funded by national funds, FCT-IP and ERDF by COMPETE 2020-POCI; EcoAgriFood(NORTE-01-0145-FEDER-000009), supported by NORTE-2020, under the PORTUGAL 2020 Partnership Agreement.TCacknowledgesYeastdocEuropean Union’s Horizon 2020 research andinnovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 76492

Serious games assisted by playware as a way to improve socio-emotional skills in children with autism spectrum disorder

This paper presents a project developed with the aim of promoting emotional skills in children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). The project involves a serious game and a playware object, which is a physical component that allows the user to interactively play the serious game. The playware object has six buttons, each one showing an emoji with a specific facial expression and communicates via Bluetooth with the serious game app installed in an Android device. The facial expressions used are: happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise and neutral/normal. They were applied to the three game activities (imitation, recognition and storytelling). The chain of tests started with an online questionnaire to validate the avatars created to represent the previously mentioned facial expressions in the game, which was followed by a usability test of the application (serious game and playware object) with six typically developing children. Finally, the three game activities were tested with six children with ASD in three/four sessions. Due to the small test group and reduced number of sessions, the primary objective was to assess if the target group accepted the application. In fact, it had a high level of approval regarding both the serious game and the playware object. had a high level of approval regarding both the serious game and the playware object.COMPETE: POCI-01-0145-FEDER-007043 and FCT –Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia within the Project Scope: UID/CEC/00319/2013. Vinicius Silva also thanks FCT for the PhD scholarship SFRH/BD/SFRH/BD/133314/2017. The authors thank the teachers and students of the Elementary School of Gualtar (EB1/JI Gualtar) in Braga for the participation in the testsinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Evaluation of feline permanent canine tooth mineral density using micro-computed tomography

The tooth is made up of three mineralized tissues, enamel, dentin, and cementum, which surround a non-mineralized tissue called the dental pulp. Micro-computed tomography (mCT) is an imaging technology based on X-rays that allows non-invasive visualization of objects at a microscopic scale, according to their radiopacity and in three dimensions (3D). Likewise, it allows the subsequent execution of morphological and quantitative analysis of the objects, such as, for example, the determination of the relative mineral density (MD). The present work aimed to describe the MD of feline teeth using mCT. The studied sample consisted of four European Shorthair cats, from which nine canine teeth were extracted per medical indication. These teeth were evaluated through dental radiography before and after their extraction. Using mCT and the CTAn software, the values of the relative mineral density of the root of each tooth and of specific segments corresponding to the coronal, middle, and apical thirds of the root were determined. Mean MD of root tissues was 1.374 ± 0040 g·cm−3, and of hard root, tissues was 1.402 ± 0.035 g·cm−3. Through mCT, it was possible to determine the mean MD values of feline canine teeth. The study of MD could become an ancillary method for the diagnosis and characterization of dental pathology.This work was funded by national funds through FCT—Foundation for Science and Technology, I.P., under the Scientific Employment Stimulus—Institutional Call-CEECINS/00127/2018 (J.F. Requicha) and supported by the projects UIDB/CVT/00772/2020 and LA/P/0059/2020

Exploring plasma membrane transporters to improve organic acid production in yeast – Characterization and engineering

Organic acids are industrially relevant building-block chemicals obtainable from renewable feedstocks by utilization of microbial cell factories. With a wide variety of applications, including bioplastics synthesis, microbially produced organic acids have the potential to replace petroleum-derived commodity chemicals that are obtained through unsustainable production processes. Yeasts commonly represent the organisms of choice for production of organic acids, namely due to their tolerance of low pH environments, since such production conditions allow for direct formation of the desired protonated form of the acid and thus cut downstream processing costs. Efficient product export over the plasma membrane in such conditions is particularly demanding, therefore expression of membrane transporters with adequate substrate specificity and transport mechanism is often the determining factor at acquiring competitive product titres. Here, we are characterizing and engineering plasma membrane transporters with the final aim to improve production of dicarboxylic acids, namely succinic acid, in yeast. This includes transporters that have already been described as efficient dicarboxylate transporters, as well as promising transporters from the AceTr family. First, we perform functional characterization by studying transporter kinetics, energetics and specificity, as well as site-directed mutagenesis, to acquire insight into functional-structural relationship of transporters. This insight further uncovers engineering targets that can lead to improved transporter activity as well as altered substrate specificity. Finally, the performance of these transporters can be assessed via their expression in S. cerevisiae that is engineered for succinic acid production.This work was supported by the strategic programme UID/BIA/ 04050 2019 funded by Portuguese funds through the FCT IP, the project TransAcids (PTDC/ 5184 2014 funded by FCT IP and ERDF by COMPETE 2020 POCI and the project EcoAgriFood (NORTE 01 0145 FEDER 000009 supported by NORTE 2020 under the PORTUGAL 2020 Partnership Agreemen

Comparison of major LiDAR data-driven feature extraction methods for autonomous vehicles

Object detection is one of the areas of computer vision that has matured very rapidly. Nowadays, developments in this research area have been playing special attention to the detection of objects in point clouds due to the emerging of high-resolution LiDAR sensors. However, data from a Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) sensor is not characterised by having consistency in relative pixel densities and introduces a third dimension, raising a set of drawbacks. The following paper presents a study on the requirements of 3D object detection for autonomous vehicles; presents an overview of the 3D object detection pipeline that generalises the operation principle of models based on point clouds; and categorises the recent works on methods to extract features and summarise their performance.FEDER - Federación Española de Enfermedades Raras(POCI-01-0247-FEDER-037902). European Structural and Investment Funds in the FEDER component, through the Operational Competitiveness and Internationalization Programme (COMPETE 2020) [Project no 037902; Funding Reference: POCI-01-0247-FEDER-03790

Circular economyeast: saccharomyces cerevisiae as a sustainable source of glucans and its safety for skincare application

Glucans, a polysaccharide naturally present in the yeast cell wall that can be obtained from side streams generated during the fermentation process, have gained increasing attention for their potential as a skin ingredient. Therefore, this study focused on the extraction method to isolate and purify water-insoluble glucans from two different Saccharomyces cerevisiae strains: an engineered strain obtained from spent yeast in an industrial fermentation process and a wild strain produced through lab-scale fermentation. Two water-insoluble extracts with a high glucose content (> 90 %) were achieved and further subjected to a chemical modification using carboxymethylation to improve their water solubility. All the glucans' extracts, water-insoluble and carboxymethylated, were structurally and chemically characterized, showing almost no differences between both yeast-type strains. To ensure their safety for skin application, a broad safety assessment was undertaken, and no cytotoxic effect, immunomodulatory capacity (IL-6 and IL-8 regulation), genotoxicity, skin sensitization, and impact on the skin microbiota were observed. These findings highlight the potential of glucans derived from spent yeast as a sustainable and safe ingredient for cosmetic and skincare formulations, contributing to the sustainability and circular economy.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

O SISTEMA PENITENCIÁRIO FRENTE À VIOLAÇÃO DOS DIREITOS HUMANOS E DIGNIDADE DA PESSOA HUMANA

Trata-se de um artigo científico cujo objetivo é analisar a insuficiência do sistema prisional, tendo em vista a violação dos direitos humanos e o princípio da dignidade humana, considerando que não são assegurados para aqueles que estão sob custódia do Estado os direitos previstos na Legislação Penitenciária. Desta forma, é abordado no texto a disparidade da atual situação e tratamento existente dentro dos presídios com o objetivo que lhe foi atribuído, ou seja, a falta de estrutura e organização, juntamente com todas as deficiências presentes neste ambiente, não condiz com suas finalidades primordiais, quais sejam: reeducar e ressocializar. É fato que os cárceres estão assolados pela precariedade, onde os presos são submetidos a tratamentos desumanos e degradantes, e a fonte deste problema está no descaso do Governo para com eles, implicando, assim, na reincidência criminal.

A influência da neuromodulação não-invasiva, através das microcorrentes NESA, na mobilidade do nervo mediano e na variabilidade da frequência cardíaca, em jovens saudáveis: um estudo piloto

Introdução: Patologias do nervo mediano associam-se a vários problemas, podendo causar até 28 dias de ausência laboral por ano. O sistema nervoso autónomo (SNA) poderá estar afetado neste tipo de patologias. Para avaliação de disfunções deste sistema pode ser utilizado a variabilidade da frequência cardíaca (VFC) e para o tratamento as microcorrentes NESA, que nos últimos anos tem vindo a crescer como método não-invasivo de neuromodulação, que influencia o SNA.Objetivo: Analisar a influência da neuromodulação não-invasiva do SNA com microcorrentes NESA na mobilidade do nervo mediano e na VFC.Métodos: Estudo quasi-experimental, transversal, quantitativo e duplocego. Dividiram-se dez participantes em grupo de controlo e intervenção. Aplicaramse microcorrentes NESA no segundo. Avaliaram-se cinco variáveis, uma para a amplitude de extensão do cotovelo no onset of pain e quatro para a VFC: desvio padrão dos intervalos R-R normais (SDNN), raiz quadrada da média dos quadrados das diferenças entre intervalos R-R normais adjacentes (RMSSD), baixa frequência (LF) e alta frequência (HF).Resultados: O grupo de intervenção apresentou alterações estatisticamente significativas e aumentos em média no onset of pain (29,19º) e na VFC: SDNN (17,200ms), RMSSD (32,00ms). O grupo de controlo apresentou valores reduzidos e até negativos: onset of pain (12,64º), SDNN (-20ms) e RMSSD (-6,6ms) e sem diferenças significativas. O LF e HF não apresentaram diferenças significativas em nenhum dos grupos.Conclusões: A neuromodulação não-invasiva com microcorrentes NESA parece influenciar positivamente a mobilidade do nervo mediano e a VFC.N/