Search results for " USA"

Gene expression levels influence amino acid usage and evolutionary rates in endosymbiotic bacteria

2005

International audience; Most endosymbiotic bacteria have extremely reduced genomes, accelerated evolutionary rates, and strong AT base compositional bias thought to reflect reduced efficacy of selection and increased mutational pressure. Here, we present a comparative study of evolutionary forces shaping five fully sequenced bacterial endosymbionts of insects. The results of this study were three-fold: (i) Stronger conservation of high expression genes at not just nonsynonymous, but also synonymous, sites. (ii) Variation in amino acid usage strongly correlates with GC content and expression level of genes. This pattern is largely explained by greater conservation of high expression genes, l…

A manipulative parasite increasing an antipredator response decreases its vulnerability to a nonhost predator.

2009

8 pages; International audience; Trophically transmitted parasites have to deal with the antipredator adaptations of their intermediate hosts. Some of these parasites induce behavioural changes in their intermediate hosts that make them more vulnerable to predation by definitive hosts. However, the adaptiveness of behavioural manipulation also depends on the probability of being eaten by a nonhost predator. Parasites might therefore try to use specific antipredator responses of intermediate hosts to avoid this dead end. We tested this hypothesis using the acanthocephalan Polymorphus minutus and its intermediate amphipod host, Gammarus roeseli. In their natural habitat, uninfected G. roeseli…

Evolutionary Changes after Translational Challenges Imposed by Horizontal Gene Transfer

2019

International audience; Genes acquired by horizontal gene transfer (HGT) may provide the recipient organism with potentially new functions, but proper expression level and integration of the transferred genes in the novel environment are not granted. Notably, transferred genes can differ from the receiving genome in codon usage preferences, leading to impaired translation and reduced functionality. Here, we characterize the genomic and proteomic changes undergone during experimental evolution of Escherichia coli after HGT of three synonymous versions, presenting very different codon usage preference, of an antibiotic resistance gene. The experimental evolution was conducted with and without…

Teaching clinical reasoning and decision-making skills to nursing students: Design, development, and usability evaluation of a serious game

2016

Background\ud \ud Serious games (SGs) are a type of simulation technology that may provide nursing students with the opportunity to practice their clinical reasoning and decision-making skills in a safe and authentic environment. Despite the growing number of SGs developed for healthcare professionals, few SGs are video based or address the domain of home health care.\ud \ud Aims\ud \ud This paper aims to describe the design, development, and usability evaluation of a video based SG for teaching clinical reasoning and decision-making skills to nursing students who care for patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) in home healthcare settings.\ud \ud Methods\ud \ud A prototy…

Usability and acceptability assessment of an empathic virtual agent to prevent major depression

2016

In Human-Computer Interaction, the adaptation of the content and the way of how this content is communicated to the users in interactive sessions is a critical issue to promote the acceptability and usability of any computational system. We present a user-adapted interactive platform to identify and provide an early intervention for symptoms of depression and suicide. In particular, we describe the work performed to assess users' system acceptability and usability. An empathic Virtual Agent is the main interface with the user, and it has been designed to generate the appropriate dialogues and emotions during the interactions according to the detected user's specific needs. This personalizat…

2018

Amino acid usage in a proteome depends mostly on its taxonomy, as it does the codon usage in transcriptomes. Here, we explore the level of variation in the codon usage of a specific amino acid, glutamine, in relation to the number of consecutive glutamine residues. We show that CAG triplets are consistently more abundant in short glutamine homorepeats (polyQ, four to eight residues) than in shorter glutamine stretches (one to three residues), leading to the evolutionary growth of the repeat region in a CAG-dependent manner. The length of orthologous polyQ regions is mostly stable in primates, particularly the short ones. Interestingly, given a short polyQ the CAG usage is higher in unstable…

Study of the polysemic term of minerality in wine: Segmentation of consumers based on their textual responses to an open-ended survey

2016

International audience; Over the past 20 years, the word "minerality" has been increasingly used in the description of wines. However, a precise definition of the concept of minerality appears to be inexistent, and no consensual meaning, even among wine professionals, can be identified. Although this word usage seems to spread out from wine professionals to consumers, research on what consumers assume about minerality is scarce. This paper aims to study the various concepts about minerality held-by consumers by using an open-ended questionnaire.A total of 1697 French-speaking consumers responded to an, online survey and their free answers were analysed using statistical textual methods. The…

Adaptive inputs in an interface for people with Dyskinetic Cerebral Palsy: Learning and usability

2016

This study concerns the difficulty in accessing computers faced by people with Dyskinetic Cerebral Palsy (DCP). Thus diminishing their opportunities to communicate or learn. This population usually needs an alternative input human-computer interface (HCI). The paper presents an alternative multimodal HCI that incorporates a head-mounted interface and superficial electromyography sensors (sEMG). The aim of the study is to assess the usability and the suitability of these two HCI devices. Six non-disabled subjects and ten subjects with DCP participated in the iterative process in which each test follows an improvement of an input. The results indicated that for both systems, the improvements …

3D models of humanoid soccer robot in USAR sim and robotics studio simulators

2008

This paper describes our experience in the simulation of humanoid soccer robots using two general purposes 3D simulators, namely USARSim and Microsoft Robotics Studio. We address the problem of the simulation of a soccer match among two teams of small humanoid robots in the RoboCup Soccer Kid-Size Humanoid competitions. The paper reports the implementation of the virtual models of the Robovie-M humanoid robot platform in the two simulators. Robovie-M was the robot used by our team "Artisti" in the RoboCup 2006 competitions. This paper focuses on the procedures needed to implement the virtual models of the robot and in the details of the models. We describe experiments assessing the feasibi…

Sharenting and the exercise of parental authority: the first court decisions

2020

El sharenting, fenómeno social ampliamente extendido que consiste en que los progenitores publican fotografías y vídeos de sus hijos menores de edad en sus redes sociales, plantea el problema de si es suficiente el consentimiento del progenitor usuario de la red social o es necesario el de ambos progenitores. Acerca de esta cuestión se han pronunciado varias Audiencias Provinciales, cuyas sentencias se analizan en el presente trabajo. Las mismas se refieren, en primer lugar, a la cuestión de en qué medida el sharenting afecta al derecho a la propia imagen y al de protección de datos personales de los menores y cuándo es necesario el consentimiento de los progenitores para la disposición de …