Search results for " CULTURA"
showing 10 items of 3715 documents
Statistical characterization of deviations from planned flight trajectories in air traffic management
2016
Understanding the relation between planned and realized flight trajectories and the determinants of flight deviations is of great importance in air traffic management. In this paper we perform an in depth investigation of the statistical properties of planned and realized air traffic on the German airspace during a 28 day periods, corresponding to an AIRAC cycle. We find that realized trajectories are on average shorter than planned ones and this effect is stronger during night-time than daytime. Flights are more frequently deviated close to the departure airport and at a relatively large angle to destination. Moreover, the probability of a deviation is higher in low traffic phases. All the…
Femtosecond Structural Dynamics of Proteins
2016
Proteins are the workhorses of living cells, providing essential functions such as structural support, signal transduction, enzymatic catalysis, transport and storage of small ligands. Atomic-resolution structures obtained with conventional X-ray crystallography show proteins essentially as static. In reality, however, proteins move and their motion is crucial for functioning. Although the structure and dynamics of proteins are intimately related, they are not equally well understood. A very large number of protein structures have been determined, but only a few studies have been able to monitor experimentally the dynamics of proteins in real time. In the last two decades, the availability …
Heat- and pH-induced BSA conformational changes, hydrogel formation and application as 3D cell scaffold
2016
Aggregation and gelation of globular proteins can be an advantage to generate new forms of nanoscale biomaterials based on the fibrillar architecture. Here, we report results obtained by exploiting the proteins' natural tendency to self-organize in 3D network, for the production of new material based on BSA for medical application. In particular, at five different pH values the conformational and structural changes of the BSA during all the steps of the thermal aggregation and gelation have been analyzed by FTIR spectroscopy. The macroscopic mechanical properties of these hydrogels have been obtained by rheological measurements. The microscopic structure of the gels have been studied by AFM…
Bioprotection Can Be Tuned with Proper Protein/Saccharide Ratio: The Case of Solid Amorphous Matrices
2018
Saccharides, and in particular trehalose, are well known for their high efficiency in protecting biostructures against adverse environmental conditions. The protein dynamics is known to be highly inhibited in a low-water trehalose host medium, the inhibition being markedly dependent on the amount of residual water. Besides hydration, the protein/sugar ratio is expected to affect the properties of saccharide amorphous matrices. In this work, we report an infrared spectroscopy study in dry amorphous matrices of various sugars (the disaccharides trehalose, maltose, sucrose, and lactose, and the trisaccharide raffinose) containing myoglobin, at different protein/sugar ratios. We analyze the str…
Viable But Not Culturable (VBNC) state of Brettanomyces bruxellensis in wine: New insights on molecular basis of VBNC behaviour using a transcriptomi…
2016
International audience; The spoilage potential of Brettanomyces bruxellensis in wine is strongly connected with the aptitude of this yeast to enter in a Viable But Non Culturable (VBNC) state when exposed to the harsh wine conditions. In this work, we characterized the VBNC behaviour of seven strains of B. bruxellensis representing a regional intraspecific biodiversity, reporting conclusive evidence for the assessment of VBNC as a strain-dependent character. The VBNC behaviour was monitored by fluorescein diacetate staining/flow cytometry for eleven days after addition of 0.4, 0.6, 0.8, 1 and 1.2 mg/L of molecular SO2 (entrance in the VBNC state) and after SO2 removal (exit from the VBNC st…
A possible desensitized state conformation of the human α7 nicotinic receptor: A molecular dynamics study
2017
International audience; The determination of the conformational states corresponding to diverse functional roles of ligand gated ion channels is subject of intense investigation with various techniques, from X-rays structure determination to electrophysiology and computational modeling. Even with a certain number of structures becoming recently available, only few major structural features distinguishing conductive open channel from the non conductive resting protein have been highlighted, while high-resolution details are still missing. The characterization of the desensitized conformation(s) is even more complex, and only few specific characteristics have been identified. Furthermore, exp…
Biopreservation of Myoglobin in Crowded Environment: A Comparison between Gelatin and Trehalose Matrixes.
2017
Biopreservation by sugar and/or polymeric matrixes is a thoroughly studied research topic with wide technological relevance. Ternary amorphous systems containing both saccharides and proteins are extensively exploited to model the in vivo biopreservation process. With the aim of disentangling the effect of saccharides and polypeptidic crowders (such as gelatin) on the preservation of a model protein, we present here a combined differential scanning calorimetry and UV-vis spectrophotometry study on samples of myoglobin embedded in amorphous gelatin and trehalose + gelatin matrixes at different hydrations, and compare them with amorphous myoglobin-only and myoglobin-Trehalose samples. The res…
Inner Archipelagos in Sicily. From Culture-Based Development to Creativity-Oriented Evolution
2020
When Covid-19 arrived in Europe from the far East, the media and experts in economics and social sciences noticed that it was the expected discontinuity in the socio-economic development process. Really, the current phase has spread since the 1960s, when the application of econometric worldwide-spread development model was going to produce social inequalities, and consumption of physical, social, and cultural resources. Some places in Italy, far from the erosive and urban context and erosive metropolitan areas, are currently isolated seeds of a new cycle of life, because of the local community identity and the strong link between human, cultural, and natural components are currently working…
Becoming more EUropean or European after ERASMUS?
2015
Lijphart was the first to emphasize the necessity to study the impact of student mobility upon European integration, but mobility programmes have only been studied in the last decade. The European Commission points to the ERASMUS programme as a successful example of construction of European identity; however, this assumption hasn’t yet been empirically proved on an European scale. This paper has been devoted to research of the impact of the ERASMUS programme on fostering European identity in Europe. In academic literature at least two different understandings of the European identity can be distinguished: political and cultural European identity. The quantitative survey (in which 12’173 res…
Wandering lives: a case study of ethnic and cultural selfidentification discourses of two adult cross-cultural kids from a family of Transylvanian Sa…
2019
Abstract The paper presents a case study of two adult crosscultural kids (ACCK’s) from a family of Saxons that emigrated from Romania during communist period. They had what we call a wandering life before resettling as adults in Romania. The objective of the paper is to present and analyse how the ethnic and cultural selfidentification discourse of the two is constructed and its modulations between a primordial stance and a contextual one.