Search results for " FEA"

Dopamine neurons drive fear extinction learning by signaling the omission of expected aversive outcomes

2018

Extinction of fear responses is critical for adaptive behavior and deficits in this form of safety learning are hallmark of anxiety disorders. However, the neuronal mechanisms that initiate extinction learning are largely unknown. Here we show, using single-unit electrophysiology and cell-type specific fiber photometry, that dopamine neurons in the ventral tegmental area (VTA) are activated by the omission of the aversive unconditioned stimulus (US) during fear extinction. This dopamine signal occurred specifically during the beginning of extinction when the US omission is unexpected, and correlated strongly with extinction learning. Furthermore, temporally-specific optogenetic inhibition o…

Search for a Minimal Set of Parameters by Assessing the Total Optimization Potential for a Dynamic Model of a Biochemical Network.

2017

Selecting an efficient small set of adjustable parameters to improve metabolic features of an organism is important for a reduction of implementation costs and risks of unpredicted side effects. In practice, to avoid the analysis of a huge combinatorial space for the possible sets of adjustable parameters, experience-, and intuition-based subsets of parameters are often chosen, possibly leaving some interesting counter-intuitive combinations of parameters unrevealed. The combinatorial scan of possible adjustable parameter combinations at the model optimization level is possible; however, the number of analyzed combinations is still limited. The total optimization potential (TOP) approach is…

‘Green’ Wine through a Responsible and Efficient Production: A Case Study of a Sustainable Sicilian Wine Producer

2016

Abstract Sustainability is progressively gaining importance in the winegrowing sector. Implementing this concept implies environmental soundness, social equity and economic feasibility. A proliferation of initiatives to develop the sustainable production of wine started officially in Italy since the year 2010. The objective of this paper is to illustrate the reshaping of Sicilian winegrowing according to the ‘Triple bottom line’ approach to sustainability. By analyzing the case-study of the Tasca d’Almerita firm, pilot farm of various national projects in wine-sustainability, we found that adopting sustainable operative, organizational and competitive strategies has lead to a well-managed a…

New insights in primary ciliary dyskinesia

2017

Introduction: Primary ciliary dyskinesia (PCD) is a rare genetic disease with an estimated prevalence of 1:20.000 births. It is characterized by abnormal motility of cilia, leading to impaired mucociliary clearance, and subsequent infection and chronic inflammation of the airways. PCD also affects spermatozoa and cilia in the Fallopian tubes, contributing to fertility issues; dyskinesia of embryonic nodal cilia causes a random distribution of the organs. Areas covered: An overview of the history, genetics, clinical manifestations in children and adults, diagnostic tests, treatments, and prognosis are reviewed. We also discuss current research and future prospects of PCD. Expert opinion: As …

MetProc: Separating Measurement Artifacts from True Metabolites in an Untargeted Metabolomics Experiment

2019

High-throughput metabolomics using liquid chromatography and mass spectrometry (LC/MS) provides a useful method to identify biomarkers of disease and explore biological systems. However, the majority of metabolic features detected from untargeted metabolomics experiments have unknown ion signatures, making it critical that data should be thoroughly quality controlled to avoid analyzing false signals. Here, we present a postalignment method relying on intermittent pooled study samples to separate genuine metabolic features from potential measurement artifacts. We apply the method to lipid metabolite data from the PREDIMED (PREvención con DIeta MEDi-terránea) study to demonstrate clear remova…

Deciphering function of the pulmonary arterial sphincters in loggerhead sea turtles (Caretta caretta)

2018

To provide new insight to the pathophysiological mechanisms underlying gas emboli (GE) in bycaught loggerhead sea turtles (Caretta caretta), the present study investigated the vasoactive characteristics of the pulmonary and systemic arteries, and the lung parenchyma (LP). Tissues were opportunistically excised from recently dead animals for in vitro studies of vasoactive responses to four different neurotransmitters: acetylcholine (ACh, parasympathetic), serotonin (5HT), epinephrine (Epi, sympathetic) and histamine. The significant amount of smooth muscle in the LP contracted in response to ACh, Epi and histamine. The intrapulmonary and systemic arteries contracted under both parasympatheti…

Variable Ranking Feature Selection for the Identification of Nucleosome Related Sequences

2018

Several recent works have shown that K-mer sequence representation of a DNA sequence can be used for classification or identification of nucleosome positioning related sequences. This representation can be computationally expensive when k grows, making the complexity in spaces of exponential dimension. This issue effects significantly the classification task computed by a general machine learning algorithm used for the purpose of sequence classification. In this paper, we investigate the advantage offered by the so-called Variable Ranking Feature Selection method to select the most informative k − mers associated to a set of DNA sequences, for the final purpose of nucleosome/linker classifi…

2018

Amino acid composition is a sequence feature that has been extensively used to characterize proteomes of many species and protein families. Yet the analysis of amino acid composition of protein domains and the linkers connecting them has received less attention. Here, we perform both a comprehensive full-proteome amino acid composition analysis and a similar analysis focusing on domains and linkers, to uncover domain- or linker-specific differential amino acid usage patterns. The amino acid composition in the 38 proteomes studied showcase the greater variability found in archaea and bacteria species compared to eukaryotes. When focusing on domains and linkers, we describe the preferential u…

genuMet: distinguish genuine untargeted metabolic features without quality control samples

2019

AbstractMotivationLarge-scale untargeted metabolomics experiments lead to detection of thousands of novel metabolic features as well as false positive artifacts. With the incorporation of pooled QC samples and corresponding bioinformatics algorithms, those measurement artifacts can be well quality controlled. However, it is impracticable for all the studies to apply such experimental design.ResultsWe introduce a post-alignment quality control method called genuMet, which is solely based on injection order of biological samples to identify potential false metabolic features. In terms of the missing pattern of metabolic signals, genuMet can reach over 95% true negative rate and 85% true posit…

Measuring trunk orientation with a CMOS camera: feasibility and accuracy.

2007

International audience; The purpose of this study was to develop and validate a new tool to objectively quantify trunk orientation at the bedside, especially dedicated to the measurement of the lateropulsion in acute and subacute stroke patients. We developed software to analyze 2D movement with a CMOS camera (Logitech Quickcam Pro 4000) and to calculate the orientation of a segment defined by two color markers. First, the accuracy, reproducibility and noise when measuring segment orientations were evaluated with the CMOS camera placed in different positions, and second trunk orientation was measured in static and in dynamic conditions both with a CMOS camera and with a gold standard 3D vid…