Search results for "CIP"

Population genomic analysis of elongated skulls reveals extensive female-biased immigration in Early Medieval Bavaria

2018

Significance Many modern European states trace their roots back to a period known as the Migration Period that spans from Late Antiquity to the early Middle Ages. We have conducted the first population-level analysis of people from this era, generating genomic data from 41 graves from archaeological sites in present-day Bavaria in southern Germany mostly dating to around 500 AD. While they are predominantly of northern/central European ancestry, we also find significant evidence for a nonlocal genetic provenance that is highly enriched among resident Early Medieval women, demonstrating artificial skull deformation. We infer that the most likely origin of the majority of these women was sout…

2017

Human Cytomegalovirus (CMV) can lead to primary infection or reactivation in CMV-seronegative or -seropositive kidney transplant recipients, respectively. Complications comprise severe end-organ diseases and acute or chronic transplant rejection. Risk for CMV manifestation is stratified according to the CMV-IgG-serostatus, with donor+/recipient- (D+/R-) patients carrying the highest risk for CMV-replication. However, risk factors predisposing for primary infection in CMV-seronegative recipients are still not fully elucidated. Therefore, we monitored D+/R- high-risk patients undergoing kidney transplantation in combination with antiviral prophylaxis for the incidence of CMV-viremia for a med…

Cultivation trials of hop (Humulus lupulus L.) in semi-arid environments

2020

Abstract The recent developments in the market and craft beer industry in Italy have led to an increasing demand for local raw materials, such as barley malt and hops. Few works have been addressed to evaluate suitability and productivity of hop in semi-arid Italian environments. With this purpose, two experiments were carried out in 2018 and 2019, testing the suitability to cultivation of three commonly used hop varieties (Cascade, Chinook and Nuggett) in two typical semi-arid environments in Sicily. Phenological stages were also evaluated, and GDDs accumulated in vegetative and reproductive stages were calculated according to 9 different methods, dealing with three Tbase temperatures (0 °…

Identification of factors involved in dimorphism and pathogenicity of Zymoseptoria tritici

2017

A forward genetics approach was applied in order to investigate the molecular basis of morphological transition in the wheat pathogenic fungus Zymoseptoria tritici. Z. tritici is a dimorphic plant pathogen displaying environmentally regulated morphogenetic transition between yeast-like and hyphal growth. Considering the infection mode of Z. tritici, the switching to hyphal growth is essential for pathogenicity allowing the fungus the host invasion through natural openings like stomata. We exploited a previously developed Agrobacterium tumefaciens-mediated transformation (ATMT) to generate a mutant library by insertional mutagenesis including more than 10,000 random mutants. To identify gene…

Coupling News Sentiment with Web Browsing Data Improves Prediction of Intra-Day Price Dynamics

2015

The new digital revolution of big data is deeply changing our capability of understanding society and forecasting the outcome of many social and economic systems. Unfortunately, information can be very heterogeneous in the importance, relevance, and surprise it conveys, affecting severely the predictive power of semantic and statistical methods. Here we show that the aggregation of web users' behavior can be elicited to overcome this problem in a hard to predict complex system, namely the financial market. Specifically, our in-sample analysis shows that the combined use of sentiment analysis of news and browsing activity of users of Yahoo! Finance greatly helps forecasting intra-day and dai…

Vitamin D in malaria: more hypotheses than clues

2019

Abstract Vitamin D is a secosteroid hormone regulating calcium and phosphate metabolism, immune response and brain development. Low blood 25(OH)D levels have been reported in patients affected by infectious diseases caused by parasites, including malaria. Despite the high effectiveness of antimalarials, malaria is burdened with high morbidity and mortality, and the search for additional therapies is rapidly growing. Furthermore, available preventive measures have proved to be barely effective so far. Finding new prevention and therapy tools is a matter of urgency. Studies on animal models and humans have hypothesized some mechanisms by which the hormone can influence malaria pathogenesis, a…

2016

Protein export is central for the survival and virulence of intracellular P. falciparum blood stage parasites. To reach the host cell, exported proteins cross the parasite plasma membrane (PPM) and the parasite-enclosing parasitophorous vacuole membrane (PVM), a process that requires unfolding, suggestive of protein translocation. Components of a proposed translocon at the PVM termed PTEX are essential in this phase of export but translocation activity has not been shown for the complex and questions have been raised about its proposed membrane pore component EXP2 for which no functional data is available in P. falciparum. It is also unclear how PTEX mediates trafficking of both, soluble as…

Quantitative super-resolution localization microscopy of DNA in situ using Vybrant® DyeCycle™ Violet fluorescent probe.

2016

Single Molecule Localization Microscopy (SMLM) is a recently emerged optical imaging method that was shown to achieve a resolution in the order of tens of nanometers in intact cells. Novel high resolution imaging methods might be crucial for understanding of how the chromatin, a complex of DNA and proteins, is arranged in the eukaryotic cell nucleus. Such an approach utilizing switching of a fluorescent, DNA-binding dye Vybrant® DyeCycle™ Violet has been previously demonstrated by us (Żurek-Biesiada et al., 2015) [1]. Here we provide quantitative information on the influence of the chemical environment on the behavior of the dye, discuss the variability in the DNA-associated signal density,…

Targeting RNA structure in SMN2 reverses spinal muscular atrophy molecular phenotypes

2018

Modification of SMN2 exon 7 (E7) splicing is a validated therapeutic strategy against spinal muscular atrophy (SMA). However, a target-based approach to identify small-molecule E7 splicing modifiers has not been attempted, which could reveal novel therapies with improved mechanistic insight. Here, we chose as a target the stem-loop RNA structure TSL2, which overlaps with the 5′ splicing site of E7. A small-molecule TSL2-binding compound, homocarbonyltopsentin (PK4C9), was identified that increases E7 splicing to therapeutic levels and rescues downstream molecular alterations in SMA cells. High-resolution NMR combined with molecular modelling revealed that PK4C9 binds to pentaloop conformati…

Increased survival of honeybees in the laboratory after simultaneous exposure to low doses of pesticides and bacteria

2018

Recent studies of honeybees and bumblebees have examined combinatory effects of different stressors, as insect pollinators are naturally exposed to multiple stressors. At the same time the potential influences of simultaneously occurring agricultural agents on insect pollinator health remain largely unknown. Due to different farming methods, and the drift of applied agents and manure, pollinators are most probably exposed to insecticides but also bacteria from organic fertilizers at the same time. We orally exposed honeybee workers to sub-lethal doses of the insecticide thiacloprid and two strains of the bacterium Enterococcus faecalis, which can occur in manure from farming animals. Our re…