Search results for "Forma"
showing 10 items of 34540 documents
Fragments of peer review: A quantitative analysis of the literature (1969-2015)
2018
This paper examines research on peer review between 1969 and 2015 by looking at records indexed from the Scopus database. Although it is often argued that peer review has been poorly investigated, we found that the number of publications in this field doubled from 2005. A half of this work was indexed as research articles, a third as editorial notes and literature reviews and the rest were book chapters or letters. We identified the most prolific and influential scholars, the most cited publications and the most important journals in the field. Co-authorship network analysis showed that research on peer review is fragmented, with the largest group of co-authors including only 2.1% of the wh…
Prediction of Chromatin Accessibility in Gene-Regulatory Regions from Transcriptomics Data
2017
AbstractThe epigenetics landscape of cells plays a key role in the establishment of cell-type specific gene expression programs characteristic of different cellular phenotypes. Different experimental procedures have been developed to obtain insights into the accessible chromatin landscape including DNase-seq, FAIRE-seq and ATAC-seq. However, current downstream computational tools fail to reliably determine regulatory region accessibility from the analysis of these experimental data. In particular, currently available peak calling algorithms are very sensitive to their parameter settings and show highly heterogeneous results, which hampers a trustworthy identification of accessible chromatin…
Diagnostic and Prognostic Relevance of Red Blood Cell Distribution Width for Vascular Aging and Cardiovascular Diseases.
2019
Evidence suggests association of red blood cell distribution width (RDW) with cardiovascular diseases (CVDs). On the contrary, we underline that the sole RDW values cannot represent a valid CVD biomarker. High RDW values are expression of biological effects of a lot of both endogenous and exogenous factors (i.e., age, sex, genetic background, inflammation, hormones, drugs, diet, exercise, hematological analyzers, and ranges of values), modulating the biology and physiology of erythrocytes. Thus, the singular monitoring of RDW cannot be used to predict cardiovascular disorders. Accordingly, we have reviewed the evidence for potential relationship of RDW values with alterations in the cardiov…
Mediterranean nutraceutical foods: Strategy to improve vascular ageing.
2015
Ageing is characterized by a decline in all systemic functions. A greater susceptibility to apoptosis and senescence may contribute to proliferative and functional impairment of endothelial progenitor cells. They play an important role in neo-angiogenesis and endothelial repair. Vascular ageing is associated with changes in the structure and functions of vessels' wall. There are many possible causes of this damage. For sure, inflammation and oxidative stress play a fundamental role in the pathogenesis of endothelial dysfunction, commonly attributed to a reduced availability of nitric oxide. Inflammageing, the chronic low-grade inflammation that characterizes elderly people, aggravates vascu…
The claustrum is a target for projections from the supramammillary nucleus in the rat.
2019
Injection of the anterograde tracer Phaseolus vulgaris leucoagglutinin (PHAL) into the rat rostral and caudal supramammillary nucleus (SUM) provided expected patterns of projections into the hippocampus and the septal region. In addition, unexpectedly intense projections were observed into the claustrum defined by parvalbumin expression. Injections of the retrograde tracer fluorogold (FG) into the hippocampus and the region of the claustrum showed that the cells of origin of these projections distributed similarly within the borders of the SUM. The SUM is usually involved in control of hippocampal theta activity, but the observation of intense projections into the claustrum indicates that i…
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…
Formation and Characterization of Early Bacterial Biofilms on Different Wood Typologies Applied in Dairy Production
2018
ABSTRACT The main hypothesis of this work was that Sicilian forestry resources are suitable for the production of equipment to be used in cheese making and indigenous milk lactic acid bacteria (LAB) are able to develop stable biofilms providing starter and nonstarter cultures necessary for curd fermentation and cheese ripening, respectively. Hence, the present work was carried out with deproteinized whey to evaluate LAB biofilm formation on different woods derived from tree species grown in Sicily. Microbiological and scanning electron microscopy analyses showed minimal differences in microbial levels and compositions for the neoformed biofilms. The specific investigation of Salmonella spp.…
Clustering of low-correlated spatial gene expression patterns in the mouse brain in the Allen Brain Atlas
2018
In this paper, clustering techniques are applied to spatial gene expression patterns with a low genomic correlation between the sagittal and coronal projections. The data analysed here are hosted on an available public DB named ABA (Allen Brain Atlas). The results are compared to those obtained by Bohland et al. on the complementary dataset (high correlation values). We prove that, by analysing a reduced dataset,hence reducing the computational burden, we get the same accuracy in highlighting different neuroanatomical region.
Block Sorting-Based Transformations on Words: Beyond the Magic BWT
2018
The Burrows-Wheeler Transform (BWT) is a word transformation introduced in 1994 for Data Compression and later results have contributed to make it a fundamental tool for the design of self-indexing compressed data structures. The Alternating Burrows-Wheeler Transform (ABWT) is a more recent transformation, studied in the context of Combinatorics on Words, that works in a similar way, using an alternating lexicographical order instead of the usual one. In this paper we study a more general class of block sorting-based transformations. The transformations in this new class prove to be interesting combinatorial tools that offer new research perspectives. In particular, we show that all the tra…
A Deep Learning Model for Epigenomic Studies
2016
Epigenetics is the study of heritable changes in gene expression that does not involve changes to the underlying DNA sequence, i.e. a change in phenotype not involved by a change in genotype. At least three main factor seems responsible for epigenetic change including DNA methylation, histone modification and non-coding RNA, each one sharing having the same property to affect the dynamic of the chromatin structure by acting on Nucleosomes posi- tion. A nucleosome is a DNA-histone complex, where around 150 base pairs of double-stranded DNA is wrapped. The role of nucleosomes is to pack the DNA into the nucleus of the Eukaryote cells, to form the Chromatin. Nucleosome positioning plays an imp…