Search results for "Information Science"
showing 10 items of 3627 documents
Pursuing softer urban mobility behaviors through game-based apps
2020
Cities are currently engaged through their urban policies in pushing people towards less environmentally impacting mobility modalities: therefore, cycling and walking are strongly promoted, especially by means of new and wider limited traffic and no-cars zones. In this paper, the effectiveness of the new smartphones and apps-based technologies in modifying the mobility behaviors of citizens towards more sustainable choices has been investigated. Specifically, the potential of a smartphone app, directly involving citizens by means of a game rewarding the most sustainable trips, has been tested on a university commuters' group. These latter, starting from their current mobility situation, wer…
Closed-Locked and Apo-Resting State Structures of the Human α7 Nicotinic Receptor: A Computational Study
2018
International audience; Nicotinic acetylcholine receptors, belonging to the Cys-loop super-family of ligand-gated ion channels (LGICs), are membrane proteins present in neurons and at neuromuscular junctions. They are responsible for signal transmission, and their function is regulated by neurotransmitters, agonists and antagonists drugs. A detailed knowledge of their conformational transition in response to ligand binding is critical to understand the basis of ligand-receptor interaction, in view of new pharmacological approaches to control receptor activity. However, the scarcity of experimentally derived structures of human channels makes this perspective extremely challenging. To contri…
Unexpected associated microalgal diversity in the lichen Ramalina farinacea is uncovered by pyrosequencing analyses
2017
The current literature reveals that the intrathalline coexistence of multiple microalgal taxa in lichens is more common than previously thought, and additional complexity is supported by the coexistence of bacteria and basidiomycete yeasts in lichen thalli. This replaces the old paradigm that lichen symbiosis occurs between a fungus and a single photobiont. The lichen Ramalina farinacea has proven to be a suitable model to study the multiplicity of microalgae in lichen thalli due to the constant coexistence of Trebouxia sp. TR9 and T. jamesii in long-distance populations. To date, studies involving phycobiont diversity within entire thalli are based on Sanger sequencing, but this method see…
Drosophila Food-Associated Pheromones: Effect of Experience, Genotype and Antibiotics on Larval Behavior
2016
International audience; Animals ubiquitously use chemical signals to communicate many aspects of their social life. These chemical signals often consist of environmental cues mixed with species-specific signals-pheromones-emitted by conspecifics. During their life, insects can use pheromones to aggregate, disperse, choose a mate, or find the most suitable food source on which to lay eggs. Before pupariation, larvae of several Drosophila species migrate to food sources depending on their composition and the presence of pheromones. Some pheromones derive from microbiota gut activity and these food-associated cues can enhance larval attraction or repulsion. To explore the mechanisms underlying…
Bacteria classification using minimal absent words
2017
Bacteria classification has been deeply investigated with different tools for many purposes, such as early diagnosis, metagenomics, phylogenetics. Classification methods based on ribosomal DNA sequences are considered a reference in this area. We present a new classificatier for bacteria species based on a dissimilarity measure of purely combinatorial nature. This measure is based on the notion of Minimal Absent Words, a combinatorial definition that recently found applications in bioinformatics. We can therefore incorporate this measure into a probabilistic neural network in order to classify bacteria species. Our approach is motivated by the fact that there is a vast literature on the com…
Canonical Variate Analysis of Sensory Profiling Data
2015
Principal Component Analysis (PCA) of product mean scores is generally used to obtain a product map from sensory profiling data. However, this approach does not take into account the variance of the product mean scores due to the individual panelist variability. Therefore, Canonical Variate Analysis (CVA) of the product effect in the two-way multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) should be considered as a natural alternative analysis to PCA. Indeed, it is the extension of the classical univariate approach used for the analysis of each descriptor separately. This analysis generates successive components maximizing product discrimination as measured by the usual Fisher statistics in analy…
Grapes: a method and a SAS program for graphical representations of assessor performances
1994
GRAPES computes individual and global analyses of variance for sensory profiling data, consisting of several sessions in which all the panelists gave scores to all the products for a number of attributes. The fitted model takes into account the session effect. GRAPES summarizes the results by means of graphical assessor scatterplots which allow to check and to compare panelist performances, such as the way of using scale, the reliability, the discrimination power and the agreement with the panel. In addition, GRAPES detects the outliers for each of these criterion. The usefulness of GRAPES for the panel leader will be demonstrated using texture and flavor profiling of 4 restructured steaks …
Discovering unbounded unions of regular pattern languages from positive examples
1996
The problem of learning unions of certain pattern languages from positive examples is considered. We restrict to the regular patterns, i.e., patterns where each variable symbol can appear only once, and to the substring patterns, which is a subclass of regular patterns of the type xαy, where x and y are variables and α is a string of constant symbols. We present an algorithm that, given a set of strings, finds a good collection of patterns covering this set. The notion of a ‘good covering’ is defined as the most probable collection of patterns likely to be present in the examples, assuming a simple probabilistic model, or equivalently using the Minimum Description Length (MDL) principle. Ou…
DNA combinatorial messages and Epigenomics: The case of chromatin organization and nucleosome occupancy in eukaryotic genomes
2019
Abstract Epigenomics is the study of modifications on the genetic material of a cell that do not depend on changes in the DNA sequence, since those latter involve specific proteins around which DNA wraps. The end result is that Epigenomic changes have a fundamental role in the proper working of each cell in Eukaryotic organisms. A particularly important part of Epigenomics concentrates on the study of chromatin, that is, a fiber composed of a DNA-protein complex and very characterizing of Eukaryotes. Understanding how chromatin is assembled and how it changes is fundamental for Biology. In more than thirty years of research in this area, Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science have gai…
Sensory methodologies and the taste of water
2009
/WOS: 000285178000010; International audience; Describing the taste of water is a challenge since drinking water is supposed to have almost no taste. In this study, different classical sensory methodologies have been applied in order to assess sensory characteristics of water and have been compared: sensory profiling, Temporal Dominance of Sensations and free sorting task. These methodologies present drawbacks: sensory profile and TDS do not provide an effective discrimination of the taste of water and the free sorting task is efficient but does not enable data aggregation. A new methodology based on comparison with a set of references and named “Polarized Sensory Positioning” (PSP) has bee…