Search results for "SN"

Genome-Wide Association Study Identifies New Candidate Markers for Somatic Cells Score in a Local Dairy Sheep

2021

In the Mediterranean basin countries, the dairy sheep production is usually based on local breeds, which are very well-adapted to their production systems and environments and can indeed guarantee income, employment, and economic viability in areas where production alternatives are scarce or non-existent. Mastitis is still one of the greatest problems affecting commercial milk production. However, genetic evaluation of mastitis is particularly difficult because of its low heritability and the categorical nature of the trait. The aim of this study was to identify genomic regions putatively associated with somatic cells count (SCC) in the local economically important Valle del Belice sheep br…

2019

As rats learn to search for multiple sources of food or water in a complex environment, they generate increasingly efficient trajectories between reward sites. Such spatial navigation capacity involves the replay of hippocampal place-cells during awake states, generating small sequences of spatially related place-cell activity that we call "snippets". These snippets occur primarily during sharp-wave-ripples (SWRs). Here we focus on the role of such replay events, as the animal is learning a traveling salesperson task (TSP) across multiple trials. We hypothesize that snippet replay generates synthetic data that can substantially expand and restructure the experience available and make learni…

The Active Inference Approach to Ecological Perception: General Information Dynamics for Natural and Artificial Embodied Cognition

2018

The emerging neurocomputational vision of humans as embodied, ecologically embedded, social agents – who shape and are shaped by their environment – offers a golden opportunity to revisit and revise ideas about the physical and information-theoretic underpinnings of life, mind, and consciousness itself. In particular, the active inference framework (AIF) makes it possible to bridge connections from computational neuroscience and robotics/AI to ecological psychology and phenomenology, revealing common underpinnings and overcoming key limitations. AIF opposes the mechanistic to the reductive, while staying fully grounded in a naturalistic and information theoretic foundation, using the princi…

Assessment of genetically modified maize MON 87411 for food and feed uses, import and processing, under Regulation (EC) No 1829/2003 (application EFS…

2018

Maize MON 87411 was developed to confer resistance to corn rootworms (Diabrotica spp.) by the expression of a modified version of the Bacillus thuringiensis cry3Bb1 gene and a DvSnf7 dsRNA expression cassette, and tolerance to glyphosate-containing herbicides by the expression of a CP4 5-enolpyruvylshikimate-3-phosphate synthase (cp4 epsps) gene. The molecular characterisation data and bioinformatics analyses did not identify issues requiring assessment for food and feed safety. No statistically significant differences in the agronomic and phenotypic characteristics tested between maize MON 87411 and its conventional counterpart were identified. The compositional analysis of maize MON 87411…

Un barrio marginado no es un barrio marginal. A propósito de Nazaret (Valencia)

2016

This article takes us to Nazaret, an outlying district on Valencia’s waterfront which we consider from three complementary perspectives: the synchronic vision of its current socio-spatial structure, the diachronic and processual contextualization of the changes it has undergone in the last century, and the perceptions and images which characterize the neighbourhood, together with the features, activity and incidence of its associative fabric. The analysis focuses on the behaviour of a set of interconnected factors, including the impact of the port and urban development policy, its socioeconomic make-up, the consistency of its associative fabric and its relations with government. Whereas the…

Genetic association study of childhood aggression across raters, instruments, and age

2021

AbstractChildhood aggressive behavior (AGG) has a substantial heritability of around 50%. Here we present a genome-wide association meta-analysis (GWAMA) of childhood AGG, in which all phenotype measures across childhood ages from multiple assessors were included. We analyzed phenotype assessments for a total of 328 935 observations from 87 485 children aged between 1.5 and 18 years, while accounting for sample overlap. We also meta-analyzed within subsets of the data, i.e., within rater, instrument and age. SNP-heritability for the overall meta-analysis (AGGoverall) was 3.31% (SE = 0.0038). We found no genome-wide significant SNPs for AGGoverall. The gene-based analysis returned three sign…

In Situ Representations and Access Consciousness in Neural Blackboard or Workspace Architectures

2018

Phenomenal theories of consciousness assert that consciousness is based on specific neural correlates in the brain, which can be separated from all cognitive functions we can perform. If so, the search for robot consciousness seems to be doomed. By contrast, theories of functional or access consciousness assert that consciousness can be studied only with forms of cognitive access, given by cognitive processes. Consequently, consciousness and cognitive access cannot be fully dissociated. Here, the global features of cognitive access of consciousness are discussed based on neural blackboard or (global) workspace architectures, combined with content addressable or "in situ" representations as …

Detecting mutations by eBWT

2018

In this paper we develop a theory describing how the extended Burrows-Wheeler Transform (eBWT) of a collection of DNA fragments tends to cluster together the copies of nucleotides sequenced from a genome G. Our theory accurately predicts how many copies of any nucleotide are expected inside each such cluster, and how an elegant and precise LCP array based procedure can locate these clusters in the eBWT. Our findings are very general and can be applied to a wide range of different problems. In this paper, we consider the case of alignment-free and reference-free SNPs discovery in multiple collections of reads. We note that, in accordance with our theoretical results, SNPs are clustered in th…

Formulation, development and characterization of a novel functional fruit snack based on fig (Ficus carica L.) coated with sugar-free chocolate

2020

The aim of the present investigation was to explore the possibility of developing a fruit snack formulation based on dried fig powder and chocolate-coated. Dried Fig (Ficus carica L.) powder with a maximum particle size of 354 μm and the lowest compaction force was formulated as the core. Persian gum was prepared at the concentrations of 1.5, 2 and 2.5% and xanthan gum was prepared at the levels of 0.25, 0.39 and 0.54% as the middle layer to the coating of the core. Regarding rheological assessments, sugar-free chocolate containing 29.3% isomalt was selected for the coating of the outer chocolate shell in the entitled snack. Textural analysis showed that coating of the core with hydrocolloi…

Preselection statistics and Random Forest classification identify population informative single nucleotide polymorphisms in cosmopolitan and autochth…

2018

Commercial single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) arrays have been recently developed for several species and can be used to identify informative markers to differentiate breeds or populations for several downstream applications. To identify the most discriminating genetic markers among thousands of genotyped SNPs, a few statistical approaches have been proposed. In this work, we compared several methods of SNPs preselection (Delta, F st and principal component analyses (PCA)) in addition to Random Forest classifications to analyse SNP data from six dairy cattle breeds, including cosmopolitan (Holstein, Brown and Simmental) and autochthonous Italian breeds raised in two different regions and …