Search results for "Surge"

Mystic Acetaldehyde: The Never-Ending Story on Alcoholism

2017

After decades of uncertainties and drawbacks, the study on the role and significance of acetaldehyde in the effects of ethanol seemed to have found its main paths. Accordingly, the effects of acetaldehyde, after its systemic or central administration and as obtained following ethanol metabolism, looked as they were extensively characterized. However, almost 5 years after this research appeared at its highest momentum, the investigations on this topic have been revitalized on at least three main directions: (1) the role and the behavioral significance of acetaldehyde in different phases of ethanol self-administration and in voluntary ethanol consumption; (2) the distinction, in the central e…

Brain-Derived Neurotrophic Factor as a Marker of Cognitive Frailty.

2016

Oxidative Stress and Rare Diseases: From Molecular Crossroads to Therapeutic Avenues.

2021

Writing an editorial about rare diseases can become a messy subject from the biological perspective [...]

2018

The expertise of humans for recognizing faces is largely based on holistic processing mechanism, a sophisticated cognitive process that develops with visual experience. The various visual features of a face are thus glued together and treated by the brain as a unique stimulus, facilitating robust recognition. Holistic processing is known to facilitate fine discrimination of highly similar visual stimuli, and involves specialized brain areas in humans and other primates. Although holistic processing is most typically employed with face stimuli, subjects can also learn to apply similar image analysis mechanisms when gaining expertise in discriminating novel visual objects, like becoming exper…

Biological investigation of neural circuits in the insect brain

2018

Watching insects thoughtfully one cannot but adore their behavioural capabilities. They have developed amazing reproductive, foraging and orientation strategies and at the same time they followed the evolutionary path of miniaturization and sparseness. Both features together turn them into a role model for autonomous robots. Despite their tiny brains, fruit flies (Drosophila) can orient, walk on uneven terrain, in any orientation to gravity, can fly in adverse winds, find partners, places for egg laying, food and shelter. Drosophila melanogaster is the model animal for geneticists and cutting-edge tools are being continuously developed to study the underpinnings of their behavioural capabil…

A Methodology to Study Pseudogenized lincRNAs

2021

Long intergenic noncoding RNAs (lincRNAs) are known to be tissue specifically expressed and able to regulate functional protein-coding genes: some can even act as competing endogenous RNAs (ceRNAs), because microRNAs can bind to them instead of the corresponding mRNA binding sites. Some lincRNAs contain remnants of protein-coding sequences and it has been hypothesized that they might arise after a pseudogenization processes. However, a major limitation in the study of such phenomenon is the lack of proper computational tools designed to align/analyze protein-coding sequences and noncoding sequences. To overcome this limitation, we published a method that finds the remnants of protein-coding…

Could lymphadenectomy be avoided in locally advanced cervical cancer patients administered preoperative chemoradiation? A large-scale retrospective s…

2017

Abstract Introduction To identify a subset of cervical cancer (CC) patients administered chemoradiation (CT/RT) plus radical surgery (RS), who can be spared lymphadenectomy, and complications. Patients and methods 430 Stage IB2-IIB patients without LN involvement at imaging were accrued (March 1996–December 2015) at Gynecologic Oncology Unit of the Catholic University of Rome/Campobasso. CT/RT consisted of pelvic irradiation plus cisplatin based chemotherapy. Objective response was evaluated according to RECIST criteria; radical hysterectomy and pelvic ± aortic lymphadenectomy was attempted in patients achieving response or stable disease. Surgical morbidity was classified according to the …

Influence of pathway topology and functional class on the molecular evolution of human metabolic genes

2018

Metabolic networks comprise thousands of enzymatic reactions functioning in a controlled manner and have been shaped by natural selection. Thanks to the genome data, the footprints of adaptive (positive) selection are detectable, and the strength of purifying selection can be measured. This has made possible to know where, in the metabolic network, adaptive selection has acted and where purifying selection is more or less strong and efficient. We have carried out a comprehensive molecular evolutionary study of all the genes involved in the human metabolism. We investigated the type and strength of the selective pressures that acted on the enzyme-coding genes belonging to metabolic pathways …

Differential binding cell-SELEX method to identify cell-specific aptamers using high-throughput sequencing

2018

AbstractAptamers have in recent years emerged as a viable alternative to antibodies. High-throughput sequencing (HTS) has revolutionized aptamer research by increasing the number of reads from a few (using Sanger sequencing) to millions (using an HTS approach). Despite the availability and advantages of HTS compared to Sanger sequencing, there are only 50 aptamer HTS sequencing samples available on public databases. HTS data in aptamer research are primarily used to compare sequence enrichment between subsequent selection cycles. This approach does not take full advantage of HTS because the enrichment of sequences during selection can be due to inefficient negative selection when using live…

Motor-skill learning in an insect inspired neuro-computational control system

2017

In nature, insects show impressive adaptation and learning capabilities. The proposed computational model takes inspiration from specific structures of the insect brain: after proposing key hypotheses on the direct involvement of the mushroom bodies (MBs) and on their neural organization, we developed a new architecture for motor learning to be applied in insect-like walking robots. The proposed model is a nonlinear control system based on spiking neurons. MBs are modeled as a nonlinear recurrent spiking neural network (SNN) with novel characteristics, able to memorize time evolutions of key parameters of the neural motor controller, so that existing motor primitives can be improved. The ad…