scholarly journals Haloarchaea as Cell Factories to Produce Bioplastics

Marine Drugs ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 159
Author(s):  
Lorena Simó-Cabrera ◽  
Salvador García-Chumillas ◽  
Nashwa Hagagy ◽  
Amna Saddiq ◽  
Hend Tag ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
State Of The Art ◽  
Industrial Scale ◽  
Design Strategies ◽  
Plastic Pollution ◽  
Plastic Recycling ◽  
Cell Factories ◽  
Environmental Deterioration ◽  
New Research ◽  
Potential Use ◽  
Shed Light

Plastic pollution is a worldwide concern causing the death of animals (mainly aquatic fauna) and environmental deterioration. Plastic recycling is, in most cases, difficult or even impossible. For this reason, new research lines are emerging to identify highly biodegradable bioplastics or plastic formulations that are more environmentally friendly than current ones. In this context, microbes, capable of synthesizing bioplastics, were revealed to be good models to design strategies in which microorganisms can be used as cell factories. Recently, special interest has been paid to haloarchaea due to the capability of some species to produce significant concentrations of polyhydroxyalkanoate (PHA), polyhydroxybutyrate (PHB), and polyhydroxyvalerate (PHV) when growing under a specific nutritional status. The growth of those microorganisms at the pilot or industrial scale offers several advantages compared to that of other microbes that are bioplastic producers. This review summarizes the state of the art of bioplastic production and the most recent findings regarding the production of bioplastics by halophilic microorganisms with special emphasis on haloarchaea. Some protocols to produce/analyze bioplastics are highlighted here to shed light on the potential use of haloarchaea at the industrial scale to produce valuable products, thus minimizing environmental pollution by plastics made from petroleum.

State of the Art on Carbonic Anhydrase Modulators for Biomedical Purposes

2019 ◽  
Vol 26 (15) ◽  
pp. 2558-2573 ◽  
Author(s):  
Murat Bozdag ◽  
Abdulmalik Saleh Alfawaz Altamimi ◽  
Daniela Vullo ◽  
Claudiu T. Supuran ◽  
Fabrizio Carta
Keyword(s):  
Central Nervous System ◽  
Nervous System ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
Cellular Level ◽  
Hydration Reaction ◽  
Carbonic Anhydrases ◽  
Crucial Importance ◽  
Learning Impairments ◽  
Current Review ◽  
Potential Use

The current review is intended to highlight recent advances in the search of new and effective modulators of the metalloenzymes Carbonic Anhydrases (CAs, EC 4.2.1.1) expressed in humans (h). CAs reversibly catalyze the CO2 hydration reaction, which is of crucial importance in the regulation of a plethora of fundamental processes at cellular level as well as in complex organisms. The first section of this review will be dedicated to compounds acting as activators of the hCAs (CAAs) and their promising effects on central nervous system affecting pathologies mainly characterized from memory and learning impairments. The second part will focus on the emerging chemical classes acting as hCA inhibitors (CAIs) and their potential use for the treatment of diseases.

Identification, Prediction and Data Analysis of Noncoding RNAs: A Review

2019 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 216-230 ◽  
Author(s):  
Abbasali Emamjomeh ◽  
Javad Zahiri ◽  
Mehrdad Asadian ◽  
Mehrdad Behmanesh ◽  
Barat A. Fakheri ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Computational Methods ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
Noncoding Rnas ◽  
Research Field ◽  
Design Strategies ◽  
Structural Prediction ◽  
Computational Costs ◽  
Cellular Processes ◽  
Laboratory Techniques ◽  
Fast Prediction

Background:Noncoding RNAs (ncRNAs) which play an important role in various cellular processes are important in medicine as well as in drug design strategies. Different studies have shown that ncRNAs are dis-regulated in cancer cells and play an important role in human tumorigenesis. Therefore, it is important to identify and predict such molecules by experimental and computational methods, respectively. However, to avoid expensive experimental methods, computational algorithms have been developed for accurately and fast prediction of ncRNAs.Objective:The aim of this review was to introduce the experimental and computational methods to identify and predict ncRNAs structure. Also, we explained the ncRNA’s roles in cellular processes and drugs design, briefly.Method:In this survey, we will introduce ncRNAs and their roles in biological and medicinal processes. Then, some important laboratory techniques will be studied to identify ncRNAs. Finally, the state-of-the-art models and algorithms will be introduced along with important tools and databases.Results:The results showed that the integration of experimental and computational approaches improves to identify ncRNAs. Moreover, the high accurate databases, algorithms and tools were compared to predict the ncRNAs.Conclusion:ncRNAs prediction is an exciting research field, but there are different difficulties. It requires accurate and reliable algorithms and tools. Also, it should be mentioned that computational costs of such algorithm including running time and usage memory are very important. Finally, some suggestions were presented to improve computational methods of ncRNAs gene and structural prediction.

scholarly journals Reactive Balance Control for Legged Robots under Visco-Elastic Contacts

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 353
Author(s):  
Thomas Flayols ◽  
Andrea Del Prete ◽  
Majid Khadiv ◽  
Nicolas Mansard ◽  
Ludovic Righetti
Keyword(s):  
Inverse Dynamics ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
Balance Control ◽  
Contact Stiffness ◽  
Poor Performance ◽  
Admittance Control ◽  
Inverse Dynamics Control ◽  
Rigid Contact ◽  
Reactive Balance ◽  
Shed Light

Contacts between robots and environment are often assumed to be rigid for control purposes. This assumption can lead to poor performance when contacts are soft and/or underdamped. However, the problem of balancing on soft contacts has not received much attention in the literature. This paper presents two novel approaches to control a legged robot balancing on visco-elastic contacts, and compares them to other two state-of-the-art methods. Our simulation results show that performance heavily depends on the contact stiffness and the noises/uncertainties introduced in the simulation. Briefly, the two novel controllers performed best for soft/medium contacts, whereas “inverse-dynamics control under rigid-contact assumptions” was the best one for stiff contacts. Admittance control was instead the most robust, but suffered in terms of performance. These results shed light on this challenging problem, while pointing out interesting directions for future investigation.

scholarly journals Advances in the Application of Machine Learning Techniques for Power System Analytics: A Survey

Energies ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (16) ◽  
pp. 4776
Author(s):  
Seyed Mahdi Miraftabzadeh ◽  
Michela Longo ◽  
Federica Foiadelli ◽  
Marco Pasetti ◽  
Raul Igual
Keyword(s):  
Machine Learning ◽  
Power Systems ◽  
Smart Grids ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
Smart Cities ◽  
Power Grids ◽  
Machine Learning Techniques ◽  
Learning Techniques ◽  
New Research ◽  
Traditional Approaches

The recent advances in computing technologies and the increasing availability of large amounts of data in smart grids and smart cities are generating new research opportunities in the application of Machine Learning (ML) for improving the observability and efficiency of modern power grids. However, as the number and diversity of ML techniques increase, questions arise about their performance and applicability, and on the most suitable ML method depending on the specific application. Trying to answer these questions, this manuscript presents a systematic review of the state-of-the-art studies implementing ML techniques in the context of power systems, with a specific focus on the analysis of power flows, power quality, photovoltaic systems, intelligent transportation, and load forecasting. The survey investigates, for each of the selected topics, the most recent and promising ML techniques proposed by the literature, by highlighting their main characteristics and relevant results. The review revealed that, when compared to traditional approaches, ML algorithms can handle massive quantities of data with high dimensionality, by allowing the identification of hidden characteristics of (even) complex systems. In particular, even though very different techniques can be used for each application, hybrid models generally show better performances when compared to single ML-based models.

scholarly journals Porous block copolymer separation membranes for 21st century sanitation and hygiene

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leiming Guo ◽  
Yong Wang ◽  
Martin Steinhart
Keyword(s):  
Block Copolymer ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Water Purification ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
Design Strategies ◽  
Separation Membranes ◽  
Sanitation And Hygiene ◽  
Device Integration ◽  
Porous Block

This review summarizes design strategies for nanoporous state-of-the-art BCP separation membranes, their preparation, their device integration and their use for water purification.

scholarly journals X-Mark: a benchmark for node-attributed community discovery algorithms

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Salvatore Citraro ◽  
Giulio Rossetti
Keyword(s):  
State Of The Art ◽  
Graph Clustering ◽  
Clustering Methods ◽  
Community Discovery ◽  
Attributed Graphs ◽  
Node Labels ◽  
Discovery Algorithms ◽  
Shed Light

AbstractGrouping well-connected nodes that also result in label-homogeneous clusters is a task often known as attribute-aware community discovery. While approaching node-enriched graph clustering methods, rigorous tools need to be developed for evaluating the quality of the resulting partitions. In this work, we present X-Mark, a model that generates synthetic node-attributed graphs with planted communities. Its novelty consists in forming communities and node labels contextually while handling categorical or continuous attributive information. Moreover, we propose a comparison between attribute-aware algorithms, testing them against our benchmark. Accordingly to different classification schema from recent state-of-the-art surveys, our results suggest that X-Mark can shed light on the differences between several families of algorithms.

scholarly journals A escola como espaço de práticas educativas e de pesquisa em Permacultura: Estado da arte da produção científica

2017 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 299-319
Author(s):  
Daniela Tomio ◽  
Daniela Andersen ◽  
Luciane Schulz
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
Academic Research ◽  
Scientific Production ◽  
Educational Context ◽  
Ecological Communities ◽  
Research School ◽  
Production And Consumption ◽  
Art Research ◽  
New Research

A permacultura é um movimento internacional de pessoas, organizadas em comunidades ecológicas, que se engajam em buscar outras formas de produção e consumo mais sustentáveis. No contexto educacional este modelo de (com)viver é fundamento de projetos de escolas que buscam ressignificar seus tempos, espaços e relações sociais a partir práticas sustentáveis. Neste cenário, por meio de uma pesquisa de estado da arte, objetivamos caracterizar compreensões e métodos das pesquisas sobre práticas educativas em permacultura na escola, divulgadas na produção científica brasileira. O conhecimento sistematizado permite apontar lacunas e oportunizar reflexões para novas investigações, contribuindo para repensar o cotidiano escolar, ampliar referências e mobilizar para construção de uma rede de conhecimentos integrados entre a pesquisa acadêmica, a escola e as comunidades na direção de uma cultura permanente de relações sustentáveis. The Permaculture is an international movement of peoples, organized in ecological communities, which are engaged in seeking other forms of more sustainable production and consumption. In the educational context this model of (co)living is the foundation of projects of schools that seek to re-signify their times, spaces and social relations from sustainable practices. In this scenario, through state-of-the-art research, we aim to characterize understandings and methods of research on educational practices in permaculture at school, disseminated in Brazilian scientific production. Systematized knowledge allows us to point out gaps and to provide reflections for new research, contributing to rethinking school daily life, expanding references and mobilizing to build a network of integrated knowledge between academic research, school and communities towards a permanent culture of relationships sustainable development. La permacultura es un movimiento internacional de personas, organizadas en comunidades ecológicas, que se dedican a buscar otras formas de producción y consumo más sostenibles. En el contexto educativo este modelo de (con) vivir es fundamento de proyectos de escuelas que buscan resignificar sus tiempos, espacios y relaciones sociales a partir de prácticas sustentables. En este escenario, por medio de una investigación de estado del arte, pretendemos caracterizar comprensiones y métodos de las investigaciones sobre prácticas educativas en permacultura en la escuela, divulgadas en la producción científica brasileña. El conocimiento sistematizado permite apuntar lagunas y oportunizar reflexiones para nuevas investigaciones, contribuyendo a repensar el cotidiano escolar, a ampliar referencias y movilizar para la construcción de una red de conocimientos integrados entre la investigación académica, la escuela y las comunidades hacia una cultura permanente de relaciones sostenibles.

scholarly journals The materialization of the Buen Vivir and the Rights of Nature: Rhetoric and Realities of Guayaquil Ecológico urban regeneration project

2022 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
María Fernanda Ordóñez ◽  
Kelly Shannon ◽  
Viviana d’Auria
Keyword(s):  
Ecological Context ◽  
Design Strategies ◽  
Buen Vivir ◽  
Planning And Design ◽  
The World ◽  
Rights Of Nature ◽  
Good Living ◽  
Natural Dynamics ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Shed Light

AbstractIn 2008, Ecuador became the first country in the world to declare nature as a subject of rights based on the ‘Buen Vivir’ (Good Living) philosophy which is premised on an indigenous principle that envisions a world where humans are part-and-parcel of a larger natural and social environment. Although Ecuador’s constitution is groundbreaking from a legal standpoint, the question arises of how the rights of nature is spatially manifested beyond the designation of protected areas? To shed light on such interrogation, this article, based on qualitative research, focuses on the linear park component of the mega-project Guayaquil Ecológico heralded as a first materialization which champions the “Rights of Nature” under the vision of the Buen Vivir. It unravels the contested rhetoric and realities of the Guayaquil Ecológico linear park in a critical review of the as-built project in relation to the larger objectives of Buen Vivir. The Guayaquil Ecologico linear park promised to simultaneously upgrade both social and environmental dimensions. However, it did not fully address the complexity of Guayaquil’s socio-ecological context and some of the structural injustices of the estuarine territory. Buen Vivir was rhetorically mobilised to implement a project where aesthetic dimensions dominated, further perpetuating socio-ecological vulnerabilities through relocation and evictions. Furthermore, its implementation was dependent on a specific political moment, leaving it in a state of abandonment and neglect. The Buen Vivir philosophy—as a decolonial stance that challenges western forms of development—can offer a fundamental base to question current modes of territorial occupation based on extractivist planning and design strategies. It holds significant potential to serve as base to re-think the relationship between forms of settlement, natural dynamics, and worldviews.

scholarly journals Learning Long- and Short-Term User Literal-Preference with Multimodal Hierarchical Transformer Network for Personalized Image Caption

2020 ◽  
Vol 34 (05) ◽  
pp. 9571-9578 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wei Zhang ◽  
Yue Ying ◽  
Pan Lu ◽  
Hongyuan Zha
Keyword(s):  
State Of The Art ◽  
Natural Extension ◽  
Target Image ◽  
Short Term ◽  
Image Representations ◽  
High Level ◽  
Image Descriptions ◽  
Shed Light ◽  
Image Caption

Personalized image caption, a natural extension of the standard image caption task, requires to generate brief image descriptions tailored for users' writing style and traits, and is more practical to meet users' real demands. Only a few recent studies shed light on this crucial task and learn static user representations to capture their long-term literal-preference. However, it is insufficient to achieve satisfactory performance due to the intrinsic existence of not only long-term user literal-preference, but also short-term literal-preference which is associated with users' recent states. To bridge this gap, we develop a novel multimodal hierarchical transformer network (MHTN) for personalized image caption in this paper. It learns short-term user literal-preference based on users' recent captions through a short-term user encoder at the low level. And at the high level, the multimodal encoder integrates target image representations with short-term literal-preference, as well as long-term literal-preference learned from user IDs. These two encoders enjoy the advantages of the powerful transformer networks. Extensive experiments on two real datasets show the effectiveness of considering two types of user literal-preference simultaneously and better performance over the state-of-the-art models.

scholarly journals Interindi: una nueva perspectiva de investigación acerca del indigenismo / Interindi: A New Research Perspective on Indigenismo

2018 ◽  
pp. 84
Author(s):  
Laura Giraudo ◽  
Juan Martín Sánchez
Keyword(s):  
State Of The Art ◽  
The State ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
Research Project ◽  
Research Perspective ◽  
Scientific Discussion ◽  
Professional Field ◽  
New Research ◽  
Empirical Contribution

This article presents the main objectives and outcomes of the Interindi research project: “El indigenismo interamericano: instituciones, redes y proyectos para un continente, 1940-1960”. Its most ambitious research objective is to provide a methodological, theoretical and empirical contribution to scientific discussion on indigenismo. After discussing the state of the art in this field, advances are offered for a new broader perspective based on two fundamental aspects: 1) the importance of consulting primary sources to explain indigenismo, and 2) the need to remove the discussion of the indigenous question and indigenismo from the auto-referential context in which it has developed.Key WordsIndigenismo, professional field, inter-American networks.ResumenEste artículo presenta los objetivos y resultados principales del proyecto de investigación Interindi: “El indigenismo interamericano: instituciones, redes y proyectos para un continente, 1940-1960”. El objetivo más ambicioso de la investigación es conseguir una contribución metodológica, teórica y empírica a la discusión científica acerca del indigenismo. Tras discutir el estado de la cuestión, se introducen los avances de una nueva perspectiva general que radica en dos aspectos fundamentales: 1) la importancia de acudir al estudio de las fuentes para explicar el indigenismo y 2) la necesidad de sacar la discusión sobre la cuestión indígena y el indigenismo del contexto autorreferencial en que se ha desarrollado.Palabras claveIndigenismo, campo profesional, redes interamericanas.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document