1,721,039 research outputs found
The Role of Mass Spectrometry in the "Omics" Era.
No full textMass spectrometry (MS) is one of the key analytical technology on which the emerging "-omics'' approaches are based. It may provide detection and quantization of thousands of proteins and biologically active metabolites from a tissue, body fluid or cell culture working in a "global'' or "targeted'' manner, down to ultra-trace levels. It can be expected that the high performance of MS technology, coupled to routine data handling, will soon bring fruit in the request for a better understanding of human diseases, leading to new molecular biomarkers, hence affecting drug targets and therapies.
In this review, we focus on the main advances in the MS technologies, influencing genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, lipidomics and metabolomics fields, up to the most recent MS applications to meta-omic studies
Numbers around Descartes: A preregistered study on the three-dimensional SNARC effect
No full textThe Spatial-Numerical Association of Response Codes (SNARC) effect suggests that numbers are represented along a horizontal left-to-right oriented, mental number line, with small numbers on the left and large numbers on the right. Much less evidence exists for vertical (down-to-up) and sagittal (near-to-far) SNARC effects. This might be due to the employment of different experimental paradigms among studies and to the, sometimes, inexact definition of the vertical and sagittal axes. We investigated for the first time the SNARC effect along the horizontal, vertical, and sagittal axes, by means of a classic SNARC task. Our results suggest the presence of three equally-strong SNARC effects. Our findings can be considered as evidence in favor of a three-dimensional, mental representation of numbers, in the form of a mental number space, defined by Cartesian coordinates
Surgical therapy of the ectropion secondary to ichthyosis vulgaris
No full textWe report a case of a female patient aged 22 years affected with vulgaris ichthyosis and ectropion of the four eyelids with incomplete lid closure in both eyes and punctuate corneal staining indicating exposure in left eye. The surgical methods, consisting in skin or mucosa graft in order to reduce skin retraction, allowed the healing of the exposure keratopathy
A rapid screening method for testing the efficiency of masks in breaking down aerosols
No full textThe highest risk of novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 to be spread through human-to-human transmission has boosted the use of personal protective equipment at worldwide level. In Europe, the medical face masks must be tested to certify the essential requirements in agreement with European Standard EN 14683:2019, and face masks for industrial use in agreement with European Standard EN 149:2009. Due to the need of large quanti- tative of medical and non-medical face masks in coronavirus outbreak, several Italian industries are working for shift a portion of their manufacturing capacity for producing medical and non-medical face mask. For screening evaluation of the effectiveness of personal protective equipment produced by reconverted industries, ARPA Lazio and the Department of Chemical Science and Technologies of Tor Vergata University have set-up an analytical system able to simulate the respiratory action and to measure the percentage of particles that pass through the face masks using optical particle counter (based on the EN 16890: 2017 that uses the same light scattering principle to evaluate the filter filtration efficiency). This set-up was challenged using face masks produced by reconverted industries and the data were compared with ones obtained using medical face mask
Study of the evolution in space and time of water diffusion in a leaf through a sub-terahertz portable imaging system
Full text linkAmong the non-destructive techniques capable of obtaining information on biological systems even in vivo, terahertz-based techniques are emerging due to their specificity to the water content, which can represent an important indicator of the presence of microorganisms and, in general, of the health status, particularly in plants. Nevertheless, the analysis of the extracted data (especially for images) and the exploitation of the potential of the technique for the study of the complex phenomena that occur in living tissues are still almost unexplored fields. In this work, the hydration status of leaves both in vivo and ex vivo was monitored continuously and non-destructively by acquiring videos in the sub-terahertz range through a portable imaging system. A model for describing the water flow in space and time in the midvein of a leaf is obtained which is suitable for the analysis of the data extracted from the portable sub-terahertz imaging system. These results show that terahertz-based technology can be used to study biological phenomena even in vivo; moreover, they pave the way for the introduction of a general method for the analysis of terahertz data based on surface fits in space and in time as well
Photoinduced long-term memory effects in n-type organic perylene transistors.
No full textIn this paper, the photoexcitation response of high mobility n-type organic field-effect transistors is analyzed. White light exposure of N,N_-dioctyl-3,4,9,10-perylene tetracarboxylic diimide _PTCDI-C8H_ transistors is demonstrated to promote the occurrence of metastable conductance states with very long retention times, similar to what has been previously reported for p-type compounds. Even in the absence of a gate-source voltage VGS, the complete recovery of the initial electrical condition can take up to 20 days. However, the initial state restoring is electrically controllable by the application of a positive VGS. These effects suggest that PTCDI-C8H is an interesting n-type material for the development of light-sensitive organic circuitry
Human serum proteome analysis: new source of markers in metabolic disorders.
No full textThe prevalence of metabolic disorders (MDs), especially diabetes, is rapidly increasing worldwide, leading to an increasing risk of cardiovascular and other socially relevant complications. To boost MD biomarker discovery, advanced proteomics can harmonize metabolomics. Indeed, the rapid development of mass spectrometry (MS) has designated proteomics as an emerging platform to interrogate the plasma/serum proteome for the discovery of next-generation biomarkers exploitable for risk assessment, early detection and prognosis of MDs. Preanalytical plasma/serum treatment, such as combinatorial peptide ligand libraries with nano-liquid chromatography coupled with tandem MS or selected reaction monitoring coupled to triple-quadrupole time-of-flight instruments, are proven clinical laboratory techniques for quantitative analyses. New strategies, such as SWATH (TM) MS, which allows us to systematically characterize and quantify query sample sets of 'any protein of interest' in complex biological samples, may dramatically improve next-generation MD biomarkers, especially considering the plethora of candidates coming from the 'bioreactor' gut microbiota affecting MD onset and progressio
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