33 research outputs found
Antiviral activity of ovotransferrin derived peptides
No full textOvotransferrin and lactoferrin are iron-binding proteins with antiviral and antibacterial activities related to natural immunity,
showing marked sequence and structural homologies. The antiviral activity of two hen ovotransferrin fragments DQKDEYELL
(hOtrf219–227) and KDLLFK (hOtrf269–301 and hOtrf633–638) towards Mareks disease virus infection of chicken embryo fibroblasts
is reported here. These fragments have sequence homology with two bovine lactoferrin fragments with antiviral activity towards
herpes simplex virus, suggesting that these fragments could have a role for the exploitation of the antiviral activity of the intact proteins
towards herpes viruses. NMR analysis showed that these peptides, chemically synthetized, did not possess any favourite conformation
in solution, indicating that both the aminoacid sequence and the conformation they display in the intact protein are essential for the antiviral activity
Hirschsprung's disease and Down syndrome: From the reappraisal of risk factors to the impact of surgery
No full textIntroduction: The association of Hirschsprung disease (HSCR) and Down Syndrome (DS) is not uncommon (HSCR + DS). This paper aims at reporting the results of a 24-year series focusing on surgical approach, complications and long term outcome. Materials and methods: The notes of all patients admitted with a diagnosis of HSCR + DS have been retrospectively reviewed. Surgical details, intraoperative complications, long term issues and functional outcome have been recorded. The results have been compared to those of patients without DS and were assessed based on surgical approach. Results: A total of 23 HSCR + DS out of a series of 385 HSCR (6%) have been included. Preoperative enterocolitis (HAEC) was reported by 32%. Associated anomalies were detected in more than half of the patients. In particular, Congenital Heart Defects (CHDs) were reported by 57%. Postoperative complications (mostly symptomatic anal sphincter achalasia) were experienced by 55%. Constipation was experienced by 30%; severe continence issues, by 53%. One patient suffering from severe CHDs died. With regard to complications, only symptomatic anal achalasia requiring intrasphincteric BoTox injection was significantly more frequent in HSCR + DS (30% vs 10%, p = 0.0071). Similarly, continence proved to be significantly worse in HSCR + DS. Discussion: With the exception of symptomatic anal achalasia, HSCR + DS patients proved not to have a higher likelihood of complications compared to HSCR alone. On the other hand, functional results in the long term are worse. As a consequence, long term follow up and personalized rehabilitation programs are warranted for this delicate subset of HSCR patients. Level of evidence: Level III
Disruption of Cerebellar Granular Layer as a Consequence of Germinal Matrix Intraventricular Hemorrhage in Extreme Prematurity: An Acute Direct Mechanism Too?
No full textCerebellum is an important brain structure for the future development of motor, cognitive, and behavioral abilities in children. This structure undergoes its most significant growth during the third trimester of pregnancy. Prematurity gathers several risk factors for cerebellar impairment and underdevelopment, and among them is ventricular dilatation following germinal matrix intraventricular hemorrhage (GMH-IVH). In this report, we illustrate how this prevalent complication associated with prematurity may induce secondary cerebellar cortical damage. A premature male born by an emergency Caesarean section displayed massive GMH-IVH at brain ultrasound performed after three hours of extrauterine life and died after 18 hours of life, despite maximized vital support. We report a postmortem histopathological specimen of the cerebellar cortex showing the disruption of the external granular layer (EGL) by hemorrhagic content flowing from the supratentorial ventricles into the fourth ventricle and cisterna magna. The expansion of the ventricular system and the presence of blood in the lateral ventricles can cause inflammation and damage to the cerebellar gyri. Experimental models have shown a thinning of the EGL, suggesting that blood surrounding the cerebellum has a harmful action. Additionally, a sudden influx of cerebrospinal fluid from the lateral ventricles may directly contribute to cerebellar damage, indicating that this may be another way in which the cerebellar gyri are impaired during acute severe GMH-IVH. This is the first histopathologically confirmed case of acute disruption in the cerebellar cortex during a GMH-IVH in a premature baby. (c) 2023 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Inc. This is an open access article under the CC BY -NC -ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/)
Anti-Tat immunity defines CD4+ T-cell dynamics in people living with HIV on long-term cART
No full textBackground: Low-level HIV viremia originating from virus reactivation in HIV reservoirs is often present in cART treated individuals and represents a persisting source of immune stimulation associated with sub-optimal recovery of CD4(+) T cells. The HIV-1 Tat protein is released in the extracellular milieu and activates immune cells and latent HIV, leading to virus production and release. However, the relation of anti-Tat immunity with residual viremia, persistent immune activation and CD4(+) T-cell dynamics has not yet been defined.Methods: Volunteers enrolled in a 3-year longitudinal observational study were stratified by residual viremia, Tat serostatus and frequency of anti-Tat cellular immune responses. The impact of anti-Tat immunity on lowlevel viremia, persistent immune activation and CD4(+) T-cell recovery was investigated by test for partitions, longitudinal regression analysis for repeated measures and generalized estimating equations.Findings: Anti-Tat immunity is significantly associated with higher nadir CD4(+) T-cell numbers, control of lowlevel viremia and long-lasting CD4(+) T-cell recovery, but not with decreased immune activation. In adjusted analysis, the extent of CD4(+) T-cell restoration reflects the interplay among Tat immunity, residual viremia and immunological determinants including CD8(+) T cells and B cells. Anti-Env immunity was not related to CD4(+) T-cell recovery.Interpretation: Therapeutic approaches aiming at reinforcing anti-Tat immunity should be investigated to improve immune reconstitution in people living with HIV on long-term cART. (C) 2021 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V
Performance of commonly used genotypic assays and comparison with phenotypic assays of HIV-1 coreceptor tropism in acutely HIV-1-infected patients.
No full textObjectives: Although founder viruses in primary HIV-1 infections (PHIs) typically use the CCR5 coreceptor (R5-tropic), 3%-19% of subjects also harbour CXCR4-using viruses (X4-tropic), making tropism determination before CCR5 antagonist usage mandatory. Genotypic methods can be used to accurately determine HIV-1 tropism in chronically infected patients. Methods:We compared the results of genotypic methods [geno2pheno10%, PSSMx4r5 including a novel nucleotideinput version (ntPSSM) and distant segments (ds)Kernel] to predict coreceptor usage in a cohort of 67 PHIs. Specimens with discrepant results were phenotypically tested after cloning the V3 gene region into proviral backbones. Recombinant viruses were used to infect U87 indicator cell lines bearing CD4 and either CCR5 or CXCR4. Results: Geno2pheno10%, PSSMx4r5 and (ds)Kernel gave identical predictions in 85% of cases. Geno2pheno10% predicted the presence of CXCR4 viruses in 18% of patients. Two patientswere predicted to carry X4-tropic viruses by all algorithms and X4-tropic viruses were detected in at least one of the recombinant AD8 or NL4-3 backbonebased assays. Ten samples resulted in discordant predictions with at least one algorithm. Full concordance between tropism prediction by using population sequencing and phenotypic assays was observed only with ntPSSM. Geno2pheno prediction and the phenotypic assay gave the same results in a minority of 'discordant' patients. Conclusions: Compared with both PSSMx4r5 versions, (ds)Kernel and our phenotypic assay, geno2pheno10% overestimated the frequency of X4-tropic viruses (18% versus 3%). ntPSSM was able to detect one additional X4 virus compared with (ds)Kernel that was confirmed with the phenotypic assay. © The Author 2015. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the British Society for Antimicrobial Chemotherap
A new antigen scanning strategy for monitoring HIV-1 specific T-cell immune responses
No full textPlease help us populate SUNScholar with the post print version of this article. It can be e-mailed to: [email protected] of the immune correlates of protection in natural infection or after vaccination is a mandatory step for vaccine development. Although the most recent techniques allow a sensitive and specific detection of the cellular immune response, a consensus on the best strategy to assess their magnitude and breadth is yet to be reached. Within the AIDS Vaccine Integrated Project (AVIP http://www.avip-eu.org) we developed an antigen scanning strategy combining the empirical-based approach of overlapping peptides with a vast array of database information. This new system, termed Variable Overlapping Peptide Scanning Design (VOPSD), was used for preparing two peptide sets encompassing the candidate HIV-1 vaccine antigens Tat and Nef. Validation of the VOPSD strategy was obtained by direct comparison with 15mer or 20mer peptide sets in a trial involving six laboratories of the AVIP consortium. Cross-reactive background responses were measured in 80 HIV seronegative donors (HIV-), while sensitivity and magnitude of Tat and Nef-specific T-cell responses were assessed on 90 HIV+ individuals. In HIV-, VOPSD peptides generated background responses comparable with those of the standard sets. In HIV-1+ individuals the VOPSD pools showed a higher sensitivity in detecting individual responses (Tat VOPSD vs. Tat 15mers or 20mers: p ≤ 0.01) as well as in generating stronger responses (Nef VOPSD vs. Nef 20mers: p < 0.001) than standard sets, enhancing both CD4 and CD8 T-cell responses. Moreover, this peptide design allowed a marked reduction of the peptides number, representing a powerful tool for investigating novel HIV-1 candidate vaccine antigens in cohorts of HIV-seronegative and seropositive individuals. © 2011 Elsevier B.V
Continued Decay of HIV Proviral DNA Upon Vaccination With HIV-1 Tat of Subjects on Long-Term ART: An 8-Year Follow-Up Study
No full textIntroduction: Tat, a key HIV virulence protein, has been targeted for the development of a therapeutic vaccine aimed at cART intensification. Results from phase II clinical trials in Italy (ISS T-002) and South Africa (ISS T-003) indicated that Tat vaccination promotes increases of CD4+ T-cells and return to immune homeostasis while reducing the virus reservoir in chronically cART-treated patients. Here we present data of 92 vaccinees (59% of total vaccinees) enrolled in the ISS T-002 8-year extended follow-up study (ISS T-002 EF-UP, ClinicalTrials.gov NCT02118168). Results: Anti-Tat antibodies (Abs) induced upon vaccination persisted for the entire follow-up in 34/92 (37%) vaccinees, particularly when all 3 Ab classes (A/G/M) were present (66% of vaccinees), as most frequently observed with Tat 30 μg regimens. CD4+ T cells increased above study-entry levels reaching a stable plateau at year 5 post-vaccination, with the highest increase (165 cells/μL) in the Tat 30 μg, 3 × regimen. CD4+ T-cell increase occurred even in subjects with CD4+ nadir ≤ 250 cells/uL and in poor immunological responders and was associated with a concomitant increase of the CD4+/CD8+ T-cell ratio, a prognostic marker of morbidity/mortality inversely related to HIV reservoir size. Proviral DNA load decreased over time, with a half-life of 2 years and an estimated 90% reduction at year 8 in the Tat 30 μg, 3 × group. In multivariate analysis the kinetic and amplitude of both CD4+ T-cell increase and proviral DNA reduction were fastest and highest in subjects with all 3 anti-Tat Ab classes and in the 30 μg, 3 × group, irrespective of drug regimens (NNRTI/NRTI vs. PI). HIV proviral DNA changes from baseline were inversely related to CD4+/CD8+ T-cell ratio and CD4+ T-cell changes, and directly related to the changes of CD8+ T cells. Further, HIV DNA decay kinetics were inversely related to the frequency and levels of intermittent viremia. Finally, Tat vaccination was similarly effective irrespective of the individual immunological status or HIV reservoir size at study entry. Conclusions: Tat immunization induces progressive immune restoration and reduction of virus reservoirs above levels reached with long-term cART, and may represent an optimal vaccine candidate for cART intensification toward HIV reservoirs depletion, functional cure, and eradication strategies
Profiling Hate Speech Spreaders on Twitter
No full textTask
Hate speech (HS) is commonly defined as any communication that disparages a person or a group on the basis of some characteristic such as race, colour, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, nationality, religion, or other characteristics. Given the huge amount of user-generated contents on Twitter, the problem of detecting, and therefore possibly contrasting the HS diffusion, is becoming fundamental, for instance for fighting against misogyny and xenophobia. To this end, in this task, we aim at identifying possible hate speech spreaders on Twitter as a first step towards preventing hate speech from being propagated among online users.
After having addressed several aspects of author profiling in social media from 2013 to 2020 (fake news spreaders, bot detection, age and gender, also together with personality, gender and language variety, and gender from a multimodality perspective), this year we aim at investigating if it is possible to discriminate authors that have shared some hate speech in the past from those that, to the best of our knowledge, have never done it.
As in previous years, we propose the task from a multilingual perspective:
English
Spanish
NOTE: Although we recommend participating in both languages (English and Spanish), it is possible to address the problem just for one language.
Award
We are happy to announce that the best performing team at the 9th International Competition on Author Profiling will be awarded 300,- Euro sponsored by Symanto
Data
Input
The uncompressed dataset consists of a folder per language (en, es). Each folder contains:
An XML file per author (Twitter user) with 100 tweets. The name of the XML file corresponding to the unique author id.
A truth.txt file with the list of authors and the ground truth.
The format of the XML files is:
Tweet 1 textual contents
Tweet 2 textual contents
...
The format of the truth.txt file is as follows. The first column corresponds to the author id. The second column contains the truth label.
b2d5748083d6fdffec6c2d68d4d4442d:::0
2bed15d46872169dc7deaf8d2b43a56:::0
8234ac5cca1aed3f9029277b2cb851b:::1
5ccd228e21485568016b4ee82deb0d28:::0
60d068f9cafb656431e62a6542de2dc0:::1
...
Output
Your software must take as input the absolute path to an unpacked dataset, and has to output for each document of the dataset a corresponding XML file that looks like this:
<author id="author-id"
lang="en|es"
type="0|1"
/>
The naming of the output files is up to you. However, we recommend using the author-id as filename and "XML" as an extension.
IMPORTANT! Languages should not be mixed. A folder should be created for each language and place inside only the files with the prediction for this language.
Evaluation
The performance of your system will be ranked by accuracy. For each language, we will calculate individual accuracies in discriminating between the two classes. Finally, we will average the accuracy values per language to obtain the final ranking.
Related Work
[1] Valerio Basile, Cristina Bosco, Elisabetta Fersini, Dora Nozza, Viviana Patti, Francisco Rangel, Paolo Rosso, Manuela Sanguinetti (2019). SemEval-2019 task 5: Multilingual detection of hate speech against immigrants and women in Twitter. Proc. SemEval 2019
[2] Fabio Poletto, Valerio Basile, Manuela Sanguinetti, Cristina Bosco, Viviana Patti (2020). Resources and benchmark corpora for hate speech detection: a systematic review. Language Resources & Evaluation. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10579-020-09502-8
[3] Paula Fortuna, Sérgio Nunes (2018). A survey on automatic detection of hate speech in text. ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR) 51.4
[4] Maria Anzovino, Elisabetta Fersini, Paolo Rosso (2018). Automatic Identification and Classification of Misogynistic Language on Twitter. In: Proc. 23rd Int. Conf. on Applications of Natural Language to Information Systems, NLDB-2018, Springer-Verlag, LNCS(10859), pp. 57-64
[5] Elisabetta Fersini, Paolo Rosso, Maria Anzovino (2018). Overview of the task on automatic misogyny identification at IberEval 2018. Proc. IberEval 2018
[6] Elisabetta Fersini, Dora Nozza, Paolo Rosso (2018). Overview of the Evalita 2018 task on automatic misogyny identification (AMI). Proc. EVALITA 2018
[7] Cristina Bosco, Felice Dell'Orletta, Fabio Poletto, Manuela Sanguinetti, Maurizio Tesconi (2018). Overview of the EVALITA 2018 hate speech detection task. Proc. EVALITA 2018
[8] Samuel Caetano da Silva, Thiago Castro Ferreira, Ricelli Moreira Silva Ramos, Ivandre Paraboni (2020). Data-driven and psycholinguistics motivated approaches to hate speech detection. Computación y Sistemas, 24(3): 1179–1188
[9] Stiven Zimmerman, Udo Kruschwitz, Cris Fox (2018). Improving hate speech detection with deep learning ensembles. In Proc. of the Eleventh Int. Conf. on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018)
[10] Francisco Rangel, Anastasia Giachanou, Bilal Ghanem, Paolo Rosso. Overview of the 8th Author Profiling Task at PAN 2020: Profiling Fake News Spreaders on Twitter. In: L. Cappellato, C. Eickhoff, N. Ferro, and A. Névéol (eds.) CLEF 2020 Labs and Workshops, Notebook Papers. CEUR Workshop Proceedings.CEUR-WS.org, vol. 2696
[11] Francisco Rangel and Paolo Rosso. Overview of the 7th Author Profiling Task at PAN 2019: Bots and Gender Profiling in Twitter. In: L. Cappellato, N. Ferro, D. E. Losada and H. Müller (eds.) CLEF 2019 Labs and Workshops, Notebook Papers. CEUR Workshop Proceedings.CEUR-WS.org, vol. 2380
[12] Francisco Rangel, Paolo Rosso, Martin Potthast, Benno Stein. Overview of the 6th author profiling task at pan 2018: multimodal gender identification in Twitter. In: CLEF 2018 Labs and Workshops, Notebook Papers. CEUR Workshop Proceedings. CEUR-WS.org, vol. 2125.
[13] Francisco Rangel, Paolo Rosso, Martin Potthast, Benno Stein. Overview of the 5th Author Profiling Task at PAN 2017: Gender and Language Variety Identification in Twitter. In: Cappellato L., Ferro N., Goeuriot L, Mandl T. (Eds.) CLEF 2017 Labs and Workshops, Notebook Papers. CEUR Workshop Proceedings. CEUR-WS.org, vol. 1866.
[14] Francisco Rangel, Paolo Rosso, Ben Verhoeven, Walter Daelemans, Martin Pottast, Benno Stein. Overview of the 4th Author Profiling Task at PAN 2016: Cross-Genre Evaluations. In: Balog K., Capellato L., Ferro N., Macdonald C. (Eds.) CLEF 2016 Labs and Workshops, Notebook Papers. CEUR Workshop Proceedings. CEUR-WS.org, vol. 1609, pp. 750-784
[15] Francisco Rangel, Fabio Celli, Paolo Rosso, Martin Pottast, Benno Stein, Walter Daelemans. Overview of the 3rd Author Profiling Task at PAN 2015.In: Linda Cappelato and Nicola Ferro and Gareth Jones and Eric San Juan (Eds.): CLEF 2015 Labs and Workshops, Notebook Papers, 8-11 September, Toulouse, France. CEUR Workshop Proceedings. ISSN 1613-0073, http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1391/,2015.
[16] Francisco Rangel, Paolo Rosso, Irina Chugur, Martin Potthast, Martin Trenkmann, Benno Stein, Ben Verhoeven, Walter Daelemans. Overview of the 2nd Author Profiling Task at PAN 2014. In: Cappellato L., Ferro N., Halvey M., Kraaij W. (Eds.) CLEF 2014 Labs and Workshops, Notebook Papers. CEUR-WS.org, vol. 1180, pp. 898-827.
[17] Francisco Rangel, Paolo Rosso, Moshe Koppel, Efstatios Stamatatos, Giacomo Inches. Overview of the Author Profiling Task at PAN 2013. In: Forner P., Navigli R., Tufis D. (Eds.)Notebook Papers of CLEF 2013 LABs and Workshops. CEUR-WS.org, vol. 1179
[18] Francisco Rangel and Paolo Rosso On the Implications of the General Data Protection Regulation on the Organisation of Evaluation Tasks. In: Language and Law / Linguagem e Direito, Vol. 5(2), pp. 80-102
[19] Francisco Rangel, Marc Franco-Salvador, Paolo Rosso A Low Dimensionality Representation for Language Variety Identification. In: Postproc. 17th Int. Conf. on Comput. Linguistics and Intelligent Text Processing, CICLing-2016, Springer-Verlag, Revised Selected Papers, Part II, LNCS(9624), pp. 156-169 (arXiv:1705.10754
A single Mediterranean meal does not impair postprandial flow-mediated dilatation in healthy men with sub-clinical metabolic dysregulations
No full textIntroduction: Cardiovascular risk factors are known to exacerbate high-saturated fatty acid meal (HSFAM)-induced endothelial dysfunction but the influence of sub-clinical metabolic dysregulations and the acute impact of a single mixed Mediterranean-type meal (MMM) remains unknown and could especially benefit such individuals. Thus, this study has the objective to evaluate the metabolic and vascular effect of such meals in healthy subjects with or without sub-clinical fasting metabolic dysregulations.
Material and Methods: Twenty-eight (28) healthy males without overt cardiovascular risk factors randomly ingested one of two isocaloric meals on separate days. Plasma metabolic markers, fatty acid (FA) profile and endothelial function (Flow-mediated dilatation; FMD) were assessed at baseline and 2 and 4 hours after meal ingestion. Unsupervised hierarchical clustering identified two subgroups of participants (n=11 and 17) differing by their baseline metabolic profiles.
Results: The MMM did not significantly alter postprandial endothelial function in all subjects, irrespectively of baseline metabolic parameters. In contrast, the HSFAM induced postprandial endothelial dysfunction (Î %FMDabsolute = -5.28 Âą 2.54, p-valueThe accepted manuscript in pdf format is listed with the files at the bottom of this page. The presentation of the authors' names and (or) special characters in the title of the manuscript may differ slightly between what is listed on this page and what is listed in the pdf file of the accepted manuscript; that in the pdf file of the accepted manuscript is what was submitted by the author
