1,720,964 research outputs found
Plant-Based Systems for Vaccine Production
No full text: Plant systems have been used as biofactories to produce recombinant proteins since 1983. The huge amount of data, collected so far in this framework, suggests that plants display several key advantages over existing traditional platforms when they are intended for therapeutic uses, including safety, scalability, and the speed in obtaining the final product.Here, we describe a method that could be applied for the expression and production of a candidate subunit vaccine in Nicotiana benthamiana plants by transient expression, defining all the protocols starting from plant cultivation to target recombinant protein purification
Enhanced intestinal epithelial co-culture model with orbital mechanical stimulation: a proof-of-concept application in food nanotoxicology
Full text linkIntroduction: Current in vitro intestinal models lack the mechanical forces present in the physiological environment, limiting their reliability for nanotoxicology studies. Here, we developed an enhanced Caco-2/HT29-MTX-E12 co-culture model incorporating orbital mechanical stimulation to better replicate intestinal conditions and investigate nanoparticle interactions.
Methods: We established co-cultures under static and dynamic conditions, evaluating their development through multiple approaches including barrier integrity measurements, gene expression analysis, and confocal microscopy. We introduced novel quantitative analysis of dome formation as a differentiation marker and demonstrated the model application by investigating cellular responses to titanium dioxide (TiO2) nanoparticles in a digested food matrix.
Results: Dynamic conditions accelerated epithelial differentiation, achieving functional barrier properties by day 14 rather than day 21, with enhanced mucin production and more organized three-dimensional structure. Mechanical stimulation selectively promoted goblet cell differentiation without affecting general epithelial markers. The optimized model successfully detected concentration-dependent oxidative stress responses to TiO2 exposure, revealing cellular dysfunction preceding membrane damage.
Discussion: This improved co-culture system provides a better physiological platform for nanotoxicology studies. By incorporating mechanical forces, each cell type exhibits more representative behavior, creating a more realistic experimental setup. The model bridges the gap between simple monocultures and complex 3D systems, offering a practical approach for investigating nanoparticle-epithelium interactions in a food-relevant context
Transient Expression in Red Beet of a Biopharmaceutical Candidate Vaccine for Type-1 Diabetes
Full text linkPlant molecular farming is the use of plants to produce molecules of interest. In this perspective, plants may be used both as bioreactors for the production and subsequent purification of the final product and for the direct oral delivery of heterologous proteins when using edible plant species. In this work, we present the development of a candidate oral vaccine against Type 1 Diabetes (T1D) in edible plant systems using deconstructed plant virus-based recombinant DNA technology, delivered with vacuum infiltration. Our results show that a red beet is a suitable host for the transient expression of a human derived autoantigen associated to T1D, considered to be a promising candidate as a T1D vaccine. Leaves producing the autoantigen were thoroughly characterized for their resistance to gastric digestion, for the presence of residual bacterial charge and for their secondary metabolic profile, giving an overview of the process production for the potential use of plants for direct oral delivery of a heterologous protein. Our analysis showed almost complete degradation of the freeze-dried candidate oral vaccine following a simulated gastric digestion, suggesting that an encapsulation strategy in the manufacture of the plant-derived GAD vaccine is required
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Plant Virus Nanoparticles for Vaccine Applications.
Full text link-In the rapidly evolving field of nanotechnology, plant virus nanoparticles (pVNPs) are emerging as powerful tools in diverse applications ranging from biomedicine to materials science. The proteinaceous structure of plant viruses allows the capsid structure to be modified by genetic engineering and/or chemical conjugation with nanoscale precision. This means that pVNPs can be engineered to display peptides and proteins on their external surface, including immunodominant peptides derived from pathogens allowing pVNPs to be used for active immunization. In this context, pVNPs are safer than VNPs derived from mammalian viruses because there is no risk of infection or reversion to pathogenicity. Furthermore, pVNPs can be produced rapidly and inexpensively in natural host plants or heterologous production platforms. In this review, we discuss the use of pVNPs for the delivery of peptide antigens to the host immune in pre-clinical studies with the final aim of promoting systemic immunity against the corresponding pathogens. Furthermore, we described the versatility of plant viruses, with innate immunostimulatory properties, in providing a huge natural resource of carriers that can be used to develop the next generation of sustainable vaccines
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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