1,720,997 research outputs found
Linguaggio e contesto sociale: primi risultati di una ricerca condotta su un gruppo di studenti romani di scuola media
No full textNetworks, Degeneracy and Bow ties: A Unifying Perspective of Immunological Paradigms and Architectures
No full textEnvisioning architectures, paradigms and principles is helpful and necessary to scientists to comprehend the complexity of biological systems. Network biology, for instance, is one of the most recent paradigms that have proven to be a successful approach to gain insights into the organization of biochemical networks and systems. We believe that a more integrated and unitary view of existing paradigms, principles, and concepts regarding biological systems will be even more helpful in understanding their complex organizational issues. In this view, we confront some of the most interesting ideas in systems biology such as those of network, degeneracy, and bow tie, and propose that the merging of such concepts into a more unitary view allows to re-interpret many biological phenomena in different and yet unexplored perspectives
Statistical ensemble of gene regulatory networks of macrophage differentiation
Full text linkBackground: Macrophages cover a major role in the immune system, being the most plastic cell yielding several key immune functions. Methods: Here we derived a minimalistic gene regulatory network model for the differentiation of macrophages into the two phenotypes M1 (pro-) and M2 (anti-inflammatory). Results: To test the model, we simulated a large number of such networks as in a statistical ensemble. In other words, to enable the inter-cellular crosstalk required to obtain an immune activation in which the macrophage plays its role, the simulated networks are not taken in isolation but combined with other cellular agents, thus setting up a discrete minimalistic model of the immune system at the microscopic/intracellular (i.e., genetic regulation) and mesoscopic/intercellular scale. Conclusions: We show that within the mesoscopic level description of cellular interaction and cooperation, the gene regulatory logic is coherent and contributes to the overall dynamics of the ensembles that shows, statistically, the expected behaviour
Exploring Drug Repurposing Success Stories Through a Network-based Approach: Insights from a Case Study
No full textDrug repositioning is a promising strategy to discover new therapeutic applications for existing drugs, significantly reducing the time and costs associated with traditional drug development. This study employs a network medicine approach to analyze successful cases of drug repositioning, focusing on the exploratory hypothesis that the efficacy of repositioning may be determined by functional similarity between between diseases for which the drug was originally designed and diseases for which the same drug is reused. Network medicine tools were employed to investigate the connections between disease-associated genes, proteins, and approved drugs. Biological networks, including protein-protein interactions and functional interactions networks, as well as gene- and drug-disease association data are analyzed to identify functional similarities and possible molecular connections between diseases and treatments. Using clustering techniques and topological analysis, the results reveal a suggestive overlap of involved genes and functional interactions, emphasizing the value of computational methods in accelerating drug repositioning efforts and improving understanding of drug repositioning dynamics for more efficient therapeutic interventions
Explainable Drug Repurposing Approach From Biased Random Walks
No full textDrug repurposing is a highly active research area, aiming at finding novel uses for drugs that have been previously developed for other therapeutic purposes. Despite the flourishing of methodologies, success is still partial, and different approaches offer, each, peculiar advantages. In this composite landscape, we present a novel methodology focusing on an efficient mathematical procedure based on gene similarity scores and biased random walks which rely on robust drug-gene-disease association data sets. The recommendation mechanism is further unveiled by means of the Markov chain underlying the random walk process, hence providing explainability about how findings are suggested. Performances evaluation and the analysis of a case study on rheumatoid arthritis show that our approach is accurate in providing useful recommendations and is computationally efficient, compared to the state of the art of drug repurposing approaches
The Immunological Self: A reappraisal
No full textAmong the most important theories of modern biological thought, the concept of immune self appeared as a tacit assumption in the speculations of cellular pathologists and physiologists in the second half of the Nineteenth century. Thanks to its first conceptualization advanced by Burnet in the 1950's, immune self gained the central stage during the "golden age of immunology" from 1960 to 1980, just to come up with a recent crisis because of its lack of explanatory power of emergent phenomena such as inflammatory and autoimmune diseases. The following discussion of the immune self history, together with a reassessment of recent experimental data, will suggest a further conceptual turn in the immune self theory that we propose to refer to as "Liquid Self"
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
- …
