Anàlisi del sistema productiu i comercial del vi de la Tarraconensis a partir de la combinació de metodologies

Des del segon quart del s. I aC i, especialment, durant el regnat d’August, es va desenvolupar a l’antiga província Tarraconensis un sistema productiu centrat en l’explotació agrària vitivinícola amb una finalitat clarament comercial. La majoria d’assentament vitivinícoles es troben emplaçats al litoral català, associats de vegades a figlinae que fabricaven les àmfores per al transport i comerç de l’excedent vinícola. No obstant, a l’àrea del Vallès Occidental i del Baix Llobregat es troben una sèrie de vil•les vinculades a la producció de vi i a la fabricació d’àmfores que han proporcionat restes molt significatives sobre la contribució d’aquesta zona a l’expansió econòmica de la província. La caracterització arqueològica i arqueomètrica d’un gran nombre d’àmfores procedents de diversos tallers ceràmics situats al Vallès Occidental i al Baix Llobregat, utilitzant diverses tècniques d’anàlisi química, mineralògica i petrogràfica, ha portat a establir quins tipus d’àmfores es van fabricar a cada taller i de quina manera. S’han identificat alguns dels processos tecnològics de la cadena operativa: la selecció i processat de les matèries primeres per conformar la pasta procedents, generalment, de l’àrea on es troba cada centre de producció, el modelatge, l’assecat i la cocció de les peces. En alguns dels casos analitzats, s’ha identificat quins tipus de contenidors van ser importants a l’establiment i la seva provinença. La integració d’aquests resultats en la base de dades analítica que disposa l’ERAAUB ha permès avaluar el grau d’estandardització dels processos tecnològics en aquesta àrea. La contrastació final amb les dades històriques i arqueològiques contribueix al coneixement arqueològic de les àmfores vinàries de la Tarraconensis i, a través d’elles, al coneixement de les societats que les van fabricar, comercialitzar i utilitzar.

Generic approach for the sensitive absolute quantification of large undigested peptides in plasma using a particular liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry setup.

A generic LC-MS approach for the absolute quantification of undigested peptides in plasma at mid-picomolar levels is described. Nine human peptides namely, brain natriuretic peptide (BNP), substance P (SubP), parathyroid hormone 1-34 (PTH), C-peptide, orexines A and B (Orex-A and -B), oxytocin (Oxy), gonadoliberin-1 (gonadothropin releasing-hormone or luteinizing hormone-releasing hormone, LHRH) and α-melanotropin (α-MSH) were targeted. Plasma samples were extracted via a 2-step procedure: protein precipitation using 1vol of acetonitrile followed by ultrafiltration of supernatants on membranes with a MW cut-off of 30 kDa. By applying a specific LC-MS setup, large volumes of filtrates (e.g., 2×750 μL) were injected and the peptides were trapped on a 1mm i.d.×10 mm length C8 column using a 10× on-line dilution. Then, the peptides were back-flushed and a second on-line dilution (2×) was applied during the transfer step. The refocalized peptides were resolved on a 0.3mm i.d. C18 analytical column. Extraction recovery, matrix effect and limits of detection were evaluated. Our comprehensive protocol demonstrates a simple and efficient sample preparation procedure followed by the analysis of peptides with limits of detection in the mid-picomolar range. This generic approach can be applied for the determination of most therapeutic peptides and possibly for endogenous peptides with latest state-of-the-art instruments.

Biodiversity and global change in Mediterranean benthic communities: perspectives over large spatial and long temporal scales

Many terrestrial and marine systems are experiencing accelerating decline due to the effects of global change. This situation has raised concern about the consequences of biodiversity losses for ecosystem function, ecosystem service provision, and human well-being. Coastal marine habitats are a main focus of attention because they harbour a high biological diversity, are among the most productive systems of the world and present high anthropogenic interaction levels. The accelerating degradation of many terrestrial and marine systems highlights the urgent need to evaluate the consequence of biodiversity loss. Because marine biodiversity is a dynamic entity and this study was interested global change impacts, this study focused on benthic biodiversity trends over large spatial and long temporal scales. The main aim of this project was to investigate the current extent of biodiversity of the high diverse benthic coralligenous community in the Mediterranean Sea, detect its changes, and predict its future changes over broad spatial and long temporal scales. These marine communities are characterized by structural species with low growth rates and long life spans; therefore they are considered particularly sensitive to disturbances. For this purpose, this project analyzed permanent photographic plots over time at four locations in the NW Mediterranean Sea. The spatial scale of this study provided information on the level of species similarity between these locations, thus offering a solid background on the amount of large scale variability in coralligenous communities; whereas the temporal scale was fundamental to determine the natural variability in order to discriminate between changes observed due to natural factors and those related to the impact of disturbances (e.g. mass mortality events related to positive thermal temperatures, extreme catastrophic events). This study directly addressed the challenging task of analyzing quantitative biodiversity data of these high diverse marine benthic communities. Overall, the scientific knowledge gained with this research project will improve our understanding in the function of marine ecosystems and their trajectories related to global change.

An assessment of gene prediction accuracy in large DNA sequences

One of the first useful products from the human genome will be a set of predicted genes. Besides its intrinsic scientific interest, the accuracy and completeness of this data set is of considerable importance for human health and medicine. Though progress has been made on computational gene identification in terms of both methods and accuracy evaluation measures, most of the sequence sets in which the programs are tested are short genomic sequences, and there is concern that these accuracy measures may not extrapolate well to larger, more challenging data sets. Given the absence of experimentally verified large genomic data sets, we constructed a semiartificial test set comprising a number of short single-gene genomic sequences with randomly generated intergenic regions. This test set, which should still present an easier problem than real human genomic sequence, mimics the approximately 200kb long BACs being sequenced. In our experiments with these longer genomic sequences, the accuracy of GENSCAN, one of the most accurate ab initio gene prediction programs, dropped significantly, although its sensitivity remained high. Conversely, the accuracy of similarity-based programs, such as GENEWISE, PROCRUSTES, and BLASTX was not affected significantly by the presence of random intergenic sequence, but depended on the strength of the similarity to the protein homolog. As expected, the accuracy dropped if the models were built using more distant homologs, and we were able to quantitatively estimate this decline. However, the specificities of these techniques are still rather good even when the similarity is weak, which is a desirable characteristic for driving expensive follow-up experiments. Our experiments suggest that though gene prediction will improve with every new protein that is discovered and through improvements in the current set of tools, we still have a long way to go before we can decipher the precise exonic structure of every gene in the human genome using purely computational methodology.

Prominent use of distal 5’ transcription start sites and discovery of a large number of additional exons in ENCODE regions

This report presents systematic empirical annotation of transcript products from 399 annotated protein-coding loci across the 1% of the human genome targeted by the Encyclopedia of DNA elements (ENCODE) pilot project using a combination of 5' rapid amplification of cDNA ends (RACE) and high-density resolution tiling arrays. We identified previously unannotated and often tissue- or cell-line-specific transcribed fragments (RACEfrags), both 5' distal to the annotated 5' terminus and internal to the annotated gene bounds for the vast majority (81.5%) of the tested genes. Half of the distal RACEfrags span large segments of genomic sequences away from the main portion of the coding transcript and often overlap with the upstream-annotated gene(s). Notably, at least 20% of the resultant novel transcripts have changes in their open reading frames (ORFs), most of them fusing ORFs of adjacent transcripts. A significant fraction of distal RACEfrags show expression levels comparable to those of known exons of the same locus, suggesting that they are not part of very minority splice forms. These results have significant implications concerning (1) our current understanding of the architecture of protein-coding genes; (2) our views on locations of regulatory regions in the genome; and (3) the interpretation of sequence polymorphisms mapping to regions hitherto considered to be "noncoding," ultimately relating to the identification of disease-related sequence alterations.

Physiologie de la Presse : Biographie des journalistes et des journaux de Paris et de la province

Collection : Physiologies Laisné-Aubert

[Archives de la Parole]. , [Parable of the prodigal son] : récit en dravidien, telugu, Province de Madras / [Sir George Grierson], éd. ; Linguistic survey of India ; Voix parlée, homme

[Traditions. Asie. Inde. Présidence de Madras [i.e. Chennai]. Ceded Districts]

Leveraging explicitly disclosed location information to understand tourist dynamics: a case study

In recent years, the large deployment of mobile devices has led to a massiveincrease in the volume of records of where people have been and when they were there.The analysis of these spatio-temporal data can supply high-level human behaviorinformation valuable to urban planners, local authorities, and designer of location-basedservices. In this paper, we describe our approach to collect and analyze the history ofphysical presence of tourists from the digital footprints they publicly disclose on the web.Our work takes place in the Province of Florence in Italy, where the insights on thevisitors’ flows and on the nationalities of the tourists who do not sleep in town has beenlimited to information from survey-based hotel and museums frequentation. In fact, mostlocal authorities in the world must face this dearth of data on tourist dynamics. In thiscase study, we used a corpus of geographically referenced photos taken in the provinceby 4280 photographers over a period of 2 years. Based on the disclosure of the locationof the photos, we design geovisualizations to reveal the tourist concentration and spatiotemporalflows. Our initial results provide insights on the density of tourists, the points ofinterests they visit as well as the most common trajectories they follow.

[Archives de la Parole]. , La parabole de l'enfant prodigue : dravidien, malayālam, province de Madras / [Sir George Grierson], éd. ; Linguistic survey of India ; [M.G. Philips], voix

[Traditions. Asie. Inde. Province de Madras [i.e. Chennai]. État du Kerala. Etat du tamil Nadu. Travancore]

[Archives de la Parole]. , [The silly weaver girl] : Récit en malayālam (dravidien, province de Madras) / [Sir George Grierson], éd. ; Linguistic survey of India ; [M.G. Philips], voix

[Traditions. Asie. Inde. Province de Madras [i.e. Chennai]. État du Kerala. Etat du tamil Nadu. Travancore]

[Archives de la Parole]. , La parabole de l'enfant prodigue : dravidien, tamoul, province de Madras) / [Sir George Grierson], éd. ; Linguistic survey of India ; [E. Virabahu Pillai], voix

[Traditions. Asie. Inde. Province de Madras [i.e. Chennai]. Etat du Tamil Nadu. Tinnevelly]

[Archives de la Parole]. , [Vice justly punished] : récit (dravidien, canara, province de Madras) / [Sir George Grierson], éd. ; Linguistic survey of India ; [H. Venketashamurthy], voix

[Traditions. Asie. Inde. Province de Madras [i.e. Chennai]. Etat du Karnataka. Mysore]

[Archives de la Parole]. , [The king and the margosa seed] : récit en dravidien, telugu, Province de Madras / [Sir George Grierson], éd. ; Linguistic survey of India ; [V. Krishna Rao], voix

[Traditions. Asie. Inde. Présidence de Madras [i.e. Chennai]. Ceded Districts]

[Archives de la Parole]. , [La parabole de l'enfant prodigue] : récit, caste Korava (tamoul), province de Madras / [Sir George Grierson], éd. ; Linguistic survey of India ; Voix parlée, homme

[Traditions. Asie. Inde. Province de Madras [i.e. Chennai]]