Mitochondrial DNA methylation and mitochondria-related epigenetics in neurodegeneration

Mitochondria are cytoplasmic organelles referred to as the powerhouse of the cell because they are primarily involved in oxidative phosphorylation and energy production.They are particularly abundant in tissues with high energy demands,including muscle,liver,and brain,and mitochondrial dysfunction,oxidative mitochondrial DNA(mtDNA)damage,and impaired mitochondrial dynamics have often been associated with neurodegeneration.

Beeswax:A minireview of its antimicrobial activity and its application in medicine

Beeswax is the substance that forms the structure of a honeycomb; the bees secrete wax to build the honeycombs where to store honey.Thanks to its rich hydrophobic protective properties,the beeswax is in fact present within cosmetics and body products.Also,beeswax is used in the food industry:as a film to wrap cheese for maturing or as a food additive(E901) to give shine to the products.Exactly as the honey which it contains,beeswax is also characterized by several therapeutic properties of great interest to us; it is thought to be particularly effective in healing bruises,inflammation and burns.Recently,the interest of researchers has moved even on antimicrobial properties of beeswax although there are still few studies in the literature focused only on the action of beeswax.The few studies showed an anitimicrobic effectiveness of beeswax against overall Staphylococcus aureus,Salmonella enterica,Candida albicans and Aspergillus niger; these inhibitory effects are enhanced synergistically with other natural products such as honey or olive oil.This minireview aims to be a collection of major scientific works that have considered the antimicrobial activity of beeswax alone or in combination with other natural products in recent years.

Targeting the epigenome to treat neurodegenerative diseases or delay their onset: a perspective

Epigenetic mechanisms regulate the chromatin structure and gene expression levels without changing the primary DNA sequence,and include DNA methylation and hydroxymethylation,post-translational modifications of histone tails and nucleosome positioning,as well as mechanisms mediated by long and short non-coding RNA molecules.These mechanisms are required for human development and cell differentiation,and are pivotal in differentiated cells for cellular functions,allowing a tight regulation of gene expression levels in response to environmental stimuli and cellular metabolic demands(Coppedè,2021b).Particularly,the neuronal epigenome is highly sensitive to external stimuli and its function is required for learning and memory processes(Creighton et al.,2020).Several enzymes,collectively referred to as the“epigenetic machinery”,add,remove and read epigenetic marks,allowing chromatin remodeling to promote or repress gene transcription.The activity of these enzymes allows the reversibility of epigenetic marks,which is pivotal in neurons for memory formation and consolidation(Creighton et al.,2020).

Cardiac hybrid imaging: novel tracers for novel targets

Non-invasive cardiac imaging has explored enormous advances in the last few decades.In particular,hybrid imaging represents the fusion of information from multiple imaging modalities,allowing to provide a more comprehensive dataset compared to traditional imaging techniques in patients with cardiovascular diseases.The complementary anatomical,functional and molecular information provided by hybrid systems are able to simplify the evaluation procedure of various pathologies in a routine clinical setting.The diagnostic capability of hybrid imaging modalities can be further enhanced by introducing novel and specific imaging biomarkers.The aim of this review is to cover the most recent advancements in radiotracers development for SPECT/CT,PET/CT,and PET/MRI for cardiovascular diseases.

Special features of SARS-CoV-2 in daily practice

The severe acute respiratory syndrome-coronavirus-2(commonly known as SARS-CoV-2)is a novel coronavirus(designated as 2019-nCoV),which was isolated for the first time after the Chinese health authorities reported a cluster of pneumonia cases in Wuhan,China in December 2019.Optimal management of the Coronavirus Disease-2019 disease is evolving quickly and treatment guidelines,based on scientific evidence and experts’opinions with clinical experience,are constantly being updated.On January 30,2020,the World Health Organization declared the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak as a"Public Health Emergency of International Concern".The total lack of immune protection brought about a severe spread of the contagion all over the world.For this reason,diagnostic tools,patient management and therapeutic approaches have been tested along the way,in the desperate race to break free from the widespread infection and its fatal respiratory complications.Current medical knowledge and research on severe and critical patients’management and experimental treatments are still evolving,but several protocols on minimizing risk of infection among the general population,patients and healthcare workers have been approved and diffused by International Health Authorities.

Polysaccharides from the Green Alga Ulva lactuca Improve Antioxidant Balance and Bone Mineral Density in Diabetic Rats

Diabetes mellitus(DM),the 10th leading cause of death worldwide,is a major and growing public health problem estimated to affect more than 578 million people in 2030 and 700 million people in 2045[1].In diabetic animals,protein glycation and glucose autoxidation generate free radicals,which cause lipid peroxidation.Therefore,reactive oxygen species(ROS)can quickly accumulate,decrease antioxidant activity,and cause deterioration of kidney and liver function.A disrupted redox balance in cells also damages crucial biomolecules such as deoxyribonucleic acid(DNA),proteins and lipids.Oxidative stress(OS)is elevated in diabetes mellitus and may be a major factor in the development and evolution of the typical long-term pathophysiology of diabetes and its associated complications[2].

Toward the use of smartphones for mobile mapping

This paper considers the use of a low cost mobile device in order to develop a mobile mapping system(MMS),which exploits only sensors embedded in the device.The goal is to make this MMS usable and reliable even in difficult environments(e.g.emergency conditions,when also WiFi connection might not work).For this aim,a navigation system able to deal with the unavailability of the GNSS(e.g.indoors)is proposed first.Positioning is achieved by a pedestrian dead reckoning approach,i.e.a specific particle filter has been designed to enable good position estimations by a small number of particles(e.g.100).This specific characteristic enables its real time use on the standard mobile devices.Then,3D reconstruction of the scene can be achieved by processing multiple images acquired with the standard camera embedded in the device.As most of the vision-based 3D reconstruction systems are recently proposed in the literature,this work considers the use of structure from motion to estimate the geometrical structure of the scene.The detail level of the reconstructed scene is clearly related to the number of images processed by the reconstruction system.However,the execution of a 3D reconstruction algorithm on a mobile device imposes several restrictions due to the limited amount of available energy and computing power.This consideration motivates the search for new methods to obtain similar results with less computational cost.This paper proposes a novel method for feature matching,which allows increasing the number of correctly matched features between two images according to our simulations and can make the matching process more robust.