Ricerc@Sapienza

Painting and body art are increasing their utilisation as well as their cultural impact, since piercing and tattoos are expanding social phenomena, involving many young people. However, the utilised materials often enter the market with insufficient control and several cases of skin damages are reported. Safety of the utilised products must be ensured by adequate quality controls which must be easily made, rapid, low cost, clear and persuasive.

Many fossil specimens exhibit deformations caused by taphonomic processes. Due to these deformations, even important specimens have to be excluded from morphometric analyses, impoverishing an already poor paleontological record. Techniques to retrodeform and virtually restore damaged (i.e. deformed) specimens are available, but these methods genenerally imply the use of a sparse set of bilateral landmarks, ignoring the fact that the distribution and amount of control points directly affects the result of the retrodeformation.

Several studies have reported endothelial cell (EC) derivation from human induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSCs). However, few have explored their functional properties in depth with respect to line-to-line and batch-to-batch variability and how they relate to primary ECs.

Bone, cartilage, and marrow adipocytes are generated by skeletal progenitors, but the relationships between lineages and mechanisms controlling their differentiation are poorly understood. We established mouse clonal skeletal progenitors with distinct differentiation properties and analyzed their transcriptome. Unipotent osteogenic and adipogenic cells expressed specific transcriptional programs, whereas bipotent clones combined expression of those genes and did not show a unique signature. We tested potential regulators of lineage commitment and found that in the presence of interferon-?

no abstract available

In metabolic diseases, like type 2 diabetes (T2D), adipose tissue (AT) is infiltrated by macrophages and other leukocytes – which secrete many bioactive peptides leading to local and systemic low-grade chronic inflammation – and undergoes remodeling and aberrant fibrosis. Granzyme B (GrB) is a serine protease produced by some leukocytes, including cytotoxic lymphocytes and macrophages. It exerts both intracellular apoptotic function and extracellular functions, leading to tissue injury, inflammation and repair.

Anabolic androgenic steroids (AAS) are misused very frequently in sport competitions as performance enhancing agents. One of the doping compounds that has been detected with increased frequency in the last few years is dehydrochloromethyltestosterone (DHCMT, 4-chloro-17β-hydroxy-17α-methylandrosta-1,4-dien-3-one; brand name Oral Turinabol).

In the maintenance of large infrastructures such as dams, bridges, railways, underground structures (tunnels, mines) and others, monitoring of deformations plays a key role in maintaining the safety serviceability conditions and for mitigating any consequences due to ageing factors and possible structural failures. [...].