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wordpress_basic_es_02_mappatura&menu_RebeccaGuzzo
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wordpress_basic_es_02_Matteo_Bertozzo
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wordpress_basic_es_03_product_website
wordpress_basic_es_01_Matteo_Bertozzo
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gui_es_02_analisi_coerenza_fabiola_bruni
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gui_es_02_analisi_coerenza_serena_berti
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Sharing is caring
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In the digital age, how are people supposed to know what you’re doing if you don’t share it with them?
We are moving into a research age that is all about breaking down barriers, by embracing the reason why the Web was created - for sharing knowledge. We are recognising as a collective that collaboration and communities are more powerful than individuals and isolation. The parallels are everywhere, in the open source and open education movements, for example. For me as a researcher, open science has always been a complex beast to comprehend as a process. But as a vision, it was easy, based on the underlying principles of freedom and sharing. Social media was one way of helping to push forward towards that vision, by reshaping how I both think and operate as a researcher. And you know what? It’s liberating. Knowing there is a world beyond your desk or lab bench, where people are genuinely interested in your work, and want to interact with you and help build you up as a researcher and a person. You feel connected to like-minded spirits, and are empowered by the presence of others also trying to break down ivory towers and walls and make research something for everyone.
I would not be where I am now without social media. There is an enormous, welcoming, and energetic community of researchers out there who every single day are a support mechanism for unleashing your potential as a researcher. For example, the OpenCon community is something I would not be part of without dabbling in social media, and through it learning about the open access trade. OpenCon was the first time as an academic I felt truly passionate about, well, anything - it was like an inferno was lit inside me, and I felt this burning desire to commit to this vision for an ’Open World’ as much as possible, and to help others see it too. Two years down the line, I spend every day now supporting the principles of open through various aspects of the scholarly communication process. Social media plays a huge role in this, as part of a massive scale structural re-think towards how we treat and regard knowledge as a society. Social platforms help us to re-shape cultural attitudes towards knowledge generation, and the sharing of that knowledge for the betterment of everyone.
Being open about my own research and sharing my work on social media as it was still ongoing has led to many successful collaborations. I have been fortunate to be included now on three research publications, which I would not otherwise have been involved in if other researchers involved hadn’t seen that I was working on similar things by sharing them on social media. In an academic climate where papers are still the trading currency, this collaboration has been invaluable in improving my profile as a researcher, but also in opening up a whole new channel of learning that otherwise would have been closed to me. Often with social media, it’s not obvious what opportunities will present themselves, but you sure as hell won’t find out unless you actually give it a shot and make a commitment.
As well as for academic networking, social media can be a powerful platform for public engagement. It is imperative that scientists bond more with wider society to help foster a greater understanding of the world around us. Indeed, what’s the point in doing research after all if no-one is going to learn from it? In spite of this, using social platforms in this manner is still often viewed as superlative to the ‘real work’ of researchers. So, research. Often when people ask me about Twitter or blogging, they say “Oh, that must be good for your CV”, or something similar. Which kind of misses the point entirely - we do these things because of a deep belief that science belongs to everyone, not to parade ourselves around in public. It needs to be seen that research and broader dissemination of research are not disparate, opposite, or disconnected. Research has not been complete until it has been communicated in the best possible way to the maximal audience possible. Realisation of this is the first major step towards embedding a wider sense of ‘science for society’ in our research culture, and being part of reaching a collective vision that science belongs to everyone and not just the priveleged few.
Altmetrics
Wetenschappelijk onderzoek levert een bijdrage aan de ontwikkeling van kennis in de maatschappij. Hoe meer de resultaten van wetenschappelijk onderzoek worden verspreid en bediscussieerd, hoe meer er op de resultaten wordt voortgebouwd in nieuw onderzoek en hoe meer de resultaten worden toegepast in het maken van beleid en de ontwikkeling van producten en diensten (al dan niet commercieel), hoe groter de impact van het onderzoek.
Traditioneel wordt de impact van wetenschappelijk onderzoek gemeten aan de hand van het aantal verwijzingen (citaties) naar een wetenschappelijke publicatie, doorgaans een boek of artikel, in andere wetenschappelijke publicaties. Zulke citaties geven echter een beperkt beeld van de impact van het onderzoek.
Nu steeds meer informatie online beschikbaar is, en een groot deel van de discussie over wetenschappelijke resultaten ook online plaatsvindt (bv. via blogs en sociale media) is het mogelijk om ook andere vormen van impact te meten. Dit wordt aangeduid met de term altmetrics \cite{Priem_2010}.
Contest_Italianism_Bellezza
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Open Sourcing Our Exporter
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A common workflow in submitting scientific work to a peer-reviewed venue, such as a journal or conference, is to adhere to specially provided submission guidelines. To many this story is painfully familiar: your document must satisfy a long enumeration of requirements, including an official citation style, font face, margin and font sizes, single- or multi-column, frontmatter arrangements, ... The list goes on.
The work on styling a finished document alone is known to take anywhere from a day to a week, irrespective of which tool you used - Word and LaTeX users alike had to sweat it out. What makes this situation a nightmare rather than an annoyance, however, is that more often than not a manuscript is rejected and needs to be resubmitted to a different venue, where this tedious procedure needs to be repeated from scratch. And that process can repeat for several iterations. As academics are urged to publish their work as quickly and often as possible, this type of friction accumulates.
Insect odorant receptor trafficking requires Calmodulin
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Like most animals, insects rely on their highly sensitive olfactory systems for survival.
Olfaction plays a primary role in finding food and mates as well as in the avoidance of noxious chemicals and predators.
Insect olfactory neurons typically express an odor-specific odorant receptor (OR) along with Orco, the olfactory co-receptor.
Orco binds ORs and permits their trafficking to the ciliated dendrites of antennal olfactory sensory neurons (OSNs), where together, they form heteromeric, ligand-gated, non-selective cation channels.
Orco is highly conserved across insect orders, and one particularly well-conserved region of Orco is predicted to be a Calmodulin (CaM) binding site (CBS).
In this study, we explore the relationship between Orco and CaM in vivo in the olfactory neurons of Drosophila melanogaster.
OSN-specific knock-down of CaM at the onset of OSN development dramatically reduces olfactory responsiveness and Orco trafficking to OSN dendrites without affecting OSN morphology.
We next generated a series of Orco CBS mutants and used them to rescue the Orco1 null mutant.
While wild type Orco rescues the Orco1 defect in trafficking ORs to OSN dendrites, all of the Orco CBS mutants remain stuck in the OSN cell bodies, precluding even the smallest odor-evoked response.
Finally, we found CaM's modulation of OR trafficking is activity-dependent.
Knock-down of CaM in all Orco-positive OSNs after OR expression is well-established has relatively little effect on olfactory responsiveness alone.
When combined with an extended exposure to a given odor, however, this late-onset CaM knock-down dramatically reduces both olfactory sensitivity and dendritic Orco trafficking only in OSNs that respond to that specific odor.
In this study, we show Calmodulin regulates OR trafficking and olfactory responsiveness in vivo in Drosophila olfactory neurons via a highly conserved binding site on the olfactory co-receptor Orco.
As CaM's modulation of Orco seems to be activity-dependent, we propose a model in which the CaM/Orco interaction allows insect OSNs to maintain appropriate dendritic levels of OR regardless of environmental odor concentration.
An accelerated miRNA-based screen implicates Atf-3 in Drosophila odorant receptor expression
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The Drosophila olfactory system is highly stereotyped in form and function; olfactory sensory neurons (OSNs) expressing a specific odorant receptor (OR) always appear in the same antennal location and the axons of OSNs expressing the same OR converge on the same antennal lobe glomeruli. Although some transcription factors have been implicated in a combinatorial code specifying OR expression and OSN identity, it is clear other players remain unidentified. To mitigate some of the challenges of genome-wide screening, we propose a two-tiered approach comprising a primary “pooling” screen for miRNAs whose tissue-specific over-expression causes a phenotype of interest followed by a focused secondary screen using gene-specific RNAi. Since miRNAs down-regulate their target mRNAs, miRNA over-expression phenotypes should be attributable to target loss-of-function. Since miRNA-target pairing is sequence-dependent, predicted targets of miRNAs identified in the primary screen are candidates for the secondary screen. Since miRNAs are short, however, miRNA misexpression will likely uncover non-biological miRNA-target relationships. Rather than focusing on miRNA function itself where these non-biological relationships could be misleading, we propose using miRNAs as tools to focus a more traditional RNAi-based screen. Here we describe a proof-of-concept miRNA-based screen that uncovers a role for Atf3 in the expression of the odorant receptor Or47b.
Ca-\(\alpha\)1T, a fly T-type Ca2+ channel, negatively modulates sleep
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Mammalian T-type Ca2+ channels are encoded by three separate genes (Cav3.1, 3.2, 3.3). In mammals, T-type channels are reported to be sleep stabilizers that are important in the generation of the delta rhythms of deep sleep, but controversy remains. Progress in identifying the precise physiological functions of the T-type channels has been hindered by many factors, including possible compensation between the products of these three genes and a lack of specific pharmacological inhibitors. Invertebrates have only one T-type channel gene and its physiological functions are less well-studied. We cloned Ca-α1T, the only Cav3 channel gene in the Drosophila melanogaster genome, expressed it in Xenopus oocytes or HEK-293 cells, and verified that it is capable of passing typical T-type currents. Voltage-clamp analysis revealed that the biophysical properties of Ca-α1T show mixed similarity, sometimes falling closer to Cav3.1, sometimes to Cav3.2, and sometimes to Cav3.3. We found that Ca-α1T is broadly expressed across the adult fly brain in a pattern vaguely reminiscent of mammalian T-type channels. In addition, flies lacking Ca-α1T show an abnormal increase in sleep duration that is most pronounced during subjective day under continuous dark conditions despite normal oscillations of the circadian clock. Thus, our study suggests invertebrate T-type Ca2+ channels promote wakefulness rather than stabilizing sleep.
CONTEST_ITALIANISM_MEMORIA
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gui_es_02_analisi_coerenza_parte2
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gui_es_02_analisi_coerenza
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wordpress_basic_es_01_danielezerilli
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wordpress_basic_es_01_lezione02_AuroraCappello
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wordpress_basic_es_01_lezione02_RebeccaGuzzo
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contest_italianism_armonia
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Blog Wordpress base
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