Application of computational methods for the design and optimization of Src family kinase inhibitors

Kinases constitute a family of enzymes involved in many cellular signalling pathways thanks to their ability to catalyse the transfer of a phosphate group from a donor, ATP or GTP, to an acceptor, a protein or a lipid. Src family kinases (SFKs), that represent the topic of this PhD work, belong to the cytosolic tyrosine kinases group and act by transferring the phosphate group to a tyrosine of the acceptor protein. SFKs play a key role in controlling cellular processes such as proliferation, ...

Autochthonous tuscan olive leaves (Olea europaea var. Olivastra seggianesse) as antioxidant, antimicrobial and immunomodulatory source for biomedicine and tissue engineering

Introduzione. L'Olea europaea è uno degli alberi più antichi della regione mediterranea. Gli estratti di foglie di olivo (Olive Leaf Extracts, OLE) hanno suscitato interesse nei ricercatori di diverse discipline scientifiche principalmente a causa della particolare composizione fenolica, presumibilmente correlata alla sua potente attività biologica. Obiettivi. Lo scopo di questo studio è stato valutare: a) le proprietà degli OLE di Olea europaea Toscana per proteggere le cellule endoteliali d...

Recovery of rare cells and single cells analysis: different opportunities and challenging applications

Single-cell biology is a new discipline which aims to address and solve the problem of cellular heterogeneity. Single-cell omic, which allows the molecular investigation of different cell types in a high throughput manner, is driving the Precision and Personalized Medicine approaches. Single B cell isolation strategies, the starting points of the single-cell omics, have become essential research procedures for efficiently sampling the natural repertoire of immunized animals and huma...

Immunohistochemical studies of pulmonary remodeling in mice exposed to chronic cigarette smoke

Prospective evaluation of pro/anti-inflammatory cytokines during TKI treatment in chronic myeloid leukemia patients

Chronic myeloid leukemia (CML) treatment with tyrosine kinase inhibitors (TKIs) has been associated to an increased risk of Arterial Occlusive Events (AOEs), mainly with nilotinib, but the mechanisms underlying these events have been not clarified yet. Previously, we confirmed in our retrospective cross-sectional study a higher cardiovascular (CV) risk in nilotinib treated patients, particularly if harboring the unfavorable OLR1 polymorphism and we found a nilotinib-associated pro-inflammat...

Hilbert functions and symmetric tensors identifiability

We study the Waring decompositions of a given symmetric tensor using tools of algebraic geometry for the study of finite sets of points. In particular we use the properties of the Hilbert functions and the Cayley-Bacharach property to study the uniqueness of a given decomposition (the identifiability problem), and its minimality, and show how, in some cases, one can effectively determine the uniqueness even in some range in which the Kruskal's criterion does not apply. We give also a more ef...

Evoluzione del paesaggio storico e dinamiche uomo-ambiente: sistemi di fonti, Remote Sensing e multi-proxies ambientali (Pianura costiera del Fiume Cornia, Toscana Meridionale, Italia)

La presente tesi ha utilizzato un approccio multidisciplinare e sperimentale basato sull’integrazione di diversi sistemi di fonti (archeologiche, storico-documentarie, cartografiche, fotografiche, geomorfologiche e geochimiche) e tecniche di remote sensing per lo studio del paesaggio storico della pianura della bassa Val di Cornia, area costiera della Toscana centro-meridionale. La ricerca si è svolta nell’ambito del progetto ERC nEU-Med, che ha come obbiettivo lo studio delle trasformazioni ...

Control Techniques for Optimal Management of Microgrids in the Presence of Uncertainty

Recent years have witnessed an increasing adoption of renewables and electric vehicles (EVs) to overcome issues caused by carbon-fossil resources. In fact, renewable generation makes possible to produce clean energy without impact on the environment. On the other hand, EVs are capable of reducing gas emissions by fully exploiting these new resources. However, both of these technologies are an intrinsic source of uncertainty. Indeed, renewables represent uncontrollable and intermittent energy ...

Blueprinting, implementation, and application of fully automatic protocols for the QM/MM modeling of photo-excited states of rhodopsin variants

The semi-automatic building of QM/MM models of rhodopsins has been recently proposed, by means of a new technology called Automatic Rhodopsin Model protocol. In its original version, here called original ARM protocol, published in 2016, the constructed QM/MM models were found to be useful for biophysical studies and for protein engineering, but had the disadvantage of being time-consuming to prepare, error-prone, and, also, difficult to replicate when the same model was independently construc...