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Polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) is the most common endocrine disorder among reproductive-aged women and the main cause of infertility due to anovulation. However, this syndrome spans the lives of women affecting them from in-utero life until death, leading to several health risks that can impair quality of life and increase morbidity and mortality rates. Fetal programming may represent the beginning of the condition characterized by hyperandrogenism and insulin resistance which leads to a series of medical consequences in adolescence, adulthood, and old age. Menstrual and fertility problems evolve into metabolic complications as age advances. An early and precise diagnosis is important for an adequate management of PCOS, especially at the extreme ends of the reproductive lifespan. However, many different phenotypes are included under the same condition, being important to look at these different phenotypes separately, as they may require different treatments and have different consequences. In this way, PCOS exhibits a great metabolic complexity and its diagnosis needs to be revised once again and adapted to recent data obtained by new technologies. According to the current medical literature, lifestyle therapy constitutes the first step in the management, especially when excess body weight is associated. Pharmacotherapy is frequently used to treat the most predominant manifestations in each age group, such as irregular menses and hirsutism in adolescence, fertility problems in adulthood, and metabolic problems and risk of cancer in old age. Close surveillance is mandatory in each stage of life to avoid health risks which may also affect the offspring, since fetal and post-natal complications seem to be increased in PCOS women.

The elder (Sambucus spp.) tree has a number of uses in traditional medicine. Previous studies have demonstrated the antimicrobial properties of elderberry liquid extract against human pathogenic bacteria and also influenza viruses. These properties have been mainly attributed to phenolic compounds. However, other plant defense molecules, such as antimicrobial peptides (AMPs), may be present. Here, we studied peptide extracts from flowers of Sambucus nigra L. The mass spectrometry analyses determined peptides of 3 to 3.6 kDa, among them, cysteine-rich peptides were identified with antimicrobial activity against various Gram-negative bacteria, including recurrent pathogens of Chilean aquaculture. In addition, membrane blebbing on the bacterial surface after exposure to the cyclotide was visualized by SEM microscopy and SYTOX Green permeabilization assay showed the ability to disrupt the bacterial membrane. We postulate that these peptides exert their action by destroying the bacterial membrane.

Testing database applications is a complex task since it involves designing test databases with meaningful test data in order to reveal faults and, at the same time, with a small size in order to carry out the testing process in an efficient way. This paper presents an automated approach to generating test data (test relational databases and test inputs for query parameters) for a set of SQL queries, with the aim of covering test requirements as obtained from said queries. The test data generation follows an incremental approach where, in each increment, test data are generated to cover a test requirement by re-using test data previously generated for other test requirements. The test data generation for each test requirement is formulated as a constraint satisfaction problem, where constraints are derived from the test requirement, initial database states and previously generated test data. The generation process is fully automated and supports the execution on complex queries and databases. Evaluation is carried out on a real life application, and the results show that small-size generated test relational databases achieve high coverage scores for the queries under test in a short generating time., Projects TIN2013-46928-C3-1-R and TIN2016- 76956-C3-1-R, funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology, and GRUPIN14-007, funded by the Principality of Asturias (Spain) and ERDF funds.

Deep-sea ecosystems are highly diverse, and European countries seek to protect these environments by identifying conservation targets. One of these is the Aviles Canyon, southern Bay of Biscay, NE Atlantic, Spain. We present the first analysis of historical benthic communities (1987–1988) of this canyon ecosystem, which is a valuable source of biodiversity baseline information. We found 810 taxa divided in five main macrobenthic assemblages, showing a highly diverse benthic community. Bathymetry was the major structuring agent of benthic community, separating shallow (assemblages I and II, 31 to 307 m depth) from deep stations (assemblages III, IV and V, 198 to 1400 m depth). Especially diverse was assemblage IV, located at the easternmost part of the continental slope (378–1100 m depth) where we found reef-forming corals Lophelia pertusa and Madrepora oculata. These and other communities (sea-pens [Order Pennatulacea, Phylum Cnidaria] and burrowing macrofauna) represent key habitats in NE Atlantic continental slopes, which are currently threatened. The present dataset has produced the most comprehensive assessment of diversity in this area to date, focusing on the taxonomic groups which may best reflect the health of the marine ecosystem and supporting previous studies which indicate that the continental slope of the southern Bay of Biscay hosts key benthic habitats.

7th Workshop on Teaching Software Testing (WTST). Melbourne, Florida, We describe a laboratory exercise, developed in small teams, that integrates the design of unit test cases, functional test cases and the use of support tools (JUnit, CVS, and a helpdesk system)

International Workshop on Web Services–Modeling and Testing (WS-MaTe 2006), Generating test cases for compositions of web services is complex, due to their distributed nature and asynchronous behaviour. In this paper, a formal verification tool – the SPIN model checker – is used to generate test suite specifications for compositions specified in BPEL. A transition coverage criterion is employed to define a systematic procedure to select the test cases. The approach is applied to the “loan approval” sample composition

System Testing and Validation (STV). Potsdam, XML’s rapid adoption as the data representation standard in web based systems is increasing the interest in applying XML query languages (as XPath) to access XML repositories. This technology entails new challenges related to testing, mainly derived from the hierarchical data representation in XML documents and the expressiveness of the query language. In this paper, we present a technique for the automatic generation of test cases for XPath expressions using the SPIN model checker. Both the XML schema and XPath query are previously modeled in the SPIN language and the test cases are obtained from the counterexamples that it generates

Second Workshop on Mutation Analysis (Mutation2006). Raleigh, North Carolina, We present a tool to automatically generate mutants of SQL database queries. The SQLMutation tool is available on the Web and it can be accessed using two different interfaces: A Web application to interactively generate the mutants and a Web service that allows it to be integrated with other applications developed using different platforms

La ejecución de grandes conjuntos de casos de pruebas en productos software complejos es algo costoso que puede llegar a requerir prohibitivas cantidades de recursos como pudiera ser tiempo, dinero o infraestructuras lógicas/físicas [1]. Para resolver este tipo de problemáticas, en otros campos científico-técnicos suelen abordar estas referidas como uso eficiente u optimización de recursos. La problemática más recurrente suele ir relacionada con dados unos recursos finitos, optimizar su uso para maximizar los beneficios o resultados (realizar un estudio de la calidad del código con una efectividad similar). En el campo de las pruebas, el rápido crecimiento que ha experimentado el sector del desarrollo durante los últimos años ha dado de sí varias problemáticas en las que hay un amplio margen de mejora en cuanto a la optimización de recursos. Las últimas tendencias, acorde con el crecimiento y la popularidad de los entornos de desarrollo continuos y las infraestructuras en el Cloud [2], son el uso de los recursos contenerizados/ virtualizados con objeto de aprovechar los potenciales recursos flexibles e “ilimitados” bajo demanda que nos ofrece el Cloud. A pesar de que la virtualización/contenerización ha supuesto diversos avances en cuanto a uso de los recursos, hay una serie de desafíos abiertos como la ejecución eficiente de pruebas de sistema (también denominadas End to End) contenerizadas. Durante la ejecución de las pruebas de sistema, son necesarios sistemas cuyo despliegue y/o preparación son costosos y complejos, debido a los cuales ejecutarlas tantas veces como sería necesario se convierte en prohibitivo [1][3]. Esta problemática se agrava cuando dichas pruebas son incorporadas en entornos de integración continua, donde serán re-ejecutadas por cada nueva versión desplegada, con el consiguiente gasto de recursos. Para optimizar estos recursos se podrían realizar menos pruebas, repercutiendo en que quedasen defectos encubiertos en el software y una vez desplegado, arreglarlos en producción pueda tener un coste hasta 100 superior [4]. En cambio, otra solución que si ejecutase todos los casos de prueba, podría pasar por optimizar los recursos orquestando las pruebas de manera que se pudiera reutilizar los recursos que ya hubiera desplegados. Este trabajo de fin de máster presenta una técnica de orquestación denominada RETORCH (Resource-aware E2E Test ORCHestration) compuesta de una caracterización racional de los recursos empleados en las pruebas de sistema para posteriormente basándose en dicha identificación realizar un agrupamiento y ordenación de los casos de prueba acorde al uso que estos hacen de los recursos con el objetivo de reducir el coste Las ideas previas fueron presentadas en QUATIC [5], artículo que más tarde sería aceptado y extendido para la revista Software Quality Journal [6]. Recientemente RETORCH ha sido presentado cómo póster en el ACM Student Contest de la 42th International Conference on Software Engineering. Grupo de Investigación en Ingeniería del Software bajo TestEAMoS (TIN2016-76956-C3-1-R) y continuado en TestBUS (PID2019-105455GB-C32)

Con la variedad de sistemas operativos disponibles en el mercado, especialmente en el ámbito de los dispositivos móviles, la industria del software tiende a utilizar herramientas que permitan definir una aplicación una única vez y que se genere para varias plataformas, adaptándose además a la experiencia de usuario propia de cada plataforma y a las características hardware de cada dispositivo. En este proyecto, se evalúan las posibilidades de la herramienta Titanium Studio, siendo una de las más populares entre las empresas dedicadas al desarrollo multidispositivo a nivel mundial. CTIC