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Health risks are often overlooked when the short-term consequences are not immediately apparent. During restoration work, cleaning actions can generate particles that pose health risks to workers through inhalation. This is particularly true in the case of asbestos fibres that might be spread out from the laser cleaning of buildings or heritage artifacts made of stone, such as serpentinite and other ultramafic rocks, that have a high probability of containing asbestos (e.g., chrysotile, tremolite asbestos, actinolite asbestos). To show workers the importance of wearing proper protection to prevent health injuries, several serpentinite samples, ascertained to contain asbestos minerals by specific investigations, have been laser ablated using ad hoc modified equipment in order to collocate a HEPA filter prone to collect all dust emitted during ablation. The powder deposited on the surface of these filters after laser ablation was analyzed, by Powder X -ray Diffraction (PXRD), Transmission Electron Microscopy combined with Energy Dispersive Spectroscopy (TEM/EDS), micro-Raman spectroscopy (μ-Raman) and Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR/ATR). The results confirmed the presence of asbestos fibres during the laser ablation of rocks containing Naturally Occurring Asbestos (NOA), emphasizing the importance of wearing appropriate personal protective equipment (PPE) during these procedures. Noteworthy, approximately 33 % of the analyzed fibres met the WHO criteria in size for respirable fibres. Furthermore, through our experiments, we also demonstrated that using tools that integrate filters into working tools would definitively further decrease the risk of fibres inhalation to workers.

Summary: LAT1 (SLC7A5) is one of the most studied membrane transporters due to its relevance to physiology in supplying essential amino acids to brain and fetus, and to pathology being linked to nervous or embryo alterations; moreover, LAT1 over-expression is always associated with cancer development. Thus, LAT1 is exploited as a pro-drug vehicle and as a target for anti-cancer therapy. We here report the identification of a new substrate with pathophysiological implications, i.e., Cu-histidinate, and an unconventional uniport mechanism exploited for the Cu-histidinate transport. Crystals of the monomeric species Cu(His)2 were obtained in our experimental conditions and the actual transport of the complex was evaluated by a combined strategy of bioinformatics, site-directed mutagenesis, radiolabeled transport, and mass spectrometry analysis. The LAT1-mediated transport of Cu(His)2 may have profound implications for both the treatment of copper dysmetabolism diseases, such as the rare Menkes disease, and of cancer as an alternative to platinum-based therapies.

Biodiversity monitoring represents a major challenge to supporting proper forest ecosystem management and biodiversity conservation. The latter is indeed shifting in recent years from single-species to multi-taxon approaches. However, multi-taxonomic studies are quite rare due to the effort required for performing field surveys. In this context, remote sensing is a powerful tool, continuously providing consistent and open access data at a different range of spatial and temporal scales. In particular, the Sentinel-2 (S2) mission has great potential to produce reliable proxies for biological diversity. In beech forests of two Italian National Parks, we sampled the beetle fauna, breeding birds, and epiphytic lichens. First, we calculated Shannon’s entropy and Simpson’s diversity. Then, to produce variables for biodiversity assessment, we exploited S2 data acquired in the 4 years 2017–2021. S2 images were used to construct spectral bands and photosynthetic indices time series, from which 91 harmonic metrics were derived. For each taxon and multi-taxon community, we assessed the correlation with S2 harmonic metrics, biodiversity indices, and forest structural variables. Then, to assess the potential of the harmonic metrics in predicting species diversity in terms of Shannon’s and Simpson’s biodiversity indices, we also fit a random forests model between each diversity index and the best 10 harmonic metrics (in terms of absolute correlation, that is, the magnitude of the correlation) for each taxon. The models’ performance was evaluated via the relative root mean squared error (RMSE%). Overall, 241 beetle, 27 bird, and 59 lichen species were recorded. The diversity indices were higher for the multi-taxon community than for the single taxa. They were generally higher in the CVDA site than in GSML, except for the bird community. The highest correlation values between S2 data and biodiversity indices were recorded in CVDA for multi-taxon and beetle communities (| r| = 0.52 and 0.38, respectively), and in GSML for lichen and beetle communities (| r| = 0.34 and 0.26, respectively). RMSE% ranged between 2.53 and 9.99, and between 8.1 and 16.8 for the Simpson and Shannon index, respectively. The most important variables are phase and RMSE of red-Edge bands for bird and lichen communities, while RMSE and time of tassel cap and from EVI indices for beetles and multi-taxon diversity. Our results demonstrate that S2 data can be used for identifying potential biodiversity hotspots, showing that the herein presented harmonic metrics are informative for several taxa inhabiting wood, giving concrete support to cost-effective biodiversity monitoring and nature-based forest management in complex mountain systems.

Background: Gradients in local environmental characteristics may favour the abundance of species with particular traits, while other species decline, or favour species with different traits at the same time, without an increase in average species abundances. Therefore, we asked: do variations in species and traits differ along gradients of deadwood variables? Do species abundance and trait occurrence change with species richness within or between functional groups? Thus, we analysed the beetle assemblages of five forest sites located in Italy, along the Apennines mountains. Methods: From 2012 to 2018 we sampled beetles and five deadwood types in 193 plots to characterise the deadwood gradient: standing dead trees, snags, dead downed trees, coarse woody debris, and stumps. We modelled beetle species relative abundances and trophic traits occurrences against the deadwood variables using joint species distribution models. Results: Out of 462 species, only 77 showed significant responses to at least one deadwood type, with a weak mean response across species. Trophic groups showed mostly negative responses to deadwood variables. Species abundance increased with species richness among sites only for phytophagous and saproxylophagous. Trait occurrence did not increase with species richness among sites, except for phytophagous and saproxylophagous. However, trait occurrence changed significantly with species richness of several trophic groups within some sites. We found that increases in species richness do not result in decreases in species abundance of a given trophic group, but rather null or positive relationships were found suggesting low interspecific competition. Conclusions: Our findings suggest that in Mediterranean mountain forests there is still room for increasing the level of naturalness, at least for what concerns deadwood management. On one side, our findings suggest that competition for deadwood substrates is still low, on the other side they indicate that increasing deadwood volume and types to improve overall beetle richness may increase also beetle abundances.

Forests cover 30% of the Earth's landmass, host 80% of the biodiversity on land, and represent one of the main sinks of carbon. Studying forest ecosystems and dynamics is more crucial than ever now that the climate is changing. On the other hand, forest structural attributes and microhabitats data acquisition is challenging, and require huge efforts.Here we provide a georeferenced dataset of living trees, deadwood, and microhabitats referring to 199 plots (13 m radius), collected between 2012 and 2018, and located over six Apennine mountainous forest types across Italy. The dataset we provide promotes collaboration among researchers and improves the possibilities to analyze the evolution of forest ecosystems.

Until now, the ability to form a self-assembled monolayer (SAM) on a surface has been investigated according to deposition techniques, which in turn depend on surface-coater interactions. In this paper, we pursued two goals: to form a SAM on a gold nanosurface and to correlate its formation to the nanosurface curvature. To achieve these objectives, gold nanoparticles of different shapes (spheres, rods, and triangles) were functionalized with a luminescent thiolated bipyridine (Bpy-SH), and the SAM formation was studied by investigating the photo-physics of Bpy-SH. We have shown that emission wavelength and excited-state lifetime of Bpy-SH are strongly correlated to the formation of specific aggregates within SAMs, the nature of these aggregates being in close correlation to the shape of the nanoparticles. Micro-Raman spectroscopy investigation was used to test the SERS effect of gold nanoparticles on thiolated bipyridine forming SAMs.