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Peptides seldom retain stable conformations if separated from their native protein structure. In an immunological context, this potentially affects the development of selective peptide-based bioprobes and, from a vaccine perspective, poses inherent limits in the elicitation of cross-reactive antibodies by candidate epitopes. Here, a 1,4-disubstituted-1,2,3-triazole-mediated stapling strategy was used to stabilize the native alpha-helical fold of the Pal3 peptidic epitope from the protein antigen Pal(Bp) (BPSL2765) from Burkholderia pseudomallei, the etiological agent of melioidosis. Whereas Pal3 shows no propensity to fold outside its native protein context, the engineered peptide (Pal3H) forms a stable alpha-helix, as assessed by MD, NMR, and CD structural analyses. Importantly, Pal3H shows an enhanced ability to discriminate between melioidosis patient subclasses in immune sera reactivity tests, demonstrating the potential of the stapled peptide for diagnostic purposes. With regard to antibody elicitation and related bactericidal activities, the linear peptide is shown to elicit a higher response. On these bases, we critically discuss the implications of epitope structure engineering for diagnostic- and vaccine-oriented applications.

A clean and cheap procedure for the synthesis of zeolites is presented, using glass and aluminum wastes as starting materials. The products are aluminosilicate materials with a high cation exchange capacity (CEC: 259-389.5meq/100g) containing 25-30% of crystalline zeolites. Since the synthesized materials are free of potentially toxic elements, they could be safely used for environmental and agricultural applications. More specifically, a material containing 30% of zeolite A has been synthesized at 60°C in one week, using NaOH as mineralizing agent. About 15% of zeolite A has been obtained at room temperature in six months. When KOH was employed, 25% of edingtonite has been produced in the final material after one week at 90°C. All the materials have been characterized for crystallinity, crystal morphology, particle size, pore size, surface area, and CEC. The whole process has been designed with the aim to recycle useful waste materials and reduce at minimum energy consumption and the production of harmful greenhouse gases.

RITMARE is a Flagship Project by the Italian Ministry of Research, coordinated by the National Research Council (CNR). It aims at the interdisciplinary integration of Italian marine research. Sub-project 7 shall create an interoperable infrastructure for the project, capable of interconnecting the whole community of researchers involved. It will allow coordinating and sharing of data, processes, and information produced by the other sub-projects [1]. Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDIs) allow for interoperable sharing among heterogeneous, distributed spatial content providers. The INSPIRE Directive [2] regulates the development of a pan-european SDI despite the great variety of national approaches in managing spatial data. However, six years after its adoption, its growth is still hampered by technological, cultural, and methodological gaps. In particular, in the research sector, actors may not be prone to comply with INSPIRE (or feel not compelled to) because they are too concentrated on domain-specific activities or hindered by technological issues. Indeed, the available technologies and tools for enabling standard-based discovery and access services are far from being user-friendly and requires time-consuming activities, such as metadata creation. Moreover, the INSPIRE implementation guidelines do not accommodate an essential component in environmental research, that is, in situ observations. In order to overcome most of the aforementioned issues and to enable researchers to actively give their contribution in the creation of the project infrastructure, a bottom-up approach has been adopted: a software suite has been developed, called Starter Kit, which is offered to research data production units, so that they can become autonomous, independent nodes of data provision. The Starter Kit enables the provision of geospatial resources, either geodata (e.g., maps and layers) or observations pulled from sensors, which are made accessible according to the OGC standards defined for the specific category of data (WMS, WFS, WCS, and SOS). Resources are annotated by fine-grained metadata that is compliant with standards (e.g., INSPIRE, SensorML) and also semantically enriched by leveraging controlled vocabularies and RDF-based data structures (e.g., the FOAF description of the project's organisation). The Starter Kit is packaged as an off-the-shelf virtual machine and is made available under an open license (GPL v.3) and with extensive support tools. Among the most innovative features of the architecture is the user-friendly, extensible approach to metadata creation. On the one hand, the number of metadata items that need to be provided by the user is reduced to the minimum by recourse to controlled vocabularies and context information. The semantic underpinning of these data structures enables advanced discovery functionalities. On the other hand, the templating mechanism adopted in metadata editing allows to easily plug-in further schemata. The Starter Kit provides a consistent framework for capacity building that brings the heterogeneous actors in the project under the same umbrella, while preserving the individual practices, formats, and workflows. At the same time, users are empowered with standard-compliant web services that can be discovered and accessed both locally and remotely, such as the RITMARE infrastructure itself. [1] Carrara, P., Sarretta, A., Giorgetti, A., Ribera D'Alcalà, M., Oggioni, A., & Partescano, E. (2013). An interoperable infrastructure for the Italian Marine Research. IMDIS 2013 [2] European Commission, "Establishing an Infrastructure for Spatial Information in the European Community (INSPIRE)" Directive 2007/2/EC, Official J. European Union, vol. 50, no. L 108, 2007, pp. 1-14.

This technical report concerns with experimental investigations carried-out at the CNR-INSEAN towing tank on oscillating 3D wings. The experimental campaign is aimed at characterizing the behavior of 3D translating and pitching wings, with different sectional shapes, in terms of unsteady hydrodynamic loads due to selected harmonic pitching laws. The main interest of the activity is on the dynamic stall onset that, if present, changes the hydrodynamic response of the wing respect to the stationary operating condition. For this reason, data analysis highlights the differences between steady and unsteady forces to define the operating conditions boundaries for each wing-type herein investigated. This document represents the Project Deliverable 2.0 in fulfillment to tasks 4-7 of Contract 05CT12.

This paper presents the IMAGACT annotation infrastructure which uses both corpus - based and competence - based methods for the simultaneous extraction of a language independent Action ontology from English and Italian spontaneous speech corpora. The infrastructure relies on an innovative methodology based on images of prototypical scenes and will identify high frequency action concepts in everyday life, suitable for the implementation of an open set of languages.

In the present report some details are provided concerning with the preparation of the model and of the launch system for the experiments. As discussed in the previous report INSEAN-Report-2100-057-RT, a 1:4 mock-up has been designed for the execution of the drop tests. It is composed by two main elements: the fuselage and the body flaps. A third component, i.e. the launch system, has been also designed to keep the model at the desired attitude for the tests. The launch system is designed so that it can be installed on both carriage #3 for the tests with pure vertical velocity, and on carriage #1 for tests with wind. The main steps done from the arrival of the model and flaps up to the beginning of the experimental campaign are here discussed. They are: the dimensional verification of fuselage and of the flaps, the installation of the sockets for pressure probes, the assembly of the flaps onto the back of the model and the installation of the launch system in the workshop for a preliminary verification of the different attitudes before moving the system on the carriage for the test execution.

The aim of the present work is to estimate the horizontality of the displacement of INSEAN Carriage N.1 as the parallelism between its vector and the free water surface. A lot of measures have been performed along all the useful part of the basin, from the narrow part where models are prepared to pillar n. 40.

This paper presents an overview of a number of diagnostic campaigns carried out to assess the conservation state of paintings. The specific characteristics required in cultural heritage applications have been investigated and are reported, where two main fields are considered: radiometric analyses using multispectral images and 3D surveying for geometric deformation analysis by means of photogrammetry and laser scanning. The activities described were accomplished in interdisciplinary teams, composed of photogrammetrists, art-historians, restorers and experts of non-destructive diagnostic techniques.

In this work a multi-hole GDI injector has been characterized for different operative conditions. The multi-hole approach makes possible a versatile distribution of the fuel in the engine combustion chamber, adequate to the setting requirements. Hollow-, full-cone or ellipsoidal footprint structures can be realized orienting the axes of the jets. The spatial and temporal behaviour of the jets, in terms of overall fuel distribution (penetration, cone angle) and local details (droplet size and velocities, break-up and coalescence phenomena), is indicative of the air/fuel mixture preparation for the combustion in the engine. Aim of this paper is to report the experimental work for characterizing the structure of a multi-jet gasoline spray in terms of droplets atomization and dispersion. A multi-hole injector has been used with a hollow-ellipsoid footprint structure of the injected fuel on a plane perpendicular to the spray axis. Commercial gasoline is injected (density 0.76 kg/dm³) with quantities ranging between 10 to 100 mg/str at injection pressures up to 20.0 MPa. High intensity flashes, synchronized with the injection system, have enlightened the emerging fuel from the nozzle developing in an optically accessible vessel in quiescent air at ambient temperature and atmospheric backpressure and the images of the jets have been captured by a CCD camera. The image processing techniques has enabled to extract the main parameters of the jets for characterizing their evolution. Velocity and droplet size measurements have been achieved by a Phase Doppler Anemometry (PDA) system at different locations along and off- axis of one jet. In the off-axis locations, average axial velocities around 100 m/s are reached for droplets near the nozzle exit while this value decreases to about 80 m/s downstream. Along the spray axis, the velocity increases up to 120 m/s. The droplets diameter, ranging in an interval between 17 and 22 micron, shows an inverse trend assuming higher values for droplets travelling at lower velocities, resulting higher at lower velocities and vice versa highlighting a fragmentation process that is dependent to the droplets speed.