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Many emerging technologies require materials with well-defined three-dimensional nanoscale architectures. Production of these structures is currently underpinned by self-assembling amphiphilic macromolecules or engineered all-DNA building blocks. Both of these approaches produce restricted ranges of crystal geometries due to synthetic amphiphiles' simple shape and limited specificity, or the technical difficulties in designing space-filling DNA motifs with targeted shapes. We have overcome these limitations with amphiphilic DNA nanostructures, or "C-Stars", that combine the design freedom and facile functionalization of DNA-based materials with robust hydrophobic interactions. C-Stars self-assemble into single crystals exceeding 40 μm in size with lattice parameters exceeding 20 nm.

We propose a methodology to measure the mechanical properties of membranes from their fluctuations and apply this to optical microscopy measurements of giant unilamellar vesicles of lipids. We analyze the effect of the projection of thermal shape undulations across the focal depth of the microscope. We derive an analytical expression for the mode spectrum that varies with the focal depth and accounts for the projection of fluctuations onto the equatorial plane. A comparison of our model with existing approaches, that use only the apparent equatorial fluctuations without averaging out of this plane, reveals a significant and systematic reduction in the inferred value of the bending rigidity. Our results are in full agreement with the values measured through X-ray scattering and other micromechanical manipulation techniques, resolving a long standing discrepancy with these other experimental methods., 5 pages, 3 figures, 1 table

Ligand/receptor multivalent interactions have been exploited to drive self-assembly of nanoparticles, hard colloids, and, more recently, compliant units including emulsion droplets and lipid vesicles. In deformable liposomes, formation of links between two membranes produces morphological changes depending on the amount of ligands in the environment. Here, we study a proof-of-concept biosensing system in which single lipid vesicles adhere to a flat supported lipid bilayer, both decorated with membrane-anchored biotinylated receptors. Adhesion is driven by multivalent streptavidin (SA) ligands forming bridges between the vesicles and the supported bilayer. Upon changing the concentration of ligands, we characterize the morphological and mechanical changes of the vesicles, including the formation of a stable adhesion patch, membrane tension, and the kinetics of bridge rupture/formation. We observe vesicle binding only within a specific range of ligand concentrations: adhesion does not occur if the amount of SA is either too low or too high. A theoretical model is presented, elucidating the mechanism underlying this observation, particularly, the role of SA multivalency in determining the onset of adhesion. We elaborate on how the behavior of membranes studied here could be exploited in next-generation (bio)molecular analytical devices.

Silvia Scurati1, Franco Frati1, Gianni Passalacqua2, Paola Puccinelli1, Cecile Hilaire1, Cristoforo Incorvaia3, Italian Study Group on SLIT Compliance 1Scientific and Medical Department, Stallergenes, Milan, Italy; 2Allergy and Respiratory Diseases, Department of Internal Medicine, Genoa; 3Allergy/Pulmonary Rehabilitation, ICP Hospital, Milan, ItalyObjectives: Sublingual immunotherapy (SLIT) is a viable alternative to subcutaneous immunotherapy to treat allergic rhinitis and asthma, and is widely used in clinical practice in many European countries. The clinical efficacy of SLIT has been established in a number of clinical trials and meta-analyses. However, because SLIT is self-administered by patients without medical supervision, the degree of patient adherence with treatment is still a concern. The objective of this study was to evaluate the perception by allergists of issues related to SLIT adherence.Methods: We performed a questionnaire-based survey of 296 Italian allergists, based on the adherence issues known from previous studies. The perception of importance of each item was assessed by a VAS scale ranging from 0 to 10.Results: Patient perception of clinical efficacy was considered the most important factor (ranked 1 by 54% of allergists), followed by the possibility of reimbursement (ranked 1 by 34%), and by the absence of side effects (ranked 1 by 21%). Patient education, regular follow-up, and ease of use of SLIT were ranked first by less than 20% of allergists.Conclusion: These findings indicate that clinical efficacy, cost, and side effects are perceived as the major issues influencing patient adherence to SLIT, and that further improvement of adherence is likely to be achieved by improving the patient information provided by prescribers.Keywords: adherence, sublingual immunotherapy, efficacy, cost, side effects

Short DNA linkers are increasingly being exploited for driving-specific self-assembly of Brownian objects. DNA-functionalized colloids can assemble into ordered or amorphous materials with tailored morphology. Recently, the same approach has been applied to compliant units, including emulsion droplets and lipid vesicles. The liquid structure of these substrates introduces new degrees of freedom: the tethers can diffuse and rearrange, radically changing the physics of the interactions. Unlike droplets, vesicles are extremely deformable and DNA-mediated adhesion causes significant shape adjustments. We investigate experimentally the thermal response of pairs and networks of DNA-tethered liposomes and observe two intriguing and possibly useful collective properties: negative thermal expansion and tuneable porosity of the liposome networks. A model providing a thorough understanding of this unexpected phenomenon is developed, explaining the emergent properties out of the interplay between the temperature-dependent deformability of the vesicles and the DNA-mediated adhesive forces., SCOPUS: ar.j, info:eu-repo/semantics/published

Introduction: Gender, age, physiology (GAP) system have proven to be an easy tool for predicting disease stages and survival in idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) patients. Objective: To validate mortality risk as determined by the GAP system in a real-life multicentre IPF population treated with pirfenidone. Methods: The study included patients who received pirfenidone for at least 6 months. The GAP calculator and the GAP index were determined. The primary outcome was all-cause mortality. The prognostic accuracy of the GAP system was evaluated with respect to calibration and discrimination. Results and Conclusion: Sixty-eight IPF patients were enrolled in the study. The median follow-up was 2.4 years (range 0.1-7.4 years). A total of 22 deaths as first event (32%) and of 10 lung transplantation (15%) were recorded. The cumulative incidence of mortality at 1, 2 and 3 years was 10.4%, 22.4% and 38.4%, respectively. The differences between the predicted and observed mortality were not significant for the GAP index while the observed mortality become comparable to that predicted by the GAP calculator only in the third year of follow-up. The C-index for the GAP index was 0.74 (95% CI 0.57-0.93) while the C-statistic value for the GAP calculator was 0.77 (95% CI 0.59-0.95).

Underpinned by an interpretative grid where the analytic categories of gender and race are interwoven, the paper contends that Doris Lessing’s first novel, The Grass Is Singing (1950), unveils and dismantles culturally-constructed inscriptions of the white female body as elaborated within the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British colonial discourses and largely reproduced at folk level. Exploring Lessing’s robust delineation of the entanglements of gendered sexuality and race-biased social constraints as active in the colonial context, the paper also suggests that the novel problematizes and recasts traditional British identity configurations from an authorial perspective which posits itself as internal to the nation. Moreover, in focusing on the contradictory nature of white colonial women’s social positioning, the novel questions the Identity/Otherness binary which buttressed the colonial paradigm and anticipates a number of theoretical issues that would come to prominence within Cultural, Gender and (Post-)colonial studies nearly three decades later.

In 1992 P.D. James surprised her affectionate crime fiction reading public by issuing a visionary dystopia: The Children of Men. From a thematic point of view, this science fiction novel focuses precisely on the problem of re-generation, since it deals with an utterly hopeless near future where the humankind has become entirely infertile. The novel opens with the news that the last human being to be born on earth, aged 25, was killed in a pub fight in Buenos Aires. The fact is recorded by the main character, Theo Farrel, a fiftiesh professor of Victorian history, who is writing a depressing diary of his life which, in his intention, is also a report of the world’s last days. “Man is diminished if he lives without knowledge of his past”, Theo writes but “without hope of a future he becomes a beast”. This statement is, in my opinion, the conceptual engine of the whole novel, where P.D. James wonderfully exploits the opportunities of the genre in order to discuss troubling topics. As readers we are haunted by questions on the disputable ways this scientifically advanced society deals with human reproduction and death, or on the dangers of unscrupulous uses of science by some kind of political powers to force their will on human beings. But even though I find the themes of the novel extremely fascinating, my aim in this paper is that of showing how, from a media point of view, P.D. James’s text has been re-generated in its film adaptation by Alfonso Cuarón (2006). I believe that any ‘adaptation’, a word in itself rich in scientific suggestions, can be seen as “a dynamic process of re-constitution on a different level which is essential to life”, to quote the AIA Cultural Studies CfP. In the case here under scrutiny a Mexican director has literally re-generated an English novel by re-constituting on screen its geo/gender politics, as I hope to demonstrate through a close comparison between the novel and the film.

During the 1990s, British writers paid a growing attention to the controversial subject of the holocaust. Their interest was a response to the long-standing debate on the possibilities of representing the tragic collective experience of concentration camps in art and literature. On this point, Theodor Adorno asserted that art can only have a marginal role, since it runs the risk of “aestheticizing”, de-historicising and even giving meaning to the devastating experience of an entire community of people. More recently, in an interview-discussion centred on Adorno’s theory, Martin Amis pointed out that art has instead the power and the responsibility to keep memory alive and to make individuals ‘experience’ the past in order to – critically and crucially – refigure their present and their future. In his seventh novel, entitled Time’s Arrow, or The Nature of the Offence (1991) Amis problematizes the issue of the artistic and linguistic representation of the tragedy of the holocaust. The novel is a postmodern narrative going backwards in time, and is about the (counter) story life of the protagonist, Tod T. Friendly, from his death as a doctor living in the American province to his peregrinations in disguise to different countries, as he becomes younger and stronger. Eventually, he is shown to be a German doctor who tortures and makes atrocious experiments on the deportees in the concentration camp of Auschwitz. Odilo Unverdorben – this is Friendly’s real name – gradually gets younger until he forgets the atrocities he committed and finally vanishes into his mother’s womb. In my paper I will focus on two main aspects: first, I will explore the cultural, political and historical effects caused by the narrative reversal of the linearity of time with its connected cause-effect relations. In narrating Tod/Odilo’s experience backwards, Amis also reverses the meaning of his actions and thoughts that ultimately lead him to “create” people instead of exterminating them. As a consequence, by virtually annihilating the effects of the second law of thermodynamics which presides the unidirectionality of time, Amis subverts and deconstructs the concepts of life and death, creation and destruction, regeneration and sterility, renewal and devastation, past and present, memory and forgetfulness, order and disorder, and above all, meaning and lack of meaning. I will then analyse how the transformation of the figure of Tod/Odilo from “angel of death” to “angel of life” compels readers to search for a (impossible?) hidden meaning in a narrative world lacking common logic. Secondly, I will discuss how the inversion of the arrow of time is paralleled by the reversal of the traditional linearity of the narrative sequences and dialogues in the novel. In trying to decode the text from a syntactic and linguistic perspective, readers are directly faced with the illogic world of the novel, which prepares them to accomplish the more difficult hermeneutic action of decoding the illogic inverted world of Auschwitz.