State Diagrams of PBTTT Derivatives Mixed with PCBM and Their Relevance for Organic Electronics: Influence of Incongruently Melting Co-crystals and Homocoupling Defects.

Double binary state diagrams of the benchmark semi-crystalline conjugated polymer PBTTT and its alkoxy derivatives PBTTT-OR-R and PBTTT-(OR), mixed with PCBM, are constructed using Rapid Heat-Cool Differential Scanning Calorimetry and T-resolved synchrotron X-Ray Diffraction. The polymerization method is adapted to ensure the absence of homocouplings and obtain reliable state diagrams, supported by Flory-Huggins calculations. Co-crystallization always occurs at a 45:55 w/w% polymer:PCBM mixing ratio.

Integrative bioinformatic analysis of prognostic biomarkers in heart failure: Insights from clinical trials.

Background: Heart failure (HF) remains a major cause of morbidity and mortality worldwide. Therefore, there is a need to identify robust biomarkers to improve early diagnosis, stratify disease severity and predict outcomes. Biomarkers such as galectin-3 (Gal-3), TIMP-1, BNP, NT-proBNP, CysC, CA125, ST2 and MMP9 have shown the potential to reflect the pathophysiology of HF.

Deviation from neutral species abundance distributions unveils geographical differences in the structure of diatom communities.

In recent years, the application of metagenomics techniques has advanced our understanding of plankton communities and their global distribution. Despite this progress, the relationship between the abundance distribution of diatom species and varying marine environmental conditions remains poorly understood. This study, leveraging data from the Oceans expedition, tests the hypothesis that diatoms in sampled stations display a consistent species abundance distribution structure, as though they were sampled from a single ocean-wide metacommunity.

An overview of bioinformatics courses delivered at the academic level in Italy: Reflections and recommendations from BITS.

In Italian universities, bioinformatics courses are increasingly being incorporated into different study paths. However, the content of bioinformatics courses is usually selected by the professor teaching the course, in the absence of national guidelines that identify the minimum indispensable knowledge in bioinformatics that undergraduate students from different scientific fields should achieve. The Training&Teaching group of the Bioinformatics Italian Society (BITS) proposed to university professors a survey aimed at portraying the current situation of bioinformatics courses within undergraduate curricula in Italy (i.