Selection, growth and form. Turing's two biological paths towards intelligent machinery.

We inquire into the role of Turing's biological thought in the development of his concept of intelligent machinery. We trace the possible relations between his proto-connectionist notion of 'organising' machines in Turing (1948) on the one hand and his mathematical theory of morphogenesis in developmental biology (1952) on the other. These works were concerned with distinct fields of inquiry and followed distinct paradigms of biological theory, respectively postulating analogues of Darwinian selection in learning and mathematical laws of form in organic pattern formation.

Assessment of PABPN1 nuclear inclusions on a large cohort of patients and in a human xenograft model of oculopharyngeal muscular dystrophy.

Oculopharyngeal muscular dystrophy (OPMD) is a rare muscle disease characterized by an onset of weakness in the pharyngeal and eyelid muscles. The disease is caused by the extension of a polyalanine tract in the Poly(A) Binding Protein Nuclear 1 (PABPN1) protein leading to the formation of intranuclear inclusions or aggregates in the muscle of OPMD patients. Despite numerous studies stressing the deleterious role of nuclear inclusions in cellular and animal OPMD models, their exact contribution to human disease is still unclear.

Adaptation and its analogues: Biological categories for biosemantics.

"Teleosemantic" or "biosemantic" theories form a strong naturalistic programme in the philosophy of mind and language. They seek to explain the nature of mind and language by recourse to a natural history of "proper functions" as selected-for effects of language- and thought-producing mechanisms. However, they remain vague with respect to the nature of the proposed analogy between selected-for effects on the biological level and phenomena that are not strictly biological, such as reproducible linguistic and cultural forms.

Trehalose alleviates the phenotype of Machado-Joseph disease mouse models.

Background: Machado-Joseph disease (MJD), also known as spinocerebellar ataxia type 3, is the most common of the dominantly inherited ataxias worldwide and is characterized by mutant ataxin-3 aggregation and neuronal degeneration. There is no treatment available to block or delay disease progression. In this work we investigated whether trehalose, a natural occurring disaccharide widely used in food and cosmetic industry, would rescue biochemical, behavioral and neuropathological features of an in vitro and of a severe MJD transgenic mouse model.

Low level of exosomal long non-coding RNA is a prognostic biomarker in colorectal cancer.

Molecular risk stratification of colorectal cancer can improve patient outcome. A panel of lncRNAs ( and ) derived from serum exosomes of patients with non-metastatic CRC and healthy donors was analyzed. Exosomes from healthy donors carried significantly more and transcripts in comparison to CRC patients.