Sandy beach macrofauna along the shore of Fiji: Low species richness due to beach morphodynamics or low productivity in coastal waters?

Six sandy beaches located on the south coast of Viti-Levu, Fiji, were sampled to provide as a first aim, an environmental description based upon their physical and biological attributes, to serve as a reference tool for further monitoring programs. Beach face slopes were measured at 4 replicated transects stretching from the front dunes or the seaward reach of the tree vegetation (upper shore level) to the low tide level. Samples for analyses of sand particle size were collected at 4 tidal levels: the upper shore, the drift and effluent lines, and the low tide level.

Microbes identified from monitoring cell manipulations in 5-year life of the Cell Factory G. Gaslini.

Introduction: Quality and safety of a cell product, essential to guarantee the health of patients, depends on many factors including an appropriate environmental monitoring of the manufacturing rooms. Nonetheless, the maintenance of a controlled environment is requested to minimize the risk of contamination. Thus, a timely detection of changes in microbiological trends is important to adopt promptly effective measures against resistant strains that, in turn, may invalidate not only the sanitization procedures but also the safety of the cell product.

Validation of analytical methods for the production of expanded γδ T lymphocytes useful for therapeutic purposes.

The use of γδ T lymphocytes as advanced therapeutic medicinal product has attracted much interest in the last years. Indeed, such cells are an ideal tool for the reconstitution of the immune system in patients receiving hematopoietic stem cell transplantation, due to their MHC-independent anti-tumor and anti-viral activities. We have here setup a protocol for the production of pure and functional γδ T lymphocytes, expanded from healthy donors' mononuclear cells, and validated the analytical methods to identify them and to analyze their potency.

Biodiversity patterns of the benthic macrofaunal communities across the intertidal sedimentary shores of two Antarctic islands.

Antarctic benthic ecosystems support a unique fauna characterized by high levels of diversity and endemism. However, our knowledge of the macrofauna communities across the Antarctic intertidal sedimentary shore is limited, and their fundamental ecological features, including spatial variability, remain poorly understood. This study aimed to investigate the abundance, community structure (i.

Optimizing dense feed-forward neural networks.

Deep learning models have been widely used during the last decade due to their outstanding learning and abstraction capacities. However, one of the main challenges any scientist has to face using deep learning models is to establish the network's architecture. Due to this difficulty, data scientists usually build over complex models and, as a result, most of them result computationally intensive and impose a large memory footprint, generating huge costs, contributing to climate change and hindering their use in computational-limited devices.