Combatting Intimate Partner Violence: Representations of Social and Healthcare Personnel Working with Gender-Based Violence Interventions.

Intimate partner violence (IPV) has been declared a global epidemic by the World Health Organization. Although the attention paid to both the perpetrators and victims of gender-based violence has increased, scientific research is still lacking in regard to the representations of operators involved in interventions and management. Therefore, the following study explores how the representations of operators affect how gender violence can be managed and combatted through an ecological approach to this phenomenon, in addition to highlighting the roles of organizational-level services and their cultural and symbolic substrates.

In vivo tumor detection in small animals by hematoporphyrin-mediated fluorescence imaging.

Objective: Noninvasive in vivo imaging of human tumors implanted in mice provides a reliable and economic tool for the investigation of tumor progression and metastasis and of the effectiveness of the antiblastic drugs on them. The purpose of this study is to report on the performance achievable by the well-known and extensively investigated HP-FRI (HematoPorphyrin (HP)-mediated Fluorescence Reflectance Imaging) when a high-quality image-acquisition device is used.

Background Data: Previous articles of ours showed that HP-FRI still represents a useful, simple and reliable optical imaging technique to detect surface tumors.

Role of synectin in lymphatic development in zebrafish and frogs.

The molecular basis of lymphangiogenesis remains incompletely characterized. Here, we document a novel role for the PDZ domain-containing scaffold protein synectin in lymphangiogenesis using genetic studies in zebrafish and tadpoles. In zebrafish, the thoracic duct arises from parachordal lymphangioblast cells, which in turn derive from secondary lymphangiogenic sprouts from the posterior cardinal vein.

G protein-coupled receptor APJ and its ligand apelin act downstream of Cripto to specify embryonic stem cells toward the cardiac lineage through extracellular signal-regulated kinase/p70S6 kinase signaling pathway.

Rationale: Pluripotent stem cells represent a powerful model system to study the early steps of cardiac specification for which the molecular control is largely unknown. The EGF-CFC (epidermal growth factor-Cripto/FRL-1/Cryptic) Cripto protein is essential for cardiac myogenesis in embryonic stem cells (ESCs).

Objective: Here, we study the role of apelin and its G protein-coupled receptor, APJ, as downstream targets of Cripto both in vivo and in ESC differentiation.