Characteristics of Commercial and Raw Pellets Available on the Italian Market: Study of Organic and Inorganic Fraction and Related Chemometric Approach.

Air pollution and the increasing production of greenhouse gases has prompted greater use of renewable energy sources; the EU has set a target that the use of green energy should be at 32 percent by 2030. With this in mind, in the last 10 years, the demand for pellets in Italy has more than doubled, making Italy the second largest consumer in Europe. The quality of the pellets burned in stoves is crucial to indoor and outdoor pollution.

Validating the Italian Version of the International Skin Tear Advisory Panel Classification System.

Objective: To validate the International Skin Tear Advisory Panel (ISTAP) Classification System in Italian.

Methods: In collaboration with the ISTAP, the classification system was translated into Italian using a forward-back translation process. To validate the translated system, a convenience sample of 212 health professionals classified 30 photographs of skin tears originally used by ISTAP.

Gerstmann-Sträussler-Scheinker disease amyloid protein polymerizes according to the "dock-and-lock" model.

Prion protein (PrP) amyloid formation is a central feature of genetic and acquired prion diseases such as Gerstmann-Sträussler-Scheinker disease (GSS) and variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. The major component of GSS amyloid is a PrP fragment spanning residues approximately 82-146, which when synthesized as a peptide, readily forms fibrils featuring GSS amyloid. The present study employed surface plasmon resonance (SPR) to characterize the binding events underlying PrP82-146 oligomerization at the first stages of fibrillization, according to evidence suggesting a pathogenic role of prefibrillar oligomers rather than mature amyloid fibrils.