We generated transplastomic tobacco lines that stably express a human Basic Fibroblast Growth Factor (hFGFb) in their chloroplasts stroma and purified a biologically active recombinant hFGFb. MAIN: The use of plants as biofactories presents as an attractive technology with the potential to efficiently produce high-value human recombinant proteins in a cost-effective manner. Plastid genome transformation stands out for its possibility to accumulate recombinant proteins at elevated levels.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis paper aims to identify how cognitive and emotional self-regulation (SR) processes in infants from 0 to 36 months are defined within the Latin American academic context. A systematic review based on the PRISMA methodology was implemented to review the conceptual and operational definition of SR, the type of study, the country of origin of the authors, and the reference to the adequacy of the research to the specific cultural context of Latin America. Twenty-two papers that met the selection criteria were selected.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCognitive interventions that involve executive functions (EF)-demanding activities are effective in changing task-related brain activity in children from homes with low socioeconomic status (SES). However, less is known about the efficiency of EF-based interventions in modifying segregation and integration properties of the functional neural organization during a resting state. Further, the consideration of the initial cognitive performance in the design of interventions and its role in the outcome of cognitive training has been poorly studied.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPreschool children show neural responses and make behavioral adjustments immediately following an error. However, there is a lack of evidence regarding how neural responses to error predict subsequent behavioral adjustments during childhood. The aim of our study was to explore the neural dynamics of error processing and associated behavioral adjustments in preschool children from unsatisfied basic needs (UBN) homes.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDeveloping more productive and sustainable crops will be essential to achieving food security in coming decades. A core process in plant evolution has been the transfer of chloroplast-encoded genes to the nuclear genome. We propose reverting this process as a new approach to improve plant disease resistance and photosynthesis in future crops.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFContemporary evidence shows that different intervention approaches can be effective in improving executive cognitive performance in preschoolers from poor homes. However, several aspects about the role of individual and contextual differences in intervention effects remain to be elucidated. The present study aimed to explore the impact of a computerized executive cognitive intervention with lab-based tasks in preschoolers from Unsatisfied Basic Needs (UBN) homes.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFUpon immune activation, chloroplasts switch off photosynthesis, produce antimicrobial compounds and associate with the nucleus through tubular extensions called stromules. Although it is well established that chloroplasts alter their position in response to light, little is known about the dynamics of chloroplast movement in response to pathogen attack. Here, we report that during infection with the Irish potato famine pathogen Phytophthora infestans, chloroplasts accumulate at the pathogen interface, associating with the specialized membrane that engulfs the pathogen haustorium.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFInt J Environ Res Public Health
April 2020
Over the last few decades, different interventions were shown to be effective in changing cognitive performance in preschoolers from poor homes undertaking tasks with executive demands. However, this evidence also showed that not all children included in the intervention groups equally increased their performance levels, which could be related to individual and contextual variability. The present study aimed to explore the impact of a computerized cognitive training intervention with lab-based tasks in preschoolers from Unsatisfied Basic Needs (UBN) homes under the consideration of their baseline performance.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEmotional processing and episodic memory are closely related throughout childhood development. With respect to emotional episodic memory, available evidence shows that the consolidation of information is accompanied by an arousal that generates longer duration and persistence of the memory representations. In the case of early stages of development (i.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPlants are continuously challenged by pathogens, affecting most staple crops compromising food security. They have evolved different mechanisms to counterattack pathogen infection, including the accumulation of pathogenesis-related (PR) proteins. These proteins have been implicated in active defense, and their overexpression has led to enhanced resistance in nuclear transgenic plants, although in many cases constitutive expression resulted in lesion-mimic phenotypes.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWhile poverty all over the world is more typical and extreme in rural contexts, interventions to improve cognition in low socioeconomic status (SES) children are for the most part based on studies conducted in urban populations. This paper investigate how poverty and rural or urban settings affect child cognitive performance. Executive functions and non-verbal intelligence performance, as well as individual and environmental information was obtained from 131 5-year-old children.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDuring plant cell invasion, the oomycete remains enveloped by host-derived membranes whose functional properties are poorly understood. secretes a myriad of effector proteins through these interfaces for plant colonization. Recently we showed that the effector protein PexRD54 reprograms host-selective autophagy by antagonising antimicrobial-autophagy receptor Joka2/NBR1 for ATG8CL binding (Dagdas et al.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn plants, the highly conserved catabolic process of autophagy has long been known as a means of maintaining cellular homeostasis and coping with abiotic stress conditions. Accumulating evidence has linked autophagy to immunity against invading pathogens, regulating plant cell death, and antimicrobial defences. In turn, it appears that phytopathogens have evolved ways not only to evade autophagic clearance but also to modulate and co-opt autophagy for their own benefit.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe describe the potato CDPK family and place StCDPK7 as a player in potato response to Phytophthora infestans infection, identifying phenylalanine ammonia lyase as its specific phosphorylation target in vitro. Calcium-dependent protein kinases (CDPKs) decode calcium (Ca) signals and activate different signaling pathways involved in hormone signaling, plant growth, development, and both abiotic and biotic stress responses. In this study, we describe the potato CDPK/CRK multigene family; bioinformatic analysis allowed us to identify 20 new CDPK isoforms, three CDPK-related kinases (CRKs), and a CDPK-like kinase.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNew Dir Child Adolesc Dev
June 2016
For at least eight decades, researchers have analyzed the association between childhood poverty and cognitive development in different societies worldwide, but few of such studies have been carried out in Latin America. The aim of the present paper is to systematically review the empirical studies that have analyzed the associations between poverty and cognitive development in children under 18 years of age from Latin American and Caribbean countries between 2000 and 2015. This analysis takes into consideration the country where the work was conducted, the experimental and analytical design, sample size and composition, cognitive and poverty paradigms implemented, levels of analysis, and the inclusion of mediation analyses.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPlants and animals rely on immune receptors, known as nucleotide-binding domain and leucine-rich repeat (NLR)-containing proteins, to defend against invading pathogens and activate immune responses. How NLR receptors respond to pathogens is inadequately understood. We previously reported single-residue mutations that expand the response of the potato immune receptor R3a to AVR3a(EM), a stealthy effector from the late blight oomycete pathogen Phytophthora infestans.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFFront Hum Neurosci
February 2015
The neuroscientific study of child poverty is a topic that has only recently emerged. In comparison with previous reviews (e.g.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFHuman papillomavirus (HPV) is the causal agent of cervical cancer, one of the most common causes of death in women worldwide, and its E7 antigen is the major candidate for a therapeutic vaccine. The large scale production of E7 by molecular farming that would lead to the development of a safe and inexpensive vaccine is impaired by its low accumulation level in the plant cell. To enhance antigen production in the plastids, two alternative strategies were carried out: the expression of E7 as a translational fusion to β-glucuronidase enzyme and redirection of E7 into the thylakoid lumen.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFExecutive functions (EF) in children can be trained, but it remains unknown whether training-related benefits elicit far transfer to real-life situations. Here, we investigate whether a set of computerized games might yield near and far transfer on an experimental and an active control group of low-SES otherwise typically developing 6-y-olds in a 3-mo pretest-training-posttest design that was ecologically deployed (at school). The intervention elicits transfer to some (but not all) facets of executive function.
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