DNA methylation shapes the Polycomb landscape during the exit from naive pluripotency.

In mammals, 5-methylcytosine (5mC) and Polycomb repressive complex 2 (PRC2)-deposited histone 3 lysine 27 trimethylation (H3K27me3) are generally mutually exclusive at CpG-rich regions. As mouse embryonic stem cells exit the naive pluripotent state, there is massive gain of 5mC concomitantly with restriction of broad H3K27me3 to 5mC-free, CpG-rich regions. To formally assess how 5mC shapes the H3K27me3 landscape, we profiled the epigenome of naive and differentiated cells in the presence and absence of the DNA methylation machinery.

On the Performance of Different Genetic Programming Approaches for the SORTING Problem.

In genetic programming, the size of a solution is typically not specified in advance, and solutions of larger size may have a larger benefit. The flexibility often comes at the cost of the so-called bloat problem: individuals grow without providing additional benefit to the quality of solutions, and the additional elements can block the optimization process. Consequently, problems that are relatively easy to optimize cannot be handled by variable-length evolutionary algorithms.

Improving the Efficiency of Viewpoint Composition.

In this paper, we concentrate on the problem of finding the viewpoint that best satisfies a set of visual composition properties, often referred to as Virtual Camera or Viewpoint Composition. Previous approaches in the literature, which are based on general optimization solvers, are limited in their practical applicability because of unsuitable computation times and limited experimental analysis. To bring performances much closer to the needs of interactive applications, we introduce novel ways to define visual properties, evaluate their satisfaction, and initialize the search for optimal viewpoints, and test them in several problems under various time budgets, quantifying also, for the first time in the domain, the importance of tuning the parameters that control the behavior of the solving process.

Antibiotic prophylaxis of early onset pneumonia in critically ill comatose patients. A randomized study.

Objective: To evaluate if a 3-day ampicillin-sulbactam prophylaxis can reduce the occurrence of early-onset pneumonia (EOP) in comatose mechanically-ventilated patients.

Design: This was a single-centre, prospective, randomised, open study.

Setting: A 10-bed general-neurological ICU in a 2,000-bed university hospital.

Surveillance of infections acquired in intensive care: usefulness in clinical practice.

Nosocomial infection surveillance is common in the USA and in some European countries but in Italy few hospitals use it. In order to evaluate its usefulness in clinical practice we performed a one year prospective epidemiological study that included 178 patients, admitted to an intensive care unit (ICU) for more than 48 h. Median ICU stay was 16 days.