RCAAP Repository

Background: ochratoxins are mycotoxins produced by filamentous fungi with important implications in the food manufacturing industry due to their toxicity. Decontamination by specific ochratoxin-degrading enzymes has become an interesting alternative for the treatment of contaminated food commodities. Methods: using a structure-based approach based on homology modeling, blind molecular docking of substrates and characterization of low-frequency protein motions, we performed a proteome mining in filamentous fungi to characterize new enzymes with potential ochratoxinase activity. Results: the proteome mining results demonstrated the ubiquitous presence of fungal binuclear zinc-dependent amido-hydrolases with a high degree of structural homology to the already characterized ochratoxinase from Aspergillus niger. Ochratoxinase-like enzymes from ochratoxin-producing fungi showed more favorable substrate-binding pockets to accommodate ochratoxins A and B. Conclusions: filamentous fungi are an interesting and rich source of hydrolases potentially capable of degrading ochratoxins, and could be used for the detoxification of diverse food commodities.

We describe a series of four African women with lipomembranous panniculitis after subcutaneous injections of depot medroxyprogesterone acetate (DMPA), a synthetic progestin commonly used as a contraceptive, in the buttocks and thighs, due to aesthetic reasons.

Departing from the analysis of the book series "Collection", I sought to define an insightful space of thought that would deepen the developed works. Such analysis is strongly anchored on the books, but it also aims to further investigate other theoretical, historical, and artistic dimensions, in a fluid intertwinement of theory and practice. This dissertation has two distinct moments. In the first chapter, which develops from a set of questions around the creation of a book collection of photographic images, I have tried to analyze the essential elements of the presented works, both from a material and formal points of view. The themes addressed in the second chapter stem from anintrospective process, where I have investigated the motivations underlying this body of work, particularly by focusing on the impetus of artistic creation in permanent connection to the transiency and ephemerality of everyday experience. While taking up the question of the relationship between art and experience, and between art and life, I have defended a context for art, advocating for a possibility of micro-scale actions, and for a definition of a field that would allow us to escape from the dominant spectacular trends of the artistic phenomena. Ideally, my project regards the outlining of another space, one that would welcome intimacy, contemplation and silence.the establishment of such essentially poetic space belongs to the inevitable dimension of personal experience. I believe, however, that by illuminating the everyday vulgarity of the real, art offers a possibility to re!ect upon it and upon the ability we have to ultimately transform it

In the last two decades, molecular surveys of arboviruses have enabled the identification of several new viruses, contributing to the knowledge of viral diversity and providing important epidemiological data regarding possible new emerging viruses. A combination of diagnostic assays, Illumina sequencing and phylogenetic inference are here used to characterize two new Massilia phlebovirus strains isolated from sandflies collected in the Arrábida region, Portugal. Whole genome sequence analysis enabled their identification as reassortants and the recognition of genomic variants co-circulating in Portugal. Much is still unknown about the life cycle, geographic range, evolutionary forces and public health importance of these viruses in Portugal and elsewhere, and more studies are needed.

Mobile health (mHealth) has emerged as a potential solution to providing valuable ecological information about the severity and burden of Parkinson's disease (PD) symptoms in real-life conditions. Objective: The objective of our study was to explore the feasibility and usability of an mHealth system for continuous and objective real-life measures of patients' health and functional mobility, in unsupervised settings. Methods: Patients with a clinical diagnosis of PD, who were able to walk unassisted, and had an Android smartphone were included. Patients were asked to answer a daily survey, to perform three weekly active tests, and to perform a monthly in-person clinical assessment. Feasibility and usability were explored as primary and secondary outcomes. An exploratory analysis was performed to investigate the correlation between data from the mKinetikos app and clinical assessments. Results: Seventeen participants (85%) completed the study. Sixteen participants (94.1%) showed a medium-to-high level of compliance with the mKinetikos system. A 6-point drop in the total score of the Post-Study System Usability Questionnaire was observed. Conclusions: Our results support the feasibility of the mKinetikos system for continuous and objective real-life measures of a patient's health and functional mobility. The observed correlations of mKinetikos metrics with clinical data seem to suggest that this mHealth solution is a promising tool to support clinical decisions.

Changes in plasma membrane curvature and intracellular ionic strength are two key features of cell volume perturbations. In this hypothesis we present a model of the responsible molecular apparatus which is assembled of two molecular motors [non-muscle myosin II (NMMII) and protrusive actin polymerization], a spring [a complex between the plasma membrane (PM) and the submembrane actin-based cytoskeleton (smACSK) which behaves like a viscoelastic solid] and the associated signaling proteins. We hypothesize that this apparatus senses changes in both the plasma membrane curvature and the ionic strength and in turn activates signaling pathways responsible for regulatory volume increase (RVI) and regulatory volume decrease (RVD). During cell volume changes hydrostatic pressure (HP) changes drive alterations in the cell membrane curvature. HP difference has opposite directions in swelling versus shrinkage, thus allowing distinction between them. By analogy with actomyosin contractility that appears to sense stiffness of the extracellular matrix we propose that NMMII and actin polymerization can actively probe the transmembrane gradient in HP. Furthermore, NMMII and protein-protein interactions in the actin cortex are sensitive to ionic strength. Emerging data on direct binding to and regulating activities of transmembrane mechanosensors by NMMII and actin cortex provide routes for signal transduction from transmembrane mechanosensors to cell volume regulatory mechanisms.

Barely has literature failed to inspire the concept of trauma. Nor has trauma been a trivial cogitation for literature. This reciprocation, which is ingrained in the ineludible alliance between the two, has given rise to innumerable masterpieces throughout the history of literature from classic works of Homer to the modernist works of Woolf, Faulkner, and Hemingway. Nonetheless, trauma studies were not formulated in literature until two decades ago, which shapes an uncanny question mark never to be erased. Cormac McCarthy’s traumatic footprint in literature is as inerasable as the very same question mark, insofar as most, if not all, of his canon has been indelibly imbued with the notion of trauma. His characters seem to have a uniquely innovative bearing of traumatization, which is rarely found with that weight in other analogous works of literature. Chigurh, called the “prophet of destruction” by McCarthy himself in No Country for Old Men (2005), punches a hole into the forehead of his victims, leaving his vile mark metaphorically on the decaying civilization. Ballard in Child of God (1973), in what is termed as necrophilia, makes love to his victims, while judge Holden in Blood Meridian (1985) kills children, collects scalps, and never dies. This traumatic road eventually boils down to The Road (2006) in which everything comes to naught: an ashen apocalypse. Lending themselves to widespread critical acclaim, the novels No Country for Old Men and The Road did not fail to lend themselves to silver screen translations, which were indebted to the directorial efforts of the Coen brothers and John Hillcoat in 2007 and 2009, respectively. The narratives, textually or visually, are densely informed, if not formed, by the notion of trauma, which consolidates not only the bond between the two novels but also the traumatic trajectory from the novels to the films. It is thus through a thoroughgoing analysis of trauma and its footprints that a mastery of the inner workings, mysteries, and thematics of the aforementioned narratives will come to life, which is what the present dissertation aspires to achieve. Composed of three chapters, the foregoing dissertation sets out to initially establish the theoretical framework for trauma notions in chapter one whose application will shape the arguments of chapters two and three for the novels/films No Country for Old Men and The Road, respectively.

Análise do filme Minute Bodies: The Films of F. Percy Smith (2016) de Stuart A. Staples.

Frankenweenie (2012) is amongst the most personal films directed by Tim Burton because it reflects the director’s visual aesthetics and thematic obsessions, while also being a composite of different bodies: monstrous, anomalous, literary and cinematic. In this sense, the film serves as a container for Burton’s art and creative view. Basing our analysis on research developed by Salisbury (2000) and Weinstock (2013), this study looks at ideas of monstrosity (Mittman, 2016) and the monstrous bodies portrayed in the film, which are connected with the other “bodies” the director creates and reanimates. Victor and Sparky, but also the film itself, are constructions deriving from literature and cinema and, consequently, can be viewed as bodies produced from a palimpsest of ideas and concepts. Thus, the purpose of this essay is to look into the different bodies explored in the film, while trying to understand how the director has contributed to the ongoing discussion of what it means to be monstrous and, therefore, what it means to be human.

This book studies the relationship between tourism and migration by considering a range of mobilities Covers a broad geographical spread including but not limited to South Africa, Argentina, Spain, Cape Verde, Latvia, Mexico, Portugal, Greece, Japan, Iceland Offers an interdisciplinary approach including contributions from geography, sociology, urbanism, economics, tourism, anthropology and more

Livro de Atas do V Congresso Espanha-Portugal, realizado na Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Lisboa, a 25 e 26 de novembro de 2021.

This chapter foregrounds discussions on the city as a lifestyle destination in the context of increasing urban tourism and privileged migration to the city of Lisbon. Drawing on qualitative data collected, between 2017 and early 2020, through life history interviews, this chapter aims to explore how intra-EU migrants benefiting from the Non-Habitual Residence (NHR) fiscal scheme understand and narrate their migration aspirations, motivations and locational choice. The desire to move is induced by past mobility experiences attending to the idea of migration as an ongoing transformative process. The structures of tourism are essential in creating a pre-migration imaginary of place and a mechanism in the decision-making process as movers travel to compare different locations refining place attributes conducive to their desired mode of life. Despite the tourism-induced nature of lifestyle migration to Lisbon, this chapter makes the case for analytical distinctiveness between tourism and lifestyle mobilities. Folding them together obscures the political asymmetries in the EU mobility regime and constellations of privilege reinforced by fiscal benefits. Moreover, in this case, the interpretative frames that migrants use to understand their mobilities dissociates them in ideological terms from tourists. The urban lifestyle prism reveals diverse lifestyle-led mobilities from retirees to working families in search of a lower-cost and slower urbanism and a better work-life balance supported by city infrastructures for consumption and continued production for the non-retired movers.

Compound weather and climate events are combinations of climate drivers and/or hazards that contribute to societal or environmental risk. Studying compound events often requires a multidisciplinary approach combining domain knowledge of the underlying processes with, for example, statistical methods and climate model outputs. Recently, to aid the development of research on compound events, four compound event types were introduced, namely (1) preconditioned, (2) multivariate, (3) temporally compounding, and (4) spatially compounding events. However, guidelines on how to study these types of events are still lacking. Here, we consider four case studies, each associated with a specific event type and a research question, to illustrate how the key elements of compound events (e.g., analytical tools and relevant physical effects) can be identified. These case studies show that (1) impacts on crops from hot and dry summers can be exacerbated by preconditioning effects of dry and bright springs. (2) Assessing compound coastal flooding in Perth (Australia) requires considering the dynamics of a non-stationary multivariate process. For instance, future mean sea-level rise will lead to the emergence of concurrent coastal and fluvial extremes, enhancing compound flooding risk. (3) In Portugal, deep-landslides are often caused by temporal clusters of moderate precipitation events. Finally, (4) crop yield failures in France and Germany are strongly correlated, threatening European food security through spatially compounding effects. These analyses allow for identifying general recommendations for studying compound events. Overall, our insights can serve as a blueprint for compound event analysis across disciplines and sectors.

Sewing is one of the oldest activities of humanity. To it are associated several machines, such as the sewing machine. It came up along with the Industrial Revolution, time in which was the boom of new inventions. In Portugal, the sewing machine emerged on the second half of the XIX century, from foreign brands. It was only in 1948 that Portugal had access to the first national sewing machine, which was produced by the company commonly known as Oliva, founded in 1925 as a small iron foundry factory. Besides sewing machines, Oliva produced other equipments, from enameled iron bathtubs to small displacement engines. At the time, design still wasn‟t a totally recognized profession, making its job engineers or artisans. Besides production itself, there was also a concern about the publicity of the sewing machine. So, there was an investment on the diffusion of the brand through jingles, billboards or even sponsors of important portuguese events. As a great sewing machine user, the role of the portuguese women stands out at the Oliva‟s publicity and the immersion of the brand in the social and cultural life. They are those who will better relate with these equipments, as a labor or domestic tool. Between the 40‟s and 70‟s decades of the 20th century, the sewing machine and the domestic concerns, following the ideals of Estado Novo, will be one of the most usual accomplices of the portuguese women

Papers in this special issue offer a wide range of political economy and sociological perspectives to explain the development and impacts of short-term rentals (STRs) in European cities. Empirically, they provide insights regarding STR providers, socio-spatial impacts, and regulation. Authors reveal the professionalization of the sector vis-à-vis the connection between STRs and the wider financialization of housing. STRs are predominantly supplied by professional property managers as well as by middle-class individuals for which renting on digital platforms is their main professional activity. Furthermore, the increasing professionalization of hosts and the intrinsic competition among them is largely stimulated by the business model of digital platforms which has progressively favoured professional operators. Understanding how STRs are shaped by platform capitalism helps to explain the socio-spatial impacts of this market as well as why current regulations have not mitigated such impacts. In terms of impacts, contributions to this special issue document processes of displacement, gentrification, and how the penetration of visitors in neighbourhoods is experienced by residents as a process of loss and dispossession. However, due to the lobbying campaigns of professional operators and industry players, regulation has led to the legitimization of this new market rather than to the limitation of the activity. Therefore, the special issue challenges the use of a ‘sharing economy' and ‘peer-to-peer platforms’ as analytical categories, and, instead, provides evidence of why the STR market should be seen as part of the wider expansion of platform capitalism, consolidating the neoliberal and financialized urban paradigm.

Heatwaves are an extreme meteorological event in which affected populations may also be exposed to deteriorated air quality conditions due to the increase in air pollutant concentrations, such as PM10 (particulate matter < 10 µg/m3). In order to identify heatwaves (1973–2019) in the region of Faro (Algarve) during the hot season (April–September), the Excess Heat Factor (EHF) index was applied. The Mann–Kendall test revealed an upward trend in three heatwave metrics in Faro, and the trend of accumulated heat load (EHF load) was also positive as would be expected, but its signal was not statistically significant. An inventory of North African dust events (2006–2019) was made, and their simultaneous occurrence with heatwaves was assessed, pointing to only 20% of dust events of the Sahara occurring simultaneously with heatwave days. A cluster analysis was conducted on daily geopotential height fields at 850 hPa level over the 2006–2019 period, and four distinct patterns were identified as the most prominent synoptic circulations promoting both heatwave conditions and North African dust over the Algarve

Agriculture provides the largest share of food supplies and ensures a critical number of ecosystem services (e.g., food provisioning). Therefore, agriculture is vital for food security and supports the Sustainable Development Goal (SDGs) 2 (SDG 2 - zero hunger) as others SDG's. Several studies have been published in different world areas with different research directions focused on increasing food and nutritional security from an agricultural land system perspective. The heterogeneity of the agricultural research studies calls for an interdisciplinary and comprehensive systematization of the different research directions and the plethora of approaches, scales of analysis, and reference data used. Thus, this work aims to systematically review the contributions of the different agricultural research studies by systematizing the main research fields and present a synthesis of the diversity and scope of research and knowledge. From an initial search of 1151 articles, 260 meet the criteria to be used in the review. Our analysis revealed that most articles were published between 2015 and 2019 (59%), and most of the case studies were carried out in Asia (36%) and Africa (20%). The number of studies carried out in the other continents was lower. In the last 30 years, most of the research was centred in six main research fields: land-use changes (28%), agricultural efficiency (27%), climate change (16%), farmer's motivation (12%), urban and peri-urban agriculture (11%), and land suitability (7%). Overall, the research fields identified are directly or indirectly linked to 11 of the 17 SDGs. There are essential differences in the number of articles among research fields, and future efforts are needed in the ones that are less represented to support food security and the SDGs.

A Câmara Municipal de Sines iniciou, em 2016, um processo de modernização administrativa que tem como objectivo tornar a autarquia mais eficiente. Desde o dia 4 de Julho de 2016 toda a autarquia adoptou o Plano de Classificação de Informação Arquivística para a Administração Local (PCIAAL), e em simultâneo, uma nova estrutura dos serviços e uma nova solução de gestão documental entraram em vigor. Desta estratégia fez parte também a criação do Balcão Único, que agrega num único espaço físico o atendimento e o início dos procedimentos administrativos, o qual entrou em funcionamento no dia 3 de Maio de 2017. Esta comunicação tem como objectivo descrever e avaliar o processo de adopção deste plano de classificação, assim como os seus impactos na organização, quer no que respeita ao seu funcionamento interno, quer às dificuldades de implementação da nova filosofia e metodologia de trabalho que o PCIAAL exige.

This research describes the design process for interactive spatio-temporal information visualization by recognizing the requirements, factors, and dimensions of its graphical interface. Spatio-temporal visualization allows the user to observe, interpret, and understand events by locating them in time and space. When interactive, spatio-temporal visualization promotes exploration, discovery, and analysis of complex phenomena.This dissertation consists of two parts. The first one is based on the review anddiscussion of the reference literature and introduces the research question inits scientific area and design processes. First, "information visualization" is contextualized historically and conceptually. Subsequently, the research object, "interactive spatio-temporal visualization", is defined through the classification of its components and the identification of the intricacies of projects of this kind. In the second part – the operational section – we apply the case study method and analyze the main techniques practiced in a set of reference visualizations. Throughout this study, it was noticed that the spatio-temporal context requires specific multidimensional interaction functionalities. Therefore, a second approach of the same method focuses exclusively on interactivity, encompassing the potentials and limitations of interaction with Time and Space. This procedure results in a proposed new taxonomy for spatio-temporal interaction. Finally, we outline a conceptual model for interactive spatio-temporal information visualization, which involved the collaboration of three experts. The outcome classifies and systematizes the creative process by organizing the inherent design decisions into requirements, factors, and dimensions. The research concludes with one hypothesis of validation of the proposed conceptual model through its application in a visualization chosen by a fourth expert. The proposal of a theoretical tool that reflects the multidisciplinar and iterative properties of the design process contributes to the mitigation of boundaries between design practice and research.

The present report was developed in the context of the master’s degree in Science of Conservation, Restoration and Production of Contemporary Art, ministered at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Lisbon, and sets out to describe and illustrate the conservation and restoration intervention and storage process undergone by A Raça do Fim, a sculpture by the artist David Oliveira, an ex-student of that school. This piece is part of the Mercado da Fruta collection, a project developed in 2008 and 2009 by students and professors of that institution, in collaboration with the City Council of Caldas da Rainha. The object presented some preservation issues, which justified the intervention detailed herein. The main problems related to fractures, as well as gaps in the ceramic structure and the pictorial layer. Moreover, some of the components of this sculpture are rabbit hide and fur, which presented a challenge due to the lack of information and research originated in Portugal concerning the conservation and restoration of taxidermy. For that reason, this intervention demanded a multidisciplinary approach, having been developed with the collaboration of specialists in the areas of Biology and Taxidermy, as well as Conservation and Restoration of Scientific Heritage. Such material diversity, and the fact that this is the most remarkable piece in the Mercado da Fruta collection, were the main contributing factors for its protagonist role in this project. This report is organised into three parts. The first section contextualizes the project in which A Raça do Fim is integrated, identifies and describes the piece, and presents its author, David Oliveira. The second part focuses on the conservation and restoration of the components of the object: ceramics and taxidermy. The third and last section details the piece’s conservation status, describes the intervention to which it was submitted, and illustrates the construction of a storage box made with alveolar polypropylene. This work aims to contribute to the valorisation and preservation of the artistic heritage belonging to the Faculty of Fine Arts, which is such an important part of Portuguese Art Education history