Genomic Vision (France)

<title>Abstract</title> Rapa Nui preserves an isolated lineage of <italic>Coffea arabica var. Typica</italic> with remarkable genetic purity, high homozygosity, and distinctive biochemical and sensory traits. Integrated genetic, sensory, and chemical analyses reveal its potential as a unique clonal reservoir with value for conservation and climate resilience. These findings highlight the island’s relevance for specialty coffee, sustainable development, and diversification of global Arabica genetic resources.

We present a virtual reality (VR) experience designed to raise awareness towards the impact of low-vision conditions on social interactions for patients. Specifically, we look at age-related macular degeneration (AMD) that results in the loss of central visual field acuity (a.k.a. a scotoma), which hinders AMD patients from perceiving facial expressions and gestures, and can bring about awkward interactions, misunderstandings, and feelings of isolation. Using VR, we co-designed an experience composed of four scenes from the life of AMD patients through structured interviews with the patients and orthoptists. The experience takes the perspective of a patient, and throughout the scenarios, provides voiceovers on their feelings, the challenges they face, how they adapt to their situation, and also bits of advice on how their quality of life was improved through considerate actions from people in their social circles. A virtual scotoma is designed to follow the gaze of the user using the HTC Vive Focus 3 headset with an eye-tracking module. Setting out from a formal definition of awareness, we evaluate our experience on three components of awareness – knowledge, engagement, and empathy – through established questionnaires, continuous measures of gaze and skin conductance, and qualitative feedback. Carrying out a experiment with 29 participants, we found not only that our experience had a positive and strong impact on the awareness of participants towards AMD, but also that the scotoma and events had observable influences on gaze activity and emotions. We believe this work outlines the advantages of immersive technologies for public awareness towards conditions such as AMD, and opens avenues to conducting studies with fine-grained, multimodal analysis of user behaviour for designing more engaging experiences.

This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY

Virtual Reality (VR) technology enables “embodied interactions” in realistic environments where users can freely move and interact, with deep physical and emotional states. However, a comprehensive understanding of the embodied user experience is currently limited by the extent to which one can make relevant observations, and the accuracy at which observations can be interpreted.

Iron is essential for retinal metabolism, but an excess of ferrous iron causes oxidative stress. In glaucomatous eyes, retinal ganglion cell (RGC) death has been associated with dysregulation of iron homeostasis. Transferrin (TF) is an endogenous iron transporter that controls ocular iron levels. Intraocular administration of TF is neuroprotective in various models of retinal degeneration, preventing iron overload and reducing iron-induced oxidative stress. Herein, we assessed the protective effects of TF on RGC survival, using ex vivo rat retinal explants exposed to iron, NMDA-induced excitotoxicity, or CoCl2-induced hypoxia, and an in vivo rat model of ocular hypertension (OHT). TF significantly preserved RGCs against FeSO4-induced toxicity, NMDA-induced excitotoxicity, and CoCl2-induced hypoxia. TF protected RGCs from apoptosis, ferroptosis, and necrosis. In OHT rats, TF reduced RGC loss by about 70% compared to vehicle-treated animals and preserved about 47% of the axons. Finally, increased iron staining was shown in the retina of a glaucoma patient's eye as compared to non-glaucomatous eyes. These results indicate that TF can interfere with different cell-death mechanisms involved in glaucoma pathogenesis and demonstrate the ability of TF to protect RGCs exposed to elevated IOP. Altogether, these results suggest that TF is a promising treatment against glaucoma neuropathy.

SummarySince the beginning of the COVID19 pandemics, an unprecedented research effort has been conducted to analyze the antibody responses in patients, and many trials based on passive immunotherapy — notably monoclonal antibodies — are ongoing. Twenty-one antibodies have entered clinical trials, 6 having reached phase 2/3, phase 3 or having received emergency authorization. These represent only the tip of the iceberg, since many more antibodies have been discovered and represent opportunities either for diagnosis purposes or as drug candidates. The main problem facing laboratories willing to develop such antibodies is the huge task of analyzing them and choosing the best candidate for exhaustive experimental validation. In this work we show how artificial intelligence-based methods can help in analyzing large sets of antibodies in order to determine in a few hours the best candidates in few hours. The MAbCluster method, which only requires knowledge of the amino acid sequences of the antibodies, allows to group the antibodies having the same epitope, considering only their amino acid sequences and their 3D structures (actual or predicted), and to infer some of their functional properties. We then use MAbTope to predict the epitopes for all antibodies for which they are not already known. This allows an exhaustive comparison of the available epitopes, but also gives a synthetic view of the possible combinations. Finally, we show how these results can be used to predict which antibodies might be affected by the different mutations arising in the circulating strains of the virus, such as the N501Y mutation that has started to spread in Great-Britain.

Author forgot to attach a supplementary doc file which includes the supplementary methods and supplementary figure legends.