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Browsing by Issue Date, starting with "2018-10-08"

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  • The biological performance of purified supercoiled p53 plasmid DNA in different cancer cell lines
    Publication . Valente, J.F.A.; Sousa, A.; Gaspar, V.M.; Queiroz, João; Sousa, F.
    Tumor suppressor p53 remains one of the most interesting therapeutic targets in cancer gene therapy due to its consistent mutation in numerous cancers. Thus, the reinstatement of the p53 expression and function can be seen as an effective alternative for cancer treatment, motivating research in this field. In this study, L-methionine matrix was used to purify the supercoiled topoisoform of a plasmid DNA encoding the p53 protein. This pure biopharmaceutical was conjugated with liposomes to comprehensively analyze its in vitro performance and therapeutic potential in different cancer cell lines, including the lung and cervix models. A different profile of cellular responses was attained after the transfection of these cancer cell lines with the p53-pDNA. Actually, the in vitro transfection with pure sc p53-pDNA resulted in a higher expression of the tumor suppressor protein in cancer cells when compared with the native pDNA samples (oc + sc topoisoforms). Also, wild-type p53 ex pression following transfection was significantly higher in HeLa cervix cancer cells compared to that obtained in A549 lung cancer cells. Overall, our findings emphasize the potential of sc pDNA gene-based therapy, also raising awareness of the need to adjust the therapeutics, considering the feature of high heterogeneity of cancer cells.
    2018-10-08Journal article Open access Show more
  • Analysis of the impact of test based development techniques (TDD, BDD, AND ATDD) to the software life cycle
    Publication . Gómez, Luis Alberto Cisneros; Reis, Catarina Isabel Ferreira Viveiros Tavares dos; Maximiano, Marisa da Silva
    Within the world of software development, there is a permanent need to create quality products that are capable of facing challenges in environments of changing requirements. The industry in this area is aware of this, and so, it makes use of software development methodologies such as: traditional or agile. Agile development represents a distancing from traditional approaches, allowing the creation of applications incrementally and iteratively and, thus, adjusting to the changing requirements of customers. For this reason, companies have recently adopted the use of its practices and techniques, e.g.: Test-Driven Development (TDD), Acceptance Test-Driven Development (ATDD), Behavior-Driven Development (BDD), among others. These techniques promise mainly to improve the quality of the software and the productivity of the programmers; therefore, many experiments, especially using TDD, have been made within the academy and the industry; which shows variant results (some with positive effects and others not so much). In addition, expert programmers have put these techniques into practice in software creation, getting satisfactory results due to the advantages offered by its use. The main objective of this work is to verify the impact produced by the techniques of software development based on tests (TDD, ATDD and BDD), analyzing its primordial promises. A literature research has been conducted in order to understand the strengths and weaknesses of each one of these techniques. With the intention of observing the effectiveness of TDD and BDD, an experiment was planned in an academic scenario, considering education and appropriate training to implement enough knowledge about them. With the results obtained, it was possible to understand that the techniques studied ensured the quality of the product developed and improved the productivity of the programmers; validating its effects within software development.
    2018-10-08Master thesis Open access Show more