Publications

There is an urgent need for the development of new antifungal agents. A facile in vivo model that evaluates libraries of chemical compounds could solve some of the main obstacles in current antifungal discovery. We show that Candida albicans, as well as other Candida species, are ingested by Caenorhabditis elegans and establish a persistent lethal […]

BACKGROUND Chikungunya virus (CHIKV), which is transmitted by Aedes spp mosquitoes, has recently caused several outbreaks on islands in the Indian Ocean and on the Indian subcontinent. We report on an outbreak in Italy. METHODS After reports of a large number of cases of febrile illness of unknown origin in two contiguous villages in northeastern […]

Alternative splicing of tau exon 10 produces tau isoforms with either 3 (3R) or 4 (4R) repeated microtubule-binding domains. Increased ratios of 4R to 3R tau expression, above the physiological 1:1, leads to neurofibrillary tangles and causes neurode-generative disease. An RNA stem loop structure plays a significant role in determining the ratio, with decreasing stability […]

A library of ∼51,000 compounds was interrogated by high throughput screening (HTS) using a heparin-induced tau fibrillization assay. HTS was conducted with bacterially expressed recombinant tau fragment K18 and the reaction was monitored by thioflavine T fluorescence. Hits meeting criteria set for selection in HTS were further evaluated in a panel of assays designed (a) […]

This study describes a method for mining and modeling binding data obtained from a large panel of targets (in vitro safety pharmacology) to distinguish differences between promiscuous and selective compounds. Two naïve Bayes models for promiscuity and selectivity were generated and validated on a test set as well as publicly available drug databases. The model […]