Spinal cord injuries (SCI) lead to major disabilities affecting > 2.5 million people worldwide. Major shortcomings in clinical translation result from multiple factors, including species differences, development of moderately predictive animal models, and differences in methodologies between preclinical and clinical studies. To overcome these obstacles, we first conducted a comparative neuroanatomical analysis of the spinal cord between mice, Microcebus murinus (a nonhuman primate), and humans. Next, we developed and characterized a new model of lateral spinal cord hemisection in M. murinus. Over a 3-month period after SCI, we carried out a detailed, longitudinal, behavioral follow-up associated with in vivo magnetic resonance imaging (1H-MRI) monitoring. Then, we compared lesion extension and tissue alteration using 3 methods: in vivo 1H-MRI, ex vivo 1H-MRI, and classical histology. The general organization and glial cell distribution/morphology in the spinal cord of M. murinus closely resembles that of humans. Animals assessed at different stages following lateral hemisection of the spinal cord presented specific motor deficits and spinal cord tissue alterations. We also found a close correlation between 1H-MRI signal and microglia reactivity and/or associated post-trauma phenomena. Spinal cord hemisection in M. murinus provides a reliable new nonhuman primate model that can be used to promote translational research on SCI and represents a novel and more affordable alternative to larger primates.

Materials are the key roadblocks for the commercialization of energy conversion devices in fuel cells andsolar cells. Significant research has focused on tuning the intrinsic properties of materials at the nanometerscale. The soft template mediated controlled fabrication of advanced nanostructured materials isattracting considerable interest due to the promising applications of these materials in catalysis and electrocatalysis.Swollen hexagonal lyotropic liquid crystals (SLCs) consist of oil-swollen surfactant-stabilized1D, 2D or 3D nanometric assemblies regularly arranged in an aqueous solvent. Interestingly, the characteristicsize of the SLCs can be controlled by adjusting the volume ratio of oil to water. The non-polarand/or polar compartments of the SLCs can be doped with guest molecules and used as nanoreactorsfor the synthesis of various metals (Pt, Pd, Au, etc.), conducting polymers and composite nanostructureswith controlled size and shape. 1D, 2D and 3D mono- and bimetallic nanostructures of controlled compositionand porosity can also be fabricated. These materials have demonstrated impressive enhancementsof their electrochemical properties as compared to their bulk counterparts and have been identifiedas promising for further implementation in energy harvesting applications. In this review article,recent research materials are described regarding the development of functional materials with muchimproved performances for catalysis applications. This review addresses a brief overview of swollen hexagonalmesophases as nanoreactors, describes examples of nanostructured materials synthesized inthese nanoreactors, shows several examples of the energy conversion applications in solar light harvesting,fuel cells etc. and also summarizes the associated reaction mechanisms developed in the recent literaturefor enhanced catalytic activity.

A novel experimental technique based on in situ AFM monitoring of the mechanisms of damage and the strain fields associated to the slow steady-state propagation of a fracture in glassy polymers is presented. This micron-scale investigation is complemented by optical measurements of the sample deformation up to the millimetric macroscopic scale of the sample in order to assess the proper crack driving conditions. These multi-scale observations provide important insights towards the modeling of the fracture toughness of glassy polymers and its relationship with the macromolecular structure and non-linear rheological properties. This novel technique is first tested on a standard PMMA thermoplastic in order to both evaluate its performance and the richness of this new kind of observations. Although the fracture propagation in PMMA is well known to proceed through crazing in the bulk of the samples, our observations provide a clear description and quantitative evaluation of a change of fracture mechanism towards shear yielding fracture accompanied by local necking close to the free surface of the sample, which can be explained by the local change of stress triaxiality. Moreover , this primary surface necking mechanism is shown to be accompanied by a network of secondary grooves that can be related to surface crazes propagating towards the interior of the sample. This overall scenario is validated by post-mortem fractographic investigations by scanning electron microscopy.

An original setup combining a very stable loading stage, an atomic force microscope and an environmental chamber, allows to obtain very stable sub-critical fracture propagation in oxide glasses under controlled environment, and subsequently to finely characterize the nanometric roughness properties of the crack surfaces. The analysis of the surface roughness is conducted both in terms of the classical root mean square roughness to compare with the literature, and in terms of more physically adequate indicators related to the self-affine nature of the fracture surfaces. Due to the comparable nanometric scale of the surface roughness, the AFM tip size and the instrumental noise, a special care is devoted to the statistical evaluation of the metrologic properties. The 2 roughness amplitude of several oxide glasses was shown to decrease as a function of the stress intensity factor, to be quite insensitive to the relative humidity and to increase with the degree of heterogeneity of the glass. The results are discussed in terms of several modeling arguments concerning the coupling between crack propagation, material's heterogeneity, crack tip plastic deformation and water diffusion at the crack tip. A synthetic new model is presented combining the predictions of a model by Wiederhorn et al. [1] on the effect of the material's heterogeneity on the crack tip stresses with the self-affine nature of the fracture surfaces.

We study the rigid limit of a class of hypermultiplet moduli spaces appearing in Calabi-Yau compactifications of type IIB string theory, which is induced by a local limit of the Calabi-Yau. We show that the resulting hyperkahler manifold is obtained by performing a hyperkahler quotient of the Swann bundle over the moduli space, along the isometries arising in the limit. Physically, this manifold appears as the target space of the non-linear sigma model obtained by compactification of a five-dimensional gauge theory on a torus. This allows to compute dyonic and stringy instantons of the gauge theory from the known results on D-instantons in string theory. Besides, we formulate a simple condition on the existence of a non-trivial local limit in terms of intersection numbers of the Calabi-Yau, and find an explicit form for the hypermultiplet metric including corrections from all mutually non-local D-instantons, which can be of independent interest.

One of the greatest challenges in biophysical models of translation is to identify coding sequences features that affect the rate of translation and therefore the overall protein production in the cell. We propose an analytic method to solve a translation model based on the inhomogeneous totally asymmetric simple exclusion process, which allow us to unveil simple design principles of nucleotide sequences determining protein production rates. Our solution shows an excellent agreement when compared to numerical genome-wide simulations of S. cerevisiae transcript sequences and predicts that the first 10 codons, together with the value of the initiation rate, are the main determinants of protein production rate. Finally, we interpret the obtained analytic results based on the evolutionary role of codons' choice for regulating translation rates and ribosome densities.

The bacterial genome is organized in a structure called the nucleoid by a variety of associated proteins. These proteins can form complexes on DNA that play a central role in various biological processes, including chromosome segregation. A prominent example is the large ParB-DNA complex, which forms an essential component of the segregation machinery in many bacteria. ChIP-Seq experiments show that ParB proteins localize around centromere-like parS sites on the DNA to which ParB binds specifically, and spreads from there over large sections of the chromosome. Recent theoretical and experimental studies suggest that DNA-bound ParB proteins can interact with each other to condense into a coherent 3D complex on the DNA. However, the structural organization of this protein-DNA complex remains unclear, and a predictive quantitative theory for the distribution of ParB proteins on DNA is lacking. Here, we propose the Looping and Clustering (LC) model, which employs a statistical physics approach to describe protein-DNA complexes. The LC model accounts for the extrusion of DNA loops from a cluster of interacting DNA-bound proteins. Conceptually, the structure of the protein-DNA complex is determined by a competition between attractive protein interactions and the configurational and loop entropy of this protein-DNA cluster. Indeed, we show that the protein interaction strength determines the "tightness" of the loopy protein-DNA complex. With this approach we consider the genomic organization of such a protein-DNA cluster around a single high-affinity binding site. Thus, our model provides a theoretical framework to quantitatively compute the binding profiles of ParB-like proteins around a cognate (parS) binding site.