Scaffold-Mediated Immunoengineering as Innovative Strategy for Tendon Regeneration

Tendon injuries are at the frontier of innovative approaches to public health concerns and sectoral policy objectives. Indeed, these injuries remain difficult to manage due to tendon’s poor healing ability ascribable to a hypo-cellularity and low vascularity, leading to the formation of a fibrotic tissue affecting its functionality. Tissue engineering represents a promising solution for the regeneration of damaged tendons with the aim to stimulate tissue regeneration or to produce functional implantable biomaterials. However, any technological advancement must take into consideration the role of the immune system in tissue regeneration and the potential of biomaterial scaffolds to control the immune signaling, creating a pro-regenerative environment. In this context, immunoengineering has emerged as a new discipline, developing innovative strategies for tendon injuries. It aims at designing scaffolds, in combination with engineered bioactive molecules and/or stem cells, able to modulate the interaction between the transplanted biomaterial-scaffold and the host tissue allowing a pro-regenerative immune response, therefore hindering fibrosis occurrence at the injury site and guiding tendon regeneration. Thus, this review is aimed at giving an overview on the role exerted from different tissue engineering actors in leading immunoregeneration by crosstalking with stem and immune cells to generate new paradigms in designing regenerative medicine approaches for tendon injuries.

Management by Development of Innovative Potential of Organization

This article explores the innovation potential of the staff at industrial enterprises. The relevance of the research is confirmed by the increasing interest of companies in innovation. This manifests itself both in the changing organizational structure of enterprises and a new approach to human resource management, for instance, the revision of the key performance indicators of employees. One of the main goals of the research was determining the factors that influence the development of the innovation potential of staff and assessment of their impact. The institutional approach formed the conceptual basis of the study. It allowed the authors to consider the management of innovation potential as a special mechanism for achieving sustainability, stable development of an enterprise, and its strategic success in general. The authors established that organizational and administrative factors have the greatest influence on the formation and development of the innovation potential of staff, while the constraining factors are the lack of an innovative strategy, authoritarian management style, and bureaucratization. Studying the techniques aimed at the development of staff’s innovation potential, the authors concluded that the most effective ones for industrial enterprises are consultations of subject matter specialists. A significant novelty of this work is the model of interaction of participants in the innovation process developed by the authors. The research findings enabled the authors to devise recommendations for the formation and development of the innovation potential of the company’s employees.

Modeling the Selection of Innovative Strategy for Development of Industrial Enterprises

The assessment of the state of the innovation sphere of Poland in relation to the world level shows that Poland has educational and scientific potential allowing to produce scientific ideas and developments but the level of their commercialization remains low. As a result, Poland lags in terms of such criteria for the development of innovation sphere as labor productivity and financial support for innovation activities. The methodological basis of the study is the theory of fuzzy sets and the matrix approach — in modeling the selection of strategies to stimulate innovative development of industrial enterprises. The construction of a matrix of strategies is based on the diagnosis of the total potential of industrial enterprises and the level of its implementation in the innovation sphere. Modeling of the selection of innovation development strategy for industrial entities based on the use of fuzzy set theory in assessing the level of investment attractiveness and innovation potential of enterprises is carried out. Based on the proposed methodological approach, the strategic directions of innovative development of three Polish industrial enterprises are substantiated.

The Role of the Geospatial Information System (GIS) in Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) represent an innovative strategy to transform the socio-economic and environmental aspects of communities. Sustainable development provides the communities with a set of substantial challenges that are totally geospatial in concept and practice. Most of these challenges can be identified, examined, and visualized within a spatial framework. Despite of noteworthy progress in geospatial information system and science, the lack of comprehensive impressions in planning necessitates the integrative role of geospatial information. This study aims to investigate this role in contributing to SDGs by describing each single goal and following objectives. Furthermore, spatial and non-spatial issues regarding every specific SDG will be accurately discussed to determine the spatial aspects in practice. In this way, the communities will be empowered by unique opportunities to integrate and represent geospatial information into the global agenda in a specific manner, specifically in contributing data resources toward measuring and monitoring the 17 SDGs.

Inquiry-based learning. Beliefs of trainee teachers in a physics course

The teaching of physics should be supported by practical or laboratory activities that seek to develop the scientific competencies of the students who study physics, so it is necessary to propose innovative strategies, such as research-based learning, in which students answer research questions through the analysis of data, which increases the interaction between the student and the physical concepts under investigation. Therefore, the objective of the study was to analyze the beliefs of teachers in natural science training at a public university in Colombia who take the subject of physics on research-based learning, to provide information on how to guide the use of innovative strategies. The study responds to a type of quantitative research with a descriptive approach and was based on a field design. On the other hand, the results reflect slightly positive beliefs of students in initial teacher training who study physics about research-based learning as an innovative strategy, although it is recommended to expand the sample to generalize. Finally, the analysis reveals as a conclusion that the implementation of innovative methodologies such as inquiry-based learning for science teaching, especially physics, should be promoted and supported more effectively to foster motivation, skills development, and conceptual understanding. of the scientific contents.

Tilapia Head Protein Hydrolysate Attenuates Scopolamine-Induced Cognitive Impairment through the Gut-Brain Axis in Mice

The destruction of the homeostasis in the gut-brain axis can lead to cognitive impairment and memory decline. Dietary intervention with bioactive peptides from aquatic products is an innovative strategy to prevent cognitive deficits. The present study aimed to determine the neuroprotective effect of tilapia head protein hydrolysate (THPH) on scopolamine-induced cognitive impairment in mice, and to further explore its mechanism through the microbiota–gut-brain axis. The results showed that THPH administration significantly improved the cognitive behavior of mice, and normalized the cholinergic system and oxidative stress system of the mice brain. The histopathological observation showed that THPH administration significantly reduced the pathological damage of hippocampal neurons, increased the number of mature neurons marked by NeuN and delayed the activation of astrocytes in the hippocampus of mice. In addition, THPH administration maintained the stability of cholinergic system, alleviated oxidative stress and further improved the cognitive impairment by reshaping the gut microbiota structure of scopolamine-induced mice and alleviating the disorder of lipid metabolism and amino acid metabolism in serum. In conclusion, our research shows that THPH supplementation is a nutritional strategy to alleviate cognitive impairment through the gut-brain axis.

Assessing learners’ needs for practising spoken Icelandic L2 with the mobile app TALAÐU!

This article presents results from a human-centred approach study to designing a mobile app TALAÐU!, which aims at assisting learners of Icelandic as a second language (L2) with spoken language practice. The main goal of the app would be to encourage learners to have real-life conversations with Icelandic speakers by accomplishing conversational missions. In the first stage of development, a qualitative deep-method needs study in the form of interviews was conducted with 19 migrants from 14 different countries, who permanently live in Iceland. Results indicated that learners have five core needs for practising spoken language: connection, confidence, clarity, growth, and convenience. Based on different learning styles and confidence in speaking rather than language ability, three main learner profiles were indicated: ‘diving in’, ‘learning with caution’ and ‘dipping a toe’. Both the learners’ needs and the profiles would drive the design of the learning app to personalise and maximise the learner experience with practising spoken L2. This human-centred study approach suggests an innovative strategy in designing a learning app for practising L2 in a specific language and culture environment.

Biosafe Management of Botrytis Grey Mold of Strawberry Fruit by Novel Bioagents

Recently, there have been urgent economic and scientific demands to decrease the use of chemical fungicides during the treatment of phytopathogens, due to their human health and environmental impacts. This study explored the biocontrol efficacy of novel and eco-friendly preen (uropygial) oil and endophytic Bacillus safensis in managing postharvest Botrytis grey mold in strawberry fruit. The preen oil (25 μL/mL) showed high antifungal activity against B. cinerea Str5 in terms of the reduction in the fungal radial growth (41.3%) and the fungal colony-forming units (28.6%) compared to the control. A new strain of Bacillus safensis B3 had a good potential to produce chitinase enzymes (3.69 ± 0.31 U/mL), hydrolytic lipase (10.65 ± 0.51 U/mL), and protease enzymes (13.28 ± 0.65 U/mL), which are responsible for the hydrolysis of the B. cinerea Str5 cell wall and, consequently, restrict fungal growth. The in vivo experiment on strawberry fruit showed that preen (uropygial) oil reduced the disease severity by 87.25%, while the endophytic bacteria B. safensis B3 reduced it by 86.52%. This study reports the efficiency of individually applied bioagents in the control of phytopathogenic fungi for the first time and, consequently, encourages their application as a new and innovative strategy for prospective agricultural technology and food safety.

Revealing microbial species diversity using sequence capture by hybridization

Targeting small parts of the 16S rDNA phylogenetic marker by metabarcoding reveals microorganisms of interest but cannot achieve a taxonomic resolution at the species level, precluding further precise characterizations. To identify species behind operational taxonomic units (OTUs) of interest, even in the rare biosphere, we developed an innovative strategy using gene capture by hybridization. From three OTU sequences detected upon polyphenol supplementation and belonging to the rare biosphere of the human gut microbiota, we revealed 59 nearly full-length 16S rRNA genes, highlighting high bacterial diversity hidden behind OTUs while evidencing novel taxa. Inside each OTU, revealed 16S rDNA sequences could be highly distant from each other with similarities down to 85 %. We identified one new family belonging to the order Clostridiales , 39 new genera and 52 novel species. Related bacteria potentially involved in polyphenol degradation have also been identified through genome mining and our results suggest that the human gut microbiota could be much more diverse than previously thought.