Giuseppe Pigola

University of Catania | UNICT · Department of Mathematics and Computer Science (DMI)

The treatment of multidrug-resistant Gram-negative infections is based on colistin. As result, COL-resistance (COL-R) can develop and spread. In Acinetobacter baumannii, a crucial step is to understand COL-R onset and stability, still far to be elucidated. COL-R phenotypic stability, onset modalities, and phylogenomics were investigated in a clinic...

Methicillin-susceptible (MSSA) and methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) is a pathogen commonly found in bone and joint infections, including septic arthritis. S. aureus virulence and the frailty of affected patients can cause several complications; a prompt and specific antibiotic treatment can positively affect the outcome of patient...

Daptomycin (DAP) is one of the last-resort treatments for heterogeneous vancomycin-intermediate Staphylococcus aureus (hVISA) and vancomycin-intermediate S. aureus (VISA) infections. DAP resistance (DAP-R) is multifactorial and mainly related to cell-envelope modifications caused by single-nucleotide polymorphisms and/or modulation mechanisms of tr...

Multidrug-Resistant (MDR) and Extensively Drug Resistant (XDR) Acinetobacter baumannii (Ab) represent a serious cause of healthcare-associated infections worldwide. Currently, the available treatment options are very restricted and colistin-based therapies are last-line treatments of these infections, even though colistin resistant (COLR) Ab have r...

Even though colistin-based treatment represents the antimicrobial-regimen backbone for the management of multidrug-resistant Gram-negative infections, colistin resistance is still rare, at least as a full resistance, in Acinetobacter baumannii (Ab). We investigated the genomics and transcriptomics of two clinical Extensively Drug Resistance (XDR) c...

Vitis vinifera (Grapevine) is the most important fruit species in the modern world. Wine and table grapes sales contribute significantly to the economy of major wine producing countries. The most relevant goals in wine production concern quality and safety. In order to significantly improve the achievement of these objectives and to gain biological...

Motivation: Vitis vinifera L. (Grapevine) is the most important fruit species in the modern world. Wine and table grapes sales contribute significantly to the economy of major wine producing countries. The two main goals in wine production concern quality and safety [1]. To properly deal with these aspects and to gain biological knowledge about...

Microarray is a well-established technology to analyze the expression of many genes in a single reaction whose applications range from cancer diagnosis to drug response. In cancer classification and prediction, microarrays help by analyzing the expression of genes in tumor cells taken from different tissues. This chapter sketches the experimental d...

We present a new classification method for expression profiling data, called MIDClass (Microarray Interval Discriminant CLASSifier), based on association rules. It classifies expressions profiles exploiting the idea that the transcript expression intervals better discriminate subtypes in the same class. A wide experimental analysis shows the effect...

MIDClass user manual. (PDF)

Clustering is a widely used unsupervised data mining technique. It allows to identify structures in collections of objects by grouping them into classes, named clusters, in such a way that similarity of objects within any cluster is maximized and similarity of objects belonging to different clusters is minimized. In density-based clustering, a clus...

microRNAs (miRNAs) have been shown to play a crucial role in the most important biological processes and their dysregulation has been connected to a variety of diseases, including cancer. The number of computational tools for the analysis of miRNA related data is continuously increasing. They range from simple look-up resources to more sophisticate...

Mobile Backbone Wireless Networks (MBWN) [10] are wireless networks in which the base stations are mobile. Our strategy is the following: mobile nodes are dynamically grouped into clusters of bounded radius. In the very large wireless networks we deal with we deal with, several hundreds of clusters may be generated. Clustering makes use of a two di...

In this paper, we propose a protocol for dynamic reconfiguration of ad-hoc wireless networks with movable base stations in presence of obstacles. Hosts are assigned to base stations according to a probabilistic throughput function based on both the quality of the signal and the base station load. In order to optimize space coverage, base stations c...

BACKGROUND: Synonymous mutations might be involved at the HIV RNA level in HIV-1 drug resistance mechanisms. The goal of this study was to investigate the correlation between synonymous mutations at the HIV RNA level, the known nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitor (NRTI) resistance mutations, and viro-immunological parameters.

NetMatch is a Cytoscape plugin which allows searching biological networks for subcomponents matching a given query. Queries may be approximate in the sense that certain parts of the subgraph-query may be left unspecified. To make the query creation process easy, a drawing tool is provided. Cytoscape is a bioinformatics software platform for the vis...

Backtranslation is the process of decoding a sequence of amino acids into the corresponding codons. All synthetic gene design systems include a backtranslation module. The degeneracy of the genetic code makes backtranslation potentially ambiguous since most amino acids are encoded by multiple codons. The common approach to overcome this difficulty...

In this paper a simple and efficient distributed version of the introduced antipole clustering algorithm for general metric spaces is proposed. This combines ideas from the M-tree, the multi-vantage point structure and the FQ-tree to create a new structure in the "bisector tree" class, called the antipole tree. Bisection is based on the proximity t...

In this chapter, we present a new multiple sequence alignment algorithm called AntiClustAl. The method makes use of the commonly used idea of aligning homologous sequences belonging to classes generated by some clustering algorithm and then continuing the alignment process in a bottom-up way along a suitable tree structure. The final result is then...

In this paper we present a new Multiple Sequence Alignment (MSA) algorithm called AntiClusAl. The method makes use of the commonly use idea of aligning homologous sequences belonging to classes generated by some clustering algorithm, and then continue the alignment process ina bottom-up way along a suitable tree structure. The final result is then...

In this paper algorithms for modelling dy-namic reconfiguration of ad-hoc wireless networks with movable base stations in presence of obstacles are pro-posed. This problem is considerably harder than the one treated in [1] where base stations were organized in a starred network and no obstacles were present. In these models nodes communicate throug...