Horacio Rodriguez - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Uploads

Papers by Horacio Rodriguez

General and Comparative Endocrinology, 2008

Human and wildlife are exposed at critical periods of development to endocrine disruptor chemical... more Human and wildlife are exposed at critical periods of development to endocrine disruptor chemicals (EDC) that may be responsible for reproductive disorders. To test the hypothesis that in ovum exposure to EDC at a critical period for gonadal organogenesis alters post-hatching folliculogenesis and steroidogenesis in Caiman latirostris, we studied the impact of in ovum exposure to 17b-estradiol (E 2 ), bisphenol A (BPA), endosulfan (END) and atrazine (ATZ) on gonadal differentiation, follicular dynamics and circulating levels of steroid hormones in neonatal and juvenile caiman. Since C. latirostris is a species with temperature dependent sex determination, eggs were incubated at male (33°C) or female (30°C) producing temperatures and the effect of EDC was evaluated. Neonatal ovaries exhibited germ cells mainly located in clusters evidencing proliferative activity and type I to III follicles. Juvenile ovaries exhibited germ cells and advanced stages of pre-vitellogenic follicles. Prenatal exposure to the highest doses of E 2 (1.4 ppm) or BPA (140 ppm) overrode male temperature effect on sex determination. Neonatal females produced by sex reversion lacked type III follicles, while females prenatally exposed to the lowest doses of E 2 (0.014 ppm) and BPA (1.4 ppm) or ATZ (0.2 ppm) showed an increase in type III follicles. Juvenile caiman prenatally exposed to E 2 or BPA showed an augmented incidence of multioocyte follicles. Neonatal female caiman exposed in ovum to E 2 or BPA had higher estrogen serum levels whereas exposure to E 2 , BPA, ATZ and END decreased T levels. Present data demonstrates that exposure to EDC during gonadal organogenesis alters follicular dynamics and steroid levels later in life. These effects might have an impact on caiman fertility.

ABSTRACT It is shown that the property of dynamic linearizability, to be understood as linearizab... more ABSTRACT It is shown that the property of dynamic linearizability, to be understood as linearizability by means of the dynamic extension algorithm, implies the existence of static, possibly time varying, control laws yielding asymptotic output tracking with arbitrary speed of convergence and asymptotic stabilization with a computable bound on the region of attraction. Similar results hold for systems which are only input/output linearizable by means of dynamic state feedback, provided that the inverse dynamics possess certain stability properties. Applications of these results to the problem of regional stabilization of a VTOL aircraft is considered, together with the tracking problem for a class of flexible joints robots. Moreover, a novel parameterization for flexible joint robots is also proposed.

Page 1. Automatically extracting Translation Links using a wide coverage semantic taxonomy German... more Page 1. Automatically extracting Translation Links using a wide coverage semantic taxonomy German Rigau1, Horacio Rodríguez and Jordi Turmo. Departament de Llenguatges i Sistemes Informàtics. Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya. ...

A method for stochastically modeling bidirectionality in chart parsing is presented. A bidirectio... more A method for stochastically modeling bidirectionality in chart parsing is presented. A bidirectional parser, which starts analysis from certain dynamically determined positions of the sentence (the islands), has been built. This island-driven parser uses the stochastic model to guide the recognition process. The system has been trained and tested over two wide-coverage corpus: Spanish Lexesp and English Penn Treebank. Results regarding comparison of our approach with the basic Bottom-Up are encouraging.

Proceedings of The National Academy of Sciences, 1986

Partial amino acid sequence information allowed the isolation of cDNA clones encoding the turkey ... more Partial amino acid sequence information allowed the isolation of cDNA clones encoding the turkey erythrocyte beta-adrenergic receptor. Antisera raised against synthetic peptides encoded by the cDNA crossreacted with the purified receptor and appropriate tryptic fragments, confirming the identity of the cDNA. The receptor is composed of 483 amino acids and has a molecular mass of 54 kDa. Its sequence suggests that it is arranged predominantly in seven membrane-spanning sequences and a long cytoplasmic carboxyl-terminal domain. The extracellular amino-terminal domain contains a consensus sequence for N-glycosylation. The beta-adrenergic receptor displays overall structural similarity and weak sequence homology with rhodopsin. Because both proteins act by regulating GTP-binding proteins, a compact structure based on seven membrane-spanning regions may be a general model for receptors that act on G proteins.

Autologous islet cell transplantation after near-total or total pancreatic resection can alleviat... more Autologous islet cell transplantation after near-total or total pancreatic resection can alleviate pain in patients with severe chronic pancreatitis and preserve endocrine function. From February 2000 to February 2003, a total of 22 patients, whose median age was 38 years, underwent pancreatectomy and autologous islet cell transplantation. Postoperative complications, metabolic studies, insulin usage, pain scores, and quality of life were recorded for all of these patients. The average number of islet cells harvested was 245,457 (range 20,850 to 607,466). Operative data revealed a mean estimated blood loss of 635 ml, an average operative time of 9 hours, and a mean length of hospital stay of 15 days. Sixty-eight percent of the patients had either a minor or major complication. Major complications included acute respiratory distress syndrome (n ϭ 2), intra-abdominal abscess (n ϭ 1), and pulmonary embolism (n ϭ 1). There were no deaths in our series. All patients demonstrated C-peptide and insulin production indicating graft function. Forty-one percent are insulin independent, and 27% required minimal amount of insulin or a sliding scale. All patients had preoperative pain and had been taking opioid analgesics; 82% no longer required analgesics postoperatively. Pancreatectomy with autologous islet cell transplantation can alleviate pain for patients with chronic pancreatitis and preserve endocrine function. ( J GASTROINTEST SURG 2003;7:978-989) Ć

Applied Intelligence, 1999

The most extended way of acquiring information for knowledge based systems is to do it manually. ... more The most extended way of acquiring information for knowledge based systems is to do it manually. However, the high cost of this approach and the availability of alternative Knowledge Sources has lead to an increasing use of automatic acquisition approaches. In this paper we present M-TURBIO, a Text-Based Intelligent System (TBIS) that extracts information contained in restricted-domain documents. The system acquires part of its knowledge about the structure of the documents and the way the information is presented (i.e. syntactic-semantic rules) from a training set of these. Then, a database is created by means of applying these syntactic-semantic rules to extract the information contained in the whole documents.

This paper describes the enhancements made, within a unification framework, based on typed featur... more This paper describes the enhancements made, within a unification framework, based on typed feature structures, in order to support linking of lexical entries to their translation equivalents. To help this task we have developed an interactive environment: TGE. Several experiments, corresponding to rather "closed" semantic domains, have been developed in order to generate lexical cross-relations between English and Spanish.

Endocrinology, 2003

Herein, we examine both the time course of BPA action on the rat prostate and the effects of BPA ... more Herein, we examine both the time course of BPA action on the rat prostate and the effects of BPA on the male hypothalamicpituitary-gonadal axis. This was achieved by exposing rats to BPA in utero, followed by immunohistochemistry and morphometric analysis of prostatic tissue, evaluation of estrogen receptor-␣ (ER␣) and ER␤ mRNA expression in both the preoptic area (POA) and medial basal hypothalamus, and determination of PRL, LH, and testosterone serum levels. On d 30 (peripubertal period), the prostatic periductal stroma of BPAexposed rats demonstrated a significantly larger layer of fibroblasts than that of controls, whereas on d 120 (adulthood) no significant differences were observed. Moreover, BPAexposed rats on d 15 exhibited an increase in stromal cellular proliferation compared with controls. Decreased expression of both androgen receptor in prostatic stromal cells and prostatic acid phosphatase in epithelial cells was observed only on d 30 in BPA-exposed males. BPA did not alter POA ER␣ mRNA expression, whereas a 4-fold increase in POA ER␤ mRNA expression was observed on both d 30 and 120. No alterations were observed in either ER␣ or ER␤ expression in the medial basal hypothalamus. BPA-exposed males exhibited increased PRL levels only on d 30, whereas a transient increase in serum testosterone levels was observed on d 15. These results support the hypothesis that prenatal exposure to environmental doses of BPA induces both transient and permanent agedependent alterations in the male reproductive axis at different levels.

General and Comparative Endocrinology, 2008

Human and wildlife are exposed at critical periods of development to endocrine disruptor chemical... more Human and wildlife are exposed at critical periods of development to endocrine disruptor chemicals (EDC) that may be responsible for reproductive disorders. To test the hypothesis that in ovum exposure to EDC at a critical period for gonadal organogenesis alters post-hatching folliculogenesis and steroidogenesis in Caiman latirostris, we studied the impact of in ovum exposure to 17b-estradiol (E 2 ), bisphenol A (BPA), endosulfan (END) and atrazine (ATZ) on gonadal differentiation, follicular dynamics and circulating levels of steroid hormones in neonatal and juvenile caiman. Since C. latirostris is a species with temperature dependent sex determination, eggs were incubated at male (33°C) or female (30°C) producing temperatures and the effect of EDC was evaluated. Neonatal ovaries exhibited germ cells mainly located in clusters evidencing proliferative activity and type I to III follicles. Juvenile ovaries exhibited germ cells and advanced stages of pre-vitellogenic follicles. Prenatal exposure to the highest doses of E 2 (1.4 ppm) or BPA (140 ppm) overrode male temperature effect on sex determination. Neonatal females produced by sex reversion lacked type III follicles, while females prenatally exposed to the lowest doses of E 2 (0.014 ppm) and BPA (1.4 ppm) or ATZ (0.2 ppm) showed an increase in type III follicles. Juvenile caiman prenatally exposed to E 2 or BPA showed an augmented incidence of multioocyte follicles. Neonatal female caiman exposed in ovum to E 2 or BPA had higher estrogen serum levels whereas exposure to E 2 , BPA, ATZ and END decreased T levels. Present data demonstrates that exposure to EDC during gonadal organogenesis alters follicular dynamics and steroid levels later in life. These effects might have an impact on caiman fertility.

ABSTRACT It is shown that the property of dynamic linearizability, to be understood as linearizab... more ABSTRACT It is shown that the property of dynamic linearizability, to be understood as linearizability by means of the dynamic extension algorithm, implies the existence of static, possibly time varying, control laws yielding asymptotic output tracking with arbitrary speed of convergence and asymptotic stabilization with a computable bound on the region of attraction. Similar results hold for systems which are only input/output linearizable by means of dynamic state feedback, provided that the inverse dynamics possess certain stability properties. Applications of these results to the problem of regional stabilization of a VTOL aircraft is considered, together with the tracking problem for a class of flexible joints robots. Moreover, a novel parameterization for flexible joint robots is also proposed.

Page 1. Automatically extracting Translation Links using a wide coverage semantic taxonomy German... more Page 1. Automatically extracting Translation Links using a wide coverage semantic taxonomy German Rigau1, Horacio Rodríguez and Jordi Turmo. Departament de Llenguatges i Sistemes Informàtics. Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya. ...

A method for stochastically modeling bidirectionality in chart parsing is presented. A bidirectio... more A method for stochastically modeling bidirectionality in chart parsing is presented. A bidirectional parser, which starts analysis from certain dynamically determined positions of the sentence (the islands), has been built. This island-driven parser uses the stochastic model to guide the recognition process. The system has been trained and tested over two wide-coverage corpus: Spanish Lexesp and English Penn Treebank. Results regarding comparison of our approach with the basic Bottom-Up are encouraging.

Proceedings of The National Academy of Sciences, 1986

Partial amino acid sequence information allowed the isolation of cDNA clones encoding the turkey ... more Partial amino acid sequence information allowed the isolation of cDNA clones encoding the turkey erythrocyte beta-adrenergic receptor. Antisera raised against synthetic peptides encoded by the cDNA crossreacted with the purified receptor and appropriate tryptic fragments, confirming the identity of the cDNA. The receptor is composed of 483 amino acids and has a molecular mass of 54 kDa. Its sequence suggests that it is arranged predominantly in seven membrane-spanning sequences and a long cytoplasmic carboxyl-terminal domain. The extracellular amino-terminal domain contains a consensus sequence for N-glycosylation. The beta-adrenergic receptor displays overall structural similarity and weak sequence homology with rhodopsin. Because both proteins act by regulating GTP-binding proteins, a compact structure based on seven membrane-spanning regions may be a general model for receptors that act on G proteins.

Autologous islet cell transplantation after near-total or total pancreatic resection can alleviat... more Autologous islet cell transplantation after near-total or total pancreatic resection can alleviate pain in patients with severe chronic pancreatitis and preserve endocrine function. From February 2000 to February 2003, a total of 22 patients, whose median age was 38 years, underwent pancreatectomy and autologous islet cell transplantation. Postoperative complications, metabolic studies, insulin usage, pain scores, and quality of life were recorded for all of these patients. The average number of islet cells harvested was 245,457 (range 20,850 to 607,466). Operative data revealed a mean estimated blood loss of 635 ml, an average operative time of 9 hours, and a mean length of hospital stay of 15 days. Sixty-eight percent of the patients had either a minor or major complication. Major complications included acute respiratory distress syndrome (n ϭ 2), intra-abdominal abscess (n ϭ 1), and pulmonary embolism (n ϭ 1). There were no deaths in our series. All patients demonstrated C-peptide and insulin production indicating graft function. Forty-one percent are insulin independent, and 27% required minimal amount of insulin or a sliding scale. All patients had preoperative pain and had been taking opioid analgesics; 82% no longer required analgesics postoperatively. Pancreatectomy with autologous islet cell transplantation can alleviate pain for patients with chronic pancreatitis and preserve endocrine function. ( J GASTROINTEST SURG 2003;7:978-989) Ć

Applied Intelligence, 1999

The most extended way of acquiring information for knowledge based systems is to do it manually. ... more The most extended way of acquiring information for knowledge based systems is to do it manually. However, the high cost of this approach and the availability of alternative Knowledge Sources has lead to an increasing use of automatic acquisition approaches. In this paper we present M-TURBIO, a Text-Based Intelligent System (TBIS) that extracts information contained in restricted-domain documents. The system acquires part of its knowledge about the structure of the documents and the way the information is presented (i.e. syntactic-semantic rules) from a training set of these. Then, a database is created by means of applying these syntactic-semantic rules to extract the information contained in the whole documents.

This paper describes the enhancements made, within a unification framework, based on typed featur... more This paper describes the enhancements made, within a unification framework, based on typed feature structures, in order to support linking of lexical entries to their translation equivalents. To help this task we have developed an interactive environment: TGE. Several experiments, corresponding to rather "closed" semantic domains, have been developed in order to generate lexical cross-relations between English and Spanish.

Endocrinology, 2003

Herein, we examine both the time course of BPA action on the rat prostate and the effects of BPA ... more Herein, we examine both the time course of BPA action on the rat prostate and the effects of BPA on the male hypothalamicpituitary-gonadal axis. This was achieved by exposing rats to BPA in utero, followed by immunohistochemistry and morphometric analysis of prostatic tissue, evaluation of estrogen receptor-␣ (ER␣) and ER␤ mRNA expression in both the preoptic area (POA) and medial basal hypothalamus, and determination of PRL, LH, and testosterone serum levels. On d 30 (peripubertal period), the prostatic periductal stroma of BPAexposed rats demonstrated a significantly larger layer of fibroblasts than that of controls, whereas on d 120 (adulthood) no significant differences were observed. Moreover, BPAexposed rats on d 15 exhibited an increase in stromal cellular proliferation compared with controls. Decreased expression of both androgen receptor in prostatic stromal cells and prostatic acid phosphatase in epithelial cells was observed only on d 30 in BPA-exposed males. BPA did not alter POA ER␣ mRNA expression, whereas a 4-fold increase in POA ER␤ mRNA expression was observed on both d 30 and 120. No alterations were observed in either ER␣ or ER␤ expression in the medial basal hypothalamus. BPA-exposed males exhibited increased PRL levels only on d 30, whereas a transient increase in serum testosterone levels was observed on d 15. These results support the hypothesis that prenatal exposure to environmental doses of BPA induces both transient and permanent agedependent alterations in the male reproductive axis at different levels.