Browsing by Issue Date, starting with "2021-07-30"
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- Customer equity drivers and emotions on algarve 5-star hotel clients´ satisfaction and loyaltyPublication . Alipourianzadeh, Rahil; Rebelo, Efigénio; Silva, Nelson Tavares daThe tourism and hotel industry are critical drivers for Portugal, particularly for Algarve’s economy. The hotel industry’s demand depends not only on macroeconomic variables of countries of the tourists but also on other customer behavior issues, such as Satisfaction, Loyalty, Emotions, and Customer Equity drivers, which are significantly related. All these items are essential for customer decision making. Therefore, understanding their relations can be useful for academia and, by knowledge transfer, to the industry. This research aimed to clarify the relationships between Customer Equity Drivers and Emotions with Satisfaction and Loyalty of five-star hotel clients from Algarve’s predominant tourist nationalities, contributing to a more integrative conceptual model. For this purpose, the perspectives of two leading hotel brands in Algarve were compared with the perspective of their clients. Questionnaires were administrated amongst five-star hotel clients from the two famous brands, who stayed overnight during July, August, and September of 2019 in the Algarve region. A sample of 133 respondents from the predominant tourist nationalities with valid answers was achieved. The five-star hotels’ management answered the questionnaires based on their data and perception to compare their clients’ perspectives. Complementary, the emotions of tourists about the Algarve region were also studied. The analysis was done in an exploratory approach, using three-way data analysis supported by Multiple Factor Analysis (MFA) developed by Escofier and Pagès (1985). The MFA results confirmed stability between the dimensions constructed with the two hotel brands and clients’ data. It was identified, as expected, an opposition between negative emotions and all other model items. Nonetheless, there was a more evident linkage between positive emotions, joy, and happiness, with overall satisfaction and perception of brand ethics. Another highlighted linkage was between positive emotion enthusiasm, service/product quality, and attitudinal loyalties. The results showed that hotel brand one is a variance with the other two perspectives. This difference was mostly related to Portuguese nationality clients. The presupposes of the proposed conceptual model were aligned with the research results.
- Nanocarrier-mediated topical insulin delivery for wound healingPublication . Macedo, Ana S.; Mendes, Francisca; Filipe, Patrícia; Reis, Salette; Fonte, PedroWound care has been clinically demanding due to inefficacious treatment that represents an economic burden for healthcare systems. In Europe, approximately 7 million people are diagnosed with untreated wounds, leading to a cost between 6.000€ and 10.000€ per patient/year. In the United States of America, 1.5 million people over 65 years old suffer from chronic wounds. A promising therapeutic strategy is the use of exogenous growth factors because they are decreased at the wound site, limiting the recovery of the skin. Insulin is one of the cheapest growth factors in the market able to accelerate the re-epithelialization and stimulate angiogenesis and cell migration. However, the effectiveness of topical insulin in wound healing is hampered by the proteases in the wound bed. The encapsulation into nanoparticles improves its stability in the wound, providing adhesion to the mucosal surface and allowing its sustained release. The aim of this review is to perform a standing point about a promising strategy to treat different types of wounds by the topical delivery of insulin-loaded nanocarriers.
- ClockOME: searching for oscillatory genes in early vertebrate developmentPublication . Liber, Marta; Duarte, Guilhermina Isabel dos Santos; Andrade, Raquel Gláucia Varzielas Pego deEmbryo development is a dynamic process regulated in space and time. Cells must integrate biochemical and mechanical signals to generate fully functional organisms, where oscillatory gene expression plays a key role. The embryo molecular clock (EMC) is the best known genetic oscillator active in embryo segmentation, involving genes from the Notch, FGF, and WNT pathways. However, the list of cyclic genes is still incomplete mostly due to the challenges involved with studying periodic systems. Recently, such studies have become more feasible with the development of pseudo-time ordering algorithms that search for candidate oscillatory genes using large transcriptomics datasets sampled without explicit time measurements. This study aims at finding candidate oscillatory genes - ClockOME - active in early chick embryo development. Two Gallus gallus microarray transcriptomics datasets from Presomitic mesoderm (PSM), and one dataset from limb segmentation were gathered from GEO and ArrayExpress. To normalize these data from different experiments, an RData package - FrozenChicken - was developed to apply a frozen Robust MultiArray (fRMA) normalization to the data. Next the datasets were processed with Oscope (a pseudo-time ordering algorithm) to search for candidate periodic genes clustered by similar oscillatory behaviour. The clusters of predicted oscillators were then subject to functional enrichment and interaction network analyses to highlight the biological functions associated with these genes. Oscope predicted three clusters of oscillators: two in PSM (106 and 32 genes), and one in Limb (162 genes). Overall, the genes are associated with regulatory, morphological, and developmental processes. Mesp2, a gene involved with the EMC, was found in this dataset, validating the approach, however, the majority of genes are novel oscillatory candidates, associated with chromatin and transcriptional regulation, as well as protein and oxygen metabolism. The list of candidate oscillators represents a valuable resource for guided experimental validation to discover additional members of the chick EMC. Six genes have been proposed for high-priority experimental validation: SRC, PTCH1, NOTCH2, YAP1, KDR, CTR9.