ALBERT

Description: Oil extraction platforms are potential sources of oil spills. For this reason, an oil spill forecasting system was set up to support the management of emergencies from the oil fields in the Italian seas. The system provides ready-to-use products to the relevant response agencies and optimizes the anti-pollution resources by assessing hazards and risks related to this issue. The forecasting system covers seven working oil platforms in the Sicily Channel and middle/low Adriatic Sea. It is composed of a numerical chain involving nested ocean models from regional to coastal spatial scales and an oil spill model. The system provides two online services, one automatic and a second dedicated to possible real emergencies or exercises on risk preparedness and responding. The automatic service produces daily short-term simulations of hypothetical oil spill dispersion, transport, and weathering processes from each extraction platform. Products, i.e., risk maps, animations, and a properly called bulletin, are available on a dedicated web-portal. The hazard estimations are computed by performing geo-statistical analysis on the daily forecasts database. The second service is activated in near-real-time producing oil spill simulations for the following 48 h.

Description: RIG-I-like receptors (retinoic acid-inducible gene-I-like receptors, or RLRs) are family of pattern-recognition receptors for RNA viruses, consisting of three members: retinoic acid-inducible gene I (RIG-I), melanoma differentiation-associated gene 5 (MDA5) and laboratory of genetics and physiology 2 (LGP2). To understand the role of RLRs in bird evolution, we performed molecular evolutionary analyses on the coding genes of avian RLRs using filtered predicted coding sequences from 62 bird species. Among the three RLRs, conservation score and dN/dS (ratio of nonsynonymous substitution rate over synonymous substitution rate) analyses indicate that avian MDA5 has the highest conservation level in the helicase domain but a lower level in the caspase recruitment domains (CARDs) region, which differs from mammals; LGP2, as a whole gene, has a lower conservation level than RIG-I or MDA5. We found evidence of positive selection across all bird lineages in RIG-I and MDA5 but only on the stem lineage of Galliformes in LGP2, which could be related to the loss of RIG-I in Galliformes. Analyses also suggest that selection relaxation may have occurred in LGP2 during the middle of bird evolution and the CARDs region of MDA5 contains many positively selected sites, which might explain its conservation level. Spearman’s correlation test indicates that species-to-ancestor dN/dS of RIG-I shows a negative correlation with endogenous retroviral abundance in bird genomes, suggesting the possibility of interaction between immunity and endogenous retroviruses during bird evolution.