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Pietrini, A.

Publications and source records attributed to Pietrini, A..

2 recordsLinked to original sources

From Chewing to Chirping: The Misophonia Audiovisual Trigger Archive (MATA)

Misophonia is an emerging condition in which everyday sounds, such as chewing, sniffing, or tapping, evoke disproportionately intense emotional and physiological responses. Despite growing recognition of its clinical significance, progress in understanding misophonia has been hindered by the limited availability of standardized and ecologically valid stimulus sets. Here, we present a large, open-access archive of 1,300 five-second audiovisual clips spanning 12 empirically validated categories of misophonic triggers. This resource extends beyond orofacial movement-related sounds to include a diverse array of real-world triggers, and its audiovisual format enables systematic investigation of how visual context shapes responses to misophonic sounds. The archive lowers the barrier for laboratories to study misophonia, promotes reproducibility across sites, and offers applications ranging from crowdsourced assessments of population-level sensitivities to machine learning approaches for automated trigger detection. By providing the largest and most diverse audiovisual misophonia stimulus repository to date, this resource is designed to accelerate mechanistic, clinical, and translational research on misophonia and related sensory-emotional phenomena.

neuroscience↗

Electrospray sample injection for single-particle imaging with X-ray lasers

The possibility of imaging single proteins constitutes an exciting challenge for X-ray lasers. Despite encouraging results on large particles, imaging small particles has proven to be difficult for two reasons: not quite high enough pulse intensity from currently available X-ray lasers and, as we demonstrate here, contamination of the aerosolised molecules by non-volatile contaminants in the solution. The amount of contamination on the sample depends on the initial droplet-size during aerosolisation. Here we show that with our electrospray injector we can decrease the size of aerosol droplets and demonstrate virtually contaminant-free sample delivery of organelles, small virions, and proteins. The results presented here, together with the increased performance of next generation X-ray lasers, constitute an important stepping stone towards the ultimate goal of protein structure determination from imaging at room temperature and high temporal resolution.

biophysics↗