LLukas22/scidocs huggingface dataset:
The Vacuolar Na+/H+ Antiporter Gene SsNHX1 from the Halophyte Salsola soda Confers Salt Tolerance in Transgenic Alfalfa (Medicago sativa L.)

A putative vacuolar Na+/H+ antiporter gene (SsNHX1) was isolated from the halophyte Salsola soda using the rapid amplification of cDNA ends method. Highly conserved regions of plant vacuolar Na+/H+ antiporter, including amiloride-binding domain, NHE (Na+/H+ exchange) domain, and 12 transmembrane segments, were found in the deduced amino acid sequence of SsNHX1. Multiple alignments of vacuolar Na+/H+ antiporters showed that SsNHX1 shared high identity with other plant vacuolar Na+/H+ antiporters. Phylogenetic relationship analysis indicated that SsNHX1 was clustered into the vacuolar Na+/H+ antiporter group. Taken together, these results suggest that SsNHX1 is a new member of the vacuolar Na+/H+ antiporter family. The effective expression of SsNHX1 in alfalfa (Medicago sativa L.) enhanced the salt tolerance of transgenic alfalfa which could grow in high concentrations of NaCl (up to 400 mM) over 50 days. This was the highest level of salt tolerance reported in transgenic plants. A further analysis of the physiological characteristics of transgenic and wild-type plants, including the Na+ and K+ contents, superoxide dismutase activity, the rate of electrolyte leakage, and the proline content, showed that large amounts of Na+ in the cytoplasm of leaves were transported into vacuoles by the exogenous Na+/H+ antiporter, which averted the toxic effects of Na+ to the cell of transgenic alfalfa.
Early response as predictor of final remission in elderly depressed patients.

BACKGROUND
Several studies have attempted to predict the final response or remission based on improvement during the early course of treatment of major depression. There is however a great variation in cut offs used to define early response and in the optimal week to predict final results.


OBJECTIVE
To compare different cut offs at different time points early in the treatment of elderly depressed patients.


METHOD
A 12 week randomised, controlled trial in 81 elderly inpatients with DSM-IV major depression comparing venlafaxine with nortriptyline. At least 20, 25, 30 or 50% improvement was analysed after 1, 3 and 5 weeks using the Hamilton Depression Rating Scale and the Montgomery Asberg Depression Rating Scale. We plotted sensitivity against 1-specificity and calculated areas under the curve (AUCs).


RESULTS
The highest percentage of correctly classified patients is found using at least 50% decrease as cut off in week 5, with acceptable sensitivity (81.8%) and specificity (87.4%). In week 5, the AUCs were 0.891 (95% CI 0.798-0.984) and 0.866 (95% CI 0.789-0.983) for the HAM-D and MADRS, respectively.


CONCLUSIONS
Combining the results from our study and the other studies addressing this issue, we suggest that the treatment should be changed in the elderly if after 3-4 weeks less than 30% improvement in depression score has been achieved.
Merkel Cell Polyomavirus Small T Antigen mRNA Level Is Increased following In Vivo UV-Radiation

Merkel cell carcinoma (MCC) is a rare but aggressive skin cancer involving Merkel cells. Recently, a new human polyomavirus was implicated in MCC, being present in 80% of the samples analyzed. In virus-positive MCC, the Merkel cell polyomavirus (MCPyV) is clonally integrated into the patients DNA, and carries mutations in its large T antigen, leading to a truncated protein. In non-symptomatic tissue MCPyV can reside at very low levels. MCC is also associated with older age, immunosuppression and sun exposure. However, the link with solar exposure remains unknown, as the precise mechanism and steps involved between time of infection by MCPyV and the development of MCC. We thus investigated the potential impact of solar simulated radiation (SSR) on MCPyV transcriptional activity. We screened skin samples of 20 healthy patients enrolled in a photodermatological protocol based on in vivo-administered 2 and 4 J/cm(2) SSR. Two patients were infected with two new variants of MCPyV, present in their episomal form and RT-QPCR analyses on SSR-irradiated skin samples showed a specific and unique dose-dependent increase of MCPyV small t antigen transcript. A luciferase based in vitro assay confirmed that small t promoter is indeed UV-inducible. These findings demonstrate that solar radiation has an impact on MCPyV mRNA levels that may explain the association between MCC and solar exposure.
BIACORE analysis of histidine-tagged proteins using a chelating NTA sensor chip.

While BIACORE instruments are routinely used for kinetic measurements and for the determination of binding constants, the immobilization of a ligand onto the sensor chip surface has to be individually optimized for every system. We show here that the histidine (His) tag, routinely used in protein purification and in detection is an ideal tag for immobilization, despite the intrinsically low affinity between an immobilized metal ion and the His tag. This is due to strong rebinding effects caused by the high surface density of immobilized Ni2+-nitrilotriacetic acid (NTA) on the chips used here. The immobilization of the ligand can be adjusted to a low level using the same chip, such that mass transport limitation and rebinding of the analyte to the immobilized ligand is minimal. Nine different proteins with different numbers of His tags were tested for stable binding to the Ni2+-NTA surface. Most proteins with one His tag dissociate very rapidly from the Ni2+-NTA surface, and the KD for the interaction between His tag and Ni2+-NTA was estimated to about 10(-6) m at neutral pH. In contrast, two His tags are usually found to be sufficient for stable binding. The kinetics of the chaperonin system of Escherichia coli GroEL and GroES were analyzed as a model using this system and found to be very similar to those obtained with covalently immobilized ligands. The sensor chip can be reused many times, because of the powerful regeneration methods. The ligand can be freshly immobilized after each cycle, thus eliminating potential denaturation upon regeneration as a source of error.
Reporting adverse events—Swedish Registered Nurses experience in a municipal home care context

Aim
To describe how Registered Nurses in a municipal home care context experience adverse event reports.


Design
A qualitative design was used.


Method
Twelve semistructured individual interviews with Registered Nurses in a municipal home care context were collected on two occasions and analysed with qualitative content analysis.


Results
The results show that conflicts exist between being able to trust the managers and their feedback, being loyal to colleagues and retaining professional pride. These are described in the theme "Contradiction" and the three categories: "Awareness"; "Uncertainty"; and "Concealment."
The effectiveness of problem-based learning on development of nursing students' critical thinking: a systematic review and meta-analysis.

OBJECTIVES
The objective of this systematic review and meta-analysis was to estimate the effectiveness of problem-based learning in developing nursing students' critical thinking.


DATA SOURCES
Searches of PubMed, EMBASE, Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature (CINAHL), Proquest, Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials (CENTRAL) and China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) were undertaken to identify randomized controlled trails from 1965 to December 2012, comparing problem-based learning with traditional lectures on the effectiveness of development of nursing students' critical thinking, with no language limitation. The mesh-terms or key words used in the search were problem-based learning, thinking, critical thinking, nursing, nursing education, nurse education, nurse students, nursing students and pupil nurse.


REVIEW METHODS
Two reviewers independently assessed eligibility and extracted data. Quality assessment was conducted independently by two reviewers using the Cochrane Collaboration's Risk of Bias Tool. We analyzed critical thinking scores (continuous outcomes) using a standardized mean difference (SMD) or weighted mean difference (WMD) with a 95% confidence intervals (CIs). Heterogeneity was assessed using the Cochran's Q statistic and I(2) statistic. Publication bias was assessed by means of funnel plot and Egger's test of asymmetry.


RESULTS
Nine articles representing eight randomized controlled trials were included in the meta-analysis. Most studies were of low risk of bias. The pooled effect size showed problem-based learning was able to improve nursing students' critical thinking (overall critical thinking scores SMD=0.33, 95%CI=0.13-0.52, P=0.0009), compared with traditional lectures. There was low heterogeneity (overall critical thinking scores I(2)=45%, P=0.07) in the meta-analysis. No significant publication bias was observed regarding overall critical thinking scores (P=0.536). Sensitivity analysis showed that the result of our meta-analysis was reliable. Most effect sizes for subscales of the California Critical Thinking Dispositions Inventory (CCTDI) and Bloom's Taxonomy favored problem-based learning, while effect sizes for all subscales of the California Critical Thinking Skills Test (CCTST) and most subscales of the Watson-Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal (WCGTA) were inconclusive.


CONCLUSIONS
The results of the current meta-analysis indicate that problem-based learning might help nursing students to improve their critical thinking. More research with larger sample size and high quality in different nursing educational contexts are required.
Editorial - Big Data, Data Science, and Analytics: The Opportunity and Challenge for IS Research

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Physician-pharmacist collaborative care in dyslipidemia management: the perception of clinicians and patients.

BACKGROUND
Collaborative practices allow physicians and pharmacists to comanage pharmacotherapy to maximize the benefits of medication regimens. The Trial to Evaluate an Ambulatory primary care Management program for patients with dyslipidemia (TEAM) study compared the efficacy of a physician-pharmacist collaborative primary care (PPCC) intervention, where pharmacists requested laboratory tests and adjusted medication dosage, to the usual care (UC) for patients under treatment with lipid-lowering medication.


OBJECTIVE
In a qualitative study nested within the TEAM study, the perceptions of physicians, pharmacists, and patients regarding the PPCC model, interprofessional collaboration, and the clinicians' willingness to implement the model in their practice were explored.


METHODS
In the area of Montreal (Quebec, Canada), TEAM study participants assigned to the PPCC group were invited to participate. Individual semistructured interviews with physicians (n=7) and 2 six-member focus groups with pharmacists (n=12) and patients (n=12) were analyzed using a phenomenological approach.


RESULTS
The vast majority of participants reported PPCC was more structured and systematic than the UC they had received previously, wherein physicians prescribe and adjust pharmacotherapy and pharmacists provide the counseling and dispense medications. Many patients felt they received better follow-up and reported being reassured and well informed, making them more inclined to care for themselves better. These feelings were attributed largely to the pharmacists' accessibility and ability to communicate with them easily. Given the physician shortage, physicians perceived interprofessional collaboration as almost inevitable. They considered PPCC to be safe and effective. However, obstacles were also identified. Physicians were concerned that it might alter their special relationship with patients and threaten their overall medical follow-up. Pharmacists felt enthusiastic about their new role, but found PPCC time consuming and thought it might not be applicable to all the patients.


CONCLUSIONS
PPCC model was highly appreciated by patients, and clinicians saw it as beneficial to patients. However, several obstacles still have to be overcome before the model can be implemented in the current health care context.
Another Proof of Clairaut's Theorem

AbstractThis note gives an alternate proof of Clairaut's theorem—that the partial derivatives of a smooth function commute—using the Stone–Weierstrass theorem.
Catecholamine pathway polymorphisms and antidepressant response.

INTRODUCTION
Genes that regulate the catecholamine metabolism pathways are potential targets for research in the antidepressant treatment response. This study was intended to determine whether antidepressant responses to selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) are associated with genetic polymorphisms of the tyrosine or tryptophan gene in Chinese major depressive disorder (MDD) patients.


METHODS
A total of 290 MDD patients were recruited and received a 6-week SSRIs randomized double-blinded treatment. Allele, genotype, and haplotype frequencies were compared between responders and nonresponders in catecholamine genes.


RESULTS
Genotype frequency of the rs1800544 polymorphism in the DRD4 gene was significantly different between responders and nonresponders after false discovery rate correction (P = 0.042). The frequency of the DRD4 rs1800544 CG genotype was significantly higher (P = 0.003) in responders (51.4%) than in nonresponders (35.8%), and patients with the CG genotype showed an 81.7% response rate. In comparison, the response rates were 73.9% and 52.2% in patients with the GG genotype and the CC genotype, respectively. The frequencies of the DRD4 rs1800544 CC and GG genotypes were significantly lower (P = 0.003) in responders (7.7%, 40.9%) than in the nonresponders (19.4%, 44.8%). No significant difference was found between two groups either in genotype or allele frequencies of single nucleotide polymorphisms in the TPH, SLC6A2, SLC6A3, or DRD2 genes. No significant difference was found between two groups in TPH, SLC6A2, SLC6A3, DRD2, orDRD4 gene haplotypes.


DISCUSSION
Polymorphisms of the DRD4 gene appear to be associated with SSRI treatment response in Chinese MDD patients.
Tattooing and body piercing--what motivates you to do it?

BACKGROUND
Body ornamentation is becoming more and more popular, especially among young people.


AIMS
To establish the sociodemographic characteristics of people with tattoos or body piercing and to analyze the motivations for body ornamentation.


METHODS
The questionnaire studies were undertaken in Lodz--one of the largest cities in Poland. The data was collected from a group of 968 people, 476 of whom had a piercing and 492 a permanent tattoo.


RESULTS
Statistical analysis revealed that in the group of people with a tattoo, 36.8% were female and 63.2% were male. Contrary proportions were noted among people with a piercing: 78.8% female and 21.2% male.


CONCLUSIONS
Body piercing is significantly more popular among women while tattooing is more popular in men. Among adolescents, body piercing is performed considerably earlier than tattooing. The main reasons for body ornamenting in the Polish population are the desire to enhance one's individuality and the need to increase sexual attractiveness.
Unsupervised Learning of Depth and Ego-Motion from Monocular Video Using 3D Geometric Constraints

We present a novel approach for unsupervised learning of depth and ego-motion from monocular video. Unsupervised learning removes the need for separate supervisory signals (depth or ego-motion ground truth, or multi-view video). Prior work in unsupervised depth learning uses pixel-wise or gradient-based losses, which only consider pixels in small local neighborhoods. Our main contribution is to explicitly consider the inferred 3D geometry of the whole scene, and enforce consistency of the estimated 3D point clouds and ego-motion across consecutive frames. This is a challenging task and is solved by a novel (approximate) backpropagation algorithm for aligning 3D structures. We combine this novel 3D-based loss with 2D losses based on photometric quality of frame reconstructions using estimated depth and ego-motion from adjacent frames. We also incorporate validity masks to avoid penalizing areas in which no useful information exists. We test our algorithm on the KITTI dataset and on a video dataset captured on an uncalibrated mobile phone camera. Our proposed approach consistently improves depth estimates on both datasets, and outperforms the state-of-the-art for both depth and ego-motion. Because we only require a simple video, learning depth and ego-motion on large and varied datasets becomes possible. We demonstrate this by training on the low quality uncalibrated video dataset and evaluating on KITTI, ranking among top performing prior methods which are trained on KITTI itself.1
A Randomized Population Constructive Heuristic for the Team Orienteering Problem

Email: zettammanal@gmail.com Abstract: The NP-hard (complete) team orienteering problem is a particular vehicle routing problem with the aim of maximizing the profits gained from visiting control points without exceeding a travel cost limit. The team orienteering problem has a number of applications in several fields such as athlete recruiting, technician routing and tourist trip. Therefore, solving optimally the team orienteering problem would play a major role in logistic management. In this study, a novel randomized population constructive heuristic is introduced. This heuristic constructs a diversified initial population for population-based metaheuristics. The heuristics proved its efficiency. Indeed, experiments conducted on the well-known benchmarks of the team orienteering problem show that the initial population constructed by the presented heuristic wraps the best-known solution for 131 benchmarks and good solutions for a great number of benchmarks.
Home Automation and Security System Using Android ADK

Today we are living in 21 st century where automation is playing important role in human life. Home automation allows us to control household appliances like light, door, fan, AC etc. It also provides home security and emergency system to be activated. Home automation not only refers to reduce human efforts but also energy efficiency and time saving. The main objective of home automation and security is to help handicapped and old aged people which will enable them to control home appliances and alert them in critical situations. This paper put forwards the design of home automation and security system using Android ADK. The design is based on a standalone embedded system board Android ADK(Accessory Development Kit) at home. Home appliances are connected to the ADK and communication is established between the ADK and Android mobile device or tablet. The home appliances are connected to the input/output ports of the embedded system board and their status is passed to the ADK. We would develop an authentication to the system for authorized person to access home appliances. The device with low cost and scalable to less modification to the core is much important. It presents the design and implementation of automation system that can monitor and control home appliances via android phone or tablet. Keywords-Home Automation and Security; Arduino; Embedded Systems; Android ADK; Android phone; Tablet
A comparison of linear regression and neural network methods for predicting excess returns on large stocks

Recent studies have shown that there is predictable variation in returns of financial assets over time. We investigate whether the predictive power of the economic and financial variables employed in the above studies can be enhanced if the statistical method of linear regression is replaced by feedforward neural networks with backpropagation of error. A shortcoming of backpropagation networks is that too many free parameters allow the neural network to fit the training data arbitrarily closely resulting in an “overfitted” network. Overfitted networks have poor generalization capabilities. We explore two methods that attempt to overcome this shortcoming by reducing the complexity of the network. The results of our experiments confirm that an “overfitted” network, while making better predictions for within-sample data, makes poor predictions for out-of-sample data. The methods for reducing the complexity of the network, explored in this paper, clearly help improve out-ofsample forecasts. We show that one cannot say that the linear regression forecasts are conditionally efficient with respect to the neural networks forecasts with any degree of confidence. However, one can say that the neural networks forecasts are conditionally efficient with respect to the linear regression forecasts with some confidence.
Effect of baseline or changes in adrenergic activity on clinical outcomes in the beta-blocker evaluation of survival trial.

BACKGROUND
Adrenergic activation is thought to be an important determinant of outcome in subjects with chronic heart failure (CHF), but baseline or serial changes in adrenergic activity have not been previously investigated in a large patient sample treated with a powerful antiadrenergic agent.


METHODS AND RESULTS
Systemic venous norepinephrine was measured at baseline, 3 months, and 12 months in the beta-Blocker Evaluation of Survival Trial (BEST), which compared placebo treatment with the beta-blocker/sympatholytic agent bucindolol. Baseline norepinephrine level was associated with a progressive increase in rates of death or death plus CHF hospitalization that was independent of treatment group. On multivariate analysis, baseline norepinephrine was also a highly significant (P<0.001) independent predictor of death. In contrast, the relation of the change in norepinephrine at 3 months to subsequent clinical outcomes was complex and treatment group-dependent. In the placebo-treated group but not in the bucindolol-treated group, marked norepinephrine increase at 3 months was associated with increased subsequent risks of death or death plus CHF hospitalization. In the bucindolol-treated group but not in the placebo-treated group, the 1st quartile of marked norepinephrine reduction was associated with an increased mortality risk. A likelihood-based method indicated that 18% of the bucindolol group but only 1% of the placebo group were at an increased risk for death related to marked reduction in norepinephrine at 3 months.


CONCLUSIONS
In BEST, a subset of patients treated with bucindolol had an increased risk of death as the result of sympatholysis, which compromised the efficacy of this third-generation beta-blocker.
The effect of insulin-loaded trimethylchitosan nanoparticles on rats with diabetes type I.

OBJECTIVE
The aim of this study was to explore the efficacy of insulin-loaded trimethylchitosan nanoparticles on certain destructive effects of diabetes type one.


MATERIALS AND METHODS
Twenty-five male Wistar rats were randomly divided into three control groups (n=5) and two treatment groups (n=5). The control groups included normal diabetic rats without treatment and diabetic rats treated with the nanoparticles. The treatment groups included diabetic rats treated with the insulin-loaded trimethylchitosan nanoparticles and the diabetic rats treated with trade insulin. The experiment period was eight weeks and the rats were treated for the last two weeks.


RESULT
The livers of the rats receiving both forms of insulin showed less severe microvascular steatosis and fatty degeneration, and ameliorated blood glucose, serum biomarkers, and oxidant/antioxidant parameters with no significant differences. The gene expression of pyruvate kinase could be compensated by both the treatment protocols and the new coated form of insulin could not significantly influence the gene expression of glucokinase (p<0.05). The result of the present study showed the potency of the nanoparticle form of insulin to attenuate hyperglycemia, oxidative stress, and inflammation in diabetes, which indicate the bioavailability of insulin-encapsulated trimethylchitosan nanoparticles.