Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
LATITUDINAL VARIATION FOR TWO ENZYME LOCI AND AN INVERSION POLYMORPHISM IN DROSOPHILA MELANOGASTER FROM CENTRAL AND SOUTH AMERICA

Abstract Many organisms show latitudinal variation for various genetically determined traits. Such clines may involve neutral variation and originate from historical events or their maintenance may be explained by selection. For Drosophila melanogaster, latitudinal variation for allozymes, inversions, and quantitative traits has been found on several continents. We sampled D. melanogaster populations in Panama and along a transect of 40 latitudinal degrees on the west coast of South America. Negative correlations with latitude were found for AdhS and αGpdhF allele frequencies and for the frequency of the cosmopolitan inversion In(2L)t in AdhS αGpdhF chromosomes. A positive correlation existed between wing length and latitude. Significant correlations were found between these traits and climatic variables like temperature and rainfall. The observed clines show considerable resemblance to those found on other continents. Gametic disequilibrium between AdhS and αGpdhF occurred predominantly at higher latitudes and was caused by the presence of In(2L)t. The reasons for the clinal distributions are discussed and it is argued that selection is the most likely explanation. However, the exact nature of the selective force and the interactions of allozymes with each other and with In(2L)t are complex and not fully understood. In tropical regions In(2L)t-containing genotypes have higher fitness than ST/ST and Adh and αGpdh hitchhike with the inversion, but there is also evidence for balancing selection at the Adh locus. Corresponding Editor: E. Zouros
Backpressure-based routing protocol for DTNs

In this paper we consider an alternative, highly agile In this paper we consider an alternative, highly agile approach called backpressure routing for Delay Tolerant Networks (DTN), in which routing and forwarding decisions are made on a per-packet basis. Using information about queue backlogs, random walk and data packet scheduling nodes can make packet routing and forwarding decisions without the notion of end-to-end routes. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first ever implementation of dynamic backpressure routing in DTNs. Simulation results show that the proposed approach has advantages in terms of DTN networks.
Robustness of Ethnocentrism to Changes in Interpersonal Interactions

We use the methods of evolutionary game theory and computational modelling to examine the evolution of ethnocentrism. We show that ethnocentrism evolves in a spatially structured population not only under prisoner's dilemma interactions, but also hawk-dove, assurance, harmony, and leader games. In the case of harmony, ethnocentrism evolves even when defection is irrational. This suggests that the pressure of competing for a common resource (in our model: free space) can produce irrational hostility between groups. The minimal cognitive assumptions in our model also suggest that the ethnocentrism observed in humans and elsewhere in nature has an evolutionary basis that is robust over changes in interaction types.
Deletion of G Protein–Coupled Estrogen Receptor Increases Endothelial Vasoconstriction

Endogenous estrogens mediate protective effects in the cardiovascular system, affecting both endothelium-dependent and endothelium-independent mechanisms. Previous studies have suggested that nonselective estrogen receptor agonists such as endogenous estrogens inhibit endothelium-dependent vasoconstriction; however, the role of estrogen receptors in this response has not yet been clarified. This study investigated whether the intracellular transmembrane G protein–coupled estrogen receptor (GPER) regulates vascular reactivity in mice. Effects of chronic deficiency (using mice lacking the GPER gene) and acute inhibition (using the GPER-selective antagonist G15) on endothelium-dependent and endothelium-independent vascular reactivity, and the effects of GPER deficiency on vascular gene expression and structure were investigated. We found that chronic GPER deficiency is associated with increased endothelial prostanoid-mediated vasoconstriction but has no effect on endothelial nitric oxide bioactivity, gene expression of endothelial nitric oxide synthase and thromboxane prostanoid (TP) receptor, or vascular structure. GPER deletion also increases TP receptor–mediated contraction. Acute GPER blockade enhances endothelium-dependent contractions and reduces endothelial nitric oxide bioactivity. Contractions in response to TP receptor activation are unaffected by G15. In conclusion, this study identifies GPER as the first estrogen receptor with inhibitory activity on endothelium-dependent contractility. These findings may be important for understanding and treating diseases associated with increased endothelial vasoconstrictor prostanoid activity such as hypertension and obesity.
Building and Exploiting Maps in a Telepresence Robotic Application

Robotic telepresence is a promising tool for enhancing remote communications in a variety of applications. It enables a person to embody a robot and interact within a remote place in a direct and natural way. A particular scenario where robotic telepresence demonstrates its advantages is in elder telecare applications in which a caregiver regularly connects to the robots deployed at the apartments of the patients to check their health. Normally, in these cases, the caregiver may encounter additional problems in guiding the robot because s/he is not familiar with the houses. In this paper we describe a procedure to remotely create and to exploit different types of maps for facilitating the guidance of a telepresenc e robot. Our work has been implemented and successfully tested on the Giraff telepresence robot.
Multicategory Classification Using An Extreme Learning Machine for Microarray Gene Expression Cancer Diagnosis

In this paper, the recently developed Extreme Learning Machine (ELM) is used for directing multicategory classification problems in the cancer diagnosis area. ELM avoids problems like local minima, improper learning rate and overfitting commonly faced by iterative learning methods and completes the training very fast. We have evaluated the multicategory classification performance of ELM on three benchmark microarray data sets for cancer diagnosis, namely, the GCM data set, the Lung data set, and the Lymphoma data set. The results indicate that ELM produces comparable or better classification accuracies with reduced training time and implementation complexity compared to artificial neural networks methods like conventional back-propagation ANN, Linder's SANN, and Support Vector Machine methods like SVM-OVO and Ramaswamy's SVM-OVA. ELM also achieves better accuracies for classification of individual categories.
Differentiation of porcine Mycoplasma strains.

SUMMARY: Porcine Mycoplasma strains, previously called ‘swine enzootic pneumonia strains’ are antigenically closely related to Mycoplasma hyorhinis. Other porcine Mycoplasma strains which are culturally and antigenically distinct from M. hyorhinis are more heterogeneous and fall into four serotypes. M. granularum, however, is antigenically unrealted to these strains.
Current concepts in preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD): a molecular biologist's view.

The first clinically applied preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) was reported more than a decade ago and since then PGD has known an exponential growth. This first report described the use of PCR to sex embryos from couples at risk for X-linked diseases. Not surprisingly, in the first years, the development of PCR-based tests led to PGD for well-known monogenic diseases such as cystic fibrosis and thalassaemia. When fluorescent in-situ hybridization (FISH) was introduced it quickly replaced PCR-based methods, which had led to misdiagnoses, for sexing of embryos. FISH was also quickly introduced for aneuploidy screening, which has as its main aim the improvement of IVF results in patients with poor reproductive outcome, and later for PGD in translocation carriers. In this review, PGD for patients with a pre-existing genetic risk will be discussed, i.e. the monogenic diseases and the translocations, as well as different biopsy methods and promising new developments.
Drought tolerance and plasticity in the invasive knapweed Centaurea stoebe s.l. (Asteraceae): effect of populations stronger than those of cytotype and range.

BACKGROUND AND AIMS Spotted knapweed (Centaurea stoebe s.l., Asteraceae) is native to Europe, where it occurs as a diploid (2xEU) and tetraploid cytotype (4xEU), but so far only the tetraploid has been reported in the introduced range in North America (4xNA). In previous studies, significant range shifts have been found towards drier climates in 4xEU compared with 2xEU, and in 4xNA when compared with the native range. In addition, 4x plants showed thicker leaves and reduced specific leaf area compared with 2x plants, suggesting higher drought tolerance in 4x plants. It is thus hypothesized that the 4x cytotype might be better pre-adapted to drought than the 2x, and the 4xNA better adapted than the 4xEU due to post-introduction selection. METHODS Plants of the three geocytotypes (2xEU, 4xEU and 4xNA ), each represented by six populations, were subjected to three water treatments over 6 weeks in a greenhouse experiment. Plasticity and reaction norms of above- and below-ground biomasses and their ratio, survival rate, stomatal conductance and carbon isotope discrimination were analysed using linear and generalized linear mixed effect models. KEY RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONS Above-ground and total biomasses of European tetraploids were slightly less affected by drought than those of European diploids, and 4xEU plants maintained higher levels of stomatal conductance under moderate drought than 4xNA plants, thus supporting the pre-adaptation but not the post-introduction evolution hypothesis. Plasticity indexes for most of the traits were generally higher in 2xEU and 4xNA than in 4xEU plants, but these differences were not or were only marginally significant. Interestingly, the effect of population origin and its interaction with treatment was more important than the effects of geocytotype and range. Population means for the control treatment showed several significant associations either with latitude or some aspect of climatic data, suggesting evolution of local adaptations, especially within the 2xEU and 4xEU geocytotypes.
Maternally Inherited npm2 mRNA Is Crucial for Egg Developmental Competence in Zebrafish1

ABSTRACT The molecular mechanisms underlying and determining egg developmental competence remain poorly understood in vertebrates. Nucleoplasmin (Npm2) is one of the few known maternal effect genes in mammals, but this maternal effect has never been demonstrated in nonmammalian species. A link between developmental competence and the abundance of npm2 maternal mRNA in the egg was previously established using a teleost fish model for egg quality. The importance of maternal npm2 mRNA for egg developmental competence remains unknown in any vertebrate species. In the present study, we aimed to characterize the contribution of npm2 maternal mRNA to early developmental success in zebrafish using a knockdown strategy. We report here the oocyte-specific expression of npm2 and maternal inheritance of npm2 mRNA in zebrafish eggs. The knockdown of the protein translated from this maternal mRNA results in developmental arrest before the onset of epiboly and subsequent embryonic death, a phenotype also observed in embryos lacking zygotic transcription. Npm2 knockdown also results in impaired transcription of the first-wave zygotic genes. Our results show that npm2 is also a maternal effect gene in a nonmammalian vertebrate species and that maternally inherited npm2 mRNA is crucial for egg developmental competence. We also show that de novo protein synthesis from npm2 maternal mRNA is critical for developmental success beyond the blastula stage and required for zygotic genome activation. Finally, our results suggest that npm2 maternal mRNA is an important molecular factor of egg quality in fish and possibly in all vertebrates.
Streaming Property Testing of Visibly Pushdown Languages

In the context of formal language recognition, we demonstrate the superiority of streaming property testers against streaming algorithms and property testers, when they are not combined. Initiated by Feigenbaum et al., a streaming property tester is a streaming algorithm recognizing a language under the property testing approximation: it must distinguish inputs of the language from those that are e-far from it, while using the smallest possible memory (rather than limiting its number of input queries). Our main result is a streaming e-property tester for visibly pushdown languages (Vpl) with memory space poly((log n)/e). Our construction is done in three steps. First, we simulate a visibly pushdown automaton in one pass using a stack of small height but whose items can be of linear size. In a second step, those items are replaced by small sketches. Those sketches rely on a notion of suffix-sampling we introduce. This sampling is the key idea for taking benefit of both streaming algorithms and property testers in the third step. Indeed, the last step relies on a (non-streaming) property tester for weighted regular languages based on a previous tester by Alon et al. This tester can directly be used for streaming testing special cases of instances of Vpl that are already hard for both streaming algorithms and property testers. We then use it to decide the correctness of completed items, given their sketches, before removing them from the stack.
Marine Group II Archaea, potentially important players in the global ocean carbon cycle

Marine Group (MG) I (currently known as Thaumarchaeota) and MG II Archaea were first reported over two decades ago. While significant progress has been made on MG I microbiology and ecology, the progress on MG II has been noticeably slower. The common understanding is that while MG I mainly function as chemolithoautotrophs and occur predominantly in the deep ocean, MG II reside mostly in the photic zone and live heterotrophically. Studies to date have shown that MG II are abundant in the marine aquatic environment and display great seasonal and spatial variation and phylogenetic diversity. They also show unique patterns of organic carbon degradation and their energy requirements may be augmented by light in the photic zone. However, no pure culture of MG II has been obtained and thus their precise ecological role remains elusive.
Host range studies with an Australian isolate of Ascochyta rabiei

In glasshouse tests, 20 plant species were inoculated with an isolate of Ascochyta rabiei (DAR 71767) obtained from chickpea in South Australia, and maintained under humid conditions for 72 h at 20 ± 5°C. The isolate was pathogenic to chickpea and four common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris) cultivars (Brown-boy, CH-190-7D, Cran-34 and Rain-bird). None of the other plant species was infected by the pathogen. The pathogen was re-isolated from the affected common bean cultivars and pathogenicity to chickpea was confirmed.
Current Frontiers in Computer Go

This paper presents the recent technical advances in Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS) for the game of Go, shows the many similarities and the rare differences between the current best programs, and reports the results of the Computer Go event organized at the 2009 IEEE International Conference on Fuzzy Systems (FUZZ-IEEE2009), in which four main Go programs played against top level humans. We see that in 9 × 9, computers are very close to the best human level, and can be improved easily for the opening book; whereas in 19 × 19, handicap 7 is not enough for the computers to win against top level professional players, due to some clearly understood (but not solved) weaknesses of the current algorithms. Applications far from the game of Go are also cited. Importantly, the first ever win of a computer against a 9th Dan professional player in 9 × 9 Go occurred in this event.
Response of children to Neisseria meningitidis polysaccharide vaccines.

Children aged two to six years were inoculated with various amounts of group C Neisseria meningitidis polysaccharide vaccine. Doses of 5, 25, and 50 tg were less satisfactory in eliciting antibody than larger doses of 100 or 250 [tg. Antibody response was directly related to age. Children in three of the vaccinated groups were inoculated again eight months later with 50 ctg of both group A and group C vaccines. Booster responses occurred in all groups, and those who received the highest doses originally still had the greatest amount of antibody to group C N. meningitidis. All responded to group A vaccine. The hemagglutination method did not offer sufficient sensitivity in detection of antibody, but the radioimmunoassay procedure was satisfactory. However, even with this sensitive technique, the response in children was of lower magnitude than that in adults given smaller doses of vaccine.
Clinical pregnancy following blastomere biopsy and PGD for a reciprocal translocation carrier: analysis of meiotic outcomes and embryo quality in two IVF cycles

A couple were referred for preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) following diagnosis of a reciprocal translocation in the female partner: 46,XX,t(14;22)(q11.2;q13.3). PGD was carried out using fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) with probes specific for the translocated and centric segments of chromosome 22. An initial cycle was unsuccessful, producing 11 embryos for biopsy, only one of which, when followed up on day 4, yielded more than 10 nuclei (median 7.5, n=10). In addition, five of the embryos showed mosaic or chaotic chromosome constitutions; some of these embryos had fragmented or multilobed abnormal nuclei, hindering interpretation of the FISH signals. The single embryo transferred did not result in a pregnancy. A second cycle, using a revised protocol, produced 10 embryos, three of which were transferred, resulting in an ongoing singleton pregnancy. All the remaining embryos yielded 12 to 23 nuclei by day 4 (median 17, n=7). Apart from some tetraploid nuclei, only one embryo showed mosaicism. The significance of the changes in protocol leading to the successful outcome is discussed, and the pattern of meiotic segregation products is analysed and compared with other previous reports of reciprocal translocations. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Speech performance and oral impairments with lingual and labial orthodontic appliances in the first stage of fixed treatment.

OBJECTIVES To compare (1) speech performance based on an auditive analysis and sonagraphy and (2) levels of oral impairment between fixed lingual and labial orthodontic appliances. MATERIALS AND METHODS Thirty-four patients with Class I division 1 malocclusion and moderate crowding of upper teeth were distributed randomly into two groups. Seventeen patients in group A (mean age: 20.6 years; standard deviation [SD]: 2.9 years) were treated with fixed lingual appliances (Stealth®, AO, Sheboygan, Wisc), whereas 17 patients in group B (mean age: 21.8 years; SD: 3.3 years) were treated with conventional fixed labial appliances. Speech performance was tested using spectrographic analysis of fricative /s/ sound before, immediately after (T1), 1 month after, and 3 months after bracket placement. The levels of oral impairment were assessed using standardized questionnaires. RESULTS A significant deterioration in articulation was recorded at all assessment times in group A but only at T1 in group B. Significant intergroup differences were recorded at all assessment times (P < .001). Speech difficulties were significantly higher in the lingual brackets group after 1 month of bracket placement (P < .001). Soft tissue irritation and chewing difficulty were significantly higher in the lingual appliance group after 24 hours of bracket placement (P < .001). CONCLUSIONS The lingual appliance is more problematic than the labial one in terms of speech articulation. Although patients with both appliances suffered from different degrees of oral impairment, patients with lingual appliances had more untoward effects, particularly during the first month of treatment.
Compiler and Runtime Analysis for Efficient Communication in Data Intensive Applications

Abstract: Processing and analyzing large volumes of data plays an increasingly important role in many domains of scientific research. We are developing a compiler that processes data intensive applications written in a dialect of Java and compiles them for efficient execution on distributed memory parallel machines. In this paper, we focus on the problem of generating correct and efficient communication for data intensive applications. We present static analysis techniques for 1) extracting a global reduction function from a data parallel loop, and 2) determining if a subscript function is monotonic. We also present a runtime technique for reducing the volume of communication during the global reduction phase. We have experimented with two data intensive applications to evaluate the efficacy of our techniques. Our results show that 1) our techniques for extracting global reduction functions and establishing monotonicity of subscript functions can successfully handle these applications, 2) significant reduction in communication volume and execution times is achieved through our runtime analysis technique, 3) runtime communication analysis is critical for achieving speedups on parallel configurations.
Antibacterial activity of Glycyrrhiza glabra against oral pathogens: an in vitro study

Objectives: Oral infections and dental caries are still considered as serious public health problems and inflict a costly burden to health care services around the world and especially in developing countries. Materials and Methods: In the present study, we evaluated the antibacterial activity of Glycyrrhiza glabra (G. glabra) against oral pathogens by diffusion methods and determined the minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) by both broth and Agar dilution methods and minimum bactericidal concentration (MBC) by broth dilution methods. Results: In this study, G. glabra extract showed good antibacterial activity against six bacteria. No strain in this study showed resistance against this extract. Conclusion: G. glabrais suggested as an appropriate candidate to help us in order to control dental caries and endodontic infections.
Biguanides and Sulfonylureas as Combination Therapy in NIDDM

Oral combination therapy with biguanides (metformin) and sulfonylureas is discussed. The rationale for the use of this combination is based on the different sites of action of the two kinds of drugs and the possibility for obtaining additive or potentiating effects and reduced side effects. The clinical usefulness of chlorpropamide and glyburide in combination with metformin has been demonstrated in some clinical trials. The combination may provide satisfactory glycemic control for several years, and possibly insulin therapy can be postponed or even avoided. No special safety problems are encountered with the use of the combination other than those attributed to the use of metformin or sulfonylurea alone, i.e., lactic acidosis and hypoglycemia, respectively. The lethality risks of these associated conditions are comparable. It is concluded that more data are needed to evaluate the full clinical potential and the mechanism of action of oral combination therapy.