Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Regulation of CYP2A5 Gene by the Transcription Factor Nuclear Factor (Erythroid-Derived 2)-Like 2

We have previously shown that cadmium, a metal that alters cellular redox status, induces CYP2A5 expression in nuclear factor (erythroid-derived 2)-like 2 wild-type (Nrf2+/+) mice but not in the knockout (Nrf2–/–) mice. In the present studies, the potential role of Nrf2 in cadmium-mediated regulation of Cyp2a5 gene was investigated in mouse primary hepatocytes. Cadmium chloride (CdCl2) caused a time-dependent induction of the CYP2A5 at mRNA, protein, and activity levels, with a substantial increase observed within 3 h of exposure. Immunoblotting showed cadmium-dependent nuclear accumulation of Nrf2 within 1 h of exposure. Cotransfection of mouse primary hepatocytes with Cyp2a5 promoter-luciferase reporter plasmids and Nrf2 expression plasmid resulted in a 3-fold activation of Cyp2a5 promoter-mediated transcription relative to the control. Deletion analysis of the promoter localized the Nrf2 responsive region to an area from –2656 to –2339 base pair. Computer-based sequence analysis identified two putative stress response elements (StRE) within the region at positions –2514 to –2505 and –2386 to –2377. Chromatin immunoprecipitation and electrophoretic mobility shift assays showed that interaction of the more proximal StRE with Nrf2 was stimulated by CdCl2. Finally, site-directed mutagenesis of the proximal StRE in Cyp2a5 promoter-luciferase reporter plasmids abolished Nrf2-mediated induction. Collectively, the results indicate that Nrf2 activates Cyp2a5 transcription by directly binding to the StRE in the 5′-flanking region of the gene. This acknowledges Cyp2a5 as the first phase I xenobiotic-metabolizing gene identified under the control of the StRE-Nrf2 pathway with a potential role in adaptive response to cellular stress.
Response to serotonin reuptake inhibitors in OCD is not influenced by common CYP2D6 polymorphisms

The cornerstone of pharmacotherapy for OCD is serotonin reuptake inhibition, either with clomipramine or with selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs). In spite of the success of serotonin reuptake inhibiting drugs, nearly half of OCD patients do not respond to treatment. Treatment response may be affected by genetic polymorphisms of the P450 metabolic system. The four most common enzyme-activity reducing polymorphisms of the P450 CYP2D6 enzyme were determined in 91 outpatients with primary OCD according to DSM-IV criteria, receiving dosages titrated upward to 300 mg/day of venlafaxine or 60 mg/day of paroxetine, using a fixed dosing schedule. Our results show that the investigated CYP2D6 polymorphisms are not a decisive factor in the response to paroxetine and venlafaxine treatment in OCD in spite of their highly significant effect on the blood levels of these medicines.
Ceramide synthesis in the endoplasmic reticulum can permeabilize mitochondria to proapoptotic proteins Published, JLR Papers in Press, December 11, 2007.

Increased mitochondrial ceramide levels are associated with the initiation of apoptosis. There is evidence that ceramide is causal. Thus, the conversion of the precursor, dihydroceramide, to ceramide by the enzyme dihydroceramide desaturase may be important in preparing the cell for apoptosis. Ceramide can initiate apoptosis by permeabilizing the mitochondrial outer membrane to apoptosis-inducing proteins. However, the mitochondrion's ability to produce ceramide may be limited by its proteome. Here, we show that ceramide synthesized in isolated mammalian endoplasmic reticulum (ER) vesicles from either C8-dihydroceramide or sphingosine to produce long-chain ceramide can transfer to isolated mitochondria. The rate of transfer is consistent with a simple collision model. The transfer of the long-chain ceramide is faster than expected for an uncatalyzed process. Sufficient ceramide is transferred to permeabilize the outer membrane to cytochrome c and adenylate kinase. The mitochondria-associated membranes, ER-like membranes that are tightly associated with isolated mitochondria, can produce enough ceramide to permeabilize the outer membrane transiently. Thus, this ceramide exchange obviates the need for a complete ceramide de novo pathway in mitochondria to increase ceramide levels to the critical value required for functional changes, such as ceramide channel self-assembly followed by protein release.
MIS Protocol for Secure Connection and Fast Handover on Wireless LAN

MIS (mobile Internet services) architecture is designed for secure connection and fast handover with wireless LAN. This architecture consists of three protocols, MISP (mobile Internet services protocol), MISAUTHP (mobile Internet services authentication protocol) and MIS MobilelP, and two kinds of servers, authentication servers and home agent, base routers and mobile nodes. MISP is a protocol designed for authentication, IP address assignments, session key exchanges and various negotiations between mobile nodes and base routers with one-round-trip packet exchange after a mobile node receives beacons. MISP quickly establishes link between mobile nodes and base routers. MISAUTHP is a protocol for authentication between authentication servers and base routers. MISAUTHP can authenticate mobile nodes and base routers with single exchange of packets too, MIS MobilelP is a mobility support protocol for IPv4. This is a subset of RFC2002 MobileIP. We mainly describe about MISP, MISAUTHP and comparison between MISP with MISAUTHP and IEEE802.11 with IEEE802.1x
Advances in Brief Mutations in the Retinoblastoma-related Gene RB 2 / p 130 in Primary Nasopharyngeal Carcinoma 1

Nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) is an endemic cancer in southern China and northern Africa, and its pathogenesis is not yet well defined at the molecular level. Although the involvement of p53 and of the retinoblastoma gene (RB/p105) in NPC has been well studied, there is paucity of mutational data regarding the retinoblastoma-related geneRB2/p130in primary tumors and particularly in NPC. We have shown previously that RB2/p130could be rearranged in a nasopharyngeal cell line. In the present study, we screened by single-strand conformation polymorphism and sequence analysis the retinoblastoma-related gene RB2/p130for mutations within exons 19–22. Mutations in theRB2/p130gene were detected in 3 of 10 primary human NPCs from Northern Africa (30%). These findings, along with previous data showing that genetic replacement of RB2/p130 restores a normal growth pathway in the nasopharyngeal cell line Hone-1, strengthen the hypothesis that genetic changes of RB2/p130may be involved in the development and/or progression of nasopharyngeal cancer and suggest thatRB2/p130could be considered a tumor suppressor gene and may be a candidate for novel gene therapeutic approaches for NPC.
On-Line Metrology with Conoscopic Holography: Beyond Triangulation

On-line non-contact surface inspection with high precision is still an open problem. Laser triangulation techniques are the most common solution for this kind of systems, but there exist fundamental limitations to their applicability when high precisions, long standoffs or large apertures are needed, and when there are difficult operating conditions. Other methods are, in general, not applicable in hostile environments or inadequate for on-line measurement. In this paper we review the latest research in Conoscopic Holography, an interferometric technique that has been applied successfully in this kind of applications, ranging from submicrometric roughness measurements, to long standoff sensors for surface defect detection in steel at high temperatures.
Fact-Free Learning

People may be surprised by noticing certain regularities that hold in existing knowledge they have had for some time. That is, they may learn without getting new factual information. We argue that this can be partly explained by computational complexity. We show that, given a database, finding a small set of variables that obtain a certain value of R^2 is computationally hard, in the sense that this term is used in computer science. We discuss some of the implications of this result and of fact-free learning in general.
Revisiting the Factors that Engender Trust of Global Systems Engineers

Trust is generally considered a key element of effective and productive distributed team collaborations. In this paper, we report the results of our investigation into the factors that engender trust in Global Systems Engineering (GSE) teams in five multinational organizations. We extend our previous work by conducting a new field study focused solely on factors that engender trust and identify the implications of these factors. Our work provides significant contributions to practitioners, researchers and tool developers. Managers working in study field sites have confirmed that our findings will be used to inform future team management strategies. Our results can also be used to structure and guide future research in this field, as it identifies gaps in existing literature. Finally, our findings can be used to inform the development of future tools that aim to support collaborative work in general and GSE teams specifically.
Bounds and extremal microstructures for two-component composites: a unified treatment based on the translation method

The overall energy or stiffness of an elastic composite depends on the microgeometry. Recently, there has been a lot of work on ‘extremal microstructures’ for elastic composites, for example microstructures which minimize the elastic energy at a given macroscopic strain. However, most attention has been focused on composites made of the elastically isotropic component materials. Breaking with this tradition, we consider composites made of two fully anisotropic phases. Our approach, based on the well-known translation method, provides not only the energy bound but also necessary and sufficient conditions for optimality in terms of the local strain field. These optimality conditions enable us to look for optimal microstructures in a more systematic way than before. They also provide clarification of the relations between different problems, for example bounding effective conductivity of a conducting composite versus minimizing strain energy of an elastic composite. Our analysis shows that anisotropy of the constituent materials is very important in determining optimal microgeometries. Some constructions of extremal matrixinclusion composites made from isotropic components cease to be available when the matrix material is anisotropic, even when the degree of anisotropy is small. Most of our analysis is restricted to two space dimensions.
A direct comparison of errorless and errorful therapy for object name relearning in Alzheimer's disease

Developing rehabilitation techniques to combat cognitive decline is a key goal of healthcare strategies aimed at promoting increased longevity and better quality of life for individuals with Alzheimer's disease (AD). In AD, problems with episodic memory and word-finding greatly affect everyday life and, as such, these symptoms provide a clear clinical target for therapeutic interventions. Errorless learning (EL) has been proposed as a particularly effective technique for relearning in individuals with memory dysfunction, including AD. However, EL learning has rarely been directly contrasted with other more traditional trial-and-error techniques (errorful learning or EF) in individuals with AD, especially in the context of alleviating word-finding problems. In the current study, we directly contrasted the therapeutic gains of an EL learning paradigm (consisting of reading/repetition of object names) with an EF learning technique (comprised of phonemic/orthographic cueing) in eight mild to moderate AD patients with pronounced anomia. Both techniques were administered concurrently in sessions run twice a week over a five-week period. Therapeutic gains were assessed at one week and five weeks post-intervention using confrontation naming. Our results suggest that, both at the group and individual patient level, EL and EF techniques were equally effective. Correlational analyses of overall therapy gains and background assessments of patient neuropsychology revealed that individuals with better scores on measures of semantic memory, pre-intervention naming, and recognition memory demonstrated larger therapy gains. No individual patient showed a significant advantage for EL over EF learning, however, for patients that showed a numerical advantage in this direction. These results suggest that either EL or EF therapy can be used to alleviate word-finding problems in AD.
Fuzzy model for estimating induction dose for general anesthesia

At present, anesthetist estimates initial anesthetic dose required to produce induction in general anesthesia. This paper proposes a fuzzy model for deciding this dose based on patient data (age, gender, height and weight) and computes the dose by defining IF-THEN rules between age and body surface area. Deviation of predicted initial anesthetic dose from the actual dose given by the anesthetist to patients (9) was found to be within ± 7%.
Nutrigenetics and Prostate Cancer: 2011 and Beyond

Background/Aims: Prostate cancer runs in families and shows a clear dietary involvement. Until recently, the key risk gene(s) have proved elusive. We summarise current understandings of nutrient-gene interactions in prostate cancer risk and progression. Methods: A MEDLINE-based literature search was conducted. Results: Hypothesis-directed candidate gene approaches provide plausible, albeit statistically weak, nutrient-gene interactions. These are based on early understandings of factors likely to impact on carcinogenesis, including both nutrient and genetic effects on androgen biosynthesis and action, xenobiotic metabolism, DNA damage and DNA repair. Non-hypothesis-directed genome-wide association studies provide much stronger evidence for other genes, not hitherto suspected for involvement. Although only a few of these have been formally tested for dietary associations in well-designed epidemiologic studies, the nature of many of the genes suggests that their activity may be regulated by nutrients. These effects may not only be relevant to prostate cancer susceptibility, but also to disease progression. Conclusions: It will be important to move beyond studying single nucleotide polymorphisms, into more complex chromosomal rearrangements and to epigenetic changes. For future progress, large international cohorts will not only need to provide proof of individual nutrient-gene interactions, but also to relate these to more complex nutrient-gene-gene interactions, as parts of pathways. Bioinformatics and biostatistics will be increasingly important tools in nutrigenetic studies beyond 2011.
Combinatorial Multicollision Attacks on Generalized Iterated Hash Functions

We develop a word combinatorial approach to multi-collisions in generalized iterated hash functions. The work rests on the notable discoveries of A. Joux and on generalizations provided by M. Nandi and D. Stinson as well as J. Hoch and A. Shamir. New results and improvements to some previously published ones are produced. We also wish to unify the diverse notations and bring the results together by applying concepts of combinatorics on words. A multicollision attack method informally described by Hoch and Shamir is presented as a statistical procedure and analyzed in detail.
Optimal Management and Sizing of Energy Storage Under Dynamic Pricing for the Efficient Integration of Renewable Energy

We address the optimal energy storage management and sizing problem in the presence of renewable energy and dynamic pricing associated with electricity from the grid. We formulate the problem as a stochastic dynamic program that aims to minimize the long-run average cost of electricity used and investment in storage, if any, while satisfying all the demand. We model storage with ramp constraints, conversion losses, dissipation losses and an investment cost. We prove the existence of an optimal storage management policy under mild assumptions and show that it has a dual threshold structure. Under this policy, we derive structural results, which indicate that the marginal value from storage decreases with its size and that the optimal storage size can be computed efficiently. We prove a rather surprising result, as we characterize the maximum value of storage under constant prices and i.i. d. net-demand processes: if the storage is a profitable investment, then the ratio of the amortized cost of storage to the constant price is less than 1/4. We further perform sensitivity analysis on the size of optimal storage and its gain via a case study. Finally, with a computational study on real data, we demonstrate significant savings with energy storage.
Precoding Design for MIMO Relay Multicasting

In this paper, we consider a two-hop multicasting multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) relay system where one transmitter multicasts common message to multiple receivers with the aid of a relay node, and all nodes are equipped with multiple antennas. Joint transmit and relay precoding design problems are investigated for multicasting multiple data streams based on two design criteria. In the first scheme, we aim at minimizing the maximal mean-squared error (MSE) of the signal waveform estimation among all receivers subjecting to power constraints at the transmitter and the relay node. This problem is highly nonconvex with matrix variables and the exactly optimal solution is very hard to obtain. We develop an iterative algorithm to jointly optimize the transmitter, relay, and receiver matrices through solving convex subproblems. By exploiting the optimal structure of the relay precoding matrix, we then propose a low complexity solution which decouples the optimization of the transmitter and relay matrices under the (moderately) high first-hop signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) assumption. In the second scheme, we propose a total transmission power minimization strategy subjecting to quality-of-service (QoS) constraints. By using the optimal structure of the relay precoding matrix and the (moderately) high first-hop SNR assumption, we show that this problem can be solved using the semidefinite programming (SDP) technique. Numerical simulations demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms. Interestingly, we show that for the special case of single data stream multicasting, the relay precoding matrix optimization problem can be equivalently converted to the transmit beamforming problem for single-hop multicasting systems.
Morphology analysis of physiological signals using hidden Markov models

We describe a clustering algorithm based on continuous hidden Markov models (HMM) to automatically classify both electrocardiogram (ECG) and intracranial pressure (ICP) beats based on their morphology. The algorithm detects, classifies and labels each beat based on morphology. In order to avoid the numerical problems with classical expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm we apply a novel method of simulated annealing (SIM) for HMM optimization. We show that better results are achieved using simulated annealing approach.
Senescence and programmed cell death in plants: polyamine action mediated by transglutaminase

Research on polyamines (PAs) in plants laps a long way of about 50 years and many roles have been discovered for these aliphatic cations. PAs regulate cell division, differentiation, organogenesis, reproduction, dormancy-break and senescence, homeostatic adjustments in response to external stimuli and stresses. Nevertheless, the molecular mechanisms of their multiple activities are still matter of research. PAs are present in free and bound forms and interact with several important cell molecules; some of these interactions may occur by covalent linkages catalyzed by transglutaminase (TGase), giving rise to “cationization” or cross-links among specific proteins. Senescence and programmed cell death (PCD) can be delayed by PAs; in order to re-interpret some of these effects and to obtain new insights into their molecular mechanisms, their conjugation has been revised here. The TGase-mediated interactions between proteins and PAs are the main target of this review. After an introduction on the characteristics of this enzyme, on its catalysis and role in PCD in animals, the plant senescence and PCD models in which TGase has been studied, are presented: the corolla of naturally senescing or excised flowers, the leaves senescing, either excised or not, the pollen during self-incompatible pollination, the hypersensitive response and the tuber storage parenchyma during dormancy release. In all the models examined, TGase appears to be involved by a similar molecular mechanism as described during apoptosis in animal cells, even though several substrates are different. Its effect is probably related to the type of PCD, but mostly to the substrate to be modified in order to achieve the specific PCD program. As a cross-linker of PAs and proteins, TGase is an important factor involved in multiple, sometimes controversial, roles of PAs during senescence and PCD.
Fire Endurance of Fiber-Reinforced Polymer-Confined Concrete Columns

The use of fiber-reinforced polymers (FRPs) for strengthening and rehabilitating reinforced concrete structures has been the subject of numerous research projects and has seen widespread implementation in recent years. Very little information is available on the behavior of FRP materials at high temperatures, however, and this is a primary factor discouraging the widespread application of FRP wraps in buildings where fire-related issues are critical design requirements. This paper presents the results of two full-scale fire endurance tests on circular FRP-wrapped reinforced concrete columns insulated with different thicknesses of fire insulation. Test data are compared with the predictions of a numerical fire simulation model, and the model is shown to adequately predict the observed thermal and structural response. It is demonstrated that, while currently available infrastructure composites are particularly sensitive to elevated temperatures, appropriately designed FRP-wrapped reinforced concrete columns are capable of achieving the required fire endurances.
Energy-Based Seismic Risk Evaluation of Tall Reinforced Concrete Building in Vancouver, BC, Canada, under Mw9 Megathrust Subduction Earthquakes and Aftershocks

This paper presents a seismic performance evaluation framework for reinforced concrete (RC) buildings, comprising of shear-walls and gravity frames. The evaluation is undertaken within a performance-based earthquake engineering framework by considering regional seismicity and site-specific ground motion selection. Different engineering demand parameters (EDPs), i.e. maximum inter-story drift ratio and energy-based damage index, are considered as performance indicators. Various prediction models of EDPs are developed by considering four ground motion intensity measures (IMs), i.e. spectral acceleration at the fundamental period, Arias intensity, cumulative absolute velocity, and significant duration of ground motion. For this study, a 15-story RC building, located in Vancouver, British Colombia, Canada, is considered as a case study. Using 50 mainshock and 50 mainshock-aftershock earthquake records (two horizontal components per record and bi-directional loading), nonlinear dynamic analyses are performed. Subsequently, the calculated maximum inter-story drift ratios and damage indices are correlated with suitable IMs using cloud analysis, and the most efficient IM-EDP prediction models are selected by comparing standard deviations of the regression errors. The maximum inter-story drift ratio of the shear-walls is less than 1% for the mainshock and mainshock-aftershock records. The energy-based damage index shows sensitivity to delineate impact of earthquake types and aftershocks. The cumulative absolute velocity is showed to be the most efficient IM for the energy-based damage index.