Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The functionalization of single-walled carbon nanotubes with biomolecules to target professional phagocytes and promote biodegradation

Aggressive penetration of nanomaterials in different spheres of our life - from novel technologies to a plethora of consumer products, raises concerns about their possible adverse effects on public health. Several studies report that nanotubes cause lung toxicity. With increase in day-to-day applications of carbon nanotubes, particulate exposure either under occupational or environmental settings is inevitable. In the classic inflammatory response to nanotubes, emigration of neutrophils (PMNs) followed by macrophages into sites of particle deposition has been observed. The major role of the cells is to phagocytoze and promotes particulate clearance and the clearance might be essentially dependent on effective recognition. Carbon nanotubes are not effectively recognized by professional phagocytes and delayed clearance of particles within the lung parenchyma can thus be majorly attributed to impaired phagocytosis or deficiency in components involving their effective degradation. We in our research coated nanotubes with biomolecules to promote recognition, uptake and biodegradation by professional phagocytes. Coating nanotubes with "eat-me"-phospholipid signal, phosphatidylserine proved to be an effective strategy for targeting particles to professional phagocytes, specifically macrophages both in vitro and in vivo. However, opsonization of nanotubes made them competent for both macrophages and neutrophils. This targeting also enhanced the biodegradation in neutrophils and to a lesser extent in macrophages via action of myeloperoxidase and its potent oxidants whose critical role in biodegradation was delineated in cell free based in vitro studies. Further, in vivo experiments using wild type and myeloperoxidase null mice showed a significantly lower degree of biodegradation and particle elimination in latter animal type, underscoring the role of neutrophil peroxidase in biodegrading carbon nanotubes. Using contemporary techniques- confocal, transmission and scanning electron microscopy, Vis-NIR and Raman spectroscopy, we evaluated the hypothesis. Taken together, the results from the doctoral work suggest that targeting of nanotubes to professional phagocytes can be achieved by coating with certain biomolecules and this targeting can reduce the biopersistence and inflammation associated due to the presence of otherwise relatively biodurable nanotubes in biological ambience. The dissertation also foresees functionalization of nanotubes as a strategy to combat potential toxic effects of nanotubes which pose potential risk to the public health.
RESULTS ON LATTICE VECTOR QUANTIZATION WITH DITHERINGz

The statistical properties of the error in uniform scalar quantization have been analyzed by a number of authors in the past, and is a well understood topic today. The analysis has also been extended to the case of dithered quantizers, and the advantages and limitations of dithering have been studied and well documented in the literature. Lattice vector quantization is a natural extension into multiple dimensions of the uniform scalar quantization. Accordingly, there is a natural extension of the analysis of the quantization error. It is the purpose of this paper to present this extension and to elaborate on some of the new aspects that come with multiple dimensions. We show that, analogous to the one dimensional case, the quantization error vector can be rendered independent of the input in subtractive vector-dithering. In this case, the total mean square error is a function of only the underlying lattice and there are lattices that minimize this error. We give a necessary condition on such lattices. In nonsubtractive vector dithering, we show how to render moments of the error vector independent of the input by using appropriate dither random vectors. These results can readily be applied for the case of wide sense stationary (WSS) vector random processes, by use of iid dither sequences. We consider the problem of pre-and post ltering around a dithered lattice quantizer, and show how these lters should be designed in order to minimize the overall quantization error in the mean square sense. For the special case where the WSS vector process is obtained by blocking a WSS scalar process, the optimum preelter matrix reduces to the blocked version of the well-known scalar half-whitening lter.
Specificity of herbivore‐induced responses in an invasive species, Alternanthera philoxeroides (alligator weed)

Abstract Herbivory‐induced responses in plants can both negatively affect subsequently colonizing herbivores and mitigate the effect of herbivory on the host. However, it is still less known whether plants exhibit specific responses to specialist and generalist herbivores in non‐secondary metabolite traits and how specificity to specialists and generalists differs between invasive and native plant populations. We exposed an invasive plant, Alternanthera philoxeroides, to Agasicles hygrophila (Coleoptera, Chrysomelidae; specialist), Spodoptera litura (Lepidoptera, Noctuidae; generalist), manual clipping, or application of exogenous jasmonic acid and examined both the specificity of elicitation in traits of fitness (e.g., aboveground biomass), morphology (e.g., root:shoot ratio), and chemistry (e.g., C/N ratio and lignin), and specificity of effect on the subsequent performance of A. hygrophila and S. litura. Then, we assessed variation of the specificity between invasive and native populations (USA and Argentina, respectively). The results showed S. litura induced higher branching intensity and specific leaf area but lower C/N ratio than A. hygrophila, whereas A. hygrophila induced higher trichome density than S. litura. The negative effect of induction on subsequent larval growth was greater for S. litura than for A. hygrophila. Invasive populations had a weaker response to S. litura than to A. hygrophila in triterpenoid saponins and C/N ratio, while native populations responded similarly to these two herbivores. The specific effect on the two herbivores feeding on induced plants did not vary between invasive and native populations. Overall, we demonstrate specificity of elicitation to specialist and generalist herbivores in non‐secondary metabolite traits, and that the generalist is more susceptible to induction than the specialist. Furthermore, chemical responses specific to specialist and generalist herbivores only exist in the invasive populations, consistent with an evolutionary change in specificity in the invasive populations.
The graduating international undergraduate class of 2020—Counterintuitive graduation rate and time to degree during onset of the coronavirus pandemic

What were the graduation rate and time to degree for international undergraduates who would have been expected to graduate during the coronavirus pandemic’s onset in spring 2020? The present study addressed this question by testing for intergroup differences in graduation outcomes between an American public university’s international undergraduate class of 2020 and its pre-pandemic comparison counterpart of 2019. Controlling for early (pre-pandemic) graduations, the study yielded counterintuitive results; although the literature on the pandemic’s educational disruptions, mental health symptoms, xenophobia, and stressors would predict that the class of 2020’s graduation rate should have been lower and average time to degree longer than the class of 2019’s, the two classes’ values were almost identical. These results, together with previous ones on term grade point averages, are indicative of this class of 2020’s academic success, resilience, and/or benefit from institutional support. They are discussed in the context of racism and caste.
Forms of LGBTQIAPN+ vulnerability in Brazil

Abstract This integrative literature review identifies the forms of vulnerabilities experienced by lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender individuals and as well as those of other identities in Brazil. The analysis of the five selected and classified articles revealed mental and physical vulnerabilities in contexts of violence, training environments, COVID-19, existence and deprivation of liberty. These vulnerabilities are historically associated with this community and have been accentuated over the years. Organization of social movements for this population and scientific production incentives are needed to afford greater visibility, reduce injustices and promote changes to the current scenario.
Telomere length of patients with major depression is shortened but independent from therapy and severity of the disease

Background: Shortened telomere length has been observed in a variety of diseases. Our objective was to analyze mean telomere length of patients with major depressive disorder. A key question was whether telomere length varies in different groups of depressive patients. Methods: We obtained blood samples from patients with major depressive disorder (n=54) and healthy subjects (n=20). We isolated genomic DNA and measured mean telomere length using telomere restriction fragments and Southern blotting. We grouped patients according to the therapy they received including total antidepressant dose. Results: Mean telomere length of the entire patient group (7.20±0.61 kb) was significantly shorter than in the control group (7.55±0.54 kb). We observed no significant difference in telomere length among the different patient groups, but each of these patient groups had significantly shorter telomeres than the healthy subjects. Further analysis revealed no significant association between telomere length and illness duration and between telomere length and the severity of depression, as determined by the Hamilton score. Conclusion: These results provide further evidence that major depressive disorder is associated with shortened telomeres. However, differences in the applied therapy, the duration of illness, or the severity of depression do not seem to have any influence on telomere length. Depression and Anxiety, 2010. © 2010 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Pushing the Limits of Affine Rank Minimization by Adapting Probabilistic PCA

Many applications require recovering a matrix of minimal rank within an affine constraint set, with matrix completion a notable special case. Because the problem is NP-hard in general, it is common to replace the matrix rank with the nuclear norm, which acts as a convenient convex surrogate. While elegant theoretical conditions elucidate when this replacement is likely to be successful, they are highly restrictive and convex algorithms fail when the ambient rank is too high or when the constraint set is poorly structured. Non-convex alternatives fare somewhat better when carefully tuned; however, convergence to locally optimal solutions remains a continuing source of failure. Against this backdrop we derive a deceptively simple and parameterfree probabilistic PCA-like algorithm that is capable, over a wide battery of empirical tests, of successful recovery even at the theoretical limit where the number of measurements equals the degrees of freedom in the unknown low-rank matrix. Somewhat surprisingly, this is possible even when the affine constraint set is highly ill-conditioned. While proving general recovery guarantees remains evasive for nonconvex algorithms, Bayesian-inspired or otherwise, we nonetheless show conditions whereby the underlying cost function has a unique stationary point located at the global optimum; no existing cost function we are aware of satisfies this property. The algorithm has also been successfully deployed on a computer vision application involving image rectification and a standard collaborative filtering benchmark.
The Delimitation of Landscape Units for the Planning of Protection – The Example of the Forests by Upper Liswarta Landscape Park

Abstract The delimitation of landscape units can be helpful in the preparation of studies related to landscape protection and landscaping. The aim of this article is to propose the modification of the method of local landscape delimitation developed for the landscape audit for the needs of protected areas. The comparison of two methods of delimitation indicates that the same area can be assigned to different landscape types and subtypes. The proposed modification of the method of landscape unit delimitation allows a more detailed reflection of the landscape and its links to the administrative boundaries of administrative communities.
Epoxyeicosatrienoic acids, hypertension, and kidney injury.

Kidney disease afflicts 33 million in the United States, and chronic kidney disease (CKD) accounts for >$60 billion in Medicare costs.1,2 Hypertension afflicts 75 million in the United States, and significant portions of those patients develop CKD and progress to end-stage renal disease.1–5 Interestingly, resistant hypertension which is defined as uncontrolled hypertension, despite 3 antihypertensive medication classes, increases the risk for cardiovascular diseases and end-stage renal disease.6 These recent findings in the Antihypertensive and Lipid-Lowering Treatment to Prevent Heart Attack Trial (ALLHAT) highlights the fact that current treatments only slow the loss of kidney function, or have no benefit at all.5,6 New therapeutic approaches are urgently needed. Development of drugs to increase a novel class of fatty acids, epoxyeicosatrienoic acids (EETs), represents a unique approach to treat hypertension and kidney disease. EETs are generated from the substrate arachidonic acid by cytochrome P450 (CYP) epoxygenase enzymes.7,8 There are 4 regioisomeric EETs formed: 5,6-EET; 8,9-EET; 11,12-EET; and 14,15-EET. These regioisomeric EETs are further metabolized to less active or inactive diols by the soluble epoxide hydrolase (sEH; Ephx2 ) enzyme. For clarity, EETs will be used as a general term and regioisomers mentioned when actions can be attributed to a specific regioisomeric EET. In the majority of circumstances, the primary EETs evaluated for cardiovascular and renal function have been 11,12-EET and 14,15-EET.7 Once formed, EETs act in an autocrine or paracrine manner to elicit biological responses. Vascular endothelial and renal epithelial cells are major sites for EET production.7,8 This localized EET generation aligns with the biological actions and contribution of EETs to cardiovascular and renal function. Prominent biological actions of EETs include their role as endothelial-derived hyperpolarizing factors and regulation of tubular sodium reabsorption by inhibiting epithelial …
Resistance Analysis of the Hepatitis C Virus NS3 Protease Inhibitor Asunaprevir

ABSTRACT Asunaprevir (BMS-650032) is a potent hepatitis C virus (HCV) NS3 protease inhibitor demonstrating efficacy in alfa interferon-sparing, direct-acting antiviral dual-combination regimens (together with the NS5A replication complex inhibitor daclatasvir) in patients chronically infected with HCV genotype 1b. Here, we describe a comprehensive in vitro genotypic and phenotypic analysis of asunaprevir-associated resistance against genotypes 1a and 1b using HCV replicons and patient samples obtained from clinical studies of short-term asunaprevir monotherapy. During genotype 1a resistance selection using HCV replicons, the primary NS3 protease substitutions identified were R155K, D168G, and I170T, which conferred low- to moderate-level asunaprevir resistance (5- to 21-fold) in transient-transfection susceptibility assays. For genotype 1b, a higher level of asunaprevir-associated resistance was observed at the same selection pressures, ranging from 170- to 400-fold relative to the wild-type control. The primary NS3 protease substitutions identified occurred predominantly at amino acid residue D168 (D168A/G/H/V/Y) and were associated with high-level asunaprevir resistance (16- to 280-fold) and impaired replication capacity. In asunaprevir single-ascending-dose and 3-day multiple-ascending-dose studies in HCV genotype 1a- or 1b-infected patients, the predominant pre-existing NS3 baseline polymorphism was NS3-Q80K. This substitution impacted initial virologic response rates in a single-ascending-dose study, but its effects after multiple doses were more ambiguous. Interestingly, for patient NS3 protease sequences containing Q80 and those containing K80, susceptibilities to asunaprevir were comparable when tested in an enzyme assay. No resistance-associated variants emerged in these clinical studies that significantly impacted susceptibility to asunaprevir. Importantly, asunaprevir-resistant replicons remained susceptible to an NS5A replication complex inhibitor, consistent with a role for asunaprevir in combination therapies.
Pocket, Bag, Hand, etc. - Automatically Detecting Phone Context through Discovery

Most top end smart phones come with a handful of sensors today. We see this growth continuing over the next decade with an explosion of new distributed sensor applications supporting both personal sensing with local use (e.g., healthcare) to distributed sensing with large scale community (e.g., air quality, stress levels and well being), population and global use. One fundamental building block for distributed sensing systems on mobile phones is the automatic detection of accurate, robust and low-cost phone sensing context ; that is, the position of the phone carried by a person (e.g., in the pocket, in the hand, inside a backpack, on the hip, arm mounted, etc.) in relation to the event being sensed. Mobile phones carried by people may have many different sensing contexts that limit the use of a sensor, for example: an air-quality sensor offers poor sensing quality buried in a person’s backpack. We present the preliminary design, implementation, and evaluation of Discovery, a framework to automatically detect the phone sensing context in a robust, accurate and low-cost manner, as people move about in their everyday lives. The initial system implements a set of sophisticated inference models that include Gaussian Mixture Model and Support Vector Machine on the Nokia N95 and Apple iPhone with focus on a limited set of sensors and contexts. Initial results indicate this is a promising approach to provide phone sensing context on mobile phones.
Medication Adherence and the Risk of Cardiovascular Mortality and Hospitalization Among Patients With Newly Prescribed Antihypertensive Medications

The importance of adherence to antihypertensive treatments for the prevention of cardiovascular disease has not been well elucidated. This study evaluated the effect of antihypertensive medication adherence on specific cardiovascular disease mortality (ischemic heart disease [IHD], cerebral hemorrhage, and cerebral infarction). Our study used data from a 3% sample cohort that was randomly extracted from enrollees of Korean National Health Insurance. Study subjects were aged ≥20 years, were diagnosed with hypertension, and started newly prescribed antihypertensive medication in 2003 to 2004. Adherence to antihypertensive medication was estimated as the cumulative medication adherence. Subjects were divided into good (cumulative medication adherence, ≥80%), intermediate (cumulative medication adherence, 50%–80%), and poor (cumulative medication adherence, <50%) adherence groups. We used time-dependent Cox proportional hazards models to evaluate the association between medication adherence and health outcomes. Among 33 728 eligible subjects, 670 (1.99%) died of coronary heart disease or stroke during follow-up. Patients with poor medication adherence had worse mortality from IHD (hazard ratio, 1.64; 95% confidence interval, 1.16–2.31; P for trend=0.005), cerebral hemorrhage (hazard ratio, 2.19; 95% confidence interval, 1.28–3.77; P for trend=0.004), and cerebral infarction (hazard ratio, 1.92; 95% confidence interval, 1.25–2.96; P for trend=0.003) than those with good adherence. The estimated hazard ratios of hospitalization for cardiovascular disease were consistent with the mortality end point. Poor medication adherence was associated with higher mortality and a greater risk of hospitalization for specific cardiovascular diseases, emphasizing the importance of a monitoring system and strategies to improve medication adherence in clinical practice.
Full mouth fixed implant rehabilitation in a patient with generalized aggressive periodontitis

BACKGROUND Generalized aggressive periodontitis (GAP) is a destructive periodontal disease that can develop in young age. Only a few cases of full mouth rehabilitation, using dental implants, have been reported in a patient with aggressive periodontitis. CASE DESCRIPTION This clinical report describes the treatment procedures and results of full mouth rehabilitation in a patient with aggressive periodontitis. After all teeth were extracted, 6 implants were placed in the maxilla and mandible, respectively. Fixed detachable implant prostheses were made. The patient was satisfied with the final results. She was followed for 10 months postloading. CLINICAL IMPLICATION For a long-term success, continuous maintenance care is critical, as the contributing factors of the disease (such as immune factors or periodontal pathogens) may not be controlled adequately.
Molecular structure of membrane vesicles from Escherichia coli.

The molecular architecture of membrane vesicles prepared from Escherichia coli ML 308-225 has been studied by using crossed immunoelectrophoresis, and a reference pattern of 52 discrete immunoprecipitates has been established. Progressive immunoadsorption experiments conducted with untreated control vesicles and with physically disrupted vesicles demonstrate that the membrane-associated immunogens fall into two categories: (i) those immunogens typified by ATPase (ATP phosphohydrolase, EC 3.6.1.3) and NADH dehydrogenase [NADH: (acceptor) oxidoreductase, EC 1.6. 99.3] whose expression is minimal unless the vesicles are disrupted; and (ii) immunogens such as Braun's lipoprotein that are expressed to similar extents in untreated and in disrupted vesicles. A mathematical relationship between the peak area subtended by an immunoprecipitate in the crossed immuno-electrophoresis system and the quantity of vesicles used in the adsorption process has been derived. This relationship allows quantitation of the degree to which specific membrane immunogens partition between exposed and unexposed surfaces of the vesicle membrane. The results demonstrate conclusively that >95% of the membrane in the vesicle preparations is in the form of sealed sacculi with the same polarity as the intact cell. Moreover, the findings provide a strong indication that dislocation of immunogens from the inner to the outer surface of the membrane during vesicle preparation does not occur to an extent exceeding 11%.
The Cochlear Nerve Canal and Internal Auditory Canal in Children with Normal Cochlea but Cochlear Nerve Deficiency

Background There is an increasing frequency of requests for cochlear implantation (CI) in deaf children and more detailed image information is necessary for selecting appropriate candidates. Cochlear nerve deficiency (CND) is a contraindication to CI. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has been used to evaluate the integrity of the cochlear nerve. The abnormalities of the cochlear nerve canal (CNC) and internal auditory canal (IAC) have been reported to be associated with CND. Purpose To correlate CNC manifestation, size, and IAC diameter on high-resolution CT (HRCT) with CND diagnosed by MRI in children. Material and Methods HRCT images from 35 sensorineurally deaf children who had normal cochlea but bilateral or unilateral CND diagnosed by MRI were studied retrospectively. The CNC and IAC manifestation and size were assessed and correlated with CND. Results CND was diagnosed by MRI in 54/70 ears (77.1%). Thirty-two ears had an absent cochlear nerve (59.3%), while 22 ears had a small cochlear nerve (40.7%). The CNC diameter was, 1.5 mm in 36 ears (66.7%). The CNC diameter ranged between 1.5 and 2.0 mm in seven ears (13.0%) and was . 2.0 mm in 11 ears (20.4%). The IAC diameter was, 3.0 mm in 25 ears (46.3%) and . 3.0 mm in 29 ears (53.7%). Conclusion The hypoplastic CNC might be more highly indicative of CND than that of a narrow IAC.