Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Functional monocyte‐derived dendritic cells can be generated in chronic lymphocytic leukaemia

Chronic lymphocytic leukaemia (CLL) remains an incurable disease. Although modern available treatments are able to induce disease regression, relapse almost inexorably occurs. Therefore, novel therapeutic strategies aimed at reducing the disease relapse rate are very much needed. Among these, the induction of tumour‐associated antigen‐specific cytotoxic T lymphocytes (CTL), through either DNA vaccines or injection of idiotype pulsed dendritic cells (DCs), has been actively investigated with encouraging preliminary results in B‐cell malignancies. As the CLL B lymphocyte characteristically expresses low amounts of surface immunoglobulin (Ig) and T cells from these patients have been reported to display impaired functional activity, there are concerns related to the possibility of generating specific cytotoxic antitumoral T cells in this disease. In addition, no information is presently available regarding the functional ability of CLL‐derived DCs. In the present work, freshly purified monocytes from CLL patients and normal donors were induced to differentiate in granulocyte–macrophage colony‐stimulating factor (GM‐CSF) and interleukin (IL)‐4 serum‐free medium and compared for their morphological, phenotypic and functional characteristics. Our results demonstrate that: (1) functional DCs can be generated from CLL patients with similar phenotype and function to those observed from normal donors; (2) in contrast to normal control subjects, monocyte‐derived DCs from CLL patients spontaneously secrete endogenous IL‐10; and (3) interferon (IFN)‐γ in combination with CD40L plays a major role in priming DCs from CLL patients for IL‐12 and IL‐15 production. Overall, these results indicate that it is possible to derive functionally competent DCs from circulating monocytes in CLL patients.
Postmenopausal Motherhood Reloaded: Advanced Age and In Vitro Derived Gametes

In this paper we look at the implications of an emerging technology for the case in favor of, or against, postmenopausal motherhood. Technologies such as in vitro derived gametes (sperm and eggs derived from nonreproductive cells) have the potential to influence the ways in which reproductive medicine is practiced, and are already bringing new dimensions to debates in this area. We explain what in vitro derived gametes are and how their development may impact on the case of postmenopausal motherhood. We briefly review some of the concerns that postmenopausal motherhood has raised—and the implications that the successful development, and use in reproduction, of artificial gametes might have for such concerns. The concerns addressed include arguments from nature, risks and efficacy, reduced energy of the mother, and maternal life expectancy. We also consider whether the use of in vitro derived gametes to facilitate postmenopausal motherhood would contribute to reinforcing a narrow, geneticized account of reproduction and a pro‐reproductive culture that encourages women to produce genetically related offspring at all costs.
Increased Capacity to Delay Reward in Anorexia Nervosa

Abstract Individuals with anorexia nervosa (AN) are often characterized as possessing excessive self-control and are unusual in their ability to reduce or avoid the consumption of palatable foods. This behavior promotes potentially life-threatening weight loss and suggests disturbances in reward processing. We studied whether individuals with AN showed evidence of increased self-control by examining the tendency to delay receipt of a monetary, non-food related, reward. Underweight AN (n = 36) and healthy controls (HC, n = 28) completed a monetary intertemporal choice task measuring delay discounting factor. Individuals with AN reduced the value of a monetary reward over time significantly less than HC (F[1,61] = 5.03; p = 0.029). Secondary analyses indicated that the restricting subtype of AN, in particular, showed significantly less discounting than HC (F[1,46] = 8.3; p = 0.006). These findings indicate that some individuals with AN show less temporal discounting than HC, suggestive of enhanced self-control that is not limited to food consumption. This is in contrast to other psychiatric disorders, for example, substance abuse, which are characterized by greater discounting. Though preliminary, these findings suggest that excessive self-control may contribute to pathological processes and individuals with AN may have neuropsychological characteristics that enhance their ability to delay reward and thereby may help to maintain persistent food restriction. (JINS, 2012, 18, 1–8)
Macrophage HIV‐1 infection and the gastrointestinal tract reservoir

Excluding parenteral transmissions, virtually all vertical and homosexual transmission of human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV‐1) occurs via the gastrointestinal tract. Cellular routes implicated in the translocation of virus across the epithelium include M cells, dendritic cells, and epithelial cells. Intestinal epithelial cells express CCR5 and can selectively transfer CCR5‐tropic HIV‐1, the phenotype of the majority of transmitted viruses. In the lamina propria, virus encounters the largest reservoir of mononuclear cells in the body. Surprisingly, lamina propria lymphocytes, not macrophages, express CCR5 and CXCR4 and support HIV‐1 replication, implicating intestinal lymphocytes as the initial target cell in the intestinal mucosa. From the mucosa, virus is disseminated to systemic sites, followed by profound depletion of CD4+ T cells, first in the intestinal lamina propria and subsequently in the blood. As mucosal and circulating CD4+ T cells are depleted, monocytes and macrophages assume an increasingly important role as target and reservoir cells for HIV‐1. Blood monocytes, including HIV‐1‐infected cells, are recruited to the mucosa, where they differentiate into lamina propria macrophages in the presence of stroma‐derived factors. Although the prevalence of HIV‐1‐infected macrophages in the mucosa is low (0.06% of lamina propria mononuclear cells), the extraordinary size of the gastrointestinal mucosa imparts to intestinal macrophages a prominent role as a HIV‐1 reservoir. Elucidating the immunobiology of mucosal HIV‐1 infection is critical for understanding disease pathogenesis and ultimately for devising an effective mucosal HIV‐1 vaccine.
Cairne Arabic Syllable Structure though Different Phonological Theories

Since the times of the old Arab grammarians, the syllable has played a major role in the phonology of classical as well as colloquial Arabic. In the 1970s, phonologists investigated Cairene Arabic (CA) syllable structure and found it to be the domain of some phonological processes, such as emphatic spread, CVC syllables light word final but heavy word internally, limitations on consonant clusters in certain positions of a word, and epenthesis of a vowel to break consonant clusters if there happen to be more than two consonants in word concatenation. This paper discusses some CA phonological phenomena investigated through different theories in generative phonology, i.e. rule based, autosegmental and Optimality Theory (OT). An overview of early theories is given. Early generative theories contributed substantially to the theory of the syllable of CA; however, each theory was able to explain a given phonological phenomenon. It is through the generative Optimality Theoretic approach that more than one phenomenon can be described and analyzed. The paper’s aim is not to compare between the different theories, but to describe the progression CA syllable structure analysis took in generative phonology. Unlike earlier research which based conclusions on some CA words mixed with some other classical Arabic words pronounced by CA native speakers, this paper presents an Optimality Theoretic analysis that is based on uniquely CA phonetic outputs. The analysis finds that some syllable structure constraints are high ranked and inviolable such as ONSET, and *[μ μ μ]σ. The study also shows that OT analysis can illustrate and explain in one representation, i.e. tableau two different phonological phenomena, insertion and deletion of a vowel in consonant clusters, despite their relatedness to separate prosodic domains, the syllable, the prosodic word, and the phrase. This is carried out by analyzing the ranking, relationship and interaction between the following constraints, ONSET MAX-IO, *[μ μ μ], *COMPLEX CODA, DEP-IO >> NOCODA, *APPENDIX; -*V,+hi]$:, ALIGNR (σ, PrWd), and LINEARITY. The study analyzes data that is mainly from Cairene spoken Arabic, attempting to fill a gap created by one of the contentious issues related to studies of the phonology of CA, and that is mixing between colloquial Cairene and classical Arabic.
Combinatorial Auctions : VC v . VCG

The existence of incentive-compatible, computationally-efficient protocols for combinatorial auctions with decent approximation ratios is one of the most central and well studied open questions in mechanism design. The only universal technique known for the design of truthful mechanisms is the celebrated Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG) scheme, which is “maximal in range”, i.e., it always exactly optimizes over a subset of the possible outcomes. We present a first-of-its-kind technique for proving computational-complexity inapproximability results for maximal-in-range mechanism for combinatorial auctions (under the complexity assumption that NP has no polynomial circuits). We show that in some interesting cases the lower bounds obtained using this technique can be extended to hold for all truthful mechanisms. Our lowerbounding method is based on a generalization of the VC-dimension to k-tuples of disjoint sets. We illustrate our technique via the case of two-bidder combinatorial auctions. We believe that this technique is of independent interest, and has great promise for making progress on the general problem. ∗Statistics and Computer Science, U.C. Berkeley, and Mathematics and Computer Science Weizmann Institute. Supported by Sloan fellowship in Mathematics, NSF Career award DMS 0548249, DOD grant N0014-07-1-05-06, and by ISF. mossel@stat.berkeley. edu †Computer Science Division University of California at Berkeley, CA, 94720 USA. christos@cs.berkeley. edu ‡Department of Computer Science, Yale University, CT, USA, and Computer Science Division, University of California at Berkeley, CA, USA. Supported by NSF grant 0331548. michael.schapira@yale.edu. §Computer Science Division University of California at Berkeley, CA, 94720 USA. Supported by grants XXXXX. yaron@cs.berkeley. edu.
HIV and STD Status Among MSM and Attitudes About Internet Partner Notification for STD Exposure

Objectives: This study assessed the acceptability and perceived utility of Internet-based partner notification (PN) of sexually transmitted disease (STD) exposure for men who have sex with men (MSM) by human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) serostatus. Study Design: We recruited 1848 US MSM via a banner advertisement posted on an MSM website for meeting sexual partners between October and November 2005. Results: Even though there was broad acceptance of a PN e-mail across HIV serostatus groups, HIV-infected men rated the importance of each component (e.g., information about where to get tested/treated, additional education regarding the STD exposed to, a mechanism for verifying the authenticity of the PN e-mail) lower than HIV-uninfected or status-unknown participants (all P's <0.01). Additionally, HIV-infected participants were less likely to use the services offered within a PN e-mail (if they were to receive an e-mail notifying them of possible STD exposure in the future), and were less likely to inform their partners of possible STD exposure via an Internet notification system in the future (all P's <0.01). A similar trend emerged about men who reported not having a previous STD compared with those who did. Men who reported no previous STD found Internet PN more acceptable. Conclusions: Overall, this study documents broad acceptance of Internet PN by at-risk MSM, regardless of HIV serostatus, including a willingness to receive or initiate PN-related e-mail. If public health officials consider using Internet notification services, they may need to anticipate and address concerns of HIV-infected MSM, and will need to use a culturally-sensitive, social marketing campaign to ensure that those who may benefit from these services are willing to use this modality for PN. Internet PN should be considered as a tool to decrease rising STD and HIV rates among MSM who use the Internet to meet sexual partners.
Structural relationships between measures based on heart beat intervals: potential for improved risk assessment

Decreased left ventricular ejection fraction is the most commonly used risk factor for identification of patients at high-risk for lethal ventricular arrhythmic events. Twenty-four-hour electrocardiographic (ECG) approaches to risk stratification include: counts of ventricular premature contractions (VPCs), measures of heart rate variability (HRV), and heart rate turbulence (HRT) which has two components, turbulence onset and turbulence slope (TS). Refinement of these ECG risk stratifiers could enhance their clinical utility. We explored the structural relationships between heart rate (HR) and HRV and HRT measures. Our goal was to separate out the component of these measures due to the underlying average heart rate (HR), thus potentially reducing the variability of the measures and increasing their power to stratify risk. We proposed re-scaling tachograms of heart-beat intervals so that the re-scaled tachogram has a HR of 75 (or equivalently an average interval of 800 ms) and calculating HRV and HRT from the rescaled time series. We also explored the relationship between the number of VPCs and HRT. We showed that TS is structurally related to the number of VPCs (and hence to the length of the ECG recording). We proposed an adjusted TS that is independent of the number of VPCs. We also addressed the ability of shorter ECG recording to estimate HRV and HRT measures. We evaluated standard and rescaled HRV and HRT measures using qualifying ambulatory ECG recordings from 744 patients in the Cardiac Arrhythmia Suppression Trial. We found that measures based on the rescaled tachogram had reduced variance (20% to 40%). Correlations between measures were also substantially reduced. We also found substantial circadian effects on some, but not all HRV indices, not explained by the circadian pattern in HR and possibly pointing to additional measures for risk prediction. In conclusion, we found that adjusting for HR and the number of VPCs in heart-beat related ambulatory ECG measures has the potential to significantly improve the power of these measures to risk stratify cardiac patients.
A staging system for congenital cholesteatoma.

OBJECTIVE To develop a staging system for congenital cholesteatoma in predicting the likelihood of residual disease. DESIGN Retrospective analysis of data from a case series, to identify predictors of residual disease. SETTING Tertiary care pediatric hospital. PARTICIPANTS Children undergoing surgical removal of congenital cholesteatoma. There were 156 patients, with 160 cholesteatomas; 4 children had bilateral disease. INTERVENTIONS Each case was scored as to quadrants of the middle ear involved, ossicular involvement, and mastoid extension. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURE Surgically confirmed residual disease at any time after the initial procedure. RESULTS Four stages were defined as follows: stage I, disease confined to a single quadrant; stage II, cholesteatoma in multiple quadrants, but without ossicular involvement or mastoid extension; stage III, ossicular involvement without mastoid extension; and stage IV, mastoid disease. There was a strong association between stage and residual disease, ranging from a 13% risk in stage I to 67% in stage IV. CONCLUSIONS This simple staging system may be particularly useful in standardizing the reporting of congenital cholesteatoma and in adjusting for severity in evaluating outcomes. It also provides information that is useful in counseling parents.
Skeletal muscle uncoupling protein 3 (UCP3): mitochondrial uncoupling protein in search of a function

The uncoupling protein 1 homologue, uncoupling protein 3, is able to uncouple adenosine triphosphate production from mitochondrial respiration, thereby dissipating energy as heat and affecting the efficiency of energy metabolism. Uncoupling protein 3 is expressed predominantly in skeletal muscle, and has been associated with whole-body energy metabolism. However, on the basis of present evidence it has been concluded that the primary function of uncoupling protein 3 is not in the regulation of energy expenditure. For example, fasting, an energy expenditure attenuating condition, upregulates uncoupling protein 3 expression, and uncoupling protein 3 knockout mice have a normal metabolic rate. The exact function of uncoupling protein 3 remains to be elucidated, but at present putative roles for uncoupling protein 3 include involvement in the regulation of the production of reactive oxygen species, mitochondrial fatty acid transport and the regulation of glucose metabolism in skeletal muscle. Because all these putative functions assume that uncoupling protein 3 affects mitochondrial coupling, a secondary effect of the function of uncoupling protein 3 might still be that it influences (but not regulates) energy metabolism, consistent with observations in linkage and association studies. Therefore, uncoupling protein 3 remains an interesting target for pharmacological upregulation in the treatment of obesity and diabetes.
A methodology to predict the power consumption of servers in data centres

Until recently, there have been relatively few studies exploring the power consumption of ICT resources in data centres. In this paper, we propose a methodology to capture the behaviour of most relevant energy-related ICT resources in data centres and present a generic model for them. This is achieved by decomposing the design process into four modelling phases. Furthermore, unlike the state-of-the-art approaches, we provide detailed power consumption models at server and storage levels. We evaluate our model for different types of servers and show that it suffers from an error rate of 2% in the best case, and less than 10% in the worst case.
A Biomechanical Analysis of Anterior Bankart Repair Using Suture Anchors

Background: Arthroscopic repair of anterior Bankart lesions is typically done with single-loaded suture anchors tied with simple stitch configuration. Hypothesis: The knotless suture anchor will have similar biomechanical properties compared with two types of conventional suture anchors. Study Design: Controlled laboratory study. Methods: Fresh-frozen shoulders were dissected and an anteroinferior Bankart lesion was created. For phase 1, specimens were randomized into either simple stitch (SSA) or knotless suture anchors (KSA) and loaded to failure. For phase 2, specimens were randomized into 1 of 4 repair techniques and cyclically loaded then loaded to failure: (1) SSA, (2) suture anchor with horizontal mattress configuration, (3) double-loaded suture anchor with simple stitch configuration, or (4) KSA. Data recorded included mode of failure, ultimate load to failure, load at 2 mm of displacement, as well as displacement during cyclical loading. Results: For phase 1, the load required to 2 mm displacement of the repair construct was significantly greater in SSA (66.5 ± 21.7 N) than KSA (35.0 ± 12.5 N, P = .02). For phase 2, there was a statistically significant difference in ultimate load to failure among the 4groups, with both the single-loaded suture anchor with simple stitch (184.0 ± 64.5 N), horizontal mattress stitch (189.0 ± 65.3N), and double-loaded suture anchor with simple stitch (216.7 ± 61.7 N) groups having significantly (P < .05) higher loads than the knotless group (103.9 ± 52.8 N). There was no statistically significant difference (P > .05) among the 4 groups in displacement after cyclical loading or load at 2 mm of displacement. Conclusion: Both knotless and simple anchor configurations demonstrated similar single loads to failure (without cycling); however, the knotless device required less single load to displace 2 mm. All repair stitches, including simple, horizontal, and double-loaded performed similarly. Clinical Relevance: The findings may suggest that with cyclical loading up to 25 N there is no difference in gapping greater than 2mm, but a macrotraumatic event may demonstrate a difference in fixation during the initial postoperative period. Additional in vivo studies are needed to determine whether these differences affect the integrity of the repair construct and, ultimately, the clinical outcome.
Fine Tuning of Sympathetic Transmitter Release via Ionotropic and Metabotropic Presynaptic Receptors

The release of transmitters at sympathoeffector junctions is not constant, but subject to modulation by a plethora of different mechanisms. In this respect, presynaptic receptors located on the sympathetic axon terminals are of utmost importance, because they are activated by exogenous agonists and by endogenous neurotransmitters. In the latter case, the transmitters that activate the presynaptic receptors of a nerve terminal may be released either from the very same nerve ending or from a different axon terminal, and the receptors involved are auto- and heteroreceptors, respectively. In terms of their structural and functional features, receptors of sympathetic axon terminals can be categorized as either ionotropic (transmitter-gated ion channels) or metabotropic (most commonly G protein-coupled) receptors. This review summarizes results on more than 30 different metabotropic and four different ionotropic receptors that have been found to control the amount of transmitter being released from sympathetic neurons. Each of these receptors may not only stimulate, facilitate, and reduce sympathetic transmitter release, respectively, but also interact with the functions of other receptors present on the same axonal varicosity. This provides a multitude of mechanisms that regulate the amount of sympathetic transmitter output. Accordingly, a sophisticated cross-talk within and between extra- and intracellular signals is integrated at axon terminals to adapt the strength of sympathoeffector transmission to a given situation. This will not only determine the function of the sympathetic nervous system in health and disease, but also therapeutic and untoward effects of drugs that bind to the presynaptic receptors in sympathetically innervated tissues.
ORC interacts with THSC/TREX-2 and its subunits promote Nxf1 association with mRNP and mRNA export in Drosophila

Abstract The origin recognition complex (ORC) of eukaryotes associates with the replication origins and initiates the pre-replication complex assembly. In the literature, there are several reports of interaction of ORC with different RNAs. Here, we demonstrate for the first time a direct interaction of ORC with the THSC/TREX-2 mRNA nuclear export complex. The THSC/TREX-2 was purified from the Drosophila embryonic extract and found to bind with a fraction of the ORC. This interaction occurred via several subunits and was essential for Drosophila viability. Also, ORC was associated with mRNP, which was facilitated by TREX-2. ORC subunits interacted with the Nxf1 receptor mediating the bulk mRNA export. The knockdown of Orc5 led to a drop in the Nxf1 association with mRNP, while Orc3 knockdown increased the level of mRNP-bound Nxf1. The knockdown of Orc5, Orc3 and several other ORC subunits led to an accumulation of mRNA in the nucleus, suggesting that ORC participates in the regulation of the mRNP export.