Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Enzyme Activity as a Function of Age in the Human Erythrocyte

SABINE (1940, 1951) showed that the cholinesterase activity of erythrocytes containing a high proportion of reticulocytes was higher than normal. She also showed that the greater the proportion of reticulocytes, the greater was the enzyme activity. A similar correlation between the erythrocyte cholinesterase activity in the rat and the percentage of reticulocytes has also been reported by Pritchard (1949). These observations can be taken to mean that the cholinesterase activity is at a high level at the reticulocyte stage and subsequently falls to a lower level in mature erythrocytes. In this paper evidence is presented which supports the theory that the enzyme activity of human erythrocytes is a function of their age. Erythrocytes contain a number of enzymes, and three which are present in high concentration and easy to measure are cholinesterase, catalase and glyoxalase. First, we have studied the activities of these three enzymes in the erythrocytes of normal human subjects in order to distinguish between three components of variance: the error of estimation, the variation of activity in any one subject at different times, and the variation between different subjects. Secondly, Sabine’s work has been confirmed and extended to include catalase and glyoxalase, and an attempt has been made to calculate the absolute enzyme activity of reticulocytes. Thirdly, the change in cholinesterase and catalase activity of donor erythrocytes has been measured after transfusion, the donor cells being identified by differential agglutination.
Novel Role for JNK as a Stress-activated Bcl2 Kinase*

Interleukin (IL)-3-induced Bcl2 phosphorylation at Ser70 may be required for its full and potent antiapoptotic activity. However, in the absence of IL-3, increased expression of Bcl2 can also prolong cell survival. To determine how Bcl2 may be functionally phosphorylated following IL-3 withdrawal, astress-activated Bcl2 kinase (SAK) was sought. Results indicate that anisomycin, a potent activator of the stress kinase JNK/SAPK, can induce Bcl2 phosphorylation at Ser70 and that JNK1 can be latently activated following IL-3 withdrawal to mediate Bcl2 phosphorylation. JNK1 directly phosphorylates Bcl2 in vitro, co-localizes with Bcl2, and collaborates with Bcl-2 to mediate prolonged cell survival in the absence of IL-3 or following various stress applications. Dominant-negative (DN)-JNK1 can block both anisomycin and latent IL-3 withdrawal-induced Bcl2 phosphorylation (>90%) and potently enhances cell death. Furthermore, low dose okadaic acid (OA), a potent protein phosphatase 1 and 2A inhibitor, can activate the mitogen-activated protein kinases JNK1 and ERK1/2, but not p38 kinase, to induce Bcl2 phosphorylation and prolong cell survival in factor-deprived cells. Since PD98059, a specific MEK inhibitor, can only partially inhibit OA-induced Bcl2 phosphorylation but completely blocks OA-induced Bcl2 phosphorylation in cells expressing DN-JNK1, this supports the conclusion that OA may stimulate Bcl2 phosphorylation via a mechanism involving both JNK1 and ERK1/2. Collectively, these findings indicate a novel role for JNK1 as a SAK and may explain, at least in part, how functional phosphorylation of Bc12 can occur in the absence of growth factor.
Involvement of the bacterial groM gene product in bacteriophage T7 reproduction. II. A reduced level of ion concentrations causes the blockage of T7 maturation in K-12-M cells

Cellular leakage observed in Escherichia coli K-12-M shortly after T7 infection might be the cause of arrested phage morphogenesis. We observed in this strain, but not in the normal host, a drastic reduction of the intracellular concentration of potassium (60%), magnesium (40%), putrescine (90%), and spermidine (40%), whereas ATP was not significantly reduced. Leakage started about 1 min after the addition of phage and was arrested 3 to 5 min postinfection. Larger molecules such as o-nitrophenyl-beta-D-galactopyranoside could not enter the cells, showing that the permeability of the membrane was not generally affected. To prevent their leakage, we increased the outside concentrations of several small molecules and ions. The yield of progeny phage was substantially increased by the addition of 100 mM MgSO4.
Long-term effects of postnatal 6-hydroxydopamine treatment on tissue catecholamine levels.

Littermate albino rats were injected with doses of 6-hydroxydopamine hydrobromide (6-OHDA) intracisternally (i.c.) (0, 50, 100 or 200µg) or i.p. (0, 2.5, 5.0 or 10.0 mg/kg) at birth, and again 48 hours later. The animals were killed at 3, 12, 24 or 60 days of age and brain norepinephrine (NE) and dopamine, adrenal NE and epinephrine, and cardiac and splenic NE were determined. The i.c. administration of 6-OHDA produced doserelated decreases in the catecholamine contents of brain, heart and spleen, whereas the i.p. treatment decreased NE only in the heart and spleen. The highest i.c. dose reduced adrenal NE content in animals autopsied at 24 days of age and decreased epinephrine content in those animals sacrificed at 60 days of age; lower i.c. doses and all i.p. doses were ineffective. Brain NE was more depressed by i.c. 6-OHDA than was brain dopamine and showed less recovery to normal levels. Cardiac and splenic NE levels recovered partially from the effects of 6-OHDA administered via either route. Intracisternal 6-OHDA severely impaired growth; hence, the effect of the drug on catecholamine levels in the brain and in sympathetic neurons may result from both a toxic action on the nerve terminals and from the malnourished state of the animal. Other rats received i.c. 6-OHDA at birth, or at 12 or 24 days of age and again 48 hours later. The brain contents of both NE and dopamine were maximally depressed when treatment was begun at birth; a clear, age-related trend was observed which suggests increasing resistance to the effects of 6-OHDA.
Qualitative and Quantitative Analysis for Facial Complexion in Traditional Chinese Medicine

Facial diagnosis is an important and very intuitive diagnostic method in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM). However, due to its qualitative and experience-based subjective property, traditional facial diagnosis has a certain limitation in clinical medicine. The computerized inspection method provides classification models to recognize facial complexion (including color and gloss). However, the previous works only study the classification problems of facial complexion, which is considered as qualitative analysis in our perspective. For quantitative analysis expectation, the severity or degree of facial complexion has not been reported yet. This paper aims to make both qualitative and quantitative analysis for facial complexion. We propose a novel feature representation of facial complexion from the whole face of patients. The features are established with four chromaticity bases splitting up by luminance distribution on CIELAB color space. Chromaticity bases are constructed from facial dominant color using two-level clustering; the optimal luminance distribution is simply implemented with experimental comparisons. The features are proved to be more distinctive than the previous facial complexion feature representation. Complexion recognition proceeds by training an SVM classifier with the optimal model parameters. In addition, further improved features are more developed by the weighted fusion of five local regions. Extensive experimental results show that the proposed features achieve highest facial color recognition performance with a total accuracy of 86.89%. And, furthermore, the proposed recognition framework could analyze both color and gloss degrees of facial complexion by learning a ranking function.
Ligand Induced Galectin-3 Protein Self-association*

Background: One galectin-3 function is to bind glycoproteins and cross-link them. Results: A glycoprotein engaged many more galectin-3 carbohydrate-binding sites than its number of relevant glycans. Conclusion: The ligand induced binding of one galectin-3 to another galectin-3 to form oligomers in a previously unrecognized way. Significance: This differs from previous models and provides a new framework to interpret biological effects of galectin-3. Many functions of galectin-3 entail binding of its carbohydrate recognition site to glycans of a glycoprotein, resulting in cross-linking thought to be mediated by its N-terminal noncarbohydrate-binding domain. Here we studied interaction of galectin-3 with the model glycoprotein asialofetuin (ASF), using a fluorescence anisotropy assay to measure the concentration of free galectin carbohydrate recognition sites in solution. Surprisingly, in the presence of ASF, this remained low even at high galectin-3 concentrations, showing that many more galectin-3 molecules were engaged than expected due to the about nine known glycan-based binding sites per ASF molecule. This suggests that after ASF-induced nucleation, galectin-3 associates with itself by the carbohydrate recognition site binding to another galectin-3 molecule, possibly forming oligomers. We named this type-C self-association to distinguish it from the previously proposed models (type-N) where galectin-3 molecules bind to each other through the N-terminal domain, and all carbohydrate recognition sites are available for binding glycans. Both types of self-association can result in precipitates, as measured here by turbidimetry and dynamic light scattering. Type-C self-association and precipitation occurred even with a galectin-3 mutant (R186S) that bound poorly to ASF but required much higher concentration (∼50 μm) as compared with wild type (∼1 μm). ASF also induced weaker type-C self-association of galectin-3 lacking its N-terminal domains, but as expected, no precipitation. Neither a monovalent nor a divalent N-acetyl-d-lactosamine-containing glycan induced type-C self-association, even if the latter gave precipitates with high concentrations of galectin-3 (>∼50 μm) in agreement with published results and perhaps due to type-N self-association.
Small deformations of supersymmetric Wilson loops and open spin-chains

We study insertions of composite operators into Wilson loops in = 4 supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory in four dimensions. The loops follow a circular or straight path and the composite insertions transform in the adjoint representation of the gauge group. This provides a gauge invariant way to define the correlator of non-singlet operators. Since the basic loop preserves an SL(2,) subgroup of the conformal group, we can assign a conformal dimension to those insertions and calculate the corrections to the classical dimension in perturbation theory. The calculation turns out to be very similar to that of single-trace local operators and may also be expressed in terms of a spin-chain. In this case the spin-chain is open and at one-loop order has Neumann boundary conditions on the type of scalar insertions that we consider. This system is integrable and we write the Bethe ansatz describing it. We compare the spectrum in the limit of large angular momentum both in the dilute gas approximation and the thermodynamic limit to the relevant string solution in the BMN limit and in the full AdS5 × S5 metric and find agreement.
The Reliability of the Vestibular Autorotation Test (VAT) in Patients with Dizziness

Objective: To establish intrarater and interrater reliability of the Vestibular Autorotation Test (VAT) (Western Systems Research Inc., Pasadena, CA) in a clinical sample of individuals reporting dizziness. Study Design: Ninety-eight patients with reports of dizziness referred for vestibular function testing performed repeated trials of horizontal VAT. A subsample of 49 individuals repeated the test for a second rater. Results: Approximately 66% of subjects were unable to meet the performance criterion of six consecutive trials where data was displayed at frequencies ≥3.9 Hz with coherence values held constant trial to trial. There was a good level of intrarater reliability for gain independent of the effects of practice (intraclass correlation coefficient [ICC] = 0.78 [95% confidence interval [CI]: 0.69–0.87] to 0.95 [(95% CI: 0.93–0.97]). A significant difference in intrarater reliability was found when the first three trials were compared to the last three trials for phase (ICC ranged from 0.04 [95% CI: 0.00–0.31] to 0.96 [95% CI: 0.93–0.97]) and asymmetry (ICC ranged from 0.39 [95% CI: 0.17–0.56] to 0.73 [95% CI: 0.32–0.81]) particularly at frequencies ≥4.3 Hz. Interrater reliability was good to excellent across all variables at frequencies ≤3.9 Hz. Conclusions: Many patients had difficulty performing the VAT. The reliability estimates for phase and asymmetry, but not gain, were significantly affected by practice. Careful attention to patient preparation, instruction, and test monitoring including sufficient patient practice before data collection are likely to be critical factors to ensure quality data.
Credence goods markets, distributional preferences and the role of institutions

We study credence goods markets where an expert not only cares for her own monetary payoff, but also for the monetary payoff of her customer. We show how an expert with heterogeneous distributional preferences responds to monetary incentives in the absence of institutions, under liability and/or verifiability and identify optimal contracts for an expert with distributional preferences in each of these settings.
On Zeros of Tall, Fat and Square Blocked Time-Invariant Systems

The well-known technique of blocking or lifting has been used in systems and control [5], [2]. This method has mostly been exploited to transform linear discrete-time periodic systems to linear time-invariant systems so that the well-developed tools for linear time-invariant systems can be extended for design and analysis of linear discrete-time periodic systems [3], [1] and [2] . For example, the authors in [3] have extended the notions of poles and zeros of linear time-invariant systems to linear periodic systems. Some necessary and sufficient conditions for structural properties such as observability and reachability have been studied in [7]. The blocking technique has been applied to linear time-invariant systems as well, see e.g. [5], [10] and the references therein. For instance, in [10], linear time-invariant systems have been blocked for the purpose of designing periodic controllers while
Mechanisms underlying global temperature-related patterns in leaf longevity

Aim At a global scale, the relationship of leaf longevity (LL) to mean annual temperature (MAT) is positive for deciduous species but negative for evergreen species. The aim of this paper is to understand the mechanisms underlying these contrasting patterns of leaf longevity, from a cost–benefit perspective. Location Global. Methods We tested our hypothesis that contrasting LL–MAT relationships in evergreen and deciduous species result from differing adaptations to variation in the length of the annual favourable period. We defined f as the portion of the year when monthly temperature and water availability were favourable. We examined whether the contrasting LL patterns with MAT can be also seen with f. Next, we calculated the optimal LL that maximizes carbon gain per unit time across a range of f. Results The contrasting LL patterns across MAT were also found across f. Our optimization model successfully reproduced the contrasting LL patterns across f for the evergreen (LL longer than 1 year) and deciduous plants. The model shows that longer LL is required to maximize carbon gain for evergreen plants in shorter f, while LL of deciduous plants decreases with decreasing f. Without any a priori trait association, the model reproduced the well-known LL–leaf mass per area (LMA) relationship. The model also reproduced observed shifts in LL–LMA relationships across MAT or f. Evergreen leaves in long f need greater LMA to maintain LL than those in shorter f. Main conclusions Observed contrasting LL–MAT patterns in deciduous and evergreen species can be reproduced via the simple rule of maximizing carbon gain across different lengths of favourable periods. Our model provides a mechanistic explanation for the empirical global patterns of several key leaf traits and their relationships.
Assessment of a Wearable Force- and Electromyography Device and Comparison of the Related Signals for Myocontrol

In the frame of assistive robotics, multi-finger prosthetic hand/wrists have recently appeared, offering an increasing level of dexterity; however, in practice their control is limited to a few hand grips and still unreliable, with the effect that pattern recognition has not yet appeared in the clinical environment. According to the scientific community, one of the keys to improve the situation is multi-modal sensing, i.e., using diverse sensor modalities to interpret the subject's intent and improve the reliability and safety of the control system in daily life activities. In this work, we first describe and test a novel wireless, wearable force- and electromyography device; through an experiment conducted on ten intact subjects, we then compare the obtained signals both qualitatively and quantitatively, highlighting their advantages and disadvantages. Our results indicate that force-myography yields signals which are more stable across time during whenever a pattern is held, than those obtained by electromyography. We speculate that fusion of the two modalities might be advantageous to improve the reliability of myocontrol in the near future.
On Applying Normalized Systems Theory to the Business Architectures of Information Systems

Application of the database normalization theory and the principle of orthogonal design allows us to reduce data redundancy in relational/SQL databases and hence avoid certain update anomalies and simplify development of database applications. The normalized systems theory for achieving modular and highly evolvable systems has similar goals in case of distributing the tasks of a system between its elements. We have suggested data-centric practices for finding the functional and data-centric subsystems of transactional information systems by identifying and analyzing the main business entity types and their life cycles. These subsystems and their interconnections constitute a large part of information systems' business architectures. The specification of business architecture helps us to decompose the system development problem into more manageable subproblems. This paper studies whether the practices contribute towards creating normalized systems. We present a metamodel of the subsystems-related elements of data-centric practices and a metamodel of elements of normalized systems.
Routing and Spectrum Assignment for Dual Failure Path Protected Elastic Optical Networks

We present the design of a dual failure protected elastic optical network (EON) for different sharing capabilities of protection lightpaths. Routing and spectrum assignment (RSA) is considered for such a network so as to minimize the maximum number of frequency slots (FSs) used. The key principles for protection resource sharing among the first and the second protection lightpaths are identified for dedicated 1:1:1, mixed 1:1:1, 1+1:1, and 1+1+1 protection. Both integer linear programming (ILP) models and spectrum window plane (SWP)-based heuristic algorithms are proposed for RSA in dual failure protected EONs. Simulation results indicate that, apart from being efficient, the proposed SWP-based heuristic algorithm not only performs close to the ILP model but also does much better than a benchmark adaptive routing algorithm. We find that 1:1:1 protection technique performs better in terms of the maximum number of FSs used and the spare capacity redundancy than both the 1+1:1 and 1+1+1 techniques. In addition, the mixed 1:1:1 case outperforms the dedicated 1:1:1 case both in minimizing the maximum number of link FSs used and its spare capacity redundancy.
Effects of endothelin receptor antagonism with bosentan on peripheral nerve function in experimental diabetes

1 The effects of the non‐selective endothelin (ET) receptor (ETA/ETB) antagonist, bosentan, on sciatic nerve dysfunction in experimental diabetes were investigated. 2 Rats with 5–6 weeks untreated streptozotocin‐diabetes exhibited characteristic slowed motor nerve conduction velocity (mean ± s.d., 36.6 ± 3.4 m s−1) and nerve laser Doppler flux (197 ±64 arbitrary units) compared to age‐matched control animals (42.7 ± 2.4 m s−′ and 398 ± 77 arbitrary units, respectively). Preventative treatment of diabetic rats with bosentan at 100 mg kg−1 day−1 p.o. attenuated both these deficits (39.7 ± 3.0 m s−1 and 305 ± 56 arbitrary units, respectively) without affecting mean arterial pressure. 3 In control and untreated diabetic rats, ET‐1, 1 nmol kg−1 i.v. , caused an initial hypotension (duration, 30 ±13 and 26 ± 9 s, respectively; change in mean arterial pressure, −27 ±13 and − 25 ± 7 mmHg, respectively) followed by prolonged hypertension (change in mean arterial pressure, 52 ± 18 and 31 ± 5 mmHg, respectively). Effectiveness of the chronic bosentan treatment was demonstrated by inhibition of the hypotensive response to ET‐1 in treated diabetic rats (duration, 5 ± 2 s; change in mean arterial pressure, − 4 + 2 mmHg) although the hypertension was unaltered (change in mean arterial pressure, 32 + 9 mmHg). 4 Acute i.v. administration of 10mg kg−1 bosentan caused variable and transient rises in nerve laser Doppler flux in control (78 ± 63 arbitrary units) and untreated diabetic rats (93 ± 77 arbitrary units). Acute bosentan blocked the hypotensive response to subsequent ET‐1 administration and attenuated the later hypertension (change in mean arterial pressure, 21 ±9 mmHg in control, 29 ±10 mmHg in diabetic). 5 Our results indicate that oral treatment of diabetic rats with an ET receptor antagonist can improve sciatic nerve perfusion and conduction, suggesting that the vasoconstrictor action of endogenous ET may contribute to peripheral nerve dysfunction in experimental diabetes.
Serum TPS versus TPA in Egyptian Bladder Cancer Patients

This study included 328 cases (106 with bladder cancer, 152 with non-malignant urinary tract diseases and 70 healthy controls). Serum TPA was determined using the Prolifigen TPA IRMA kit supplied by AB Sangtec Medical, Bromma, Sweden and serum TPS was determined using the TPS IRMA kit supplied by Beki Diagnostics AB, Bromma, Sweden. The results of this study revealed that serum TPA had better sensitivity than serum TPS while no marked difference was found in the false-positivity rates in the non-malignant urinary tract diseases, A correlation coefficient of 0.83 was found between serum TPA and TPS. No relation was found between either TPA or TPS and histopathological stage, grade or association of the tumor with bilharziasis. As regards the histopathological type of the tumor, serum TPS was slightly higher in squamous cell than transitional cell carcinoma but TPA showed no difference. In the follow-up of bladder cancer patients after surgery both TPA and TPS showed an excellent concordance with the clinial state of the patients. In conclusion, TPS does not seem to be an optimal test in Egyptian patients with bladder cancer but serial determinations of one of the two markers can be used in the follow-up of these patients after surgery.