Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
RNA Sequencing Reveals Differential Expression of Mitochondrial and Oxidation Reduction Genes in the Long-Lived Naked Mole-Rat When Compared to Mice

The naked mole-rat (Heterocephalus glaber) is a long-lived, cancer resistant rodent and there is a great interest in identifying the adaptations responsible for these and other of its unique traits. We employed RNA sequencing to compare liver gene expression profiles between naked mole-rats and wild-derived mice. Our results indicate that genes associated with oxidoreduction and mitochondria were expressed at higher relative levels in naked mole-rats. The largest effect is nearly 300-fold higher expression of epithelial cell adhesion molecule (Epcam), a tumour-associated protein. Also of interest are the protease inhibitor, alpha2-macroglobulin (A2m), and the mitochondrial complex II subunit Sdhc, both ageing-related genes found strongly over-expressed in the naked mole-rat. These results hint at possible candidates for specifying species differences in ageing and cancer, and in particular suggest complex alterations in mitochondrial and oxidation reduction pathways in the naked mole-rat. Our differential gene expression analysis obviated the need for a reference naked mole-rat genome by employing a combination of Illumina/Solexa and 454 platforms for transcriptome sequencing and assembling transcriptome contigs of the non-sequenced species. Overall, our work provides new research foci and methods for studying the naked mole-rat's fascinating characteristics.
Unraveling the Mystery of Indian Monsoon Failure During El Niño

The 132-year historical rainfall record reveals that severe droughts in India have always been accompanied by El Niño events. Yet El Niño events have not always produced severe droughts. We show that El Niño events with the warmest sea surface temperature (SST) anomalies in the central equatorial Pacific are more effective in focusing drought-producing subsidence over India than events with the warmest SSTs in the eastern equatorial Pacific. The physical basis for such different impacts is established using atmospheric general circulation model experiments forced with idealized tropical Pacific warmings. These findings have important implications for Indian monsoon forecasting.
Multicast capacity of ad hoc networks with transmission uncertainty

We investigate the multicast capacity of ad hoc networks with transmission uncertainty. Previous approaches on the multicast capacity of wireless networks mainly focus on ideal transmission models, e.g., protocol model, physical model or Gaussian channel model. All the above transmission models assume an error-free reception at the receiver node given that the Signal to Interference and Noise Ratio (SINR) at the receiver node exceeds a certain threshold. Using the above ideal transmission model, the per-node multicast capacity was shown to be Θ(1/√kn log n) when k = O(n/log n), and is Θ(1/n) when k = Ω(n/log n). In this paper, we consider more realistic transmission model. We investigate the multicast capacity of ad hoc networks by considering the non-zero probability of erroneous reception at the receiver nodes. We show that for the multicast pattern, the cumulative impact of packet losses over multihops during the transmission from a source node to its destinations will cause a per-node capacity reduction, which behaviors as O(1/kn). We then propose a new scheduling scheme to overcome this limitation, which can increase the per-node capacity to Ω(1/Ωkn (log n)α + 2/2(α-2)), where α > 2 is the path loss exponent.
The Social Dimension of the Learning Economy

This paper is a slightly revised version of Bengt-Ake Lundvall's Inaugural Lecture, the 10th of November at Department for Business Studies, Aalborg University. The general message is that the growing frequency of so-called paradoxes in economic theory and of unsolved socioeconomic problems reflects that neither economic theory nor policy has been adapted to the fact that we have entered a new phase: the 'Learning Economy'. It is shown that in the learning economy the capacity to learn increasingly determines the relative position of individuals, firms and national systems. The growing polarisation in the OECD-labour markets is explained by the increasing importance of learning and the acceleration in the rate of change. Finally, it is argued that the learning economy will not be sustainable if these tendencies are not countered by a New New Deal which puts the focus on the distribution of capabilities to learn
Adhesion of Diarrheagenic Escherichia coli and Inhibition by Glycocompounds Engaged in the Mucosal Innate Immunity

Escherichia coli colonizes the human intestine shortly after birth, with most strains engaging in a commensal relationship. However, some E. coli strains have evolved toward acquiring genetic traits associated with virulence. Currently, five categories of enteroadherent E. coli strains are well-recognized, and are classified in regard to expressed adhesins and the strategy used during the colonization. The high morbidity associated with diarrhea has motivated investigations focusing on E. coli adhesins, as well on factors that inhibit bacterial adherence. Breastfeeding has proved to be the most effective strategy for preventing diarrhea in children. Aside from the immunoglobulin content, glycocompounds and oligosaccharides in breast milk play a critical role in the innate immunity against diarrheagenic E. coli strains. This review summarizes the colonization factors and virulence strategies exploited by diarrheagenic E. coli strains, addressing the inhibitory effects that oligosaccharides and glycocompounds, such as lactoferrin and free secretory components, exert on the adherence and virulence of these strains. This review thus provides an overview of experimental data indicating that human milk glycocompounds are responsible for the universal protective effect of breastfeeding against diarrheagenic E. coli pathotypes.
Blood Oxygen Level–Dependent Magnetic Resonance Imaging Identifies Cortical Hypoxia in Severe Renovascular Disease

Atherosclerotic renal artery stenosis has a range of manifestations depending on the severity of vascular occlusion. The aim of this study was to examine whether exceeding the limits of adaptation to reduced blood flow ultimately leads to tissue hypoxia, as determined by blood oxygen level dependent MRI. We compared 3 groups of hypertensive patients, 24 with essential hypertension, 13 with “moderate” (Doppler velocities 200–384 cm/s), and 17 with “severe” atherosclerotic renal artery stenosis (ARAS; velocities >384 cm/s and loss of functional renal tissue). Cortical and medullary blood flows and volumes were determined by multidetector computed tomography. Poststenotic kidney size and blood flow were reduced with ARAS, and tissue perfusion fell in the most severe lesions. Tissue medullary deoxyhemoglobin, as reflected by R2* values, was higher as compared with the cortex for all of the groups and did not differ between subjects with renal artery lesions and essential hypertension. By contrast, cortical R2* levels were elevated for severe ARAS (21.6±9.4 per second) as compared with either essential hypertension (17.8±2.3 per second; P<0.01) or moderate ARAS (15.7±2.1 per second; P<0.01). Changes in medullary R2* after furosemide administration tended to be blunted in severe ARAS as compared with unaffected (contralateral) kidneys. These results demonstrate that severe vascular occlusion overwhelms the capacity of the kidney to adapt to reduced blood flow, manifest as overt cortical hypoxia as measured by blood oxygen level–dependent MRI. The level of cortical hypoxia is out of proportion to the medulla and may provide a marker to identify irreversible parenchymal injury.
Acute Diverticulitis in the Young: The Same Disease in a Different Patient

Background. Natural history and risk factors for diverticulitis in young patients are still debatable. This study aimed to assess whether difference exists in patients aged 50 and younger when compared to older patients and to identify risk factors for acute diverticulitis in the young. Patients and Methods. From January 2006 to December 2011, 80 patients were admitted to our department for acute diverticulitis. We carried out a cross-sectional study in 23 patients (28.7%) aged 50 and younger and 57 older patients (71.3%). Results. Acute diverticulitis in the young was not more aggressive than in the older patient. Diverticulitis at patient's admission was similar with respect to Hinchey's stage and prior history of diverticulitis. No significant difference was found for both medical and surgical treatment. The rate of recurrent diverticulitis in nonoperated patients was similar. Male gender, body mass index ≥25, and assumption of alcohol were independent risk factors for the occurrence of an acute diverticulitis in the young. Conclusions. The same disease seems to be affecting young patients such as overweight or obese male individual. Current policies to prevent diverticular disease and its related complications must include obesity control together with high-fiber diet and regular exercise.
The Atg8 Family of Proteins—Modulating Shape and Functionality of Autophagic Membranes

Aging is a multifactorial process involving an accumulation of alterations on various organizational levels, which finally compromises viability and limits the lifespan of organisms. It is now well-established that many aspects of aging can be positively affected by (macro)autophagy, a mechanism of self-digestion found in virtually all eukaryotic cells. A comprehensive understanding of autophagy is thus expected to not only deepen our insight into the mechanisms of aging but to also open up new avenues toward increasing the healthy lifespan in humans. In this review, we focus on the Atg8 family of ubiquitin-like proteins, which play a crucial role in the autophagy process by virtue of their unique mode of reversible membrane association.
Innovating or Doing as Told? Status Differences and Overlapping Boundaries in Offshore Collaboration

Increasingly, firms source more complex and strategic as well as harder to codify information technology projects to low-cost offshore locations. Completing such projects successfully requires close collaboration among all participants. Yet, achieving such collaboration is extremely difficult because of the complexity of the context: multiple and overlapping boundaries associated with diverse organizational and national contexts separate the participants. These boundaries also lead to a pronounced imbalance of resources among onshore and offshore contributors giving rise to status differences and inhibiting collaboration. This research adopts a practice perspective to investigate how differences in country and organizational contexts give rise to boundaries and associated status differences in offshore application development projects and how these boundaries and status differences can be renegotiated in practice to establish effective collaboration. To illustrate and refine the theory, a qualitative case study of a large financial services firm, which sourced a variety of high-end IT work to its wholly owned subsidiaries ("captive centers") and to third party vendors in multiple global locations (in particular, to India and Russia), is presented. Using a grounded theory approach, the paper finds that differences in country contexts gave rise to a number of boundaries that inhibited collaboration effectiveness, while differences in organizational contexts were largely mediated through organizational practices that treated vendor centers and captive units similarly. It also shows that some key onshore managers were able to alleviate status differences and facilitate effective collaboration across diverse country contexts by drawing on their position and resources. Implications are drawn for the theory and practice of global software development and multiparty collaboration.
Timing Modeling with AUTOSAR - Current state and future directions

In the automotive industry, the Automotive Open System Architecture AUTOSAR is established as a de-facto standard and is applied in a steadily increasing number of development projects. In addition, AUTOSAR attracted the attention of other non-automotive industries, like railway, agriculture and construction machines, power generation and marine technology. The first versions of the standard successfully achieved the objective of integrating in a common framework various components from different suppliers and ensuring their interfaces interoperability. In actual and future versions of the standard, the objective becomes even more ambitious as it considers behavioral and timing characteristics of these components. Therefore, this paper presents the current status of AUTOSAR Release 4.0 concerning the behavioral modeling and timing characterization of components and opens several research and development directions for future extensions of the standard.
Stable Expression of Primary Human Immunodeficiency Virus Type 1 Structural Gene Products by Use of a Noncytopathic Sindbis Virus Vector

ABSTRACT Efficient expression of the human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) structural gene products Gag, Pol, and Env involves the regulation by viral Rev and Rev-responsive elements (RRE). Removal of multiple inhibitory sequences (INS) in the coding regions of these structural genes or modification of the codon usage patterns of HIV-1 genes to those used by highly expressed human genes has been found to significantly increase HIV-1 structural protein expression in the absence of Rev and RRE. In this study, we show that efficient and stable expression of the HIV-1 structural gene products Gag and Env could be achieved by transfection with a noncytopathic Sindbis virus expression vector by using HIV-1 sequences from primary isolates without any sequence modification. Stable expression of these Gag and Env proteins was observed for more than 12 months. The fact that the Sindbis virus expression vector replicates its RNA only in the cytoplasm of the transfected cells and the fact that the lack of expression of HIV-1 Gag by the DNA vector containing unmodified HIV-1 gag sequences was associated with a lack of detectable cytoplasmic gag RNA suggest that a major blockage in the expression of HIV-1 structural proteins in the absence of Rev/RRE is caused by inefficient accumulation of mRNA in the cytoplasm. Efficient long-term expression of structural proteins of diverse HIV-1 strains by the noncytopathic Sindbis virus expression system may be a useful tool for functional study of HIV-1 gene products and vaccine research.
Postischemic Recovery and Oxidative Stress Are Independent of Nitric-Oxide Synthases Modulation in Isolated Rat Heart

During myocardial ischemia and reperfusion, nitric oxide (⋅NO) was shown to exert either beneficial or detrimental effects. Uncoupled⋅NO synthases (NOS) can generate superoxide anion under suboptimal concentrations of substrate and cofactors. The aim of our study was to investigate the role of NOS modulation on 1) the evolution of functional parameters and 2) the amount of free radicals released during an ischemia-reperfusion sequence. Isolated perfused rat hearts underwent 30 min of total ischemia, followed by 30 min of reperfusion in the presence of N G-nitro-d- or l-arginine methyl ester (NAME, 100 μM) or ofd- or l-arginine (3 mM). Functional parameters were recorded and coronary effluents were analyzed with electron spin resonance to identify and quantify the amount of α-phenyl-N-tert-butylnitrone spin adducts produced during reperfusion. The antioxidant capacities of the compounds were determined with the oxygen radical absorbance capacity test. l-NAME-treated hearts showed a reduction of coronary flow and contractile performance, although neither l-NAME nor l-arginine improved the recovery of coronary flow, left end diastolic ventricular pressure, rate pressure product, and duration of reperfusion arrhythmia, compared with their d-specific enantiomers. A large and long-lasting release of alkyl/alkoxyl radicals was detected upon reperfusion, but no differences of free radical release were observed between d- and l-NAME ord- and l-arginine treatment. These results may indicate that, in our experimental conditions, cardiac NOS might not be a major factor implicated in the oxidative burst that follows a global myocardial ischemia.
Staying warm in the cold with a hot drink: The role of visceral thermoreceptors

Comment on: Morris NB, Bain AR, Cramer MN, Jay O. Evidence that transient changes in sudomotor output with cold and warm fluid ingestion are independently modulated by abdominal, but not oral thermoreceptors. J Appl Physiol (1985). 2014;116:1088-1095. PMID:24577060; doi:10.1152/japplphysiol.01059. 2013. Morris NB, Filingeri D, Halaki M, Jay O. Evidence of viscerally-mediated cold-defence thermoeffector responses in man. J Physiol. 2017; 595(4):1201-1212. PMID:27929204; doi:10.1113/JP273052.
Cognitive processes in social anxiety: a study of anticipatory processing, attentional biases and post-eventprocessing

Cognitive models of social phobia (Clark & Wells, 1995; Rapee & Heimberg, 1997) theorize that the dysfunctional cognitive processes maintain the fear people with social anxiety have in social situations. Research has shown that there are three stages of cognitive processes that contribute to social anxiety: anticipatory processing, in-situation processing, and post-event processing. This study investigated differences in these three cognitive processes between 252 individuals with high and low social anxiety in Hong Kong. Study 1 developed Chinese-language self-report measures of anticipatory processing by translating two English measures. It also investigated anticipatory processing questionnaires in terms of internal consistency, factor structure, and concurrent validity. It further examined differences in anticipatory processing between the two groups. The Chinese versions of the two measures of anticipatory processing—the Anticipatory Processing Questionnaire (APQ) and the Measure of Mental Anticipation Processes (MMAP)—showed good to excellent psychometric properties. The factor structure of the Chinese APQ was consistent with the original version (Vassilopoulos, 2004). The MMAP was best explained by two factors, as opposed to the original four. Results from the surveys indicated that individuals with high social anxiety were more likely to engage in maladaptive anticipatory processing. Study 2 experimentally induced distraction, positive, and negative anticipatory processing in sixty-three participants with high and low social anxiety who then gave an impromptu speech. The effects of processing style on anxiety, confidence, and cognitive processing during the speech (self-focused attention) were measured. Positive anticipatory processing increased confidence before the speech for both high and low socially anxious groups, whereas negative anticipatory processing decreased confidence. There was no significant effect of processing manipulation on anxiety. Negative anticipatory processing led to marginally higher scores on the Self-focus Attention subscale of the Focus of Attention Questionnaire (FAQ). Furthermore, people with high social anxiety were found to be more likely than their low socially anxious counterparts to engage in self-focused attention and post-event processing. These findings give evidence that high and low socially anxious individuals differ in anticipatory processing, self-focused attention, and post-event processing. Furthermore, positive anticipatory processing increases confidence before social situations, but fails to reduce anxiety. This contributes to the understanding of differences in cognitive processing between individuals with high and low social anxiety.
Information Content Moderates Positivity and Negativity Biases in Memory This Article Has Been Corrected. See Last Page Experiment 1 Method Participants. Participants Were Recruited from the Raleigh, Nc Community through Newspaper and Internet Advertisements. 855 Content Influences on Memory

Two experiments examined the impact of encoding conditions and information content in memory for positive, neutral, and negative pictures. We examined the hypotheses that the positivity effect in memory (i.e., a bias in favor of positive or against negative information in later life) would be reduced when (a) pictures were viewed under structured as opposed to unstructured conditions, and (b) contained social as opposed to nonsocial content. Both experiments found that the positivity effect observed with nonsocial stimuli was absent with social stimuli. In addition, little evidence was obtained that encoding conditions affected the strength of the positivity effect. We argue that some types of social stimuli may engage different types of processing than nonsocial stimuli, perhaps encouraging self-referential processing that engages attention and supports memory. This processing may then conflict with the goal-driven, top-down processing that is hypothesized to drive the positivity effect. Thus, our results identify further boundary conditions associated with the positivity effect in memory, arguing that stimulus factors as well as situational goals may affect its occurrence. Further research awaits to determine if this effect is specific to all social stimuli or specific subsets. Emotional content has privileged status in memory across adult-hood. In contrast to relatively neutral stimuli, individuals of all ages remember emotional stimuli better and report more vivid memories for such stimuli (for review, see Kensinger, 2009). Studies of aging suggest that emotional content may have an even greater advantage in later life (e.g., Carstensen & Turk-Charles, 1994), and that the impact of affective content may be qualitatively different from that seen in young adulthood when valence is considered. Specifically, in laboratory studies of memory for pictures and words, younger adults exhibit enhanced memory for both positive and negative stimuli, with either no difference in retention rates by valence or better memory for negative than for positive items (i.e., a negativity bias). In contrast, older adults are often found to exhibit enhanced memory for positive information (i.e., a positivity bias) or reduced memory for negative information Mather & Knight, 2005). This age-based trend toward an increased ratio of positive to negative information in memory has traditionally been referred to as the positivity effect. According to socio-emotional selectivity theory (SST), this effect is thought to reflect emotion regulatory functions that contribute to enhanced well-being in later adulthood (Mather & Carstensen, 2005). Whereas the positivity effect has been found in several studies, it is not …