Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Cloning and characterization of a cDNA encoding Ran binding protein from wheat

Ran, which functions in nucleocytoplasmic transport and mitosis, binds to and is regulated in part by Ran binding protein (RanBP). A RanBP cDNA (TaRanBP1) was isolated from a wheat cDNA library using RT-PCR product as a probe. The predicted amino acid sequence of TaRanBP1 is over 60% identity to AtRanBP1 from Arabidopsis and also with considerable similarity to human and fungi RanBPs. TaRanBP1 gene was expressed ubiquitously in roots, leaves and stems, with a similar abundance in these tissues. Phylogenetic reconstruction of TaRanBP1 with 32 other RanBPs from 26 species of organisms revealed that RanBPs from plants, animals and fungi clustered as the distinct groups, intraspecies isoforms were not developed for RanBPs, contrast with most other ancestral genes. Structural analysis revealed that all RanBPs were highly conserved in the middle region of their amino acid sequence, which included Ran binding domain and the three conserved motifs that have the essential roles in binding with Ran protein and promotion of GTP hydrolysis by the Ran/RanGAP/RanBP complex. However, N-terminus and C-terminus exhibited very low similarity between the different RanBPs. The different structures in N-terminus and C-terminus of RanBPs are likely to direct the Ran into the specific physiological processes and subsequently exhibit the different roles in different organisms.
Integrated Low-Rank-Based Discriminative Feature Learning for Recognition

Feature learning plays a central role in pattern recognition. In recent years, many representation-based feature learning methods have been proposed and have achieved great success in many applications. However, these methods perform feature learning and subsequent classification in two separate steps, which may not be optimal for recognition tasks. In this paper, we present a supervised low-rank-based approach for learning discriminative features. By integrating latent low-rank representation (LatLRR) with a ridge regression-based classifier, our approach combines feature learning with classification, so that the regulated classification error is minimized. In this way, the extracted features are more discriminative for the recognition tasks. Our approach benefits from a recent discovery on the closed-form solutions to noiseless LatLRR. When there is noise, a robust Principal Component Analysis (PCA)-based denoising step can be added as preprocessing. When the scale of a problem is large, we utilize a fast randomized algorithm to speed up the computation of robust PCA. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of our method.
WRNIP1 protects stalled forks from degradation and promotes fork restart after replication stress

Accurate handling of stalled replication forks is crucial for the maintenance of genome stability. RAD51 defends stalled replication forks from nucleolytic attack, which otherwise can threaten genome stability. However, the identity of other factors that can collaborate with RAD51 in this task is poorly elucidated. Here, we establish that human Werner helicase interacting protein 1 (WRNIP1) is localized to stalled replication forks and cooperates with RAD51 to safeguard fork integrity. We show that WRNIP1 is directly involved in preventing uncontrolled MRE11‐mediated degradation of stalled replication forks by promoting RAD51 stabilization on ssDNA. We further demonstrate that replication fork protection does not require the ATPase activity of WRNIP1 that is however essential to achieve the recovery of perturbed replication forks. Loss of WRNIP1 or its catalytic activity causes extensive DNA damage and chromosomal aberrations. Intriguingly, downregulation of the anti‐recombinase FBH1 can compensate for loss of WRNIP1 activity, since it attenuates replication fork degradation and chromosomal aberrations in WRNIP1‐deficient cells. Therefore, these findings unveil a unique role for WRNIP1 as a replication fork‐protective factor in maintaining genome stability.
Choosing social situations: Two investigations of self-monitoring processes

Two investigations examined the processes by which individuals choose social situations. In the first investigation, participants chose to enter or not to enter a situation that called for behavioral expressions of extraversion. For high selfmonitoring individuals, willingness to enter this situation was a direct reflection of the clarity with which the extraverted character of the situation was defined. For low self-monitoring individuals, willingness to enter this situation was a direct reflection of their personal dispositions within the domain of extraversion and introversion. In the second investigation, participants were assigned to a situation and were allowed to indicate how the situation might be changed to make them more willing to enter it. The transformed situations of high self-monitoring individuals were of relatively clearly defined character. The transformed situations of low self-monitoring individuals were relatively congruent with their own extraverted or introverted dispositions. The processes by which high self-monitoring individuals and low self-monitoring individuals facilitate the enactment of their characteristic behavioral orientations are discussed.
High performance and low cost architecture for H.264/AVC CAVLD targeting HDTV

This work presents a high throughput and low cost architecture for the Context Adaptive Variable Length Decoder (CAVLD) of the H.264/AVC video coding standard. Usually, a large number of memory bits and memory accesses are required to decode the CAVLD in H.264/AVC since a large number of syntax elements are decoded based on look-up tables. To solve this problem, we propose an efficient decoding of syntax elements through the use of tree structures. Due to the difficulty to parallelize operations with variable length codes, we have proposed a few optimizations aiming to improve performance, and these optimizations are presented in this paper. The designed architecture was described in VHDL and synthesized to TSMC 0. 18μm CMOS standard-cells technology. The obtained results show that this solution reached the necessary throughput to decode HDTV videos (1920x1080 pixels) in real-time (30fps).
Mixed-lingual text analysis for polyglot TTS synthesis

Text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis is more and more confronted with the language mixing phenomenon. An important step towards the solution of this problem and thus towards a socalled polyglot TTS system is an analysis component for mixedlingual texts. In this paper it is shown how such an analyzer can be realized for a set of languages, starting from a corresponding set of monolingual analyzers which are based on DCGs and chart parsing.
Study of the Effect of Cyclic Strain Reversal on the Interactions between SRX and PPT in the Microalloyed Austenite during Hot Rolling Process

In the present work cyclic torsion test was used to simulate hot plate rolling process in order to study the effect of strain reversal on non-recrystallisation temperature using unalloyed and microalloyed austenite model alloys. It was found that the amount of strain reversal directly influences both static recrystallisation and strain-induced precipitation process significantly delaying their kinetics. The proper assessment of the interactions between strain reversal and microstructure evolution plays a crucial role during hot rolling process - as continuous changes in the deformation mode (strain reversal) affect the level of redundant strain (in the areas near the surface of the stock) and lead to strain inhomogeneity across the plate thickness. This complex strain path introduces microstructural inhomogeneity and makes its predictions very difficult. Proper understanding of the effects of strain reversal on microstructure evolution in the austenite will help to optimise the hot rolling process.
Prospective randomized double-blinded trial comparing 2 anti-MRSA agents with supplemental coverage of cefazolin before lower extremity revascularization.

OBJECTIVE To compare with antibiotics with methicillin-resistant microbial coverage in a prospective fashion. BACKGROUND Current antibiotic prophylaxis for vascular procedures includes a first generation cephalosporin. No changes in recommendations have occurred despite changes in reports of incidence of MRSA related surgical site infections. Does supplemental anti-MRSA prophylactic coverage provide a significant reduction in Gram-positive or MRSA infections? METHODS Single center prospective double blinded randomized study of patients undergoing lower extremity vascular procedures from 2011 to 2014. One hundred seventy-eight (178) patients were evaluated at 90 days for surgical site infection. Infections were categorized as early infections less than 30 days of the index procedure and late after 90 days. RESULTS Early vascular surgical site infection occurred in 7(8.24%) of patients in the Vancomycin arm, and 11 (11.83%) in the Daptomycin arm (P = 0.43). Gram-positive related infections and MRSA infections occurred in 1(1.18%)/0(0%) of Vancomycin patients and 9 (9.68%)/1 (1.08%) of Daptomycin patients, respectively (P < 0.02 and P = 1.00). Readmissions related to surgical site infections occurred in 4(4.71%) in the Vancomycin group and 11 (11.8%) in the Daptomycin group (P = 0.11). Patients undergoing operative exploration occurred in 5 (5.88%) in the Vancomycin group and 10 (10.75%) of the Daptomycin group (P = 0.17). Late infections were reported in 3 patients, 2 of which were in the combined Daptomycin group. Median hospital charges related to readmissions due to a surgical site infection was $50,823 in the combination Vancomycin arm and $110,920 in the combination Daptomycin group; however, no statistical significance was appreciated (P = 0.11). CONCLUSIONS Vancomycin supplemental prophylaxis seems to reduce the incidence of Gram-positive infection compared with adding supplemental Daptomycin prophylaxis. The Incidence of MRSA-related surgical site infections is low with the addition of either anti-MRSA agents compared with historical incidence of MRSA-related infection.
Predicting information credibility in time-sensitive social media

Purpose – Twitter is a popular microblogging service which has proven, in recent years, its potential for propagating news and information about developing events. The purpose of this paper is to focus on the analysis of information credibility on Twitter. The purpose of our research is to establish if an automatic discovery process of relevant and credible news events can be achieved. Design/methodology/approach – The paper follows a supervised learning approach for the task of automatic classification of credible news events. A first classifier decides if an information cascade corresponds to a newsworthy event. Then a second classifier decides if this cascade can be considered credible or not. The paper undertakes this effort training over a significant amount of labeled data, obtained using crowdsourcing tools. The paper validates these classifiers under two settings: the first, a sample of automatically detected Twitter “trends” in English, and second, the paper tests how well this model transfers to.
Association between Blood Mercury Level and Visceral Adiposity in Adults

Background Few studies have examined the association between mercury exposure and obesity. The aim of this study is to investigate the association between blood mercury concentrations and indices of obesity in adults. Methods A total of 200 healthy subjects, aged 30 to 64 years, who had no history of cardiovascular or malignant disease, were examined. Anthropometric and various biochemical profiles were measured. Visceral adipose tissue (VAT) was measured using dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry (DXA). Results All subjects were divided into three groups according to blood mercury concentrations. Compared with the subjects in the lowest tertile of mercury, those in the highest tertile were more likely to be male; were current alcohol drinkers and smokers; had a higher body mass index (BMI), waist circumference (WC), and VAT; had higher levels of blood pressure, fasting glucose, and insulin resistance; and consumed more fish. The blood mercury concentration was significantly associated with anthropometric parameters, showing relationships with BMI, WC, and VAT. After adjusting for multiple risk factors, the odds ratios (ORs) for high mercury concentration was significantly higher in the highest VAT tertile than in the lowest VAT tertile (OR, 2.66; 95% confidence interval, 1.05 to 6.62; P<0.05). Conclusion The blood mercury concentration was significantly associated with VAT in healthy adults. Further studies are warranted to confirm our findings.
Automatic Design of Decision-Tree Algorithms with Evolutionary Algorithms

This study reports the empirical analysis of a hyper-heuristic evolutionary algorithm that is capable of automatically designing top-down decision-tree induction algorithms. Top-down decision-tree algorithms are of great importance, considering their ability to provide an intuitive and accurate knowledge representation for classification problems. The automatic design of these algorithms seems timely, given the large literature accumulated over more than 40 years of research in the manual design of decision-tree induction algorithms. The proposed hyper-heuristic evolutionary algorithm, HEAD-DT, is extensively tested using 20 public UCI datasets and 10 microarray gene expression datasets. The algorithms automatically designed by HEAD-DT are compared with traditional decision-tree induction algorithms, such as C4.5 and CART. Experimental results show that HEAD-DT is capable of generating algorithms which are significantly more accurate than C4.5 and CART.
Two pathways of homologous recombination in Trypanosoma brucei

African trypanosomes are unicellular parasites that use DNA recombination to evade the mammalian immune response. They do this in a process called antigenic variation, in which the parasites periodically switch the expression of VSG genes that encode distinct Variant Surface Glycoprotein coats. Recombination is used to move new VSG genes into specialised bloodstream VSG transcription sites. Genetic and molecular evidence has suggested that antigenic variation uses homologous recombination, but the detailed reaction pathways are not understood. In this study, we examine the recombination pathways used by trypanosomes to integrate transformed DNA into their genome, and show that they possess at least two pathways of homologous recombination. The primary mechanism is dependent upon RAD51, but a subsidiary pathway exists that is RAD51‐independent. Both pathways contribute to antigenic variation. We show that the RAD51‐independent pathway is capable of recombining DNA substrates with very short lengths of sequence homology and in some cases aberrant recombination reactions can be detected using such microhomologies.
Agelastatin A: a novel inhibitor of osteopontin-mediated adhesion, invasion, and colony formation

Effective inhibitors of osteopontin (OPN)–mediated neoplastic transformation and metastasis are still lacking. (-)-Agelastatin A is a naturally occurring oroidin alkaloid with powerful antitumor effects that, in many cases, are superior to cisplatin in vitro. In this regard, past comparative assaying of the two agents against a range of human tumor cell lines has revealed that typically (-)-agelastatin A is 1.5 to 16 times more potent than cisplatin at inhibiting cell growth, its effects being most pronounced against human bladder, skin, colon, and breast carcinomas. In this study, we have investigated the effects of (-)-agelastatin A on OPN-mediated malignant transformation using mammary epithelial cell lines. Treatment with (-)-agelastatin A inhibited OPN protein expression and enhanced expression of the cellular OPN inhibitor, Tcf-4. (-)-Agelastatin A treatment also reduced β-catenin protein expression and reduced anchorage-independent growth, adhesion, and invasion in R37 OPN pBK-CMV and C9 cell lines. Similar effects were observed in MDA-MB-231 and MDA-MB-435s human breast cancer cell lines exposed to (-)-agelastatin A. Suppression of Tcf-4 by RNA interference (short interfering RNA) induced malignant/invasive transformation in parental benign Rama 37 cells; significantly, these events were reversed by treatment with (-)-agelastatin A. Our study reveals, for the very first time, that (-)-agelastatin A down-regulates β-catenin expression while simultaneously up-regulating Tcf-4 and that these combined effects cause repression of OPN and inhibition of OPN-mediated malignant cell invasion, adhesion, and colony formation in vitro. We have also shown that (-)-agelastatin A inhibits cancer cell proliferation by causing cells to accumulate in the G2 phase of cell cycle. [Mol Cancer Ther 2008;7(3):548–58]
CURE: an efficient clustering algorithm for large databases

Clustering, in data mining, is useful for discovering groups and identifying interesting distributions in the underlying data. Traditional clustering algorithms either favor clusters with spherical shapes and similar sizes, or are very fragile in the presence of outliers. We propose a new clustering algorithm called CURE that is more robust to outliers, and identifies clusters having non-spherical shapes and wide variances in size. CURE achieves this by representing each cluster by a certain fixed number of points that are generated by selecting well scattered points from the cluster and then shrinking them toward the center of the cluster by a specified fraction. Having more than one representative point per cluster allows CURE to adjust well to the geometry of non-spherical shapes and the shrinking helps to dampen the effects of outliers. To handle large databases, CURE employs a combination of random sampling and partitioning. A random sample drawn from the data set is first partitioned and each partition is partially clustered. The partial clusters are then clustered in a second pass to yield the desired clusters. Our experimental results confirm that the quality of clusters produced by CURE is much better than those found by existing algorithms. Furthermore, they demonstrate that random sampling and partitioning enable CURE to not only outperform existing algorithms but also to scale well for large databases without sacrificing clustering quality.
Tensile Properties and Fatigue Strength in High Humidity in Extruded 7075 Al Alloys with Different Aging Conditions

In the present study, the tensile and fatigue properties of extruded 7075 Al alloys subjected to re-solution treatment and then T6, T73 and retrogression-reaging (RRA) tempers were reassessed based upon the microstructural analyses by means of electron backscattering diffraction (EBSD) and X-ray diffraction (XRD). The microstructural analyses indicated that fibrous grains having orientations close to <111> and <001> were preferentially aligned in the extrusion direction and that re-solution treatment increased the fraction of <111> grains. Further the as-received T6 specimens had very high dislocation density as well as fine subgrains, while the re-solution treatment decreased dislocation density considerably and increased grain size. These characteristics explained tensile properties well, by taking into account the effect of precipitates formed by tempers. On the other hand, fatigue strength decreased prominently in all of the specimens, as the relative humidity (RH) was increased from 25% to 85%. T73 and RRA treatments which improve the resistance to stress corrosion cracking (SCC) in static loading were not effective in the humidity-enhanced deterioration in fatigue strength.
The Truncated Isoform of Somatostatin Receptor5 (sst5TMD4) Is Associated with Poorly Differentiated Thyroid Cancer

Somatostatin receptors (ssts) are expressed in thyroid cancer cells, but their biological significance is not well understood. The aim of this study was to assess ssts in well differentiated (WDTC) and poorly differentiated thyroid cancer (PDTC) by means of imaging and molecular tools and its relationship with the efficacy of somatostatin analog treatment. Thirty-nine cases of thyroid carcinoma were evaluated (20 PDTC and 19 WDTC). Depreotide scintigraphy and mRNA levels of sst-subtypes, including the truncated variant sst5TMD4, were carried out. Depreotide scans were positive in the recurrent tumor in the neck in 6 of 11 (54%) PDTC, and in those with lung metastases in 5/11 cases (45.4%); sst5TMD4 was present in 18/20 (90%) of PDTC, being the most densely expressed sst-subtype, with a 20-fold increase in relation to sst2. In WDTC, sst2 was the most represented, while sst5TMD4 was not found; sst2 was significantly increased in PDTC in comparison to WDTC. Five depreotide positive PDTC received octreotide for 3–6 months in a pilot study with no changes in the size of the lesions in 3 of them, and a significant increase in the pulmonary and cervical lesions in the other 2. All PDTC patients treated with octreotide showed high expression of sst5TMD4. ROC curve analysis demonstrated that only sst5TMD4 discriminates between PDTC and WDTC. We conclude that sst5TMD4 is overexpressed in PDTC and may be involved in the lack of response to somatostatin analogue treatment.
Specific developmental disruption of disrupted-in-schizophrenia-1 function results in schizophrenia-related phenotypes in mice

Disrupted-in-schizophrenia 1 (DISC1) was initially discovered through a balanced translocation (1;11)(q42.1;q14.3) that results in loss of the C terminus of the DISC1 protein, a region that is thought to play an important role in brain development. Here, we use an inducible and reversible transgenic system to demonstrate that early postnatal, but not adult induction, of a C-terminal portion of DISC1 in mice results in a cluster of schizophrenia-related phenotypes, including reduced hippocampal dendritic complexity, depressive-like traits, abnormal spatial working memory, and reduced sociability. Accordingly, we report that individuals in a discordant twin sample with a DISC1 haplotype, associating with schizophrenia as well as working memory impairments and reduced gray matter density, were more likely to show deficits in sociability than those without the haplotype. Our findings demonstrate that alterations in DISC1 function during brain development contribute to schizophrenia pathogenesis.