Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The tyrosinase gene codes for an antigen recognized by autologous cytolytic T lymphocytes on HLA-A2 melanomas

Lymphocytes of melanoma patients can be restimulated in vitro with autologous tumor cells to generate antitumor cytolytic T lymphocytes (CTL). Previous reports have indicated that, when such CTL are obtained from HLA-A2 melanoma patients, they often display broad reactivity on A2 melanoma cell lines. Such antitumor CTL clones, which appeared to recognize the same antigen, were isolated from two patients. We report here the cloning of a cDNA that directs the expression of the antigen recognized by these CTL. This cDNA corresponds to the transcript of the tyrosinase gene. The gene was found to be active in all tested melanoma samples and in most melanoma cell lines. Among normal cells, only melanocytes appear to express the gene. The tyrosinase antigen presented by HLA-A2 may therefore constitute a useful target for specific immunotherapy of melanoma. But possible adverse effects of antityrosinase immunization, such as the destruction of normal melanocytes and its consequences, will have to be examined before clinical pilot studies can be undertaken.
Actin filament dynamics are dominated by rapid growth and severing activity in the Arabidopsis cortical array

Metazoan cells harness the power of actin dynamics to create cytoskeletal arrays that stimulate protrusions and drive intracellular organelle movements. In plant cells, the actin cytoskeleton is understood to participate in cell elongation; however, a detailed description and molecular mechanism(s) underpinning filament nucleation, growth, and turnover are lacking. Here, we use variable-angle epifluorescence microscopy (VAEM) to examine the organization and dynamics of the cortical cytoskeleton in growing and nongrowing epidermal cells. One population of filaments in the cortical array, which most likely represent single actin filaments, is randomly oriented and highly dynamic. These filaments grow at rates of 1.7 µm/s, but are generally short-lived. Instead of depolymerization at their ends, actin filaments are disassembled by severing activity. Remodeling of the cortical actin array also features filament buckling and straightening events. These observations indicate a mechanism inconsistent with treadmilling. Instead, cortical actin filament dynamics resemble the stochastic dynamics of an in vitro biomimetic system for actin assembly.
Structure of Herpes Simplex Virus Glycoprotein D Bound to the Human Receptor Nectin-1

Binding of herpes simplex virus (HSV) glycoprotein D (gD) to a cell surface receptor is required to trigger membrane fusion during entry into host cells. Nectin-1 is a cell adhesion molecule and the main HSV receptor in neurons and epithelial cells. We report the structure of gD bound to nectin-1 determined by x-ray crystallography to 4.0 Å resolution. The structure reveals that the nectin-1 binding site on gD differs from the binding site of the HVEM receptor. A surface on the first Ig-domain of nectin-1, which mediates homophilic interactions of Ig-like cell adhesion molecules, buries an area composed by residues from both the gD N- and C-terminal extensions. Phenylalanine 129, at the tip of the loop connecting β-strands F and G of nectin-1, protrudes into a groove on gD, which is otherwise occupied by C-terminal residues in the unliganded gD and by N-terminal residues in the gD/HVEM complex. Notably, mutation of Phe129 to alanine prevents nectin-1 binding to gD and HSV entry. Together these data are consistent with previous studies showing that gD disrupts the normal nectin-1 homophilic interactions. Furthermore, the structure of the complex supports a model in which gD-receptor binding triggers HSV entry through receptor-mediated displacement of the gD C-terminal region.
Power management of a stand-alone hybrid wind-microturbine distributed generation system

As generation and transmission costs, system stability, and security issues continue to be complicated by growing electricity demand that relies primarily on centralized electricity production, alternative distributed generation (DG) systems show promise as a solution. This paper presents a hybrid wind-microturbine generation (MTG) system for stand-alone applications. The Wind-MTG hybrid mainly consists of a wind energy conversion system that utilizes a self-excited induction generator and a split-shaft microturbine that incorporates a self-excited induction generator. The system component models and an overall power management scheme are presented in the paper. A simulation model for the hybrid energy system has been developed using MATLAB/Simulink®. Actual wind data and a practical load profile are used to evaluate the system performance through a simulation case study. The simulation results indicate the suitability of the hybrid DG system for DG applications.
Increased cystic fibrosis transmembrane conductance regulator (CFTR) expression in the human hydrosalpinx.

BACKGROUND Hydrosalpinx (HSP), characterized by abnormal fluid accumulation in the Fallopian tube, is one of the main causes of infertility in women; however, the mechanism underlying the formation of hydrosalpinx fluid (HF) remains elusive. The present study investigated the possible involvement of cystic fibrosis transmembrane conductance regulator (CFTR), a cAMP-dependent chloride channel, in the pathogenesis of hydrosalpinx. METHODS Masson's trichrome staining was used to characterize epithelial transformation in human HSP; RT-PCR, immunohistochemistry and immunofluorescence staining were used for CFTR expression and localization. RESULTS Masson's trichrome staining showed areas of epithelial transformation, focally attenuated and pseudostratified. Immunostaining showed enhanced CFTR immunoreactivity in the focally attenuated and pseudostratified areas of HSP epithelium. RT-PCR revealed that CFTR expression in HSP was significantly greater than that in normal Fallopian tubes. CONCLUSIONS These results indicate that HSP epithelium undergoes epithelial transformation with elevated CFTR expression, which may lead to increased transepithelial electrolyte and fluid secretion resulting in HF formation. The present findings may lead to the development of new treatment strategies for infertile patients with HSP.
Photometry of SN 2002bo with template image subtraction

VRI photometry of the type Ia supernova 2002bo is presented. This SN exploded in a dusty region of the host galaxy NGC 3190, thus, subtraction of a template frame was necessary to obtain reliable photometry. We used a template frame of NGC 3190 taken during the course of our galaxy imaging project, fortunately, just a few days before SN 2002bo was discovered. The aim of this project is to collect template frames of nearby galaxies that are potential hosts of bright SNe. Subtraction of pre-SN images helped us to exclude the background light contamination of the host galaxy. The maximum occurred at JD 2 452 346, with maximal V brightness of 13: m 58. MLCS analysis led to T0(B)= JD 2 452 346:1 0:8 (fiducial B-
A Novel Sample Selection Strategy for Imbalanced Data of Biomedical Event Extraction with Joint Scoring Mechanism

Biomedical event extraction is an important and difficult task in bioinformatics. With the rapid growth of biomedical literature, the extraction of complex events from unstructured text has attracted more attention. However, the annotated biomedical corpus is highly imbalanced, which affects the performance of the classification algorithms. In this study, a sample selection algorithm based on sequential pattern is proposed to filter negative samples in the training phase. Considering the joint information between the trigger and argument of multiargument events, we extract triplets of multiargument events directly using a support vector machine classifier. A joint scoring mechanism, which is based on sentence similarity and importance of trigger in the training data, is used to correct the predicted results. Experimental results indicate that the proposed method can extract events efficiently.
Control of lead and trail limbs during obstacle crossing following stroke.

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Obstacle crossing is compromised following stroke. The purpose of this study was to quantify modifications during obstacle clearance following stroke. SUBJECTS Twelve subjects with stroke and 12 subjects without stroke participated in the study. METHODS Kinematic variables were measured while participants crossed a 4-cm-high obstacle. Subjects with stroke walked at a self-selected speed; subjects without stroke walked at a comparable speed and at a self-selected speed. RESULTS Several modifications were observed following stroke with both groups walking at self-selected speeds. The affected lead limb was positioned closer to the obstacle before crossing. Affected trail-limb clearance over the obstacle was reduced. Both affected and unaffected lead and trail limbs landed closer to the obstacle after clearance. Swing time was increased in the affected lead limb after obstacle clearance. Fewer modifications were detected at matched walking speed; the trail limb still landed closer to the obstacle. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION Modifications during obstacle crossing following stroke may be partly related to walking speed. The findings raise issues of safety because people with stroke demonstrated reduced clearance of a 4-cm obstacle and limb placement closer to the obstacle after clearance.
Sexuality in Cyberspace: Update for the 21st Century

Online sexuality has become a much discussed topic in the 90's however most people continue to have a narrow and uninformed view of what this area truly consists of. This paper provides an overview of the ubiquitous and explosive effect of the Internet on sexuality and summarizes the following key dimensions including: internet relationships and how they influence face to face relationships, alternative communities and sexually disenfranchised people, commercial aspects of internet sexuality, concerns about employee morality and productivity, and, sexual information and education in the 21st century. The internet and associated technological advances will have a tremendous influence on every aspect of sexuality in this new ''information age'' and thus we encourage professionals involved in this area to get informed and thereby have a say in shaping the future. In addition, those keeping current with these rapid developments will be in a position to both warn people as to the pathological aspects of cybers.
European Conference on Information Systems ( ECIS ) 2007 Fostering Information Security Culture in Small and Medium Size Enterprises : An Interpretive Study in Australia

By having an effective organisational information security culture where employees intuitively protect corporate information assets, small and medium size enterprises (SMEs) could improve information security. However, previous research has largely overlooked the development of such a culture for SMEs, and the national context in which SMEs operate. The paper explores this topic and provides key findings from an interpretive Australian study based on a literature review, two focus groups and three case studies. A holistic framework is provided for fostering an information security culture in SMEs in a national setting. The paper discusses key managerial challenges for SMEs attempting to develop such a culture. The main findings suggest that Australian SME owners do not provide sufficient support for information security due to insufficient awareness of its importance and may also be affected by national attitudes to risk. The paper concludes that Australian SME owners may benefit from adopting a risk-based approach to information security and should be educated about the potential strategic role of information technology and information security. The paper also identifies the value and difficulty of promoting a behavioural and learning approach to information security to complement traditional technological and managerial approaches. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.
Ju l 2 00 0 Instabilities in Granular Flows

The flow and handling of granular materials is of major importance to many industries. Yet despite efforts over several decades, the modeling of such flows has achieved only modest success. Dense gravity-driven flows in hoppers have been often modeled as elastic-plastic continua, for example. In this picture, the granular material flows as a plastic with a frictional yield condition, and deforms as an elastic solid otherwise. This model has been used to analyze mass flows, where the material is flowing throughout the hopper, but has failed to provide adequate agreement with experiment in the prediction of quantities such as discharge rate, for example [17]. Despite such shortcomings, Jenike’s [6] construction of steady-state incompressible rigid-plastic radial solutions in hoppers with simple geometries has been of considerable importance in hopper design [10]. These are solutions for quasistatic flow (inertial effects are neglected) where grains travel radially in conical or wedge-shaped hoppers. Only recently have numerical solutions of steady-state quasistatic flows in more complicated geometries been produced [5]. However, it is now clear that there are serious mathematical difficulties with the equations for time-dependent incompressible rigid-plastic flow (IRPF). In many instances, the equations for such flows have been shown to be ill-posed i.e. they possess instabilities with arbitrarily short wavelengths (Schaeffer [12], Valanis and Peters [18]). Hence, it is problematic to interpret the steady-state rigid-plastic flow equations as long-time solutions of the time-dependent equations. Additionally, both the steady-state and time-dependent equations have physical shortcomings. There are several features of hopper flows where the particle size is important, indicating that it may not be appropriate to model such dense granular flows as continua.
Job characteristics and perceived organizational support among police officers

Research supports that treatment of employees, in terms of organizational policies, practices, and resources, are associated with employees’ perception of organizational support. Furthermore, research supports that there is often disparate treatment between employees’ work related factors. For this reason, it is reasonable to speculate that variances in police officers’ perception that their organization cares about them and values their work contributions may exist. The purpose of this exploratory research was to describe how police officers’ job characteristics (duty assignment, rank, tenure, and department size) might be associated with perceptions of organizational support. Utilizing OLS regression, the findings revealed that perceived organizational support varied across different job characteristics. This study extends our understanding of how the aforementioned job characteristics are associated with police officer attitudes.
Observations and Theoretical Implications of the Large-Separation Lensed Quasar SDSS J1004+4112

We study the recently discovered gravitational lens SDSS J1004+4112, the first quasar lensed by a cluster of galaxies. It consists of four images with a maximum separation of 14. ″62. The system was selected from the photometric data of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) and has been confirmed as a lensed quasar at z = 1.734 on the basis of deep imaging and spectroscopic follow-up observations. We present color-magnitude relations for galaxies near the lens plus spectroscopy of three central cluster members, which unambiguously confirm that a cluster at z = 0.68 is responsible for the large image separation. We find a wide range of lens models consistent with the data, and despite considerable diversity they suggest four general conclusions: (1) the brightest cluster galaxy and the center of the cluster potential well appear to be offset by several kiloparsecs; (2) the cluster mass distribution must be elongated in the north-south direction, which is consistent with the observed distribution of cluster galaxies; (3) the inference of a large tidal shear (~0.2) suggests significant substructure in the cluster; and (4) enormous uncertainty in the predicted time delays between the images means that measuring the delays would greatly improve constraints on the models. We also compute the probability of such large-separation lensing in the SDSS quasar sample on the basis of the cold dark matter model. The lack of large-separation lenses in previous surveys and the discovery of one in SDSS together imply a mass fluctuation normalization σ8 = 1.0 (95% confidence) if cluster dark matter halos have an inner density profile ρ ∝ r-1.5. Shallower profiles would require higher values of σ8. Although the statistical conclusion might be somewhat dependent on the degree of the complexity of the lens potential, the discovery of SDSS J1004+4112 is consistent with the predictions of the abundance of cluster-scale halos in the cold dark matter scenario.
Biological children as participants in foster families

Abstract In this article, we aim to provide insight into the experiences of biological children in foster families, in terms of their participation and involvement in the foster home. The article is based on an in-depth qualitative study of four children aged 11–14 years and four ‘adult children’ aged 22–30 years. This unique approach presents a comprehensive picture of growing up with foster siblings, including the ‘here-and-now’ perspective of children presently living in foster families, and the ‘looking back’ perspective of the ‘adult children’. Both groups perceived themselves as active participants in the early phases of the foster family. They felt involved in the family planning to invite a foster child, and they engaged with warmth and care in the everyday life with the foster sibling. In retrospect the adult children recollected more about the conflicts and strains of growing up in a foster families, especially in periods when the foster child needed much attention, or in case of unplanned removal of the foster sibling. They then felt excluded and that they had to cope with loss and sorrow alone. Despite this, three of the four adult children were planning to become a foster family themselves. The informants had not experienced support from the child protection services (CPS). We conclude that more research is needed to develop knowledge about biological children’s benefits and risks when growing up in foster families, about participation in the foster family life, and about participation in contact with the CPS.
Syntactic Constraints on Phrase Extraction for Phrase-Based Machine Translation

A typical phrase-based machine translation (PBMT) system uses phrase pairs extracted from word-aligned parallel corpora. All phrase pairs that are consistent with word alignments are collected. The resulting phrase table is very large and includes many non-syntactic phrases which may not be necessary. We propose to filter the phrase table based on source language syntactic constraints. Rather than filter out all non-syntactic phrases, we only apply syntactic constraints when there is phrase segmentation ambiguity arising from unaligned words. Our method is very simple and yields a 24.38% phrase pair reduction and a 0.52 BLEU point improvement when compared to a baseline PBMT system with full-size tables.
IbeR Facilitates Stress-Resistance, Invasion and Pathogenicity of Avian Pathogenic Escherichia coli

Systemic infections by avian pathogenic Escherichia coli (APEC) are economically devastating to poultry industries worldwide. IbeR, located on genomic island GimA, was shown to serve as an RpoS-like regulator in rpoS gene mutation neonatal meningitis E. coli (NMEC) RS218. However, the role of IbeR in pathogenicity of APEC carrying active RpoS has not yet been investigated. We showed that the APEC IbeR could elicit antibodies in infected ducks, suggesting that IbeR might be involved in APEC pathogenicity. To investigate the function of IbeR in APEC pathogenesis, mutant and complementation strains were constructed and characterized. Inactivation of ibeR led to attenuated virulence and reduced invasion capacity towards DF-1 cells, brains and cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) in vitro and in vivo. Bactericidal assays demonstrated that the mutant strain had impaired resistance to environmental stress and specific pathogen-free (SPF) chicken serum. These virulence-related phenotypes were restored by genetic complementation. Quantitative real-time reverse transcription PCR revealed that IbeR controlled expression of stress-resistance genes and virulence genes, which might led to the associated virulence phenotype.
Expression of Transient Receptor Potential Ankyrin 1 (TRPA1) and Its Role in Insulin Release from Rat Pancreatic Beta Cells

Objective Several transient receptor potential (TRP) channels are expressed in pancreatic beta cells and have been proposed to be involved in insulin secretion. However, the endogenous ligands for these channels are far from clear. Here, we demonstrate the expression of the transient receptor potential ankyrin 1 (TRPA1) ion channel in the pancreatic beta cells and its role in insulin release. TRPA1 is an attractive candidate for inducing insulin release because it is calcium permeable and is activated by molecules that are produced during oxidative glycolysis. Methods Immunohistochemistry, RT-PCR, and Western blot techniques were used to determine the expression of TRPA1 channel. Ca2+ fluorescence imaging and electrophysiology (voltage- and current-clamp) techniques were used to study the channel properties. TRPA1-mediated insulin release was determined using ELISA. Results TRPA1 is abundantly expressed in a rat pancreatic beta cell line and freshly isolated rat pancreatic beta cells, but not in pancreatic alpha cells. Activation of TRPA1 by allyl isothiocyanate (AITC), hydrogen peroxide (H2O2), 4-hydroxynonenal (4-HNE), and cyclopentenone prostaglandins (PGJ2) and a novel agonist methylglyoxal (MG) induces membrane current, depolarization, and Ca2+ influx leading to generation of action potentials in a pancreatic beta cell line and primary cultured pancreatic beta cells. Activation of TRPA1 by agonists stimulates insulin release in pancreatic beta cells that can be inhibited by TRPA1 antagonists such as HC030031 or AP-18 and by RNA interference. TRPA1-mediated insulin release is also observed in conditions of voltage-gated Na+ and Ca2+ channel blockade as well as ATP sensitive potassium (KATP) channel activation. Conclusions We propose that endogenous and exogenous ligands of TRPA1 cause Ca2+ influx and induce basal insulin release and that TRPA1-mediated depolarization acts synergistically with KATP channel blockade to facilitate insulin release.