Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Haematological Parameters: Indicators of the Physiological Status of Farm Animals

This review examined haematological parameters as indicators of the physiological status of farm animals. Blood is important and reliable medium for assessing the physiological and health status of farm animals and haematology is the study of the morphology and physiology of blood. Haematological parameters are those parameters that are related to the blood and blood forming organs. Haematological analysis involves the determination of the various blood parameters and the parameters include erythrocyte (red blood cells (RBC)), leucocyte (white blood cells (WBC)), Packed Cell Volumes (PCV) among others. Haematological examination is among the methods which may contribute to the detection of some changes in health and physiological status, which may not be apparent during physical examination but which affect the fitness of the animal. Thus, haematological parameters are good indicators of the physiological status of farm animals. Furthermore, there is a great variation in haematological parameters of farm animals caused by several factors. There is therefore, the need to investigate these factors and how they affect blood parameters. This will help to establish appropriate physiological baseline values for various livestock.
Structural and Functional Insights into Foamy Viral Integrase

Successful integration of retroviral DNA into the host chromosome is an essential step for viral replication. The process is mediated by virally encoded integrase (IN) and orchestrated by 3'-end processing and the strand transfer reaction. In vitro reaction conditions, such as substrate specificity, cofactor usage, and cellular binding partners for such reactions by the three distinct domains of prototype foamy viral integrase (PFV-IN) have been described well in several reports. Recent studies on the three‑dimensional structure of the interacting complexes between PFV-IN and DNA, cofactors, binding partners, or inhibitors have explored the mechanistic details of such interactions and shown its utilization as an important target to develop anti-retroviral drugs. The presence of a potent, non-transferable nuclear localization signal in the PFV C-terminal domain extends its use as a model for investigating cellular trafficking of large molecular complexes through the nuclear pore complex and also to identify novel cellular targets for such trafficking. This review focuses on recent advancements in the structural analysis and in vitro functional aspects of PFV-IN.
Light-induced photoreceptor and RPE degeneration involve zinc toxicity and are attenuated by pyruvate, nicotinamide, or cyclic light

Purpose Light-induced damage can be a problem after surgery or sun exposure. Short-duration, intense light causes preferential photoreceptor death in the superior central retina of albino mice and rats and serves as a model of oxidation-induced neurodegeneration. Previous work on retinal ischemia-induced neuronal death suggests the involvement of zinc (Zn2+) toxicity in the death and collapse of many retinal cell layers and demonstrates the protective efficacy of pyruvate. Retinal pigment epithelial (RPE) cells were shown to be sensitive to oxidative stress, and zinc, causing loss of nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD+) and adenine triphosphate (ATP), which was prevented by pyruvate and nicotinamide. We previously showed similar results in cortical neurons exposed to oxidative stress or Zn2+. In vivo, Zn2+ is normally present in the inner and outer segments (associated with rhodopsin), Bruch’s membrane and sclera (elastin), RPE, and the outer plexiform layer of the eye (synaptic). In this study, we examine the role of Zn2+ in oxidative stress and light-induced damage in vitro and in vivo. Methods We modeled retinal toxicity in cell-culture lines derived from retinal tissue: Müller and human retinal pigment epithelial (ARPE-19) cells and a cone photoreceptor-derived line (661W). These cultures were exposed to Zn2+ and OS, and the therapeutic efficacy of pyruvate, nicotinamide, and NAD+ was determined. Sprague Dawley albino rats were exposed to 18 kLux of white fluorescent light for 1–4 h in the presence and absence of pyruvate, nicotinamide, lactate, and cyclic light. The intracellular free zinc concentration ([Zn2+]i) and cell damage were assessed 0.5 and 7 days later, respectively. Results We show that Zn2+ and oxidative stress results in increased [Zn2+]i and that Zn2+ therapeutic compounds (pyruvate, nicotinamide, and NAD+) and inhibitors of previously implicated pathways (sirtuin) are efficacious in vitro. Exposure to 18 kLux of cool white fluorescent light for 1 h induced a large increase in Zn2+ staining 4–14 h later, particularly in the superior outer nuclear layer and RPE of dark-maintained Sprague Dawley albino rats; 4 h of light was required to induce similar damage in cyclic light-maintained rats. Photoreceptors and RPE cells died in untreated animals at 3–7 days. However, nicotinamide and pyruvate (intraperitoneal), but not lactate, attenuated this death in treated animals, as measured using optical coherence tomography and confirmed by counting photoreceptor nuclei. Conclusions Zn2+ plays a role in this injury, as suggested by the increased Zn2+ staining and the efficacy of Zn2+ therapeutics. These results suggest that cyclic light maintenance, Zn2+ chelation, pyruvate, and nicotinamide promote RPE and photoreceptor survival after injury and could be effective for various forms of retinal neurodegeneration. These results could have immediate clinical applications in surgery- or sun exposure- induced light damage to the retina.
A new PPM variant for Chinese text compression

Abstract Large alphabet languages such as Chinese are very different from English, and therefore present different problems for text compression. In this article, we first examine the characteristics of Chinese, then we introduce a new variant of the Prediction by Partial Match (PPM) model especially for Chinese characters. Unlike the traditional PPM coding schemes, which encodes an escape probability if a novel character occurs in the context, the new coding scheme directly encodes the order first before encoding a symbol, without having to output an escape probability. This scheme achieves excellent compression rates in comparison with other schemes on a variety of Chinese text files.
Trained Ternary Quantization

Deep neural networks are widely used in machine learning applications. However, the deployment of large neural networks models can be difficult to deploy on mobile devices with limited power budgets. To solve this problem, we propose Trained Ternary Quantization (TTQ), a method that can reduce the precision of weights in neural networks to ternary values. This method has very little accuracy degradation and can even improve the accuracy of some models (32, 44, 56-layer ResNet) on CIFAR-10 and AlexNet on ImageNet. And our AlexNet model is trained from scratch, which means it's as easy as to train normal full precision model. We highlight our trained quantization method that can learn both ternary values and ternary assignment. During inference, only ternary values (2-bit weights) and scaling factors are needed, therefore our models are nearly 16x smaller than full-precision models. Our ternary models can also be viewed as sparse binary weight networks, which can potentially be accelerated with custom circuit. Experiments on CIFAR-10 show that the ternary models obtained by trained quantization method outperform full-precision models of ResNet-32,44,56 by 0.04%, 0.16%, 0.36%, respectively. On ImageNet, our model outperforms full-precision AlexNet model by 0.3% of Top-1 accuracy and outperforms previous ternary models by 3%.
Auctions with Options to Re-Auction y

We examine a dynamic model of English auctions with independent private values. There is a single object for sale and it is not possible for the seller, who has a value of zero for the object, to commit not to sell in the future if a sale is not accomplished today. The seller may be able to commit to a reserve price, or make a cheap-talk announcement of a reserve price and secretly bid for the object herself in order to re-auction it in a later round with a new set of bidders. Bidders are " short-lived " in the sense that at the end of each round all existing bidders vanish and new bidders start arriving. This framework allows us to obtain existing results for one shot-auctions as special cases. This framework also allows us to capture some of the features of thick internet auctions and to obtain some new insights on the role of commitment, on optimal length and on socially optimal reserve prices that are not apparent from a one-shot auction perspective. JEL: D44, D82. While accepting responsibility for all remaining shortcomings of the paper, we would like to thank Paulo Monteiro and seminar participants at the of Sydney and ESAM 2002 for their comments. Particular thanks are owed to Guillaume Rocheteau, who carefully read earlier drafts and o¤ered many valuable suggestions. The …nancial support of ARC (Grant no. A000000055) is gratefully acknowledged.
MiR-744 functions as a proto-oncogene in nasopharyngeal carcinoma progression and metastasis via transcriptional control of ARHGAP5

Nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) is a highly invasive and metastasis-prone epithelial cancer. The paucity of effective treatment strategies for recurrent and metastatic NPC is the major cause for stagnating survival rate of NPC. Therefore, it's urgent to understand the molecular mechanisms underlying NPC progression and identify novel avenues for targeted therapy. It has emerged recently that microRNAs are potential pro-tumorigenic or tumor-suppressive factors that participate in oncogenesis. In this study, we found that miR-744 expression was upregulated in NPC specimens compared to nasopharyngeal epithelium (NPE) tissue, and miR- 744 upregulation was significantly associated with TNM stage, tumorigenesis and metastasis. Functional studies revealed that miR-744 acts as a novel tumor promotor in NPC. Moreover, we determined that miR-744 targets ARHGAP5 (Rho GTPase activating protein 5), a protumorigenic gene, by directly interacting with its promoter and thereby regulating its expression at transcriptional level. Reintroduction of ARHGAP5 resembled the effects of miR-744 and silencing of ARHGAP5 clearly abrogated miR-744-induced enhancement of cell migration and invasion. High level of ARHGAP5 was positively correlated with that of miR-744 and with advanced stages of NPC, as well as with lymph node metastasis. Taken together, these data reveal for the first time that miR-744 exerts its proto-oncogenic function by directly targeting ARHGAP5 promoter. This newly identified miR-744/ARHGAP5 pathway provides further insight into the progression and metastasis of NPC and indicates potential novel therapeutic targets for NPC.
Comparison and Inter-Calibration of Different Soil P Tests Used in the Baltic Sea Countries

In the countries of the Baltic Sea Region, different standardmethods are currently applied to determine theamounts of available P in soils. Target of this knowledgereport was the inter-calibration of the respective nationalsoil P tests to enable the comparison and interpretationof the values obtained by the different methods in thefuture. The soil samples used for the comparison andinter-calibration of eight different soil P tests were takenin four countries and represented prevalent soil typesand parent materials.Results showed that all soil P tests applied in this studywere significantly correlated with each other, however,their extraction force varied considerably. Generally, itwas possible to transform data from one soil P test intoanother but the quality of the resulting values dependedon the pair of soil tests at question. While in some cases,simple regressions already yielded a coefficient of determination>80%, in other cases the inclusion of additionalsoil parameters was needed to achieve this level of accuracy.In some cases, no satisfactory regression equations(i.e. with R² > 80%) could be produced at all.This report on the “Comparison and inter-calibration ofdifferent soil P tests used in the Baltic Sea Countries” wasprepared as part of work package 4 on manure standardsof the project Baltic Manure.
USING ARTIFICIAL NEURAL NETWORK TO ESTIMATE REFERENCE EVAPOTRANSPIRATION

Irrigation, when rationally used, can contribute to the efficient performance of the agribusiness. Planning irrigation, monitoring the soil moisture, the rainfall and the reference evapotranspiration (ET 0 ) is necessary for a rational water management. The FAO Penman-Monteith (FAO PM) method is the standard method for estimating ET 0 , but in some cases, the use of this method is restricted due to missing some climatic variables. For this reason, methods with a lower number of meteorological variables, as temperature values, are quite often used. This study aims to propose an artificial neural network (ANN) to estimate the ET 0 as a function of maximum and minimum air temperatures for the city of Salinas, Minas Gerais State, Brazil. After training, validation and comparison with the Hargreaves methodology, it was observed the existence of a good correlation between the values estimated by the standard method and those estimated by ANN, with the performance index classified as optimal, better than the Hargreaves methodology one. The use of ANN proved to be an excellent alternative for ET 0 estimation, reducing the costs of acquiring climatic data.
Clinical safety of enamel matrix derivative (EMDOGAIN) in the treatment of periodontal defects.

The aim of the present clinical trial was to test tolerability during 2 treatments with EMDOGAIN in a large number of patients. An open, controlled study design in 10 Swedish specialist clinics was chosen, with a test group of 107 patients treated with EMDOGAIN in connection with periodontal surgery at 2 surgical test sites per patient. The procedures were performed 2 to 6 weeks apart on one-rooted teeth with at least 4 mm deep intraosseous lesions. A control group of 33 patients underwent flap surgery without EMDOGAIN at 1 comparable site. In total, 214 test and 33 control surgeries were performed. Serum samples were obtained from test patients for analysis of total and specific antibody levels. 10 of the patients had samples taken before and after the first surgery, 56 other samples were taken after one treatment with EMDOGAIN, and 63 after 2 treatments. None of the samples, not even from allergy-prone patients after 2 treatments, indicated deviations from established baseline ranges. This indicates that the immunogenic potential of EMDOGAIN is extremely low when applied in conjunction with periodontal surgery. Comparison between the test and control groups demonstrated the same type and frequency of postsurgical experiences, i.e., reactions caused by the surgical procedure itself. Clinical probing and radiographic evaluation was performed at baseline and 8 months postsurgery. About half of the patients (44 test and 21 control) were also evaluated after 3 years. There was a significant difference between the test and control results at 8 months postsurgery, and this difference had increased further at the 3 year follow-up. The 2.5-3 mm increase in attachment and bone level after treatment with EMDOGAIN was of the same magnitude as seen in the studies with split-mouth design aiming for test of effectiveness of EMDOGAIN.
The neuroleptic drug pimozide inhibits stem-like cell maintenance and tumorigenicity in hepatocellular carcinoma

Drug repurposing is currently an important approach for accelerating drug discovery and development for clinical use. Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) presents drug resistance to chemotherapy, and the prognosis is poor due to the existence of liver cancer stem-like cells. In this study, we investigated the effect of the neuroleptic agent pimozide to inhibit stem-like cell maintenance and tumorigenicity in HCC. Our results showed that pimozide functioned as an anti-cancer drug in HCC cells or stem-like cells. Pimozide inhibited cell proliferation and sphere formation capacities in HCC cells by inducing G0/G1 phase cell cycle arrest, as well as inhibited HCC cell migration. Surprisingly, pimozide inhibited the maintenance and tumorigenicity of HCC stem-like cells, particularly the side population (SP) or CD133-positive cells, as evaluated by colony formation, sphere formation and transwell migration assays. Furthermore, pimozide was found to suppress STAT3 activity in HCC cells by attenuating STAT3-dependent luciferase activity and down-regulating the transcription levels of downstream genes of STAT3 signaling. Moreover, pimozide reversed the stem-like cell tumorigenic phenotypes induced by IL-6 treatment in HCC cells. Further, the antitumor effect of pimozide was also proved in the nude mice HCC xenograft model. In short, the anti-psychotic agent pimozide may act as a novel potential anti-tumor agent in treating advanced HCC.
Enterohemorrhagic Escherichia coli Hemolysin Employs Outer Membrane Vesicles to Target Mitochondria and Cause Endothelial and Epithelial Apoptosis

Enterohemorrhagic Escherichia coli (EHEC) strains cause diarrhea and hemolytic uremic syndrome resulting from toxin-mediated microvascular endothelial injury. EHEC hemolysin (EHEC-Hly), a member of the RTX (repeats-in-toxin) family, is an EHEC virulence factor of increasingly recognized importance. The toxin exists as free EHEC-Hly and as EHEC-Hly associated with outer membrane vesicles (OMVs) released by EHEC during growth. Whereas the free toxin is lytic towards human endothelium, the biological effects of the OMV-associated EHEC-Hly on microvascular endothelial and intestinal epithelial cells, which are the major targets during EHEC infection, are unknown. Using microscopic, biochemical, flow cytometry and functional analyses of human brain microvascular endothelial cells (HBMEC) and Caco-2 cells we demonstrate that OMV-associated EHEC-Hly does not lyse the target cells but triggers their apoptosis. The OMV-associated toxin is internalized by HBMEC and Caco-2 cells via dynamin-dependent endocytosis of OMVs and trafficked with OMVs into endo-lysosomal compartments. Upon endosome acidification and subsequent pH drop, EHEC-Hly is separated from OMVs, escapes from the lysosomes, most probably via its pore-forming activity, and targets mitochondria. This results in decrease of the mitochondrial transmembrane potential and translocation of cytochrome c to the cytosol, indicating EHEC-Hly-mediated permeabilization of the mitochondrial membranes. Subsequent activation of caspase-9 and caspase-3 leads to apoptotic cell death as evidenced by DNA fragmentation and chromatin condensation in the intoxicated cells. The ability of OMV-associated EHEC-Hly to trigger the mitochondrial apoptotic pathway in human microvascular endothelial and intestinal epithelial cells indicates a novel mechanism of EHEC-Hly involvement in the pathogenesis of EHEC diseases. The OMV-mediated intracellular delivery represents a newly recognized mechanism for a bacterial toxin to enter host cells in order to target mitochondria.
Ieee Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence Longitudinal Study of Automatic Face Recognition

—The two underlying premises of automatic face recognition are uniqueness and permanence. This paper investigates the permanence property by addressing the following: Does face recognition ability of state-of-the-art systems degrade with elapsed time between enrolled and query face images? If so, what is the rate of decline w.r. t. the elapsed time? While previous studies have reported degradations in accuracy, no formal statistical analysis of large-scale longitudinal data has been conducted. We conduct such an analysis on two mugshot databases, which are the largest facial aging databases studied to date in terms of number of subjects, images per subject, and elapsed times. Mixed-effects regression models are applied to genuine similarity scores from state-of-the-art COTS face matchers to quantify the population-mean rate of change in genuine scores over time, subject-specific variability, and the influence of age, sex, race, and face image quality. Longitudinal analysis shows that despite decreasing genuine scores, 99% of subjects can still be recognized at 0.01% FAR up to approximately 6 years elapsed time, and that age, sex, and race only marginally influence these trends. The methodology presented here should be periodically repeated to determine age-invariant properties of face recognition as state-of-the-art evolves to better address facial aging.
Parental divorce and disordered eating: an investigation of a gene-environment interaction.

OBJECTIVE We investigated gene-environment interactions (GxE) for associations between parental divorce and disordered eating (DE). METHOD Participants were 1,810 female twins from the Michigan State University Twin Registry and the Minnesota Twin Family Study. The Minnesota Eating Behaviors Survey was used to assess DE. We tested for GxE by comparing the heritability of DE in twins from divorced versus intact families. It was hypothesized that divorce would moderate the heritability of DE, in that heritability would be higher in twins from divorced than twins from intact families. RESULTS As expected, the heritability of body dissatisfaction was significantly higher in twins from divorced than intact families. However, genetic influences were equal in twins from divorced and intact families for all other forms of DE. DISCUSSION Although divorce did not moderate heritability of most DE symptoms, future research should replicate GxEs for body dissatisfaction and identify factors underlying this unique relationship.
Post-thaw variability in litter decomposition best explained by microtopography at an ice-rich permafrost peatland

ABSTRACT Litter decomposition, a key process by which recently fixed carbon is lost from ecosystems, is a function of environmental conditions and plant community characteristics. In ice-rich peatlands, permafrost thaw introduces high variability in both abiotic and biotic factors, both of which may affect litter decomposition rates in different ways. Can the existing conceptual frameworks of litter decomposition and its controls be applied across a structurally heterogeneous thaw gradient? We investigated the variability in litter decomposition and its predictors at the Stordalen subarctic peatland in northern Sweden. We measured in situ decomposition of representative litter and environments using litter bags throughout two years. We found highly variable litter decomposition rates with turnover times ranging from five months to four years. Surface elevation was a strong correlate of litter decomposition across the landscape, likely as it integrates multiple environmental and plant community changes brought about by thaw. There was faster decomposition but also more mass remaining after two years in thawed areas relative to permafrost areas, suggesting faster initial loss of carbon but more storage into the slow-decomposing carbon pool. Our results highlight mechanisms and predictors of carbon cycle changes in ice-rich peatlands following permafrost thaw.