Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Increased neurogenesis and brain‐derived neurotrophic factor in neurokinin‐1 receptor gene knockout mice

It has previously been shown that chronic treatment with antidepressant drugs increases neurogenesis and levels of brain‐derived neurotrophic factor in the hippocampus. These changes have been correlated with changes in learning and long‐term potentiation and may contribute to the therapeutic efficacy of antidepressant drug treatment. Recently, antagonists at the neurokinin‐1 receptor, the preferred receptor for the neuropeptide substance P, have been shown to have antidepressant activity. Mice with disruption of the neurokinin‐1 receptor gene are remarkably similar both behaviourally and neurochemically to mice maintained chronically on antidepressant drugs. We demonstrate here that there is a significant elevation of neurogenesis but not cell survival in the hippocampus of neurokinin‐1 receptor knockout mice. Neurogenesis can be increased in wild‐type but not neurokinin‐1 receptor knockout mice by chronic treatment with antidepressant drugs which preferentially target noradrenergic and serotonergic pathways. Hippocampal levels of brain‐derived neurotrophic factor are also two‐fold higher in neurokinin‐1 receptor knockout mice, whereas cortical levels are similar. Finally, we examined hippocampus‐dependent learning and memory but found no clear enhancement in neurokinin‐1 receptor knockout mice. These data argue against a simple correlation between increased levels of neurogenesis or brain‐derived neurotrophic factor and mnemonic processes in the absence of increased cell survival. They support the hypothesis that increased neurogenesis, perhaps accompanied by higher levels of brain‐derived neurotrophic factor, may contribute to the efficacy of antidepressant drug therapy.
A chloroplast thylakoid lumen protein is required for proper photosynthetic acclimation of plants under fluctuating light environments

Significance Photosynthesis harnesses sunlight to assimilate carbon dioxide and produce biomass essential for life on earth. Photosystem integrity and activity are negatively impacted by fluctuations in incident light from the sun. How plants regulate photosynthetic dynamics under natural fluctuating growth light is relatively poorly understood. Loss of the Arabidopsis thaliana chloroplast lumenal protein MPH2 causes photosystem II (PSII) repair deficiency under changing light. PSII repair mutants are impaired in growth under greenhouse fluctuating light environments, while photoprotection mutants grow normally. These findings inform strategies for engineering plant photosynthetic performance under field conditions, to sustainably address increasing needs for food, fiber, and fuel at a time of changing climate and rapid population growth. Despite our increasingly sophisticated understanding of mechanisms ensuring efficient photosynthesis under laboratory-controlled light conditions, less is known about the regulation of photosynthesis under fluctuating light. This is important because—in nature—photosynthetic organisms experience rapid and extreme changes in sunlight, potentially causing deleterious effects on photosynthetic efficiency and productivity. Here we report that the chloroplast thylakoid lumenal protein MAINTENANCE OF PHOTOSYSTEM II UNDER HIGH LIGHT 2 (MPH2; encoded by At4g02530) is required for growth acclimation of Arabidopsis thaliana plants under controlled photoinhibitory light and fluctuating light environments. Evidence is presented that mph2 mutant light stress susceptibility results from a defect in photosystem II (PSII) repair, and our results are consistent with the hypothesis that MPH2 is involved in disassembling monomeric complexes during regeneration of dimeric functional PSII supercomplexes. Moreover, mph2—and previously characterized PSII repair-defective mutants—exhibited reduced growth under fluctuating light conditions, while PSII photoprotection-impaired mutants did not. These findings suggest that repair is not only required for PSII maintenance under static high-irradiance light conditions but is also a regulatory mechanism facilitating photosynthetic adaptation under fluctuating light environments. This work has implications for improvement of agricultural plant productivity through engineering PSII repair.
Hydrogen sulfide releasing naproxen offers better anti-inflammatory and chondroprotective effect relative to naproxen in a rat model of zymosan induced arthritis.

OBJECTIVE Hydrogen sulfide (H2S) is rapidly gaining ground as a physiological mediator of inflammation, but there is no clear consensus as to its precise role in inflammation. Therefore, this study was undertaken to evaluate the effects of ATB-346 as a novel H2S-releasing naproxen compared to naproxen, as a traditional non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug on zymosan induced mono-arthritis in rats. MATERIALS AND METHODS Male Wistar rats (n=48) were randomly assigned to four main groups: normal control, untreated arthritis, Naproxen and ATB-346 treated groups. Mono-arthritis was induced by intra-articular injection of zymosan into the knee joints. Mechanical hypernociception and joint swelling were evaluated at 6 hours and 5 days. Inflammatory cellular recruitment and adherence, tumor necrosis factor alpha, nuclear factor kappa β, total sulfide levels, and histological changes were evaluated in knee lavages, blood or joint tissues at selected time points. RESULTS Zymosan injection evoked knee inflammation and pain as characterized by mechanical hypernociception, impaired gait, joint swelling with inflammatory exudation and histological changes. Treatment with ATB-346 attenuated nociceptive responses, inflammatory cellular and biochemical changes in comparison to naproxen. Only ATB-346 was able to suppress neutrophil adherence and to preserve normal articular structure. CONCLUSIONS H2S releasing naproxen represents an advancement over the parent drug, naproxen. Apart from the superior anti-inflammatory and anti-noceiceptive activity, ATB-346 offered a distinguished chondroprotective effect and is almost devoid from naproxen deleterious effects on articular cartilage.
A Unified Framework for Testing Linear-Invariant Properties

There has been a sequence of recent papers devoted to understanding the relation between the testability of properties of Boolean functions and the invariance of the properties with respect to transformations of the domain. Invariance with respect to F_2-linear transformations is arguably the most common such symmetry for natural properties of Boolean functions on the hypercube. Hence, it is an important goal to find necessary and sufficient conditions for testability of linear-invariant properties. This is explicitly posed as an open problem in a recent survey of Sudan. We obtain the following results: 1. We show that every linear-invariant property that can be characterized by forbidding induced solutions to a (possibly infinite) set of linear equations can be tested with one-sided error. 2. We show that every linear-invariant property that can be tested with one-sided error can be characterized by forbidding induced solutions to a (possibly infinite) set of {\em systems} of linear equations. We conjecture that our result from item (1) can be extended to cover systems of linear equations. We further show that the validity of this conjecture would have the following implications: 1. It would imply that every linear-invariant property that is closed under restrictions to linear subspaces is testable with one-sided error. Such a result would unify several previous results on testing Boolean functions, such as the testability of low-degree polynomials and of Fourier dimensionality. 2. It would imply that a linear-invariant property ${\cal P}$ is testable with one-sided error {\bf if and only if} ${\cal P}$ is closed under restrictions to linear subspaces, thus resolving Sudan's problem.
OrdRec: an ordinal model for predicting personalized item rating distributions

We propose a collaborative filtering (CF) recommendation framework, which is based on viewing user feedback on products as ordinal, rather than the more common numerical view. This way, we do not need to interpret each user feedback value as a number, but only rely on the more relaxed assumption of having an order among the different feedback ratings. Such an ordinal view frequently provides a more natural reflection of the user intention when providing qualitative ratings, allowing users to have different internal scoring scales. Moreover, we can address scenarios where assigning numerical scores to different types of user feedback would not be easy. Our approach is based on a pointwise ordinal model, which allows it to linearly scale with data size. The framework can wrap most collaborative filtering algorithms, upgrading those algorithms designed to handle numerical values into being able to handle ordinal values. In particular, we demonstrate our framework with wrapping a leading matrix factorization CF method. A cornerstone of our method is its ability to predict a full probability distribution of the expected item ratings, rather than only a single score for an item. One of the advantages this brings is a novel approach to estimating the confidence level in each individual prediction. Compared to previous approaches to confidence estimation, ours is more principled and empirically superior in its accuracy. We demonstrate the efficacy of the approach on some of the largest publicly available datasets, the Netflix data, and the Yahoo! Music data.
Interference Protection Versus Spatial Reuse in Wireless Networks

In this paper the capacity of decentralized wireless networks is addressed. An exclusion region is introduced that protects active receivers from destructive interference of nearby transmitters. An exclusion range imposes an upper bound on the interference that a transmitter may cause to receivers of competing links. While an exclusion region avoids excessive interference and thus improves capacity per link, the spatial reuse in terms of concurrently served links is compromised. The resulting trade-off is elaborated by computer simulations, so to optimize the exclusion range as a function of the user density and maximum transmit power. We demonstrate that by an appropriately specified exclusion range, the network capacity is substantially enhanced. In this context, it has been found that the exclusion range that maximizes the system capacity does not vary greatly when changing the a priori user density. In addition, the trade-off between maximizing the system capacity and maintaining fairness is investigated.
Deep Learning-based Face Pose Recovery

Facial pose estimation has gained a lot of attentions in many practical applications, such as human-robot interaction, gaze estimation and driver monitoring. Meanwhile, end-to-end deep learning-based facial pose estimation is becoming more and more popular. However, facial pose estimation suffers from a key challenge: the lack of sufficient training data for many poses, especially for large poses. Inspired by the observation that the faces under close poses look similar, we reformulate the facial pose estimation as a label distribution learning problem, considering each face image as an example associated with a Gaussian label distribution rather than a single label, and construct a convolutional neural network which is trained with a multi-loss function on AFLW dataset and 300WLP dataset to predict the facial poses directly from color image. Extensive experiments are conducted on several popular benchmarks, including AFLW2000, BIWI, AFLW and AFW, where our approach shows a significant advantage over other state-of-the-art methods.
Lack of Transmission of Human Immunodeficiency Virus From Infected to Uninfected Chimpanzees

Four uninfected chimpanzees were each housed in separate cages with an HIV‐infected chimpanzee for six to twenty‐nine months. Despite close daily contact, all uninoculated chimpanzees remained seronegative for HIV, and virus was never isolated from peripheral blood mononuclear cells of the uninfected chimpanzees. These data indicate that the probability of transmission from infected animals to humans is extremely low and also provide supportive evidence for lack of transmission of HIV by casual contact.
The effect of water content on the dielectric strength of polyalphaolefin (PAO) coolants

Many variables can affect the dielectric strength of coolants and insulating fluids including particulates, water content, temperature, viscosity, and pressure. The present paper evaluates the effects of dissolved water content, adjusted in a controlled manner, on the dielectric strength and the variability of breakdown voltages in synthetic polyalphaolefin (PAO) MIL-PRF-87252 coolants obtained from three different suppliers. Additionally, the effect on dielectric strength of using nitrogen gas versus air for the removal of water is evaluated. The results indicate that the dielectric strength of the fluids decreases by up to 80% over a range of 0 to 70 ppm water content. The variability in breakdown voltage generally increases with increasing water content for all of the samples tested. These results indicate the notable effects of water at concentrations below the MIL-PRF-87252 specified acceptable limit of 50 ppm. The effect on the dielectric strength of using two different sparging gases for the removal of water, dry air or dry nitrogen, was irrelevant when compared at similar water contents.
SprB Is a Cell Surface Component of the Flavobacterium johnsoniae Gliding Motility Machinery

ABSTRACT Cells of the gliding bacterium Flavobacterium johnsoniae move rapidly over surfaces by an unknown mechanism. Transposon insertions in sprB resulted in cells that were defective in gliding. SprB is a highly repetitive 669-kDa cell surface protein, and antibodies against SprB inhibited the motility of wild-type cells. Polystyrene microspheres coated with antibodies against SprB attached to and were rapidly propelled along the cell surface, suggesting that SprB is one of the outermost components of the motility machinery. The movement of SprB along the cell surface supports a model of gliding motility in which motors anchored to the cell wall rapidly propel cell surface adhesins.
The Prevalence of Microalbuminuria among Hypertensive Patients Attending University of Nigeria Teaching Hospital ( UNTH ) Enugu Clinics

Objective: To determine the prevalence of microalbuminuria among patients with essential hypertension and its relationship with age of the patient, prevailing blood pressure and duration of illness. Methods: One hundred patients with essential hypertension attending clinics of the University of Nigeria Teaching Hospital, Ituku-Ozalla, in Enugu State, Southeast Nigeria who gave their informed consent, participated in the study. Their random urine samples were analyzed. Samples that gave positive test result for overt proteinuria as well as those negative for both microalbuminuria and proteinuria were noted. Standard method was used to assay for microalbumin in the rest of the samples. Results: Out of the one hundred patients, 24 (24%). 54 (54%) and 22 (22%) had overt proteinuria, neither overt proteinuria nor microalbuminuria and microalbuminuria respectively. There was no significant difference among these three groups in their mean ages, Systolic Blood Pressure (SBP), Diastolic Blood Pressure (DBP) and Duration of illness. The rate of excretion of albumin did not correlate significantly with the blood pressure, age or duration of illness. Conclusion: A 22% prevalence rate of microalbuminuria recorded in this study is thought to be high since the patients were on drug treatment that was expected to reduce the figure. Frequent screening of patients of essential hypertension is indicated in order to prevent hypertensive nephropathy.
Vesicular Stomatitis Virus Matrix Protein Mutations That Affect Association with Host Membranes and Viral Nucleocapsids*

Viral matrix (M) proteins bind the nucleoprotein core (nucleocapsid) to host membranes during the process of virus assembly by budding. Previous studies using truncated M proteins had implicated the N-terminal 50 amino acids of the vesicular stomatitis virus M protein in binding both membranes and nucleocapsids and a sequence from amino acids 75-106 as an additional membrane binding region. Structure-based mutations were introduced into these two regions, and their effects on membrane association and incorporation into nucleocapsid-M protein complexes were determined using quantitative assays. The results confirmed that the N terminus of M protein is involved in association with plasma membranes as well as nucleocapsids, although these two activities were differentially affected by individual mutations. Mutations in the 75-106 region affected incorporation into nucleocapsid-M complexes but had only minor effects on association with membranes. The ability of site-specific mutant M proteins to complement growth of temperature-sensitive M mutant virus did not correlate well with the ability to associate with membranes or nucleocapsids, suggesting that complementation involves an additional activity of M protein. Mutants with similar abilities to associate with membranes and nucleocapsids but differing in complementation activity were incorporated into infectious cDNA clones. Infectious virus was repeatedly recovered containing mutant M proteins capable of complementation but was never recovered with mutant M proteins that lacked complementation activity, providing further evidence for a separate activity of M protein that is essential for virus replication.
Benefits of Lactoferrin, Osteopontin and Milk Fat Globule Membranes for Infants

The provision of essential and non-essential amino acids for breast-fed infants is the major function of milk proteins. In addition, breast-fed infants might benefit from bioactivities of milk proteins, which are exhibited in the intestine during the digestive phase and by absorption of intact proteins or derived peptides. For lactoferrin, osteopontin and milk fat globule membrane proteins/lipids, which have not until recently been included in substantial amounts in infant formulas, in vitro experiments and animal models provide a convincing base of evidence for bioactivities, which contribute to the protection of the infant from pathogens, improve nutrient absorption, support the development of the immune system and provide components for optimal neurodevelopment. Technologies have become available to obtain these compounds from cow´s milk and the bovine compounds also exhibit bioactivities in humans. Randomized clinical trials with experimental infant formulas incorporating lactoferrin, osteopontin, or milk fat globule membranes have already provided some evidence for clinical benefits. This review aims to compare findings from laboratory and animal experiments with outcomes of clinical studies. There is good justification from basic science and there are promising results from clinical studies for beneficial effects of lactoferrin, osteopontin and the milk fat globule membrane complex of proteins and lipids. Further studies should ideally be adequately powered to investigate effects on clinically relevant endpoints in healthy term infants.
From Classical Genetics to Quantitative Genetics to Systems Biology: Modeling Epistasis

Gene expression data has been used in lieu of phenotype in both classical and quantitative genetic settings. These two disciplines have separate approaches to measuring and interpreting epistasis, which is the interaction between alleles at different loci. We propose a framework for estimating and interpreting epistasis from a classical experiment that combines the strengths of each approach. A regression analysis step accommodates the quantitative nature of expression measurements by estimating the effect of gene deletions plus any interaction. Effects are selected by significance such that a reduced model describes each expression trait. We show how the resulting models correspond to specific hierarchical relationships between two regulator genes and a target gene. These relationships are the basic units of genetic pathways and genomic system diagrams. Our approach can be extended to analyze data from a variety of experiments, multiple loci, and multiple environments.
Influence of Gag-Protease-Mediated Replication Capacity on Disease Progression in Individuals Recently Infected with HIV-1 Subtype C

ABSTRACT HLA class I-mediated selection of immune escape mutations in functionally important Gag epitopes may partly explain slower disease progression in HIV-1-infected individuals with protective HLA alleles. To investigate the impact of Gag function on disease progression, the replication capacities of viruses encoding Gag-protease from 60 individuals in early HIV-1 subtype C infection were assayed in an HIV-1-inducible green fluorescent protein reporter cell line and were correlated with subsequent disease progression. Replication capacities did not correlate with viral load set points (P = 0.37) but were significantly lower in individuals with below-median viral load set points (P = 0.03), and there was a trend of correlation between lower replication capacities and lower rates of CD4 decline (P = 0.09). Overall, the proportion of host HLA-specific Gag polymorphisms in or adjacent to epitopes was negatively associated with replication capacities (P = 0.04), but host HLA-B-specific polymorphisms were associated with higher viral load set points (P = 0.01). Further, polymorphisms associated with host-specific protective HLA alleles were linked with higher viral load set points (P = 0.03). These data suggest that transmission or early HLA-driven selection of Gag polymorphisms results in reduced early cytotoxic T-lymphocyte (CTL) responses and higher viral load set points. In support of the former, 46% of individuals with nonprotective alleles harbored a Gag polymorphism exclusively associated with a protective HLA allele, indicating a high rate of their transmission in sub-Saharan Africa. Overall, HIV disease progression is likely to be affected by the ability to mount effective Gag CTL responses as well as the replication capacity of the transmitted virus.