Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Structural basis for the CsrA-dependent modulation of translation initiation by an ancient regulatory protein

Significance CsrA proteins are repressors of translation that target the Shine–Dalgarno sequence of the ribosome-binding site. Small noncoding RNAs competitively sequester CsrA by offering multiple binding sites that mimic the Shine–Dalgarno. Antagonism of CsrA by small noncoding RNAs is a widely conserved mechanism of posttranscriptional regulation. Here we present the first crystal structure of protein FliW, which allosterically regulates CsrA in a highly specific manner. Our phylogenetic analysis reveals that the FliW–CsrA regulon is subject to coevolution and represents the ancestral state in flagellated bacteria. Regulation of translation is critical for maintaining cellular protein levels, and thus protein homeostasis. The conserved RNA-binding protein CsrA (also called RsmA; for carbon storage regulator and regulator of secondary metabolism, respectively; hereafter called CsrA) represents a well-characterized example of regulation at the level of translation initiation in bacteria. Binding of a CsrA homodimer to the 5′UTR of an mRNA occludes the Shine–Dalgarno sequence, blocking ribosome access for translation. Small noncoding RNAs (sRNAs) can competitively antagonize CsrA activity by a well-understood mechanism. However, the regulation of CsrA by the protein FliW is just emerging. FliW antagonizes the CsrA-dependent repression of translation of the flagellar filament protein, flagellin. Crystal structures of the FliW monomer reveal a novel, minimal β-barrel-like fold. Structural analysis of the CsrA/FliW heterotetramer shows that FliW interacts with a C-terminal extension of CsrA. In contrast to the competitive regulation of CsrA by sRNAs, FliW allosterically antagonizes CsrA in a noncompetitive manner by excluding the 5′UTR from the CsrA–RNA binding site. Our phylogenetic analysis shows that the FliW-mediated regulation of CsrA regulation is the ancestral state in flagellated bacteria. We thus demonstrate fundamental mechanistic differences in the regulation of CsrA by sRNA in comparison with an ancient regulatory protein.
Identifying the Customer Profiles for 3C-prpduct Retailers: A Data Mining Approach

Because of a speedy pace of technology innovation, the competition of the information and communication industries in Taiwan has grown vigorously. At the same time, the demand of consumers has become more sophisticated than ever. In order to outperform competitors and fulfill consumers’ sophisticated requests, retailers of 3C (Computer, Communication, and Consumer Electronics) products, on one hand, have to improve greater efficiency and effectiveness of their up-stream supply chains. On the other hand, the retailers have to establish stronger relationships with their customers. This paper intends to identify customer profiles for 3C product retailers and then develop customized marketing strategies for meeting the demands of different customers. In this paper, we adopted a data mining approach. First, the three indicators (recency, frequency and monetary) of the RFM model were used to cluster customers into homogeneous purchasing-behavior-pattern groups through K-means analysis. Then, the characteristics of the individual customer groups were further analyzed in terms of a CART (Classification and Regression Tree) method. According to the research findings, the two indicators (frequency and monetary) were used for profiling four customer groups. Finally, this paper formulated four marketing strategies customized to target the individual customer groups, respectively.
A Special Case of Multi-Way Relay Channel: When Beamforming is not Applicable

In this paper, we study a special case of multi-way relaying channel, to which traditional beamforming cannot achieve the best performance due to insufficient antennas. A new transmission protocol is proposed by aligning the messages from the same pair with the help of relay precoding. As a result, inter-pair interference can be avoided and intra-pair interference can be coped with by using network coding. Then analytic results, such as the ergodic sum rate and the outage probability, are developed for the proposed protocol. The numerical results are also provided to demonstrate the performance of our proposed scheme. To improve the diversity gain of the proposed scheme, an optimal scheme is also presented.
Arcobacter Species in Humans

During an 8-year study period, Arcobacter butzleri was the fourth most common Campylobacter-like organism isolated from 67,599 stool specimens. Our observations suggest that A. butzleri displays microbiologic and clinical features similar to those of Campylobacter jejuni; however, A. butzleri is more frequently associated with a persistent, watery diarrhea.
Intracellular pH Distribution in Saccharomyces cerevisiae Cell Populations, Analyzed by Flow Cytometry

ABSTRACT Intracellular pH has an important role in the maintenance of the normal functions of yeast cells. The ability of the cell to maintain this pH homeostasis also in response to environmental changes has gained more and more interest in both basic and applied research. In this study we describe a protocol which allows the rapid determination of the intracellular pH of Saccharomyces cerevisiae cells. The method is based on flow cytometry and employs the pH-dependent fluorescent probe carboxy SNARF-4F. The protocol attempts to minimize the perturbation of the system under study, thus leading to accurate information about the physiological state of the single cell. Moreover, statistical analysis performed on major factors that may influence the final determination supported the validity of the optimized protocol. The protocol was used to investigate the effect of external pH on S. cerevisiae cells incubated in buffer. The results obtained showed that stationary cells are better able than exponentially grown cells to maintain their intracellular pH homeostasis independently of external pH changes. Furthermore, analysis of the intracellular pH distribution within the cell populations highlighted the presence of subpopulations characterized by different intracellular pH values. Notably, a different behavior was observed for exponentially grown and stationary cells in terms of the appearance and development of these subpopulations as a response to a changing external pH.
One-Sided Unsupervised Domain Mapping

In unsupervised domain mapping, the learner is given two unmatched datasets $A$ and $B$. The goal is to learn a mapping $G_{AB}$ that translates a sample in $A$ to the analog sample in $B$. Recent approaches have shown that when learning simultaneously both $G_{AB}$ and the inverse mapping $G_{BA}$, convincing mappings are obtained. In this work, we present a method of learning $G_{AB}$ without learning $G_{BA}$. This is done by learning a mapping that maintains the distance between a pair of samples. Moreover, good mappings are obtained, even by maintaining the distance between different parts of the same sample before and after mapping. We present experimental results that the new method not only allows for one sided mapping learning, but also leads to preferable numerical results over the existing circularity-based constraint. Our entire code is made publicly available at this https URL .
Efficient automated speedpath debugging

Speedpath diagnosis is one of the major challenges in designing high-performance Very-Large-Scale Integrated (VLSI) circuits due to timing variations caused by process variations and environmental effects. In this paper, an efficient approach to automate speedpath debugging is presented. The approach relies on converting the timing behavior of a circuit and its corresponding timing variations into functional domain. Afterwards, a SAT-based debug engine is utilized to extract potential failing speedpaths. The experimental results on ISCAS'85 and ISCAS'89 benchmark suites show that our approach achieves a 63% decrease in the size of model resulting in 54% decrease in the debugging time compared to previous work while having a high diagnosis accuracy.
Sparse sensing for distributed gaussian detection

An offline sampling design problem for Gaussian detection is considered in this paper. The sensing operation ismodeled by a selection vector, whose sparsity order is determined by the prescribed global error probability. Since the numerical optimization of the error probability is difficult, equivalent simpler costs, viz., the Kullback-Liebler distance and Bhattacharyya distance are optimized. The sensing problem is formulated and solved sub-optimally using convex optimization techniques. It is shown that the sensing problem can be solved optimally for conditionally independent Gaussian observations. Further, we show that for non-identical sensor observations, the number of sensors required to achieve a certain detection performance decreases as the sensors become more correlated.
Beauville surfaces and finite simple groups

Abstract A Beauville surface is a rigid complex surface of the form (C1 × C2)/G, where C1 and C2 are non-singular, projective, higher genus curves, and G is a finite group acting freely on the product. Bauer, Catanese, and Grunewald conjectured that every finite simple group G, with the exception of A5, gives rise to such a surface. We prove that this is so for almost all finite simple groups (i.e., with at most finitely many exceptions). The proof makes use of the structure theory of finite simple groups, probability theory, and character estimates.
Improvements on Bismuth Tri-iodide Platelets For Room Temperature X-ray Detection

Bismuth tri-iodide synthesized from bismuth carbonate and potassium iodide and then treated with hydriodic acid was used as starting material. Platelets were grown by physical vapor deposition (PVD), with a source temperature of 320 degC, during 1 day. Growth temperature was about 250 degC. Platelets are up to 30 times 20 mm2 in size, and from 50 to 80 mum in thickness. Platelet surface exhibits extreme brightness and higher uniformity than the ones previously reported, confirmed by optical and scanning electron microscopy. Several reactants were used for platelets' surface etching; any of them did not improve the crystal surface. Detectors were made with the as-grown platelets by Pd thermal deposition (contact areas of 0.071 cm2), with and without guard-ring, Pd wire attachment with aquadag and acrylic encapsulation. Detector X-ray response was measured by irradiation with a 241Am source of 3.5 mR/h. Resistivities up to 1.7 times 1013 Omega-cm were obtained, the best reported for detectors made with monocrystals of this material, which correlates with the fact that these detectors show the best signal to dark relation as response to an X-ray moderate radiation exposure: 11.0, with a bias of 60 V. This new generation of platelets give better surfaces, higher resistivities, lower dark currents and better signal to dark relation than previous ones.
Salivary Nerve Growth Factor Reactivity to Acute Psychosocial Stress: A New Frontier for Stress Research

Objective Neurotrophins such as nerve growth factor (NGF) may represent a stress-responsive system complementing the better known neuroendocrine (hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis) and autonomic nervous system, but there is little evidence for NGF response to acute stress in humans because noninvasive measures have not been available. We investigated salivary NGF (sNGF) in 40 healthy young adults confronting a romantic conflict stressor. Methods Five saliva samples—two collected before and three after the conflict—were assayed for sNGF, cortisol (hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal marker), and &agr;-amylase (sAA; ANS marker). In addition, a control group (n = 20) gave saliva samples at the same time intervals to determine whether sNGF changes were specific to the conflict stressor. Results sNGF showed significant reactivity from entry to the first poststress sample among study participants (&bgr; = .13, p = .001), with nonsignificant change across poststress samples. Control participants showed no change in sNGF across the same period. Within-person changes in sNGF were generally aligned with both cortisol (&bgr; = .17, p = .003) and sAA (&bgr; = .17, p = .021) responses. Preconflict negative emotion predicted lower sNGF reactivity (&bgr; = −.08, p = .009) and less alignment with sAA (&bgr; = −.09, p = .040), whereas positive emotion predicted less alignment with cortisol (&bgr; = −.10, p = .019). Conclusions This study is the first to document sNGF as a marker that responds to stress in humans.
The role of population heterogeneity and human mobility in the spread of pandemic influenza

Little is known on how different levels of population heterogeneity and different patterns of human mobility affect the course of pandemic influenza in terms of timing and impact. By employing a large-scale spatially explicit individual-based model, founded on a highly detailed model of the European populations and on a careful analysis of air and railway transportation data, we provide quantitative measures of the influence of such factors at the European scale. Our results show that Europe has to be prepared to face a rapid diffusion of a pandemic influenza, because of the high mobility of the population, resulting in the early importation of the first cases from abroad and highly synchronized local epidemics. The impact of the epidemic in European countries is highly variable because of the marked differences in the sociodemographic structure of European populations. R0, cumulative attack rate and peak daily attack rate depend heavily on sociodemographic parameters, such as the size of household groups and the fraction of workers and students in the population.
Phase-field simulation of solidification and coarsening in dendritic microstructures

Phase-Field Simulation of Solidification and Coarsening in Dendritic Microstructures Larry Kenneth Aagesen, Jr. Phase-field models are used to simulate dendritic microstructures during solidification and coarsening of metallic alloys. Equiaxed dendrites in a Cu-Ni alloy are simulated during rapid solidification and coarsening. The morphology of the solid-liquid interface is characterized using Interface Shape Distributions. The interface’s topology is quantified using genus and number of handles and voids. The system is found to evolve non-self-similarly during solidification and the early stages of coarsening. A method is developed to calculate the time rate of change of interfacial curvatures for a diffuse interface representation of a microstructure, and an algorithm to calculate the rate of change numerically is implemented. Accurate results are obtained, but relatively large interface widths (> 10 points) are required. A phase-field model to simulate isothermal coarsening in a binary alloy is implemented and tested against the predictions of a linear stability analysis. Solid-liquid interfacial velocities are calculated from experimental data for isothermal coarsening of an Al-Cu alloy. The experimental data is used in the phase-field model, and interfacial
The Effect of Cooperation on Localization Systems Using UWB Experimental Data

Localization systems based on ultrawide bandwidth (UWB) technology have been recently considered for indoor environments, due to the property of UWB signals to resolve multipath and penetrate obstacles. However, line-of-sight (LoS) blockage and excess propagation delay a ﬀ ect ranging measurements thus drastically reducing the localization accuracy. In this paper, we ﬁrst characterize and derive models for the range estimation error and the excess delay based on measured data from real ranging devices. These models are used in various multilateration algorithms to determine the position of the target. Using measurements in a real indoor scenario, we investigate how the localization accuracy is a ﬀ ected by the number of beacons and by the availability of priori information about the environment and network geometry. We also examine the case where multiple targets cooperate by measuring ranges not only from the beacons but also from each other. An iterative multilateration algorithm that incorporates information gathered through cooperation is then proposed with the purpose of improving the localization accuracy. Using numerical results, we demonstrate the impact of cooperation on the localization accuracy.
Maternal urinary iodine concentration in pregnancy and children's cognition: results from a population-based birth cohort in an iodine-sufficient area

Objective Reports from populations with an insufficient iodine intake suggest that children of mothers with mild iodine deficiency during pregnancy are at risk for cognitive impairments. However, it is unknown whether, even in iodine-sufficient areas, low levels of iodine intake occur that influence cognitive development in the offspring. This study investigated the association between maternal low urinary iodine concentration (UIC) in pregnancy and children's cognition in a population-based sample from a country with an optimal iodine status (the Netherlands). Setting and participants In 1525 mother–child pairs in a Dutch multiethnic birth cohort, we investigated the relation between maternal UIC<150 μg/g creatinine, assessed <18 weeks gestation and children's cognition. Outcomes measures Non-verbal IQ and language comprehension were assessed during a visit to the research centre using Dutch test batteries when the children were 6 years. Results In total, 188 (12.3%) pregnant women had UIC<150 μg/g creatinine, with a median UIC equal to 119.3 μg/g creatinine. The median UIC in the group with UIC>150 μg/g creatinine was 322.9 μg/g and in the whole sample 296.5 μg/g creatinine. There was a univariate association between maternal low UIC and children's suboptimum non-verbal IQ (unadjusted OR=1.44, 95% CI 1.02 to 2.02). However, after adjustment for confounders, maternal low UIC was not associated with children's non-verbal IQ (adjusted OR=1.33, 95% CI 0.92 to 1.93). There was no relation between maternal UIC in early pregnancy and children's language comprehension at 6 years. Conclusions The lack of a clear association between maternal low UIC and children's cognition probably reflects that low levels of iodine were not frequent and severe enough to affect neurodevelopment. This may result from the Dutch iodine fortification policy, which allows iodised salt to be added to almost all processed food and emphasises the monitoring of iodine intake in the population.
Liver enzyme monitoring in patients treated with troglitazone.

CONTEXT Soon after initial marketing in March 1997, troglitazone, the first thiazolidinedione antidiabetic agent, was found to cause life-threatening acute liver failure. The drug was removed from the market in March 2000. OBJECTIVE To evaluate the effect of US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) risk management efforts, including repeated labeling changes and "Dear Healthcare Professional" letters, on periodic liver enzyme monitoring of patients taking troglitazone. DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS Claims data from a large, multistate managed care organization were used to establish 4 cohorts of patients (N = 7603) with at least 90 days of health plan enrollment before first troglitazone prescription during 4 consecutive periods spanning April 1997 to September 1999 and representing 4 progressively stringent liver monitoring recommendations. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES Percentage of eligible troglitazone users in each cohort with baseline, monthly (for up to 6 months of continuous use), and complete (baseline and monthly) enzyme monitoring, based on computerized records of laboratory claims. RESULTS Baseline testing increased from 15% before any FDA monitoring recommendations (cohort 1) to 44.6% following 4 separate FDA interventions (cohort 4; P<.001). In cohort 4, 33.4% of users had follow-up testing after 1 month of therapy, falling to 13% after 5 months of continuous use. In all cohorts, less than 5% received all recommended liver enzyme tests by the third month of continuous use. CONCLUSIONS The FDA risk management efforts did not achieve meaningful or sustained improvement in liver enzyme testing. Evaluation of the impact of regulatory actions is needed before such actions can be regarded as effective or sufficient.
Inverses, Conditionals and Compositional Operators in Separative Valuation Algebra

Compositional models were introduce by Jirousek and Shenoy in the general framework of valuation-based systems. They based their theory on an axiomatic system of valuations involving not only the operations of combination and marginalisation, but also of removal. They claimed that this systems covers besides the classical case of discrete probability distributions, also the cases of Gaussian densities and belief functions, and many other systems. Whereas their results on the compositional operator are correct, the axiomatic basis is not sufficient to cover the examples claimed above. We propose here a different axiomatic system of valuation algebras, which permits a rigorous mathematical theory of compositional operators in valuation-based systems and covers all the examples mentioned above. It extends the classical theory of inverses in semigroup theory and places thereby the present theory into its proper mathematical frame. Also this theory sheds light on the different structures of valuation-based systems, like regular algebras (represented by probability potentials), canncellative algebras (Gaussian potentials) and general separative algebras (density functions).
Role of the Reversible Xanthophyll Cycle in the Photosystem II Damage and Repair Cycle in Dunaliella salina 1

The Dunaliella salina photosynthetic apparatus organization and function was investigated in wild type (WT) and a mutant (zea1) lacking all β,β-epoxycarotenoids derived from zeaxanthin (Z). The zea1 mutant lacked antheraxanthin, violaxanthin, and neoxanthin from its thylakoid membranes but constitutively accumulated Z instead. It also lacked the so-called xanthophyll cycle, which, upon irradiance stress, reversibly converts violaxanthin to Z via a de-epoxidation reaction. Despite the pronounced difference observed in the composition of β,β-epoxycarotenoids between WT and zea1, no discernible difference could be observed between the two strains in terms of growth, photosynthesis, organization of the photosynthetic apparatus, photo-acclimation, sensitivity to photodamage, or recovery from photo-inhibition. WT and zea1 were probed for the above parameters over a broad range of growth irradiance and upon light shift experiments (low light to high light shift and vice versa). A constitutive accumulation of Z in the zea1 strain did not affect the acclimation of the photosynthetic apparatus to irradiance, as evidenced by indistinguishable irradiance-dependent adjustments in the chlorophyll antenna size and photosystem content of WT and zea1 strain. In addition, a constitutive accumulation of Z in the zea1 strain did not affect rates of photodamage or the recovery of the photosynthetic apparatus from photo-inhibition. However, Z in the WT accumulated in parallel with the accumulation of photodamaged PSII centers in the chloroplast thylakoids and decayed in tandem with a chloroplast recovery from photo-inhibition. These results suggest a role for Z in the protection of photodamaged and disassembled PSII reaction centers, apparently needed while PSII is in the process of degradation and replacement of the D1/32-kD reaction center protein.