Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Diversity in rat tissue accumulation of vitamin B12 supports a distinct role for the kidney in vitamin B12 homeostasis.

BACKGROUND Vitamin B(12) in plasma is complexed to the carrier proteins transcobalamin (TC) and haptocorrin. The TC-B(12) complex is filtered in the glomeruli and reabsorbed in the renal tubules by receptor-mediated endocytosis, providing a route for a significant renal accumulation of vitamin B(12). The present study investigates the role of the rodent kidney in B(12) homeostasis by examining the distribution of vitamin B(12) in rats during vitamin B(12) depletion or B(12) load, and compares kidney accumulation with the vitamin distribution in other tissues including brain, liver, testes, intestine, spleen and plasma. METHODS Fifteen rats were fed on a diet containing different concentrations of B(12) supplemented with s.c. injections of B(12). Twenty four hours prior to sacrifice, all animals were injected with [(57)Co]B(12). The vitamin contents of kidneys, liver, spleen, brain, testis, intestine, skeletal muscle, serum and urine were analysed. Both total tissue vitamin B(12) accumulation and [(57)Co]B(12) were determined to compare steady-state B(12) and the distribution of an acutely injected dose. In the kidney, free and protein-bound B(12) was determined by gel filtration. RESULTS The rat kidneys accumulated more B(12) during normal and loaded conditions than any other tissue. A 110-fold increase in vitamin content was observed from the deficient to the loaded conditions in the kidney compared with a 3.5-fold increase in the liver. In contrast to all other organs, significantly smaller amounts of acutely injected B(12) accumulated in the kidneys in the vitamin-deprived state compared with both the normal and the vitamin-loaded condition. CONCLUSIONS The present study suggests a significant role for the rodent kidney in vitamin B(12) metabolism. We propose a model for rat tissue uptake consistent with the presence of two different TC-B(12) receptors and renal uptake following filtration of TC-B(12) in the glomeruli. The presented model allows for the reduced renal uptake and accumulation in vitamin-deprived conditions, thus reserving the vitamin for other tissues, including nerve tissue and bone marrow, which are more sensitive to vitamin B(12) deficiency.
Growth kinetics and model comparison of Cronobacter sakazakii in reconstituted powdered infant formula.

UNLABELLED Cronobacter sakazakii is a life-threatening bacterium, infrequently implicated in illnesses associated with the consumption of powdered infant formula (PIF). It can cause rare but invasive infections in neonatal infants who consume contaminated PIF. The objective of this research was to investigate the growth kinetics and develop mathematical models to predict the growth of heat-injured C. sakazakii in reconstituted PIF (RPIF). RPIF, inoculated with a 6-strain cocktail of non-heat-treated (uninjured) or heat-injured C. sakazakii, was incubated at different temperatures to develop growth models. Except for storage at 6 °C, C. sakazakii grew well at all test temperatures (10 to 48 °C). Uninjured C. sakazakii exhibited no observable lag phase, while a lag phase was apparent in heat-treated cells. A simple 3-parameter logistic equation was used to fit growth curves for non-heat-treated cells, while both Baranyi and Huang models were suitable for heat-treated C. sakazakii. Calculated minimum and maximum growth temperatures were 6.5 and 51.4 °C for non-heat-treated cells, and 6.9 and 50.1 °C for heat-treated cells of C. sakazakii in RPIF, respectively. There was no significant difference between growth rates of non-heat-treated and heat-injured cells in RPIF. For heat-treated cells of C. sakazakii, the lag phase was temperature-dependent and very short (between 25 °C and 48 °C). These results suggest that both non-heat-treated and heat-injured C. sakazakii cells may present a risk to infants if the pathogens are not completely destroyed by heat in RPIF and then exposed to subsequent temperature abuse. PRACTICAL APPLICATION C. sakazakii is a life-threatening bacterium found in powdered infant formula (PIF). This study shows that the uninjured bacterium exhibits very short or no lag phase if not refrigerated and can grow well in reconstituted PIF (RPIF), while the heat-injured cells can multiply at an equivalent rate following metabolic recovery. Temperature abuse may allow C. sakazakii to grow and endanger infants fed with RPIF. Predictive models developed in this study can be used to estimate the growth and conduct risk assessments of this pathogen.
On the exit time from a cone for brownian motion with drift

We investigate the tail distribution of the first exit time of Brownian motion with drift from a cone and find its exact asymptotics for a large class of cones. Our results show in particular that its exponential decreasing rate is a function of the distance between the drift and the cone, whereas the polynomial part in the asymptotics depends on the position of the drift with respect to the cone and its polar cone, and reflects the local geometry of the cone at the points that minimize the distance to the drift.
1-D Combline Leaky-Wave Antenna With the Open-Stopband Suppressed: Design Considerations and Comparisons With Measurements

The design of a 1-D planar periodic combline leaky-wave antenna that avoids the open-stopband effects as the beam is scanned through broadside is discussed and verified experimentally. This antenna radiates from nearly resonant stubs, which ensures a small leakage constant and hence a high directivity, and shows a single beam scanning through its n = -1 space harmonic in the X-band frequency range. The open-stopband suppression is obtained by applying a recently proposed matching technique within the unit cell that is experimentally validated here for the first time. Measurements are made of the phase and leakage constants, the S-parameters, and the realized gain patterns. Comparisons are made with numerical values obtained from specialized and commercial software and very good agreement is found in all cases.
Dynamic hybrid routing: Achieve load balancing for changing traffic demands

Classical TE methods calculate the optimal routing based on a known traffic matrix. However, they are unable to handle unexpected traffic changes. Thus, various methods were proposed in recent years, such as online dynamic TE and robust static routing TE. However, online dynamic TE requires additional overhead on routers for information dissemination and suffers from the transient disruptions during routing protocol convergence, while using one robust static routing to accommodate a wide range of traffic scenarios is unable to ensure near optimality of performance for each individual traffic scenario. This paper presents an approach called dynamic hybrid routing (DHR) to achieve load balancing for a wide range of traffic scenarios. Our basic idea is to configure several routing policies in advance and then dynamically rebalance traffic by applying different preconfigured routing policy to react to traffic fluctuations. Each routing policy composes of a common basic destination-based routing and a few complementary explicit routing forwarding entries for a small set of selected ingress/egress node pairs. We design a method to find the near-optimal dynamic hybrid routing configuration. Extensive evaluation demonstrates the effectiveness of DHR. We show that DHR achieves nearoptimal load balancing and thus obtain about at least 96% throughput compared to optimal routing for each individual traffic scenario with very low overhead.
Centaurin-α2 Interacts with β-Tubulin and Stabilizes Microtubules

Centaurin-α2 is a GTPase-activating protein for ARF (ARFGAP) showing a diffuse cytoplasmic localization capable to translocate to membrane, where it binds phosphatidylinositols. Taking into account that Centaurin-α2 can localize in cytoplasm and that its cytoplasmatic function is not well defined, we searched for further interactors by yeast two-hybrid assay to investigate its biological function. We identified a further Centaurin-α2 interacting protein, β-Tubulin, by yeast two-hybrid assay. The interaction, involving the C-terminal region of β-Tubulin, has been confirmed by coimmunoprecipitation experiments. After Centaurin-α2 overexpression in HeLa cells and extraction of soluble (αβ dimers) and insoluble (microtubules) fractions of Tubulin, we observed that Centaurin-α2 mainly interacts with the polymerized Tubulin fraction, besides colocalizing with microtubules (MTs) in cytoplasm accordingly. Even following the depolimerizing Tubulin treatments Centaurin-α2 remains mainly associated to nocodazole- and cold-resistant MTs. We found an increase of MT stability in transfected HeLa cells, evaluating as marker of stability the level of MT acetylation. In vitro assays using purified Centaurin-α2 and tubulin confirmed that Centaurin-α2 promotes tubulin assembly and increases microtubule stability. The biological effect of Centaurin-α2 overexpression, assessed through the detection of an increased number of mitotic HeLa cells with bipolar spindles and with the correct number of centrosomes in both dividing and not dividing cells, is consistent with the Centaurin-α2 role on MT stabilization. Centaurin-α2 interacts with β-Tubulin and it mainly associates to MTs, resistant to destabilizing agents, in vitro and in cell. We propose Centaurin-α2 as a new microtubule-associated protein (MAP) increasing MT stability.
Shrinkage insensitivity of NKCC 1 in myosin II-depleted cytoplasts from Ehrlich ascites tumor cells

Hoffmann EK, Pedersen SF. Shrinkage insensitivity of NKCC1 in myosin II-depleted cytoplasts from Ehrlich ascites tumor cells. Am J Physiol Cell Physiol 292: C1854–C1866, 2007. First published January 17, 2007; doi:10.1152/ajpcell.00474. 2006. —Protein phosphorylation/dephosphorylation and cytoskeletal reorganization regulate the Na -K -2Cl cotransporter (NKCC1) during osmotic shrinkage; however, the mechanisms involved are unclear. We show that in cytoplasts, plasma membrane vesicles detached from Ehrlich ascites tumor cells (EATC) by cytochalasin treatment, NKCC1 activity evaluated as bumetanide-sensitive Rb influx was increased compared with the basal level in intact cells yet could not be further increased by osmotic shrinkage. Accordingly, cytoplasts exhibited no regulatory volume increase after shrinkage. In cytoplasts, cortical F-actin organization was disrupted, and myosin II, which in shrunken EATC translocates to the cortical region, was absent. Moreover, NKCC1 activity was essentially insensitive to the myosin light chain kinase (MLCK) inhibitor ML-7, a potent blocker of shrinkage-induced NKCC1 activity in intact EATC. Cytoplast NKCC1 activity was potentiated by the Ser/Thr protein phosphatase inhibitor calyculin A, partially inhibited by the protein kinase A inhibitor H89, and blocked by the broad protein kinase inhibitor staurosporine. Cytoplasts exhibited increased protein levels of NKCC1, Ste20-related prolineand alanine-rich kinase (SPAK), and oxidative stress response kinase 1, yet they lacked the shrinkage-induced plasma membrane translocation of SPAK observed in intact cells. The basal phosphorylation of p38 mitogen-activated protein kinase (p38 MAPK) was increased in cytoplasts compared with intact cells, yet in contrast to the substantial activation in shrunken intact cells, p38 MAPK could not be further activated by shrinkage of the cytoplasts. Together these findings indicate that shrinkage activation of NKCC1 in EATC is dependent on the cortical F-actin network, myosin II, and MLCK.
Business Process Instances Discovery from Email Logs

Email is a reliable, confidential, fast, free and easily accessible form of communication. Due to its wide use in personal, but most importantly, professional contexts, email represents a valuable source of information that can be harvested for understanding, reengineering and repurposing undocumented business processes of companies and institutions. Few researchers have investigated the problem of extracting and analyzing the process-oriented information contained in emails. In this paper, we go forward in this direction by proposing a new method to discover business process instances from email logs that uses unsupervised classification techniques. The approach is composed of two clustering steps. The first one uses a powerful semantic similarity measurement method, Word2vec, while the second one uses a similarity measure combing several email attributes. Experimental results are detailed to illustrate and prove our approach contributions.
Enhanced approximate cloaking by optimal change of variables

The aim of (passive) cloaking with respect to electromagnetic (or acoustic) sensing is to surround a region of space with a material layer—the cloak—that renders its contents and even the existence of the layer undetectable by such measurements. At least theoretically this can be achieved using the coordinate invariance of the underlying wave equation, through so-called cloaking by mapping. However, a practical realization of the cloaking by mapping schemes discussed in the literature frequently requires the design of highly anisotropic materials with extreme dielectric properties. In this work we consider, in the electrostatic case, a regularized, approximate cloaking by mapping scheme and discuss the problem of optimal choice of radial maps, that determine the conductivity distribution of the cloak. We consider two different optimality criteria: minimal maximal anisotropy and minimal mean anisotropy of this conductivity distribution. Using both criteria we show that it is possible to achieve significantly lower anisotropy (for a prescribed level of invisibility) or significantly lower visibility (for a prescribed level of anisotropy). For example, in two dimensions one may achieve exponentially small visibility with a cloak, that in terms of anisotropy (and lowest and highest conductivity) is no worse than the traditional affine map cloak, which only yields quadratically small visibility.
iPads in early education: separating assumptions and evidence

Since their first appearance in 2010, iPads and other comparable tablets have been heralded for their potential to revolutionize education, including that of young children. Like previous multimedia technologies (e.g., whiteboards, Kozma, 1991), iPads are multimodal, allowing users to use texts, pictures, and sounds. In comparison with other, so far available multimedia technologies, iPads have three novel features which have the potential to make a positive difference to early education: iPads are portable and light-weight (unlike netbooks and laptops), they eliminate the need for separate input devices requiring certain levels of dexterity (such as mouse and keyboard) and thirdly, they are specifically designed to accommodate a number of apps, many of which have a child-friendly intuitive design. With several of these apps, iPads provide unprecedented opportunities for children to create their own contents and participate in rich and dynamic learning contexts. Yet, despite the possible benefits, there is an absence of research supporting the enthusiastic claims that iPads will “revolutionize education” (e.g., Ferenstein, 2011). This is due to several reasons but in early education, two prevalent myths concerning new technologies hinder research progress and innovation in practice: technological determinism and the digital/non-digital binary. This article outlines how these technology myths relate to the emerging iPad research in early education of children aged between 2 and 8 years old. After a critical assessment of the assumptions underlying some of the studies, attention is turned to a “second wave” of iPads' research which avoids these conceptual obstacles. Recommendations for future research are provided throughout the article, with the aim of provoking a wider debate regarding some of the identified issues.
Lycopene modulates cellular proliferation, glycolysis and hepatic ultrastructure during hepatocellular carcinoma

AIM To investigate the effect of lycopene extracted from tomatoes (LycT) on ultrastructure, glycolytic enzymes, cell proliferation markers and hypoxia during N-Nitrosodiethylamine (NDEA)-induced hepatocarcinogenesis. METHODS Female BALB/c mice were randomly divided into four groups: The Control, NDEA (200 mg NDEA/kg b.w. given i.p.), LycT (5 mg/kg b.w. given orally on alternate days) and LycT + NDEA group. The mRNA and protein expression of various cell proliferation markers (PCNA, Cyclin D1, and p21) were assessed by reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction and enzyme linked immunosorbent assay, respectively. The ultrastructure of hepatic tissue was analyzed using scanning and transmission electron microscopy. The enzymatic activity of glycolytic enzymes was estimated using standardized protocols, while glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase activity level was estimated using a kit obtained from Reckon Diagnostic P. Ltd. (India). RESULTS Uncontrolled proliferation in the liver of NDEA (P ≤ 0.001) mice was evident from the high expression of cell-proliferation associated genes (PCNA, Cyclin D1, and p21) when compared to control and LycT mice. In addition, enhanced activities of hexokinase, phosphoglucoisomerase, aldolase, glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase and hypoxia-inducible factor-1α were observed in NDEA mice as compared to control (P ≤ 0.001) and LycT (P ≤ 0.001) mice. The alterations in hepatic ultrastructure observed in the NDEA group correlated with the changes in the above parameters. LycT pre-treatment in NDEA-challenged mice ameliorated the investigated pathways disrupted by NDEA treatment. Moreover, hepatic electron micrographs from the LycT + NDEA group showed increased macrophages, apoptotic bodies and well-differentiated hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) in comparison to undifferentiated HCC as observed in the NDEA treated group. CONCLUSION This study demonstrates that dietary supplementation with LycT has a multidimensional role in preventing HCC development.
Selective-Fading Multiple-Access MIMO Channels: Diversity-Multiplexing Tradeoff and Dominant Outage Event Regions

We establish the optimal diversity-multiplexing (DM) tradeoff for coherent selective-fading multiple-access MIMO channels and provide corresponding code design criteria. As a byproduct, on the conceptual level, we find an interesting relation between the DM tradeoff framework and the notion of dominant error event regions, first introduced in the AWGN case by Gallager, IEEE Trans. IT, 1985. This relation allows us to accurately characterize the error mechanisms in MIMO fading multiple-access channels. In particular, we find that, for a given rate tuple, the maximum achievable diversity order is determined by a single outage event that dominates the total error probability exponentially in SNR. Finally, we examine the distributed space-time code construction proposed by Badr and Belfiore, Int. Zurich Seminar on Commun. , 2008, using the code design criteria derived in this paper.
Linear vs. semidefinite extended formulations: exponential separation and strong lower bounds

We solve a 20-year old problem posed by Yannakakis and prove that there exists no polynomial-size linear program (LP) whose associated polytope projects to the traveling salesman polytope, even if the LP is not required to be symmetric. Moreover, we prove that this holds also for the cut polytope and the stable set polytope. These results were discovered through a new connection that we make between one-way quantum communication protocols and semidefinite programming reformulations of LPs.
Identification and HLA Restriction of Naturally Derived Th1-Cell Epitopes from the Secreted Mycobacterium tuberculosisAntigen 85B Recognized by Antigen-Specific Human CD4+T-Cell Lines

ABSTRACT Antigen 85B (Ag85B/MPT59) is a major secreted protein fromMycobacterium tuberculosis which is a promising candidate antigen for inclusion in novel subunit vaccines against tuberculosis (TB). The present study was undertaken to map naturally derived T-cell epitopes from M. tuberculosis Ag85B in relation to major histocompatibility complex (MHC) class II restriction. Antigen-specific CD4+ T-cell lines were established from HLA-typed TB patients and Mycobacterium bovis BCG vaccinees by stimulation of peripheral blood mononuclear cells with purified Ag85B in vitro. The established T-cell lines were then tested for proliferation and gamma interferon (IFN-γ) secretion in response to 31 overlapping synthetic peptides (18-mers) covering the entire sequence of the mature protein. The results showed that the epitopes recognized by T-cell lines from TB patients were scattered throughout the Ag85B sequence whereas the epitopes recognized by T-cell lines from BCG vaccinees were located toward the N-terminal part of the antigen. The T-cell epitopes represented by peptides p2 (amino acids [aa] 10 to 27), p3 (aa 19 to 36), and p11 (aa 91 to 108) were frequently recognized by antigen-specific T-cell lines from BCG vaccinees in both proliferation and IFN-γ assays. MHC restriction analysis demonstrated that individual T-cell lines specifically recognized the complete Ag85B either in association with one of the self HLA-DRB1,DRB3, or DRB4 gene products or nonspecifically in a promiscuous manner. At the epitope level, panel studies showed that peptides p2, p3, and p11 were presented to T cells by HLA-DR-matched as well as mismatched allogeneic antigen-presenting cells, thus representing promiscuous epitopes. The identification of naturally derived peptide epitopes from the M. tuberculosisAg85B presented to Th1 cells in the context of multiple HLA-DR molecules strongly supports the relevance of this antigen to subunit vaccine design.
Reliability models of a bridge system structure under incomplete information

Most methods of system reliability analysis assume that the precise probability distributions of the component lifetime to failure are available, and the system components are independent. However this assumption may be unreasonable in a wide scope of cases. Therefore, imprecise reliability modes of a bridge system structure are put forward in this paper, for cases when the above assumptions are violated. The analysis is based on only some partial information about the component lifetime distributions including points of unknown distributions, and probabilities on nested intervals. The effect of the component independence condition on the reliability of systems is studied. The formulas of the unreliability of the bridge system structure are obtained in the explicit form under different conditions.
Feedforward Sequential Memory Networks: A New Structure to Learn Long-term Dependency

In this paper, we propose a novel neural network structure, namely \emph{feedforward sequential memory networks (FSMN)}, to model long-term dependency in time series without using recurrent feedback. The proposed FSMN is a standard fully-connected feedforward neural network equipped with some learnable memory blocks in its hidden layers. The memory blocks use a tapped-delay line structure to encode the long context information into a fixed-size representation as short-term memory mechanism. We have evaluated the proposed FSMNs in several standard benchmark tasks, including speech recognition and language modelling. Experimental results have shown FSMNs significantly outperform the conventional recurrent neural networks (RNN), including LSTMs, in modeling sequential signals like speech or language. Moreover, FSMNs can be learned much more reliably and faster than RNNs or LSTMs due to the inherent non-recurrent model structure.