Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Lrp12/Mig13a Reveals Changing Patterns of Preplate Neuronal Polarity during Corticogenesis that Are Absent in Reeler Mutant Mice

During corticogenesis, the earliest generated neurons form the preplate, which evolves into the marginal zone and subplate. Lrp12/Mig13a, a mammalian gene related to the Caenorhabditis elegans neuroblast migration gene mig-13, is expressed in a subpopulation of preplate neurons that undergo ventrally directed tangential migrations in the preplate layer and pioneer axon projections to the anterior commissure. As the preplate separates, Lrp12/Mig13a-positive neurons polarize in the radial plane and form a pseudocolumnar pattern, prior to moving to a deeper position within the emerging subplate layer. These changes in neuronal polarity do not occur in reeler mutant mice, revealing the earliest known defect in reeler cortical patterning and suggesting that the alignment of preplate neurons into a pseudolayer facilitates the movement of later-born radially migrating neurons into the emerging cortical plate.
Biological roles of progesterone, prostaglandins, and interferon tau in endometrial function and conceptus elongation in ruminants

A large majority of pregnancy loss in cattle occurs during the first three weeks after conception, particularly during the peri-implantation period. This review integrates established and new information on the biological role of ovarian progesterone (P4), prostaglandins (PGs) and interferon tau (IFNT) in endometrial function and conceptus elongation during the peri-implantation period of pregnancy in ruminants. Progesterone is secreted by the ovarian corpus luteum (CL) and is the unequivocal hormone of pregnancy. Prostaglandins are produced from both the endometrium as well as conceptus trophectoderm during early pregnancy. Interferon tau is produced solely by the conceptus trophectoderm and is the maternal recognition of pregnancy signal that inhibits production of luteolytic pulses of PGF2α by the endometrium to maintain the CL and thus production of P4. Conceptus-endometrial interactions in ruminants are complex and involve carefully orchestrated temporal and spatial alterations in endometrial gene expression during pregnancy. Available results support the idea that the individual, interactive, and coordinated actions of P4, PGs, and IFNT regulate uterine receptivity to conceptus implantation by controlling expression of genes in the endometrium and that their actions are essential for conceptus elongation. One outcome of gene expression changes in the endometrial epithelia is alterations in lumenal secretions that govern conceptus elongation via effects on the trophectoderm. An increased knowledge of conceptusendometrial interactions during early pregnancy in ruminants is necessary to understand and elucidate the causes of infertility and recurrent pregnancy loss and to provide a basis for new strategies to improve fertility, pregnancy outcomes and thus reproductive efficiency.
Application of Shaping Technique With Turbo Coset Codes

This paper presents a method for the combined turbo code and quadratic-amplitude modulation using coset coding. It also presents a fixed-rate shaping algorithm offering lower complexity as compared to all relevant methods reported in the literature. A symbol-based turbo code acting on symbols of size 4 is used to select a coset along each 1D subconstellation (using the partition Z/4Z). The proposed coset coding method satisfies the conditions for the separability of shaping and coding, and, consequently, can be easily integrated with the shaping algorithm. Numerical results are presented for an additive white Gaussian noise channel. The proposed coding-shaping algorithm offers the best performance reported in the literature, enjoys very low complexity, can be easily scaled to accommodate different bit rates and spectral efficiencies, and does not suffer from an early error floor, as observed in many other related works.
High Efficiency Excitation of Dielectric Rods Using a Magnetic Ring Current

We describe a theoretical analysis of the excitation of the fundamental surface wave mode on an infinite dielectric rod by a magnetic ring current that is interior to the rod. Earlier work has provided results for an external ring source. Results obtained by us show that for an interior source excitation efficiencies close to 100% are possible for high permittivity dielectrics and launching efficiencies greater than 90% can be achieved over bandwidths greater than 20%. This is a higher efficiency than is possible with an exterior source. Simulation results verifying the theoretical analysis are presented for the practical case of a coaxial waveguide exciting the dielectric rod.
Analysis of automated quantification of motor activity in REM sleep behaviour disorder

Rapid eye movement (REM) sleep behaviour disorder (RBD) is characterized by dream enactment and REM sleep without atonia. Atonia is evaluated on the basis of visual criteria, but there is a need for more objective, quantitative measurements. We aimed to define and optimize a method for establishing baseline and all other parameters in automatic quantifying submental motor activity during REM sleep. We analysed the electromyographic activity of the submental muscle in polysomnographs of 29 patients with idiopathic RBD (iRBD), 29 controls and 43 Parkinson's (PD) patients. Six adjustable parameters for motor activity were defined. Motor activity was detected and quantified automatically. The optimal parameters for separating RBD patients from controls were investigated by identifying the greatest area under the receiver operating curve from a total of 648 possible combinations. The optimal parameters were validated on PD patients. Automatic baseline estimation improved characterization of atonia during REM sleep, as it eliminates inter/intra‐observer variability and can be standardized across diagnostic centres. We found an optimized method for quantifying motor activity during REM sleep. The method was stable and can be used to differentiate RBD from controls and to quantify motor activity during REM sleep in patients with neurodegeneration. No control had more than 30% of REM sleep with increased motor activity; patients with known RBD had as low activity as 4.5%. We developed and applied a sensitive, quantitative, automatic algorithm to evaluate loss of atonia in RBD patients.
Contraception choice for HIV positive women

UNAIDS/WHO estimates that 42 million people are living with HIV/AIDS worldwide and 50% of all adults with HIV infection are women predominantly infected via heterosexual transmission. Women with HIV infection, like other women, may wish to plan pregnancy, limit their family, or avoid pregnancy. Health professionals should enable these reproductive choices by counselling and appropriate contraception provision at the time of HIV diagnosis and during follow up. The aim of this article is to present a global overview of contraception choice for women living with HIV infection including effects on sexual transmission risk.
Distributed modulation for cooperative wireless communications

W e examine the modulation and signal processing aspect of communications assisted by cooperative relay nodes in wireless ad hoc networks. Several distributed modulation, detection, and combining schemes, utilizing either nonregenerative or regenerative relay nodes, are reviewed and their performances in fading channels are discussed. These schemes offer cooperative diversity against channel fading compared to their noncoop-erative counterparts. They may or may not require knowledge of the channel state information (CSI) at the receiving nodes, thus suiting both slow and fast fading environments. We bring out connections between such cooperative systems and noncooperative multichannel communication systems, and highlight unique challenges in the design and analysis of the former. INTRODUCTION A wireless ad hoc network consists of multiple wireless nodes that can move around and communicate without a fixed network infrastructure. The broadcasting nature of the wireless medium allows neighboring nodes to cooperate in information transport, creating multiple communication routes and offering cooperative diversity for fading mitigation (e.g., [1]–[3]). Cooperative diversity is considered particularly useful in wireless ad hoc and sensor networks, where power/bandwidth/size restrictions of the mobile nodes may prevent use of other diversity techniques (e.g., antenna diversity) to combat channel fading. The purpose of this article is to provide an overview of distributed modulation for cooperative wireless systems. We consider cases when the CSI can be conveniently and accurately estimated as well as when it cannot. CSI estimation, typically performed at the receiving nodes via training, is challenging
IMMUNOLOGICAL MEMORY IN VITRO

The immune responses to sheep erythrocytes of mouse spleen cell suspensions from immune and nonimmune donors were compared in vitro. In vivo immunity was only transiently reflected in vitro, and 8 wk after in vivo immunization the responses of cultures from immunized and nonimmunized mice were virtually identical. There appeared to be two mechanisms for an antibody response to sheep erythrocytes. The first was responsible for the early primary response and is unmodified in the immune animal though contributing little to subsequent in vivo responses due to its suppressibility by specific antibody. The second was expressed in the in vivo secondary response but not on in vitro challenge of spleen cells from mice immunized many weeks previously; spleen cell cultures from such immune mice, freed from the antibody of the in vivo environment, once again demonstrate a pure primary-type response.
Dietary intake of fish and PUFA, and clinical depressive and anxiety disorders in women

Fish and PUFA consumption are thought to play a role in mental health; however, many studies do not take into account multiple sources of PUFA. The present study analysed data from a sample of 935 randomly selected, population-based women aged 20–93 years. A validated and comprehensive dietary questionnaire ascertained the consumption of n-3 and n-6 PUFA. Another assessed fish and energy intake and provided data for a dietary quality score. The General Health Questionnaire-12 (GHQ-12) measured psychological symptoms and a clinical interview (Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-IV-TR Research Version, Non-patient edition) assessed depressive and anxiety disorders. Median dietary intakes of long-chain n-3 fatty acids (310 mg/d) were below suggested dietary target levels. The only PUFA related to categorical depressive and anxiety disorders was DHA. There was a non-linear relationship between DHA intake and depression; those in the second tertile of DHA intake were nearly 70 % less likely to report a current depressive disorder compared to those in the first tertile. The relationship of DHA to anxiety disorders was linear; for those in the highest tertile of DHA intake, the odds for anxiety disorders were reduced by nearly 50 % after adjustments, including adjustment for diet quality scores, compared to the lowest tertile. Those who ate fish less than once per week had higher GHQ-12 scores, and this relationship was particularly obvious in smokers. These are the first observational data to indicate a role for DHA in anxiety disorders, but suggest that the relationship between DHA and depressive disorders may be non-linear.
Diabetes incidence in psoriatic arthritis, psoriasis and rheumatoid arthritis: a UK population-based cohort study.

OBJECTIVE The objective of this study was to evaluate the incidence of diabetes among patients with PsA and RA in the general population. METHODS We conducted a cohort study using an electronic medical records database representative of the UK general population (1986-2010). We estimated hazard ratios (HRs) for incident diabetes in PsA, psoriasis and RA cohorts compared with age- and sex-matched comparison cohorts without the corresponding conditions, adjusting for BMI, smoking, alcohol use, co-morbidities and glucocorticoids at baseline. RESULTS Cohorts included 4196 persons with PsA, 59 281 with psoriasis and 11 158 with RA, with mean follow-up times of 5.9, 5.8 and 5.5 years, respectively. Incidence rates for diabetes were 7.3, 6.4 and 6.3 cases per 1000 person-years among individuals with PsA, psoriasis and RA, respectively. Age- and sex-matched HRs for diabetes were 1.72 (95% CI 1.46, 2.02) in PsA, 1.39 (95% CI 1.32, 1.45) in psoriasis and 1.12 (95% CI 1.01, 1.25) in RA. After adjustment for BMI, smoking and alcohol, the HRs were attenuated substantially (1.43, 1.24 and 1.00, respectively). With further adjustment for baseline glucocorticoid use and co-morbidities, the HRs were 1.33 (1.09, 1.61) in PsA, 1.21 (1.15, 1.27) in psoriasis and 0.94 (0.84, 1.06) in RA. CONCLUSION This general population study suggests an increased incidence of diabetes in PsA and RA, which is substantially explained by obesity and lifestyle factors. These findings support the importance of managing such factors in PsA and RA patients.
Tonoplast Na+/H+ Antiport Activity and Its Energization by the Vacuolar H+-ATPase in the Halophytic Plant Mesembryanthemum crystallinum L

Tonoplast vesicles were isolated from leaf mesophyll tissue of the inducible Crassulacean acid metabolism plant Mesembryanthemum crystallinum to investigate the mechanism of vacuolar Na+ accumulation in this halophilic species. In 8-week-old plants exposed to 200 mM NaCl for 2 weeks, tonoplast H+-ATPase activity was approximately doubled compared with control plants of the same age, as determined by rates of both ATP hydrolysis and ATP-dependent H+ transport. Evidence was also obtained for the presence of an electroneutral Na+/H+ antiporter at the tonoplast that is constitutively expressed, since extravesicular Na+ was able to dissipate a pre-existing transmembrane pH gradient. Initial rates of H+ efflux showed saturation kinetics with respect to extravesicular Na+ concentration and were 2.1-fold higher from vesicles of salt-treated plants compared with the controls. Na+-dependent H+ efflux also showed a high selectivity for Na+ over K+, was insensitive to the transmembrane electrical potential difference, and was more than 50% inhibited by 200 [mu]M N-amidino-3,5-diamino-6-chloropyrazinecarboxamide hydrochloride. The close correlation between increased Na+/H+ antiport and H+-ATPase activities in response to salt treatment suggests that accumulation of the very high concentrations of vacuolar Na+ found in M. crystallinum is energized by the H+ electrochemical gradient across the tonoplast.
Development of Direct Tension Test Method for Ultra-High- Performance Fiber-Reinforced Concrete

Sustained postcracking tensile resistance is a fundamental mechanical characteristic of ultra high-performance fiber-reinforced concrete (UHPFRC). This research program developed a simple, reliable direct tension test (DTT) method that can generate the uniaxial tensile mechanical response for both cast and extracted UHPFRC samples. The developed test method emulates DTT methods already commonly used in the mechanical testing of metals, thus addressing many of the hurdles that can hinder the implementation of new test methods. It was demonstrated to be applicable to two UHPFRCs with two different steel fiber reinforcement contents in seven total sets of specimens. The test method can facilitate the development of appropriate quality control processes for UHPFRC, the advancement of UHPFRC mixture designs, and the development of strain-based UHPFRC structural design criteria.
Representation Learning on Graphs: Methods and Applications

Machine learning on graphs is an important and ubiquitous task with applications ranging from drug design to friendship recommendation in social networks. The primary challenge in this domain is finding a way to represent, or encode, graph structure so that it can be easily exploited by machine learning models. Traditionally, machine learning approaches relied on user-defined heuristics to extract features encoding structural information about a graph (e.g., degree statistics or kernel functions). However, recent years have seen a surge in approaches that automatically learn to encode graph structure into low-dimensional embeddings, using techniques based on deep learning and nonlinear dimensionality reduction. Here we provide a conceptual review of key advancements in this area of representation learning on graphs, including matrix factorization-based methods, random-walk based algorithms, and graph neural networks. We review methods to embed individual nodes as well as approaches to embed entire (sub)graphs. In doing so, we develop a unified framework to describe these recent approaches, and we highlight a number of important applications and directions for future work.
Training-Time Optimization of a Budgeted Booster

We consider the problem of feature-efficient prediction - a setting where features have costs and the learner is limited by a budget constraint on the total cost of the features it can examine in test time. We focus on solving this problem with boosting by optimizing the choice of base learners in the training phase and stopping the boosting process when the learner's budget runs out. We experimentally show that our method improves upon the boosting approach AdaBoostRS [Reyzin, 2011] and in many cases also outperforms the recent algorithm SpeedBoost [Grubb and Bagnell, 2012]. We provide a theoretical justication for our optimization method via the margin bound. We also experimentally show that our method outperforms pruned decision trees, a natural budgeted classifier.
Functional Characterization of Three Mouse Formyl Peptide Receptors

The evolutionary relationship and functional correlation between human formyl peptide receptors (FPRs) and their mouse counterparts remain incompletely understood. We examined three members of the mouse formyl peptide receptor subfamily (mFprs) and found that they differ in agonist preference and cellular distributions. When stably expressed in transfected rat basophilic leukemia (RBL-2H3) cells, mFpr1 was readily activated by N-formylated peptides derived from Listeria monocytogenes (fMIVTLF), Staphylococcus aureus (fMIFL), and mitochondria (fMMYALF). In contrast, the Escherichia coli–derived fMLF was 1000-fold less potent. The aforementioned peptides were much less efficacious at mFpr2, which responded better to the synthetic hexapeptide WKYMVm, the synthetic agonists Quin-C1 (a substituted quinazolinone), and compound 43 (a nitrosylated pyrazolone derivative). Saturation binding assays showed that mFpr1 and mFpr2 were expressed at similar levels on the cell surface, although their affinity for N-formyl-Met-Leu-Phe-Ile-Ile-Lys-fluorescein isothiocyanate varied by more than 1000-fold [dissociation constant (Kd) values of 2.8 nM for mFpr1 and 4.8 μM for mFpr2]). Contrary to these receptors, mFpr-rs1 responded poorly to all the previously mentioned peptides that were tested. Fluorescent microscopy revealed an intracellular distribution pattern of mFpr-rs1. On the basis of these results, we conclude that mFpr1 is an ortholog of human FPR1 with certain pharmacologic properties of human FPR2/ALX, whereas mFpr2 has much lower affinity for formyl peptides. The intracellular distribution of mFpr-rs1 suggests an evolutionary correlation with human FPR3.
Idiopathic recurrent pancreatitis: long-term results after ERCP, endoscopic sphincterotomy, or ursodeoxycholic acid treatment

OBJECTIVE:In about 30% of cases, the etiology of acute recurrent pancreatitis remains unexplained, and the term “idiopathic” is currently used to define such disease. We aimed to evaluate the long-term outcome of patients with idiopathic recurrent pancreatitis who underwent endoscopic cholangiopancreatography (ERCP) followed by either endoscopic biliary (and seldom pancreatic) sphincterotomy or ursodeoxycholic acid (UDCA) treatment, in a prospective follow-up study.METHODS:A total of 40 consecutive patients with intact gallbladder entered the study protocol after a 24-month observation period during which at least two episodes of pancreatitis occurred. All patients underwent diagnostic ERCP, followed by biliary or minor papilla sphincterotomy in cases of documented or suspected bile duct microlithiasis and sludge, type 2 sphincter of Oddi dysfunction, or pancreas divisum with dilated dorsal duct. Patients with no definite anatomical or functional abnormalities received long-term treatment with UDCA. After biliary sphincterotomy, patients with further episodes of pancreatitis underwent main pancreatic duct stenting followed by pancreatic sphincterotomy if the stent had proved to be effective.RESULTS:ERCP found an underlying cause of pancreatitis in 70% of cases. Patients were followed-up for a period ranging from 27 to 73 months. Effective therapeutic ERCP or UDCA oral treatment proved that occult bile stone disease and type 2 or 3 sphincter of Oddi dysfunction (biliary or pancreatic segment) had been etiological factors in 35 of the 40 cases (87.5%) After therapeutic ERCP or UDCA, only three patients still continued to have episodes of pancreatitis.CONCLUSIONS:Diagnostic and therapeutic ERCP and UDCA were effective in 92.5% of our cases, over a long follow-up, indicating that the term “idiopathic” was justified only in a few patients with acute recurrent pancreatitis.
Mitochondrial impairment induced by poly(ADP‐ribose) polymerase‐1 activation in cortical neurons after oxygen and glucose deprivation

Neuronal cells injured by ischemia and reperfusion to a certain extent are committed to death in necrotic or apoptotic form. Necrosis is induced by gross ATP depletion or ‘energy crisis’ of the cell, whereas apoptosis is induced by a mechanism still to be defined in detail. Here, we investigated this mechanism by focusing on a DNA damage‐sensor, poly(ADP‐ribose) polymerase‐1 (PARP‐1). A 2‐h oxygen and glucose deprivation (OGD) followed by reoxygenation (Reox) induced apoptosis, rather than necrosis, in rat cortical neurons. During the Reox, PARP‐1 was much activated and autopoly(ADP‐ribosyl)ated, consuming the substrate, NAD+. Induction of apoptosis by OGD/Reox was suppressed by overexpression of Bcl‐2, indicating mitochondrial impairment in this induction process. Mitochondrial permeability transition (MPT), or membrane depolarization, and a release of proapoptotic proteins, i.e. cytochrome c, apoptosis‐inducing factor and endonuclease G, from mitochondria were observed during the Reox. These apoptotic changes of mitochondria and the nucleus were attenuated by PARP‐1 inhibitors, 1,5‐dihydroxyisoquinoline and benzamide, and also by small interfering RNA specific for PARP‐1. These results indicated that PARP‐1 plays a principal role in inducing mitochondrial impairment that ultimately leads to apoptosis of neurons after cerebral ischemia.