Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Antagonist interaction with the human 5‐HT7 receptor mediates the rapid and potent inhibition of non‐G‐protein‐stimulated adenylate cyclase activity: a novel GPCR effect

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE The human 5‐hydroxytryptamine7 (h5‐HT7) receptor is Gs‐coupled and stimulates the production of the intracellular signalling molecule cAMP. Previously, we reported a novel property of the h5‐HT7 receptor: pseudo‐irreversible antagonists irreversibly inhibit forskolin‐stimulated (non‐receptor‐mediated) cAMP production. Herein, we sought to determine if competitive antagonists also affect forskolin‐stimulated activity and if this effect is common among other Gs‐coupled receptors.
Experimental reproduction of poult enteritis syndrome: Clinical findings, growth response, and microbiology

ABSTRACT Poult enteritis syndrome (PES) is an infectious disease of turkey poults characterized by diarrhea, dullness, and depression. Five experiments were conducted to reproduce the disease in turkey poults using intestinal contents of PES-affected birds. In all experiments, poults at 14 d of age were divided into 4 groups and were orally given 2 mL of unfiltered supernatant, filtered supernatant, sediment dissolved in PBS, or PBS alone. Inocula in experiments 1, 3, and 5 consisted of intestinal contents from PES-affected birds of less than 2 wk of age, whereas those in experiments 2 and 4 consisted of intestinal contents from PES-affected birds of 4 to 6 wk of age. Poults in all groups were observed daily for clinical signs. The BW and microbiological criteria in experiments 1, 3, and 5 were evaluated at 5, 10, and 15 d postinoculation, whereas in experiments 2 and 4, these observations were made at 10 and 20 d postinoculation. Rotavirus, astrovirus, and Salmonella were present in all 5 inocula. Diarrhea and depression were the major signs in poults given PES material. Significant retardation of growth was observed in poults given any of the 3 PES materials, but this effect was more pronounced in poults given the sediment inoculum. Rotavirus, astrovirus, and Salmonella were detected in poults given PES material. In some cases, enterovirus was also detected. No major difference was noticed in experimental reproduction of PES when intestinal contents from different age birds were used as the inoculum.
Kinesin-1 Regulates Microtubule Dynamics via a c-Jun N-terminal Kinase-dependent Mechanism*♦

In the kinesin family, all the molecular motors that have been implicated in the regulation of microtubule dynamics have been shown to stimulate microtubule depolymerization. Here, we report that kinesin-1 (also known as conventional kinesin or KIF5B) stimulates microtubule elongation and rescues. We show that microtubule-associated kinesin-1 carries the c-Jun N-terminal kinase (JNK) to allow its activation and that microtubule elongation requires JNK activity throughout the microtubule life cycle. We also show that kinesin-1 and JNK promoted microtubule rescues to similar extents. Stimulation of microtubule rescues by the kinesin-1/JNK pathway could not be accounted for by the rescue factor CLIP-170. Indeed only a dual inhibition of kinesin-1/JNK and CLIP-170 completely blocked rescues and led to extensive microtubule loss. We propose that the kinesin-1/JNK signaling pathway is a major regulator of microtubule dynamics in living cells and that it is required with the rescue factor CLIP-170 to allow cells to build their interphase microtubule network.
Neural Headline Generation on Abstract Meaning Representation

Neural network-based encoder-decoder models are among recent attractive methodologies for tackling natural language generation tasks. This paper investigates the usefulness of structural syntactic and semantic information additionally incorporated in a baseline neural attention-based model. We encode results obtained from an abstract meaning representation (AMR) parser using a modiﬁed version of Tree-LSTM. Our proposed attention-based AMR encoder-decoder model improves head-line generation benchmarks compared with the baseline neural attention-based model.
Overexpression of factor inhibiting HIF‐1 enhances vessel maturation and tumor growth via platelet‐derived growth factor‐C

Recent studies have revealed that the maturation state of vessels in tumors, in addition to vascularity, is a critical determinant of tumor growth. The role of oxygen‐dependent signaling pathways in hypoxia‐stimulated angiogenesis is well established, however, little is known about their impact on vessel maturation in tumors. Here, we have studied the function of the cellular oxygen sensor, factor inhibiting HIF‐1 (FIH), which controls the activity of hypoxia‐inducible factor‐1. FIH silencing in mouse LM8 osteosarcoma stimulated angiogenesis but did not influence tumor growth. In contrast, FIH overexpression led to increased pericyte coverage of the tumor vasculature, reduced vessel leakiness and enhanced tumor growth. Vessel maturation was paralleled by up‐regulation of platelet‐derived growth factor (PDGF)‐C in tumors and expression of PDGF receptor‐α on pericytes. Ablation of PDGF‐C in FIH‐overexpressing tumor cells reduced pericyte coverage and tumor growth. Our data suggest that FIH‐mediated PDGF‐C induction in LM8 osteosarcoma stimulates the recruitment of PDGFR‐α positive pericytes to the tumor vasculature, leading to vessel maturation and enhanced tumor growth.
The Determinants of Capital Structure: An empirical Analysis of Listed Manufacturing Companies in Colombo Stock Exchange Market in SriLanka

Capital structure/leverage level of the firm determined by several factors. Proper capital structure leads the firm to achieve the better performance and ensures the sustainability in its operation. Even though there are several factors contribute to the institutional performance, determinants of the capital structure play an important role. Therefore it is necessary to identify that what are factors contribute to the firms’ capital structure composition in its operation. Hence the present study was undertaken with the objective of finding out the relationship between capital structure determinants and leverage level of the listed companies in SriLanka. Using a multiple regression analysis, the leverage behavior of the listed manufacturing companies in Colombo stock exchange market in SriLanka was examined for the period of 2003-2007. The final sample consists of 19 manufacturing companies. In this study, dependent variable that is, leverage level of the companies, is measured by longterm debt ratio, shortterm debt ratio and total debt ratio. Capital structure determinants (independent variables) are measured by capital intensity, tangibility, profitability, firm size and nondebt tax shield. Findings showed that the direction of the explanatory variables such as, tangibility, profitability, firm size and non-debt tax shields with total debt largely consistent with the explanations of trade off theory and prove past empirical findings also.
Animal models in peritoneal dialysis

Peritoneal dialysis (PD) has been extensively used over the past years as a method of kidney replacement therapy for patients with end stage renal disease (ESRD). In an attempt to better understand the properties of the peritoneal membrane and the mechanisms involved in major complications associated with PD, such as inflammation, peritonitis and peritoneal injury, both in vivo and ex vivo animal models have been used. The aim of the present review is to briefly describe the animal models that have been used, and comment on the main problems encountered while working with these models. Moreover, the differences characterizing these animal models, as well as, the differences with humans are highlighted. Finally, it is suggested that the use of standardized protocols is a necessity in order to take full advantage of animal models, extrapolate their results in humans, overcome the problems related to PD and help promote its use.
Does asymmetric dimethylarginine play a role in depression in chronic kidney disease patients?

Depression is a pervasive disorder involving mood, thought and body function. It causes discomfort and moral pain to the depressed person and his/her family and close social contacts. This disorder manifests by a series of symptoms that alter sleep, eating habits, work capacity and the ability to enjoy pleasant life activities. Depression may be a sporadic phenomenon but it usually recurs during lifetime. Without appropriate treatment, a depressive episode may last for years and may not resolve. Importantly, depression is a proteiform condition and may occur within the context of other chronic illnesses such as heart disease or chronic kidney disease (CKD) where it stands as the most frequentmental problem [1]. A recentmeta-analysis carried out on 55 982 CKD patients showed that about one-quarter of such patients are depressed. The prevalence of depression increases in parallel with the severity of CKD [2] and may depend on the type of substitutive treatment in patients with end-stage renal disease [3]. It is associated with poor outcomes in dialysis patients, and depressive symptoms predict a higher risk of mortality and cardiovascular events [4] as well as an increased risk of hospitalization [5]. This association is also true in pre-dialysis CKD patients where the presence of depression predicts progression to kidney failure, hospitalization or death independently of age, race, serum haemoglobin, albumin, phosphorus, comorbidities and kidney disease severity [6]. Overall these studies suggest that depression should not be considered as a mere surrogate of other CKD comorbidities and that it may be an independent risk factor for adverse clinical outcomes in these patients. Behavioural factors such as non-adherence to medical treatment, poor nutrition, unhealthy life style and lack of social interactions [7, 8] as well as biological factors including genetic background [9], inflammation and impaired immune status [10] may concur to explain the association between depression and adverse outcomes in this population.
Agenesis of the Inferior Vena Cava in H Syndrome Due to a Novel SLC29A3 Mutation

We present a 10‐year‐old girl with typical clinical features of H syndrome. Complete agenesis of the inferior vena cava was found on echocardiography and radiologic studies. Mutation analysis of the SLC29A3 gene revealed a novel nonsense mutation. This unique case extends the clinical and mutation spectrum associated with H syndrome and underlines the importance of routine cardiac screening in this disorder.
Treatment of hypertension and the price to pay; adverse events and discontinuation from randomized treatment in clinical trials.

M eta-analyses of randomized controlled trials of blood pressure (BP)-lowering treatment show that treatment lowers risk of cardiovascular outcomes like cerebral stroke, myocardial infarction, heart failure, renal failure, cardiovascular death and total mortality in hypertensive patients. Also novel endpoints like atrial fibrillation, incident diabetes mellitus and Alzheimer type of cognitive decline may be prevented though stronger evidence in long-lasting studies is needed for the latter. However, treatment comes with a price to pay because many patients discontinue treatment even in clinical trials, possibly because of side-effects of the treatment that is given. Side-effect may be drug specific or nondrug specific, and they are therefore termed adverse events. An adverse event is thus any untoward event that happens during the course of a clinical trial and is reported by the study investigators. Adverse events associated with BP-lowering treatment have not before been systematically meta-analyzed in large scale in the same way as the benefits of preventing the cardiovascular and renal events caused by treatment of hypertension. Thomopoulos, Parati and Zanchetti have published a series of important meta-analyses of various aspects of the treatment of hypertension in Journal of Hypertension through the past 2 years. They have created a database containing literally all important details from the randomized and controlled hypertension trials that have been published to date. In the database, they have also included adverse events reported in the trials, and that could be extracted from a majority of the publications. This issue of the Journal [1] contains a report on this aspect of the clinical trials.
Field Evaluation of the Efficacy of Mycobacterium bovis Bacillus Calmette-Guérin against Bovine Tuberculosis in Neonatal Calves in Ethiopia

ABSTRACT In developing countries, the conventional test and slaughter strategy for the control of bovine tuberculosis is prohibitively expensive, and alternative control methods such as vaccination are urgently required. In this study, the efficacy of Mycobacterium bovis bacillus Calmette-Guérin (BCG) for protection against bovine tuberculosis (bTB) was evaluated in Holstein calves under field conditions in Ethiopia. Thirteen neonatally vaccinated and 14 control calves were exposed for 10 to 23 months to skin test reactor cows. Gamma interferon (IFN-γ) testing, comparative intradermal tuberculin testing, postmortem examination, and bacteriological culture were used for the evaluation of BCG efficacy. The overall mean pathology score was significantly (P < 0.05) higher in control calves than in vaccinated calves. Culture positivity for Mycobacterium bovis was higher in the control calves than in the vaccinated calves, and significantly more BCG-vaccinated animals would have passed a standard meat inspection (P = 0.021). Overall, the protective efficacy of BCG was between 56% and 68%, depending on the parameters selected. Moreover, by measuring gamma interferon responses to the antigens ESAT-6 and CFP-10, which are present in M. bovis but absent from BCG, throughout the experiment, we were able to distinguish between vaccinated animals that were protected against bTB and those animals that were not protected. In conclusion, the present trial demonstrated an encouraging protective effect of BCG against bTB in a natural transmission setting in Ethiopia.
High Dimensional Bayesian Optimization via Restricted Projection Pursuit Models

Bayesian Optimization (BO) is commonly used to optimize blackbox objective functions which are expensive to evaluate. A common approach is based on using Gaussian Process (GP) to model the objective function. Applying GP to higher dimensional settings is generally difficult due to the curse of dimensionality for nonparametric regression. Existing works makes strong assumptions such as the function is low-dimensional embedding (Wang et al., 2013) or is axis-aligned additive (Kandasamy et al., 2015). In this paper, we generalize the existing assumption to a projected-additive assumption. Our generalization provides the benefits of i) greatly increasing the space of functions that can be modeled by our approach, which covers the previous works (Wang et al., 2013; Kandasamy et al., 2015) as special cases, and ii) efficiently handling the learning in a larger model space. We prove that the regret for projected-additive functions has only linear dependence on the number of dimensions in this general setting. Directly using projectedadditive GP (Gilboa et al., 2013) to BO results in a non-box constraint, which is not easy to optimize. We tackle this problem by proposing a restricted-projection-pursuit GP for BO. We conduct experiments on synthetic examples and scientific and hyper-parameter tuning tasks in many cases. Our method outperforms existing approaches even when the function does not meet the projected additive assumption. Last, we study the validity of the additive and projected-additive assumption in practice. Appearing in Proceedings of the 19 International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS) 2016, Cadiz, Spain. JMLR: W&CP volume 51. Copyright 2016 by the authors.
Prevalence of Pseudoexfoliation Syndrome in an Isolated Island Population of Korea: The Woodo Study

Purpose: To determine the prevalence and clinical characteristics of pseudoexfoliation syndrome (PXS) within Korean population living in Woodo Island. Methods: Among the 625 residents aged 50 years or older, 305 residents (197 women and 108 men) participated in the study; a response rate of 48.8%. Participants filled out questionnaires on life style. Intraocular pressure and corneal endothelial cell function was measured. Both pupils were dilated. Fundus photographs and stereo disc photographs were taken. Vertical cup-to-disc ratio was determined. Pure tone audiometry threshold was measured at 0.5, 1, 2, 4, and 6 kHz of frequencies for each ear. Results: The prevalence rate of PXS among Woodo Island residents older than 50 years significantly increased with age, from 1.0% [95% confidence interval (CI), 0%-2.8%] in participants aged 50 to 59 years to 23.3% (95% CI, 8.2%-38.5%) in those aged over 80 years (P<0.001). The prevalence of PXS showed no significant difference between men and women in all age groups. The age-standardized prevalence rate of PXS was 10.4% (95% CI, 8.0%-12.8%), with a rate of 9.4% (95% CI, 5.8%-13.1%) in men and 14.9% (95% CI, 11.3%-18.4%) in women. PXS did not show significant association with smoking, outdoor activity, and occupation, except alcohol consumption. PXS showed significant decrease in endothelial cell density. Pure tone audiometry test of PXS group revealed statistically significant decrease in 1, 2 kHz. Conclusions: The prevalence of PXS was 10.4% in the 50 years and older age group, and tended to increase with age. Decrease in corneal endothelial function and selective hearing loss was correlated in PXE patients, supporting impairment of systemic endothelial function in PXE syndrome.
Oxidation kinetics of degradation of 1,4-dioxane in aqueous solution by H2O2/Fe(II) system

Kinetic studies of oxidative degradation of 1,4-dioxane present in aqueous solutions in the concentration range between 2.27 × 10−3 mol/L (200 ppm) and 5.68 × 10−3 mol/L (500 ppm) were conducted in batch rector. This analysis considers the hydroxyl radicals (·OH) produced by Fenton reagent as the main species responsible for the degradation process. 1,4-dioxane was degraded to the extent of 97 to 99% after 30 min of reaction time. The pH of the reaction medium decreased substantially during the experiment. In all cases, most of 1,4-dixane degradation occurred during the initial 5 min of reaction. A kinetic model is proposed for the oxidation of 1,4-dioxane by Fenton reagent and this model is applied to calculate the kinetic rate constant for the reaction between hydroxyl radicals and 1,4 dioxane. The reaction rate constant for the reaction of 1,4-dioxane with ·OH radicals was evaluated and the value is 2.25 × 108/M-s.
On Autoencoders and Score Matching for Energy Based Models

We consider estimation methods for the class of continuous-data energy based models (EBMs). Our main result shows that estimating the parameters of an EBM using score matching when the conditional distribution over the visible units is Gaussian corresponds to training a particular form of regularized autoencoder. We show how different Gaussian EBMs lead to different autoencoder architectures, providing deep links between these two families of models. We compare the score matching estimator for the mPoT model, a particular Gaussian EBM, to several other training methods on a variety of tasks including image denoising and unsupervised feature extraction. We show that the regularization function induced by score matching leads to superior classification performance relative to a standard autoencoder. We also show that score matching yields classification results that are indistinguishable from better-known stochastic approximation maximum likelihood estimators.
Sequential Match Network: A New Architecture for Multi-turn Response Selection in Retrieval-based Chatbots

We study response selection for multi-turn conversation in retrieval based chatbots. Existing works either ignores relationships among utterances, or misses important information in context when matching a response with a highly abstract context vector finally. We propose a new session based matching model to address both problems. The model first matches a response with each utterance on multiple granularities, and distills important matching information from each pair as a vector with convolution and pooling operations. The vectors are then accumulated in a chronological order through a recurrent neural network (RNN) which models the relationships among the utterances. The final matching score is calculated with the hidden states of the RNN. Empirical study on two public data sets shows that our model can significantly outperform the state-of-the-art methods for response selection in multi-turn conversation.
The human primary motor cortex

To the Editor: Rao et al.1 used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to map the somatotopic organization of the human primary motor cortex. Eight neurologically intact right-handed subjects performed voluntary movements of the hand, arm, and foot while undergoing echo-planar imaging. Statistically significant MRI signal changes were noted in the left motor cortex in all subjects and in all movement conditions. In contrast, no functional activity was observed in the right hemisphere. Finger movements, which consisted of self-paced repetitive tapping of the fingers on a flat surface, produced the most robust signal changes. In summary, the findings of Rao et al. support the notion that discrete limb movements are represented in localized regions of the contralateral motor cortex consistent with the motor “homunculus” of Penfield and Boldrey.2 Given the findings of Rao et al.,1 and the potential utility of fMRI in mapping the human …
An Innovative Safety Model and E-Learning Guide to Working Safely with Beryllium Throughout the Industrial Supply Chain

Over the past 10 years, Brush Wellman Inc., the primary beryllium producer, has partnered with the National Institute for Occupational Health and Safety (NIOSH) and others in conducting research to develop a beryllium safety model to prevent chronic beryllium disease. As the result of this research-to-practice partnership, a philosophically different worker protection model evolved based on the premise of addressing all routes and pathways of potential worker exposure. The model's fundamental principles involve keeping beryllium (1) out of the lungs, (2) work areas clean, (3) off the skin, (4) off clothing, (5) at the source, (6) in the work area, (7) on the plant site, and (8) workers prepared to work safely. Recent research by NIOSH is demonstrating that the model has reduced beryllium sensitization and lowered the risk of chronic beryllium disease in employees hired since 2001. As a result, an e-learning tool was created to enhance the communication of the model throughout the industrial supply chain.