Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Molecular Analysis and Structure-Activity Relationship Modeling of the Substrate/Inhibitor Interaction Site of Plasma Membrane Monoamine Transporter

Plasma membrane monoamine transporter (PMAT) is a new polyspecific transporter that interacts with a wide range of structurally diverse organic cations. To map the physicochemical descriptors of cationic compounds that allow interaction with PMAT, we systematically analyzed the interactions between PMAT and three series of structural analogs of known organic cation substrates including phenylalkylamines, n-tetraalkylammonium (n-TAA) compounds, and β-carbolines. Our results showed that phenylalkylamines with a distance between the aromatic ring and the positively charged amine nitrogen atom of ∼6.4 Å confer optimal interactions with PMAT, whereas studies with n-TAA compounds revealed an excellent correlation between IC50 values and hydrophobicity. The five β-carbolines that we tested, which possess a pyridinium-like structure and are structurally related to the neurotoxin 1-methyl-4-phenylpyridinium, inhibited PMAT with high affinity (IC50 values of 39.1–65.5 μM). Cytotoxicity analysis further showed that cells expressing PMAT are 14- to 15-fold more sensitive to harmalan and norharmanium, suggesting that these two β-carbolines are also transportable substrates of PMAT. We then used computer-aided modeling to generate qualitative and quantitative three-dimensional pharmacophore models on the basis of 23 previously reported and currently identified PMAT inhibitors and noninhibitors. These models are characterized by a hydrogen bond donor and two to three hydrophobic features with distances between the hydrogen bond donor and hydrophobic features ranging between 5.20 and 7.02 Å. The consistency between the mapping results and observed PMAT affinity of a set of test compounds indicates that the models performed well in inhibitor prediction and could be useful for future virtual screening of new PMAT inhibitors.
Perceptions of Adverse Work Conditions and Innovative Behavior: The Buffering Roles of Relational Resources

This study investigates how employees’ perceptions of adverse work conditions might discourage innovative behavior and the possible buffering roles of relational resources. Data from a Mexican–based organization reveal that perceptions of work overload negatively affect innovative behavior, but this effect gets attenuated with greater knowledge sharing and interpersonal harmony. Further, although perceived organizational politics lead to lower innovative behavior when relational resources are low, they increase this behavior when resources are high. Organizations which seek to adopt innovative ideas in the presence of adverse work conditions thus should create relational conduits that can mitigate the associated stress.
Correlates of serum apelin-12 and adiponectin in obese non-diabetic youth females

The relationship between serum concentration of apelin-12 and adiponectin could be an important determinant in the pathophysiology of obesity-related diseases. The aim of this project is to evaluate serum apelin-12 concentration in non-diabetic obese youth Saudi females and display the relationship with serum adiponectin level. In this study, 163 students (19.3±2.5 years) of King Abdul Aziz University, KSA were stratified into four groups based on their BMI (Underweight 25 kg/m 2 and obese >30 kg/m 2 ). The enzyme linked immunosorbent assay system (ELISA) was used to determine the serum apelin and adiponectin levels. In comparing serum apelin-12 level and adiponectin level in the four groups, the result showed that apelin-12 level did not differ significantly (P=1.00), whereas adiponectin level decreased with increased BMI (P=0.24). Pearson correlation analysis showed a high significant correlation between serum apelin-12 level and serum adiponectin level (P=0.008) in the obese group. Serum apelin-12 level did not correlate with anthropometric parameters, lipid profile, and glucose level in the four groups. The finding suggests that serum apelin-12 level does not reflect visceral or subcutaneous fat accumulation in youth Saudi females. It also proposes that regulation of circulating apelin-12 and adiponectin seems to be alike in obese non-diabetic young women.
Impact Modified Oil Palm Empty Fruit Bunch Fiber/Poly(Lactic) Acid Composite

In this study, composites were fabricated from oil palm empty fruit bunch fiber and poly(lactic) acid by extrusionn followed by injection moulding. Surface of the fiber was pre-treated by ultrasound in an alkali medium and treatment efficiency was investigated by scanning electron microscopy (SEM) analysis and Fourier transforms infrared spectrometer (FTIR). Effect of fiber treatment on composite was characterized by tensile strength (TS), tensile modulus (TM) and impact strength (IS). Furthermore, biostrong impact modifier was incorporated into the treated fiber composite to improve its impact properties. Mechanical testing showed an improvement of up to 23.5% and 33.6% respectively for TS and TM of treated fiber composite above untreated fiber composite. On the other hand incorporation of impact modifier led to enhancement of about 20% above the initial IS of the treated fiber composite.
Synthesizing Products for Online Catalogs

A comprehensive product catalog is essential to the success of Product Search engines and shopping sites such as Yahoo! Shopping, Google Product Search, and Bing Shopping. Given the large number of products and the speed at which they are released to the market, keeping catalogs up-to-date becomes a challenging task, calling for the need of automated techniques. In this paper, we introduce the problem of product synthesis, a key component of catalog creation and maintenance. Given a set of offers advertised by merchants, the goal is to identify new products and add them to the catalog, together with their (structured) attributes. A fundamental challenge in product synthesis is the scale of the problem. A Product Search engine receives data from thousands of merchants about millions of products; the product taxonomy contains thousands of categories, where each category has a different schema; and merchants use representations for products that are different from the ones used in the catalog of the Product Search engine. We propose a system that provides an end-to-end solution to the product synthesis problem, and addresses issues involved in data extraction from offers, schema reconciliation, and data fusion. For the schema reconciliation component, we developed a novel and scalable technique for schema matching which leverages knowledge about previously-known instance-level associations between offers and products; and it is trained using automatically created training sets (no manually-labeled data is needed). We present an experimental evaluation using data from Bing Shopping for more than 800K offers, a thousand merchants, and 400 categories. The evaluation confirms that our approach is able to automatically generate a large number of accurate product specifications. Furthermore, the evaluation shows that our schema reconciliation component outperforms state-of-the-art schema matching techniques in terms of precision and recall.
Trends in Sexual Concerns After Myocardial Infarction

Background and Research Objective:Healthcare providers are expected to provide information and support as myocardial infarction (MI) patients resume normal activities, including sexual relations. The healthcare literature, however, suggests that few providers follow through with the assessment of understanding, provision of appropriate information, and support for patients with MI in resuming their sexual activity. The purpose of the study was to examine trends in sexual concerns of patients with MI and patterns of sexual concerns in early, middle, and later recovery periods. Sample and Methods:Archival data were analyzed using thematic content analysis. Narrative comments from 3 samples of patients with MI spanning the time periods of 1995 to 2002 (N = 302) were unitized into sentences and phrases. A total of 346 units of analysis were coded using the concept of sexual integrity and examined across time: (a) sexual concerns from 1995 to 2002 and (b) sexual concerns in early, middle, and later recovery after MI. Findings and Conclusions:Predominant themes included alterations in self-identity, specifically physical and psychological health state. Communication issues involved a lack of sexual information and intimacy concerns. Perception of patients with MI on family concerns, particularly the influence of spouses upon return to sexual activity, was reflected within the comments. Trends in early, middle, and later recovery periods were similar to findings across the 8-year period. All 3 determinants of sexual integrity were represented in the data. Our findings clearly illustrate the need for sexual counseling for patients with MI by healthcare professionals and help to inform providers about content for patient education.
Genotype‐based matching to correct for population stratification in large‐scale case‐control genetic association studies

Genome‐wide association studies are helping to dissect the etiology of complex diseases. Although case‐control association tests are generally more powerful than family‐based association tests, population stratification can lead to spurious disease‐marker association or mask a true association. Several methods have been proposed to match cases and controls prior to genotyping, using family information or epidemiological data, or using genotype data for a modest number of genetic markers. Here, we describe a genetic similarity score matching (GSM) method for efficient matched analysis of cases and controls in a genome‐wide or large‐scale candidate gene association study. GSM comprises three steps: (1) calculating similarity scores for pairs of individuals using the genotype data; (2) matching sets of cases and controls based on the similarity scores so that matched cases and controls have similar genetic background; and (3) using conditional logistic regression to perform association tests. Through computer simulation we show that GSM correctly controls false‐positive rates and improves power to detect true disease predisposing variants. We compare GSM to genomic control using computer simulations, and find improved power using GSM. We suggest that initial matching of cases and controls prior to genotyping combined with careful re‐matching after genotyping is a method of choice for genome‐wide association studies. Genet. Epidemiol. 33:508–517, 2009. © 2009 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Computational Model for Predicting Visual Fixations from Childhood to Adulthood

How people look at visual information reveals fundamental information about themselves, their interests and their state of mind. While previous visual attention models output static 2-dimensional saliency maps, saccadic models aim to predict not only where observers look at but also how they move their eyes to explore the scene. Here we demonstrate that saccadic models are a flexible framework that can be tailored to emulate observer's viewing tendencies. More specifically, we use the eye data from 101 observers split in 5 age groups (adults, 8-10 y.o., 6-8 y.o., 4-6 y.o. and 2 y.o.) to train our saccadic model for different stages of the development of the human visual system. We show that the joint distribution of saccade amplitude and orientation is a visual signature specific to each age group, and can be used to generate age-dependent scanpaths. Our age-dependent saccadic model not only outputs human-like, age-specific visual scanpath, but also significantly outperforms other state-of-the-art saliency models. In this paper, we demonstrate that the computational modelling of visual attention, through the use of saccadic model, can be efficiently adapted to emulate the gaze behavior of a specific group of observers.
An Intuitive Approach to Understanding the Attributable Fraction of Disease Due to a Risk Factor: The Case of Smoking

The health damage from tobacco use has been studied intensively, yet quantifying the precise burden of disease and death due to smoking is a complex problem, and consequently open to manipulation by interested parties. The goals of this paper are to clearly communicate the concept of the attributable fraction (AF), i.e., the proportion of disease in a population which can be attributed to a risk factor, and to understand the relationship between the AF, the prevalence of exposure in a population, and the relative risk of disease given the exposure. The current approach to calculating the AF is summarized. An intuitive formula is proposed, with accompanying graphical illumination. For diseases caused by smoking, the AF of disease due to smoking increases with the prevalence of smoking and with the relative risk of disease due to smoking. The proposed method has the potential to help health professionals and decision makers understand the concept of the burden of disease due to smoking or other lifestyle, environmental, and occupational factors, in the context of public health importance. This will aid sound decision-making in public health policy.
Effects of Anisotropic Conductive Film Viscosity on ACF Fillet Formation and Chip-On-Board Packages

In this paper, the effects of anisotropic conductive film (ACF) viscosity on ACF fillet formation and, ultimately, on the pressure cooker test (PCT) reliability of ACF flip chip assemblies were investigated. The ACF viscosity was controlled by varying the molecular weight of the epoxy materials. It was found that the ACF viscosity increased as the increase of molecular weight of the epoxy materials. However, there was little variation of the thermomechanical properties among the evaluated ACFs with different viscosites. Also, the results showed that the ACFs have no differences in moisture absorption rate, die adhesion strength, and degree-of-cure. In scanning electron microscopy images, the lower ACF viscosity resulted in the smoother ACF fillet shape and the higher fillet height. From the results of PCT, the ACF flip chip assembly with the smoother fillet shape showed better reliability in terms of contact resistance changes. After 130 h of PCT, the flip chip assembly with lower ACF viscosity also showed a lesser degree of delamination at the ACF/chip interface.
Exploiting Diversity in Molecular Timing Channels via Order Statistics

We study diversity in one-shot communication over molecular timing channels. We consider a channel model where the transmitter simultaneously releases a large number of information particles, while the information is encoded in the time of release. The receiver decodes the information based on the random time of arrival of the information particles. The random propagation is characterized by the general class of right-sided unimodal densities. We characterize the asymptotic exponential decrease rate of the probability of error as a function of the number of released particles, and denote this quantity as the system diversity gain. Four types of detectors are considered: the maximum-likelihood (ML) detector, a linear detector, a detector that is based on the first arrival (FA) among all the transmitted particles, and a detector based on the last arrival (LA). When the density characterizing the random propagation is supported over a large interval, we show that the simple FA detector achieves a diversity gain very close to that of the ML detector. On the other hand, when the density characterizing the random propagation is supported over a small interval, we show that the simple LA detector achieves a diversity gain very close to that of the ML detector.
Seasonal changes in the body size of two rotifer species living in activated sludge follow the Temperature-Size Rule

Temperature-Size Rule (TSR) is a phenotypic body size response of ectotherms to changing temperature. It is known from the laboratory studies, but seasonal patterns in the field were not studied so far. We examined the body size changes in time of rotifers inhabiting activated sludge. We hypothesize that temperature is the most influencing parameter in sludge environment, leading sludge rotifers to seasonally change their body size according to TSR, and that oxygen content also induces the size response. The presence of TSR in Lecane inermis rotifer was tested in a laboratory study with two temperature and two food-type treatments. The effect of interaction between temperature and food was significant; L. inermis followed TSR in one food type only. The seasonal variability in the body sizes of the rotifers L. inermis and Cephalodella gracilis was estimated by monthly sampling and analyzed by multiple regression, in relation to the sludge parameters selected as the most influential by multivariate analysis, and predicted to alter rotifer body size (temperature and oxygen). L. inermis varied significantly in size throughout the year, and this variability is explained by temperature as predicted by the TSR, but not by oxygen availability. C. gracilis also varied in size, though this variability was explained by both temperature and oxygen. We suggest that sludge age acts as a mortality factor in activated sludge. It may have a seasonal effect on the body size of L. inermis and modify a possible effect of oxygen. Activated sludge habitat is driven by both biological processes and human regulation, yet its resident organisms follow general evolutionary rule as they do in other biological systems. The interspecific response patterns differ, revealing the importance of taking species-specific properties into account. Our findings are applicable to sludge properties enhancement through optimizing the conditions for its biological component.
Network mechanisms of memory storage in the balanced cortex

It is generally maintained that one of cortex’ functions is the storage of a large number of memories. In this picture, the physical substrate of memories is thought to be realised in pattern and strengths of synaptic connections among cortical neurons. Memory recall is associated with neuronal activity that is shaped by this connectivity. In this framework, active memories are represented by attractors in the space of neural activity. Electrical activity in cortical neurones in vivo exhibits prominent temporal irregularity. A standard way to account for this phenomenon is to postulate that recurrent synaptic excitation and inhibition as well as external inputs are balanced. In the common view, however, these balanced networks do not easily support the coexistence of multiple attractors. This is problematic in view of memory function. Recently, theoretical studies showed that balanced networks with synapses that exhibit short-term plasticity (STP) are able to maintain multiple stable states. In order to investigate whether experimentally obtained synaptic parameters are consistent with model predictions, we developed a new methodology that is capable to quantify both response variability and STP at the same synapse in an integrated and statistically-principled way. This approach yields higher parameter precision than standard procedures and allows for the use of more efficient stimulation protocols. However, the findings with respect to STP parameters do not allow to make conclusive statements about the validity of synaptic theories of balanced working memory. In the second part of this thesis an alternative theory of cortical memory storage is developed. The theory is based on the assumptions that memories are stored in attractor networks, and that memories are not represented by network states differing in their average activity levels, but by micro-states sharing the same global statistics. Different memories differ with respect to their spatial distributions of firing rates. From this the main result is derived: the balanced state is a necessary condition for extensive memory storage. Furthermore, we analytically calculate memory storage capacities of rate neurone networks. Remarkably, it can be shown that crucial properties of neuronal activity and physiology that are consistent with experimental observations are directly predicted by the theory if optimal memory storage capacity is required.
Anti-Depressant Like Effect of Methyl Gallate Isolated from Acer barbinerve in Mice

In the present study, the anti-depressant like effect of methyl gallate (MG) isolated from the stem bark of Acer barbinerve was examined in ICR mice. Body weight (BDW) and blood glucose (BDG) levels significantly decreased in the repeated restraint stress (RRS) group (2 h/day for 14 days) compared to the no stress (NS) group. To examine the effect of MG on RS-induced BDW loss and hypoglycemia, MG (10 mg/kg) and the anti-depressant fluoxetine (10 mg/kg) were administered daily for 14 days. Orally administered MG and fluoxetine significantly attenuated the RS-induced BDW loss and hypoglycemia. Interestingly, MG administered mice showed increased BDG levels in the normal and glucose feeding condition. Chronic RS-subjected mice showed immobilized and depressed behaviors. The effect of MG on the depressed behaviors was evaluated using the tail-suspension test (TST) and the forced swimming test (FST). In both tests, RS-induced immobilized behaviors were significantly reversed in MG and fluoxetine administered groups. Taken together, MG significantly attenuated the RS-induced BDW loss, hypoglycemia, and depressed behaviors. Considering that decreased BDG levels (hypoglycemia) can cause depression, MG may exert its anti-depressant like effect by preventing hypoglycemia. Our results suggest that MG isolated from A. barbinerve can exert anti-depressant like effect, and could be used as a new and natural anti-depressant therapy.
Mutagenic nucleotide incorporation and hindered translocation by a food carcinogen C8-dG adduct in Sulfolobus solfataricus P2 DNA polymerase IV (Dpo4): modeling and dynamics studies

Bulky carcinogen-DNA adducts commonly cause replicative polymerases to stall, leading to a switch to bypass polymerases. We have investigated nucleotide incorporation opposite the major adduct of 2-amino-1-methyl-6-phenylimidazo[4,5-b]pyridine (PhIP) in the DinB family polymerase, Dpo4, using molecular modeling and molecular dynamics (MD) simulations. PhIP, the most prevalent heterocyclic aromatic amine formed by cooking of proteinaceous food, is mutagenic in mammalian cells and is implicated in mammary and colon tumors. Our results show that the dG-C8-PhIP adduct can be accommodated in the spacious major groove Dpo4 open pocket, with Dpo4 capable of incorporating dCTP, dTTP or dATP opposite the adduct reasonably well. However, the PhIP ring system on the minor groove side would seriously disturb the active site, regardless of the presence and identity of dNTP. Furthermore, the simulations indicate that dATP and dTTP are better incorporated in the damaged system than in their respective mismatched but unmodified controls, suggesting that the PhIP adduct enhances incorporation of these mismatches. Finally, bulky C8-dG adducts, situated in the major groove, are likely to impede translocation in this polymerase (Rechkoblit et al. (2006), PLoS Biol., 4, e11). However, N2-dG adducts, which can reside on the minor groove side, appear to cause less hindrance when in this position.