Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Variola and Evidence for Dimer Formation Comparison to Homologs in Vaccinia and Monkeypox Inhibitor of Complement: Structure and Regulatory Profile of the

The outbreak of monkeypox in the Unites States in the summer of 2003 was the ﬁrst occurrence of this smallpox-like disease outside of Africa. This limited human epidemic resulted from cross-infection of prairie dogs by imported African rodents. Although there were no human fatalities, this outbreak illustrates that monkeypox is an emerging natural infection and a potential biological weapon. We characterized a virulence factor expressed by monkeypox (monkeypox inhibitor of complement enzymes or MOPICE). We also compared its structure and regulatory function to homologous complement regulatory proteins of variola (SPICE) and vaccinia (VCP). In multiple expression systems, 5–30% of MOPICE, SPICE, and VCP consisted of function-en-hancing disulﬁde-linked homodimers. Mammalian cells infected with vaccinia virus also expressed VCP dimers. MOPICE bound human C3b/C4b intermediate to that of SPICE and VCP. Cofactor activity of MOPICE was similar to VCP, but both were (cid:1) 100-fold less efﬁcient than SPICE. SPICE and VCP, but not MOPICE, possessed decay-accelerating activity for the C3 and C5 convertases of the classical pathway. Additionally, all three regulators possessed heparin-binding capability. These studies demonstrate that MOPICE regulates human complement and suggest that dimerization is a prominent feature of these virulence factors. Thus, our data add novel information relative to the functional repertoire of these poxviral virulence factors. Furthermore, targeting and neutralizing these complement regulatory active sites via mAbs is a therapeutic approach that may enhance pro-tection against smallpox. The Journal of Immunology, 2006, 176: 3725–3734.
Does top management team diversity promote or hamper foreign expansion

PCT No. PCT/FI96/00538 Sec. 371 Date Jun. 19, 1998 Sec. 102(e) Date Jun. 19, 1998 PCT Filed Oct. 11, 1996 PCT Pub. No. WO97/13567 PCT Pub. Date Apr. 17, 1997An extraction method is disclosed, where organic impurities are removed from a phase essentially containing sulfuric acid, by means of supercritical or liquid carbon dioxide. In particular, the spent sulfuric acid from a process for production of alkylate fuel may be regenerated for re-introduction into the process without incineration.
Parallel-cascade realizations and approximations of truncated Volterra systems

This paper introduces parallel-cascade realizations of truncated Volterra systems with arbitrary, but finite order of nonlinearity. Parallel-cascade realizations implement higher-order Volterra systems using parallel and multiplicative combinations of lower-order Volterra systems. Such realizations are very modular and therefore well-suited for VLSI implementation. A systematic way of approximating higher-order Volterra systems in parallel-cascade form using a reduced number of branches and a bound on the mean-square error in the output signals caused by such approximate realizations are derived. A variation of the parallel-cascade structure in which a pth order Volterra filter is implemented as a parallel combination of linear filters whose outputs are raised to the pth power is also described.
Optical wireless networks employing dual header-pulse interval modulation (DH-PIM)

DH-PIM modulation as an alternative to other pulse modulation schemes is presented. Its symbol and spectral properties are given. Expressions for slot and packet error rates are presented. Results obtained for the packet error rate are compared with OOK and PIM. It offers the same performance as PIM but considerably better performance compared with OOK.
p160/SRC/NCoA coactivators form complexes via specific interaction of their PAS-B domain with the CID/AD1 domain

Transcriptional activation involves the ordered recruitment of coactivators via direct interactions between distinct binding domains and recognition motifs. The p160/SRC/NCoA coactivator family comprises three members (NCoA-1, -2 and -3), which are organized in multiprotein coactivator complexes. We had identified the PAS-B domain of NCoA-1 as an LXXLL motif binding domain. Here we show that NCoA family members are able to interact with other full-length NCoA proteins via their PAS-B domain and they specifically interact with the CBP-interaction domain (CID/AD1) of NCoA-1. Peptide competition, binding experiments and mutagenesis of LXXLL motifs point at distinct binding motif specificities of the NCoA PAS-B domains. NMR studies of different NCoA-1-PAS-B/LXXLL peptide complexes revealed similar although not identical binding sites for the CID/AD1 and STAT6 transactivation domain LXXLL motifs. In mechanistic studies, we found that overexpression of the PAS-B domain is able to disturb the binding of NCoA-1 to CBP in cells and that a CID/AD1 peptide competes with STAT6 for NCoA-1 in vitro. Moreover, the expression of an endogenous androgen receptor target gene is affected by the overexpression of the NCoA-1 or NCoA-3 PAS-B domains. Our study discloses a new, complementary mechanism for the current model of coactivator recruitment to target gene promoters.
SLAM-based Cross-a-Door Solution Approach for a Robotic Wheelchair

This paper proposes a solution to the cross-a-door problem in unknown environments for a robotic wheelchair commanded through a Human-Machine Interface (HMI). The problem is solved by a dynamic path planning algorithm implementation based on successive frontier points determination. An adaptive trajectory tracking control based on the dynamic model of the robotic wheelchair is implemented on the vehicle to direct the wheelchair motion along the path in a smooth movement. An EKF feature-based SLAM is also implemented on the vehicle which gives an estimate of the wheelchair pose inside the environment. The SLAM allows the map reconstruction of the environment for safe navigation purposes. The whole system steers satisfactorily the wheelchair with smooth movements through common doorways which are narrow considering the size of the vehicle. Implementation results validating the proposal are also shown in this work.
Vocational Education and Training: A Pathway to the Straight and Narrow

Education is often claimed to reduce social exclusion and crime, yet there is little empirical evidence beyond that for increased schooling. In this study, we estimate the crime-reducing effects of participating in post-secondary vocational education and training (VET) between ages 16 and 44, exploiting a natural experiment in Australia that increased VET participation in the state of Victoria, but not in the neighbouring state of New South Wales. Using postcode (zipcode) level administrative data and difference-in-differences estimation, we find that increased VET participation is associated with reduced person, drug and property crime. We find much larger effects for mature-age people (26-44) than for young people (16-25), possibly because crime at this age is more closely linked to legitimate labor market opportunities. These results provide plausibly causal evidence that extending opportunities for later-life education and training can have substantial public benefits.
Arabidopsis Plasmodesmal Proteome

The multicellular nature of plants requires that cells should communicate in order to coordinate essential functions. This is achieved in part by molecular flux through pores in the cell wall, called plasmodesmata. We describe the proteomic analysis of plasmodesmata purified from the walls of Arabidopsis suspension cells. Isolated plasmodesmata were seen as membrane-rich structures largely devoid of immunoreactive markers for the plasma membrane, endoplasmic reticulum and cytoplasmic components. Using nano-liquid chromatography and an Orbitrap ion-trap tandem mass spectrometer, 1341 proteins were identified. We refer to this list as the plasmodesmata- or PD-proteome. Relative to other cell wall proteomes, the PD-proteome is depleted in wall proteins and enriched for membrane proteins, but still has a significant number (35%) of putative cytoplasmic contaminants, probably reflecting the sensitivity of the proteomic detection system. To validate the PD-proteome we searched for known plasmodesmal proteins and used molecular and cell biological techniques to identify novel putative plasmodesmal proteins from a small subset of candidates. The PD-proteome contained known plasmodesmal proteins and some inferred plasmodesmal proteins, based upon sequence or functional homology with examples identified in different plant systems. Many of these had a membrane association reflecting the membranous nature of isolated structures. Exploiting this connection we analysed a sample of the abundant receptor-like class of membrane proteins and a small random selection of other membrane proteins for their ability to target plasmodesmata as fluorescently-tagged fusion proteins. From 15 candidates we identified three receptor-like kinases, a tetraspanin and a protein of unknown function as novel potential plasmodesmal proteins. Together with published work, these data suggest that the membranous elements in plasmodesmata may be rich in receptor-like functions, and they validate the content of the PD-proteome as a valuable resource for the further uncovering of the structure and function of plasmodesmata as key components in cell-to-cell communication in plants.
Dating Violence Perspectives of Latino College Students: Considerations for Violence Prevention Programming

This study sought to explore dating violence perceptions from Latino students in a college setting with the goal of enhancing knowledge for developing successful culturally tailored preventive interventions that decrease Latino college student dropout and enhance persistence. Focus groups including 35 college students attending a Hispanic Serving Institution were conducted. Conventional qualitative analysis showed Latino college students prefer dating violence prevention programming that places a focus on interdependent self-construals emphasizing relationships, which is consistent with their collectivistic values. Moreover, participants addressed unique cultural characteristics of Latinos that should be considered in any dating violence prevention program targeting this population.
The Perry Preschool Program and Its Long-Term Effects: A Benefit-Cost Analysis. High/Scope Early Childhood Policy Papers, No. 2.

3arnett, W. Steven The Perry Preschool Program and Its Long-Term Effects: A Benefit-Cost Analysis. High/Scope Early Childhood Policy Papers, No. 2. High/Scope Educational Research Foundation, Ypsilanti, Mich. ISBN-0-93-1114-34-9 85 124p. ; Fox related documents, see ED 262 902-903 and PS 015 510. High/Scope Educational Research Foundation, 600 North River Street, Ypsilanti, MI 48198. Reports Descriptive (141) -Statistical Data (110)
Reply to Lars Olof Björn’s Comment on our article “Fundamental molecules of life are pigments which arose and co-evolved as a response to the thermodynamic imperative of dissipating the prevailing solar spectrum”

Abstract. Lars Björn, in his critique of our article, doubts our assertion that at the origin of life the fundamental molecules of life (those in the three domains) were UVC pigments, dissipatively structured under a thermodynamic imperative to absorb and dissipate this UVC light into heat. Björn bases his critique on the suggestion that non-living material can be more photon absorbing than living material. He gives a number of examples in which he shows that the albedo of material devoid of life is lower than that of biotic material and concludes that these examples counter our assertion. However, Björn makes the erroneous assumption that albedo (reflection) is the only important factor related to photon dissipation (entropy production) occurring in the light-pigment interaction in living systems. He ignores the other contributions to entropy production due to the photon interaction which were listed in our article; 1) the shift towards the infrared of the emitted spectrum, 2) the diffuse emission and reflection of light into a greater outgoing solid angle, 3) the coupling of photon-induced evapotranspiration in the pigmented leaf to further photon dissipating processes such as the water cycle, which further allows dissipating biopigments to flourish over all of Earth’s surface. His assumption is therefore incorrect and his analysis does not provide legitimate reason for doubting our assertion that the fundamental molecules of life arose as pigments as a response to the thermodynamic imperative of dissipating the prevailing solar spectrum. In the following, we respond to each critique using the same section headings of Björn’s Comment.
Draft Genome Sequence of the Butyric Acid Producer Clostridium tyrobutyricum Strain CIP I-776 (IFP923)

ABSTRACT Here, we report the draft genome sequence of Clostridium tyrobutyricum CIP I-776 (IFP923), an efficient producer of butyric acid. The genome consists of a single chromosome of 3.19 Mb and provides useful data concerning the metabolic capacities of the strain.
Deep ALTAIR + NIRI Imaging of the Disk and Bulge of M31

Deep J, H, and K′ images, recorded with the ALTAIR adaptive optics system and NIRI imager on Gemini North, are used to probe the stellar content of the disk and bulge of the Local Group galaxy M31. With an FWHM near 0. ″08 in K, these are the highest angular resolution near-infrared images yet obtained of this galaxy. One field samples the outer disk of M31 at a galactocentric distance of roughly 62′ along the major axis. The mean metallicity in this field is close to that of the metal-rich globular cluster NGC 6528, and no stars with [Fe/H] < -0.7 are detected. Another field, located on the major axis 9′ from the galaxy center, contains a roughly equal mix of disk and bulge stars. The red giant branch (RGB) in this field is redder than that of NGC 6528, although it is argued that reddening internal to M31 may be significant in this region of the galaxy. The remaining two fields, located at projected galactocentric distances of 2′ and 4′, are dominated by bulge stars. The RGB tip occurs between K = 17.0 and 17.2, and the color of the RGB in the field closest to the center of M31 is consistent with that of NGC 6528. After accounting for random photometric errors, the upper RGB in each field has a width on the (K, J - K) color-magnitude diagrams that is consistent with a ±0.5 dex dispersion in [Fe/H], in rough agreement with what is seen in other disk and spheroid fields in M31. The number of bright asymptotic giant branch (AGB) and RGB stars also scales with the r-band surface brightness in all four fields. Thus, we conclude that the stellar content does not change markedly from field to field and that the photometric properties of the brightest AGB stars in the two innermost fields are not affected significantly by crowding. The brightest star has MK = -8.6 and Mbol = -5.2, although this may not be a reliable measure of the AGB-tip brightness because of photometric variability. A population of very bright red stars, which we identify as C stars, are seen in the three fields that are closest to the center of M31. The spatial distribution of these objects suggest that they are well mixed throughout this part of M31, and thus they likely did not form in a compact region near the galactic nucleus but more probably in the inner disk. We speculate that these C stars may be the most luminous members of the intermediate-age population that has been detected previously in studies of the integrated spectrum of the central regions of M31.
Wheat Grain Filling Is Limited by Grain Filling Capacity rather than the Duration of Flag Leaf Photosynthesis: A Case Study Using NAM RNAi Plants

It has been proposed that delayed leaf senescence can extend grain filling duration and thus increase yields in cereal crops. We found that wheat (Triticum aestivum) NAM RNAi plants with delayed senescence carried out 40% more flag leaf photosynthesis after anthesis than control plants, but had the same rate and duration of starch accumulation during grain filling and the same final grain weight. The additional photosynthate available in NAM RNAi plants was in part stored as fructans in the stems, whereas stem fructans were remobilised during grain filling in control plants. In both genotypes, activity of starch synthase was limiting for starch synthesis in the later stages of grain filling. We suggest that in order to realise the potential yield gains offered by delayed leaf senescence, this trait should be combined with increased grain filling capacity.
Information systems research and Hofstede's culture's consequences: an uneasy and incomplete partnership

Information systems (IS) researchers have begun to investigate how national culture, as articulated by Hofstede, affects a wide variety of issues. A citation analysis of IS articles that cite Hofstede's research on national culture suggests that most research is focused on issues related to IS management and to IS, while issues related to IS development and operations and to IS usage remain relatively unexamined. Within the dominant categories, research is concentrated in the IS management and types of information systems subcategories. Furthermore, the dimensions of national culture outlined by Hofstede have not been frequently used to develop and to build theory. Research opportunities and approaches to develop a stronger cumulative tradition and theory for international IS issues are proposed.
Genomic Comparison of Translocating and Non-Translocating Escherichia coli

Translocation of E. coli across the gut epithelium can result in fatal sepsis in post-surgical patients. In vitro and in vivo experiments have identified the existence of a novel pathotype of translocating E. coli (TEC) that employs an unknown mechanism for translocating across epithelial cells to the mesenteric lymph nodes and the blood stream in both humans and animal models. In this study the genomes of four TEC strains isolated from the mesenteric lymph nodes of a fatal case of hospitalised patient (HMLN-1), blood of pigs after experimental shock (PC-1) and after non-lethal haemorrhage in rats (KIC-1 and KIC-2) were sequenced in order to identify the genes associated with their adhesion and/or translocation. To facilitate the comparison, the genomes of a non-adhering, non-translocating E. coli (46–4) and adhering but non-translocating E. coli (73–89) were also sequenced and compared. Whole genome comparison revealed that three (HMLN-1, PC-1 and KIC-2) of the four TEC strains carried a genomic island that encodes a Type 6 Secretion System that may contribute to adhesion of the bacteria to gut epithelial cells. The human TEC strain HMLN-1 also carried the invasion ibeA gene, which was absent in the animal TEC strains and is likely to be associated with host-specific translocation. Phylogenetic analysis revealed that the four TEC strains were distributed amongst three distinct E. coli phylogroups, which was supported by the presence of phylogroup specific fimbriae gene clusters. The genomic comparison has identified potential genes that can be targeted with knock-out experiments to further characterise the mechanisms of E. coli translocation.
Interplay Between Routing and Distributed Source Coding in Wireless Sensor Network

Recent advances in distributed source coding (DSC) for mission-driven wireless sensor networks (WSN) are related to the coding for multiple correlated sensors in applications such as real time target tracking and environment monitoring. The characteristic of these DSC applications provides significant potential opportunities in the associated sensor network to utilize multirate transmissions for enhancing network performance. In this paper, we study a methodology for interplay optimization between routing and DSC in WSN, and propose a novel multirate based routing scheme for mission-driven DSC applications that considerably extends network lifetime. The proposed scheme adopts the rate assignment based on the residual energy, and employs a joint rate and energy scheduling mechanism to meet the end-to-end transmission rate constraint, information precision requirement, and the energy constraints in the network for DSC. Simulation results show that this multirate based routing scheme achieves significantly longer network lifetime compared to other existing research in WSN for DSC applications.
Influence of detecting inaccurate messages in real-time remote text-based communication via machine translation

In multilingual communication using machine translation, translation correction based on back translation plays an important role. If users are unable to identify inaccurate translations, they will not attempt to correct them. This is an important issue because a considerable proportion of inaccurate machine translations go undetected, which prevents smooth communication. Therefore, it is necessary to develop a method for preventing users from transmitting inaccurate messages. This method can ensure that only accurate messages are exchanged between users. However, some problems may occur with the use of this method, because it rejects the user's judgment. It is important to verify the effectiveness of this method. We propose a method that reduces the transmission of inaccurate messages. If the method identifies a message as inaccurate, the chat server does not send the message to the receiver; it will instead encourage the sender to correct the message. We verified the effectiveness of the proposed method in chat communication using the Wizard of Oz method. The following conclusions were drawn from experimental results: (1) The chat communication progressed even when a user occasionally sent an inaccurate message. However, inaccurate messages did disrupt communication to some extent. When the proposed method was applied, users were able to communicate with each other more accurately. We observed that there were no significant differences in the effectiveness of communication with or without the proposed method. This suggests that our method is best applied to communication situations that require high degrees of accuracy. (2) The use of the proposed method caused users some discomfort because it rejected their judgment; thus, they did not know how to repair the messages. Based on this, it would seem that it is not easy to apply the proposed method to chat communication.
Optimal Convergence for Overlapping and Non-Overlapping Schwarz Waveform Relaxation

Optimized Schwarz methods are a new class of Schwarz methods with greatly enhanced convergence properties. They converge uniformly faster than classical Schwarz methods and their convergence rates dare asymptotically much better than the convergence rates of classical Schwarz methods if the overlap is of the order of the mesh parameter, which is often the case in practical applications. They achieve this performance by using new transmission conditions between subdomains which greatly enhance the information exchange between subdomains and are motivated by the physics of the underlying problem. We analyze in this paper these new methods for symmetric positive definite problems and show their relation to other modern domain decomposition methods like the new Finite Element Tearing and Interconnect (FETI) variants. GANDER, Martin Jakob, HALPERN, L. , NATAF, F. Optimized Schwarz Methods. In: 12th International Conference on Domain Decomposition Methods. 2000. p. 15-27