Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Keratinocyte growth factor-induced proliferation of rat airway epithelium is restricted to Clara cells in vivo

Keratinocyte growth factor (KGF) is a potent mitogen of pulmonary bronchial and alveolar epithelial cells. However, it is unclear which type(s) of airway epithelial cells (AEC) proliferate(s) in response to KGF. AEC proliferation was induced in rats by either endobronchial instillation of 5 mg recombinant human (rHu) KGF per kg body weight or by adenoviral transfer of the human KGF gene (Ad5-HuKGF). Alterations in terminal airway AEC were followed for up to 7 days after rHuKGF, and for up to 28 days after Ad5-HuKGF. Cell proliferation, as assessed by immunohistochemistry (IHC) for incorporated 5-bromo-2′-deoxyuridine (BrdU) and quantified by stereology, peaked at days 1–2 and was resolved by day 7 after rHuKGF and by day 21 after Ad5-HuKGF. Double immunofluorescence labelling for BrdU or Ki-67 on the one hand, and for Clara cell specific protein 10 (CC10) and calcitonin-gene related peptide on the other hand, demonstrated that Clara cells, not pulmonary neuroendocrine cells, proliferated in response to human KGF. TUNEL (terminal deoxynucleotidyl transferase-mediated deoxyuridine triphosphate nick end-labelling) method in conjunction with IHC for MNF116 failed to detect significant numbers of apoptotic AEC. IHC in conjunction with stereology revealed transient phenotypic alterations with a decrease in CC10, an increase in surfactant protein D and an increase in CD44v6 in AEC. The authors conclude that Clara cells responded to human keratinocyte growth factor in vivo by proliferation as well as by changes in protein expression, whereas no significant response was observed in pulmonary neuroendocrine cells. As Clara cells are intimately involved in airway epithelial repair, ion and fluid transport, and modulate lung inflammation, the potential of human keratinocyte growth factor to protect the lung may in part rely on the response of Clara cells.
Dual Role of the Metalloprotease FtsH in Biogenesis of the DrrAB Drug Transporter*

Background: Metalloprotease FtsH is involved in quality control of membrane proteins. Results: Simultaneous (or sequential) expression of misfolded DrrAB and FtsH results in significant recovery of DrrAB-mediated doxorubicin efflux function. Conclusion: FtsH facilitates refolding of previously misassembled DrrAB. Significance: This is the first study showing that FtsH contains both protease and refolding functions and plays a dual role in biogenesis of membrane proteins. This study provides the first direct evidence for the dual role of the metalloprotease FtsH in membrane protein biogenesis. Using the physiological substrate DrrAB, it is shown that FtsH is not only responsible for proteolysis of unassembled DrrB protein but also plays a much broader role in biogenesis of the DrrAB complex. Previous studies showed that the stable expression of DrrB in the membrane depends on simultaneous expression of DrrA. Here we show that DrrB is proteolyzed by FtsH when it is expressed alone. Moreover, DrrA and DrrB proteins expressed together in a temperature-sensitive ftsH mutant strain of Escherichia coli were found to be nonfunctional due to their incorrect assembly. Simultaneous expression of wild-type FtsH in trans resulted in normal doxorubicin efflux. Strikingly, doxorubicin efflux could be restored in mutant cells irrespective of whether FtsH was expressed simultaneously with DrrAB or expressed after these proteins had already accumulated in an inactive conformation, thus providing crucial evidence for the ability of FtsH to refold the misassembled proteins. Complementation experiments also showed that the catalytic AAA domain of FtsH contains a chaperone-like activity, however, unlike wild-type FtsH, it was unable to restore function. Our results therefore show for the first time that FtsH contains the protease as well as refolding functions, and both the AAA and the proteolytic domains of FtsH are required for each of these activities.
Current trend of drug sensitivity in bovine mastitis

The study was conducted on 190 milk samples of bovine mastitis and 138 samples were confirmed positives for microorganisms. All the 138 samples were subjected to drug sensitivity test. The most effective antibiotic was enrofloxacin (91.67%) followed by ciprofloxacin (90.15%), amikacin (87.12%), ceftriaxone (84.10%), chloramphenicol (80.31%), cefotaxime (79.55%) and gentamicin (77.27%). Microorganisms were mostly resistant to drugs like streptomycin, penicillinG, ampicillin, cloxacillin, amoxycillin and neomycin in increasing order of resistance. Hence, it is suggested that the line of treatment should be based on antibiogram study of various isolates from bovine mastitis. Further, the selection of drugs after culture and sensitivity test should be based on their ability to cross blood tissue barrier or mammary parenchyma, lipophilicity and ability to work in alkaline pH.
A Blood-Based Screening Tool for Alzheimer's Disease That Spans Serum and Plasma: Findings from TARC and ADNI

Context There is no rapid and cost effective tool that can be implemented as a front-line screening tool for Alzheimer's disease (AD) at the population level. Objective To generate and cross-validate a blood-based screener for AD that yields acceptable accuracy across both serum and plasma. Design, Setting, Participants Analysis of serum biomarker proteins were conducted on 197 Alzheimer's disease (AD) participants and 199 control participants from the Texas Alzheimer's Research Consortium (TARC) with further analysis conducted on plasma proteins from 112 AD and 52 control participants from the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI). The full algorithm was derived from a biomarker risk score, clinical lab (glucose, triglycerides, total cholesterol, homocysteine), and demographic (age, gender, education, APOE*E4 status) data. Major Outcome Measures Alzheimer's disease. Results 11 proteins met our criteria and were utilized for the biomarker risk score. The random forest (RF) biomarker risk score from the TARC serum samples (training set) yielded adequate accuracy in the ADNI plasma sample (training set) (AUC = 0.70, sensitivity (SN) = 0.54 and specificity (SP) = 0.78), which was below that obtained from ADNI cerebral spinal fluid (CSF) analyses (t-tau/Aβ ratio AUC = 0.92). However, the full algorithm yielded excellent accuracy (AUC = 0.88, SN = 0.75, and SP = 0.91). The likelihood ratio of having AD based on a positive test finding (LR+) = 7.03 (SE = 1.17; 95% CI = 4.49–14.47), the likelihood ratio of not having AD based on the algorithm (LR−) = 3.55 (SE = 1.15; 2.22–5.71), and the odds ratio of AD were calculated in the ADNI cohort (OR) = 28.70 (1.55; 95% CI = 11.86–69.47). Conclusions It is possible to create a blood-based screening algorithm that works across both serum and plasma that provides a comparable screening accuracy to that obtained from CSF analyses.
One-Class versus Binary Classification: Which and When?

Binary classifiers have typically been the norm for building classification models in the Machine Learning community. However, an alternate to binary classification is one-class classification, which aims to build models using only a single class of data. This is particularly useful when there is an over-abundance of data of a particular class. In such imbalanced cases, binary classifiers may not perform very well, and one-class classifiers then become the viable option. In this paper, we are interested in investigating the performance of binary and one-class classifiers as the level of imbalance increases, and, thus, uncertainty in the second class. Our objective is to gain insight into which classification paradigm becomes more suitable as imbalance and uncertainty increase. To this end, we conduct experiments on various datasets, both artificial and from the UCI repository, and monitor the performance of the binary and one-class classifiers as the size of the second class gradually decreases, thus increasing the level of imbalance. The results show that as the level of imbalance increases, the performance of binary classifiers decreases, whereas one-class classifiers stay relatively stable.
Utility of the laparoscopic approach to surgical treatment of acute appendicitis in a single surgical unit

Introduction Acute appendicitis (AA) is one of the most common reasons for emergency surgery within the abdominal cavity in Poland. Aim To compare outcomes of surgical treatment of AA using both classical (OA) and laparoscopic methods (LA). Material and methods Retrospective analysis of 299 patients (157 men and 142 women) operated on in 2008–2011 due to AA. The following comparisons between LA and OA were done: mean operative time, mean hospital stay after surgery, conversion rate, proportion of LA to OA in successive years. Results Laparoscopic appendectomy was performed in 170 (56.9%) patients (74 men and 96 women), whereas OA was done in 89 (29.8%) patients (44 men and 45 women). In 13.4% of patients (24 men and 16 women) conversion from LA to OA was done. Mean operating time was 53.4 ±16.1 min (range: 25–100 min) for LA, and 55.4 ±20.2 min (range: 20–140 min) for OA; p = 0.64. Mean hospital stay after LA was 4.0 ±1.2 days (range: 2–9 days), while it was 6.0 ±4.2 days (range: 2–28 days) after OA; p < 0.001. Laparoscopic appendectomy was 24.1% of all appendectomies performed in the year 2008, 54.1% in the year 2009, and in consecutive years 71.7% in 2010 and 65.6% in 2011. Conclusions Laparoscopic appendectomy method did not require longer surgery times and entailed shorter hospital stays as compared with OA. In our opinion, LA should be the preferred approach in surgical treatment of AA in adults.
Political Dissatisfactions and Citizen Involvement: Political Participation in Europe during the Early Stages of the Economic Crisis

This article examines the links between three kinds of political dissatisfaction and four types of political participation during the early stages of the economic crisis in 2008-2009. Since economic crisis exacerbates negative political attitudes and thereby strains the legitimacy of the political system, it is im-portant to examine how citizens convey their grievances to political decision makers during such crisis. Recent decades have witnessed changes in patterns of political participation entailing that citizens abstain from traditional political participation in favor of non-institutionalized activities, but the implications for democracy are disputed since it is unclear what drives non-institutionalized participation. To ascertain what the changes mean for democracy during times of economic crisis, it is helpful to distinguish different kinds of political dissatisfaction with diverse implications for democracy. The data comes from the fourth round of the European Social Survey and include a total of 47489 respondents in 25 European democracies. The results suggest that only some kinds of political dissatisfaction affect the pro-pensity for political participation while others lead to passivity. Additionally, political dissatisfaction is not necessarily a major driving force behind the popularity of non-institutionalized participation since satisfied citizens are also involved in these.
Career Concerns in Teams 1 Emmanuelle Auriol ARQADE and IDEI Toulouse

We study the impact of changes in the commitment power of a principal on cooperation among agents, in a model in which the principal and her agents are symmetrically uncertain about the agents’ innate abilities. When the principal cannot commit herself to long-term wage contracts, two types of implicit incentives emerge. First, agents become concerned about their perceived personal productivity. Second, agents become more reluctant to behave cooperatively they have an incentive to ‘sabotage’ their colleagues. Anticipating this risk, and in order to induce the desired level of cooperation, the principal must offer more collectively oriented incentive schemes. We also show that temporary workers are not affected by the sabotage effect and that as a result, their incentives are more individually oriented.
Cell Type-Specific Inhibitory Inputs to Dendritic and Somatic Compartments of Parvalbumin-Expressing Neocortical Interneuron

Parvalbumin (PV)-producing fast-spiking neurons are well known to generate gamma oscillation by mutual chemical and electrical connections in the neocortex. Although it was clearly demonstrated that PV neurons form a dense gap junction network with each other not only at the proximal sites but also at the distal dendrites, comprehensive quantitative data on the chemical connections are still lacking. To elucidate the connectivity, we investigated inhibitory inputs to PV neurons in the somatosensory cortex, using the transgenic mice in which the dendrites and cell bodies of PV neurons were clearly visualized. We first examined GABAergic inputs to PV neurons by labeling postsynaptic and presynaptic sites with the immunoreactivities for gephyrin and vesicular GABA transporter. The density of GABAergic inputs was highest on the cell bodies, and almost linearly decreased to the distal dendrites. We then investigated inhibitory inputs from three distinct subgroups of GABAergic interneurons by visualizing the axon terminals immunopositive for PV, somatostatin (SOM), or vasoactive intestinal polypeptide (VIP). PV and SOM inputs were frequently located on the dendrites with the ratio of 2.5:1, but much less on the cell bodies. By contrast, VIP inputs clearly preferred the cell bodies to the dendrites. Consequently, the dendritic and somatic compartments of PV neurons received ∼60 and 62% of inhibitory inputs from PV and VIP neurons, respectively. This compartmental organization of inhibitory inputs suggests that PV neurons, together with gap junctions, constitute mutual connections at the dendrites, and that their activities are negatively controlled by the somatic inputs of VIP neurons.
Upper Bounds of the Continuous ARE Solution

In this paper, we provide a bound of the continuous ARE solution in terms of a matrix associated with Lyapunov solutions. Based on the new matrix-type bound, we also consider various scalar bounds and compare them with existing bounds. The major advantage of our results over existing results is that the new bounds can be always obtained if the stabilizing solution exists, whereas all existing bounds might not be computed because they require other conditions additional to the existence condition. key words: continuous ARE, upper bound
Short- and Intermediate-Term Outcomes of Preterm Infants Receiving Positive Pressure Ventilation in the Delivery Room

Although recent advances in neonatal care have improved survival rates, rates of bronchopulmonary dysplasia remain unchanged. Although neonatologists are increasingly applying gentle ventilation strategies in the neonatal intensive care unit, the same emphasis has not been applied immediately after birth. A lung-protective strategy should start with the first breath to help in the establishment of functional residual capacity, facilitate gas exchange, and reduce volutrauma and atelectotrauma. This paper will discuss techniques and equipment during breathing assistance in the delivery room.
Sequential and simultaneous multiple explanation: Implications for alternative consideration when response options are not provided

This paper reports two experiments comparing variants of multiple explanation applied in the early stages of a judgment task (a case involving employee theft) where participants are not given a menu of response options. Because prior research has focused on situations where response options are provided to judges, we identify relevant dependent variables that an intervention might affect when such options are not given. We use these variables to build a causal model of intervention that illustrates both the intended effects of multiple explanation and some potentially competing processes that it may trigger. Although multiple explanation clearly conveys some benefits (e.g., willingness to delay action to engage in information search, increased detail, quality and confidence in alternative explanations) in the present experiments, we also found evidence that it may initiate or enhance processes that attenuate its advantages (e.g., feelings that one does not need more data if one has multiple good explanations).
Beneficial Effects of High Potassium: Contribution of Renal Basolateral K+ Channels

The prevalence of hypertension in the United States is estimated to have reached 85.7 million adults1 without taking into account new American College of Cardiology/American Heart Association guideline for the prevention, detection, evaluation, and management of high blood pressure,2 which is certain to increase this estimate. Hypertension is a major risk factor for stroke, coronary heart disease, and renal failure. Additionally, high blood pressure (BP) increases cardiovascular mortality rates and progression of many other chronic diseases. Salt and water handling by the kidney directly affects BP, whereas renal ion channels and transporters maintain electrolyte homeostasis.3,4 Epidemiological and anthropological studies suggest that in isolated societies with diets composed primarily of fruits, vegetables, and nuts, hypertension affects only 1% of the population. In contrast, in countries consuming a modern Western diet high in processed foods and dietary sodium, the prevalence of hypertension is as high as 30%. This effect of the Western diet is not solely attributed to high sodium content but rather the dramatically decreased dietary potassium-to-sodium ratio. In industrialized countries, the daily intakes of potassium and sodium are ≈30 to 50 and 80 to 250 mmol per day, respectively. This is in sharp contrast with isolated or primitive societies, having the daily rates of 150 to 290 mmol for potassium and 20 to 40 mmol per day for sodium.5 Therefore, estimated potassium-to-sodium intake ratios range from 0.12 to 0.63 for industrialized societies and 3.8 to 14.5 for isolated societies. According to the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, only about one tenth of US adults have potassium-to-sodium intake ratios consistent with the World Health Organization guidelines for reduced risk of mortality.6 Potassium is the most abundant intracellular ion, and its role in the regulation of BP is well established. Dietary supplementation with potassium …
Utility of Host Markers Detected in Quantiferon Supernatants for the Diagnosis of Tuberculosis in Children in a High-Burden Setting

Background The diagnosis of childhood tuberculosis (TB) disease remains a challenge especially in young and HIV-infected children. Recent studies have identified potential host markers which, when measured in Quantiferon (QFT-IT) supernatants, show promise in discriminating between Mycobacterium tuberculosis (M.tb) infection states. In this study, the utility of such markers was investigated in children screened for TB in a setting with high TB incidence. Methodology and Principal Findings 76 children (29% HIV-infected) with or without active TB provided blood specimens collected directly into QFT-IT tubes. After overnight incubation, culture supernatants were harvested, aliquoted and frozen for future immunological research purposes. Subsequently, the levels of 12 host markers previously identified as potential TB diagnostic markers were evaluated in these supernatants for their ability to discriminate between M.tb infection and disease states using the Luminex platform. Of the 76 children included, 19 (25%) had culture confirmed TB disease; 26 (46%) of the 57 without TB had positive markers of M.tb infection defined by a positive QFT-IT test. The potentially most useful analytes for diagnosing TB disease included IFN-α2, IL-1Ra, sCD40L and VEGF and the most useful markers for discriminating between QFT-IT positive children as TB or latent infection included IL-1Ra, IP-10 and VEGF. When markers were used in combinations of four, 84% of all children were accurately classified into their respective groups (TB disease or no TB), after leave-one-out cross validation. Conclusions Measurement of the levels of IFN-α2, IL-1Ra, sCD40L, IP-10 and VEGF in QFT-IT supernatants may be a useful method for diagnosing TB disease and differentiating between active TB disease and M.tb infection in children. Our observations warrant further investigation in larger well-characterized clinical cohorts.
Enhanced Browsing System for Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) can be a valuable aid to learning and scholarship. However, current systems that provide access to ETDs only provide a full text and/or metadata based search and browse facility, thereby limiting ways in which users can interact with and make use of such collections. Long documents like ETDs can be viewed as containing various streams of information - textual content (in chapters, table of contents, etc.), tables, images, references, etc. In addition to presenting the ETD as a whole to the user, we present the various streams of information in a synergistic fashion, in order to enhance browsing and comprehension. We describe a design and a prototype for an enhanced web based ETD browsing system, called ETD-Enhance. It allows users to browse and interact with various streams of information present in ETDs, in an integrated fashion. To allow this, we have developed tools to extract individual chapters, figures, captions, etc. from these PDF files. For our pilot study, we have prototyped ETD-Enhance on a small collection of ETDs, and have made the prototype available for public viewing and to collect feedback. We plan to research better techniques for extracting different information streams, as well as better support for user interaction, and to extend our work to the entire collection of ETDs.
Why does the clustering of haloes depend on their formation history

We discuss in the framework of the excursion set formalism a recent discovery from N-body simulations that the clustering of haloes of given mass depends on their formation history. We review why the standard implementation of this formalism is unable to explain such dependencies, and we show that this can, in principle, be rectified by implementing in full an ellipsoidal collapse model where collapse depends not only on the overdensity but also on the shape of the initial density field. We also present an alternative remedy for this deficiency, namely the inclusion of collapse barriers for pancakes and filaments, together with the assumption that formation history depends on when these barriers are crossed. We implement both these extensions in a generalised excursion set method, and run large Monte Carlo realisations to quantify the effects. Our results suggest that effects as large as those found in simulations can only arise in the excursion set formalism if the formation history of a halo does indeed depend on the size of its progenitor filaments and pancakes. We also present conditional distributions of progenitor pancakes and filaments for low-mass haloes identified at present epoch, and discuss a recent claim by Mo et.al. that most low-mass haloes were embedded in massive pancakes at z � 2.
Public Approval of Plea Bargaining in Hong Kong

Despite the prevalence of plea bargaining, few studies have endeavored to measure public support of it. The few that did neglected offender characteristics even when it is a core consideration stipulated by prosecution policy in plea bargaining decision making. This study argues that public approval toward plea bargaining is not binary but rather multifaceted and is dependent upon a variety of factors including the parties involved, the type of plea bargain reached, and the characteristics of the defendant. Telephone interviews were conducted with respondents selected randomly from Hong Kong (N = 374) who responded to a series of hypothetical plea bargaining scenarios. Public approval was higher when there was judicial presence and when offenders were elderly, had a clean criminal record, and displayed remorse. It was lower for fact bargaining and offenders from high-income families. Policy implications and reform are discussed.