Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Intracellular Gene Transfer in Rats by Tail Vein Injection of Plasmid DNA

In this study, we examined the effect of various factors on gene delivery efficiency of tail vein injection of plasmid DNA into rats. We measured the level of reporter gene expression in the internal organs including the lung, heart, spleen, kidney, and liver as function of injection volume, injection time, and DNA dose. Persistency of reporter gene expression in transfected animals was also examined. We demonstrated that plasmid delivery to rats by the tail vein is effective as long as the volume of injected DNA solution is adjusted to 7–8% of body weight with an injection time of less than 10 s. With the exception of a short-term increase in serum concentration of alanine aminotransferase and transient irregularity in cardiac function during and soon after the injection, the procedure is well tolerated. Lac Z staining of the liver from transfected animals showed approximately 5–10% positive cells. Persistency test for transgene expression in animals using plasmid carrying cDNA of human alpha 1 antitrypsin gene driven by chicken beta actin gene promoter with CMV enhancers showed peak level of transgene product 1 day after the injection followed by a gradual decline with time. Peak level was regained by a second injection performed on day 38 after the first injection. These results show that tail vein injection is an effective means for introducing plasmid DNA into liver cells in rats. We believe that this procedure will be extremely useful for gene function studies in the context of whole animal in rats.
Acute effects of breakfasts containing α-lactalbumin, or gelatin with or without added tryptophan, on hunger, ‘satiety’ hormones and amino acid profiles

Proteins are the most satiating macronutrients. Tryptophan (TRP) may contribute to the satiating effect, as it serves as a precursor for the anorexigenic neurotransmitter serotonin. To address the role of TRP in the satiating properties of dietary protein, we compared three different breakfasts, containing either α-lactalbumin (high in TRP), gelatin (low in TRP) or gelatin with added TRP (gelatin+TRP, high in TRP), on appetite. Twenty-four subjects (22–29 kg/m2; aged 19–37 years) received a subject-specific breakfast at t = 0 with 10, 55 and 35 % energy from protein, carbohydrate and fat repectively in a randomised, single-blind design. Hunger, glucagon-like peptide (GLP)-1, ghrelin, amino acid concentrations and energy intake during a subsequent lunch were determined. Suppression of hunger was stronger 240 min after the breakfast with α-lactalbumin compared with gelatin and gelatin+TRP. Total plasma amino acid concentrations were lower with α-lactalbumin compared with gelatin with or without TRP (from t = 180–240 min). TRP concentrations were higher after α-lactalbumin than after gelatin with or without TRP from t = 0–100 min, whereas from t = 100–240 min, TRP concentrations were lower after gelatin than after α-lactalbumin and gelatin+TRP. The plasma ratio of TRP to other large neutral amino acids (LNAA) was, only at t = 100 min, lower after gelatin+TRP than after the other breakfasts. Plasma amino acid responses, TRP concentrations and TRP:LNAA ratios were not correlated with hunger. GLP-1 and ghrelin concentrations were similar for all diets. Energy intake during a subsequent lunch was similar for all diets. Summarised, an α-lactalbumin breakfast suppresses hunger more than a gelatin or gelatin+TRP breakfast. This cannot be explained by (possible) differences found in TRP concentrations and TRP:LNAA ratios in the breakfasts and in plasma, as well as in ciruclating total amino acids, GLP-1 and ghrelin.
INSTANCE-BASED LEARNING : Nearest Neighbour with Generalisation

Instance-based learning is a machine learning method that classifies new examples by comparing them to those already seen and in memory. There are two types of instance-based learning; nearest neighbour and case-based reasoning. Of these two methods, nearest neighbour fell into disfavour during the 1980s, but regained popularity recently due to its simplicity and ease of implementation. Nearest neighbour learning is not without problems. It is difficult to define a distance function that works well for both discrete and continuous attributes. Noise and irrelevant attributes also pose problems. Finally, the specificity bias adopted by instance-based learning, while often an advantage, can over-represent small rules at the expense of more general concepts, leading to a marked decrease in classification performance for some domains. Generalised exemplars offer a solution. Examples that share the same class are grouped together, and so represent large rules more fully. This reduces the role of the distance function to determining the class when no rule covers the new example, which reduces the number of classification errors that result from inaccuracies of the distance function, and increases the influence of large rules while still representing small ones. This thesis investigates non-nested generalised exemplars as a way of improving the performance of nearest neighbour. The method is tested using benchmark domains and the results compared with documented results for ungeneralised exemplars, nested generalised exemplars, rule induction methods and a composite rule induction and nearest neighbour learner. The benefits of generalisation are isolated and the performance improvement measured. The results show that non-nested generalisation of exemplars improves the classification performance of nearest neighbour systems and reduces classification time. who have provided help over the past year. Grateful thanks must go to my supervisor, Ian Witten, for giving me the freedom to pursue my studies independently while always being there when needed, and to my partner, Suky, for her unending tolerance and support. Thank you also to the other machine learning students at the University of Waikato, for your valuable assistance and friendship.
Social rhythm disrupting events increase the risk of recurrence among individuals with bipolar disorder

As outlined in the social zeitgeber hypothesis, social rhythm disrupting (SRD) life events begin a cascade of social and biological rhythm disruption that may lead to the onset of affective episodes in those vulnerable to bipolar disorder. Thus, the study of SRD events is particularly important in individuals with this chronic condition. The purpose of the current study was to evaluate (i) the extent to which SRD life events increased the risk of recurrence of a bipolar mood episode, and (ii) whether the social rhythm disruption associated with the event conferred an increased risk of recurrence, after accounting for the level of threat associated with the life event.
The Public Dimensions of the University in Africa

This paper's principal purpose is to explore the range of ways in which African universities act as public institutions—i.e., how both are shaped by and influence the social, political, and economic contexts in which they are situated. In particular, we consider the multiple dimensions, often resulting in tensions in contexts of poverty and instability, of the African university as an actor in politics, civil society, and the public sphere AND as a key institution in the expectations and the strategies of a range of actors, groups, and constituencies. L'objet essentiel de ce texte est d'explorer les differentes voies ou les universites africaines interviennent en tant qu'institutions publiques. C'est-a-dire, comment sont-elles faconnees et comment agissent-elles sur le contexte social, politique et economique au sein duquel elles evoluent. Nous tenons particulierement compte, des dimensions multiples, qui resultent souvent des situations de tension dans des contextes de pauvrete et d'instabilite, des universites africaines qui jouent le role d'acteurs dans la politique, la societe civile et la sphere publique ET qui sont egalement considerees comme des institutions cles, dans les attentes et les strategies d'une variete d'acteurs, de groupes et de cibles.
In vitro genetic selection analysis of alfalfa mosaic virus coat protein binding to 3'-terminal AUGC repeats in the viral RNAs

The coat proteins of alfalfa mosaic virus (AMV) and the related ilarviruses bind specifically to the 3' untranslated regions of the viral RNAs, which contain conserved repeats of the tetranucleotide sequence AUGC. The purpose of this study was to develop a more detailed understanding of RNA sequence and/or structural determinants required for coat protein binding by characterizing the role of the AUGC repeats. Starting with a complex pool of 39-nucleotide RNA molecules containing random substitutions in the AUGC repeats, in vitro genetic selection was used to identify RNAs that bound coat protein. After six iterative rounds of selection, amplification, and reselection, 25% of the RNAs selected from the randomized pool were wild type; that is, they contained all four AUGC sequences. Among the 31 clones analyzed, AUGC was clearly the preferred selected sequence at the four repeats, but some nucleotide sequence variability was observed at AUGC(865-868) if the other three AUGC repeats were present. Variant RNAs that bound coat protein with affinities equal to or greater than that of the wild-type molecule were not selected. To extend the in vitro selection results, RNAs containing specific nucleotide substitutions were transcribed in vitro and tested in coat protein and peptide binding assays. The data strongly suggest that the AUGC repeats provide sequence-specific determinants and contribute to a structural platform for specific coat protein binding. Coat protein may function in maintaining the 3' ends of the genomic RNAs during replication by stabilizing an RNA structure that defines the 3' terminus as the initiation site for minus-strand synthesis.
Exploring international students experiences of studying in UK universities : a narrative inquiry of Nigerian students

This thesis is a narrative inquiry of 10 international students from Nigeria studying in selected UK universities. The thesis draws from emerging discourse on international student’s overseas experiences and extends this knowledge by analysing these experiences from the framework of trauma, individuation, spiritual emergency and the African initiation process, in an attempt to gain an in depth knowledge of Nigerian students’ experiences of studying abroad in the current period. The previous understanding of international students’ experiences from culture shock framework does not account for how their difficult experiences affect their psychological, emotional, physical, social and spiritual wellbeing, so this thesis have reconceptualised these problems and explained them in more depth using the trauma framework and contributed to knowledge in this area. It is an exploratory qualitative study and data for the study was gathered through narrative interviewing. The narrative or story telling method applied in this study enabled the researcher to capture how the participants construct meaning to their lived experiences. The narrative inquiry is chosen because it gives voice to silenced group of people like the Nigerian students whose experiences are not heard. Narratives gathered were textually analysed to evidence the narrators’ unique individual experiences. Findings revealed that the participants had experiences that coincided with trauma experiences such as feeling of helplessness, disorganization, confusion, depression, sleeplessness and disorientation, lack of concentration and supressed emotion as they lived and studied in UK. The thesis concluded from the findings of the study that there is resemblance of trauma experiences in the participants’ stories. The study recommends that support was necessary when they are in UK, while adequate information should be provided before the students sojourn to the UK since most of their difficulties were as a result of failed expectations from their preconceptions about studying in the UK before they arrived.
Argumentation in dispute mediation : a reasonable way to handle conflict

The context of mediation immediately highlights the importance of argumentation as a means to reasonably handle conflict. Argumentation in dispute mediation tackles this topic providing both theoretical insights and detailed empirical argumentative analysis. Its goal is twofold: to explore mediation as a real-life context of argumentation and to show how an increased argumentative awareness could improve conflict resolution. Particular emphasis is accorded to mapping mediation through an interdisciplinary reasoned review of existing accounts. The outline of a conceptual framework of mediation constitutes a solid basis for the study of argumentation in mediation. The argumentative analysis of a corpus of mediation cases, based on the pragma-dialectical account and the Argumentum Model of Topics, shows the mediator’s moves which actually help conflicting parties discuss reasonably. The mediator’s topical potential plays a crucial role in this relation at the levels of issue selection, evoking of cultural-contextual premises and choice of argument schemes.
Generation of Customized Accelerators for Loop Pipelining of Binary Instruction Traces

Many embedded applications process large amounts of data using regular computational kernels, amenable to acceleration by specialized hardware coprocessors. To reduce the significant design effort, the dedicated hardware may be automatically generated, usually starting from the application's source or binary code. This paper presents a moduloscheduled loop accelerator capable of executing multiple loops and a supporting toolchain. A generation/scheduling procedure, which fully relies on MicroBlaze instruction traces, produces accelerator instances, customized in terms of functional units and interconnections. The accelerators support integer and single-precision floatingpoint arithmetic, and exploit instruction-level parallelism, loop pipelining, and memory access parallelism via two read/write ports. A complete implementation of the proposed architecture is evaluated in a Virtex-7 device. Augmenting a MicroBlaze processor with a tailored accelerator achieves a geometric mean speedup, over software-only execution, of 6.61× for 13 floatingpoint kernels from the Livermore Loops set, and of 4.08× for 11 integer kernels from Texas Instruments' IMGLIB. The proposed customized accelerators are compared with ALU-based ones. The average specialized accelerator requires only 0.47× the number of field-programmable gate array slices of an accelerator with four ALUs. A geometric mean speedup of 1.78× over a four-issue very long instruction word (without floating-point support) was obtained for the integer kernels.
Identification of tryptamine and tryptamine‐serotonin neurons in the rat dorsal raphe nuclei using specific antibodies

Previous studies have shown that tryptamine (T) is closely associated with the serotonergic system but have failed to determine whether neurons containing only T exist in the raphe nuclei (RN) and/or if T colocalizes with serotonin (5‐HT). The use of rabbit‐conjugated T antisera (TAS) and rat‐conjugated 5‐HT antisera (5‐HTAS) in a double‐labelling technique has made the study of the colocalization of T and 5‐HT in neurons of the rat dorsal RN (DR) possible. Slices taken from the same zone of the DR were treated following four different procedures of double‐immunolabelling: DAB coloration for the rabbit TAS and DAB‐nickel coloration for the rat 5‐HTAS either first or second; or DAB coloration for the 5‐HTAS and DAB‐nickel coloration for the TAS first or second. Control sections were treated according to a single immunoperoxidase staining in the same zone. The immunolabelled neurons were computed using the Biocom 200 program at the same magnification. The results of this double‐immunolabelling show that three different cell types exist in the rat DR: (1) T‐only‐containing neurons, (2) 5‐HT‐only‐containing neurons displaying either homogeneous DAB or homogeneous DAB‐nickel, and (3) neurons where T colocalizes with 5‐HT (T‐positive/5‐HT‐positive neurons) displaying heterogeneous DAB‐nickel coloration. The results were identical whatever the procedure performed or the order of the DAB‐nickel revelation. In contrast, the single immunolabelling method failed to stain T‐only‐containing neurons (or 5‐HT‐only‐containing neurons); T‐immunoreactive cells (or 5‐HT‐immunoreactive cells) correspond in fact to neurons containing either T (or 5‐HT) or T and 5‐HT. © 1993 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
A sample preparation method for microbiological analysis of seeds

There have been several outbreaks of food poisoning linked to the consumption of raw sprouts. The two most common pathogens associated with sprout consumption are Salmo-nella spp and verocyto-toxin producing Escherichia coli. During sprouting the warm, humid and nutrient rich conditions are ideal for bacterial growth. Pathogenic bacteria can infect seeds at very low numbers only to grow to dangerous levels during sprouting. Mi-crobiological analysis of dry seeds is difficult because of the low amount of pathogens and because hard seeds are difficult to handle. In this study a safe and reliable sample preparation method for seeds used for sprouting have been developed. The developed method starts with soaking the seeds in water and germinating them for one day. Soaking and germination softens seeds, make them easier to crush and allows bacterial growth, which increases chances of detection. After germination, the seeds are crushed with a mortar and pestle and placed in double stomacher bags. Buffered peptone water is added to samples, which are then pummeled in a stomacher. After enrichment at 37 ˚C, samples are analyzed according to validated methods. In order to get faster test result it is possible to analyze soaking water in addition to seeds. The soaking water is blended with equal amounts of double strength buffered peptone water and bacteria are enriched by incubation. Samples of alfalfa (Medicago sativa), fenugreek (Trigonella foenum-graecum) and mung bean (Vigna radiata) were used in the seed processing trials. Detection trials were performed on seeds inoculated with Salmonella Enteritidis and E. coli O157 and detection was performed with both cultivation- and PCR-based methods. Using cultivation based methods, Salmonella Enteritidis could be detected in all samples of soaking water, seeds before germination and after two days of germination, when inoculated in levels of 8-12 CFU/g dried seed. E. coli O157 was detected using real-time PCR detection of an 88 bp section of the rfbE-gene. At inoculation levels of approximately 40 CFU/g dried seeds, E. coli O157 was not detected in all samples. Detection rate was higher when using soaking water and after at least one day of germination. To determine the optimal germination time, bacterial growth on sprouting seeds was studied by following the growth of inherent aerobic bacteria for five days and inoculated E. coli O157 during three days of germination. The amount of aerobic reached its maximum after two to three days of germination. In seeds inoculated with E. coli O157, the bacteria were only detected in fenugreek seeds where most of the growth occurred during the first two days of germination.
Customer satisfaction towards internet banking services: Case analysis on a Malaysian bank

The purpose of this paper is to determine the factors influencing customer satisfaction towards Internet banking services. A total of 172 online banking users from a local commercial bank in Malaysia participated in this study. Using hierarchical multiple regression analysis, we controlled the variables of age, income and education levels, and found that (1) staff supports and knowledge; (2) web security and trust were significant predictors for the customer satisfaction towards Internet banking services. It is hoped that findings from the study provide greater insights to bank managers as what affects the users' satisfaction towards online banking so that resources can be utilized more efficiently in any improvement efforts.
Maternal and neonatal outcomes in dichorionic twin pregnancies following IVF treatment: a hospital-based comparative study.

AIM To compare maternal, and neonatal outcomes in IVF/ICSI and spontaneously conceived dichorionic twin pregnancy. METHOD We collected data regarding dichorionic twin pregnancies following in vitro fertilization/ intracytoplasmic sperm injection (IVF/ICSI, n=162) with the transfer of fresh embryos as well as data regarding spontaneously conceived pregnancies (n=213) delivered after 28 weeks of gestation at the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Renmin Hospital in Wuhan in the years of 2010-2013. We then compared maternal and neonatal outcomes between IVF/ICSI and spontaneous dichorionic twin pregnancies, with a subgroup analysis separating traditional IVF from ICSI pregnancies. Odds ratios (OR) for associations between IVF/ICSI and pregnancy outcomes were adjusted for maternal factors. RESULTS The mean maternal age and the percentage of primiparous women were significantly higher in the IVF/ICSI group. Multivariate analysis revealed that maternal outcomes were comparable in both groups with/without adjustment for maternal age and parity. However, IVF/ICSI twins were less likely to have birth weight discordance than those spontaneously conceived (unadjusted OR=0.526, 95% CI 0.297-0.932; adjusted OR=0.486, 95% CI 0.255-0.856). In subgroup analyses, these associations were confirmed in the IVF (adjusted OR=0.496, 95% CI 0.265-0.926), but not in the ICSI group (adjusted OR=0.500, 95% CI 0.139-1.807). CONCLUSION IVF/ICSI treatment was not a risk factor for adverse maternal neonatal outcomes, but the risk for birth weight discordance is lower among IVF/ICSI twins.
Physical Activity Attenuates the Effect of Low Birth Weight on Insulin Resistance in Adolescents

OBJECTIVE To examine whether physical activity influences the association between birth weight and insulin resistance in adolescents. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS The study comprised adolescents who participated in two cross-sectional studies: the Healthy Lifestyle in Europe by Nutrition in Adolescence (HELENA) study (n = 520, mean age = 14.6 years) and the Swedish part of the European Youth Heart Study (EYHS) (n = 269, mean age = 15.6 years). Participants had valid data on birth weight (parental recall), BMI, sexual maturation, maternal education, breastfeeding, physical activity (accelerometry, counts/minute), fasting glucose, and insulin. Insulin resistance was assessed by homeostasis model assessment–insulin resistance (HOMA-IR). Maternal education level and breastfeeding duration were reported by the mothers. RESULTS There was a significant interaction of physical activity in the association between birth weight and HOMA-IR (logarithmically transformed) in both the HELENA study and the EYHS (P = 0.05 and P = 0.03, respectively), after adjusting for sex, age, sexual maturation, BMI, maternal education level, and breastfeeding duration. Stratified analyses by physical activity levels (below/above median) showed a borderline inverse association between birth weight and HOMA-IR in the low-active group (standardized β = −0.094, P = 0.09, and standardized β = −0.156, P = 0.06, for HELENA and EYHS, respectively), whereas no evidence of association was found in the high-active group (standardized β = −0.031, P = 0.62, and standardized β = 0.053, P = 0.55, for HELENA and EYHS, respectively). CONCLUSIONS Higher levels of physical activity may attenuate the adverse effects of low birth weight on insulin sensitivity in adolescents. More observational data, from larger and more powerful studies, are required to test these findings.