Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Impaired spatial working memory but spared spatial reference memory following functional loss of NMDA receptors in the dentate gyrus

Novel spatially restricted genetic manipulations can be used to assess contributions made by synaptic plasticity to learning and memory, not just selectively within the hippocampus, but even within specific hippocampal subfields. Here we generated genetically modified mice (NR1ΔDG mice) exhibiting complete loss of the NR1 subunit of the N‐methyl‐d‐aspartate receptor specifically in the granule cells of the dentate gyrus. There was no evidence of any reduction in NR1 subunit levels in any of the other hippocampal subfields, or elsewhere in the brain. NR1ΔDG mice displayed severely impaired long‐term potentiation (LTP) in both medial and lateral perforant path inputs to the dentate gyrus, whereas LTP was unchanged in CA3‐to‐CA1 cell synapses in hippocampal slices. Behavioural assessment of NR1ΔDG mice revealed a spatial working memory impairment on a three‐from‐six radial arm maze task despite normal hippocampus‐dependent spatial reference memory acquisition and performance of the same task. This behavioural phenotype resembles that of NR1ΔCA3 mice but differs from that of NR1ΔCA1 mice which do show a spatial reference memory deficit, consistent with the idea of subfield‐specific contributions to hippocampal information processing. Furthermore, this pattern of selective functional loss and sparing is the same as previously observed with the global GluR‐A l‐α‐amino‐3‐hydroxy‐5‐methyl‐4‐isoxazelopropionate receptor subunit knockout, a mutation which blocks the expression of hippocampal LTP. The present results show that dissociations between spatial working memory and spatial reference memory can be induced by disrupting synaptic plasticity specifically and exclusively within the dentate gyrus subfield of the hippocampal formation.
Investigation of the prevalence of female genital tract tuberculosis and its relation to female infertility:An observational analytical study

Background: Genital tuberculosis is a common entity in gynecological practice particularly among infertile patients. It is rare in developed countries but is an important cause of infertility in developing countries. Objective: The present study has investigated the prevalence of female genital tract tuberculosis (FGT) among infertile patients, which was conducted at the Obstetrics and Gynecology Unit-I, Allied Hospital, affiliated with Punjab Medical College, Faisalabad, Pakistan. Materials and Methods: 150 infertile women who were referred to infertility clinic were selected randomly and enrolled in our study. Patients were scanned for possible presence of FGT by examination and relevant investigation. We evaluated various aspects (age, symptoms, signs, and socio-economic factors) of the patients having tuberculosis. Results: Very high frequency of FGT (20%) was found among infertile patients. While, a total of 25 patients out of 30 (83.33%) showed primary infertility and the remaining 5 cases (16.67%) had secondary infertility. Among secondary infertility patients, the parity ranged between 1 and 2. A total of 40% of patients (12 cases) were asymptomatic but infertile. Evidence of family history was found in 4 out of a total of 30 patients (13.3%), respectively. According to histopathological and bacteriological examination of endometrial biopsy and laparotomy, tuberculous endometritis was found in 20 out of a total of 25 (80%) cases, while tuberculous salpingitis and tuberculous oophoritis were found both in 2 (8%) of the cases, respectively. Only one case (4%) of tuberculosis cervicitis was found in the present study. Conclusion: Although infertility is not a disease in classical sense, but it is an extremely important personal concern for many couples and a significant health problem for our profession. So, it is worthwhile to identify and evaluate the factors contributing to infertility.
Lipid stress inhibits endocytosis of melanocortin-4 receptor from modified clathrin-enriched sites and impairs receptor desensitization

Melanocortin-4 receptor (MC4R) is a G-protein–coupled receptor expressed in the brain's hypothalamus where it regulates energy homeostasis. MC4R agonists function to lower food intake and weight. In this respect, although obesity promotes hyperlipidemia and hypothalamic injury, MC4R agonists are nevertheless more effective to reduce food intake within hours of administration in overweight, rather than lean, mice. MC4R undergoes constitutive internalization and recycling to the plasma membrane with agonist binding inducing receptor retention along the intracellular route and, under prolonged exposure, desensitization. Here, we found that, in neuronal cells, lipid stress by exposure to elevated palmitate leaves unchanged the rate by which MC4R and transferrin receptor are constitutively excluded from the cell surface. However, lipid stress disrupted later steps of MC4R and transferrin receptor internalization to endosomes as well as traffic of agonist-occupied MC4R to lysosomes and MC4R desensitization. In the lipid-stressed cells, MC4R and clathrin were redistributed to the plasma membrane where they colocalized to sites that appeared by super-resolution microscopy to be modified and to have higher clathrin content than those of cells not exposed to elevated palmitate. The data suggest that lipid stress disrupts steps of endocytosis following MC4R localization to clathrin-coated sites and exclusion of the receptor from the extracellular medium. We conclude that increased effectiveness of MC4R agonists in obesity may be an unexpected outcome of neuronal injury with disrupted clathrin-dependent endocytosis and impaired receptor desensitization.
Improvement of the primary metabolism of cell cultures by introducing a new cytoplasmic pyruvate carboxylase reaction.

Continuous mammalian cell lines are important hosts for the production of biological pharmaceuticals. However, these cell lines show some severe disorders in primary metabolism, which they have in common with many cancer cells. This leads to a high throughput of substrates giving a low energy yield and ample toxic side products such as lactate and ammonia. Because the enzymatic connection between glycolysis and the tricarboxylic acid cycle (TCA) is very poor, glucose is mainly degraded via oxidative glycolysis. It will be shown that introducing a pyruvate carboxylase gene expressed in the cytoplasma into a continuous BHK-21 cell line, and thus reconstituting the missing link between glycolysis and TCA, can reduce this problem. Thus, glucose consumption could be reduced by a factor of four and glutamine utilization up to a factor of two, compared with control. Moreover, a 1.4-fold-higher adenosine triphosphate (ATP) content was achieved. The flux of labeled [(14)C]-glucose into the TCA is shown to be enhanced, indicating a higher rate of oxidative glucose degradation. Host cell lines with an improved energy metabolism will therefore result in better exploitation of substrates, an increasing yield by the more efficient use of carbon source, and higher product integrity combined with lower production costs.
ASMOV: results for OAEI 2010

The Automated Semantic Mapping of Ontologies with Validation (ASMOV) algorithm for ontology alignment has consistently been one of the top performing algorithms in the Ontology Alignment Evaluation Initiative (OAEI) contests. In this paper, we present a brief overview of the algorithm and its improvements, followed by an analysis of its results on the 2010 OAEI tests.
Z-Forcing: Training Stochastic Recurrent Networks

Many efforts have been devoted to training generative latent variable models with autoregressive decoders, such as recurrent neural networks (RNN). Stochastic recurrent models have been successful in capturing the variability observed in natural sequential data such as speech. We unify successful ideas from recently proposed architectures into a stochastic recurrent model: each step in the sequence is associated with a latent variable that is used to condition the recurrent dynamics for future steps. Training is performed with amortized variational inference where the approximate posterior is augmented with a RNN that runs backward through the sequence. In addition to maximizing the variational lower bound, we ease training of the latent variables by adding an auxiliary cost which forces them to reconstruct the state of the backward recurrent network. This provides the latent variables with a task-independent objective that enhances the performance of the overall model. We found this strategy to perform better than alternative approaches such as KL annealing. Although being conceptually simple, our model achieves state-of-the-art results on standard speech benchmarks such as TIMIT and Blizzard and competitive performance on sequential MNIST. Finally, we apply our model to language modeling on the IMDB dataset where the auxiliary cost helps in learning interpretable latent variables. Source Code: \url{this https URL}
Cambridge Handbook of Culture, Organizations, and Work: The culture theory jungle: divergence and convergence in models of national culture

On both a conceptual and empirical level, serious research on cultural differences in organization and management has been simultaneously facilitated and inhibited by the existence of multiple and often conflicting models of national culture. These models offer useful templates for comparing management processes, HRM policies, and business strategies across national borders. Some models have gone a step further and offered measures or numerical indicators for various countries that have been used widely in cross-cultural research. However, a problem that continues to plague organizational researchers in this area is a lack of convergence across these models. This divergence represents what we refer to as the culture theory jungle – a situation in which researchers must choose between competing, if sometimes overlapping, models to further their research goals and then defend such choices against a growing body of critics. This reality fails to facilitate either parsimony or rigor in organizational research, let alone useful comparisons across studies and samples. As such, after a brief review of the divergence that currently exists in the most commonly used models of culture, we argue in this paper that a clear need exists to seek convergence across the various models where it exists in ways that facilitate both research and meaningful cross-cultural comparisons. We then seek such convergence by identifying five relative common themes, or core cultural dimensions , that pervade the various extant models. Based on these themes, culture ratings for country clusters are presented based on data secured through the use of multiple measures and multiple methods.
Moral coherence and value pluralism

This paper addresses the question of what value pluralism tells us about the pursuit of moral coherence as a method of moral reasoning. I focus on the status of the norm of ‘systematicity,’ or the demand that our principles be as few and as simple as possible. I argue that, given certain descriptive facts about the pluralistic ways we value, epistemic ways of supporting a systematicity norm do not succeed. Because it is sometimes suggested that coherence functions in moral reasoning as it does in scientific reasoning, my argument considers analogies and disanalogies between moral reasoning and scientific reasoning.
Maternal Neural Responses to Infant Cries and Faces: Relationships with Substance Use

Substance abuse in pregnant and recently post-partum women is a major public health concern because of effects on the infant and on the ability of the adult to care for the infant. In addition to the negative health effects of teratogenic substances on fetal development, substance use can contribute to difficulties associated with the social and behavioral aspects of parenting. Neural circuits associated with parenting behavior overlap with circuits involved in addiction (e.g., frontal, striatal, and limbic systems) and thus may be co-opted for the craving/reward cycle associated with substance use and abuse and be less available for parenting. The current study investigates the degree to which neural circuits associated with parenting are disrupted in mothers who are substance-using. Specifically, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to examine the neural response to emotional infant cues (faces and cries) in substance-using compared to non-using mothers. In response to both faces (of varying emotional valence) and cries (of varying distress levels), substance-using mothers evidenced reduced neural activation in regions that have been previously implicated in reward and motivation as well as regions involved in cognitive control. Specifically, in response to faces, substance users showed reduced activation in prefrontal regions, including the dorsolateral and ventromedial prefrontal cortices, as well as visual processing (occipital lobes) and limbic regions (parahippocampus and amygdala). Similarly, in response to infant cries, substance-using mothers showed reduced activation relative to non-using mothers in prefrontal regions, auditory sensory processing regions, insula and limbic regions (parahippocampus and amygdala). These findings suggest that infant stimuli may be less salient for substance-using mothers, and such reduced saliency may impair developing infant-caregiver attachment and the ability of mothers to respond appropriately to their infants.
Emerging models on the regulation of intercellular transport by plasmodesmata-associated callose

The intercellular transport of molecules through membranous channels that traverse the cell walls-so-called plasmodesmata-is of fundamental importance for plant development. Regulation of plasmodesmata aperture (and transport capacity) is mediated by changes in the flanking cell walls, mainly via the synthesis/degradation (turnover) of the (1,3)-β-glucan polymer callose. The role of callose in organ development and in plant environmental responses is well recognized, but detailed understanding of the mechanisms regulating its accumulation and its effects on the structure and permeability of the channels is still missing. We compiled information on the molecular components and signalling pathways involved in callose turnover at plasmodesmata and, more generally, on the structural and mechanical properties of (1,3)-β-glucan polymers in cell walls. Based on this revision, we propose models integrating callose, cell walls, and the regulation of plasmodesmata structure and intercellular communication. We also highlight new tools and interdisciplinary approaches that can be applied to gain further insight into the effects of modifying callose in cell walls and its consequences for intercellular signalling.
Microenvironmental Effects on Enzyme Activity

One of the problems to be considered in evaluating the results of experiments involving fragmentation of cells and subcellular organelles and fractionation of the particles and supernatants obtained, is that enzymic activities measured by a standard assay at various stages of the procedure may not provide a true measure of the amount of a given enzyme which is present. In some cases the reason for this may be that the enzyme is localized inside a compartment, for example within a vesicular organelle, which the substrate cannot penetrate. However, more subtle microenvironmental effects may also play a role. An enzyme which is bound to or embedded in a lipoprotein membrane is situated in a milieu different from that of the same enzyme in aqueous solution. The bound enzyme may, therefore, display an activity different from that of the soluble enzyme, as a result of local charge effects or of the lipid character of the membrane. Moreover, diffusion of substrates and products to and from a membrane-bound enzyme may be affected owing to the presence of unstirred layers around the membrane fragment. At the Weizmann Institute we have been engaged in studying enzymes bound to insoluble polymeric carriers, and to synthetic membranes, as simple model systems for native particulate enzymes (see, for example, reference 1). In the following, I want to describe briefly one type of anomalous enzymic activity observed in a synthetic membrane, and to show how the explanation for the behavior of this system could, in its turn, be used to explain the behavior of a natural membrane-bound enzyme. The synthetic enzyme membrane system under consideration was prepared by impregnating a highly porous collodion membrane with a solution of crystalline papain, and then chemically cross-linking the absorbed enzyme with the bifunctional reagent bisdiazobenzidine disulfonic acid (2, 3). The membranes used in the experiments I will describe were about 400 thick and contained layers of enzyme 70 /, thick on each side, colored by reaction with the cross-linking agent (Fig. 1). The papain-collodion membrane contained about 1 mg cf enzyme per cm 2. These membranes were very
Effects of pressure on the kinetics of capture by yeast alcohol dehydrogenase

High pressure causes biphasic effects on the oxidation of benzyl alcohol by yeast alcohol dehydrogenase as expressed in the kinetic parameter V/K which measures substrate capture. Moderate pressure increases the rate of capture of benzyl alcohol by activating the hydride transfer step. This means that the transition state for hydride transfer has a smaller volume than the free alcohol plus the capturing form of enzyme, with a ΔV⧧ of −39 ± 1 mL/mol, a value that is relatively large. This is the first physical property of an enzymatic transition state thus characterized, and it offers new possibilities for structure−activity analyses. Pressures of >1.5 kbar decrease the rate of capture of benzyl alcohol by favoring a conformation of the enzyme which binds nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD+) less tightly. This means that the ground state for tight binding, E*−NAD+, has a larger volume than the collision complex, E−NAD+, with a ΔV* of 73 ± 2 mL/mol. The equilibrium constant of the conformational change K.
The topomer search model: A simple, quantitative theory of two‐state protein folding kinetics

Most small, single‐domain proteins fold with the uncomplicated, single‐exponential kinetics expected for diffusion on a smooth energy landscape. Despite this energetic smoothness, the folding rates of these two‐state proteins span a remarkable million‐fold range. Here, we review the evidence in favor of a simple, mechanistic description, the topomer search model, which quantitatively accounts for the broad scope of observed two‐state folding rates. The model, which stipulates that the search for those unfolded conformations with a grossly correct topology is the rate‐limiting step in folding, fits observed rates with a correlation coefficient of ∼0.9 using just two free parameters. The fitted values of these parameters, the pre‐exponential attempt frequency and a measure of the difficulty of ordering an unfolded chain, are consistent with previously reported experimental constraints. These results suggest that the topomer search process may dominate the relative barrier heights of two‐state protein‐folding reactions.
An Open FOAM-based electro-hydrodynamical model

In this work we present an OpenFOAM-based electro-hydrodynamics model. We have incorporated Gauss’s Law and a free charge transport equation in an existing Volume-Of-Fluid model delivered with OpenFOAM. With the model it is possible to simulate the interaction of a fluid-fluid interface with an electric field, using perfect dielectric liquids as well as conductive liquids. Our implementation is validated using two approaches; first off, we simulate two vertically stacked liquids subjected to an electric field. The potential distribution is compared to the analytical result and a good comparison is found, using either a combination of two perfect dielectric liquids and a dielectric and a conductive liquid. For the latter case, we also find a good agreement with the theoretical relation for the surface charges. Secondly, we have simulated an artificial charge bump in a conductive liquid, and verify the charge transport equation by comparing the decay of the charge over time. Again, a good agreement with theory is found. Finally, we present a test case where we break up a droplet in an electric field. With that, we have shown to have a reliable EHD implementation in the OpenFOAM framework. For our future goal to simulate electrowetting phenomena, we require the electric field distribution in a coupled solid phase as well; we will use the current EHD model and extend it to a multi-region solver to include those effects.
Major Disease Prevalence and Menstrual Characteristics in Infertile Female Korean Smokers

We investigated the prevalence of smoking and factors associated with smoking in infertile Korean women. Smoking status, education, occupation, personal habits, past medical history, current illness, stress level, and menstrual characteristics were collected from self-report questionnaires. The Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) was used to assess the degree of depression. Data on the causes of infertility and levels of six reproductive hormones were collected from medical records. Among 785 women less than 42 years of age, the prevalence of current, secondhand, past, and never smokers were 12.7%, 45.7%, 0.9%, and 40.6%, respectively. Primary infertility was more frequent in secondhand smokers. Causes of infertility were similar among current, secondhand, and never smokers. Current smokers were less educated (P < 0.001) and more likely to consume alcohol than secondhand or never smokers (P < 0.001). Secondhand smokers slept less than current smokers (P = 0.041). Among several major diseases, only the prevalence of diabetes mellitus (4.0%) was significantly higher in current smokers than in secondhand smokers (0.0%, P = 0.002) or never smokers (0.6%, P = 0.031). The self-reported prevalence of depression, and the degree of depression were similar among women with different smoking statuses. There were no differences in menstrual characteristics or serum levels of six reproductive hormones between current, secondhand, and never smokers, even after excluding women with polycystic ovary syndrome. In conclusion, education/employment status, alcohol drinking, and the prevalence of primary infertility and diabetes mellitus were significantly different according to smoking status among infertile women.
Income, the love of money, pay comparison, and pay satisfaction

Purpose – This study aims to test a model of pay satisfaction and argue that the income‐pay satisfaction relationship depends on one's love of money and how one compares.Design/methodology/approach – The paper investigates: a direct path (income → total pay satisfaction); an indirect path (income → the love of money → pay equity comparison → total pay satisfaction) using a structural equation model (SEM) based on 210 full‐time employees; and the model across race and gender in multi‐group analyses.Findings – The paper finds that for the whole sample, there was one significant path (pay equity comparison → total pay satisfaction). Since African‐Americans ($32,073.15) and women ($32,400.58) tended to have lower income than Caucasians ($37,180.73) and men ($38,287.97), respectively, income significantly increased the importance of the love of money for African‐Americans and females, but not for Caucasians and males. The love of money to pay equity comparison path was not significant. Income was not related t.