Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Enhancing Production and Cytotoxic Activity of Polymeric Soluble FasL-Based Chimeric Proteins by Concomitant Expression of Soluble FasL

Membrane FasL is the natural trigger of Fas-mediated apoptosis. A soluble homotrimeric counterpart (sFasL) also exists which is very weakly active, and needs oligomerization beyond its trimeric state to induce apoptosis. We recently generated a soluble FasL chimera by fusing the immunoglobulin-like domain of the leukemia inhibitory factor receptor gp190 to the extracellular region of human FasL, which enabled spontaneous dodecameric homotypic polymerization of FasL. This polymeric soluble human FasL (pFasL) displayed anti-tumoral activity in vitro and in vivo without systemic cytotoxicity in mouse. In the present work, we focused on the improvement of pFasL, with two complementary objectives. First, we developed more complex pFasL-based chimeras that contained a cell-targeting module. Secondly, we attempted to improve the production and/or the specific activity of pFasL and of the cell-targeting chimeras. We designed two chimeras by fusing to pFasL the extracellular portions of the HLA-A2 molecule or of a human gamma-delta TCR, and analyzed the consequences of co-expressing these molecules or pFasL together with sFasL on their heterotopic cell production. This strategy significantly enhanced the production of pFasL and of the two chimeras, as well as the cytotoxic activity of the two chimeras but not of pFasL. These results provide the proof of concept for an optimization of FasL-based chimeric proteins for a therapeutic use.
Unexpected Sources of Strontium to the Neuse and Cape Fear River Basins, North Carolina: Implications for the Global Strontium Isotope Budget in Seawater

Water, bedrock, and saprolite samples from the Neuse and Cape Fear River basins, North Carolina, were analyzed for 87Sr/86Sr and [Sr] to evaluate the control of exposed bedrock on fluvial Sr isotopic compositions and the influence of geology on Sr delivered to the ocean. The 87Sr/86Sr and [Sr] of the two rivers start low and rise downstream, eventually approximating recent ocean isotopic compositions before entering their estuaries. Groundwater samples from the headwaters have 87Sr/86Sr ratios that are lower than expected from the dominant exposed bedrock. The isotopic compositions of bedrock and saprolite samples vary predictably with rock type and age and show no correlation with degree of weathering. The data indicate that dominant surficial bedrock is not the primary source of Sr to the headwaters of the rivers. Rather, mafic dikes that focus groundwater flow and are more easily weathered than their silicic hosts impact the 87Sr/86Sr of the waters more than their limited exposure might suggest. Furthermore, the Sr isotopic composition of the water delivered to the marine environment is buffered by groundwater from coastal plain sedimentary rocks, leaving no evidence of upstream geology. The data suggest that rock type and structure exert significant control on the Sr isotope geochemistry of groundwater that enters into streams. Considering the global fluvial Sr budget, these results emphasize that, in some settings, (1) rock exposure area can be a poor indication of the geologic influence on Sr isotopic compositions of surface waters, and (2) downstream Sr isotopic compositions may not reflect upstream geology.
Dynamics of Attentional Bias to Threat in Anxious Adults: Bias towards and/or Away?

The aim of the present study was to question untested assumptions about the nature of the expression of Attentional Bias (AB) towards and away from threat stimuli. We tested the idea that high trait anxious individuals (N = 106; M(SD)age = 23.9(3.2) years; 68% women) show a stable AB towards multiple categories of threatening information using the emotional visual dot probe task. AB with respect to five categories of threat stimuli (i.e., angry faces, attacking dogs, attacking snakes, pointed weapons, violent scenes) was evaluated. In contrast with current theories, we found that 34% of participants expressed AB towards threat stimuli, 20.8% AB away from threat stimuli, and 34% AB towards some categories of threat stimuli and away from others. The multiple observed expressions of AB were not an artifact of a specific criterion AB score cut-off; not specific to certain categories of threat stimuli; not an artifact of differences in within-subject variability in reaction time; nor accounted for by individual differences in anxiety-related variables. Findings are conceptualized as reflecting the understudied dynamics of AB expression, with implications for AB measurement and quantification, etiology, relations, and intervention research.
Adaptive input design for ARX systems

A key problem in optimal input design is that the solution depends on system parameters to be identified. In this contribution we provide formal results for convergence and asymptotic optimality of an adaptive input design method based on the certainty equivalence principle, i.e. for each time step an optimal input design problem is solved using the present parameter estimate and one sample of this input is applied to the system. The results apply to stable ARX systems with the input restricted to be generated by white noise filtered through an FIR filter, or a binary signal obtained from the latter by a static nonlinearity.
Permutation flowshop scheduling by genetic local search

In this paper, the landscape for the permutation flowshop scheduling problem (PFSP) with stochastic local search and a critical block-based neighbourhood structure has been investigated. Numerical experiments using small benchmark problems show that there are good correlations between the makespans of local optima! the average distances to other local optima and the distances to the known global optima. These correlations suggest the existence of a 'big valley' structure, where local optima occur in clusters over the landscape. An approximation method for PFSP that would make use of this big valley structure is proposed by using a critical block-based neighbourhood structure, and a genetic local search method called MSXFGA, previously developed for the job shop scheduling problem. Computational experiments using more challenging benchmark problems demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Fate of Pathogens Present in Livestock Wastes Spread onto Fescue Plots

ABSTRACT Fecal wastes from a variety of farmed livestock were inoculated with livestock isolates of Escherichia coli O157, Listeria monocytogenes, Salmonella, Campylobacter jejuni, and Cryptosporidium parvum oocysts at levels representative of the levels found in naturally contaminated wastes. The wastes were subsequently spread onto a grass pasture, and the decline of each of the zoonotic agents was monitored over time. There were no significant differences among the decimal reduction times for the bacterial pathogens. The mean bacterial decimal reduction time was 1.94 days. A range of times between 8 and 31 days for a 1-log reduction in C. parvum levels was obtained, demonstrating that the protozoans were significantly more hardy than the bacteria. Oocyst recovery was more efficient from wastes with lower dry matter contents. The levels of most of the zoonotic agents had declined to below detectable levels by 64 days. However, for some waste types, 128 days was required for the complete decline of L. monocytogenes levels. We were unable to find significant differences between the rates of pathogen decline in liquid (slurry) and solid (farmyard manure) wastes, although concerns have been raised that increased slurry generation as a consequence of more intensive farming practices could lead to increased survival of zoonotic agents in the environment.
Culturally Relevant Leadership: Advancing Critical Consciousness in American Muslim Students

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to explore how leaders in an Islamic school in the United States engaged in culturally relevant leadership (CRL) within a diverse school community to develop students’ critical social consciousness. Research Design: Data were collected over 4 years at an Islamic K-8 school in the United States and included the following: 12 in-depth semistructured interviews with school and community leaders; 4 phone interviews; 7 focus group interviews with teachers, students, and parents; 5 observations of classroom and school events; and documents from the Islamic center, school, and classrooms. Data specific to the school leaders were analyzed using tenets of CRL. Findings and Conclusions: This article describes how Muslim and non-Muslim leaders in an Islamic school engaged in the tenets of CRL. This study suggests that the tenets of CRL, in this context, were grounded in inter and intrafaith dialogue, cultural syncretism, and a unique focus on the development of an American Muslim identity.
Chapter 6 Bone Marrow-Derived JNK 2-Positive Cells in Perivascular Adipose Tissue Blunt Microvascular Insulin-Induced Vasodilation Early During Nutrient Excess

Rationale Obesity is associated with impaired delivery of insulin and glucose by the microcirculation in skeletal muscle. Perivascular adipose tissue (PVAT) has anticontractile properties that are lost in obesity, thereby blunting insulin-induced vasodilation. We hypothesized that microvascular dysfunction develops during a two-week Western Diet (WD) and that PVAT is involved in this development, both inand ex-vivo. We further hypothesized that c-Jun N-terminal kinase 2 (JNK2) expressing cells from the bone marrow in PVAT are causative for the change in PVAT function. Methods and Results In C57Bl/6 mice after two weeks of WD, PVAT weight around the gracilis arteries increased compared to chowfed controls. Mice on WD had reduced insulin-induced microvascular recruitment, along with insulin resistance, as shown by Contrast Enhanced Ultrasound (CEU) during a hyperinsulinemic euglycemic clamp. To study whether perfusion defects were caused by altered effects of PVAT on muscle resistance arteries (RA), insulin responses of RA from chow or WD mice were studied by pressure myography, in the absence, or presence of PVAT. Chow RA showed insulin-induced vasodilation after incubation with chow PVAT, but not when incubated alone or with WD PVAT. Moreover, insulin induced vasoconstriction in WD RA with WD PVAT, but not chow PVAT. Transplantation with JNK2-/bone marrow restored the insulin-induced vasodilation by WD-PVAT. Conclusions Impaired insulin-induced muscle perfusion is an early phenomenon during exposure to nutrient excess and is caused by endothelial as well as PVAT dysfunction. The latter is caused by infiltration of JNK2 positive cells from bone marrow in PVAT.
Supervised Hashing for Image Retrieval via Image Representation Learning

Hashing is a popular approximate nearest neighbor search approach for large-scale image retrieval. Supervised hashing, which incorporates similarity/dissimilarity information on entity pairs to improve the quality of hashing function learning, has recently received increasing attention. However, in the existing supervised hashing methods for images, an input image is usually encoded by a vector of hand-crafted visual features. Such hand-crafted feature vectors do not necessarily preserve the accurate semantic similarities of images pairs, which may often degrade the performance of hashing function learning. In this paper, we propose a supervised hashing method for image retrieval, in which we automatically learn a good image representation tailored to hashing as well as a set of hash functions. The proposed method has two stages. In the first stage, given the pairwise similarity matrix $S$ over training images, we propose a scalable coordinate descent method to decompose $S$ into a product of $HH^T$ where $H$ is a matrix with each of its rows being the approximate hash code associated to a training image. In the second stage, we propose to simultaneously learn a good feature representation for the input images as well as a set of hash functions, via a deep convolutional network tailored to the learned hash codes in $H$ and optionally the discrete class labels of the images. Extensive empirical evaluations on three benchmark datasets with different kinds of images show that the proposed method has superior performance gains over several state-of-the-art supervised and unsupervised hashing methods.
An Increase of Plasma Advanced Oxidation Protein Products Levels Is Associated with Cardiovascular Risk in Incident Peritoneal Dialysis Patients: A Pilot Study

Advanced oxidation protein products (AOPPs) are considered as markers and even mediators of the proinflammatory effect of oxidative stress in uremia. We hypothesized that an increase of oxidative stress associated with peritoneal dialysis (PD), estimated by the variation of plasma AOPPs over time, might be associated with cardiovascular (CV) risk and overall prognosis. In 48 PD patients, blood samples were collected on two occasions: the first one in the first six months after starting PD therapy and the second one, one year after. The plasma AOPPs level variation over the first year on PD was significantly associated with CV antecedents and also with CV prognosis. In those patients in whom the AOPPs levels increased more than 50% above the baseline value, a significant association with past and future CV disease was confirmed. These patients had 4.7 times greater risk of suffering later CV disease than those with a smaller increase, even after adjusting for previous CV history. Our data suggest that the increase of AOPPs plasma level over the first year on PD is conditioned by CV antecedents but also independently predicts CV prognosis. AOPPs plasma levels seem to represent the CV status of PD patients with sufficient sensitivity to identify those with a clearly sustained higher CV risk.
Luteal phase estradiol versus luteal phase GnRH antagonist administration: their effects on antral follicular size coordination and basal hormonal levels

Background: The differential efficacy between long GnRH agonist with antagonist can partly be due to the preexisting differences in the early antral follicles before ovarian stimulation. Objective: To compare the effect of pretreatment by estradiol with GnRH antagonist on antral follicular size coordination and basal hormone levels in GNRH antagonist protocol. Materials and Methods: On cycle day 3 (control/day 3), women underwent measurements of early antral follicles by ultrasound and serum FSH and ovarian hormones then were randomized to receive oral estradiol 4mg/day (n=15) or 3mg cetrorelix acetate (n=15) in luteal phase before subsequent antagonist protocol. Participants were re-evaluated as on control/day 3. Results: There was a significant reduction of mean follicular sizes in each group after medical intervention (7.63±2.11 Vs. 4.30±0.92 in group A and 8.73±1.96 Vs. 4.13±1.11 in group B) (p=0.0001). The magnitude of follicular size reduction was significantly higher in group B (-4.60±2.04 Vs. -3.33±2.28) (0.027). There was a non significant attenuation of follicular size discrepancies in two groups. FSH and inhibin B levels in the day 3 of the next cycle in both groups were significantly decreased but did not have significant difference between two groups. Conclusion: Both luteal E2 and premenstrual GnRH antagonist administration reduces the follicular sizes significantly and GnRH antagonist acts more potently than E2 in this way but attenuation of follicular size discrepancies in both treatment is not significant.
A framework for nation-centric classification and observation of the internet

The Internet has matured to a mission-critical infrastructure, and recently attracted much attention at political and legal levels in many countries. Civil actions regarding the Internet infrastructure require a thorough understanding of the national components of the global Internet to foresee possible impacts of regulations and operations at a country-level. In this paper we report on a methodology, tool chain and results for identifying and classifying a 'national Internet'. We argue for the importance to consider individual IP-blocks instead of prefixes and quantify the effects of our proposed approach. The methods have been applied to identify a 'German Internet', but are designed general enough to work for most countries, as well.
SUPPORT STRATEGIES TEACHERS’ USE TO ASSIST LEARNERS WITH LEARNING DISABILITIES IN PUBLIC PRIMARY SCHOOLS IN TRANS-NZOIA COUNTY, KENYA

Teacher support is critical to learners’ participation in primary schooling. However, reports show that there are high incidences of learners dropping out of various public primary schools in Trans-Nzoia. Learners with learning disability need teachers support to aid their learning process. This paper looks at the support strategies that primary school teachers used to assist learners with learning disabilities in public primary schools in Trans-Nzoia County. The study was guided by social constructivism theory by Lev Vygotsky. The target population for this study consisted of all public primary school teachers in Trans-Nzoia County. A sample size of 351 teachers was selected to participate in the study through stratified random sampling technique. Data collection for this study was done using interviews, focus group discussions and questionnaires. Analysis of data showed that most (64.7%) of teachers always supported learners with learning disabilities in their schools. Teachers (64.4%) remediated learning problems of learners with LD through structuring learning environment to suit their needs hence promoting effective inclusion in schools. Findings also showed that only 58.6% of teachers reported that they always used several support strategies to educate and support learners with LD in inclusive education. The study suggests that teachers should support learners with learning disabilities to identify their strengths and build on them, and improve on their weaknesses. Teachers should help these learners procure assistive devices and other instructional materials required for learning in schools. Article visualizations:
New Degenerate Cytophaga-Flexibacter-Bacteroides-Specific 16S Ribosomal DNA-Targeted Oligonucleotide Probes Reveal High Bacterial Diversity in River Taff Epilithon

ABSTRACT River microbial communities play an important role in global nutrient cycles, and aggregated bacteria such as those in epilithic biofilms may be major contributors. In this study the bacterial diversity of River Taff epilithon in South Wales was investigated. A 16S ribosomal DNA (rDNA) clone library was constructed and analyzed by partial sequencing of 76 of 347 clones and hybridization with taxon-specific probes. The epilithon was found to be very diverse, with an estimated 59.6% of the bacterial populations not accounted for by these clones. Members of the Cytophaga-Flexibacter-Bacteroides division (CFBs) were most abundant in the library, representing 25% of clones, followed by members of the α subdivision of the division Proteobacteria (α-Proteobacteria), γ-Proteobacteria, gram-positive bacteria, Cyanobacteria, β-Proteobacteria, δ-Proteobacteria, and the Prosthecobacter group. This study concentrated on the epilithic CFB populations, and a new set of degenerate 16S rDNA probes was developed to enhance their detection, namely, CFB560, CFB562, and CFB376. The commonly used probe CF319a/b may frequently lead to the underestimation of CFB populations in environmental studies, because it does not fully detect members of the division. CFB560 had exact matches to 95.6% of CFBs listed in the Ribosomal Database Project (release 8.0) small-subunit phylogenetic trees, compared to 60% for CF319a/b. The CFB probes detected 66 of 347 epilithon TAF clones, and 60 of these were partially sequenced. They affiliated with the RDP-designated groups Cytophaga, Sphingobacterium, Lewinella, and Cytophaga aurantiaca. CFB560 and CF319a/b detected 94% (62 of 66) and 48.5% (32 of 66) of clones, respectively, and therefore CFB560 is recommended for future use. Probe design in this study illustrated that multiple degenerate positions can greatly increase target range without adversely effecting specificity or experimental performance.
Mode of action of nintedanib in the treatment of idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis

Idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) is a progressive and ultimately fatal disease characterised by fibrosis of the lung parenchyma and loss of lung function. Although the pathogenic pathways involved in IPF have not been fully elucidated, IPF is believed to be caused by repetitive alveolar epithelial cell injury and dysregulated repair, in which there is uncontrolled proliferation of lung fibroblasts and differentiation of fibroblasts into myofibroblasts, which excessively deposit extracellular matrix (ECM) proteins in the interstitial space. A number of profibrotic mediators including platelet-derived growth factor (PDGF), fibroblast growth factor (FGF) and transforming growth factor-β are believed to play important roles in the pathogenesis of IPF. Nintedanib is a potent small molecule inhibitor of the receptor tyrosine kinases PDGF receptor, FGF receptor and vascular endothelial growth factor receptor. Data from in vitro studies have shown that nintedanib interferes with processes active in fibrosis such as fibroblast proliferation, migration and differentiation, and the secretion of ECM. In addition, nintedanib has shown consistent anti-fibrotic and anti-inflammatory activity in animal models of lung fibrosis. These data provide a strong rationale for the clinical efficacy of nintedanib in patients with IPF, which has recently been demonstrated in phase III clinical trials. Nintedanib interferes with processes active in fibrosis, e.g. fibroblast proliferation, migration and differentiation http://ow.ly/Iae9z
Buyer-Supplier Relationships in Small Firms

This article explores customer and supplier relationships from the perspective of small and medium enterprises (SMEs). A critique of supply chain literature highlights some key problems when research on purchasing behaviour, based on larger firms, is applied to SMEs. Issues considered include the dominance of ideas that depend on the practices of large firms and the assumed homogeneity of the SME population. This article sets out an alternative rationale for exploring what SMEs ‘do’ in terms of purchasing behaviour. The empirical studies outlined explore three groups of firms. The pilot stage, upon which a questionnaire was developed, involved interviews with six plastic moulding companies. Two subsequent surveys were carried out using this questionnaire; the first a general control group across the SME population and the second, a specific purposive sample of steel-based manufacturing companies. The results illustrate the important role of social factors in the management of relationships.