Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Field Response of Dendroctonus frontalis (Coleoptera: Scolytinae) to Synthetic Semiochemicals in Chiapas, Mexico

Abstract Dendroctonus frontalis Zimmermann (Coleoptera: Scolytinae) is the most serious pest of pines (Pinus spp.) in Mexico. Conspecifics are attracted to trees undergoing colonization by the aggregation pheromone frontalin, which is synergized by odors of pine oleoresin released from beetle-damaged host tissue. Synthetic racemic frontalin combined with turpentine has been the operational bait used in traps for monitoring populations of D. frontalis in Mexico as well as the United States. Recently, racemic endo-brevicomin has been reported to be a synergist of the frontalin/turpentine bait and as an important component of the aggregation pheromone for D. frontalis populations in the United States. To determine whether racemic endo-brevicomin also might function as an aggregation synergist for the geographically isolated D. frontalis populations of Central America and Mexico, we performed a field trapping trial in Lagunas de Montebello National Park, Chiapas, Mexico, during July and August 2007. The combination of endo-brevicomin (placed either directly on the trap or 4 m away) plus racemic frontalin and turpentine caught at least 5 times more D. frontalis of both sexes than did turpentine either alone or in combination with either frontalin or endo-brevicomin. The addition of endo-brevicomin to the frontalin/turpentine bait also increased the proportion of females trapped. We conclude that the addition of endo-brevicomin might substantially improve the efficiency of the frontalin/turpentine bait for monitoring of D. frontalis in Central America and Mexico. We discuss factors that reconcile our results with previous studies that reported endo-brevicomin to be an attractant antagonist for populations of D. frontalis in Mexico and Honduras.
Viewpoints of Family Caregivers about Posttraumatic Growth in Cancer Patients.

BACKGROUND There is little information about the objectivity of posttraumatic growth experienced by cancer patients. So, the aim of present study was to investigate the viewpoints of family caregivers regarding posttraumatic growth in cancer patients. MATERIALS AND METHODS This descriptive study was conducted in one referral medical center in East Azerbaijan Province in northwest of Iran. 120 primary family caregivers of cancer patients participated with a convenience sampling method. The Posttraumatic Growth Inventory (PTGI) and Perception about Prognosis Scale (PPS) were applied for data collection with analysis performed using SPSS statistical software. RESULTS Family caregivers believed that their patients had a good prognosis (score 3.95 from 5). The total score of PTGI was 60.7 (SD=18.8) that indicates a moderate level of growth as reported by family caregivers. CONCLUSIONS Family caregivers of cancer patients have incorrect viewpoints about the prognosis of their patients and reported moderate levels of growth. These findings showed that posttraumatic growth among cancer patients is an objective phenomenon.
Acute vascular rejection mediated by HLA antibodies in a cadaveric kidney recipient: discrepancies between FlowPRA, ELISA and CDC vs luminex screening.

Sensitization is defined as the presence of preformed alloantibodies (usually anti-HLA class I antibodies, but sometimes also anti-HLA class II or non-HLA antibodies) in the serum of a prospective transplant recipient. Sensitization is measured by testing the patient’s serum for cytotoxicity against a panel of lymphocytes of various HLA types. The donor’s vascular endothelium, particularly of the microcirculation, is the major target of alloantibodies. The antibodies’ ability to recruit effector systems—among which are complement, leucocytes, including neutrophils, natural killer cells and macrophages—results in the destruction of target organs [1]. Thus, a positive T-cell cross-match is an absolute contraindication to transplantation, because of the risk of hyperacute rejection and immediate graft dysfunction and loss. Indeed, alloantibodies may cause not only hyperacute rejection, the most severe type of humoral graft injury, but they also may contribute to acute or chronic rejections [2,3]. We present an interesting case entailing the presensitization of a dialysis patient, and compare different methods of sensitization testing. If preformed alioantibodies are not detected, this may respectively influence the clinical outcome of transplantation. Case
Physical and Functional Interactions between Cellular Retinoic Acid Binding Protein II and the Retinoic Acid-Dependent Nuclear Complex

ABSTRACT Two sorts of proteins bind to, and mediate the developmental and homeostatic effects of, retinoic acid (RA): the RAR and RXR nuclear receptors, which act as ligand-dependent transcriptional regulators, and the cellular RA binding proteins (CRABPI and CRABPII). CRABPs are generally known to be implicated in the synthesis, degradation, and control of steady-state levels of RA, yet previous and recent data have indicated that they could play a role in the control of gene expression. Here we show for the first time that, both in vitro and in vivo, CRABPII is associated with RARα and RXRα in a ligand-independent manner in mammalian cells (HL-60, NB-4, and MCF-7). In the nucleus, this protein complex binds the RXR-RAR-specific response element of an RA target gene (RARE-DR5). Moreover, in the presence of retinoids that bind both the nuclear receptors and CRABPII, enhancement of transactivation by RXRα-RARα heterodimers is observed in the presence of CRABPII. Thus, CRABPII appears to be a novel transcriptional regulator involved in RA signaling.
Development of voltage‐dependent currents in taste receptor cells

Taste buds, the specialized end organs of gustation, comprise a renewing sensory epithelium. Undifferentiated basal cells become taste receptor cells by elongating and extending processes apically toward the taste pore. Mature taste cells are electrically excitable and express voltage‐dependent Na+ Ca2+, and K+ currents, whereas basal stem cells exhibit only slowly activating K+ currents. The question we have addressed in the present study is whether contact with the taste pore is required for expression of voltage‐dependent inward currents in Necturus taste cells.
Dust Formation in Primordial Type II Supernovae

We have investigated the formation of dust in the ejecta of Type II supernovae (SNe), mostly of primordial composition, to answer the question of where are the first solid particles formed in the universe. However, we have also considered non-zero progenitor’s metallicity values up to Z = Z⊙. The calculations are based on standard nucleation theory and the scheme has been first tested on the well studied case of SN1987A, yielding results that are in agreement with the available data. We find that: i) the first dust grains are predominantly made of silicates, amorphous carbon (AC), magnetite, and corundum; ii) the largest grains are the AC ones, with sizes around 300u , whereas other grain types have smaller radii, around 10-20u The grain size distribution depends somewhat on the thermodynamics of the ejecta expansion and variations in the results by a factor � 2 might occur within reasonable estimates of the relevant parameters. Also, and for the same reason, the grain size distribution, is essentially unaffected by metallicity changes. The predictions on the amount of dust formed are very robust: for Z = 0, we find that SNe with masses in the range (12-35)M⊙ produce about 0.08M⊙ < Md < � 0.3M⊙ of dust/SN. The above range increases by roughly 3 times as the metallicity is increased to solar values. We discuss the implications and the cosmological consequences of the results.
Parrots of Oceania – a comparative study of extinction risk

ABSTRACT Australia, New Zealand, New Guinea, Wallacea, and the islands of the Pacific Ocean collectively possess 42% of the world’s parrot species, including half of all Critically Endangered species. We used comparative methods to review the factors related to extinction risk of 167 extant and 5 extinct parrot species from this region, subsequently referred to as ‘Oceania’. We tested a range of ecological and socio-economic variables as predictors of extinction risk for parrots in the region while controlling for phylogeny. Parrot species were most likely to be threatened if they had small historical ranges, large bodies, or a high dependency on forest, or if they were endemic to a single country, or native to a country with high unemployment. Our analysis identifies invasive species as an especially severe threat to the parrots of Oceania. We present maps of parrot species’ diversity and draw attention to regions of conservation concern. Our comparative analysis presents an important overview of the factors contributing to the decline of parrots in Oceania, and provides a strong basis for comparison with other parts of the world.
Two genes for ribosomal protein 51 of Saccharomyces cerevisiae complement and contribute to the ribosomes

We cloned and sequenced the second gene coding for yeast ribosomal protein 51 (RP51B). When the DNA sequence of this gene was compared with the DNA sequence of RP51A (J.L. Teem and M. Rosbash, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 80:4403--4407, 1983), the following conclusions emerged: both genes code for a protein of 135 amino acids; both open reading frames are interrupted by a single intron which occurs directly after the initiating methionine; the open reading frames are 96% homologous and code for the same protein with the exception of the carboxy-terminal amino acid; DNA sequence homology outside of the coding region is extremely limited. The cloned genes, in combination with the one-step gene disruption techniques of Rothstein (R. J. Rothstein, Methods Enzymol. 101:202-211, 1983), were used to generate haploid strains containing mutations in the RP51A or RP51B genes or in both. Strains missing a normal RP51A gene grew poorly (180-min generation time versus 130 min for the wild type), whereas strains carrying a mutant RP51B were relatively normal. Strains carrying mutations in the two genes grew extremely poorly (6 to 9 h), which led us to conclude that RP51A and RP51B were both expressed. The results of Northern blot and primer extension experiments indicate that strains with a wild-type copy of the RP51B gene and a mutant (or deleted) RP51A gene grow slowly because of an insufficient amount of RP51 mRNA. The growth defect was completely rescued with additional copies of RP51B. The data suggest that RP51A contributes more RP51 mRNA (and more RP51 protein) than does RP51B and that intergenic dosage compensation, sufficient to rescue the growth defect of strains missing a wild-type RP51A gene, does not take place.
Impairment of 'ileostomy adaptation' in patients after ileal resection.

Ileostomists claim that in the months following the establishment of an ileostomy, the faecal output decreases in volume and becomes less fluid. It is claimed that this ;ileostomy adaptation' does not occur in those patients who have had an ileal resection. To determine whether ileostomy adaptation does occur and to examine its physiological mechanisms, 10 ileostomy patients were studied. Five had had ileal resection and five had not. The output of fluid, sodium, and potassium from the ileostomy was studied in each patient for the first 11 days after ileostomy and again at six months. Those patients in whom the terminal ileum was preserved had small faecal outputs of fluid and sodium from the outset, and the water content of the effluent was significantly less at six months. After rapid expansion of the extracellular fluid by intravenous saline, there was a marked increase in faecal volume and sodium output. In those patients with an ileal resection, the faecal volume and sodium output were more than two and a half times greater than those for the non-resected group. At six months there was no change in either the volume or chemistry of the effluent. After intravenous saline, no faecal response was observed. It is therefore concluded that ileostomy adaptation does occur and it is a response of the intestine to conserve body salt. This response is lacking in ileostomists who have had an ileal resection.
Assessment of 54 Biomarkers for Biopsy-Detectable Prostate Cancer

Objective: We analyzed the association of 54 biomarkers from seven classes including adipokines, immune response metalloproteinases, adhesion molecules, and growth factors with prostate cancer risk adjusting for the Prostate Cancer Prevention Trial (PCPT) risk score. Methods: A total of 123 incident prostate cancer cases and 127 age-matched controls were selected from subjects in the San Antonio Center for Biomarkers of Risk of Prostate Cancer cohort study. Prediagnostic serum concentrations were measured in the sample collected at baseline using LabMAP technology. The odds ratios (OR) of prostate cancer risk associated with serum concentrations of 54 markers were estimated using univariate conditional logistic regression before and after adjustment for the PCPT risk score. Two-way hierarchical unsupervised clustering techniques were used to evaluate whether the 54-marker panel distinguished cases from controls. Results: Vascular endothelial growth factor, resistin, interleukin 1Ra (IL-1Ra), granulocyte colony-stimulating factor, matrix metalloproteinase-3, plasminogen activator inhibitor, and kallikrein-8 were statistically significantly (P < 0.05) underexpressed in prostate cancer cases, and α-fetoprotein was statistically significantly overexpressed in prostate cancer cases, but all had area underneath the receiver-operating characteristic curve <60%; none were statistically significant adjusting for multiple comparisons (P < 0.0008) or after adjustment for the PCPT risk score. Statistical clustering of patients by the marker panel did not distinguish a separate group of cases from controls. Conclusions: This age-matched case-control study did not support findings of increased diagnostic potential from a 54-marker panel when compared with the conventional risk factors incorporated in the PCPT risk calculator. Future discovery of new biomarkers should always be tested and compared against conventional risk factors before applying them in clinical practice. (Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev 2007;16(10):1966–72)
Long-Term Ecological Health Assessment of a Restored Urban Stream Based on Chemical Water Quality, Physical Habitat Conditions and Biological Integrity

We studied the chemical water quality, physical habitat and biotic integrity of an urban stream subjected to restoration measures in South Korea. We used the water pollution index (WPI), qualitative habitat evaluation index (QHEI) and index of biotic integrity (IBI) on the water quality, physical habitat and fish assemblage data respectively, during 2007–2016 in Gap Stream to evaluate the ecological health before and after restoration measures. The results revealed annual mean total phosphorus (TP) dramatically decreased by 13-fold for 10 years and the values of biological oxygen demand (BOD) and chemical oxygen demand (COD) also decreased by >50% over the time, indicating decrease in nutrient enrichment and organic matter pollution after restoration measures. In the meantime, biological health analyses using IBI indicated no major transformation in fish assemblages under restoration impact. However, the proportion of sensitive species increased, and tolerant species decreased after restoration. Gap stream is home to 50 distinct fish species. QHEI proposed that the physical habitat health was in ‘good’ condition during the study period. WPI showed the chemical water quality status remained ‘poor’ during and before restoration but improved to ‘fair-good’ condition in the ensuing years after restoration. The IBI results, however, indicated ‘very poor-poor’ biotic integrity irrespective of restoration measures. CHL-a and TP showed strong (r < 0.7) to moderately strong (r = 0.5–0.7) correlation with significantly important water quality factors. Spatially significant pattern change in TN and TP was obvious as measured levels were significantly higher (p < 0.01) in downstream than upstream. Principal component analysis successfully indicated the placement of water quality factors and indices used as in three distinct stream compartments. The higher pollutant levels in the downstream mainly linked to the nutrient-rich effluents from emerging from the wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) and industrial complexes operative in the stream catchment. Overall, restoration measures indicated minor impact on fish assemblages and physical habitat due to slow and steady improvement, however, water quality improved due to a decline of nutrients and chemicals downstream. This indicated a positive tendency of improvements in physical habitat and richness of fish assemblages in Gap Stream.
Estimating Watershed Mercury Contribution to Lake Fort Smith State Park, Arkansas, USA

Mercury contamination associated with human activities poses global human health and environmental risks. A fish-consumption advisory has been in effect at Lake Fort Smith in central west Arkansas for more than a decade due to observed methylmercury concentrations in fish tissue. Lake Fort Smith is an important municipal drinking water supply and recreational resource. Water samples from the majority contributing tributary stream, Frog Bayou creek, were collected periodically, under differing hydrologic conditions in order to quantify the allochthonous mercury load delivered to the lake. Temperature, specific conductance, and turbidity data were collected and used to estimate dissolved organic carbon, methylmercury and mercury concentration in Frog Bayou creek. Dissolved organic carbon (DOC) concentration has been previously shown to have a strong correlation with total mercury (THg) and methylmercury (MeHg) presence and mobility in surface waters. Whereas a weak correlation was observed between DOC and THg concentrations (r2= 0.47), the relation between turbidity and THg was strong (r2 = 0.95), enabling use of turbidity as a proxy for the estimation of influx of THg in Frog Bayou creek. Analysis of water samples collected from streamflow indicated very little methylmercury contribution from the watershed, suggesting methylation of mercury is occurring predominantly within the body of Lake Fort Smith itself. Turbidity proved an inexpensive, realtime proxy for quantitative determination of mercury and methylmercury load in streamflow. This methodology provided better understanding of variations in mercury concentrations under differing hydrologic regimes and provided a tool for long-term watershed mercury load approximation to Lake Fort Smith. Acknowledgements I would like to thank Dr. Phil Hays, Tim Kresse, and Dr. Ralph Davis for their guidance and support during the course of this project. Many thanks to Don Clover at Fort Smith Utilities Department for his input and help with conceptualizing the problem and sample analysis. Mercury analysis was conducted at the USGS Wisconsin District Mercury Research Lab, and I am very thankful for the work of Drs. Dave Krabbenhoft, John DeWild, and all the laboratory employees who provide the Nation with great mercury data. A special thanks to Ferrell Killion for his help with gage installation, it made a difficult job much easier. Thanks to Nick Barsotti for helping to design the water-quality monitor install and for your continued “critiques”. Thank you Joey Fleming, for sacrificing a Friday afternoon to help clean up water quality data with me. A special thank you to Dan Wagner for burning the midnight oil in order to walk me through some new statistical approaches, and to Anna Nottmeier for catching problems in my figures I never would have seen. I would also like to thank the USGS Lower Mississippi Gulf Water Science Center for the opportunity to serve as a Pathways Hydrologic Technician -Trainee during the course of this project, as it has only made me a better equipped scientist.
On predictive routing of security contexts in an all-IP network

While mobile nodes (MNs) undergo handovers across inter-wireless access networks, their security contexts must be propagated for secure re-establishment of on-going application sessions, such as those in secure mobile internet protocol (IP), authentication, authorization, and accounting (AAA) services. Routing security contexts via an IP network either on-demand or based on MNs' mobility prediction, imposes new challenging requirements of secure cross-handover services and security context management. In this paper, we present a context router (CXR) that manages security contexts in an all-IP network, providing seamless and secure handover services for the mobile users that carry multimedia-access devices. A CXR is responsible for (1) monitoring of MNs' cross-handover, (2) analysis of MNs' movement patterns, and (3) routing of security contexts ahead of MNs' arrival at relevant access points. The predictive routing reduces the delay in the underlying security association that would otherwise fetch an involved security context from a remote server. The predictive routing of security contexts is performed based on statistical learning of MNs' movement pattern, gauging (dis)similarities between the patterns obtained via distance measurements. The CXR has been evaluated with a prototypical implementation based on an MN mobility model on a grid. Our evaluation results support the predictive routing mechanism's improvement in seamless and secure cross-handover services by a factor of 2.5. Also, the prediction mechanism is shown to outperform the Kalman filter-based method [13] as a Kalman Fiter-based mechanism up to 1.5 and 3.6 times regarding prediction accuracy and computation performance, respectively. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Neural responses to emotional expression information in high- and low-spatial frequency in autism: evidence for a cortical dysfunction

Despite an overall consensus that Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) entails atypical processing of human faces and emotional expressions, the role of neural structures involved in early facial processing remains unresolved. An influential model for the neurotypical brain suggests that face processing in the fusiform gyrus and the amygdala is based on both high-spatial frequency (HSF) information carried by a parvocellular pathway, and low-spatial frequency (LSF) information separately conveyed by a magnocellular pathway. Here, we tested the fusiform gyrus and amygdala sensitivity to emotional face information conveyed by these distinct pathways in ASD individuals (and matched Controls). During functional Magnetical Resonance Imaging (fMRI), participants reported the apparent gender of hybrid face stimuli, made by merging two different faces (one in LSF and the other in HSF), out of which one displayed an emotional expression (fearful or happy) and the other was neutral. Controls exhibited increased fusiform activity to hybrid faces with an emotional expression (relative to hybrids composed only with neutral faces), regardless of whether this was conveyed by LSFs or HSFs in hybrid stimuli. ASD individuals showed intact fusiform response to LSF, but not HSF, expressions. Furthermore, the amygdala (and the ventral occipital cortex) was more sensitive to HSF than LSF expressions in Controls, but exhibited an opposite preference in ASD. Our data suggest spared LSF face processing in ASD, while cortical analysis of HSF expression cues appears affected. These findings converge with recent accounts suggesting that ASD might be characterized by a difficulty in integrating multiple local information and cause global processing troubles unexplained by losses in low spatial frequency inputs.