Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
ncRNAimprint: a comprehensive database of mammalian imprinted noncoding RNAs.

Imprinted noncoding RNAs (ncRNAs) are expressed mono-allelically in a parent-of-origin-dependent manner, which is mainly evident in mammals. Lying at a crossroad between imprinted genes and ncRNAs, imprinted ncRNAs show distinct features. They are likely to function in nontraditional ways compared to non-imprinted ncRNAs, and are much more responsible for the mechanism of genomic imprinting compared to imprinted protein-coding genes. An increasing number of human diseases have been shown to be related to abnormalities in imprinted ncRNAs. Due to their functional importance, many studies focusing on imprinted ncRNAs have been published in recent years; however, there is no systematic collection or description of imprinted ncRNAs and the rapidly growing knowledge is scattered in various places. Here, we describe a new database, ncRNAimprint, which serves as a comprehensive resource center for mammalian imprinted ncRNAs. A catalog of imprinted ncRNAs, including snoRNAs, microRNAs, piRNAs, siRNAs, antisense ncRNAs, and mRNA-like ncRNAs, was annotated in detail using information extracted from relevant literature and databases. Comprehensive collections of imprinted ncRNA-related diseases, imprinting control regions (ICRs), and imprinted regions were manually compiled to provide resources for current research focusing on imprinted ncRNAs. Small RNA deep sequencing reads that fully matched within imprinted regions were also included to offer useful evidence in detecting novel imprinted ncRNAs and to aid in analyzing expression patterns of known imprinted ncRNAs. A search page including four effective search forms and two graphical browsers was created for rapid retrieval and visualization of these data. The imprinted ncRNA database is freely accessible at http://rnaqueen.sysu. edu.cn/ncRNAimprint.
Evaluation of Contrast Sensitivity, Color Vision and Visual Acuity in Patients with and without Diabetes

Purpose: To investigate the discriminative ability of contrast sensitivity (CS), color vision and best corrected visual acuity (BCVA) in detecting functional losses in diabetic participants with and without retinopathy Methods: In this cross sectional study we examined 105 patients in Khatam-Al-Anbia Eye Hospital of Mashhad University of Medical Sciences including 70 diabetic patients (35 with retinopathy and 35 without retinopathy in fundus photography) with 35 control non-diabetic subjects matched for age and sex. The diabetic participants were subgrouped according to the level of retinopathy (EDTRS classification). CS was examined by means of CSV-1000 E instrument at 3, 6, 12 and 18 cpd, respectively in each eye. Color discrimination ability was measured with the Farnsworth D-15 test and BCVA by Snellen chart. Results: When comparing visual performance of the right and left eyes of patients in each group, only the mean CS values at 6 cpd differ significantly in diabetics without retinopathy (P=0.01). CS was significantly lower in the diabetic eyes with retinopathy than in the normal eyes in all spatial frequencies. Comparing to control group, there was a statistically significant CS loss in spatial frequencies of 3, 6, 18 cpd in the diabetic eyes without retinopathy (P<0.05). The mean logMAR BCVA and color vision abnormalities were significantly higher in the diabetic eyes with retinopathy than in the normal eyes or the diabetic eyes without retinopathy (P<0.001). There was no significant difference between the visual performance of those diabetics without retinopathy compared to the control group. The sensitivity and specificity were almost identical for all tests of visual function in the right and left eyes. The sensitivity and specificity of the CS test in 6 cpd were 71% and 82% which were significantly higher than other spatial frequencies. So the discriminative ability of this spatial frequency in detecting diabetics with retinopathy was 71% and in detecting those without was 82%. The sensitivity and the specificity of the color vision test and BCVAs (logMAR≥0.05, Snellen≤ 9 /10) were 79% and 94% respectively. Conclusion: There was significant difference between the visual performance of those diabetics with retinopathy compared to those without. There was excellent agreement between the results of these three tests. The findings also suggest that the appropriate combination of existing tests may be a useful method of improving screening accuracy in diabetic patients.
Dynamic policy programming

In this paper, we propose a novel policy iteration method, called dynamic policy programming (DPP), to estimate the optimal policy in the infinite-horizon Markov decision processes. We prove the finite-iteration and asymptotic l\infty-norm performance-loss bounds for DPP in the presence of approximation/estimation error. The bounds are expressed in terms of the l\infty-norm of the average accumulated error as opposed to the l\infty-norm of the error in the case of the standard approximate value iteration (AVI) and the approximate policy iteration (API). This suggests that DPP can achieve a better performance than AVI and API since it averages out the simulation noise caused by Monte-Carlo sampling throughout the learning process. We examine this theoretical results numerically by com- paring the performance of the approximate variants of DPP with existing reinforcement learning (RL) methods on different problem domains. Our results show that, in all cases, DPP-based algorithms outperform other RL methods by a wide margin.
Pharmacotherapy of postpartum depression

Background: The prevalence and recurrence rates of postpartum depression (PPD) are 13 and 25%, respectively. Despite its detrimental impact on the health of the mother–infant dyad, there is a paucity of data in the literature regarding the efficacy of pharmacological treatment of PPD. Objectives: i) To review the literature on the use of antidepressants and hormonal supplements for the prevention and the treatment of PPD; ii) to give the authors' opinion on the current status of the pharmacological treatment of PPD; and iii) to discuss developments that are likely to be important in the future. Methods: An electronic search was performed by using PubMed, Medline, and PsychINFO. Inclusion criteria were: i) empirical articles in peer-reviewed English-language journals; ii) well-validated measures of depression; and iii) a uniform scoring system for depression among the sample. Results/conclusion: The electronic search yielded a total of 19 articles (12 on treatment and 7 on prevention of PPD) with the following study designs: eight randomized clinical trials (six using placebo control and two using active control groups), and 11 open-label studies. The selection of the specific antidepressant for a woman with PPD should derive from a personalized risk–benefit analysis.
Regression Analysis of Quantity Data with Exact Zeroes ∗

Measurements of the magnitude or duration of physical phenomenon have the property that they are positive and continuous, except for the possibility of exact zeroes when the phenomenon does not occur. Such data cannot be transformed to normality by power transformations or any other means, and special treatment of the zero observations is usually required. The approach of this paper is to model quantity data using a family of exponential family distributions intermediate between the Poisson and the gamma families. These families have the feature of power mean-variance relationships with exponent between one and two. Regression modelling is possible using the established framework of generalized linear models. With suitable assumptions this approach allows the information in both the zero and positive observations to contribute to the estimation of all parts of the model.
Wistar rats: a forgotten model of age-related hearing loss

Age-related hearing loss (ARHL) is one of the most frequent sensory impairments in senescence and is a source of important socio-economic consequences. Understanding the pathological responses that occur in the central auditory pathway of patients who suffer from this disability is vital to improve its diagnosis and treatment. Therefore, the goal of this study was to characterize age-related modifications in auditory brainstem responses (ABR) and to determine whether these functional responses might be accompanied by an imbalance between excitation and inhibition in the cochlear nucleus of Wistar rats. To do so, ABR recordings at different frequencies and immunohistochemistry for the vesicular glutamate transporter 1 (VGLUT1) and the vesicular GABA transporter (VGAT) in the ventral cochlear nucleus (VCN) were performed in young, middle-aged and old male Wistar rats. The results demonstrate that there was a significant increase in the auditory thresholds, a significant decrease in the amplitudes and an increase in the latencies of the ABR waves as the age of the rat increased. Additionally, there were decreases in VGLUT1 and VGAT immunostaining in the VCN of older rats compared to younger rats. Therefore, the observed age-related decline in the magnitude of auditory evoked responses might be due in part to a reduction in markers of excitatory function; meanwhile, the concomitant reduction in both excitatory and inhibitory markers might reflect a common central alteration in animal models of ARLH. Together, these findings highlight the suitability of the Wistar rat as an excellent model to study ARHL.
The Uncoordinated-5 Homolog B (UNC5B) Receptor Increases Myocardial Ischemia-Reperfusion Injury

The UNC5 receptor family are chemorepulsive neuronal guidance receptors with additional functions outside the central nervous system. Previous studies have implicated that the UNC5B receptor influences the migration of leukocytes into sites of tissue inflammation. Given that this process is a critical step during the pathophysiology of myocardial ischemia followed by reperfusion (IR) we investigated the role of UNC5B during myocardial IR. In initial in-vitro experiments, the functional inhibition of UNC5B resulted in a significant reduction of chemotactic migration of neutrophils. In-vivo, using a model of acute myocardial ischemia in UNC5B+/− and wild type (WT) animals, we found a significant reduction of infarct sizes in UNC5B+/− animals. This was associated with significantly reduced levels of troponin-I and IL-6 in UNC5B+/− mice. The repression of UNC5B using siRNA and the functional inhibition of UNC5B significantly dampened the extent of myocardial IR injury. Following depletion of neutrophils, we were not able to observe any further reduction in infarct size through functional inhibition of UNC5B in WT and UNC5B+/− mice. In summary our studies demonstrate an important role for UNC5B during myocardial IR injury, and that UNC5B might be a potential therapeutic target to control reperfusion injury in the future.
Exploratory study describing 6 month outcomes for young children with autism who receive treatment as usual in Italy

Background In the last few years, the results of different studies have confirmed, in different ways, the importance of early intervention for autism. This study aims to evaluate the role of early “as usual” interventions in the outcome of toddlers diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Method Seventy children with ASD aged between 24 and 48 months were recruited at different centers in Italy. They were evaluated by blind researchers at baseline and after 6 months of using Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule-Generic (ADOS-G), Griffiths Mental Developmental Scales, and Vineland Adaptive Behavior scales. Parents filled out the MacArthur Inventory, Social Communication Questionnaire, and Child Behavior Check List. All children were referred to community providers for available interventions. Results At the endpoint, most of the children were still classified as having an ADOS-G classification of ASD. However, 21 (34.2%) passed from autism to autism spectrum, and 3 (4.2%) passed from autism spectrum to no spectrum. Treatment effects were obtained for cognitive functioning, language, adaptive behavior, and child behavior without differences between development-oriented and behavior-oriented interventions. Parent involvement was a mediator for the best clinical outcome. Baseline low impairments of communication, language comprehension, and gesture were predictors of positive outcome. Conclusion Treatment as usual, composed of individual therapy plus school-supported inclusion, may be an effective intervention in ASD. Better initial levels of communication in child and parent involvement during treatment have an important role for a positive outcome.
Cellobiose Consumption Uncouples Extracellular Glucose Sensing and Glucose Metabolism in Saccharomyces cerevisiae

ABSTRACT Glycolysis is central to energy metabolism in most organisms and is highly regulated to enable optimal growth. In the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, feedback mechanisms that control flux through glycolysis span transcriptional control to metabolite levels in the cell. Using a cellobiose consumption pathway, we decoupled glucose sensing from carbon utilization, revealing new modular layers of control that induce ATP consumption to drive rapid carbon fermentation. Alterations of the beta subunit of phosphofructokinase-1 (PFK2), H+-plasma membrane ATPase (PMA1), and glucose sensors (SNF3 and RGT2) revealed the importance of coupling extracellular glucose sensing to manage ATP levels in the cell. Controlling the upper bound of cellular ATP levels may be a general mechanism used to regulate energy levels in cells, via a regulatory network that can be uncoupled from ATP concentrations under perceived starvation conditions. IMPORTANCE Living cells are fine-tuned through evolution to thrive in their native environments. Genome alterations to create organisms for specific biotechnological applications may result in unexpected and undesired phenotypes. We used a minimal synthetic biological system in the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae as a platform to reveal novel connections between carbon sensing, starvation conditions, and energy homeostasis. IMPORTANCE Living cells are fine-tuned through evolution to thrive in their native environments. Genome alterations to create organisms for specific biotechnological applications may result in unexpected and undesired phenotypes. We used a minimal synthetic biological system in the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae as a platform to reveal novel connections between carbon sensing, starvation conditions, and energy homeostasis.
Impacts of Stream Hydrologic Characteristics on Ambient Water Quality and Aquatic Health in the Austin, Texas Area

Introduction Changing land uses associated with urbanization can have detrimental effects on urban and suburban streams, both hydrologically and biologically. For many years urban watershed management and planning has focused on controlling peak runoff rates associated with infrequent flood-producing events, primarily for flooding concerns, and more recently on addressing non-point source pollutants. However, controlling the peaks of these rare events does little to mitigate the hydrologic changes associated with smaller rainfall events caused by urbanization or the biological impacts related to the changes in flow regimes. Urbanization of a watershed is often expressed as a function of impervious cover. However, impervious cover may not always be an accurate predictor of the changes in hydrology or the changes in the biologic community. While the hydrologic changes associated with the changes in impervious cover and urbanization may be modeled (and often are), the impacts of changes in impervious cover on stream biology are often not considered when new developments are proposed. Urban planners have suggested Water quality and aquatic health data collected as part of the City of Austin (COA) Environmental Integrity Index (EII) were compared to stream flow characteristics using forty-four metrics derived from daily average flows collected by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and COA. Water quality data were highly correlated with impervious cover (r = -0.911). Most of the flow metrics were correlated with each other, as was expected, resulting in a redundancy of information and the possibility of cross-correlation when performing additional analyses. A statistical relationship between aquatic life data and three flow metrics, fraction of time the creek is dry, single pass baseflow ratio and the natural log of the 90 percentile flow, was developed based on the correlations and what metrics can be predicted reliably with existing watershed models. The resulting model has an adjusted r = 0.702. This model will be used to predict aquatic life potential in Austin-area streams using modeled flows under different development scenarios.
Semantic Understanding of Professional Soccer Commentaries

This paper presents a novel approach to the problem of semantic parsing via learning the correspondences between complex sentences and rich sets of events. Our main intuition is that correct correspondences tend to occur more frequently. Our model benefits from a discriminative notion of similarity to learn the correspondence between sentence and an event and a ranking machinery that scores the popularity of each correspondence. Our method can discover a group of events (called macro-events) that best describes a sentence. We evaluate our method on our novel dataset of professional soccer commentaries. The empirical results show that our method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art.
Generalized sphere-packing and sphere-covering bounds on the size of codes for combinatorial channels

Many of the classic problems of coding theory are highly symmetric, which makes it easy to derive sphere-packing upper bounds and sphere-covering lower bounds on the size of codes. We discuss the generalizations of sphere-packing and sphere-covering bounds to arbitrary error models. These generalizations become especially important when the sizes of the error spheres are nonuniform. The best possible sphere-packing and sphere-covering bounds are solutions to linear programs. We derive a series of bounds from approximations to packing and covering problems and study the relationships and trade-offs between them. We compare sphere-covering lower bounds with other graph theoretic lower bounds such as Tur\'{a}n's theorem. We show how to obtain upper bounds by optimizing across a family of channels that admit the same codes. We present a generalization of the local degree bound of Kulkarni and Kiyavash and use it to improve the best known upper bounds on the sizes of single deletion correcting codes and single grain error correcting codes.
Functional and molecular properties of the human recombinant Y4 receptor: resistance to agonist-promoted desensitization.

After stable transfection of Chinese hamster ovary cells with the human Y4 receptor, clone 29 was isolated and studied for receptor properties. The following data were obtained: 1) one class of binding site was identified by analysis of (125)I-human pancreatic polypeptide (hPP) binding to cell membranes with a K(d) value of 0. 26 nM and a B(max) value of 1.44 pmol/mg protein; 2) the K(i) values for inhibition of (125)I-hPP binding by hPP, human peptide YY (hPYY), human neuropeptide Y (hNPY), and analogs were hPP (0.7 nM) < rat PP (47 nM) < hPYY (94 nM) < h[Leu(31)-Pro(34)]NPY (124 nM) << hNPY = porcine NPY(13-36) = rat D-[Trp(32)]NPY (>1 microM); 3) cross-linking experiments using (125)I-hPP identified a single M(r) 60,000 glycosylated Y4 receptor; and 4) the natural peptides hPP, hPYY, and hNPY inhibited forskolin-stimulated cAMP production in clone 29 cells with EC(50) values of 0.56 nM, 218 nM, and >1 microM, respectively. The inhibitory effect of hPP was abolished when cells were incubated with pertussis toxin, indicating a pertussis toxin-sensitive G(i) protein-mediated event. 5) Exposure of cells to 10 nM hPP for 24 h resulted in the absence of modification of binding capacity (1.38 versus 1.44 pmol/mg protein in control cells) or affinity (0.31 versus 0.26 nM in control cells); there also was no modification in the potency and efficacy of hPP in inhibiting forskolin-stimulated cAMP. Immunofluorescence indicated that the Y4 receptor was not internalized within the cells after 24-h treatment with 10 nM hPP. These data support that Y4 receptors are resistant to agonist-promoted desensitization and internalization. Clone 29 cells provide a valuable tool to further characterize the pharmacological aspects of human Y4 receptor.
An interprofessional education session for first-year health science students.

OBJECTIVE To implement and evaluate the effectiveness and short-term impact of an interprofessional education (IPE) session in the first year for health sciences students representing 9 health professions. DESIGN An interprofessional faculty committee created a 2(1/2) hour introductory interprofessional education session focusing on a single patient case and 2 possible discharge scenarios. A mixed method pretest/posttest research design was used to examine changes in students' perceptions of and attitudes toward IPE. Six follow-up focus groups also were held with students from the participating professions. ASSESSMENT Of 1197 health professions students enrolled, 914 students (76%) attended the IPE session. Two hundred thirty-two of 240 pharmacy students (97%) attended. Forty-three (18.5%) pharmacy students responded to the open-ended questions on the survey instrument. The most frequently reported gains from attending the session were recognition of teamwork importance to benefit the patient (30%) and understanding of other professionals' roles (29%). Shortfalls reported by students related to the content/style of presentation (26%) and technical/organizational (23%) aspects of the session. Pharmacy students who participated in one of the focus groups stated the session demonstrated the benefits as well as facilitators and barriers to collaborative care. CONCLUSION The session served as an effective introduction to IPE; debriefing and integration with uniprofessional curricula should occur. Students need additional small group interaction with other health professional students, and can contribute as members of the planning committee.
Creation of an Interprofessional Teledementia Clinic for Rural Veterans: Preliminary Data

The teledementia clinic is a new model of care that expands the reach of specialized geriatric and dementia care using clinical video telehealth (CVT) to rural veterans, who frequently lack access to specialty care. The clinic is a Veterans Affairs (VA) Geriatric Research, Education, and Clinical Center clinical demonstration project. It is located in the Pittsburgh VA Healthcare System tertiary referral hospital and serves veterans in affiliated rural community‐based outpatient clinics (CBOCs). Rural CBOC primary care providers refer clinic patients, or referral is according to previous cognitive impairment diagnosis in a VAPHS geriatric clinic. Patients undergo interprofessional dementia assessment by a geriatrician, geropsychologist, geriatric psychiatrist or neurologist, and social worker using CVT technology. Metrics for clinic evaluation included rural patients served and savings in travel time, distance, and costs. Assessments collected depended upon individual presentation and included cognitive tests, geriatric depression scales, functional assessment, and the Zarit Burden Interview. A patient satisfaction survey was created and administered. In the first year, 95 individuals were served in 156 clinic visits and 251 interprofessional provider encounters. Of patients served, 61 lived in rural ZIP codes, 72 were diagnosed with dementia, 19 were diagnosed with mild cognitive impairment, and four were found to have primarily psychiatric diagnoses rather than cognitive impairment. The average Functional Assessment Staging of Alzheimer's Disease Scale score was 4.3 ± 1.3. This clinic model demonstrates that CVT technology is a feasible means of providing interprofessional dementia evaluations and follow‐up to rural presidents.