Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Regulation of Rhizobium meliloti exo genes in free-living cells and in planta examined by using TnphoA fusions

The exo loci of Rhizobium meliloti are necessary for the production of an acidic exopolysaccharide, EPS I, that is needed for alfalfa nodule invasion by strain Rm1021. We have isolated and characterized alkaline phosphatase fusions made with TnphoA in several exo loci of R. meliloti and used these fusions to examine the subcellular localization of exo gene products and the regulation of exo genes in free-living cells and in planta. In the course of this work, we isolated a new exo locus, exoT. We have obtained evidence that several of the exo loci may encode membrane proteins. The activity of TnphoA fusions in several exo loci is increased two- to fivefold in the presence of the regulatory mutations exoR95 and exoS96. While examining the regulation of the exo gens by exoR95 and exoS96, we found that certain classes of exo mutations are lethal in an exoR95 or exoS96 background unless a plasmid complementing the exo mutation is present. This result has possible implications for the role of these exo loci in EPS I biosynthesis. We have developed a method for staining nodules specifically for the alkaline phosphatase activity present in the inducing bacteria and used this method to show that an exoF::TnphoA fusion is expressed mainly in the invasion zone of the nodule.
The Influence of a University’s Social Identity on NCAA Divisional Affiliation

Several scholars noted universities changing their intercollegiate athletic association are influenced by rival schools with similar social identities (Smith, 2011; Smith, Williams, Soebbing, & Washington, 2013; Washington, 2004, 2004–05; Weaver, 2010). Specifically, most of these studies reviewed institutions that were former members of the NAIA and moved to the NCAA since 1973, noting university officials affiliated with the NAIA considered the organization as a detriment to their own firm’s identity (Smith, 2011; Washington, 2004–05). Thus, many of these universities departed the NAIA to join the NCAA. However, NCAA affiliation requires institutions to review NCAA rules and regulations to determine which division best suit their respective school’s needs (i.e., Division II or III). Thus, the purpose of this study was to determine if a school’s many social identities influence the likelihood of movement from the NAIA to either Division II or Division III. The results from a logistic regression model sho.
The Microvasculature of the Cerebral White Matter: Arteries of the Subcortical White Matter

The microvascular architecture of the human cerebral subcortical white matter was studied. Most of the subcortical arteries ran straight through the cortex, but upon entering the white matter, they began to coil, loop, and spiral. Vascular stains showed wide spaces between the adventitial sheaths and blood vessels. The blood vessels coiled, looped, and spiraled within these wide adventitial spaces. This phenomenon was observed in the brains from persons ranging from the first to ninth decades of life and there were no statistically significant age-related correlations. Furthermore, there was no evidence of a reduction in the volume of white matter after fixation. Therefore, the observed tortuosity does not appear to be the result of shrinkage of brain tissue following fixation. While the mechanisms responsible for the subcortical arteries circuitry remain undetermined, this coiling architecture may serve as a trap for tumor cells and microorganisms passing through the blood stream, suggesting that these coiling arterial blood vessels may play a significant role in the pathogenesis of tumor metastasis and the brain abscess that frequently occurs in the gray-white matter junction.
Barrier functions for Pucci-Heisenberg operators and applications

The aim of this paper is the explicit construction of some barrier functions ('fundamental solutions') for the Pucci? Heisenberg operators. Using these functions we obtain the continuity property, up to the boundary, for the viscosity solution of fully non-linear Dirichlet problems on the Heisenberg group, if the boundary of the domain satisfies some regularity geometrical assumptions (e.g., an exterior Heisenberg-ball condition at the characteristic points). We point out that the knowledge of the fundamental solutions allows us also to obtain qualitative properties of Hadamard, Liouville and Harnack type.
Fas ligand is not only expressed in immune privileged human organs but is also coexpressed with Fas in various epithelial tissues.

AIMS: To confirm the recent data obtained in mice, showing that the Fas ligand (FasL) is involved in the phenomenon of "immune privilege" (the apparent defect of the immune system in specific anatomical sites) and to extend this finding to humans. METHODS: The expression of FasL was analysed in a panel of histologically normal human tissues by reverse transcriptase polymerase chain reaction and Western blotting. The tissues sampled were brain, breast, bone marrow, oesophagus, kidney, liver, lung, lymph node, ovary, pancreas, pituitary gland, prostate, spleen, stomach (antrum and fundus), striated muscle, testis, thyroid, and uterus. These were obtained from patients with various neoplastic and non-neoplastic disorders; placental tissue was obtained after normal obstetric delivery, and spontaneous or voluntary abortion. RESULTS: Strong FasL expression was detected in testis and placenta. FasL expression was also detectable, although it was seen to a lesser extent, in oesophagus, prostate, lung, and uterus, which also coexpressed variable amounts of Fas mRNA or protein or both. The other organs tested for FasL expression were all negative. CONCLUSIONS: FasL in humans is expressed predominantly in immune "sanctuaries" such as testis and placenta, suggesting that, similar to mice, this expression may contribute to the immune privileged status of these organs, by preventing dangerous inflammatory responses. The coexpression of FasL and Fas in particular epithelia suggests that the physiological cell turnover of some tissues may be regulated by the Fas-FasL apoptotic pathway.
HOXB homeobox gene expression in cervical carcinoma

The homeobox (HOX) genes are a family of transcription factors that bind to specific DNA sequences in target genes regulating gene expression. Thirty-nine HOX genes have been mapped in four conserved clusters: A, B, C, and D; they act as master genes regulating the identity of body segments along the anteroposterior axis of the embryo. The role played by HOX genes in adult cell differentiation is unclear to date, but growing evidence suggests that they may play an important role in the development of cancer. To study the role played by HOX genes in cervical cancer, in the present work, we analyzed the expression of HOXB genes and the localization of their transcripts in human cervical tissues. Reverse transcription–polymerase chain reaction analysis and nonradioactive RNA in situ hybridization were used to detect HOXB expression in 11 normal cervical tissues and 17 cervical carcinomas. It was determined that HOXB1, B3, B5, B6, B7, B8, and B9 genes are expressed in normal adult cervical epithelium and squamous cervical carcinomas. Interestingly, HOXB2, HOXB4, and HOXB13 gene expression was found only in tumor tissues. Our findings suggest that the new expression of HOXB2, HOXB4, and B13 genes is involved in cervical cancer.
Development of executive processes in early childhood

Although the paediatric literature in the area of executive function has expanded significantly over the past 20 years, there is still an imbalance of knowledge when compared to the adult literature. The present project sought to redress the balance in executive function research by (1) investigating the development of a wide range of executive processes in children between the ages of 3 and 7 years, and (2) examining the effects of early frontal lobe damage on the ongoing development of these skills. Executive processes were examined within four domains of executive function: attentional control, cognitive flexibility, information processing, and goal setting. A neuropsychological test battery was administered to 99 healthy Australian children between the ages of 3 and 7 years, divided into five age groups (i.e., 3-, 4-, 5-, 6-, and 7-year-olds). To examine the impact of early frontal lobe damage on the development of executive skills, two case studies of children with lesions to anterior regions of the brain were also conducted. The utility of a newly developed test was determined via a pilot study, where 84 children between the ages of 3 and 7 years were administered the Object Classification Task for Children (OCTC), a measure of concept generation and mental flexibility. As the OCTC was found to be a useful executive function measure for use with young children, it was decided to include this task in the test protocol of the larger study. Findings from the normative study reveal different developmental trajectories for the executive processes under investigation. In particular, the results suggest that the four executive function domains develop at different rates, with subprocesses following similar developmental profiles. Findings from the case studies reveal that early frontal brain damage may interrupt the development of these domains, resulting in a number of executive impairments. The results from this project support the conceptualisation of executive function as a functional system, and suggest that the pattern of developmental profiles may assist clinicians in explaining the range of executive impairments following early frontal brain damage.
Knowledge and accessibility of self-medication among undergraduate students in Thailand

This study aims to investigate the knowledge and accessibility of self-medication among undergraduate students. Selfreport questionnaires comprised of four sections (demographics, self-medication used, self-medication accessibility and knowledge test of self-medication) were handed to undergraduate students. Four-hundred questionnaires were completed. The mean age (SD) of respondents was 21.58 (2.26) years old, mainly female. Most students (92%) had used self-medication, particularly analgesics, but only 39.8% had absolutely recovered from chief-complaints. Above half of respondents stated that they searched health information from community pharmacists but preferred television shows as further resources. The average score (SD) of the general knowledge test was 14.94 (5.51) of 28. In summary, a high number of undergraduate students had used self-medication, whereas they did not have sufficient knowledge and therefore did not always recover from their conditions. Many students trended to search for information from television shows rather than from credible sources. Therefore, community pharmacists play an important role in providing such information.
Sustainable consumer lending: local communities, rationality, and economic policy

Как показал обзор последних исследований в области устойчивого местного развития сквозь призму проблемы финансовой инклюзии, существует пробел в охвате проблематики разработки кредитных продуктов для населения в контексте гармонизации интересов всех акторов системы потребительского кредитования. Рассматриваемый в качестве инструмента финансовой инклюзии, кредит устойчивого развития, согласно авторской концепции, должен в первую очередь подразумевать разработку и внедрение в банковскую практику новых рациональных кредитных продуктов, соответствующих рациональных практик потребительского кредитования. Предложена теоретическая модель устойчивого потребительского кредитования, в качестве необходимого институционального элемента которой предлагается вовлечение местных сообществ. При этом рациональный потребительский кредит рассматривается как неотъемлемая характеристика данной модели. Обосновано, что экономическая политика на региональном и местном уровнях должна быть направлена на согласование интересов заёмщиков и кредиторов как непосредственных участников системы потребительского кредитования с целями и задачами устойчивого социально-экономического развития территорий их проживания. Малые монопромышленные города Российской Федерации предлагается рассматривать в качестве площадок для внедрения и воспроизводства, при поддержке со стороны органов региональной власти и местного самоуправления, практик устойчивого потребительского кредитования.
The neural mechanisms of worse than expected prediction errors

Learning about conditioned inhibitors, which predict omission of outcome delivery, has been relatively understudied compared to learning about reward predictors. Reward omissions lead to inhibition of dopamine neurons, driven by the lateral habenula, an important region that is also involved in learning about predictors of punishment. How could a conditioned inhibitor, which has no primary punishment association, learn to drive this dopamine dip signal? We show that the temporal-differences algorithm can account for learning negative associations for a conditioned inhibitor, and used this model to construct regressors for an fMRI conditioned inhibition experiment ran with 19 subjects. We found neural correlates of a prediction error for a CS in the ventral tegmental area, as well as value signals in the substantia nigra/VTA, along with the amygdala and caudate and pallidum regions of the basal ganglia. We also discuss a biologically based artificial neural network model called the PVLV (Primary Value, Learned Value) model, that can learn conditioned inhibition, and proposes that amygdala circuitry is involved in controlling dopamine firing for conditioned stimuli, while ventral striatal circuitry communicates with the lateral habenula to control dopamine firing for unconditioned stimuli. This model’s specification of the excitatory and inhibitory inputs to dopamine neurons in the different experimental conditions can be used to interpret fMRI signals in dopamine regions. This focus on worse than expected prediction errors can also be applied to understanding the learning about painful stimuli, and how disorders like depression and chronic pain involve distortions in these learning mechanisms leading to persistent negative predictions.
A global representation of the protein fold space

One of the principal goals of the structural genomics initiative is to identify the total repertoire of protein folds and obtain a global view of the “protein structure universe. ” Here, we present a 3D map of the protein fold space in which structurally related folds are represented by spatially adjacent points. Such a representation reveals a high-level organization of the fold space that is intuitively interpretable. The shape of the fold space and the overall distribution of the folds are defined by three dominant trends: secondary structure class, chain topology, and protein domain size. Random coil-like structures of small proteins and peptides are mapped to a region where the three trends converge, offering an interesting perspective on both the demography of fold space and the evolution of protein structures.
The Architecture of Gene Regulatory Variation across Multiple Human Tissues: The MuTHER Study

While there have been studies exploring regulatory variation in one or more tissues, the complexity of tissue-specificity in multiple primary tissues is not yet well understood. We explore in depth the role of cis-regulatory variation in three human tissues: lymphoblastoid cell lines (LCL), skin, and fat. The samples (156 LCL, 160 skin, 166 fat) were derived simultaneously from a subset of well-phenotyped healthy female twins of the MuTHER resource. We discover an abundance of cis-eQTLs in each tissue similar to previous estimates (858 or 4.7% of genes). In addition, we apply factor analysis (FA) to remove effects of latent variables, thus more than doubling the number of our discoveries (1,822 eQTL genes). The unique study design (Matched Co-Twin Analysis—MCTA) permits immediate replication of eQTLs using co-twins (93%–98%) and validation of the considerable gain in eQTL discovery after FA correction. We highlight the challenges of comparing eQTLs between tissues. After verifying previous significance threshold-based estimates of tissue-specificity, we show their limitations given their dependency on statistical power. We propose that continuous estimates of the proportion of tissue-shared signals and direct comparison of the magnitude of effect on the fold change in expression are essential properties that jointly provide a biologically realistic view of tissue-specificity. Under this framework we demonstrate that 30% of eQTLs are shared among the three tissues studied, while another 29% appear exclusively tissue-specific. However, even among the shared eQTLs, a substantial proportion (10%–20%) have significant differences in the magnitude of fold change between genotypic classes across tissues. Our results underline the need to account for the complexity of eQTL tissue-specificity in an effort to assess consequences of such variants for complex traits.
Vehicle localization by sensor fusion of LRS measurement and odometry information based on moving horizon estimation

In this study, we propose a localization method based on the fusion of the laser range sensor (LRS) measurements and the odometry information of a vehicle using moving horizon estimation (MHE). LRS measurement includes outliers and suffers from the intermittent observation; alleviation of their effect is required in order to localize a vehicle position with high accuracy. Proposed localization method merges multi-sampling data by exploiting MHE, which greatly reduces the effect of outliers and intermittent observation on localization using the data of other sampling. We show the efficacy of proposed localization by numerical simulations and experiments.
Effect of sedentary lifestyle, nutritional status and sex on the flexibility of students

Introduction: assart-day life habits have led to a more sedentary lifestyle, contributing to increased obesity. In view of these changes, it is necessary to understand whether the flexibility of the individual has also been influenced. Objective: to investigate the influence of sex, sedentary lifestyle and nutritional status on the flexibility of elementary school children. Method: 60 cheldren of both sexes aged five to 14 years were divided into a normal flexibility group (n = 21) and a reduced flexibility group (n = 39). Flexibility was evaluated by photogrammetry using the straight leg raise test, considering the leg angle. The physical activity level was evaluated using the Physical Activity Questionnaire for Older Children, and nutritional status was assessed by Body Mass Index for age and sex. Results: the normal flexibility group and the reduced flexibility group presented no significant differences regarding age, weight or height (p > 0.05). No differences were found (p > 0.05) in leg angle between the active and sedentary groups, the obese and nonobese or between males and females. Conclusions: sex, sedentary lifestyle and nutritional status exercized to influence on the flexibility of students.
Automatic and Portable Mapping of Data Parallel Programs to OpenCL for GPU-Based Heterogeneous Systems

General-purpose GPU-based systems are highly attractive, as they give potentially massive performance at little cost. Realizing such potential is challenging due to the complexity of programming. This article presents a compiler-based approach to automatically generate optimized OpenCL code from data parallel OpenMP programs for GPUs. A key feature of our scheme is that it leverages existing transformations, especially data transformations, to improve performance on GPU architectures and uses automatic machine learning to build a predictive model to determine if it is worthwhile running the OpenCL code on the GPU or OpenMP code on the multicore host. We applied our approach to the entire NAS parallel benchmark suite and evaluated it on distinct GPU-based systems. We achieved average (up to) speedups of 4.51× and 4.20× (143× and 67×) on Core i7/NVIDIA GeForce GTX580 and Core i7/AMD Radeon 7970 platforms, respectively, over a sequential baseline. Our approach achieves, on average, greater than 10× speedups over two state-of-the-art automatic GPU code generators.
Modelling Variability for System Families

In this paper, an approach to facilitate the treatment with variabilities in system families is presented by explicitly modelling variants. The proposed method of managing variability consists of a variant part, which models variants and a decision table to depict the customisation decision regarding each variant. We have found that it is easy to implement and has advantage over other methods. We present this model as an integral part of modelling system families.
RNA-mediated degradation of microRNAs: A widespread viral strategy?

Regulation of small RNAs by other non-coding RNAs is a ubiquitous feature of gene regulatory systems that can be exploited by viruses. Examples of this have been described in 3 different herpesviruses, where viral non-coding RNAs bind to highly abundant cellular (miRNAs), mediating their degradation: miR-27 is targeted by both murine cytomegalovirus and herpesvirus saimiri, while the miR-17 family is targeted by human cytomegalovirus. We review what is known about RNA-mediated regulation of miRNA stability and propose 3 potential roles that viral non-coding RNAs might assume to initiate the destruction of a miRNA, acting as “recruiters,” “localizers” or “exposers. ” Whereas the miRNAs (miR-17 and miR-27) appear to be ancient and pre-date the common ancestor of all mammalian herpesviruses, comparative analyses of herpesvirus genomes indicate that the 3 known viral regulators of miRNA each evolved independently, and much more recently. Noting that the anti-viral activity of miRNAs might be countered by a variety of mechanisms, we propose that (i) there has been continual turnover of these mechanisms during herpesvirus evolution, and (ii) there may be many other, as yet undescribed, anti-miRNA activities encoded by other herpesviruses and indeed by viruses from other families.
Preterm delivery as a predictor of diurnal cortisol profiles in adulthood: Evidence from Cebu, Philippines

Fetal exposure to elevated maternal cortisol can permanently modify hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal (HPA) axis function, and thereby have long‐term health impacts. Maternal cortisol steadily increases throughout normal pregnancy, but is abnormally high in preterm deliveries (<37 weeks). Prematurity remains a widespread public health problem, yet little is known about its potential long‐term effects on adult HPA function. Here we test the hypothesis that diurnal cortisol profiles measured in young adulthood will vary based upon an individual's preterm status.
Pharmacokinetic Interpretation of Blood Levels and Urinary Excretion Data for Cefazolin and Cephalothin After Intravenous and Intramuscular Administration in Humans

Blood levels of cefazolin and cephalothin were determined in two separate crossover studies in 20 healthy male adults, each after intravenous and intramuscular administration. Pharmacokinetic parameters were calculated from the intravenous data based upon a two-compartment open model. The rate constants controlling the distribution between the central and peripheral compartments, the overall elimination rate constants, the apparent volumes of distribution, and the fraction of the dose in the central and peripheral compartments were determined. The bioavailability was calculated to be 100% for cefazolin and cephalothin.