Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Modulatory effect of the SLC9A3 gene on susceptibility to infections and pulmonary function in children with cystic fibrosis

In cystic fibrosis (CF), CFTR dysfunction leads to salt and water imbalance across airway epithelia, depleted surface liquid layer, and impaired mucociliary clearance. This provides optimal conditions for chronic bacterial infections leading to excessive inflammation and progressive obstructive lung disease. We hypothesized that other epithelial channels affecting salt balance across the airways may play a role in the susceptibility to bacterial infections and modulate severity of CF lung disease. The SLC9A3 gene encoding a Na+/H+ exchanger was demonstrated to be a modifier intestinal disease in a murine model of CF. We examined the potential role of SLC9A3 as a modifier of CF lung disease severity. We analyzed 11 SLC9A3 gene variants for association with age of first Pseudomonas aeruginosa infection and lung function in children with CF. The T allele of an intronic variant in the SLC9A3 gene (rs4957061) was significantly (P = 0.02) associated with earlier acquisition of Pseudomonas infection in a cohort of 1,004 pediatric patients. Analysis of lung function in a subset of these patients (752) revealed that patients homozygous for the T allele had substantially reduced lung function and accelerated rate of decline. Although the functional basis for the modulatory effects of this SLC9A3 variant on CF lung disease remains to be elucidated, altered function of the Na+/H+ exchanger may further deplete the airway liquid surface, thereby enhancing susceptibility to Pseudomonas infections and worsening the severity of lung disease. Pediatr Pulmonol. 2011; 46:385–392. © 2010 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Wrinkling of Composite Sandwich Structures Under Compression

The phenomenon of wrinkling as a failure mode of sandwich composite structures under compression is examined using analysis verified by testing. Two cases are considered. In the first case, the facesheets are assumed flat and the wrinkling compression load is determined as a buckling load along with the associated short wavelength. This solution is then compared to finite element predictions and is shown to be in very good agreement. In the second case, the facesheets are assumed to have a wavy shape of known amplitude and wavelength. The various failure modes possible (core tension, compression or shear, adhesive tension or shear, and facesheet bending) are modeled in an effort to predict failure. Test specimens were fabricated and the waviness of the facesheets was measured. The specimens were then tested in compression. Reasonable agreement was found with theoretical predictions.
A reduced actuation mecanum wheel platform for pipe inspection

This paper focuses on the design, development and assessment of a novel, 2 degrees-of-freedom magnetic pipe inspection robot. It consists of 4 mecanum wheels, with the diagonals functionally coupled and the system rotation constrained by the surface geometry, maintaining full translational mobility with reduced control and actuation requirements. The system uses positional encoding that is decoupled from the transmission system to overcome the main sources of positional/positioning errors when using mecanum wheels. The kinematic and dynamic models of the system are derived and integrated within the controller. The prototype robot is then tested and shown to follow a scan path at 20mm/s within ±1.5mm whilst correcting for gravitational drift and slip events.
Cloning of Components of a Novel Subthreshold-Activating K+ Channel with a Unique Pattern of Expression in the Cerebral Cortex

Potassium channels that are open at very negative membrane potentials govern the subthreshold behavior of neurons. These channels contribute to the resting potential and help regulate the degree of excitability of a neuron by affecting the impact of synaptic inputs and the threshold for action potential generation. They can have large influences on cell behavior even when present at low concentrations because few conductances are active at these voltages. We report the identification of a new K+ channel pore-forming subunit of the ether-à-go-go (Eag) family, named Eag2, that expresses voltage-gated K+ channels that have significant activation at voltages around −100 mV. Eag2 expresses outward-rectifying, non-inactivating voltage-dependent K+ currents resembling those of Eag1, including a strong dependence of activation kinetics on prepulse potential. However, Eag2 currents start activating at subthreshold potentials that are 40–50 mV more negative than those reported for Eag1. Because they activate at such negative voltages and do not inactivate, Eag2 channels will contribute sustained outward currents down to the most negative membrane potentials known in neurons. Although Eag2 mRNA levels in whole brain appear to be low, they are highly concentrated in a few neuronal populations, most prominently in layer IV of the cerebral cortex. This highly restricted pattern of cortical expression is unlike that of any other potassium channel cloned to date and may indicate specific roles for this channel in cortical processing. Layer IV neurons are the main recipient of the thalamocortical input. Given their functional properties and specific distribution, Eag2 channels may play roles in the regulation of the behavioral state-dependent entry of sensory information to the cerebral cortex.
Specifically Progressive Deficits of Brain Functional Marker in Amnestic Type Mild Cognitive Impairment

Background Deficits of the default mode network (DMN) have been demonstrated in subjects with amnestic type mild cognitive impairment (aMCI) who have a high risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease (AD). However, no longitudinal study of this network has been reported in aMCI. Identifying links between development of DMN and aMCI progression would be of considerable value in understanding brain changes underpinning aMCI and determining risk of conversion to AD. Methodology/Principal Findings Resting-state fMRI was acquired in aMCI subjects (n = 26) and controls (n = 18) at baseline and after approximately 20 months follow up. Independent component analysis was used to isolate the DMN in each participant. Differences in DMN between aMCI and controls were examined at baseline, and subsequent changes between baseline and follow-up were also assessed in the groups. Posterior cingulate cortex/precuneus (PCC/PCu) hyper-functional connectivity was observed at baseline in aMCI subjects, while a substantial decrement of these connections was evident at follow-up in aMCI subjects, compared to matched controls. Specifically, PCC/PCu dysfunction was positively related to the impairments of episodic memory from baseline to follow up in aMCI group. Conclusions/Significance The patterns of longitudinal deficits of DMN may assist investigators to identify and monitor the development of aMCI.
GENETICS OF INCIPIENT SPECIATION IN DROSOPHILA MOJAVENSIS. I. MALE COURTSHIP SONG, MATING SUCCESS, AND GENOTYPE X ENVIRONMENT INTERACTIONS

Abstract Few studies have examined genotype by environment (GxE) effects on premating reproductive isolation and associated behaviors, even though such effects may be common when speciation is driven by adaptation to different environments. In this study, mating success and courtship song differences among diverging populations of Drosophila mojavensis were investigated in a two-environment quantitative trait locus (QTL) analysis. Baja California and mainland Mexico populations of D. mojavensis feed and breed on different host cacti, so these host plants were used to culture F2 males to examine host-specific QTL effects and GxE interactions influencing mating success and courtship songs. Linear selection gradient analysis showed that mainland females mated with males that produced songs with significantly shorter L(long)-IPIs, burst durations, and interburst intervals. Twenty-one microsatellite loci distributed across all five major chromosomes were used to localize effects of mating success, time to copulation, and courtship song components. Male courtship success was influenced by a single detected QTL, the main effect of cactus, and four GxE interactions, whereas time to copulation was influenced by three different QTLs on the fourth chromosome. Multiple-locus restricted maximum likelihood (REML) analysis of courtship song revealed consistent effects linked with the same fourth chromosome markers that influenced time to copulation, a number of GxE interactions, and few possible cases of epistasis. GxE interactions for mate choice and song can maintain genetic variation in populations, but alter outcomes of sexual selection and isolation, so signal evolution and reproductive isolation may be slowed in diverging populations. Understanding the genetics of incipient speciation in D. mojavensis clearly depends on cactus-specific expression of traits associated with courtship behavior and sexual isolation.
Stress and How Bacteria Cope with Death and Survival

Bacterial populations that are exposed to rapidly changing and sometimes hostile environments constantly switch between growth, survival, and death. Understanding bacterial survival and death are therefore cornerstones in a full comprehension of microbial life. During the last few years, new insights have emerged regarding the mechanisms of bacterial inactivation under stressful conditions. Particularly under mildly lethal stress, the ultimate cause of inactivation often seems mediated by the cell itself and is subject to additional regulation that integrates information about the global state of the cell and its environmental and social surrounding. This article explores the thin line between bacterial growth and inactivation and focuses on some emerging bacterial survival strategies, both from an individual cell and from a population perspective.
A memetic clustering algorithm for the functional partition of genes based on the gene ontology

With the invention of high throughput methods, researchers are capable of producing large amounts of biological data. During the analysis of such data the need of a functional grouping of genes arises. We propose a new clustering algorithm for the partition of genes or gene products according to their known biological function based on Gene Ontology terms. Ontologies offer a mechanism to capture knowledge in a shareable form that is also processable by computers. Our functional cluster algorithm promises to automatize, speed up and therefore improve biological data analysis.
Allometric Engineering: An Experimental Test of the Causes of Interpopulational Differences in Performance

Hatchling lizards (Sceloporus occidentalis) from a southern population are large and have high locomotor performance (speed and stamina) relative to hatchlings from northern populations. In order to determine whether differences in performance are an allometric consequence of interpopulation differences in size, yolk was removed from southern eggs, thereby producing miniaturized hatchlings equivalent in size to northern hatchlings. Miniaturized southern hatchlings no longer had higher speed than northern hatchlings, but maintained higher stamina. Interpopulation differences in speed but not in stamina are thus an allometric consequence of differences in egg size. Size manipulation adds an experimental dimension to aliometric analyses.
Postnatal development of vision in human and nonhuman primates.

In this chapter we summarize the growing literature on the optical , anatomical, physiological, and behavioral development of vision in human and nonhuman primates. The literature in this area is new and diverse, and to our knowledge it has not been previously reviewed as a whole . Emphasis is on postnatal development, in both its normal and its most common abnormal forms. All monkeys in the studies reviewed were Old World monkeys . References to the large body o f developmental studies o n nonprimate spe­ cies have been omitted (for reviews see Grobstein & Chow 1976, Tees 1976, Movshon & Van Sluyters 1981, Sherman & Spear 1982, Mitchell & Timney 1984). We have also omitted a large body of literature on embryology and prenatal anatomical development (see Rakic & Goldman-Rakic 1982, van Hof-van Duin & Mohn 1984). Of necessity, extended discussions of theoretical issues are precluded. Extended works on the topic of visual development can be found in Banks & Salapatek (1983), Aslin et al (1981), and the October 1983 issue of Behavioural Brain Research. A major reason for studying the development of vision in monkeys is to establish and use the monkey as a model for studying normal and abnormal human visual development. Many of the behavioral and anatomical studies reviewed below suggest major similarities of development, with rough parity at birth, and development proceeding about four times faster in Old World monkey infants than in human infants. To emphasize this 4: 1 conversion factor
An Image-Based Approach to Extreme Scale in Situ Visualization and Analysis

Extreme scale scientific simulations are leading a charge to exascale computation, and data analytics runs the risk of being a bottleneck to scientific discovery. Due to power and I/O constraints, we expect in situ visualization and analysis will be a critical component of these workflows. Options for extreme scale data analysis are often presented as a stark contrast: write large files to disk for interactive, exploratory analysis, or perform in situ analysis to save detailed data about phenomena that a scientists knows about in advance. We present a novel framework for a third option - a highly interactive, image-based approach that promotes exploration of simulation results, and is easily accessed through extensions to widely used open source tools. This in situ approach supports interactive exploration of a wide range of results, while still significantly reducing data movement and storage.
Popularity Growth Patterns of YouTube Videos - A Category-based Study

Understanding the growth pattern of content popularity has become a subject of immense interest to Internet service providers, content makers and on-line advertisers. This understanding is important for the sustainable deployment of content distribution systems. A significant amount of research has been done in analyzing the popularity growth patterns of YouTube videos. Unfortunately, little work has been done that investigates the popularity patterns of YouTube videos based on video object category. In this paper, we perform an in-depth analysis of the popularity pattern of YouTube videos, considering video categories. We find that the time varying popularity of different YouTube categories are different from each other. For some categories, views at early ages can be used to predict future popularity, whereas for some other categories, predicting future popularity is a challenging task and requires more sophisticated techniques (e.g. time-series clustering). The outcomes of these analyses can be instrumental towards designing a reliable workload generator, which can be further used to evaluate different caching policies and distribution mechanism for YouTube and similar sites.
A Compound Produced by Fruigivorous Tephritidae (Diptera) Larvae Promotes Oviposition Behavior by the Biological Control Agent Diachasmimorpha longicaudata (Hymenoptera: Braconidae)

ABSTRACT Tephritid fruit fly parasitoids use fruit-derived chemical cues and the vibrations that result from larval movements to locate hosts sequestered inside fruit. However, compounds produced by the larvae themselves have not been previously described nor their significance to parasitoid foraging determined. We collected the volatiles from four species of tropical and subtropical Tephritidae: Anastrepha suspensa (Loew), Bactrocera dorsalis Hendel, Bactrocera cucurbitae Coquillett, and Ceratitis capitata (Wiedemann), representing two subfamilies (Dacinae and Trypetinae). Paraethylacetophenone, an analog of a known tephritid parasitoid attractant, was a major constituent of all four, and was not associated with larvae of another acalypterate fly, Drosophila melanogaster Meigen, or with the calypterate Musca domestica L. It also was present in volatiles from whole, A. suspensa infested fruits of Eugenia uniflora (L.). Para-ethylacetophenone was not necessarily produced as a direct consequence of fruit consumption because it also was detected from larvae that developed in two artificial diets and in spent diets subsequent to larval development. Sensillae on both the antennae and ovipositor of the opiine braconid fruit fly parasitoid, Diachasmimorpha longicaudata (Ashmead) responded to the para-ethylacetophenone in larval volatiles and as a synthetic. Although a potential cue to foraging parasitoids, para-ethylacetophenone showed no long range (>1m) attractiveness to the adult female parasitoid, but did stimulate ovipositor-insertion and oviposition into both a natural (fruit) and an artificial (parafilm) substrate. Thus it may prove useful in colonizing and mass-rearing opine fruit fly parasitoids.
Direct Power Control of Doubly-Fed-Induction-Generator-Based Wind Turbines Under Unbalanced Grid Voltage

In this paper, the behavior of a doubly fed induction generator (DFIG) is studied under unbalanced grid voltage conditions. It is shown that if no special control efforts are employed, the behavior of the generator is deteriorated, basically due to two reasons: electromagnetic torque oscillations and nonsinusoidal current exchange with the grid. These phenomena are first analyzed theoretically as a function of the stator active and reactive instantaneous power exchange by the stator of the DFIG and the grid-side converter (GSC). This analysis provides the main ideas for generation of the active and reactive power references for the rotor-side converter (RSC) and the GSC, controlled by means of direct power control techniques. Therefore, this paper proposes a new algorithm that generates the RSC power references, without the necessity of a sequence component extraction, in order to eliminate torque oscillations and achieve sinusoidal stator currents exchange. On the contrary, the GSC power references are provided by means of voltage and current sequence extraction. Finally, simulation and experimental results successfully validate the proposed power reference generation methods.
Category-Epitomes : Discriminatively Minimalist Representations for Object Categories

Freehand line sketches are an interesting and unique form of visual representation. Typically, such sketches are studied and utilized as an end product of the sketching process. However, we have found it instructive to study the sketches as sequentially accumulated composition of drawing strokes added over time. Studying sketches in this manner has enabled us to create novel sparse yet discriminative sketch-based representations for object categories which we term category-epitomes. Our procedure for obtaining these epitomes concurrently provides a natural measure for quantifying the sparseness underlying the original sketch, which we term epitome-score. We construct and analyze category-epitomes and epitome-scores for freehand sketches belonging to various object categories. Our analysis provides a novel viewpoint for studying the semantic nature of object categories.
Subversion of Schwann Cell Glucose Metabolism by Mycobacterium leprae*

Mycobacterium leprae, the intracellular etiological agent of leprosy, infects Schwann promoting irreversible physical disabilities and deformities. These cells are responsible for myelination and maintenance of axonal energy metabolism through export of metabolites, such as lactate and pyruvate. In the present work, we observed that infected Schwann cells increase glucose uptake with a concomitant increase in glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase (G6PDH) activity, the key enzyme of the oxidative pentose pathway. We also observed a mitochondria shutdown in infected cells and mitochondrial swelling in pure neural leprosy nerves. The classic Warburg effect described in macrophages infected by Mycobacterium avium was not observed in our model, which presented a drastic reduction in lactate generation and release by infected Schwann cells. This effect was followed by a decrease in lactate dehydrogenase isoform M (LDH-M) activity and an increase in cellular protection against hydrogen peroxide insult in a pentose phosphate pathway and GSH-dependent manner. M. leprae infection success was also dependent of the glutathione antioxidant system and its main reducing power source, the pentose pathway, as demonstrated by a 50 and 70% drop in intracellular viability after treatment with the GSH synthesis inhibitor buthionine sulfoximine, and aminonicotinamide (6-ANAM), an inhibitor of G6PDH 6-ANAM, respectively. We concluded that M. leprae could modulate host cell glucose metabolism to increase the cellular reducing power generation, facilitating glutathione regeneration and consequently free-radical control. The impact of this regulation in leprosy neuropathy is discussed.
Automated design of self-adaptive software with control-theoretical formal guarantees

Self-adaptation enables software to execute successfully in dynamic, unpredictable, and uncertain environments. Control theory provides a broad set of mathematically grounded techniques for adapting the behavior of dynamic systems. While it has been applied to specific software control problems, it has proved difficult to define methodologies allowing non-experts to systematically apply control techniques to create adaptive software. These difficulties arise because computer systems are usually non-linear, with varying workloads and heterogeneous components, making it difficult to model software as a dynamic system; i.e., by means of differential or difference equations. This paper proposes a broad scope methodology for automatically constructing both an approximate dynamic model of a software system and a suitable controller for managing its non-functional requirements. Despite its generality, this methodology provides formal guarantees concerning the system's dynamic behavior by keeping its model continuously updated to compensate for changes in the execution environment and effects of the initial approximation. We apply the methodology to three case studies, demonstrating its generality by tackling different domains (and different non-functional requirements) with the same approach. Being broadly applicable and fully automated, this methodology may allow the adoption of control theoretical solutions (and their formal properties) for a wide range of software adaptation problems.
Extending ALCQ with Bounded Self-Reference

Self-reference has been recognized as a useful feature in description logics but is known to cause substantial problems with decidability. We have shown in previous work that the basic description logic ALC remains decidable, and in fact retains its low complexity, when extended with a bounded form of self-reference where only one variable (denoted me following previous work by Marx) is allowed, and no more than two relational steps are allowed to intercede between binding and use of me (this result is optimal in the sense that already allowing three steps leads to undecidability). Here, we extend these results to ALCQ, i.e. ALC extended with qualified number restrictions, and analyse the expressivity of the arising logic, ALCQme2. In fact it turns out the expressive power of ALCQme2 is identical to that of ALCHIQbe, the extension of ALCQ with role inverses, role hierarchies, safe Boolean combinations of roles, and a simple self-loop construct. However, while there is a straightforwardly defined polynomial translation from ALCHIQbe to ALCQme2, the translation from ALCQme2 to ALCHIQbe has an exponential blowup in the formula size. To establish the desired complexity bounds, we therefore provide a polynomial satisfiability-preserving encoding of ALCQme2 into ALCHIQbe and prove that the latter is decidable in EXPTIME.