Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Anti-Osteoporotic Activity of an Edible Traditional Chinese Medicine Cistanche deserticola on Bone Metabolism of Ovariectomized Rats Through RANKL/RANK/TRAF6-Mediated Signaling Pathways

Given the limitations of existing therapeutic agents for treatment of postmenopausal osteoporosis, there still remains a need for more options with both efficacy and less adverse effects. Cistanche deserticola Y. C. Ma is known as a popular tonic herb traditionally used to treatment deficiency of kidney energy including muscle weakness in minority area of Asian counties. Based on the theory of “kidney dominate bone,” an ovariectomized (OVX) rat model of postmenopausal osteoporosis was used to evaluate the therapeutic effect of C. deserticola extract (CDE) on bone loss. Forty eight female Sprague-Dawley rats, aged about 12 weeks, were randomly assigned into six groups including sham group orally administrated with 0.5% carboxymethyl cellulose sodium (CMC-Na) (sham), positive group treated with 1 mg/kg of estradiol valerate (EV), low, moderate, and high dosage groups orally administrated with 200, 400, and 800 mg/kg/day of CDE, respectively. After 3 months of continuous intervention, CDE exhibited significant anti-osteoporotic activity evidenced by the enhanced total bone mineral density, ameliorated bone microarchitecture; increased alkaline phosphatase activity; decreased deoxypyridinoline, cathepsin K, tartrate-resistant acid phosphatase, and malondialdehyde levels; whereas the body, uterus, and vagina weights in OVX rats were not influenced by CDE intervention. In addition, a seemed contradictory phenomenon on levels of calcium and phosphorus between OVX and sham rats were observed and elucidated. Mechanistically, CDE significantly down-regulated the levels of TRAF6, RANKL, RANK, NF-κB, IKKβ, NFAT2, and up-regulated the phosphatidylinositol 3-kinase (PI3K), AKT, osteoprotegerin, and c-Fos expressions, which implied CDE could suppress RANKL/RANK-induced activation of downstream NF-κB and PI3K/AKT pathways, and ultimately, preventing activity of the key osteoclastogenic proteins NFAT2 and c-Fos. All of the data suggested CDE possessed potential anti-osteoporotic activity and this effect was, at least in part, involved in modulation of RANKL/RANK/TRAF6-mediated NF-κB and PI3K/AKT signaling as well as c-Fos and NFAT2 levels. Therefore, CDE may represent a useful promising remedy candidate for treatment of postmenopausal osteoporosis.
The Hypomorphic Variant p.(Gly624Asp) in COL4A5 as a Possible Cause for an Unexpected Severe Phenotype in a Family With X-Linked Alport Syndrome

Background: Alport syndrome (AS) is a progressive kidney disorder leading to end stage renal disease (ESRD). Extrarenal symptoms like hearing loss and ocular changes can be observed. Approximately 85% of the patients carry pathogenic variants in COL4A5 (X-linked inheritance). The variant c.1871G>A, p.(Gly624Asp) in COL4A5 is described in the literature as a hypomorphic variant associated with thin basement membrane nephropathy (TBMN). ESRD was only seen rarely at a median age of 50 years and extrarenal manifestations have only been described in single cases. Case report and Methods: This is a report on a family with X-linked AS. In the female index patient, microscopic hematuria, and proteinuria were observed beginning at the age of 20 years and 41 years, respectively. Microscopic hematuria was also present in the daughter (from 6th month of life), the son (from 22nd month of life), the mother and the maternal grandniece. Proteinuria was observed in the maternal aunt and paternal grandmother. The father of the index patient, a paternal uncle and a second cousin presented with ESRD at the age of 49, 34, and 70 years of life, respectively. Extrarenal manifestations were absent in the whole family. In the index patient, her children and her mother molecular diagnostics were performed using Sanger and exome sequencing. Results: In all examined family members the variant c.1871G>A, p.(Gly624Asp) in COL4A5 was identified. With the exception of the index patient, who was homozygous for this variant, all family members carried the variant heterozygously, or hemizygously. A different or additional monogenic hereditary nephropathy could not be detected by exome sequencing of the index patient. Discussion: This is the first report of a patient with the variant p.(Gly624Asp) in COL4A5 in a homozygous state. The variant was previously reported as a mild variant requiring dialysis in less than 10%. The family presented, however, with a more severe clinical course. We therefore suggest to question the term “hypomorphic” in the context of the variant p.(Gly624Asp) although molecular diagnostics could not be done in all affected family members.
Fungal Communities Resist Recovery in Sand Mine Restoration

The restoration of vegetation post mining is particularly challenging in extreme conditions such as Mediterranean systems where soil moisture is limiting, soil temperature fluctuates dramatically, and soil carbon is very low. In such systems, soil microbial communities may play an important role in attenuating extreme conditions. Thus, vegetation establishment on such sites may be curtailed by depauperate soil communities. Soil fungal communities, in particular, are essential for nutrient turn over but we know very little about how these communities respond to mining and post mining restoration. Fungi may be significantly affected by restoration practises. For example, the inclusion of deeper soil profiles (i.e. “overburden”) into restoration events is rare, but may expedite fungal community development. We studied a successional gradient of sand mine restoration in a former Banksia woodland in SW Australia to determine whether soil fungal communities recovered after 13 years. We also asked whether the inclusion of overburden into restoration sites improved soil fungal community development. Overall, fungal communities did not return to a pre-disturbance state by 13 years, nor did the inclusion of overburden affect their trajectory. Longer term studies are need to determine when, if ever, fungal communities are restored, and what effect this has nascent vegetation.
Brain Activity During Unilateral Physical and Imagined Isometric Contractions

By convention, it is believed that the ipsilateral side of the body is controlled by the contralateral side of the brain. Past studies measuring brain activity primarily recorded changes before and after an intervention is performed on one side of the body within one hemisphere (usually the contralateral) of the brain. The purpose of this investigation was to observe the brain activity within the left and right hemispheres of the prefrontal and sensorimotor cortices during physical and imagined, dominant and non-dominant unilateral isometric elbow flexion. Fifteen right hand dominant individuals (six males and nine females) between the ages of 18 and 21 performed four different isometric contractions of their biceps brachii at a preacher curl bench: dominant physical contraction (DomCon), non-dominant physical contraction (NonCon), dominant imagined contraction (DomImagine), and non-dominant imagined contraction (NonImagine). Each contraction was sustained for 5 s followed by 30 s of rest. Motor activity-related cortical potential (MRCP) and event-related spectral perturbation (ERSP) within the right and left hemispheres of the sensorimotor and prefrontal cortices were determined for each condition at 500–1,000 ms and 2,000–2,500 ms after initiation of contraction. MRCP and ERSP were both changed at the 500–1,000 ms time window for all conditions. Changes in the 2,000–2,500 ms window were most consistently observed during physical contractions. While the changes during DomCon occurred in the left (contralateral) side of the brain, the greatest changes observed in MRCP and ERSP occurred in both sides of the brain during the NonCon condition. Further understanding of bilateral changes in brain activity during unilateral tasks is valuable for improving rehabilitation practices through mental and physical exercise.
Review of Clinical Studies Targeting Inflammatory Pathways for Individuals With Autism

Immune dysfunction and abnormal immune response may be associated with certain mechanisms underlying autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The early evidence for this link was based on the increased incidence of ASD in children with a history of maternal infection during pregnancy. Observational studies show increased prevalence of immune-related disorders—ranging from atopy, food allergy, viral infections, asthma, primary immunodeficiency, to autoimmune disorders—in individuals with ASD and their families. Evidence of neuroglial activation and focal brain inflammation in individuals with ASD implies that the central nervous system immunity may also be atypical in some individuals with ASD. Also, both peripheral and central inflammatory responses are suggested to be associated with ASD-related behavioral symptoms. Atypical immune responses may be evident in specific ASD subgroups, such as those with significant gastrointestinal symptoms. The present review aimed to evaluate current literature of potential interventions that target inflammatory pathways for individuals with ASD and to summarize whether these interventions were associated with improvement in autism symptoms and adaptation. We found that the current literature on the efficacy of anti-inflammatory interventions in ASD is still limited and large-scale randomized controlled trials are needed to provide robust evidence. We concluded that the role of immune-mediated mechanisms in the emergence of ASD or related challenges may be specific to subsets of individuals (e.g. those with concurrent immunological disorders, developmental regression, or high irritability). These subsets of individuals of ASD might be more likely to benefit from interventions that target immune-mediated mechanisms and with whom next-stage immune-mediated clinical trials could be conducted.
Peer Attachment and Academic Procrastination in Chinese College Students: A Moderated Mediation Model of Future Time Perspective and Grit

Although prior research has considerably documented the prevalence and correlates of academic procrastination in college students, relatively little is known about the role of longer volitional processes of goal striving, such as grit, on academic procrastination; moreover, the knowledge about direct and interactive effects of social context and personal characteristic on facilitating grit, which in turn mitigate academic procrastination, are still underexplored. Given these gaps in the existing literature, the current study, more exploratory in nature, investigates a moderated mediation model of future time perspective and grit in the association between peer attachment and academic procrastination in Chinese college students. A total of 1,098 undergraduate students (43.2% girls) aged from 18 to 25 were involved in the current study, and participants were asked to fill in a battery of self-report questionnaires. Results indicated that (a) peer attachment was negatively and significantly associated with academic procrastination; (b) grit partially mediated the association between peer attachment and academic procrastination; more precisely, peer attachment was positively associated with grit, which in turn was negatively linked to academic procrastination; and (c) future time perspective moderated the association between peer attachment and grit; more specifically, for students with low levels of future time perspective, the association between peer attachment and grit turned out to be significantly negative. These findings suggest that interventions targeting the enhancement of peer attachment and grit may prevent or reduce academic procrastination, and college students who regard future orientation as pessimistic should be paid specific attention by university-based counseling services.
How Cortisol Reactivity Influences Prosocial Decision-Making: The Moderating Role of Sex and Empathic Concern

The fight and flight theory and the tend-and-befriend theory suggest two opposite behavioral stress responses, and heterogeneous research results revealed the importance of taking sex into account. The experiment was designed to investigate the effect of stress-related cortisol reactivity on subsequent prosocial decision-making behaviors, and the moderating role of sex and empathic concern (EC) in the process. Sixty-one healthy students (34 women, 27 men) underwent the Trier Social Stress Test for Groups (TSST-G) or the control condition. Subsequently, participants completed three economic tasks—the dictator game, the ultimatum game, and the third-party compensation game. Statistical analyses revealed a significant main effect of cortisol reactivity on individuals’ third-party compensation behaviorssex. A sex-specific effect of stress-related cortisol change on prosocial behaviors was found, with men behaving more generously in the dictator game as stress-related cortisol reactivity increased. Furthermore, the level of EC was found to moderate the association between stress-related cortisol change and prosocial behaviors, that individuals with a low level of EC reported more generosity and third-party compensation behaviors. Overall, the present study contributes to a better understanding of the behavioral stress responses, that individuals whose hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis are highly activated in response to stress would exhibit tend-and-befriend responses, but only among men and those with a low level of EC.
Coevolutionary Analysis of Protein Subfamilies by Sequence Reweighting

Extracting structural information from sequence co-variation has become a common computational biology practice in the recent years, mainly due to the availability of large sequence alignments of protein families. However, identifying features that are specific to sub-classes and not shared by all members of the family using sequence-based approaches has remained an elusive problem. We here present a coevolutionary-based method to differentially analyze subfamily specific structural features by a continuous sequence reweighting (SR) approach. We introduce the underlying principles and test its predictive capabilities on the Response Regulator family, whose subfamilies have been previously shown to display distinct, specific homo-dimerization patterns. Our results show that this reweighting scheme is effective in assigning structural features known a priori to subfamilies, even when sequence data is relatively scarce. Furthermore, sequence reweighting allows assessing if individual structural contacts pertain to specific subfamilies and it thus paves the way for the identification specificity-determining contacts from sequence variation data.
On the Impossibility of First-Order Phase Transitions in Systems Modeled by the Full Euler Equations

Liquid–vapor flows exhibiting phase transition, including phase creation in single-phase flows, are of high interest in mathematics, as well as in the engineering sciences. In two preceding articles the authors showed on the one hand the capability of the isothermal Euler equations to describe such phenomena (Hantke and Thein, arXiv, 2017, arXiv:1703.09431). On the other hand they proved the nonexistence of certain phase creation phenomena in flows governed by the full system of Euler equations, see Hantke and Thein, Quart. Appl. Math. 2015, 73, 575–591. In this note, the authors close the gap for two-phase flows by showing that the two-phase flows considered are not possible when the flow is governed by the full Euler equations, together with the regular Rankine-Hugoniot conditions. The arguments rely on the fact that for (regular) fluids, the differences of the entropy and the enthalpy between the liquid and the vapor phase of a single substance have a strict sign below the critical point.
Multiscale Entropy of Cardiac and Postural Control Reflects a Flexible Adaptation to a Cognitive Task

In humans, physiological systems involved in maintaining stable conditions for health and well-being are complex, encompassing multiple interactions within and between system components. This complexity is mirrored in the temporal structure of the variability of output signals. Entropy has been recognized as a good marker of systems complexity, notably when calculated from heart rate and postural dynamics. A degraded entropy is generally associated with frailty, aging, impairments or diseases. In contrast, high entropy has been associated with the elevated capacity to adjust to an ever-changing environment, but the link is unknown between entropy and the capacity to cope with cognitive tasks in a healthy young to middle-aged population. Here, we addressed classic markers (time and frequency domains) and refined composite multiscale entropy (MSE) markers (after pre-processing) of heart rate and postural sway time series in 34 participants during quiet versus cognitive task conditions. Recordings lasted 10 min for heart rate and 51.2 s for upright standing, providing time series lengths of 500–600 and 2048 samples, respectively. The main finding was that entropy increased during cognitive tasks. This highlights the possible links between our entropy measures and the systems complexity that probably facilitates a control remodeling and a flexible adaptability in our healthy participants. We conclude that entropy is a reliable marker of neurophysiological complexity and adaptability in autonomic and somatic systems.
A Novel Residual Dense Pyramid Network for Image Dehazing

Recently, convolutional neural network (CNN) based on the encoder-decoder structure have been successfully applied to image dehazing. However, these CNN based dehazing methods have two limitations: First, these dehazing models are large in size with enormous parameters, which not only consumes much GPU memory, but also is hard to train from scratch. Second, these models, which ignore the structural information at different resolutions of intermediate layers, cannot capture informative texture and edge information for dehazing by stacking more layers. In this paper, we propose a light-weight end-to-end network named the residual dense pyramid network (RDPN) to address the above problems. To exploit the structural information at different resolutions of intermediate layers fully, a new residual dense pyramid (RDP) is proposed as a building block. By introducing a dense information fusion layer and the residual learning module, the RDP can maximize the information flow and extract local features. Furthermore, the RDP further learns the structural information from intermediate layers via a multiscale pyramid fusion mechanism. To reduce the number of network parameters and to ease the training process, we use one RDP in the encoder and two RDPs in the decoder, following a multilevel pyramid pooling layer for incorporating global context features before estimating the final result. The extensive experimental results on a synthetic dataset and real-world images demonstrate that the new RDPN achieves favourable performance compared with some state-of-the-art methods, e.g., the recent densely connected pyramid dehazing network, the all-in-one dehazing network, the enhanced pix2pix dehazing network, pixel-based alpha blending, artificial multi-exposure image fusions and the genetic programming estimator, in terms of accuracy, run time and number of parameters. To be specific, RDPN outperforms all of the above methods in terms of PSNR by at least 4.25 dB. The run time of the proposed method is 0.021 s, and the number of parameters is 1,534,799, only 6% of that used by the densely connected pyramid dehazing network.
Magnetically directed antioxidant and antimicrobial agent: synthesis and surface functionalization of magnetite with quercetin

Oxidative stress can be reduced substantially using nanoantioxidant materials by tuning its surface morphological features up to a greater extent. The physiochemical, biological and optical properties of the nanoantioxidants can be altered by controlling their size and shape. In view of that, an appropriate synthesis technique should be adopted with optimization of the process variables. Properties of magnetite nanoparticles (IONP) can be tailored to upgrade the performance of biomedicine. Present research deals with the functionalization IONP using a hydrophobic agent of quercetin (Q). The application of quercetin will control its size using both the functionalization method including in-situ and post-synthesis technique. In in-situ techniques, the functionalized magnetite nanoparticles (IONP@Q) have average particles size 6 nm which are smaller than the magnetite (IONP) without functionalization. After post functionalization technique, the average particle size of magnetite IONP@Q2 determined was 11 nm. The nanoparticles also showed high saturation magnetization of about 51–59 emu/g. Before starting the experimental lab work, Prediction Activity Spectra of Substances (PASS) software was used to have a preliminary idea about the biological activities of Q. The antioxidant activity was carried out using 2, 2-diphenyl-1-picrylhydrazyl (DPPH) assay. The antibacterial studies were carried out using well diffusion method. The results obtained were well supported by the simulated results. Furthermore, the values of the half maximal inhibitory concentration (IC50) of the DPPH antioxidant assay were decreased using the functionalized one and it exhibited a 2–3 fold decreasing tendency than the unfunctionalized IONP. This exhibited that the functionalization process can easily enhance the free radical scavenging properties of IONPs up to three times. MIC values confirms that functionalized IONP have excellent antibacterial properties against the strains used (Staphylococcus aureus, Bacillus subtilis and Escherichia coli) and fungal strains (Aspergillus niger, Candida albicans, Trichoderma sp. and Saccharomyces cerevisiae). The findings of this research showed that the synthesized nanocomposite has combinatorial properties (magnetic, antioxidant and antimicrobial) which can be considered as a promising candidate for biomedical applications. It can be successfully used for the development of biomedicines which can be subsequently applied as antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, antimicrobial and anticancer agents.