Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Distinct Intensity of Host-Pathogen Interactions in Chlamydia psittaci- and Chlamydia abortus-Infected Chicken Embryos

ABSTRACT Factors and mechanisms determining the differences in virulence and host specificity between the zoonotic agents Chlamydia psittaci and Chlamydia abortus are still largely unknown. In the present study, two strains were compared for their invasiveness, virulence, and capability of eliciting an immune response in chicken embryos. On breeding day 10, embryonated chicken eggs were inoculated with 5 × 104 inclusion-forming units. As shown by immunohistochemistry and quantitative real-time PCR, C. psittaci displayed a significantly better capability of disseminating in the chorioallantoic membrane (CAM) and internal organs than C. abortus. The higher infectious potential of C. psittaci in birds was underlined by significantly higher mRNA expression rates of essential chlamydial genes, such as incA, groEL (in CAM, liver, and spleen), cpaf, and ftsW (in CAM). Although the immune responses to both pathogens were similar, C. psittaci elicited higher macrophage numbers and a stronger expression of a subset of immune-related proteins. The data imply that invasiveness of Chlamydia spp. and propagation in the host are not solely dependent on the level of host immune response but, even to a greater extent, on the expression of bacterial factors related to virulence. The fact that C. psittaci has coped far better than C. abortus with the avian embryo's response by upregulating essential genes may be a key to understanding the mechanisms underlying host adaptation and etiopathology.
The epidemiology of tinnitus

This review considers epidemiological studies of tinnitus published in the decade 1993–2003. Ten studies reported tinnitus prevalence data ranging from 3% to 30%; four found tinnitus prevalence of 10.1%–14.5%. Tinnitus is associated with hearing loss and is positively correlated with the severity of the self‐reported loss or measured hearing impairment. There were no consistent findings with regard to the relationship between tinnitus prevalence and age or gender. For the first time two studies reported incidence data for tinnitus, with findings of 7.0% and 5.7% for 2‐year and 5‐year incidence respectively. Clinical risk factors associated with tinnitus included cardiovascular disease, history of significant middle ear disease and depression. The wide range in tinnitus prevalence appears to be less related to variation in the tinnitus questions used in the studies than to variation in the specification of the severity and/or frequency of the reported tinnitus. Major differences in other methodological aspects persist.
Abscess Formation and Alpha-Hemolysin Induced Toxicity in a Mouse Model of Staphylococcus aureus Peritoneal Infection

ABSTRACT Staphylococcus aureus is a frequent cause of skin infection and sepsis in humans. Preclinical vaccine studies with S. aureus have used a mouse model with intraperitoneal challenge and survival determination as a measure for efficacy. To appreciate the selection of protective antigens in this model, we sought to characterize the pathological attributes of S. aureus infection in the peritoneal cavity. Testing C57BL/6J and BALB/c mice, >109 CFU of S. aureus Newman were needed to produce a lethal outcome in 90% of animals infected via intraperitoneal injection. Both necropsy and histopathology revealed the presence of intraperitoneal abscesses in the vicinity of inoculation sites. Abscesses were comprised of fibrin as well as collagen deposits and immune cells with staphylococci replicating at the center of these lesions. Animals that succumbed to challenge harbored staphylococci in abscess lesions and in blood. The establishment of lethal infections, but not the development of intraperitoneal abscesses, was dependent on S. aureus expression of alpha-hemolysin (Hla). Active immunization with nontoxigenic HlaH35L or passive immunization with neutralizing monoclonal antibodies protected mice against early lethal events associated with intraperitoneal S. aureus infection but did not affect the establishment of abscess lesions. These results characterize a mouse model for the study of intraperitoneal abscess formation by S. aureus, a disease that occurs frequently in humans undergoing continuous ambulatory peritoneal dialysis for end-stage renal disease.
Fecal Microbiota Transplantation Eliminates Clostridium difficile in a Murine Model of Relapsing Disease

ABSTRACT Recurrent Clostridium difficile infection (CDI) is of particular concern among health care-associated infections. The role of the microbiota in disease recovery is apparent given the success of fecal microbiota transplantation (FMT) for recurrent CDI. Here, we present a murine model of CDI relapse to further define the microbiota recovery following FMT. Cefoperazone-treated mice were infected with C. difficile 630 spores and treated with vancomycin after development of clinical disease. Vancomycin treatment suppressed both C. difficile colonization and cytotoxin titers. However, C. difficile counts increased within 7 days of completing treatment, accompanied by relapse of clinical signs. The administration of FMT immediately after vancomycin cleared C. difficile and decreased cytotoxicity within 1 week. The effects of FMT on the gut microbiota community were detectable in recipients 1-day posttransplant. Conversely, mice not treated with FMT remained persistently colonized with high levels of C. difficile, and the gut microbiota in these mice persisted at low diversity. These results suggest that full recovery of colonization resistance against C. difficile requires the restoration of a specific community structure.
EepR Mediates Secreted-Protein Production, Desiccation Survival, and Proliferation in a Corneal Infection Model

ABSTRACT Serratia marcescens is a soil- and water-derived bacterium that secretes several host-directed factors and causes hospital infections and community-acquired ocular infections. The putative two-component regulatory system composed of EepR and EepS regulates hemolysis and swarming motility through transcriptional control of the swrW gene and pigment production through control of the pigA-pigN operon. Here, we identify and characterize a role for EepR in regulation of exoenzyme production, stress survival, cytotoxicity to human epithelial cells, and virulence. Genetic analysis supports the model that EepR is in a common pathway with the widely conserved cyclic-AMP receptor protein that regulates protease production. Together, these data introduce a novel regulator of host-pathogen interactions and secreted-protein production.
Multi-View Video Summarization Using Bipartite Matching Constrained Optimum-Path Forest Clustering

The task of multi-view video summarization is to efficiently represent the most significant information from a set of videos captured for a certain period of time by multiple cameras. The problem is highly challenging because of the huge size of the data, presence of many unimportant frames with low activity, inter-view dependencies, and significant variations in illumination. In this paper, we propose a graph-theoretic solution to the above problems. Semantic feature in form of visual bag of words and visual features like color, texture, and shape are used to model shot representative frames after temporal segmentation . Gaussian entropy is then applied to filter out frames with low activity. Inter-view dependencies are captured via bipartite graph matching. Finally, the optimum-path forest algorithm is applied for the clustering purpose. Subjective as well as objective evaluations clearly indicate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.
Enterococcus faecalis Enhances Cell Proliferation through Hydrogen Peroxide-Mediated Epidermal Growth Factor Receptor Activation

ABSTRACT Enterococcus faecalis is a member of the intestinal and oral microbiota that may affect the etiology of colorectal and oral cancers. The mechanisms by which E. faecalis may contribute to the initiation and progression of these cancers remain uncertain. Epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) signaling is postulated to play a crucial role in oral carcinogenesis. A link between E. faecalis and EGFR signaling in oral cancer has not been elucidated. The present study aimed to evaluate the association between E. faecalis and oral cancer and to determine the underlying mechanisms that link E. faecalis to EGFR signaling. We report the high frequency of E. faecalis infection in oral tumors and the clinical association with EGFR activation. Using human oral cancer cells, we support the clinical findings and demonstrate that E. faecalis can induce EGFR activation and cell proliferation. E. faecalis activates EGFR through production of H2O2, a signaling molecule that activates several signaling pathways. Inhibitors of H2O2 (catalase) and EGFR (gefitinib) significantly blocked E. faecalis-induced EGFR activation and cell proliferation. Therefore, E. faecalis infection of oral tumor tissues suggests a possible association between E. faecalis infection and oral carcinogenesis. Interaction of E. faecalis with host cells and production of H2O2 increase EGFR activation, thereby contributing to cell proliferation.
Micropatterned Macrophage Analysis Reveals Global Cytoskeleton Constraints Induced by Bacillus anthracis Edema Toxin

ABSTRACT Bacillus anthracis secretes the edema toxin (ET) that disrupts the cellular physiology of endothelial and immune cells, ultimately affecting the adherens junction integrity of blood vessels that in turn leads to edema. The effects of ET on the cytoskeleton, which is critical in cell physiology, have not been described thus far on macrophages. In this study, we have developed different adhesive micropatterned surfaces (L and crossbow) to control the shape of bone marrow-derived macrophages (BMDMs) and primary peritoneal macrophages. We found that macrophage F-actin cytoskeleton adopts a specific polar organization slightly different from classical human HeLa cells on the micropatterns. Moreover, ET induced a major quantitative reorganization of F-actin within 16 h with a collapse at the nonadhesive side of BMDMs along the nucleus. There was an increase in size and deformation into a kidney-like shape, followed by a decrease in size that correlates with a global cellular collapse. The collapse of F-actin was correlated with a release of focal adhesion on the patterns and decreased cell size. Finally, the cell nucleus was affected by actin reorganization. By using this technology, we could describe many previously unknown macrophage cellular dysfunctions induced by ET. This novel tool could be used to analyze more broadly the effects of toxins and other virulence factors that target the cytoskeleton.
Content-Aware Video2Comics With Manga-Style Layout

We introduce in this paper a new approach that conveniently converts conversational videos into comics with manga-style layout. With our approach, the manga-style layout of a comic page is achieved in a content-driven manner, and the main components, including panels and word balloons, that constitute a visually pleasing comic page are intelligently organized . Our approach extracts key frames on speakers by using a speaker detection technique such that word balloons can be placed near the corresponding speakers. We qualitatively measure the information contained in a comic page. With the initial layout automatically determined, the final comic page is obtained by maximizing such a measure and optimizing the parameters relating to the optimal display of comics. An efficient Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling algorithm is designed for the optimization. Our user study demonstrates that users much prefer our manga-style comics to purely Western style comics. Extensive experiments and comparisons against previous work also verify the effectiveness of our approach.
CCR: Clustering and Collaborative Representation for Fast Single Image Super-Resolution

Clustering and collaborative representation (CCR) have recently been used in fast single image super-resolution (SR). In this paper, we propose an effective and fast single image super-resolution (SR) algorithm by combining clustering and collaborative representation. In particular, we first cluster the feature space of low-resolution (LR) images into multiple LR feature subspaces and group the corresponding high-resolution (HR) feature subspaces. The local geometry property learned from the clustering process is used to collect numerous neighbor LR and HR feature subsets from the whole feature spaces for each cluster center. Multiple projection matrices are then computed via collaborative representation to map LR feature subspaces to HR subspaces. For an arbitrary input LR feature, the desired HR output can be estimated according to the projection matrix, whose corresponding LR cluster center is nearest to the input. Moreover, by learning statistical priors from the clustering process, our clustering-based SR algorithm would further decrease the computational time in the reconstruction phase. Extensive experimental results on commonly used datasets indicate that our proposed SR algorithm obtains compelling SR images quantitatively and qualitatively against many state-of-the-art methods.
Drug Abusing Women in the Community: The Impact of Drug Court Involvement on Recidivism

Developing community-based options for drug abusing women is important for a variety of reasons. One option that shows promise is the treatment-oriented drug court. Although drug courts enjoy considerable empirical support, relatively few studies have examined the efficacy of this model for women. The current study uses a quasi-experimental design to compare outcomes between a sample of moderate to high-risk drug court participants (n=91) and probationers (n=80). Over the course of an average two year follow-up period, female drug court participants were found to have significantly lower rates of recidivism than their probation counterparts. The results of an event history analysis confirmed that drug court participants were significantly less likely to recidivate even after controlling for differences in length of follow-up. These findings provide support for the ability of drug court programs to successfully treat drug-involved women.
Back Injuries among Nursing Personnel Related to Exposure

Abstract This investigation was undertaken to examine the consistency of epidemiologic studies relating back pain among nursing personnel and exposure to frequent stressful patient handling. A comprehensive literature review resulted in the identification of six studies that included data on both patient handling frequency and back pain prevalence. Data from each study were extracted to provide comparable information for an exposure variable and a health outcome variable. Exposure was characterized as a two-category variable: less frequent and more frequent patient handling. The health outcome variable was prevalence of a back problem according to the definition used in the particular study. Despite differences in specific criteria for characterizing exposure and defining health outcome, all of the studies were consistent in finding larger prevalence rates among those nursing personnel who more frequently performed physically stressful patient handling. Overall, the prevalence rate of those who more frequ.
Deep Relative Attributes

Relative attribute (RA) learning aims to learn the ranking function describing the relative strength of the attribute. Most of current learning approaches learn a linear ranking function for each attribute by use of the hand-crafted visual features. Different from the existing study, in this paper, we propose a novel deep relative attributes (DRA) algorithm to learn visual features and the effective nonlinear ranking function to describe the RA of image pairs in a unified framework. Here, visual features and the ranking function are learned jointly, and they can benefit each other. The proposed DRA model is comprised of five convolutional neural layers, five fully connected layers, and a relative loss function which contains the contrastive constraint and the similar constraint corresponding to the ordered image pairs and the unordered image pairs, respectively. To train the DRA model effectively, we make use of the transferred knowledge from the large scale visual recognition on ImageNet [1] to the RA learning task. We evaluate the proposed DRA model on three widely used datasets. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed DRA model consistently and significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art RA learning methods. On the public OSR, PubFig, and Shoes datasets, compared with the previous RA learning results [2], the average ranking accuracies have been significantly improved by about 8%, 9%, and 14%, respectively.
CD46 Transgenic Mouse Model of Necrotizing Fasciitis Caused by Streptococcus pyogenes Infection

ABSTRACT We developed a human CD46-expressing transgenic (Tg) mouse model of subcutaneous (s.c.) infection into both hind footpads with clinically isolated 11 group A streptococcus (GAS) serotype M1 strains. When the severity levels of foot lesions at 72 h and the mortality rates by 336 h were compared after s.c. infection with 1 × 107 CFU of each GAS strain, the GAS472 strain, isolated from the blood of a patient suffering from streptococcal toxic shock syndrome (STSS), induced the highest severity levels and mortality rates. GAS472 led to a 100% mortality rate in CD46 Tg mice after only 168 h postinfection through the supervention of severe necrotizing fasciitis (NF) of the feet. In contrast, GAS472 led to a 10% mortality rate in non-Tg mice through the supervention of partial necrotizing cutaneous lesions of the feet. The footpad skin sections of CD46 Tg mice showed hemorrhaging and necrotic striated muscle layers in the dermis, along with the exfoliation of epidermis with intracellular edema until 48 h after s.c. infection with GAS472. Thereafter, the bacteria proliferated, reaching a 90-fold or 7-fold increase in the livers of CD46 Tg mice or non-Tg mice, respectively, for 24 h between 48 and 72 h after s.c. infection with GAS472. As a result, the infected CD46 Tg mice appeared to suffer severe liver injuries. These findings suggest that human CD46 enhanced the progression of NF in the feet and the exponential growth of bacteria in deep tissues, leading to death.
A novel time domain approach for the downlink pilot design of multiantenna OFDM systems

A novel time domain approach is introduced for the downlink pilot design of multiantenna OFDM systems. Zero correlation zone sequence sets are used to construct the pilot sequences so that the intra-and inter-cell interferences between pilots are cancelled. The pilot sequences are superimposed on the time domain data signals directly and keep interference-free because of the special frequency domain property of sequences. The overhead of pilots can adapt the number of the transmit antennas. Analysis, typical design example and numerical results demonstrate that a good performance-to-complexity tradeoff and lower pilot overhead compared to traditional frequency domain approaches can be obtained by the proposed approach.
Small RNA teg49 Is Derived from a sarA Transcript and Regulates Virulence Genes Independent of SarA in Staphylococcus aureus

ABSTRACT Expression of virulence factors in Staphylococcus aureus is regulated by a wide range of transcriptional regulators, including proteins and small RNAs (sRNAs), at the level of transcription and/or translation. The sarA locus consists of three overlapping transcripts generated from three distinct promoters, all containing the sarA open reading frame (ORF). The 5′ untranslated regions (UTRs) of these transcripts contain three separate regions ∼711, 409, and 146 nucleotides (nt) upstream of the sarA translation start, the functions of which remain unknown. Recent transcriptome-sequencing (RNA-Seq) analysis and subsequent characterization indicated that two sRNAs, teg49 and teg48, are processed and likely produced from the sarA P3 and sarA P1 transcripts of the sarA locus, respectively. In this report, we utilized a variety of sarA promoter mutants and cshA and rnc mutants to ascertain the contributions of these factors to the generation of teg49. We also defined the transcriptional regulon of teg49, including virulence genes not regulated by SarA. Phenotypically, teg49 did not impact biofilm formation or affect overall SarA expression significantly. Comparative analyses of RNA-Seq data between the wild-type, teg49 mutant, and sarA mutant strains indicated that ∼133 genes are significantly upregulated while 97 are downregulated in a teg49 deletion mutant in a sarA-independent manner. An abscess model of skin infection indicated that the teg49 mutant exhibited a reduced bacterial load compared to the wild-type S. aureus. Overall, these results suggest that teg49 sRNA has a regulatory role in target gene regulation independent of SarA. The exact mechanism of this regulation is yet to be dissected.
Systematic Analysis of Two-Component Systems in Citrobacter rodentium Reveals Positive and Negative Roles in Virulence

ABSTRACT Citrobacter rodentium is a murine pathogen used to model intestinal infections caused by the human diarrheal pathogens enterohemorrhagic and enteropathogenic Escherichia coli. During infection, bacteria use two-component systems (TCSs) to detect changing environmental cues within the host, allowing for rapid adaptation by altering the expression of specific genes. In this study, 26 TCSs were identified in C. rodentium, and quantitative PCR (qPCR) analysis showed that they are all expressed during murine infection. These TCSs were individually deleted, and the in vitro and in vivo effects were analyzed to determine the functional consequences. In vitro analyses only revealed minor differences, and surprisingly, type III secretion (T3S) was only affected in the ΔarcA strain. Murine infections identified 7 mutants with either attenuated or increased virulence. In agreement with the in vitro T3S assay, the ΔarcA strain was attenuated and defective in colonization and cell adherence. The ΔrcsB strain was among the most highly attenuated strains. The decrease in virulence of this strain may be associated with changes to the cell surface, as Congo red binding was altered, and qPCR revealed that expression of the wcaA gene, which has been implicated in colanic acid production in other bacteria, was drastically downregulated. The ΔuvrY strain exhibited increased virulence compared to the wild type, which was associated with a significant increase in bacterial burden within the mesenteric lymph nodes. The systematic analysis of virulence-associated TCSs and investigation of their functions during infection may open new avenues for drug development.