Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
USE OF ANTITHYMOCYTE GLOBULIN FOR REVERSAL OF ACUTE ALLOGRAFT REJECTION

A prospective randomized study evaluating the effectiveness of antithymocyte globulin (ATG) for reversal of established rejection was undertaken in 20 recipients of related donor renal allografts. The patients were initially treated with azathioprine and prednisone. With the onset of acute rejection they were randomly assigned to additional treatment with either ATG or high-dose steroids. Eight of 10 patients treated with ATG had prompt reversal of acute rejection and have had no further evidence of rejection. Two of the patients had continuing evidence of rejection after several days of ATG treatment and therefore received high-dose steroids as well. One patient regained normal function but the second suffered repeated rejection episodes which eventually resulted in allograft failure. All 10 patients treated with high-dose steroids had initial reversal of rejection, although four required irradiation of the graft and actinomycin therapy as well and five patients subsequently required treatment for second and third rejection episodes. One patient in this group died with perforated divertic-ulitis following reversal of rejection. With a mean followup of 14 months, 9 of 10 patients treated with ATG have functional allografts, renal function being normal in 8 patients. Nine of 10 patients treated with steroids have functional grafts but renal function remains impaired in three. The effectiveness of ATG when added at the time of acute allograft rejection has been demonstrated. The major advantage of ATG for rejection reversal has been a marked decrease in the cumulative steroid dose administered to these patients. This may avoid many long-term adverse effects of steroids such as the fatal diverticulitis complication observed in this study. An additional suggested benefit is a decreased incidence of second rejection episodes in the ATG-treated patients.
Expression of a novel cytokine, IL-4delta2, in HIV and HIV–tuberculosis co-infection

Background:Correcting the Th2 shift in HIV/AIDS represents a potential intervention strategy. However data on interleukin (IL)-4 expression in HIV or AIDS are un-interpretable because of failure to distinguish between IL-4 and its splice variant and natural antagonist, IL-4δ2. Objective:To determine Th1 [interferon (IFN)-γ], IL-4δ2 and Th2 (IL-4) expression in whole blood and lung lavage from healthy volunteers and in HIV or HIV–tuberculosis (TB) co-infection. Design:Cross-sectional with prospective cohort. Methods:Expression of IL-4δ2, IL-4 and IFN-γ were determined by quantitative real-time PCR, using unstimulated cells from whole blood and lung lavage, in 20 HIV–TB (pulmonary) co-infected patients, 20 matched HIV-positive controls and 20 HIV-negative healthy volunteers. Results were correlated with plasma viral load, CD4 cell counts, radiological scores and response to anti-TB treatment. Results:Compared to HIV negative donors, stable HIV-positive donors did not have increased levels of mRNA encoding IL-4, IL-4δ2 or IFN-γ in blood or lavage. By contrast, the HIV–TB co-infected donors had increased IL-4 and IFN-γ in both compartments. However the antagonist, IL-4δ2 was increased only in lavage. Consequently the dominant form was IL-4δ2 in lavage, but IL-4 itself in blood. The lung IL-4/IFN-γ ratio correlated with radiological disease extent. With anti-TB treatment, IL-4 levels did not change whilst IL-4δ2 levels increased significantly. Conclusions:IL-4 and its natural antagonist, IL-4δ2 and are not upregulated in the absence of opportunistic infection. However in HIV-TB co-infection both cytokines increase in lung, but only IL-4 in the periphery. Further studies are required to determine if IL-4 facilitates systemic HIV progression.
Role of ΔNp63γ in Epithelial to Mesenchymal Transition*

Although members of the p63 family of transcription factors are known for their role in the development and differentiation of epithelial surfaces, their function in cancer is less clear. Here, we show that depletion of the ΔNp63α and β isoforms, leaving only ΔNp63γ, results in epithelial to mesenchymal transition (EMT) in the normal breast cell line MCF10A. EMT can be rescued by the expression of the ΔNp63α isoform. We also show that ΔNp63γ expressed in a background where all the other ΔNp63 are knocked down causes EMT with an increase in TGFβ-1, -2, and -3 and downstream effectors Smads2/3/4. In addition, a p63 binding site in intron 1 of TGFβ was identified. Inhibition of the TGFβ response with a specific inhibitor results in reversion of EMT in ΔNp63α- and β-depleted cells. In summary, we show that p63 is involved in inhibiting EMT and reduction of certain p63 isoforms may be important in the development of epithelial cancers.
Design of Compact Air-Vias-Perforated SIW Horn Antenna With Partially Detached Broad Walls

A novel substrate-integrated waveguide (SIW) horn antenna with partially detached broad walls is designed and analyzed. The conventional SIW horn antenna suffers from narrow-operating bandwidth, which mainly results from the mismatch at the horn aperture between the substrate and the free space. However, the detachment of the broad walls makes the left substrate not only act as wave-guiding structure but also impedance transformer, which brings much size reduction in comparison with conventional SIW horn antenna. Moreover, the substrate with graded dielectric constants distributed in the propagating direction is realized through perforating air-vias with different diameters to further improve the radiation performance. Results indicate that the proposed antenna operates from 17.7 to 26.7 GHz with a nearly constant peak-radiating gain between 8 and 9 dBi at end-fire direction. Stable end-fire radiation patterns can be realized in the whole operating band. Above all, the proposed technology makes it compact to design SIW horn antenna of high performance without extra extension after the aperture of the radiating horn.
Forensic acquisition and analysis of volatile data in memory=Forensische Sicherung und Auswertung flüchtiger Daten im Hauptspeicher

Standard procedures in computer forensics mainly describe the acquisition and analysis of persistent data, e.g., of hard drives or attached devices. However, due to the increasing storage capacity of these media and, correspondingly, significantly larger data volumes, creating forensically-sound duplicates and recovering valuable artifacts in time gets more and more challenging. Moreover, with the wide availability of free and easy-to-use encryption technologies, a growing number of individuals actively try to protect personal information against unauthorized access. If a suspect is unwilling to share the respective decryption key such measures can therefore quickly thwart an investigation. Last but not least, many sophisticated malicious applications entirely run in memory to date and do not leave any traces on hard disks anymore. Solely focusing on traditional sources can thus lead to an incomplete or inaccurate picture of an incident. In order to cope with these issues, researchers have proposed alternative investigative strategies and extracting pieces of evidence from a computer's RAM. For this purpose, a so-called memory snapshot is taken and inspected offline on a trusted workstation. These activities known as memory forensics have gained broad attention among practitioners over the last years, primarily because operations are repeatable and may be safely verified by other experts without polluting the system environment as, for instance, in a live response situation. In this thesis, we give a comprehensive overview of fundamental concepts and approaches for seizing as well as examining volatile information. It consists of two parts: In the first part, we formalize criteria for sound memory imaging and illustrate the characteristics, benefits, and drawbacks of proven acquisition technologies available on the market to date. As we will see, especially for software-based solutions it is difficult to produce reliable memory snapshots, because the system state cannot be effectively frozen during runtime. With the help of an evaluation platform that we have developed in the course of the dissertation period, the performance and quality of software imagers can be thoroughly assessed for the first time. In the second part of this thesis, we explain how common system compromise and manipulation techniques as they are typically employed by rootkits or other types of intelligent malware can be discovered during memory analysis. We also present rkfinder, a new plug-in for the popular, open source forensic suite DFF that facilitates some of these tasks. Rkfinder implements cross-viewing algorithms for checking the integrity of a machine and detecting possible inconsistencies that indicate the presence of a threat. By automatically highlighting suspicious resources that are likely to have been tampered with, even less experienced investigators are able to identify system areas that require particular attention. Thereby, potential sources of an intrusion can be quickly found and addressed.
Efficiently querying dynamic XML documents stored in relational database systems

Storing XML documents in relational database systems has become a widely used solution. However, in the process of shredding and indexing the XML document, the use of special labelling methods to recover the document order is still required in order to efficiently support data-centric queries and update operations (e.g., the addition and deletion of nodes from the document). In this paper, we present a new space-efficient labelling scheme based on Dewey codes. The new label structure, which is composed of parent-child components in the Dewey format, would significantly improve the performance of XML queries that are based on parent-child and sibling relationships. Furthermore, we introduce an alternative approach to validate ancestor relationships and to navigate upwards in XML trees efficiently. We report on an extensive experimental evaluation using several well-known XML benchmarks for the comparison of the impact of our approach on label length and query performance against those of some other recent Dewey-based approaches.
Solving Multicommodity Flow Problems with a Primal Embedded Network Simplex Algorithm

This article describes the authors’ experience solving large multicommodity flow problems with an embedded network simplex algorithm augmented with a fast-start heuristic for choosing an initial basis. The heuristic makes successive capacity allocations in an attempt to find a feasible initial basis. Our implementation of the heuristic makes use of piece-wise linear convex costs. The efficacy of our heuristic, and of the embedded network simplex method, is demonstrated on large publicly available multicommodity flow problems. Comparisons with other published computational results are given.
Slums in Semi-Arid Regions: An Analysis of the Vulnerability and Coping Strategies of Selected Neighbourhoods in the Wa Municipality, Ghana

This study investigates the vulnerability of slum dwellers and the resulting coping strategies of three spontaneous neighbourhoods in the Wa Municipality of Ghana. The study relied on mixed methods with questionnaire administration as its main data collection technique focusing on the social, economic and environmental dimensions of slums. It found that, even among slum close neighbourhoods, the overall degree of vulnerability varies thereby representing a potential source of dynamic resource for small cites. Slums selected are less vulnerable to environmental issues than socioeconomic dimensions. The sustainability challenges therefore lie within the improvement of social and economic choices. An identification of place based capabilities, opportunities and localised constraints could serve as basis for designing of an appropriate planned intervention.
From parental-fetal attachment to a parent-infant relationship: a systematic review about prenatal protective and risk factors

Developing an attachment to an unborn child is considered a milestone in the future parents’ developmental trajectory. Furthermore, the quality of the parent-fetus relationship is related to the quality of the postnatal parent-infant relationship. We have aimed to provide an overview of the recent findings highlighting factors that can influence parental prenatal attachment and the postpartum parent-child relationship. PubMed and PsycINFO were systematically explored looking for longitudinal studies, published from 2005 to 2016, reporting clearly the prenatal attachment measures used. We found 28 studies heterogeneous for sampling techniques, sample size and periods of assessment. Studies considered a broad range of individual, relational and contextual variables as potential risk or
Effect of soy protein supplementation in patients with chronic hepatitis C: a randomized clinical trial.

AIM To evaluate the effects of soy supplementation on insulin resistance, fatty liver and alanine aminotransferase (ALT) levels in non-diabetic patients with chronic hepatitis C (CHC). METHODS In a prospective, randomized and single-blinded clinical trial, we compared patients with CHC who had casein as a supplement (n = 80) (control group), with patients who consumed a soy supplement diet (n = 80) [intervention group (IG)]. Both groups received 32 g/d of protein for 12 wk. RESULTS Patients' baseline features showed that 48.1% were overweight, 43.7% had abdominal fat accumulation, 34.7% had hepatic steatosis and 36.3% had an homeostasis model assessment index of insulin resistance (HOMA-IR) ≥ 3.0. Descriptive analysis showed that protein supplementation diet reduced hepatic steatosis in both groups; however, significant reductions in ALT levels occurred in the soy group. Multiple regression modeling indicated that in the presence of severe fibrosis (F3/F4), γ glutamyl transferase elevation and high density lipoprotein (HDL) reduction, the intervention group had 75% less chance of developing hepatic steatosis (OR= 0.25; 95% CI: 0.06-0.82) and 55% less chance of presenting with an ALT level ≥ 1.5 × the upper limit of normal (ULN) (OR = 0.45, 95% CI: 0.22-0.89). Soy treatment did not have any effect on insulin resistance (OR = 1.92; 95% CI: 0.80-4.83), which might be attributed to the fact that the HOMA-IR values at baseline in most of our patients were in the normal range. Advanced hepatic fibrosis, an ALT level > 1.5 × ULN and visceral fat were predictors of an HOMA-IR ≥ 3. The IG group had a reduced risk of an ALT level > 1.5 × ULN. An HOMA-IR ≥ 3.0 and HDL < 35 mg/dL were also risk factors for increased ALT. CONCLUSION Soy supplementation decreased ALT levels and thus may improve liver inflammation in hepatitis C virus (HCV) patients; it also reduced hepatic steatosis in a subgroup of patients but did not change insulin resistance. It should be considered in the nutritional care of HCV patients.
Energy-Based Design of Powertrain for a Re-Engineered Post-Transmission Hybrid Electric Vehicle

This paper presents a systematic approach for the design of post-transmission hybrid electric vehicle powertrains, as an instrument aiding the designer in making the right decision. In particular, a post-transmission series/parallel hybrid electric powertrain is considered, and all of the possible energy paths are taken into account, in order to automatically select the configuration that gives the lowest fuel consumption, thus better fitting to the considered mission. The optimization problem is solved with the Dijkstra algorithm, which is more computationally efficient than other optimization algorithms in the case of massive design spaces. In this way, it is possible to design a vehicle in terms of architecture and component sizes, without making any a priori choices, which are usually based on common sense, likely compromising the overall system efficiency. In order to demonstrate the effectiveness of the methodology, different driving cycles have been simulated, and some results are presented. The methodology is particularly applied to re-engineered vehicles, aimed at maximizing the benefits of the vehicle hybridization process. Results show how the introduction, in the optimization algorithm, of the engine load factor and sharing factor, for the engine torque split between the generator and the wheels, is crucial. For example, a 10% reduction of the original engine size, suggested by a low load factor, is able to allow for a 24% reduction in the fuel consumption. On the other hand, the sharing factor is of particular importance in suggesting if the vehicle architecture should be series, parallel or rather combined.
Current knowledge of pancreatic carcinogenesis in the hamster and its relevance to the human disease

Syrian hamsters present a unique species for induction of pancreatic tumors that in many aspects resemble human pancreatic cancer. The specific response of Syrian hamsters, in contrast to many other rodents, for development of pancreatic ductal (ductular) tumors is not yet known. All pancreatic carcinogens thus far tested show certain common features. They are all nitrosamines that possess or can be metabolized to compounds with 2‐oxopropyl‐ or 2‐hydroxypropyl substituents. All but one, N‐nitrosomethyl(2‐oxopropyl)amine, occur or metabolize to nitrosamines with the ability to cyclize and form structures resembling glucose. Hence it is suggested that this cyclic structure may be responsible for the pancreatic carcinogenicity of these nitrosamines, as has been proposed for the pancreatotropic effect of streptozotocin. It is also of further interest that one pancreatic ductal (ductular) carcinogen, N‐nitroso‐2‐methoxy‐2,6‐dimethylmorpholine, which possesses a totally cyclic structure, acts, like streptozotocin, as β‐cell cytotoxic and diabetogenic when given in a high single dose. Modification of pancreatic tumor induction has been demonstrated by specific procedures. A high fat diet significantly increases both the incidence and number of induced cancers. Methods for early diagnosis and therapy are being developed and their significance and applicabilities for clinical use will be of major importance. Compared with the other most common types of human cancer, pancreatic cancer has extraordinary characteristics, which make the disease one of the most mysterious of maladies. Consequently, pancreatic cancer represents a serious international problem and requires urgent resolution, especially with regard to its etiology, early diagnosis, prevention, and therapy.
Activity‐dependent Wnt 7 dendritic targeting in hippocampal neurons: Plasticity‐ and tagging‐related retrograde signaling mechanism?

Wnt proteins have emerged as transmembrane signaling molecules that regulate learning and memory as well as synaptic plasticity at central synapses (Inestrosa and Arenas (2010) Nat Rev Neurosci 11:77‐86; Maguschak and Ressler (2011) J Neurosci 31:13057‐13067; Tabatadze et al. (2012) Hippocampus 22: 1228‐1241; Fortress et al. (2013) J Neurosci 33:12619‐12626). For example, there is both a training‐selective and Wnt isoform‐specific increase in Wnt 7 levels in hippocampus seven days after spatial learning in rats (Tabatadze et al. (2012) Hippocampus 22: 1228‐1241). Despite growing interest in Wnt signaling pathways in the adult brain, intracellular distribution and release of Wnt molecules from synaptic compartments as well as their influence on synaptic strength and connectivity remain less well understood. As a first step in such an analysis, we show here that Wnt 7 levels in primary hippocampal cells are elevated by potassium or glutamate activation in a time‐dependent manner. Subsequent Wnt 7 elevation in dendrites suggests selective somato‐dendritic trafficking followed by transport from dendrites to their spines. Wnt 7 elevation is also TTX‐reversible, establishing that its elevation is indeed an activity‐dependent process. A second stimulation given 6 h after the first significantly reduces Wnt 7 levels in dendrites 3 h later as compared to non‐stimulated controls suggesting activity‐dependent Wnt 7 release from dendrites and spines. In a related experiment designed to mimic the release of Wnt 7, exogenous recombinant Wnt 7 increased the number of active zones in presynaptic terminals as indexed by bassoon. This suggests the formation of new presynaptic release sites and/or presynaptic terminals. Wnt signaling inhibitor sFRP‐1 completely blocked this Wnt 7‐induced elevation of bassoon cluster number and cluster area. We suggest that Wnt 7 is a plasticity‐related protein involved in the regulation of presynaptic plasticity via a retrograde signaling mechanism as previously proposed (Routtenberg (1999) Trends in Neuroscience 22:255‐256). These findings provide support for this proposal, which offers a new perspective on the synaptic tagging mechanism (Redondo and Morris (2011) Nat Rev Neurosci 12:17‐30). © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Recombinant human bone morphogenetic protein‐2 maintains the articular chondrocyte phenotype in long‐term culture

Bone morphogenetic proteins have been shown to increase matrix synthesis by articular chondrocytes in short‐term cultures. Members of this family of proteins have also been shown to induce endochondral ossification in vivo. The present study was performed to determine if the addition of human recombinant bone morphogenetic protein‐2 to a long‐term monolayer articular chondrocyte cell culture system affected the ability of the chondrocytes to divide in vitro, whether the cytokine altered expression of the articular chondrocyte phenotype and synthesis of matrix proteoglycans, and whether the cytokine was capable of inducing differentiation to a hypertrophic chondrocyte. Human recombinant bone morphogenetic protein‐2 did not alter cell proliferation. It caused 3.5–6.2 times more proteoglycan synthesis by articular chondrocytes during each of the time points tested after 4 days in culture. Total proteoglycan accumulation in the extracellular matrix after 28 days in culture was 6.7 times as great in the treated cultures as in the control. Treatment with human recombinant bone morphogenetic protein‐2 maintained the articular chondrocyte phenotype of cells in culture as demonstrated by Northern blot analysis: the expression of type‐I collagen genes was increased and that of type‐II collagen and aggrecan mRNA was lost in untreated chondrocyte cultures after 14–21 days in culture. In contrast, exposure to 100 ng/ml human recombinant bone morphogenetic protein‐2 maintained expression of type‐II collagen and increased expression of aggrecan compared with controls during the 28‐day culture period. Northern blot analysis of the expression of type‐X collagen and osteocalcin by chondrocytes treated with human recombinant bone morphogenetic protein‐2 showed a lack of expression of these genes, indicating no alteration in phenotype. These experiments demonstrated the ability of human recombinant bone morphogenetic protein‐2 to promote the articular chondrocyte phenotype and matrix synthesis in long‐term culture. Characteristics of cell growth were not affected, and the cytokine did not induce differentiation to a hypertrophic chondrocyte.
The fetal origin of adult diseases

In the last decade, the development of Barker's hypothesis of fetal programming opened the field for extensive research into the fetal origin of adult diseases. The association between low birth weight, which reflects intrauterine nutritional status, and the development of adult diseases has been confirmed in many studies for type 2 diabetes, hypertension and coronary heart diseases. Many other adulthood diseases were investigated for the same association with variable outcomes. These will be presented in this review.