Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Arabidopsis Type I Proton-Pumping Pyrophosphatase Expresses Strongly in Phloem, Where It Is Required for Pyrophosphate Metabolism and Photosynthate Partitioning1[OPEN]

The type I H+-PPase is a key component of the sieve element-companion cell complexes and involved in phloem loading in Arabidopsis. Phloem loading is a critical process in plant physiology. The potential of regulating the translocation of photoassimilates from source to sink tissues represents an opportunity to increase crop yield. Pyrophosphate homeostasis is crucial for normal phloem function in apoplasmic loaders. The involvement of Arabidopsis (Arabidopsis thaliana) type I proton-pumping pyrophosphatase (AVP1) in phloem loading was analyzed at genetic, histochemical, and physiological levels. A transcriptional AVP1 promoter::GUS fusion revealed phloem activity in source leaves. Ubiquitous AVP1 overexpression (35S::AVP1 cassette) enhanced shoot biomass, photoassimilate production and transport, rhizosphere acidification, and expression of sugar-induced root ion transporter genes (POTASSIUM TRANSPORTER2 [KUP2], NITRATE TRANSPORTER2.1 [NRT2.1], NRT2.4, and PHOSPHATE TRANSPORTER1.4 [PHT1.4]). Phloem-specific AVP1 overexpression (Commelina Yellow Mottle Virus promoter [pCOYMV]::AVP1) elicited similar phenotypes. By contrast, phloem-specific AVP1 knockdown (pCoYMV::RNAiAVP1) resulted in stunted seedlings in sucrose-deprived medium. We also present a promoter mutant avp1-2 (SALK046492) with a 70% reduction of expression that did not show severe growth impairment. Interestingly, AVP1 protein in this mutant is prominent in the phloem. Moreover, expression of an Escherichia coli-soluble pyrophosphatase in the phloem (pCoYMV::pyrophosphatase) of avp1-2 plants resulted in severe dwarf phenotype and abnormal leaf morphology. We conclude that the Proton-Pumping Pyrophosphatase AVP1 localized at the plasma membrane of the sieve element-companion cell complexes functions as a synthase, and that this activity is critical for the maintenance of pyrophosphate homeostasis required for phloem function.
The Chiropractic Care of Patients With Cancer

Background and Significance: Cancer is the leading cause of death worldwide and accounted for 7.4 million deaths in 2004. By 2030, deaths from cancer have been estimated at 12 million with 30% being preventable. Complementary and alternative medicine remains popular among cancer patients; particularly with chiropractic services. However, the nature of the chiropractic clinical encounter and its reported benefits remains to be fully investigated. Towards these efforts, we begin with a systematic review of the literature on the chiropractic care of patients with cancer. Methods: The following electronic databases were searched: MANTIS [1965-2010]; Index to Chiropractic Literature [1984-2010]; Pubmed [1966-2010]; Medline [1965-2010] EMBASE [1974-2010], AMED [1975-2010], CINAHL Plus [1965-2010], Alt-Health Watch [1965-2010] and PsychINFO [1965-2010]. Key words used were “cancer” and “neoplasm” in Boolean combination with “chiropractic. ” Primary investigation/reports in peer-reviewed English journals involving chiropractic care were reviewed. Results: Our review revealed 60 case reports, 2 case series, 21 commentaries, 2 survey studies, and 2 literature reviews. The case reports were diagnostic with commentaries highlighting the importance of recognizing the patient presenting with NMS complaints due to an underlying neoplasm. The chiropractic clinical encounter prior to cancer diagnosis and subsequent medical referral is poorly characterized in the literature. Conclusion: Patients with cancer seek the care of chiropractors. The literature does not reflect or describe the totality of the chiropractic clinical encounter. We encourage further research in this field.
Overview of ImageCLEFcaption 2017 - Image Caption Prediction and Concept Detection for Biomedical Images

This paper presents an overview of the ImageCLEF 2017 caption tasks on the analysis of images from the biomedical literature. Two subtasks were proposed to the participants: a concept detection task and caption prediction task, both using only images as input. The two subtasks tackle the problem of providing image interpretation by extracting concepts and predicting a caption based on the visual information of an image alone. A dataset of 184,000 ﬁgure-caption pairs from the biomedical open access literature (PubMed Central) are provided as a testbed with the majority of them as trainign data and then 10,000 as validation and 10,000 as test data. Across two tasks, 11 participating groups submitted 71 runs. While the domain remains challenging and the data highly heterogeneous, we can note some surprisingly good results of the diﬃcult task with a quality that could be beneﬁcial for health applications by better exploiting the visual content of biomedical ﬁgures.
Race/skin color and mental health disorders in Brazil: a systematic review of the literature.

Mental health disorders contribute a significant burden to society. This systematic literature review aims to summarize the current state of the literature on race/skin color and mental health disorders in Brazil. METHODS PubMed and Lilacs were searched using descriptors for mental health disorders (depression, anxiety, Common Mental Disorders, psychiatric morbidity, etc.) and race to find studies conducted in Brazil. Studies of non-population groups, that did not analyze race/skin color, or for which the mental disorder was not the object of study were excluded. After evaluation of quality, 14 articles were selected for inclusion. There was an overall higher prevalence of mental health disorders in non-Whites. Of the six multivariate analyses that found statistically significant results, five indicated a greater prevalence or odds of mental health disorder in non-Whites compared to Whites (measure of association between 1.18-1.85). This review identified the trend in the literature regarding the association between race and mental health disorders. However, important difficulties complicate the comparability of the studies, principally in function of the differences in the mental health disorders studied, the method of categorizing race/skin color, and the screening tools used in the studies analyzed.
Detecting drought impact on terrestrial biosphere carbon fluxes over contiguous US with satellite observations

With projections of increasing drought in the future, understanding how the natural carbon cycle responds to drought events is needed to predict the fate of the land carbon sink and future atmospheric CO2 concentrations and climate. We quantified the impacts of the 2011 and 2012 droughts on terrestrial ecosystem carbon uptake anomalies over the contiguous US (CONUS) relative to non-drought years during 2010–2015 using satellite observations and the carbon monitoring system—flux inversion modeling framework. Soil moisture and temperature anomalies are good predictors of gross primary production anomalies (R2 > 0.6) in summer but less so for net biosphere production (NBP) anomalies, reflecting different respiration responses. We showed that regional responses combine in complicated ways to produce the observed CONUS responses. Because of the compensating effect of the carbon flux anomalies between northern and southern CONUS in 2011 and between spring and summer in 2012, the annual NBP decreased by 0.10 ± 0.16 GtC in 2011, and increased by 0.10 ± 0.16 GtC in 2012 over CONUS, consistent with previous reported results. Over the 2011 and 2012 drought-impacted regions, the reductions in NBP were ∼40% of the regional annual fossil fuel emissions, underscoring the importance of quantifying natural carbon flux variability as part of an overall observing strategy. The NBP reductions over the 2011 and 2012 CONUS drought-impacted region were opposite to the global atmospheric CO2 growth rate anomaly, implying that global atmospheric CO2 growth rate is an offsetting effect between enhanced uptake and emission, and enhancing the understanding of regional carbon-cycle climate relationship is necessary to improve the projections of future climate.
The Natural History of Abdominal Aortic Aneurysm

Abstract There is now sufficient published evidence to describe with confidence much but not all of the natural history of AAA. AAA of 4.0–5.5 cm in diameter have a rupture rate of 0.7–1.0% per year and for AAA < 4.0 cm this rate is even lower. Women appear to have a higher rupture rate than men for small aAa, but there is no evidence of this for AAA > 5.5 cm. Median enlargement rate of AAA 4.0–5.5 cm is about 0.3 cm per year. Enlargement rate is influenced by AAA diameter, being approximately half this rate for AAA 3.0–4.0 cm and half again faster for AAA > 5.5 cm. There is, however, considerable individual variability in enlargement rates and a variety of diseases and conditions appear to influence these rates. Rupture rates of AAA > 5.5 cm in fit individuals are unknown and unlikely to be known in the future. However, for unfit individuals with AAA > 5.5 cm, the rupture rate is high, starting at about 10% per year and increasing by several fold in the largest AAA. The search is on for drugs to favorably alter this natural history, and if successful, will doubtless shed much light on the pathophysiology of AAA enlargement.
An improved XGBoost based on weighted column subsampling for object classification

Object classification is one of main problems in computer vision and lots of state-of-the-art machine learning methods have been proposed recently. Traditional classifier may have the drawback of low effectiveness for image representations. In this paper, an improved eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) based on weighted column (feature) subsampling is proposed to classify image representations for object classification. The contributions of the paper are as follows. First, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) pre-trained on large-scale image database ILSVRC and fine-tuned on PASCAL VOC 2012 dataset is used to extract features from object images. Besides, we concatenate multiple layers of learned features to obtain more information of image contents for determining their categories. Second, due to the high dimensional of extracted features, feature redundancy will unavoidably be incurred, so a weighted column subsampling method is proposed to applied to XGBoost algorithm, in order to draw the features by the importance during growing each tree. Futhermore, our proposed method is general, which can be easily extended to other methods which need column subsampling, when the feature of data is high dimensional and redundant. Finally, we validate performance of proposed method on the PASCAL VOC 2007 dataset. Compared with four typical methods, the proposed method has superior average precision (AP) on 5 out of 20 classes, e.g. the AP of person class we obtained is 92.1, 1% higher than that of best method mentioned above.
The Acquisition of Tense, Modal and Aspect markers in Jamaican Creole

This work offers an analysis of the development of Tense, Modal and Aspect (TMA) markers as observed in the spontaneous speech of 6 children acquiring Jamaican Creole (JC). In JC, TMA markers overtly show a rich functional hierarchy, which is generally found across creole languages, and is arguably universal. The analyses detail how this functional structure is acquired, revealing that children are knowledgeable of the rules governing TMA combinations and do not entertain target-inconsistent orders. This suggests that children are aware of the articulate cartographic hierarchy as attested in the target language. Additionally, we note that the distribution of the markers in child production is skewed in the same direction as in the input data; however, differences between children’s productions as compared to their linguistic environment provide evidence that input alone cannot account for the development of TMA markers in child production
Family history, place and season of birth as risk factors for schizophrenia in Denmark: A replication and reanalysis

Background Although a family history of schizophrenia is the strongest individual risk factor for schizophrenia, environmental factors related to urbanicity may contribute to a substantial proportion of the population occurrence of the disease. Aims This study replicates previous findings in four mutually exclusive Danish study populations, including out-patient information, ICD–10 diagnoses of schizophrenia, and a broader adjustment for mental illness in family members. Method We established a population-based cohort of 2.66 million Danish people using data from the Civil Registration System linked with the Psychiatric Case Register. Results Overall, 10 264 persons developed schizophrenia during the 50.7 million person-years of follow-up. The risk of schizophrenia was increased by urbanicity of place of birth and by family history of schizophrenia or other mental disorders. Conclusions Urban–rural differences of schizophrenia risk were replicated and could not be associated with the potential sources of bias we assessed. Environmental factors underlying the effect of place of birth are major determinants of schizophrenia occurrence at the population level, although the effect of family history is the strongest at the individual level.
Ownership structure, hedging incentives and exchange rate exposure

The study examines the impact of ownership structure on exchange rate exposure using a sample of 651 Indian firms over the period 2001 to 2013. The study finds that ownership structure, in which agency costs and monitoring problems are lower, is associated with a reduced level of exchange rate exposure. The evidence also reveals that currency derivative usage is associated with greater reduction in exchange rate exposure for firms that have lower agency and monitoring problems obtained from their ownership structure. This study has important implications for managers, shareholders and investors who are associated with assessing a firm's exposure to exchange rate risk.
Cross‐priming with an epicutaneously introduced soluble protein antigen generates Tc1 cells

Epicutaneous sensitization with a protein antigen was demonstrated to induce a predominant type 2 CD4 T cell response with high IgE production in mice. On the other hand, its CD8 T cell responses have not been addressed probably partly because of the generally accepted concept that cross‐priming of soluble protein is an inefficient process. Here, we used an established patch‐applied murine model to demonstrate that cross‐priming with an epicutaneously introduced soluble protein antigen, though inefficient, generated mainly Tc1 cells, but not Tc2 cells. In the presence of an irritant or hapten, the efficiency of this cross‐priming process could be enhanced and more Tc1 cells were generated. CpG oligonucleotides also promote the generation of Tc1 cells. In contrast, lipopolysaccharide and poly (inosinic‐cytidylic) acid [poly (I:C)] have no effect. Together, these results provide supportive evidence of the epicutaneous sensitization of human cutaneous lymphocyte‐associated antigen‐positive CD8 T cells found in the peripheral blood or tissues of patients. The surprising observation of the type 1 character of the generated CD8 T cells will also help us to better understand the complicated pathogenesis of atopic and cutaneous inflammatory diseases.
Accelerated hyperfractionated radiotherapy and concomitant chemotherapy in small cell lung cancer limited-disease. Dose response, feasibility and outcome for patients treated in western Sweden, 1998–2004.

Addition of thoracic radiation therapy (TRT) to chemotherapy (CHT) can increase overall survival in patients with small cell lung cancer limited-disease (SCLC-LD). Accelerated fractionation and early concurrent platinum-based CHT, in combination with prophylactic cranial irradiation, represent up-front treatment for this group of patients. Optimised and tailored local and systemic treatment is important. These concepts were applied when a new regional treatment programme was designed at Sahlgrenska University Hospital in 1997. The planned treatment consisted of six courses of CHT (carboplatin/etoposide)+TRT±prophylactic cranial irradiation (PCI). Standard TRT was prescribed as 1.5 Gy BID to a total of 60 Gy during 4 weeks, starting concomitantly with the second or third course of CHT. However, patients with large tumour burdens, poor general condition and/or poor lung function received 45 Gy, 1.5 Gy BID, during 3 weeks. PCI in 15 fractions to a total dose of 30 Gy was administered to all patients with complete remission (CR) and “good” partial remission (PR) at response evaluation. Eighty consecutive patients were treated between January 1998 and December 2004. Forty-six patients were given 60 Gy and 34 patients 45 Gy. Acute toxicity occurred as esophagitis grade III (RTOG/EORTC) in 16% and as pneumonitis grade I–II in10%. There were no differences in toxicity between the two groups. Three- and five-year overall survival was 25% and 16%, respectively. Median survival was 20.8 months with no significant difference between the two groups. In conclusion, TRT with a total dose of 60 or 45 Gy is feasible with comparable toxicity and no difference in local control or survival. Distant metastasis is the main cause of death in this disease; the future challenge is thus further improvement of the systemic therapy combined with optimised local TRT.
Alpha Fetoprotein in Hepatocellular Carcinoma: Reply to Letter to Editor

Any comment on -fetoprotein (AFP) determination as a surveillance or diagnostic tool for hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is welcome, given the debate on the topic and the need to definitely state whether or not the marker should continue to make part of the diagnostic tools for HCC and, consequently, we appreciated the letter by Colli and coworkers. In their comment to our paper (1), they state that the design of our study prevents an actual estimation on either the specificity or sensitivity of AFP as a seromarker of HCC in patients at risk (i.e., cirrhotics). They identify flaws in both the characteristic of patient enrolment (retrospective case series without mandatory histological confirmation of the tumor) and the use of a given value of the index test (AFP >400 ng/mL) as confirmatory test for HCC diagnosis in order to include patients in our series (incorporation bias).
The importance of low-risk HPV infection for the risk of abnormal cervical cytology/histology in more than 40 000 Danish women

Objectives To estimate the age and type-specific distribution of low-risk (LR) human papillomavirus (HPV) types in cervical samples from women in the general population and to assess the distribution of LR-HPV without the coexistence of high-risk HPV types in different cytology and histology categories. Methods In a cross-sectional study, liquid-based cytology samples (SurePath) were collected over a 3-year period. The samples were HPV tested by Hybrid Capture II (HC2; Digene) and genotyped using a PCR-based assay (INNO-LiPAv2; Innogenetics Inc.). A total of 40 382 women (14–95 years of age) were included in the study. By linkage with the nationwide Pathology Data Bank, the HPV test results were directly linked to cytological diagnoses made from the same samples and to subsequent histology results. Results Overall, 2790 women (6.9%) tested positive for LR-HPV types, with HPV6 and HPV70 being the most frequent types detected, whereas HPV11 was uncommon. The highest prevalence was observed in the youngest age group (≤19 years). The LR-HPV prevalence was 6.3% in women with normal cytology, 33.1% in atypical squamous cells of undetermined significance (ASCUS), 19.6% in low-grade squamous intraepithelial lesion and 12.7% in those with high-grade squamous intraepithelial lesion. When considering women with LR-HPV alone, the prevalence was 2.0% (normal cytology), 11.3% (ASCUS), 2.6% (low-grade squamous intraepithelial lesion) and 0.7% in women with high-grade squamous intraepithelial lesion, respectively. A similar pattern was observed in relation to the histological diagnoses with the majority of LR-HPV infections detected in CIN1 lesions (24.7%). Conclusions LR-HPV types alone are relatively common in ASCUS, whereas LR-HPV types without coexisting high-risk HPV types are virtually never detected in severe cervical lesions.
Interindustry Mobility and the Cyclical Upgrading of Labor

We investigate whether a market‐clearing model is consistent with industry employment and wage patterns related to the cyclical upgrading of labor. We demonstrate that Roy's (1951) market‐clearing model of self‐selection would account for cyclical upgrading if industries were characterized by positive selection. Wage comparisons of industry movers and stayers in panel data do reveal widespread positive selection. Also consistent with the Roy model, composition‐corrected industry wages are more cyclical in high‐wage cyclical industries. The Roy model does fail to explain predictable patterns in the wage changes of industry movers, so we consider several market‐clearing and queuing extensions.
A novel bifunctional anti-PD-L1/TGF-β Trap fusion protein (M7824) efficiently reverts mesenchymalization of human lung cancer cells

ABSTRACT Mesenchymalization is a cellular and molecular program in which epithelial cells progressively lose their well-differentiated phenotype and adopt mesenchymal characteristics. Tumor mesenchymalization occurs during the progression of cancer to metastatic disease, and is also associated with resistance to multiple therapeutics, including killing by cytotoxic immune cells. Furthermore, tumor cells can evade immune destruction by upregulating the checkpoint molecule PD-L1, and emerging research has found higher PD-L1 expression in mesenchymalized tumors. Here, the association between TGF-β1-mediated mesenchymalization and PD-L1 was investigated in non-small cell lung cancer cells (NSCLC). TGF-β1 was found to upregulate PD-L1 gene transcription in a Smad2-dependent manner, and a positive association between PD-L1 and phosphorylated Smad2 was found in NSCLC tumors. The potential to target these 2 negative immune regulators with a single agent was investigated using M7824, a novel clinical-stage bifunctional agent that targets both PD-L1 and TGF-β. Treatment of NSCLC cells with M7824 in vitro and in vivo attenuated features of TGF-β1-mediated mesenchymalization, including mesenchymal marker expression, proliferation suppression, and chemoresistance. These findings demonstrate that upregulation of tumor cell PD-L1 is a novel mechanism of TGF-β1-induced immunosuppression in NSCLC, and that treatment with M7824 has the potential to simultaneously block both tumor mesenchymalization and PD-L1-dependent immunosuppression.
Who Says What's Correct and How Do You Say It? Multimodal Management of Oral Peer-Assessment in a Grammar Boardgame in a Foreign Language Classroom.

This paper describes how a small group of students in a foreign language classroom manage the interactional task of orally assessing the correctness of verb forms while playing a board game aimed at revising verb conjugation. In their interaction, the students orient to the institutional context of this activity as a language learning exercise by adhering to the rules of the game and by diligently attending to the production of grammatically correct verb forms. One rule of the game states that the students must decide as a group if the verb forms produced are correct or not. As a consequence, there are recurring ‘assessment moments’ in the game, at which the students are required to make a joint decision over the correctness of the grammatical form. As the data shows, the students manage to achieve this interactional task, taking great care to avoid potential epistemic status incongruences within the group. They do this by exploiting a fine-tuned and economically applied repertoire of multimodal resources, including the ritual of the board game and, crucially, the use of the dice. The latter turns out to be an extremely versatile tool used to complete interactional sequences, manage turn transition, ratify moves in the game and accomplish peer-assessment.