Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Expression Profiling of the Transient Receptor Potential Vanilloid (TRPV) Channels 1, 2, 3 and 4 in Mucosal Epithelium of Human Ulcerative Colitis

The Transient Receptor Potential (TRP) family of selective and non-selective ion channels is well represented throughout the mammalian gastrointestinal track. Several members of the Transient Receptor Potential Vanilloid (TRPV) subfamily have been identified in contributing to modulation of mobility, secretion and sensitivity of the human intestine. Previous studies have focused on the detection of TRPV mRNA levels in colon tissue of patients with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) whereas little information exists regarding TRPV channel expression in the colonic epithelium. The aim of this study was to evaluate the expression levels of TRPV1, TRPV2, TRPV3 and TRPV4 in mucosa epithelial cells of colonic biopsies from patients with ulcerative colitis (UC) in comparison to colonic resections from non-IBD patients (control group). Immunohistochemistry, using specific antibodies and quantitative analyses of TRPV-immunostained epithelial cells, was performed in semi-serial sections of the samples. TRPV1 expression was significantly decreased whereas TRPV4 expression was significantly increased in the colonic epithelium of UC patients compared to patients in the control group (p < 0.05). No significant difference for TRPV2 and TRPV3 expression levels between UC and control specimens was detected (p > 0.05). There was no correlation between TRPV channel expression and the clinical features of the disease (p > 0.05). Further investigation is needed to clarify the role of TRPV channels in human bowel inflammatory response.
Hierarchical Hyperdimensional Computing for Energy Efficient Classification

Brain-inspired Hyperdimensional (HD) computing emulates cognition tasks by computing with hypervectors rather than traditional numerical values. In HD, an encoder maps inputs to high dimensional vectors (hypervectors) and combines them to generate a model for each existing class. During inference, HD performs the task of reasoning by looking for similarities of the input hypervector and each pre-stored class hypervector However, there is not a unique encoding in HD which can perfectly map inputs to hypervectors. This results in low HD classification accuracy over complex tasks such as speech recognition. In this paper we propose MHD, a multi-encoder hierarchical classifier, which enables HD to take full advantages of multiple encoders without increasing the cost of classification. MHD consists of two HD stages: a main stage and a decider stage. The main stage makes use of multiple classifiers with different encoders to classify a wide range of input data. Each classifier in the main stage can trade between efficiency and accuracy by dynamically varying the hypervectors’ dimensions. The decider stage, located before the main stage, learns the difficulty of the input data and selects an encoder within the main stage that will provide the maximum accuracy, while also maximizing the efficiency of the classification task. We test the accuracy/efficiency of the proposed MHD on speech recognition application. Our evaluation shows that MHD can provide a 6.6× improvement in energy efficiency and a 6.3× speedup, as compared to baseline single level HD.
Multigenerational effects of bisphenol A or ethinyl estradiol exposure on F2 California mice (Peromyscus californicus) pup vocalizations

Rodent pups use vocalizations to communicate with one or both parents in biparental species, such as California mice (Peromyscus californicus). Previous studies have shown California mice developmentally exposed to endocrine disrupting chemicals, bisphenol A (BPA) or ethinyl estradiol (EE), demonstrate later compromised parental behaviors. Reductions in F1 parental behaviors might also be due to decreased emissions of F2 pup vocalizations. Thus, vocalizations of F2 male and female California mice pups born to F1 parents developmentally exposed to BPA, EE, or controls were examined. Postnatal days (PND) 2–4 were considered early postnatal period, PND 7 and 14 were defined as mid-postnatal period, and PND 21 and 28 were classified as late postnatal period. EE pups showed increased latency to emit the first syllable compared to controls. BPA female pups had decreased syllable duration compared to control and EE female pups during the early postnatal period but enhanced responses compared to controls at late postnatal period; whereas, male BPA and EE pups showed greater syllable duration compared to controls during early postnatal period. In mid-postnatal period, F2 BPA and EE pups emitted greater number of phrases than F2 control pups. Results indicate aspects of vocalizations were disrupted in F2 pups born to F1 parents developmentally exposed to BPA or EE, but their responses were not always identical, suggesting BPA might not activate estrogen receptors to the same extent as EE. Changes in vocalization patterns by F2 pups may be due to multigenerational exposure to BPA or EE and/or reduced parental care received.
Warburg effect, lactate dehydrogenase, and radio/chemo-therapy efficacy

Abstract The anaerobic metabolism of glucose by cancer cells, even under well-oxygenated conditions, has been documented by Otto Warburg as early as 1927. Micro-environmental hypoxia and intracellular pathways activating the hypoxia-related gene response, shift cancer cell metabolism to anaerobic pathways. In the current review, we focus on a major enzyme involved in anaerobic transformation of pyruvate to lactate, namely lactate dehydrogenase 5 (LDH5). The value of LDH5 as a marker of prognosis of cancer patients, as a predictor of response to radiotherapy (RT) and chemotherapy and, finally, as a major target for cancer treatment and radio-sensitization is reported and discussed. Clinical, translational and experimental data supporting the uniqueness of the LDHA gene and its product LDH5 isoenzyme are summarized and future directions for a metabolic treatment of cancer are highlighted.
Traceable Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption with Verifiable Outsourced Decryption in eHealth Cloud

In cloud-assisted electronic health care (eHealth) systems, a patient can enforce access control on his/her personal health information (PHI) in a cryptographic way by employing ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption (CP-ABE) mechanism. There are two features worthy of consideration in real eHealth applications. On the one hand, although the outsourced decryption technique can significantly reduce the decryption cost of a physician, the correctness of the returned result should be guaranteed. On the other hand, the malicious physician who leaks the private key intentionally should be caught. Existing systems mostly aim to provide only one of the above properties. In this work, we present a verifiable and traceable CP-ABE scheme (VTCP-ABE) in eHealth cloud, which simultaneously supports the properties of verifiable outsourced decryption and white-box traceability without compromising the physician’s identity privacy. An authorized physician can obtain an ElGamal-type partial decrypted ciphertext (PDC) element of original ciphertext from the eHealth cloud decryption server (CDS) and then verify the correctness of returned PDC. Moreover, the illegal behaviour of malicious physician can be precisely (white-box) traced. We further exploit a delegation method to help the resource-limited physician authorize someone else to interact with the CDS. The formal security proof and extensive simulations illustrate that our VTCP-ABE scheme is secure, efficient, and practical.
Serum untargeted metabolomic profile of the Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension (DASH) dietary pattern.

Background The Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension (DASH) dietary pattern is recommended for cardiovascular disease risk reduction. Assessment of dietary intake has been limited to subjective measures and a few biomarkers from 24-h urine collections. Objective The aim of the study was to use metabolomics to identify serum compounds that are associated with adherence to the DASH dietary pattern. Design We conducted untargeted metabolomic profiling in serum specimens collected at the end of 8 wk following the DASH diet (n = 110), the fruit and vegetables diet (n = 111), or a control diet (n = 108) in a multicenter, randomized clinical feeding study (n = 329). Multivariable linear regression was used to determine the associations between the randomized diets and individual log-transformed metabolites after adjustment for age, sex, race, education, body mass index, and hypertension. Partial least-squares discriminant analysis (PLS-DA) was used to identify a panel of compounds that discriminated between the dietary patterns. The area under the curve (C statistic) was calculated as the cumulative ability to distinguish between dietary patterns. We accounted for multiple comparisons with the use of the Bonferroni method (0.05 of 818 metabolites = 6.11 × 10-5). Results Serum concentrations of 44 known metabolites differed significantly between participants randomly assigned to the DASH diet compared with both the control diet and the fruit and vegetables diet, which included an amino acid, 2 cofactors and vitamins (n = 2), and lipids (n = 41). With the use of PLS-DA, component 1 explained 29.4% of the variance and component 2 explained 12.6% of the variance. The 10 most influential metabolites for discriminating between the DASH and control dietary patterns were N-methylproline, stachydrine, tryptophan betaine, theobromine, 7-methylurate, chiro-inositol, 3-methylxanthine, methyl glucopyranoside, β-cryptoxanthin, and 7-methylxanthine (C statistic = 0.986). Conclusions An untargeted metabolomic platform identified a broad array of serum metabolites that differed between the DASH diet and 2 other dietary patterns. This newly identified metabolite panel may be used to assess adherence to the DASH dietary pattern. This trial was registered at http://www.clinicaltrials. gov as NCT03403166.
Clinical Relevance and Suppressive Capacity of Human Myeloid-Derived Suppressor Cell Subsets

Purpose: Myeloid-derived suppressor cells (MDSC) are a heterogeneous group of pathologically expanded myeloid cells with immunosuppressive activity. In human disease, three major MDSC subpopulations can be defined as monocytic (M-MDSC), granulocytic [polymorphonuclear-MDSC (PMN-MDSC)], and early stage (e-MDSC), which lacks myeloid lineage markers of the former two subsets. The purpose of this study was to determine and compare the immunosuppressive capacity and clinical relevance of each of these subsets in patients with solid cancer. Experimental Design: The frequency of MDSC subsets in the peripheral blood was determined by flow cytometry in a cohort of 49 patients with advanced head and neck cancer (HNC) and 22 patients with urological cancers. Sorted and purified MDSC subsets were tested in vitro for their T-cell–suppressive capacity. Frequency of circulating MDSC was correlated with overall survival of patients with HNC. Results: A high frequency of PMN-MDSC most strongly correlated with poor overall survival in HNC. T-cell–suppressive activity was higher in PMN-MDSC compared with M-MDSC and e-MDSC. A subset of CD66b+/CD11b+/CD16+ mature PMN-MDSC displayed high expression and activity of arginase I, and was superior to the other subsets in suppressing proliferation and cytokine production of T cells in both cancer types. High levels of this CD11b+/CD16+ PMN-MDSC, but not other PMN-MDSC subsets, strongly correlated with adverse outcome in HNC. Conclusions: A subset of mature CD11b+/CD16+ PMN-MDSC was identified as the MDSC subset with the strongest immunosuppressive activity and the highest clinical relevance. Clin Cancer Res; 24(19); 4834–44. ©2018 AACR.
The long non‐coding RNAs MHRT, FENDRR and CARMEN, their expression levels in peripheral blood mononuclear cells in patients with essential hypertension and their relation to heart hypertrophy

Long non‐coding RNAs (lncRNAs) participate in the modulation of cardiac hypertrophy, and they represent potential therapeutic targets in cardiovascular disease. We investigated the expression profiles of selected lncRNAs in peripheral blood mononuclear cells of patients with essential hypertension in relation to left ventricular hypertrophy. We assessed the expression levels of the lncRNAs MHRT, FENDRR and CARMEN using real‐time reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction. Hypertensive patients showed significantly higher MHRT, FENDRR and CARMEN expression levels compared with healthy controls. In addition, we observed significant negative correlations of MHRT (r = −0.323, P = 0.003) and FENDRR (r = −0.380, P = 0.001) and a positive correlation of CARMEN (r = 0.458, P < 0.001) expression levels with left ventricular mass index. Our data reveal that the lncRNAs MHRT, FENDRR and CARMEN show distinct expression profiles in hypertensive patients and they possibly represent candidate therapeutic targets in hypertensive heart disease.
Controlling in Transition Environments: Empirical Evidence from Croatia

Controlling in Transition Environments: Empirical Evidence from Croatia The paper explores controlling developments in the particular environment of an economy involved in a transition process for almost two decades. The results presented in the paper were founded on the empirical analysis of the most successful Croatian companies, which were used as the sampling population. The presentation of controlling department existence in Croatian companies and the analysis of management perception of controlling importance were performed together with research on controlling information sources and users. All the information presented allowed us to make some conclusions about controlling development and to assess its future. Also, recent controlling developments were analyzed in the sample of Croatian SMEs to evaluate its implementation in this group of entities and to assess the factors of potential influence on its development level in a given enterprise, such as: size of the enterprise, management performance (ownermanagers or managers), intensity of accounting information use and relation to the business abroad. The results were evaluated considering the controlling evolution in developed economies. Thus, the controlling evolution was monitored in the Croatian corporate sector, from its "registering" stage, still dominant on the scene, to its "innovation" stage. In addition to the current findings, future perspectives on controlling development flows in Croatia were also assessed.
EdgeChain: An Edge-IoT Framework and Prototype Based on Blockchain and Smart Contracts

The emerging Internet of Things (IoT) is facing significant scalability and security challenges. On one hand, IoT devices are “weak” and need external assistance. Edge computing provides a promising direction addressing the deficiency of centralized cloud computing in scaling massive number of devices. On the other hand, IoT devices are also relatively “vulnerable” facing malicious hackers due to resource constraints. The emerging blockchain and smart contracts technologies bring a series of new security features for IoT and edge computing. In this paper, to address the challenges, we design and prototype an edge-IoT framework named “EdgeChain” based on blockchain and smart contracts. The core idea is to integrate a permissioned blockchain and the internal currency or “coin” system to link the edge cloud resource pool with each IoT device’ account and resource usage, and hence behavior of the IoT devices. EdgeChain uses a credit-based resource management system to control how much resource IoT devices can obtain from edge servers, based on predefined rules on priority, application types, and past behaviors. Smart contracts are used to enforce the rules and policies to regulate the IoT device behavior in a nondeniable and automated manner. All the IoT activities and transactions are recorded into blockchain for secure data logging and auditing. We implement an EdgeChain prototype and conduct extensive experiments to evaluate the ideas. The results show that while gaining the security benefits of blockchain and smart contracts, the cost of integrating them into EdgeChain is within a reasonable and acceptable range.
Latent Mycobacterium tuberculosis Infection Is Associated With a Higher Frequency of Mucosal-Associated Invariant T and Invariant Natural Killer T Cells

Increasing drug resistance and the lack of an effective vaccine are the main factors contributing to Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb) being a major cause of death globally. Despite intensive research efforts, it is not well understood why some individuals control Mtb infection and some others develop active disease. HIV-1 infection is associated with an increased incidence of active tuberculosis, even in virally suppressed individuals. Mucosal-associated invariant T (MAIT) and invariant natural killer T (iNKT) cells are innate T cells that can recognize Mtb-infected cells. Contradicting results regarding the frequency of MAIT cells in latent Mtb infection have been reported. In this confirmatory study, we investigated the frequency, phenotype, and IFNγ production of MAIT and iNKT cells in subjects with latent or active Mtb infection. We found that the frequency of both cell types was increased in subjects with latent Mtb infection compared with uninfected individuals or subjects with active infection. We found no change in the expression of HLA-DR, PD-1, and CCR6, as well as the production of IFNγ by MAIT and iNKT cells, among subjects with latent Mtb infection or uninfected controls. The proportion of CD4− CD8+ MAIT cells in individuals with latent Mtb infection was, however, increased. HIV-1 infection was associated with a loss of MAIT and iNKT cells, and the residual cells had elevated expression of the exhaustion marker PD-1. Altogether, the results suggest a role for MAIT and iNKT cells in immunity against Mtb and show a deleterious impact of HIV-1 infection on those cells.
Status of eel fisheries, stocks and their management in England and Wales

All continental life stages of eel are exploited in England and Wales. The main fisheries for glass eel are by estuarine dip-nets in the southwest. The main fisheries for yellow and silver eel occur in southern and eastern England, with fyke nets being the preferred instrument. Fishing effort is not directly recorded but is inferred from licence sales. Around 1100 glass eel licenses were sold annually from 1980 to 1994, increasing to around 2500 in 1998, but declined to about 800 per annum since 2001. Declared catches of glass eel have been below 1–2 t since 2001, compared to 10–70 t in the 1970s and 1980s. Licence sales for yellow and silver eel fisheries (combined) varied from around 1100 to 2900 over the period 1983–2007, peaking in the mid-1980s, mid-1990s and again in 2005–2007. Declared catches peaked in the late 1980s and mid-1990s (peak 280 t), but have been low since 2001 (mean 29 t). Nett export data suggests catches may be 4 times higher. Eel landings are reported as bycatch from various marine fisheries around the UK coasts, with landings from 2001 to 2007 ranging from 0.2 to 13.7 t per annum. Assessment of stock status is based mainly on catch and catch per unit effort data as there has been little fishery independent survey of eels. There has been a general decreasing trend in both glass eel catches reported to the Agency and in nett export data. Comparing maximum catch levels in the late 1970s–early 1980s with minimum levels in the 2000s suggests that the catch has declined by around 75–95%. Trends in CPUE are similar, at least until 1998. It is concluded that current glass eel recruitment to the western coast of the UK is approximately 30% of the pre-1980 level of recruitment. Yellow and silver eel indices derived from HMRC nett exports or reported catches per licence sold, both suggest that the current estimate of stocks derived from these data are 20% those of the late 1980s and mid 1990s. The Reference Condition Model has been used to assess compliance with the EC target (EU regulation 1100/2007). Assessment is at the River Basin District (RBD) level and in most cases a single river has been used to represent the whole RBD. The assessment therefore has a low level of confidence attached to it, and work to improve this is outlined in the paper. A number of options to increase silver eel escapement are presented, specifically reducing fishing pressure, improving access and habitat quality, reducing the impacts of entrainment, controlling predators and stocking, with the interplay of options varying between rivers and basins depending on local priorities.
Online Analysis of Dynamic Streaming Data

Die Arbeit zum Thema "Online Analysis of Dynamic Streaming Data" beschaftigt sich mit der Distanzmessung dynamischer, semistrukturierter Daten in kontinuierlichen Datenstromen um Analysen auf diesen Datenstrukturen bereits zur Laufzeit zu ermoglichen. Hierzu wird eine Formalisierung zur Distanzberechnung fur statische und dynamische Baume eingefuhrt und durch eine explizite Betrachtung der Dynamik von Attributen einzelner Knoten der Baume erganzt. Die Echtzeitanalyse basierend auf der Distanzmessung wird durch ein dichte-basiertes Clustering erganzt, um eine Anwendung des Clustering, einer Klassifikation, aber auch einer Anomalieerkennung zu demonstrieren. Die Ergebnisse dieser Arbeit basieren auf einer theoretischen Analyse der eingefuhrten Formalisierung von Distanzmessungen fur dynamische Baume. Diese Analysen werden unterlegt mit empirischen Messungen auf Basis von Monitoring-Daten von Batchjobs aus dem Batchsystem des GridKa Daten- und Rechenzentrums. Die Evaluation der vorgeschlagenen Formalisierung sowie der darauf aufbauenden Echtzeitanalysemethoden zeigen die Effizienz und Skalierbarkeit des Verfahrens. Zudem wird gezeigt, dass die Betrachtung von Attributen und Attribut-Statistiken von besonderer Bedeutung fur die Qualitat der Ergebnisse von Analysen dynamischer, semistrukturierter Daten ist. Auserdem zeigt die Evaluation, dass die Qualitat der Ergebnisse durch eine unabhangige Kombination mehrerer Distanzen weiter verbessert werden kann. Insbesondere wird durch die Ergebnisse dieser Arbeit die Analyse sich uber die Zeit verandernder Daten ermoglicht.
Poster: CUTER: ClUstering-based TEst Suite Reduction

Test Suite Reduction (TSR) approaches speed up regression testing by removing redundant test cases. TSR approaches can be classified as adequate or inadequate. Adequate approaches reduce test suites so that they completely preserve the test requirements (e.g., statement coverage) of the original test suites. Inadequate approaches produce reduced test suites that only partially preserve the test requirements. We propose a tool prototype for inadequate TSR and named it CUTER (ClUstering-based TEst suite Reduction). CUTER implements a clustering-based approach and a number of instances of its underlying process. We implemented CUTER as an Eclipse plug-in and applied it on 19 versions of four Java programs.