Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The role of polymerase eta in protecting against genome instability and telomere defects caused by the generation of environmentally relevant DNA lesions

Telomeres, the protective caps at chromosome ends, shorten with age in most human cell types, but may be shortened prematurely by DNA damaging agents. Defective telomeres contribute to aging-related diseases and may give rise to genomic alterations implicated in carcinogenesis. Translesion DNA synthesis is a critical cellular mechanism that ensures progression of DNA replication forks, most notably, in the face of bulky DNA lesions. Numerous environmental exposures generate bulky lesions, such as ultraviolet (UV) light and hexavalent chromium (Cr(VI)). Translesion synthesis polymerase η’s (polη) role in protecting against UV-induced lesions in the genome has been extensively documented, but its role at telomeres is unknown. Additionally, UV-induced lesions have been shown to form at telomeres. Chronic inhalation of Cr(VI) induces respiratory diseases associated with aging and telomere dysfunction, including pulmonary fibrosis and cancers, and our previous work established that Cr(VI) causes telomere damage. However, the mechanism(s) by which environmental genotoxicants promote telomere loss and defects is unknown. We investigated roles for polη in preserving telomeres following acute physical UVC exposure and chronic chemical Cr(VI) exposure. Similar to its role in protecting against UV-induced DNA damage, we report that polη protects against cytotoxicity and DNA replication stress caused by Cr(VI). Our study supports a novel role for translesion DNA synthesis in preserving telomeres after UVC and Cr(VI) exposure and genotoxic stress. We uncover a mechanism by which environmental genotoxicants alter telomere integrity, and a fundamental cellular pathway that preserves telomere function in the face of genotoxic replication stress. Telomere alterations and dysfunction have been shown to impact human health. This research is significant and relevant to public health because knowledge gained will be useful for designing intervention therapies that preserve telomeres in human populations following exposure to environmental genotoxicants. The hope is that preventative measures will inhibit or delay diseases and pathologies related to telomere defects.
Synthetic nanoparticle-based vaccines against respiratory pathogens

Pulmonary immunization poses the unique challenge of balancing vaccine efficacy with minimizing inflammation in the respiratory tract. While previous studies have shown that mice immunized intranasally with F1-V-loaded polyanhydride nanoparticles were protected from a lethal challenge with Yersinia pestis, little is known about the initial interaction between the nanoparticles and immune cells following intranasal administration. Herein, the deposition within the lung and internalization by phagocytic cells of polyanhydride nanovaccines encapsulating F1-V are compared to that of soluble F1-V alone or F1-V adjuvanted with monophosphoryl lipid A (MPLA). Encapsulation of F1-V into polyanhydride nanoparticles prolonged its presence while F1-V administered with MPLA was undetectable within 48 hours. The inflammation induced by the polyanhydride nanovaccine was mild compared to the marked inflammation induced by the MPLA-adjuvanted F1-V. Even though F1-V delivered with saline was detected in the lung 48 hours after administration, it is known that this regimen does not elicit a protective immune response. The prolonged F1-V presence in the lung in concert with the mild inflammatory response provided by the nanovaccine provides new insights into the development of protective 1 Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa 50011 2 Department of Veterinary Microbiology and Preventive Medicine, Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa 50011
Transfection methods affect cellular function and gene expression*

Recently augmentation of clinical and therapeutically important genes within the same species has become a subject of extensive research. Stearoyl-CoA desaturase (SCD) is a crucial enzyme converting saturated fatty acids to PUFAs and MUFAs and producing Conjugated Linoleic Acid (CLA) in its pathway, thus offering a complete package in granting nutritional values and immunity from fatal diseases. We aimed to identify the stable transfection method for transfecting a SCD construct in buffalo fetal fibroblast cells and determining its counter-effect on other cellular functions. Transfection of bovine SCD was performed using Nucleofection, Lipofectamine 3000 and Fugene HD. The level of transfection was analysed using flow-cytometry and efficiency was determined by MTT, relative proliferation, growth curve analysis and karyotyping. To understand the underlying genetic effect of transfection we studied the genes related to pluripotency (OCT4, SOX2, NANOG), epigenetics (DNMT1, DNMT3B, HDAC1), apoptosis (P53, CASPASE3, BAX, BID) and growth (G6PD, IGF1R). Considering the parameters tested a final transfection efficiency of 30% by nucleofection in buffalo fetal fibroblasts was observed, which was superior to all non-viral transfection methods tested to date. Also, it was observed that although all transfected cells showed higher level apoptosis, the level in nucleofected cells was the lowest. Overall when comparing the results of FACS, MTT assay and Gene expression profiling, it is suggested that nucleofection has a higher transfection efficiency and serves as a worthy candidate in delivering the expression vector with a comparatively lesser side effect on cellular functions and these cells may be further used for the production of transgenic buffalo.
Dual Roles of the GSTM1 in Hepatocellular Carcinoma Development and Metastasis

Objective: “Reactive oxygen species” (ROS) have been implicated in the genesis of cancer, and cellular antioxidant systems are important for detoxifying ROS and reversing oxidant-mediated modifications. Glutathione S-transferase mu (GSTM) belongs to a family of phase II detoxification enzymes that catalyze the conjugation of GSH to a wide range of endogenous and exogenous electrophilic compounds. The genotype of GSTM1 has been reported to be associated with the risk and the prognosis of cancer in several meta-analyses. The study was performed to explore the function of GSTM1 in HCC. Materials and Methods: PCR and western blot assay were employed to detect the expression level of genes, MTS and transwell assay and flow cytometry were used to explore the function of GSTM1 in vitro, xenografts essay and tail vein injection model was used to explore the function of GSTM1 in vivo. Results: Both the mRNA and protein levels of GSTM1 are downregulated in HCC, but its expression level is not correlated with the patients’ survival time. In vitro transwell and DOX induced cell apoptosis assays revealed that the GSTM1 showed opposite functions in different HCC cell lines with varied p53 genotype statuses. More importantly, the overexpression of GSTM1 in all the above cell lines could lead to significant decrease in ROS and an increase of GSH concentration and P53 levels, suggesting that the controversial role may result from the p53 genotype of HCC cells, the overexpression of GSTM1 can promote cell migration and inhibit cell apoptosis in MHCC-97H (p53, R249S), while inhibit cell migration and increase apoptosis in SMMC-7721 (p53 wildtype). Conclusion: GSTM1 downregulation may partially account for ROS-mediated oxidative damage and HCC carcinogenesis, and GSTM1 also regulate tumor progression by disrupting the ROS-P53 axis in HCC cells with different genetic background. Copyright © 2018 The Authors. Published by Scientific Open Access Journals LLC.
Earnings Informativeness, Trading Frequency and Synchronicity: Evidence from Common Law African Markets

Previous studies indicate that developing and emerging markets are priced more with regard to market movements than company fundamentals. We investigate the informativeness of earnings announcements in a set of common law African stock markets and examine whether, conditional on the general level of synchronicity and the liquidity of stocks, market reactions are influenced by earnings and firm fundamentals. Using a large sample of earnings announcements in suitable African markets, we find earnings announcements to be informative and that informativeness differs by country. Our preferred measure of earnings informativeness, normalised volatility, indicates that earnings announcements are informative in all our countries. The results are strongly driven by the less regularly traded sample and informativeness generally manifests at announcement and in the post-announcement window. There is little evidence of leakage. For all three countries informativeness is present for the more highly traded stocks in the post-event window. However, in cross-sectional tests, we find only limited evidence of an effect of earnings characteristics on market reactions supporting a synchronous trading argument. Earnings are only found to be significant for Nigeria whilst changes in earnings are only weakly significant in South Africa and not in other countries in the sample. A positive to negative dummy variable is strongly significant and negative for Kenyan companies but not for companies in other countries.
Tax Effects on Investment Portfolios and Financial Markets: Large-Scale Portfolio Optimization Under Stochastic and Integer Constraints

This paper investigates the quantitative effects of income and capital gains tax on large investment portfolios. As in Bonami and Lejeune (2009), portfolios are constrained to meet or exceed a prescribed return threshold with a high confidence level and satisfy buy-in threshold and diversification constraints. However, the model of Bonami and Lejeune (2009) is improved upon by incorporating complex tax trading rules with withdrawal features that enhance those considered by Osorio et al. (2004, 2008). The integer variables used result in Mixed Integer Non-linear Programming (MINLP) problems. To implement this on large scale applications, we propose a solution based on Greedy methods with newly introduced dynamic ranking and integer evaluation rules. Performance comparisons with extant MINLP branch and bound and approximation method solvers show that, while the latter fair well for small-scale MINLP problems of less than 72 assets, our proposed method retains good performance with up to 288 assets. A study on individual portfolio composition finds substantial non-linear tax effects on riskier assets and enhanced effects of withdrawal tax only when tax rates are high. The developed framework better enables investors to react to tax changes, and tax policy-makers to quantify the influence of tax changes on private investment preferences. Subject classifications: Finance: portfolio. Programming: nonlinear. Programming: branch-and-bound. Area for review: Finance. Liu, Adams and Ibrahim: Tax Effects on Investment Portfolios 1
Enrichment of Artemia nauplii with essential fatty acids and vitamin C: effect on rainbow trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss) larvae performance

The effect of essential fatty acids (EFA) and vitamin C-enriched Artemia nauplii on growth, survival, and resistance to temperature (high) stress in rainbow trout larvae reared in tanks were investigated. The larvae (average weight 120.43mg±13.5) were fed 6 times daily starting at the onset of exogenous feeding for 1 week. Triplicate groups of fish were offered one of four treatments (1) commercial starter food for rainbow trout، (2) newly hatched Artemia nauplii (unenriched) ، (3) highly unsaturated fatty acid (HUFA) + vitamin C-enriched Artemia nauplii and (4) combination of 10 % HUFA+ vitamin C enriched nauplii and commercial starter food. After 1 week, all groups of fish were switched to the commercial diet for an additional period of 3 weeks. Statistical analysis of growth after the first week and at the end of the experiment, showed that growth of larvae in various treatments was significantly different (P<0.05). After 4 weeks, the larvae in treatment 3 with the average weight of 657.50 ± 57.93 mg had the highest body weight (P<0.05). The highest percentage of survival (96%) was observed in treatment 3 (P<0.05). Proximate compositions of trout larvae after one week feeding with experimental diets showed that the protein in the larvae of treatments 3 and 4 was significantly different compared to other treatments (P<0.05). The best result of resistance to temperature (up to 24 o C) was observed in larvae reared on treatment 3 with 91.34 ± 1.52 percent (P<0.05).
ActionBytes: Learning From Trimmed Videos to Localize Actions

This paper tackles the problem of localizing actions in long untrimmed videos. Different from existing works, which all use annotated untrimmed videos during training, we learn only from short trimmed videos. This enables learning from large-scale datasets originally designed for action classification. We propose a method to train an action localization network that segments a video into interpretable fragments, we call ActionBytes. Our method jointly learns to cluster ActionBytes and trains the localization network using the cluster assignments as pseudo-labels. By doing so, we train on short trimmed videos that become untrimmed for ActionBytes. In isolation, or when merged, the ActionBytes also serve as effective action proposals. Experiments demonstrate that our boundary-guided training generalizes to unknown action classes and localizes actions in long videos of Thumos14, MultiThumos, and ActivityNet1.2. Furthermore, we show the advantage of ActionBytes for zero-shot localization as well as traditional weakly supervised localization, that train on long videos, to achieve state-of-the-art results.
The effect of mixture of rapeseed meal, white lupin seed, and pea seed in rabbit diets on performance indicators and fatty acid profile of meat and fat.

Quality of rabbit’s carcasses is largely determined by the composition of the lipid fraction. The objective of this study was to determine the effect of partial or complete substitution of soybean meal with a combination of rapeseed meal, white lupin seed and pea seed on the production results and fatty acid profile of meat and fat in rabbits. Ninety New Zealand White rabbits were divided into three feeding groups, 30 in each group: Control C (mean protein source 15% soybean meal in the diet), Experimental 1 E1 (7.5% soybean meal, 5% rapeseed meal, 4% white lupin seed, 3% pea seed) and Experimental 2 E2 (0% soybean meal, 10% rapeseed meal, 8% white lupin seed, 6% pea seed). No significant differences were determined in the final body weights of rabbits. Feed efficiency was better in both of the E groups than in group C. Dressing percentage was higher in group E2 than in group C. Also, protein content in thigh muscle was higher in groups E than in group C. As the dietary proportion of soybean decreased, the proportion of SFA in meat and in perirenal fat decreased, and that of PUFA increased. The obtained results indicate that soybean meal may be successfully replaced in rabbit diets by the combination of rapeseed meal, white lupin seed, and pea seed.
Distributed Flexibility and the value of TSO/DSO cooperation

Flexibility in a power system is the active management of an asset. Flexibility deployment can impact system balance or grid power flows on a short-term basis, i.e. from day-ahead to real-time. A wide range of assets that already participate in today’s electricity market can provide such flexibility: from current conventional generation plants to industrial or small consumers dispersed in the system with demand management capability, including storage facilities and manageable RES, etc. Such flexibilities connected to the distribution network are understood as DFR.
Engagement: a critique of the concept and its application to person-centred care

Background: Engagement is being more frequently and widely referred to in person-centred practice research and scholarship, and likewise in practice development, without any clear definition. Aims and objectives: To present a summary discussion on engagement in the context of person-centred practice and research, and to offer a working definition. Methods: The critique in this paper was informed by a focused literature review of 30 publications from the field of positive organisational scholarship and a hand search of policy reports from the past five years. Findings/results: Engagement, as a predictor of effectiveness, is supported by various researchers’ theoretical and empirical work. The definition of engagement from positive organisational scholarship offers a complementary empirical starting point on which researchers in person-centred practice research can build. Current definitions have limitations for care settings as they only apply to workers rather than including service users, and they privilege cognitive knowledge and/or psychological processes. We therefore recommend a revised definition for use in person-centred practice research. Conclusions: A revised definition that balances different ways of knowing and can be used with all people is proposed in this paper. However, further research is needed to explore what engagement is, what it looks like in different types of workplace cultures and what it offers person-centred practice. Implications for practice: • Engagement requires and leads to enhanced vigour, dedication and absorption • Other outcomes of engagement are energy and vitality – necessary for personal, team/group and workplace culture development • Engagement is an intrapersonal, interpersonal and social/group process, and an outcome that promotes enhanced engagement, learning and transformation (that is, thriving and flourishing) • Engagement is a short-term process and outcome and needs continuous nurturing in all persons
Maximum Diameter of Impacting Liquid Droplets

The impact velocity of a liquid droplet can be deduced from its spatter pattern, but there has been controversy concerning details of how droplets respond after impact. The authors show which forces play a role in impact and spreading, and obtain an expression relating impact velocity to droplet volume and maximum diameter of the resulting pattern. This offers important insight for the analysis of bloodstains in forensic science, as well as for inkjet printing and other applications.
Changes of Chemical Properties and Functional Compounds during The Germination of Various Brown Rice in Mekong Delta, Viet Nam

For the selection of the most suitable rice varieties for processing of germinated brown rice products in Mekong Delta, six varieties commonly planted in the Mekong Delta (Jasmine85, OM4900, OM2517, CLN, MBD, IR50404) were selected for study. In order to do that protein, starch, amylose, total polyphenol and GABA content were determined during 24 hours of the germination of the brown rice in aerobic and anaerobic conditions. GABA was biosynthesized with the highest levels in four varieties such as Jasmine85, IR50404, MBD and CLN in anaerobic germination conditions as 37.56 mg/100g, 35.39 mg/100g, 30.32 mg/100g and 24.65 mg/100g respectively. During the germination, both polyphenol and GABA showed a significant increase as 1.15 4.58 times and 1.56 3.34 times respectively. The high level of initial GABA content in the material may relate to the highest increase of this component during the germination. There were no relationship between initial protein and starch content to the capacity of increase of GABA and polyphenol compounds during the germination. However, high initial amylose content related to fast germination to get maximum GABA content but it is not related directly to GABA biosynthesis capacity. In addition, the rice variety which was high ability of making the increase of high protein content during germination seems to be related to the ability to biosynthesize GABA and polyphenol compounds. The results indicate that 3 varieties as Jasmine85, IR50404 and MBD can be used as materials for germinated brown rice production in Mekong Delta. KEYWORD: Germinated brown rice, anaerobic, aerobic germination, GABA, polyphenol.
Comparison of hygiene standards and food safety practices between sole-proprietor and corporate-managed restaurants in Lebanon

The objectives of this study were to compare the hygiene standards and food handling practices between sole-proprietor and the corporate-managed restaurants in Lebanon and to determine whether the variations between both groups are explained by and directly related to the type of management. ,An in-depth observation assessment of food safety environment and practices was conducted on a convenient sample of 50 food businesses in Beirut, which are typical of foodservice outlets in Lebanon and in many countries of the Middle East. The observation assessment checklist comprised six constructs of 2–7 components for analysis. It covered all areas including documentation and record-keeping requirements, which are crucial parts of a food safety system. ,There was a significant difference in the visual assessment score between sole-proprietor (77.9 ± 18.4) and corporate group (48.5 ± 12.8). Food handlers' behavior and hygiene standards were significantly associated with the type of management. However, there were still critical gaps in the food safety performance of the corporate group suggesting other underlying factors than the type of management. ,Additional elements were drawn from this study for future food safety culture research. Understanding the food safety attitudes and perception of risks of the management representatives, leaders, or food business owners is vital to develop appropriate food safety interventions and foster a positive food safety culture in the foodservice industry. ,To the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study not only in Lebanon (or MENA) but also in other regions to measure the association of management type, that is, sole-proprietor management and corporate management, with the food hygiene standards and food safety practices in the foodservice establishments. This paper presents new findings that will be of value for researchers in food safety and will complement the existing literature on food safety culture in the foodservice industry.
Towards robust cross-linguistic comparisons of phonological networks

Recent work has proposed using network science to analyse the structure of the mental lexicon by viewing words as nodes in a phonological network, with edges connecting words that differ by a single phoneme. Comparing the structure of phonological networks across different languages could provide insights into linguistic typology and the cognitive pressures that shape language acquisition, evolution, and processing. However, previous studies have not considered how statistics gathered from these networks are affected by factors such as lexicon size and the distribution of word lengths. We show that these factors can substantially affect the statistics of a phonological network and propose a new method for making more robust comparisons. We then analyse eight languages, finding many commonalities but also some qualitative differences in their lexicon structure.
Predicting Eye Fixations with a Deep Reconstruction-Based Approach

Our gaze is constantly shifting to locations of interest. Throughout the last decades, a lot of effort has been put into deciphering the mechanisms underlying these shifts. In this work, we will attempt to give a brief overview of such research and we will propose an unsupervised solution for saliency modeling that is inspired by the idea of predictive coding and that takes advantage of the existing solutions in the realm of deep learning. We will describe the implementation of this model and present the iterations that were carried out in order to perfect it. In the end, we will provide qualitative and quantitative results supporting the efficiency of our model and we will highlight some ideas for further improvements.