Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Gustatory Behaviour in Caenorhabditis elegans

textabstractThe nematode C. elegans is an ideal model-organism to study the genetics of behaviour (Brenner, 1974). It is capable of sensing salts and we discriminate three different responses: it is attracted to low salt concentrations (Ward, 1973; Dusenbery et al., 1974), it avoids high salt concentrations that give osmotic problems (Culotti & Russell, 1978), and the response to NaCl shows plasticity: normally attractive salt concentrations are avoided after pre-exposure to salt (Saeki et al., 2001; Jansen et al., 2002). The goal of this study was to unravel the molecular mechanisms and the cellular circuitry behind the different responses of C. elegans to NaCl. A candidate gene approach was used in which mutants for 123 genes were tested for their role in salt responses. A complete overview of all genes tested is given in the Chapter 5. We found 22 genes involved in attraction, 57 genes involved in avoidance and 87 genes involved in gustatory plasticity. Several of the most interesting results were followed up and are discussed in this thesis. In Chapter 1, a summary is given of what is known about the molecular mechanisms of taste, an introduction to C. elegans as a model organism, and a brief overview of the C. elegans nervous system and neurotransmission. Furthermore, various sensory behaviours of C. elegans and their plasticity are discussed. Chapter 2 focuses on chemotaxis to NaCl and discusses five newly identified genes, which function in two genetic pathways that mediate NaCl chemotaxis. Chapter 3 discusses the role of G protein signalling in gustatory plasticity and identifies multiple neurons as well as a genetic pathway involved in this process. Chapter 4 discusses the roles of different neurotransmitters in the different responses of C. elegans to NaCl. An overall discussion and summary are given in the final chapter. Taken together, this study provides new insights into the processes of NaCl chemotaxis and its plasticity in C. elegans. We expect that these insights can be extrapolated to mammals.
Effect of heat moisture treatment and annealing on physicochemical properties of red sorghum starch

Red sorghum starch was physically modified by annealing and heat moisture treatment. The swelling power and solubility increased with increasing temperature range (60-90°), while annealing and heatmoisture treatment decreased swelling power and solubility of starch. Solubility and swelling were pH dependent with higher values obtained at pH 12 in both native and modified starches. Water absorption capacities of both annealed and heat-moisture treated starches increased with increasing levels of moisture treatment while highest value was observed in annealed starch. Oil absorption capacity of annealed starch was increased which was contrast to heat-moisture treated starches which decreased from 160 glg in native starch to 140 glg in HMR18 and HMR27. Pasting analysis in the Rapid Visco Analyser (RVA) revealed that both annealing and heat-moisture treatment increased pasting temperature, while alkaline water retention improved after physical modification.
Habitat-specific and season-specific faecal pellet decay rates for five mammalian herbivores in south-eastern Australia

The accuracy of population abundance estimates of mammalian herbivores from faecal pellet counts is potentially affected by pellet decay. We collected fresh pellet groups from hog deer (Axis porcinus), European rabbit (Oryctolagus cuniculus), eastern grey kangaroo (Macropus giganteus), swamp wallaby (Wallabia bicolor) and common wombat (Vombatus ursinus) (n = 300 per species) at Wilsons Promontory National Park, Victoria, Australia. We deposited five pellet groups per species per month within each of five vegetation types in the park, then monitored pellet group decay over 24 months. We demonstrate that age estimation of pellet groups was inaccurate and is unlikely to improve the efficiency of pellet counts. We present habitat- and species-specific estimates of pellet and pellet group decay using two measures: decay rate (the proportion of pellets surviving per unit of time); and mean time to decay. We explain how our data can be used to optimise faecal pellet count design, and to improve the accuracy of both indices and estimates of abundance from pellet counts. The variability observed in the decay of pellet groups among vegetation types, and for species among seasons, suggests that caution should be used if applying pellet decay rates over long time-frames or to locations with differing environmental conditions.
Onkar Shivraj Swami.p65

In this paper, we try to study the determinants associated with the likelihood of a bank being acquired during 2006 to 2017. Study sample consists of fourteen acquired and five acquiring banks. Pooled logit model is employed to identify the bank-specific determinants that can predict probability of bank being acquired. We find that higher capital adequacy, poor asset quality, reduced profitability, operating inefficiencies, adequate liquidity position and smaller asset size may serve as leading indicators in order to identify the bank who is expected to be acquired well in advance.
Islamic insurance in the European Countries: Insights from French Muslims’ perspective

-The main purpose of the study is to investigate the willingness of the French Muslims to adopt Islamic insurance ( takaful), as well as the factors that may influence their decision. Accordingly, 100 questionnaires were distributed to French Muslims in several cities. The data was analysed using Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) as well as one sample t-test. The findings indicate that subjective norm has a positive influence on the attitude towards Islamic insurance services. Furthermore, attitude and perceived behavioural control were found to have a positive influence on the intention to adopt these services. Finally, the French Muslims have shown willingness to adopt takaful services as an alternative to the existing conventional insurance services depending on the above dimensions. Key-words: France, Europe, Islamic insurance, Takaful , SEM, TPB.
Virulence factors analysis and antibiotic resistance of uropathogenic Escherichia coli isolated from patients in northeast of Iran

Background and Objectives: Escherichia coli is known to be the pathogen commonly isolated from those infected with urinary tract infections (UTIs). The aim of this study was to investigate the presence of E. coli virulence genes and antibiotics’ resistance pattern among clinical isolates in the Northeast of Iran. Relationships between virulence genes and antimicrobial resistances were studied as well. Materials and Methods: Three hundred isolates of E. coli were isolated from patients with UTIs that referred to Ghaem and Imam Reza hospitals (Mashhad, Iran) during August 2016 to February 2017. A multiplex PCR was employed to amplify the genes encoding pyelonephritis associated pili (pap), S-family adhesions (sfa), type1fimbriae (fimH) and aerobactin (aer). Disk diffusion test was performed to test the susceptibility of isolates to β-lactams, aminoglycosides, cephalosporins, quinolone, fluoroquinolones, carbapenems and trimethoprim-sulfamethoxazole. Results: The PCR results identified the fimH in 78.4%, aer in 70.5%, sfa in 13.6% and the pap in 8.2% of isolates. The rates of antibiotic resistance of the isolates were as follows: 64.7% resistant to cephalosporins, 34% to trimethoprim-sulfamethoxazole, 31% to fluoroquinolones, 15.3% to aminoglycosides, 13.3% to β-lactams, 7.8% to quinolones and 4.4% to carbapenems. Significant relationships existed between pap and aer, pap and sfa, aer and fluoroquinolones also pap and cephalosporins. Conclusion: fimH and aer were found in > 50% of isolates suggesting the importance of both genes in UPEC. The majority of isolates had fimH as adhesion factor for colonization. Determining antibiotic resistance patterns in specific geographical areas is necessary for appropriate treatment of urinary tract infection. The high rate of resistance to cephalosporins is most likely due to incorrect drug administration.
MOŻLIWOŚCI WYKORZYSTANIA PLACEBO DO WSPOMAGANIA WYNIKÓW SPOTOWYCH

Pierwsza część artykułu stanowi podsumowanie stanu współczesnej wiedzy na temat działania placebo. Omówiono w niej konceptualizację placebo, rodzaje skutków działania placebo oraz jego mechanizmy. Placebo zdefiniowane zostało jako metoda postępowania lub składnik metody postępowania bez specyficznego działania dla warunków, w których jest ona stosowana. Omówiono propozycję klasyfikacji skutków działania placebo w jeden spójny system, na który składa się 8 efektów działania placebo. Przedyskutowano psychologiczne mechanizmy działania placebo (warunkowanie klasyczne, oczekiwania i lęk) oraz wskazano na ich wzajemne relacje. W części drugiej wiedza ta wykorzystana została do przeprowadzenia krytycznej analizy rezultatów badań nad wykorzystaniem placebo we wspomaganiu wyników sportowych. Dyskusja wyników przeprowadzonych do tej pory badań koncentruje się wokół następujących zagadnień: skuteczności placebo we wspomaganiu wyników sportowych, wpływie przekazywanych sportowcom informacji na temat działania placebo na jego efektywność, wpływie podawanych sportowcom informacji na temat działania aktywnych metod na ich efektywność oraz wcześniejszemu doświadczeniu ze stosowaniem aktywnych metod jako źródle działania placebo. Analizowane wyniki badań dowodzą, że placebo jest efektywną metodą wspomagania wyników sportowych, wskazując jednocześnie na istotną rolę informacji przekazywanych sportowcom w działaniu placebo i modyfikowaniu działania aktywnych metod. Wyniki omawianych badań sugerują, że efekty zastosowania wszelkich metod wspomagających są rezultatem działania nie tylko ich aktywnych składników, ale i czynników o charakterze psychologicznym, czyli składnika placebo obecnego w każdej aktywnej metodzie.
The sustainable development of water resources: History, financial costs, and benefits of alien plant control programmes

The water resources of the Western Cape province, and the catchment areas that produce them, need to be carefully managed if future demands for water are to be met. Good catchment management, in the form of programmes to control alien invasive plants. provides an additional means for preventing losses of water, but needs to be justified financially. Previous programmes aimed at the control of alien plants have been curtailed due to a lack of funds in the recent past, as they were conducted for reasons of nature, rather than water, conservation. However, recent studies have highlighted the impacts of alien plants on water resources, and have forced planners to take these impacts into account. In this paper, we review the history of alien plant control programmes, and assess the costs (financial) and benefits (in the form of reduced losses of water from invaded catchments) that would arise from such control. We use the standard practice of discounting future costs and benefits arising from planned and existing water supply schemes to estimate the relative efficiency of the schemes. By modelling the spread and effects of alien plants on streamflow, we show that alien plant control is effective and efficient. In the case of the proposed Skuifraam scheme (the preferred next option to supply water to Cape Town), water can be delivered at a cost of 57 and 59 c kl-1, respectively, with and without the management of alien plants, for example, indicating that such management is cost-effective. Clearing invasive plants from the existing Theewaterskloof catchment would deliver additional water at only 13.6% of the cost of delivery from the new Skuifraam scheme (unit reference values of 8 and 59 c kl-1 respectively). The analyses also show that an early investment in clearing is more cost effective than a later investment, as costs increase and yields decrease the longer the catchment is left to become more invaded. Many other benefits, including avoiding serious impacts on biodiversity, catchment stability and fire management, and enhancing social upliftment, have not been included in this assessment. and add to the argument for implementation of the programme for clearing invasive alien plants.
Nitrogen limitation and microbial diversity at the treeline

Tree growth limitation at treeline has mainly been studied in terms of carbon limitation while effects and mechanisms of potential nitrogen (N) limitation are barely known, especially in the southern hemisphere. We investigated how soil abiotic properties and microbial community structure and composition change from lower to upper sites within three vegetation belts (Nothofagus betuloides and N. pumilio forests, and alpine vegetation) across an elevation gradient (from 0 to 650 m a.s.l.) in Cordillera Darwin, southern Patagonia. Increasing elevation was associated with a decrease in soil N-NH4+ availability within the N. pumilio and the alpine vegetation belt. Within the alpine vegetation belt, a concurrent increase in the soil C:N ratio was associated with a shift from bacterial-dominated in lower alpine sites to fungal-dominated microbial communities in upper alpine sites. Lower forested belts (N. betuloides, N. pumilio) exhibited more complex patterns both in terms of soil properties and microbial communities. Overall, our results concur with recent findings from high-latitude and altitude ecosystems showing decreased nutrient availability with elevation, leading to fungal-dominated microbial communities. We suggest that growth limitation at treeline may result, in addition to proximal climatic parameters, from a competition between trees and soil microbial communities for limited soil inorganic N. At higher elevation, soil microbial communities could have comparably greater capacities to uptake soil N than trees, and the shift towards a fungal-dominated community would favour N immobilization over N mineralization. Though evidences of altered nutrient dynamics in tree and alpine plant tissue with increasing altitude remain needed, we contend that the measured residual low amount of inorganic N available for trees in the soil could participate to the establishment limitation. Finally, our results suggest that responses of soil microbial communities to elevation could be influenced by functional properties of forest communities for instance through variations in litter quality.
Blood–neural barrier: Overview and latest progress

The central and peripheral nervous systems are tightly sealed from the blood by the blood–brain barrier, the blood–cerebrospinal fluid barrier, the blood–spinal cord barrier and the blood–nerve barrier (BNB). These neural barriers inhibit free paracellular diffusion of water soluble molecules through complex tight junctions that interconnect endothelial cells and choroid plexus epithelial cells. These barriers also play a role in the influx transport of essential molecules and the efflux transport of xenobiotics. The differences and commonalities between these barrier systems have been gradually elucidated in recent years. It is now clear that disruption of the blood–neural barrier plays a key role in a number of diseases affecting the central and peripheral nervous systems. In the present review, we describe the current knowledge regarding the cellular and molecular basis of the functional blood–neural tissue barrier, while addressing the BNB in particular detail.
5.3 THE ORGANIZATION OF OCEANIC CONVECTION DURING THE ONSET OF THE EAST ASIAN SUMMER MONSOON

It has long been known that the organization of tropical convection is influenced predominantly by the vertical shear and convective available potential energy or CAPE (e.g., Moncrieff and Green 1972). Various observational studies in the eastern Atlantic and northern Australia have confirmed the strong influence of environmental winds and CAPE on the structure and orientation of convective bands (e.g., Barnes and Seickman 1984; Alexander and Young 1992; Keenan and Carbone 1992). Recently, LeMone et al. (1998) investigated the organization of convection over the western Pacific warm pool using aircraft data from TOGA COARE. They found that vertical shear in the low-to-midtroposphere was key in determining the orientation of convective bands, while CAPE influenced their depth and longevity. Their results have been recently supported by numerical simulations of convection in shear by Robe and Emanuel (2001). The way in which convection organizes is important from several perspectives. First, it has an important effect on the vertical distribution of heating. For example, it is well known that convection that organizes perpendicular to the low-level shear vector often produces squall lines with extensive stratiform precipitation (Houze 1977; Zipser 1977), and that the corresponding latent heating profiles for the convective and stratiform components of squall systems can be quite different (Houze 1982; Johnson 1984). Systems containing extensive stratiform precipitation have quite different heating profiles from those which consist principally of deep convection. In addition, there is evidence to suggest that convective momentum transport is a function of system organization, with up-gradient transport in the line-normal direction and down-gradient transport in the line-parallel direction (LeMone 1983; Wu and Yanai 1994; Tung and Yanai 2002). Further, observations from COARE indicate that surface fluxes are greatly enhanced in convection that is highly
The dynamics of energy allocation in adult arrhenotokous and thelytokous Venturia canescens

The ability to adjust resource allocation to the quality of the environment has broad implications for animal reproductive success. Organisms with complex life cycles that may experience various selection pressures during their lifetime are expected to evolve mechanisms to modulate the resource allocation strategies adopted during ontogeny to the conditions encountered by the adult. In the parasitoid Venturia canescens Gravenhorst (Hymenoptera: Ichneumonidae), thelytoky appears to have been selected for in anthropogenic habitats, where hosts are relatively numerous and food is absent, and arrhenotoky in natural habitats where hosts are more scarce and food is present. A previous study postulated that during their juvenile stage, females of both reproductive modes adopt strategies of energy allocation in accordance with these conditions, possibly providing a direct short‐term advantage to arrhenotokous forms, which partially co‐occur with thelytokous forms under natural conditions. To test this assumption, we provided daily adult thelytokous and arrhenotokous females with a small number of hosts together with food. To compare their lifetime resource allocation strategies, we recorded wasp longevities, egg loads, and carbohydrate reserves in wasps of different ages. Our analysis indicates that thelytokous females are able, to a certain extent, to cope with these conditions, because they reached the same longevity as arrhenotokous females. Nevertheless, thelytokous females suffered from a higher degree of time limitation compared with arrhenotokous ones, and arrhenotokous wasps appeared to maintain their energetic advantage over the adult stage. These results provide new insights, and point to the consideration of other activities, such as flight performance and/or ability to reach food and hosts, in the understanding of the role of resource allocation strategies in the maintenance of sex in this species.
Notes on the Breeding Behavior of a Philippine Eagle Pair at Mount Sinaka, Central Mindanao

Abstract We documented the breeding behavior and diet of a Philippine Eagle (Pithecophaga jefferyi) pair from July 1999 to January 2000 in an isolated forest in Central Mindanao. We observed eight distinct courtship displays and several activity patterns on the nest. Copulation started two months prior to egg laying and continued until the first month of incubation, with a mean of 1.5 copulations per day. Seventy-four percent of the time devoted to incubation was by the female. The incubation period lasted 58 days. Throughout the incubation and early brooding phases the male provided food for the female and the young. Diet consisted of 17 prey items of four vertebrate taxa, mostly mammals, with civet cats (Family Viverridae) and flying lemur (Cynocephalus volans) representing the bulk of the diet.
The Effects of L-Carnitine and Different Levels of Animal Fat on Performance, Carcass Characteristics, some Blood Parameters and Immune Response in Broiler Chicks

This study was conducted to investigate the effects of L-carnitine and different levels of animal fat on performance, carcass characteristics and some blood parameters of broiler chickens. Two hundred one-day old male broiler chicks were allotted to5 treatments in 4 replicates and 10 birds in each replicate. Dietary treatments consisted of: 1) diet with 5% vegetable oil (T1), 2) diet with 5% vegetable oil + 300 mg/kg Lcarnitine (T2), 3) diet with 4% animal fat + 300 mg/kg L-carnitine (T3), 4) diet with 5% animal fat + 300 mg/kg L-carnitine (T4) and 5) diet with 6% animal fat + 300 mg/kg L-carnitine (T5). The dietary treatments had not significant effect on body weight gain in days 1-21 (P>0.05). The body weight of chicks fed T4 diet was increased in days 22-42 and whole period of the experiment (P 0.05). Adding L-carnitine had a significant effect on Newcastle disease antibody titer at day 32 (P 0.05).
JVM Fuzzing for JIT-Induced Side-Channel Detection

Timing side channels arise in software when a program's execution time can be correlated with security-sensitive program input. Recent results on software side-channel detection focus on analysis of program's source code. However, runtime behavior, in particular optimizations introduced during just-in-time (JIT) compilation, can impact or even introduce timing side channels in programs. In this paper, we present a technique for automatically detecting such JIT-induced timing side channels in Java programs. We first introduce patterns to detect partitions of secret input potentially separable by side channels. Then we present an automated approach for exploring behaviors of the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) to identify states where timing channels separating these partitions arise. We evaluate our technique on three datasets used in recent work on side-channel detection. We find that many code variants labeled “safe” with respect to side-channel vulnerabilities are in fact vulnerable to JIT-induced timing side channels. Our results directly contradict the conclusions of four separate state-of-the-art program analysis tools for side-channel detection and demonstrate that JIT-induced side channels are prevalent and can be detected automatically.