Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Metformin induces the M2 macrophage polarization to accelerate the wound healing via regulating AMPK/mTOR/NLRP3 inflammasome singling pathway.

BACKGROUND Skin wound healing is a challenging problem, especially in aging or diabetic patients, which becomes more difficult to heal, and easily results in considerable public health burden. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of metformin on wound healing and explore its underlying mechanism. METHODS Metformin was local topical application in rat skin defect models. Alterations in the wounded skin were observed, and angiogenesis in the wound also was analyzed by immunohistochemical staining. The markers associated with differentiation macrophage were analyzed by immunofluorescence staining. The roles of AMPK singling pathway and the relative protein of NLRP3 inflammasome in wound were also analyzed by western blotting. In addition, AMPK/mTOR/NLRP3 inflammasome signaling axis was investigated to further analyze the molecular mechanism of metformin treatment on inducing M2 macrophage polarization in vitro. RESULTS Out results showed that metformin improved wound healing and angiogenesis which was paralleled by M2 macrophage polarization. We also found that the level of relative proteins of NLRP3 inflammasome was markedly decreased after metformin treatment. Furthermore, blockage of AMPK or activation of mTOR abolished the effects of metformin treatment on depressing NLRP3 inflammasome activation, M2 polarization and improving wound healing. It suggested that the treatment effects of metformin on wound healing were through regulating AMPK/mTOR/NLRP3 inflammasome signaling axis. CONCLUSION Metformin regulated AMPK/mTOR singling pathway to inhibit NLRP3 inflammasome activation, which boosted M2 macrophage polarization to accelerate the wound healing. These findings provided new insights into the molecular mechanism of metformin therapy and its therapeutic potential in wound healing.
p38 MAPK activity is associated with the histological degree of interstitial fibrosis in IgA nephropathy patients

Activation of p38 mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK) is associated with tissue fibrosis, and inhibition of p38 MAPK can attenuate the progression of fibrosis. We aimed to investigate whether p38 MAPK activity in kidney tissue confirmed by immunohistochemical staining is associated with renal tubulointerstitial fibrosis in chronic kidney disease patients with IgA nephropathy. We collected kidney biopsy specimens from 341 IgA nephropathy patients and 15 control patients to identify the clinical and histopathological factors associated with kidney tubulointerstitial fibrosis and to find an association between kidney phosphorylated p38 immunoactivity and pathological grading. In addition, we aimed to investigate whether the anti-fibrotic effect of p38 MAPK inhibition can be identified by assessing the immunostaining intensity of phosphorylated p38 in kidney tissue. A renal tubulointerstitial fibrosis model was introduced using 7-week-old C57BL/6 mice subjected to unilateral ureteral obstruction (UUO). The p38 MAPK inhibitor SB-731445 was injected intraperitoneally every day for 7 days, and changes in renal fibrosis-associated markers were investigated. Assessment of kidney biopsy specimens from IgA nephropathy patients revealed that the degree of interstitial fibrosis was significantly associated with the tissue immunoactivity of phosphorylated p38. High-grade interstitial fibrosis was associated with a low glomerular filtration rate, high proteinuria, and high-grade histopathological changes, including tubular atrophy, interstitial inflammation, and glomerular sclerosis. In a mouse UUO model, renal protein expression of COL1 and phosphorylated p38 were significantly increased, and the protein expression of COL1 and phosphorylated p38 decreased in mice administered 10 mg/kg/day p38 MAPK inhibitor. We found that kidney interstitial fibrosis is associated with increased immunoactivity of phosphorylated p38 in a UUO mouse model and in human IgA nephropathy patients and that the anti-fibrotic effect of p38 MAPK inhibition can be confirmed using immunohistochemical staining for phosphorylated p38 in kidney tissue.
Effect of exenatide, metformin and folic acid on experimentally induced metabolic–cognitive syndrome in rats

Background: Metabolic syndrome (MetS) and its relationship with cognitive impairment has been the subject of extensive research. Purpose: This study was designed to determine the effect of MetS on cognitive function, and the possibility of modulating this effect by exenatide, metformin and folic acid. Materials and Methods: 30 adult male albino rats were divided in 5 groups. Group (I): received a standard rat chow, group (II): none treated rats with MetS fed with 60% fructose added to the standard rat chow, group (III): rats with MetS treated with exenatide, group (IV): rats with MetS treated with metformin, group (V): rats with MetS treated with folic acid. At the end of the experiment, fasting blood glucose, fasting plasma insulin, HOMA-IR index, serum triglyceride, HDL-C, dopamine and BDNF levels in brain tissue were measured and cognitive performance was assessed by Morris water maze (MWM) test. Results: rats with MetS showed increased levels of fasting blood glucose, fasting plasma insulin, HOMA-IR index, arterial blood pressure, serum triglycerides, decreased HDL-C, dopamine and BDNF and showed memory impairment in MWM test. All treated groups resulted in decrease in fasting blood glucose, fasting plasma insulin, HOMA-IR index, arterial blood pressure, and serum triglycerides and increase in HDL-C, dopamine and BDNF as well as improvement in MWM test. Conclusion: MetS was associated with cognitive impairment. Exenatide, metformin and folic acid improved cognitive function in addition to improvement of metabolic parameters.
Cyber Behaviors Among Heterosexual and Sexual Minority Youth: Subgroup Differences and Associations with Health Indicators

To examine the associations of adolescent sexual orientation with cyber behaviors and health indicators 5 years later during young adulthood and test whether cyber behaviors contribute to sexual orientation health disparities. Data were drawn from Waves 2 and 7 from the NEXT Generational Health Study, a nationally representative cohort of U.S. adolescents (n = 2012). Multiple linear regressions were used to examine differences between sexual orientation subgroups (defined based on sexual attraction) in five cyber behaviors and five health indicators. Mediation analyses were conducted to examine whether cyber behaviors mediated the associations between bisexual attraction and health indicators. Relative to heterosexual peers, bisexual youth spent more time engaging in cyber behaviors and social media, and reported more psychosomatic symptoms and poorer general health. Gay and questioning males spent less time playing video games than heterosexual males. Bisexual females reported more depressive symptoms and less optimism and happiness than heterosexual females. Time spent on cyber behaviors and social media was a significant mediator of adolescent bisexual attraction and worse health outcomes in young adulthood. Frequency of cyber behaviors differed between sexual minority subgroups. Bisexual youth in particular had more psychosomatic symptoms and poorer general health. Engagement in cyber behaviors and social media use contributed to increased health disparities among bisexual youth.
Effects of Farmers’ Practices on Maize (Zea mays) Contamination by Potential Aflatoxigenic Fungi and Aflatoxin in Benue State, Nigeria

Aflatoxin associated with a number of cereals and legumes is estimated to increase the chances of developing primary liver cancer in 152.7 and 61.1 cancer/year/100,000 population of infants and children, respectively in Nigeria. This study was carried out to assess the implications of some agronomic practices on the infestation of aflatoxigenic fungi and total aflatoxin in maize produce in Benue State. Two maize sample types (Pre-harvest and Post-harvest) collected from 3 locations in Benue State were cultured on Sabouraud dextrose agar for fungi isolation and identification. Moisture content and total aflatoxin concentration were determined (ELISA method) in both pre-harvest oven dried and farmer’s post-harvest sun dried samples. Information on agronomic practices was obtained with the aid of questionnaire. T-test and analysis of variance (ANOVA) were used to analyze the data with confident levels set at 95%. Overall, 5 mould genera were identified: Aspergillus (44.0%), Fusarium (24.44%), Botryodiplodia (17.78%), Rhizopus (15.56%) and Penicillium (4.44%). Moisture content of oven dried samples was significantly less than that of farmers sun dried samples (t = 10.45, P < 0.001). Similarly, a significant difference in total aflatoxin concentration was recorded between farmers sun dried and oven dried samples (t = 2.37, P = 0.03). Half of the farmer’s sun dried samples had aflatoxin concentration above the recommended EU (4 ug/Kg) limit, but none of the pre-harvest oven dried samples exceeded EU limits. Maize samples from fertilized farms were more likely than non-fertilized farms to have higher aflatoxin concentration (P = 0.002). Similarly, Maize seeds purchase from the open market were more likely than seeds from previous harvest to be contaminated with aflatoxin (P = 0.003). The study advocates rapid drying of timely harvested maize so as to reduce or stop the action of heavy field fungi contaminants as well as aflatoxin accumulation.
Trends, patterns and predictive factors of infant and child mortality in well-performing and underperforming states of India: a secondary analysis using National Family Health Surveys

Objectives This paper analyses the patterns and trends in the mortality rates of infants and children under the age of 5 in India (1992–2016) and quantifies the variation in performance between different geographical states through three rounds of nationally representative household surveys. Design Three rounds of cross-sectional survey data. Setting The study is conducted at the national level: India and its selected good-performing states, namely Haryana, Kerala, Maharashtra, Punjab and Tamil Nadu, and selected poor-performing states, namely Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh. Participants Adopting a multistage, stratified random sampling, 601 509 households with 699 686 women aged 15–49 years in 2015–2016, 109 041 households with 124 385 women aged 15–49 years in 2005–2006, and 88 562 households with 89 777 ever married women in the age group 13–49 years in 1992–1993 were selected. Results Through the use of maps, this paper clearly shows that the overall trend in infant and child mortality is on a decline in India. Computation of relative change shows that majority of the states have witnessed over 50% reduction in both infant and under-5 mortality rates from National Family Health Survey (NFHS)-I to NFHS-4. However, the improvements are not evenly distributed, and there is huge variation in performance between states over time. Funnel plots show that the most populous states like Uttar Pradesh Bihar and Madhya Pradesh have underperformed consistently across the survey period from 1992 to 2016. Regression analysis comparing high-performing and low-performing states revealed that female infants and women with shorter birth intervals had greater risk of infant deaths in poor-performing states. Conclusion Attempts to reduce infant and child mortality rates in India are heading in the right direction. Even so, there is huge variation in performance between states. This paper recommends a mix of strategies that reduce child and infant mortality among the high-impact states where the biggest improvements can be expected, including the need to address neonatal mortality.
Advancing Multi-Modal Deep Learning: Towards Language-Grounded Visual Understanding

Using deep learning, computer vision now rivals people at object recognition and detection, opening doors to tackle new challenges in image understanding. Among these challenges, understanding and reasoning about language grounded visual content is of fundamental importance to advancing artificial intelligence. Recently, multiple datasets and algorithms have been created as proxy tasks towards this goal, with visual question answering (VQA) being the most widely studied. In VQA, an algorithm needs to produce an answer to a natural language question about an image. However, our survey of datasets and algorithms for VQA uncovered several sources of dataset bias and sub-optimal evaluation metrics that allowed algorithms to perform well by merely exploiting superficial statistical patterns. In this dissertation, we describe new algorithms and datasets that address these issues. We developed two new datasets and evaluation metrics that enable a more accurate measurement of abilities of a VQA model, and also expand VQA to include new abilities, such as reading text, handling out-of-vocabulary words, and understanding data-visualization. We also created new algorithms for VQA that have helped advance the state-of-the-art for VQA, including an algorithm that surpasses humans on two different chart question answering datasets about bar-charts, line-graphs and pie charts. Finally, we provide a holistic overview of several yet-unsolved challenges in not only VQA but vision and language research at large. Despite enormous progress, we find that a robust understanding and integration of vision and language is still an elusive goal, and much of the progress may be misleading due to dataset bias, superficial correlations and flaws in standard evaluation metrics. We carefully study and categorize these issues for several vision and language tasks and outline several possible paths towards development of safe, robust and trustworthy AI for language-grounded visual understanding.
High-efficiency Low-latency NTT Polynomial Multiplier for Ring-LWE Cryptography

—This paper presents a novel architecture to perform polynomial multiplication in ring learning with errors (ring-LWE) cryptosystems. By employing number theoretic transform (NTT) of the input polynomials simultaneously, the multiplication latency is significantly reduced. In addition, a multiple-path delay feedback (MDF) architecture is used to speed up the multiplication process. As a result, the proposed NTT multiplier offers a better value of area-latency product compared with that of previous studies. The simulation results for the security parameters n = 512 and q = 12,289 on Xilinx Virtex-7 FPGA show that the proposed multiplier uses only about 8.69% of the number of clock cycles required by previous works to completely perform the polynomial multiplication. Furthermore, the obtained area-latency product value of the proposed architecture is less than 45.3% of that of previous works.
Optimal media reporting intensity on mitigating spread of an emerging infectious disease

Mass media reports can induce individual behaviour change during a disease outbreak, which has been found to be useful as it reduces the force of infection. We propose a compartmental model by including a new compartment of the intensity of the media reports, which extends existing models by considering a novel media function, which is dependent both on the number of infected individuals and on the intensity of mass media. The existence and stability of the equilibria are analyzed and an optimal control problem of minimizing the total number of cases and total cost is considered, using reduction or enhancement in the media reporting rate as the control. With the help of Pontryagin’s Maximum Principle, we obtain the optimal media reporting intensity. Through parameterization of the model with the 2009 A/H1N1 influenza outbreak data in the 8th Hospital of Xi’an in Shaanxi Province of China, we obtain the basic reproduction number for the formulated model with two particular media functions. The optimal media reporting intensity obtained here indicates that during the early stage of an epidemic we should quickly enhance media reporting intensity, and keep it at a maximum level until it can finally weaken when epidemic cases have decreased significantly. Numerical simulations show that media impact reduces the number of cases during an epidemic, but that the number of cases is further mitigated under the optimal reporting intensity. Sensitivity analysis implies that the outbreak severity is more sensitive to the weight α1 (weight of media effect sensitive to infected individuals) than weight α2 (weight of media effect sensitive to media items).
Attitude of Farmers towards the Agricultural Extension System of State Department of Agriculture

The term ‘agricultural extension’ is a professional communication intervention deployed by public and private agencies or organizations to disseminate agriculture knowledge and technologies to rural communities. The public sector agency represented by the State Department of Agriculture is disseminating the agriculture and allied technologies among the farm families over the last few decades. The attitude is considered as the main variable or factor that has a great impact on the adoption rate of any technology by farmers and consequently, on the overall production rate. Experiences have shown that the favourable attitude towards any programme is bound to International Journal of Current Microbiology and Applied Sciences ISSN: 2319-7706 Volume 9 Number 4 (2020) Journal homepage: http://www.ijcmas. com
Contribution to the Study of the Relationship between Gammaproteobacteria and Rhizobia in Legume Species of the Genus Hedysarum

The nodular contents of the leguminous species of the genus Hedysarum (H. carnosum, H. spinosissimum subsp capitatum and H. pallidum) consist of cultivable bacteria belonging to the class Gammaproteobacteria, while the rhizobia of these leguminous species are not cultivable. Rhizobium sulla is the specific micro-symbiont of the H. coronarium leguminous species. The aim of this study is to see if the Gammaproteobacteria that inhabit the nodules of the three species of the genus Hedysarum (H. carnosum, H. spinosissimum subsp capitatum and H. pallidum) could have acquired the symbiotic criteria from rhizobia and cause nodulation in these host legume species by the transformation process. Transformation is carried out by extracting the plasmid DNA from the R. sulla strain and incorporate it into the bacterial strains of the Gammaproteobacteria class. Nodulation assay is performed to evaluate the ability of transformed strains to cause nodulation in legume species. The results showed that although there has been a transformation, there is a total failure of nodulation in the three legume species. This is explained by the specificity of molecular signals between bacteria and host plants as well as the genetic information carried by the plasmid is not sufficient to achieve a complete symbiotic relationship.
Accuracy of the refractive prediction determined by intraocular lens power calculation formulas in high myopia

Purpose: Our study was conducted to evaluate and compare the accuracy of the refractive prediction determined by the calculation formulas for different intraocular lens (IOL) powers for high myopia. Methods: This study reviewed 217 eyes from 135 patients who had received cataract aspiration treatment and IOL implantation. The refractive mean numerical error (MNE) and mean absolute error (MAE) of the IOL power calculation formulas (SRK/T, Haigis, Holladay, Hoffer Q, and Barrett Universal II) were examined and compared. The MNE and MAE at different axial lengths (AL) were compared, and the percentage of every refractive error absolute value for each formula was calculated at ±0.25D, ±0.50D, ±1.00D, and ±2.00D. Results: In all, 98 patients were recruited into this study and 98 eyes of them were analyzed. We found that Barrett Universal II formula had the lowest MNE and MAE, SRK/T and Haigis formulas arrived at similar MNE and MAE, and the MNE and MAE calculated by Holladay and Hoffer Q formula were the highest. Barrett Universal II formulas have the lowest MAE among different AL patients, whereas it reached the highest percentage of refractive error absolute value within 0.5D in this study. The MAE of each formula is positively correlated with AL. Conclusion: Barrett Universal II formula rendered the lowest predictive error compared with SRK/T, Haigis, Holladay, and Hoffer Q formulas. Thus, Barrett Universal II formula may be regarded as a more reliable formula for high myopia.
Crystal Structure of the Cyclostreptin-Tubulin Adduct: Implications for Tubulin Activation by Taxane-Site Ligands

It has been proposed that one of the mechanisms of taxane-site ligand-mediated tubulin activation is modulation of the structure of a switch element (the M-loop) from a disordered form in dimeric tubulin to a folded helical structure in microtubules. Here, we used covalent taxane-site ligands, including cyclostreptin, to gain further insight into this mechanism. The crystal structure of cyclostreptin-bound tubulin reveals covalent binding to βHis229, but no stabilization of the M-loop. The capacity of cyclostreptin to induce microtubule assembly compared to other covalent taxane-site agents demonstrates that the induction of tubulin assembly is not strictly dependent on M-loop stabilization. We further demonstrate that most covalent taxane-site ligands are able to partially overcome drug resistance mediated by βIII-tubulin (βIII) overexpression in HeLa cells, and compare their activities to pironetin, an interfacial covalent inhibitor of tubulin assembly that displays invariant growth inhibition in these cells. Our findings suggest a relationship between a diminished interaction of taxane-site ligands with βIII-tubulin and βIII tubulin-mediated drug resistance. This supports the idea that overexpression of βIII increases microtubule dynamicity by counteracting the enhanced microtubule stability promoted by covalent taxane-site binding ligands.
Association of Chemerin Plasma Concentration With Risk of Colorectal Cancer

Key Points Question Is there an association between peripheral concentrations of the proinflammatory biomarker chemerin and incident colorectal cancer? Findings In this case-cohort study that included 221 incident colorectal cancer cases and 2329 cancer-free participants, higher circulating plasma chemerin concentration was associated with a greater risk of colorectal cancer. This association was independent of known risk factors for colorectal cancer, including age, adiposity, lifestyle, and metabolic factors. Meaning Chemerin could have a role as an important inflammatory agent in the development of colorectal cancer and may serve as a promising future preventive and/or therapeutic target.