Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Human cancer cell line microRNAs associated with in vitro sensitivity to paclitaxel

Paclitaxel is a mainstay of treatment for many solid tumors, and frequently, clinical outcome is influenced by paclitaxel sensitivity. Despite this, our understanding of the molecular basis of paclitaxel response is incomplete. Recently, it has been shown that microRNAs (miRNAs) influence messenger RNA (mRNA) transcriptional control and can contribute to human carcinogenesis. In the present study, our objective was to identify miRNAs associated with cancer cell line response to paclitaxel and to evaluate these miRNAs as therapeutic targets to increase paclitaxel sensitivity. We measured the expression of 335 unique miRNAs in 40 human cancer cell lines selected from the NCI panel. We then integrated miRNA expression data with publicly available paclitaxel-sensitivity (GI50) data for each of the 40 cell lines to identify miRNAs associated with paclitaxel sensitivity. Ovarian cancer cell lines with differential miRNA expression and paclitaxel sensitivity were transiently transfected with miRNA precursors and inhibitors, and the effects on in vitro cell paclitaxel sensitivity were evaluated. Pearson’s correlation identified 2 miRNAs (miR-367 and miR-30a-5p) associated with the NCI40 cell line in vitro paclitaxel response (P<0.0003). Ovarian cancer cells were selected based on the association between paclitaxel sensitivity and miR-367/miR-30a-5p expression. Overexpression of miR-367 in the paclitaxel-sensitive cells [PA1; IC50, 1.69 nM, high miR-367 (2.997), low miR-30a-5p (−0.323)] further increased paclitaxel sensitivity, whereas miR-367 depletion decreased paclitaxel sensitivity. In contrast, overexpression and depletion of miR-30a-5p in the paclitaxel-resistant cells [OVCAR4; IC50, 17.8 nM, low miR-367 (−0.640), high miR-30a-5p (3.270)] decreased and increased paclitaxel sensitivity, respectively. We identified and successfully targeted miRNAs associated with human cancer cell line response to paclitaxel. Our strategy of integrating in vitro miRNA expression and drug sensitivity data may not only aid in the characterization of determinants of drug response but also in the identification of novel therapeutic targets to increase activity of existing therapeutics.
Development of Pigment Coated Paper Recognizable With UV Light

This study was carried out in order to develop a speciality functional coated paper, which can be recognized under a ultraviolet lamp. The special fluorescent whitening agent (FWA) which absorbs ultraviolet light (397~410 nm) and emits it as yellowish light (570~500nm) was used. The special FWA was applied in a coating color in two ways: (1) direct application to a coating color as a FWA; (2) application on pigment surface, drying it and application it as a fluorescence whitening pigments (colored pigments). The effects of the special FWA on coating color properties were tested and the distribution of colored pigments in coated paper was evaluated under a ultraviolet lamp. The results showed that the colored pigments didn't affect on coating color properties. Experimental results showed the possibility of producing a security coated paper using the special FWA. To produce a speciality functional paper, it was found to be proper to apply the special FWA in the form of colored pigment.
Aromatic Polyimide/MWCNT Hybrid Nanocomposites: Structure, Dynamics, and Properties

Two series of hybrid polyimide (PI)/multiwalled carbon nanotube (MWCNT) nanocomposites were prepared including COOH-functionalized or pristine nanotubes, and their structure, morphology and dynamics/mechanical properties at 20°C–500°C were studied using WAXD (Wide-angle X-ray diffraction), AFM (Atomic force microscopy), TEM (transmission electron microscopy), DSC (Differential scanning calorimetry), DMA (Dynamic mechanical analysis), CRS (creep rate spectroscopy) techniques, and stress–strain testing. The impact of nanofiller loadings of 0.125, 0.25, 0.5, or 1 wt% relative to PI was evaluated. Specific changes in the matrix morphology and different quality of nanotube dispersion in the nanocomposites with amorphous and semicrystalline matrices were determined. The best nanotube dispersion was observed in the composites with 0.5 wt% MWCNT-COOH. A peculiar high temperature dynamics, different for amorphous, and semicrystalline matrices, was revealed in these nanocomposites. The most dramatic changes in high temperature dynamics and a pronounced dynamic heterogeneity as well as substantially enhanced mechanical properties at room temperature were revealed in the case of a semicrystalline PI matrix. The results were treated in terms of the synergistic impact of nanotubes and matrix crystallites on dynamics in the intercrystalline regions of PI (“combined constrained dynamics effect”) and the peculiar interfacial dynamics.
Evolution of Robustness to Protein Mistranslation by Accelerated Protein Turnover

Translational errors occur at high rates, and they influence organism viability and the onset of genetic diseases. To investigate how organisms mitigate the deleterious effects of protein synthesis errors during evolution, a mutant yeast strain was engineered to translate a codon ambiguously (mistranslation). It thereby overloads the protein quality-control pathways and disrupts cellular protein homeostasis. This strain was used to study the capacity of the yeast genome to compensate the deleterious effects of protein mistranslation. Laboratory evolutionary experiments revealed that fitness loss due to mistranslation can rapidly be mitigated. Genomic analysis demonstrated that adaptation was primarily mediated by large-scale chromosomal duplication and deletion events, suggesting that errors during protein synthesis promote the evolution of genome architecture. By altering the dosages of numerous, functionally related proteins simultaneously, these genetic changes introduced large phenotypic leaps that enabled rapid adaptation to mistranslation. Evolution increased the level of tolerance to mistranslation through acceleration of ubiquitin-proteasome–mediated protein degradation and protein synthesis. As a consequence of rapid elimination of erroneous protein products, evolution reduced the extent of toxic protein aggregation in mistranslating cells. However, there was a strong evolutionary trade-off between adaptation to mistranslation and survival upon starvation: the evolved lines showed fitness defects and impaired capacity to degrade mature ribosomes upon nutrient limitation. Moreover, as a response to an enhanced energy demand of accelerated protein turnover, the evolved lines exhibited increased glucose uptake by selective duplication of hexose transporter genes. We conclude that adjustment of proteome homeostasis to mistranslation evolves rapidly, but this adaptation has several side effects on cellular physiology. Our work also indicates that translational fidelity and the ubiquitin-proteasome system are functionally linked to each other and may, therefore, co-evolve in nature.
Quantification of GST and esterase activities in pyrethrin-resistant mosquitoes using pyrethroid-like fluorescent substrates

ABSTRACT Botanical pyrethrins and synthetic pyrethroids are highly potent and environmentally safe insecticides that are used to control a wide range of disease vector and pest arthropods. Unfortunately, resistance to these insecticides has been demonstrated in numerous medically important mosquito species. In this study, adult Culex pipiens sensu lato were captured in agricultural and urban locations in Fresno County, California, and subsequently exposed to a commercial formulation of pyrethrin insecticide by ultra-low-volume spraying. Following insecticide exposure, two pyrethroid-like, fluorescent substrates (4-methyl-2-oxo-2H-chromen-6-yl, cis-3-(2,2-dichlorovinyl)-2,2-dimethylcyclopropanecarboxylate (cis-DCVC) and 4-methyl-2-oxo-2H-chromen-6-yl, cis-3-((Z)-2-chloro-3,3,3-trifluoroprop-1-enyl)-2,2-dimethylcyclopropanecarboxylate (cis-TFMCVC)) and 1-chloro-2,4-dinitrobenzene (CDNB) were used to measure esterase and glutathione S-transferase (GST) activities in surviving mosquitoes. Elevated esterase activity (2.5-fold) was found in surviving urban mosquitoes at 12-h post-pyrethrin exposure (in comparison to non-insecticide-exposed control mosquitoes) when cis-TFMCVC was used as a substrate. Additionally, when CDNB was used as a substrate, 2.8-fold higher GST activity was found. A simple assay was established using our pyrethroid-like, fluorescent substrates that was able to detect low-level esterase activities in homogenates made from individual mosquitoes. The cis-TFMCVC-based assay suggested that esterase activity plays a role in pyrethrin resistance in urban mosquitoes in California.
Network Analysis of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

Introduction In 1988 the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations formed a joint organization: the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. This new organization, the IPCC for short, was charged to fairly and openly assess the science and socioeconomic challenges regarding climate change. collaboration structure of climate change researchers. The IPCC report is prepared through complex procedures to successfully synthesize all relevant issues related to climate change with agreement of stakeholders. Since climate change is a sensitive and controversial issue in policy and science, achieving credibility is an important and necessary goal for the IPCC report. Figure 1 briefly shows how the IPCC report is prepared. To develop scope and outline of the report, frequent experts meeting are held. In addition, policy makers are also encouraged to address currently important policy issues related to climate change. Once the scope and outline are defined, governments are invited to nominate experts and each working group selects authors/editors from the nominated experts for the relevant volume. Authors are in charge of the contents and work based on peer-reviewed and internationally available literatures. The draft written by the authors are sent to experts for review. After authors prepare final draft based on the experts review, governments review the draft and working groups of IPCC finally approves the report and published it. 3 Figure 1-The flow chart of actors for an IPCC report. The IPCC was chosen because it is often regarded as the definitive collection of research. UN members refer to the reports when negotiating treaties and discussing other possible courses of action. Since the IPCC report plays a vital role on the world stage, we focused our efforts to see how well the IPCC lives up to its mission of openness and fairness by: • Exploring how team collaborations differ in the many fields of expertise (e.g., economics and atmospheric chemistry). • Evaluating core network metrics, such as clustering coefficient and the degree distribution, for their relevance two to identifying IPCC characteristics. • Identifying the nationality of key authors to see if they represent the goal of the IPCC to included developing and developed researchers. • Understanding who are the most connected and least connected authors. More importantly, to understand characteristics of the least connected authors, including discipline, research labs, and nationality. By studying the IPCC, we choose a seminal work in the climate change field, which many researchers defer to on a …
A High-Performance Multicell Topology Based on Single-Phase Power Cells for Three-Phase Systems Operating Under Unbalanced AC Mains and Asymmetrical Loads

This paper presents a multicell converter topology composed of N single-phase power cells per phase and a multipulse power transformer. The topology achieves high-power-quality waveforms in three-phase applications under the presence of severe unbalanced ac mains. Moreover, the power cells are properly arranged in order to achieve high-performance ac supply current waveforms under asymmetrical loads. The configuration is based on single-phase power cells that feature a pulsewidth-modulation rectifier in order to achieve an overall unitary displacement power factor and a controlled dc-link voltage at the power-cell level. The configuration is implemented, and different experimental tests are performed where unbalance and distortion indexes are computed.
Distributed Maximal Clique Computation and Management

Maximal cliques are elementary substructures in a graph and instrumental in graph analysis such as the structural analysis of many complex networks, graph clustering and community detection, network hierarchy detection, emerging pattern mining, vertex importance measures, etc. However, the number of maximal cliques is also notoriously large even for many small real world graphs. This size problem gives rise to challenges in both computing and managing the set of maximal cliques. Many algorithms for computing maximal cliques have been proposed in the literature; however, most of them are sequential algorithms that cannot scale due to the high complexity of the problem, while existing parallel algorithms for computing maximal cliques are mostly immature and especially suffer from skewed workload. As for managing the set of maximal cliques, which is essential due to its large size, there is barely any efficient method for querying or updating the set of maximal cliques. In this paper, we first propose a distributed algorithm built on a share-nothing architecture for computing the set of maximal cliques. We effectively address the problem of skewed workload distribution due to high-degree vertices, which also leads to drastically reduced worst-case time complexity for computing maximal cliques in common real-world graphs. Then, we propose a set of fundamental query operations and efficient algorithms to process the queries, to aid more efficient and effective analysis of the set of maximal cliques. Finally, we also devise algorithms to support efficient update maintenance of the set of maximal cliques when the underlying graph is updated. We verify the efficiency of our algorithms for computing, querying, and updating the set of maximal cliques with a range of real-world graphs from different application domains.
New social adaptability index predicts overall mortality

Introduction Definitions of underprivileged status based on race, gender and geographic location are neither sensitive nor specific; instead we proposed and validated a composite index of social adaptability (SAI). Material and methods Index of social adaptability was calculated based on employment, education, income, marital status, and substance abuse, each factor contributing from 0 to 3 points. Index of social adaptability was validated in NHANES-3 by association with all-cause and cause-specific mortality. Results Weighted analysis of 19,593 subjects demonstrated mean SAI of 8.29 (95% CI 8.17-8.40). Index of social adaptability was higher in Whites, followed by Mexican-Americans and then the African-American population (ANOVA, p < 0.001). The SAI was higher in subjects living in metropolitan compared to rural areas (T-test, p < 0.001), and was greater in men than in women (T-test, p < 0.001). In Cox models adjusted for age, comorbidity index, BMI, race, sex, geographic location, hemoglobin, serum creatinine, albumin, cholesterol, and glycated hemoglobin levels, SAI was inversely associated with mortality (HR 0.87 per point, 95% CI 0.84-0.90, p < 0.001). This association was confirmed in subgroups. Conclusions We proposed and validated an indicator of social adaptability with a strong association with mortality, which can be used to identify underprivileged populations at risk of death.
R Engine Cell: integrating R into the i2b2 software infrastructure

Informatics for Integrating Biology and the Bedside (i2b2) is an initiative funded by the NIH that aims at building an informatics infrastructure to support biomedical research. The University of Pavia has recently integrated i2b2 infrastructure with a registry of inherited arrhythmogenic diseases. Within this project, the authors created a novel i2b2 cell, named R Engine Cell, which allows the communication between i2b2 and the R statistical software. As survival analyses are routinely performed by cardiology researchers, the authors have first concentrated on making Kaplan-Meier analyses available within the i2b2 web interface. To this aim, the authors developed a web-client plug-in to select the patient set on which to perform the analysis and to display the results in a graphical, intuitive way. R Engine Cell has been designed to easily support the integration of other R-based statistical analyses into i2b2.
The Role of Party and Incumbency in Identification of Argumentation Strategies in Political Debate

Many facets of language can only be understood in terms of who is speaking, who is listening, and the context of their interaction. Here we explore this in the domain of political debate where prior work suggests strong links between rhetoric and partisan affiliation. In particular, we explore how party and electoral status can be used to improve performance on classification of value and identity arguments. We first consider splitting the data based on these features, training separate models for each group, and then introduce a model which directly combines these features with LSTM-generated latent text representations. We demonstrate that not only does the inclusion of these features in our final model improve performance, it does so with negligible additional computational cost.
Ceramic Response to High Speed Grinding

Abstract Material response was investigated with respect to normal grinding forces, surface roughness, and removal mechanisms in grinding of alumina, silicon carbide, silicon nitride, and zircona with a resin-bond 160 μm grit diamond wheel at the grinding speeds of upto 160 m/s. The results reveal that the normal grinding forces decreased significantly with an increase in grinding speed; they also increased substantially with an increase in a complex relation of the ceramic hardness and toughness. High speed grinding produced a reduction in surface roughness for silicon carbide and alumina but gave no improvement for zirconia and silicon nitride. Also the surface roughness in high speed grinding was found to be material-dependent that the ground silicon nitride exhibited much smoother than the other ground ceramics. The influence of grinding speed on material removal mechanisms was analyzed in terms of grinding geometry and ceramic material properties.
Modularity maximization in networks by variable neighborhood search

Finding communities, or clusters, in networks, or graphs, has been the subject of intense studies in the last ten years. The most used criterion for that purpose, despite some recent criticism, is modularity maximization, proposed by Newman and Girvan. It consists in maximizing the sum for all clusters of the number of inner edges minus the expected number of inner edges assuming the same distribution of degrees. Numerous heuristics, as well as a few exact algorithms have been proposed to maximize modularity. We apply the Variable Neighborhood Search metaheuristic to that problem. The resulting Variable Neighborhood Decomposition Search heuristic is applied to the Clustering problems of the 10 DIMACS Implementation Challenge. The optimal solution is obtained by the heuristic whenever it is known, and otherwise the best solutions from the literature are improved, except in the case of three instances for which available memory was too small.
Mitochondrial origin of the matrilocal Mosuo people in China

The Mosuo people are currently the only matrilocal population in China. The origins of the population and their matrilocal tradition remain unknown. To address these questions, we studied the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) diversity of the Mosuo. Lower mtDNA diversity is expected in matrilocal populations because the women remain with their families after marriage, and there is generally less movement of mtDNA genomes in matrilocal populations. However, the haplotype diversity of this population is not lower than the neighboring patrilocal populations, indicating that the Mosuo started practicing matrilocality at least after the Paleolithic Age. A previous haplogroup frequency clustering study indicated that the Mosuo are closest to the Naxi people, but the network analysis of individual sequence haplotypes presented herein shows that most Mosuo lineages cluster with Pumi lineages. Therefore, we concluded that the Mosuo people have the closest genetic relationship with the Pumi, and that they started to practice matrilocality several thousand years ago.
On the Performance of Diagonal Lattice Space-Time Codes

There has been tremendous work done on designing space-time codes for the quasi-static multiple-input multiple output (MIMO) channel. All the coding design up-to-date focuses on either high-performance, high rates, low complexity encoding and decoding, or targeting a combination of these criteria . In this paper, we analyze in details the performance limits of diagonal lattice space-time codes under lattice decoding. We present both lower and upper bounds on the average decoding error probability. We first derive a new closed-form expression for the lower bound using the so-called sphere lower bound. This bound presents the ultimate performance limit a diagonal lattice space-time code can achieve at any signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). The upper bound is then derived using the union-bound which demonstrates how the average error probability can be minimized by maximizing the minimum product distance of the code. Combining both the lower and the upper bounds on the average error probability yields a simple upper bound on the the minimum product distance that any (complex) lattice code can achieve. At high-SNR regime, we discuss the outage performance of such codes and provide the achievable diversity-multiplexing tradeoff under lattice decoding.