Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Influence of irradiance and iron on the growth of colonial Phaeocystis antarctica: implications for seasonal bloom dynamics in the Ross Sea, Antarctica

Laboratory culture experiments were used to investigate the growth rate of colonial Phaeocystis antarctica as a function of irradiance and dissolved iron concentration. The experiments were conducted with a P. antarctica strain isolated from the southern Ross Sea, Antarctica, and made use of natural, low-iron (<0.2 nM dissolved Fe) filtered seawater as a growth medium, thereby avoid- ing the addition of synthetic organic ligands to regulate dissolved iron concentrations. Under iron- and nutrient-replete conditions, colonial P. antarctica attained an average maximum cell-specific growth rate of 0.37 d -1 at an irradiance of 68 µE m -2 s -1 , above which growth rates decreased to 0.27 d -1 at an irradiance of 314 µE m -2 s -1 . The dependence of growth rate on ambient dissolved iron concentration was examined in dose-response type bioassay experiments using realistic sub- nanomolar additions of dissolved iron. The experimental results indicate significant changes in the iron requirements for growth of colonial P. antarctica as a function of irradiance, with our estimates of the half-saturation constant for growth with respect to dissolved iron (Kμ) ranging from 0.26 nM at ~20 µE m -2 s -1 , to 0.045 nM at ~40 µE m -2 s -1 and to 0.19 nM at ~90 µE m -2 s -1 . We interpret these vari- ations in Kμ as reflecting an increase in the cellular iron requirements of colonial P. antarctica at sub- optimal and supraoptimal irradiance, such that the cells require higher ambient dissolved iron con- centrations to attain maximum growth rates under such irradiance conditions. The experiments also provide evidence of a relationship between iron availability and the relative proportion of colonial versus solitary P. antarctica cells, whereby the colonial form appears to be favored by higher dis- solved iron concentrations. Our experimental results suggest that the initiation and termination of colonial P. antarctica blooms in the Ross Sea are determined by the combined effects of irradiance- driven changes in cellular iron requirements and a seasonal decrease in dissolved iron availability.
Evidence for a pulley of the inferior oblique muscle.

PURPOSE This study was undertaken to investigate evidence for a connective tissue pulley constraining the path of the inferior oblique (IO) muscle. METHODS From magnetic resonance images, the cross-sectional area, path, and orbital relationships of the human IO were determined in multiple gaze positions. Rectus pulleys were directly imaged with intravenous gadodiamide contrast. Images were compared with serial histologic sections of IO muscles of humans and monkeys. RESULTS The IO path from origin to the lateral border of the inferior rectus (IR) muscle was straight. Lateral to the IR, the IO curved to follow the globe. At the point of IR crossing, the IO moved anteriorly from infraduction to supraduction by approximately 53% of the IR insertion's travel. Gaze-related change in IO cross section was demonstrable near the IR center. The gaze-related inflection in IO path corresponded to its encirclement by a pulley consisting of a dense ring of collagen, stiffened by elastin and smooth muscle, and united with the IR pulley. Orbital layer fibers of the IO inserted on its pulley, the lateral rectus (LR) pulley, and associated connective tissues. CONCLUSIONS Like the rectus muscles, the human and monkey IO has a connective tissue pulley serving as its functional origin. The position of the IO pulley is influenced by its coupling to the actively moving IR pulley, whereas in turn the IO orbital layer inserts on and presumably shifts the IR and LR pulleys. These intercouplings facilitate implementation by rectus extraocular muscle suspensions of a commutative ocular motor plant.
Successful living domino liver transplantation in a child with protein C deficiency

PC is produced in the liver and inhibits blood coagulation by catalyzing active factors V and VIII. PC deficiency causes abnormal blood clotting that is difficult to regulate by anticoagulative treatments. Four reports of PC deficiency treated with LTx have been published; however, no report of DLT as a therapy for PC deficiency is available. We describe a case of a 23‐month‐old girl who received DLT for compound heterozygous PC deficiency. Her PC activity was below 5%. She developed intracranial lesion and frequent refractory purpura fulminans. Both her parents had heterozygous mutations of PC genes and were excluded as living donors. Furthermore, she was a low priority on the waiting list of deceased‐donor transplantation. We performed living DLT using the liver from a patient with MSUD. Activated PC concentrate safely supported the perioperative period. After DLT, she maintained normal PC activities and BCAA levels. This is the first case of PC deficiency successfully treated by living DLT with MSUD. We propose that DLT using liver from patients with MSUD is a treatment option for PC deficiency.
Muscle strength and sedative load in community-dwelling people aged 75 years and older: a population-based study.

BACKGROUND Use of psychotropic and sedative drugs has been associated with impaired muscle strength. Muscle weakness predicts important outcomes for older people including functional disability and mortality. The objective of this study was to investigate if the use of drugs with sedative properties is associated with poorer muscle strength. METHODS Seven-hundred community-dwelling participants, aged 75 years and older, enrolled in the population-based Geriatric Multidisciplinary Strategy for the Good Care of the Elderly (GeMS) study in 2004 were included in the present analyses. Data on demographics, diagnostics, and drug use were collected during standardized interviews, conducted by trained nurses and verified through medical records. Physiotherapists conducted objective tests of handgrip strength, knee extension strength, and the five repeated chair stands test. Sedative load was calculated using a previously published model for each participant. RESULTS Twenty-one percent of the participants (n = 147) had a sedative load of 1-2 and 8% (n = 58) had a sedative load 3 or more. After adjusting for covariates, participants with sedative load more than 0 had poorer performance on grip strength (p = .009), knee extension strength (p = .02), and five chair stands (p = .003) than nonusers of drugs with sedative properties. Increasing sedative load was associated with poorer grip strength. CONCLUSIONS Use of drugs with sedative properties was associated with impaired muscle strength. Although we adjusted for diagnoses affecting physical function, the possibility of confounding by indication cannot be entirely excluded. Given that muscle strength is predictive of functional disability and mortality, further attention should be directed toward conducting regular reviews of drug therapy and reducing use of sedative drugs.
Adaptive information agents in distributed textual environments

Hypertext cnvironmcnts such as the Web are rich with both word and link cues that can be exploited by autonomous ngents performing distributed tasks on behalf of the user. This paper characterizes such environments and identifies the fcaturcs that are most useful and readily available. We dcacribe the adaptive representation of an ecology of retrieval agents who attempt to capture important features of their surroundings, and base their behaviors upon them. We PERCUSS how such a representation allows the agents to interact with the environments where they are situated. Agents cnn internalize words that are locally correlated with fitness, based on user feedback. They are shown to outperform nonndaptivn search by an order of magnitude. Furthermore, cnch agent learns new strategies at local time and space scnlcs, while the population evolves at a global scale.
What about Us? Economic and Policy Changes Affecting Rural HIV/AIDS Services and Care

ABSTRACT Health care budgets and policies are chief drivers in the delivery and access to health services. Place is also a factor that affects patient and provider experiences within the health care system. We examine the impact of policy changes and subsequent budget cuts on rural HIV/AIDS care, support services, and prevention. We interviewed 11 social workers, case managers, and outreach workers who serve rural people living with HIV/AIDS. We conducted telephone interviews inquiring about the effect of economics and policies on direct practice with rural clients. We analyzed data using a content analysis approach. We found several themes from the data. Ryan White funding and policy changes shifted direct practice to a medical case management model. Changes in federal and state poverty levels affected client eligibility for the AIDS Drugs Assistance Program. Policy banning financial support for syringe service programs hindered prevention efforts to reduce HIV/AIDS transmission. Ancillary services were reduced, such as housing assistance, transportation, and emergency financial assistance. In conclusion, we highlight the importance of place-based policies to improve access to healthcare and services. We also provide recommendations for greater inclusion in HIV/AIDS-related policy development, care, and service planning for rural workers.
Equality bias impairs collective decision-making across cultures

Significance When making decisions together, we tend to give everyone an equal chance to voice their opinion. To make the best decisions, however, each opinion must be scaled according to its reliability. Using behavioral experiments and computational modelling, we tested (in Denmark, Iran, and China) the extent to which people follow this latter, normative strategy. We found that people show a strong equality bias: they weight each other’s opinion equally regardless of differences in their reliability, even when this strategy was at odds with explicit feedback or monetary incentives. We tend to think that everyone deserves an equal say in a debate. This seemingly innocuous assumption can be damaging when we make decisions together as part of a group. To make optimal decisions, group members should weight their differing opinions according to how competent they are relative to one another; whenever they differ in competence, an equal weighting is suboptimal. Here, we asked how people deal with individual differences in competence in the context of a collective perceptual decision-making task. We developed a metric for estimating how participants weight their partner’s opinion relative to their own and compared this weighting to an optimal benchmark. Replicated across three countries (Denmark, Iran, and China), we show that participants assigned nearly equal weights to each other’s opinions regardless of true differences in their competence—even when informed by explicit feedback about their competence gap or under monetary incentives to maximize collective accuracy. This equality bias, whereby people behave as if they are as good or as bad as their partner, is particularly costly for a group when a competence gap separates its members.
Microbial Biomass and Enzymatic Activity of the Surface Microlayer and Subsurface Water in Two Dystrophic Lakes

Abstract Nutrient and organic matter concentration, microbial biomass and activities were studied at the surface microlayers (SML) and subsurface waters (SSW) in two small forest lakes of different water colour. The SML in polyhumic lake is more enriched with dissolved inorganic nitrogen (0.141 mg l–1) than that of oligohumic lake (0.124 mg l–1), the former also contains higher levels of total nitrogen (2.66 mg l–1). Higher activities of lipase (Vmax 2290 nmol l–1 h–1 in oligo- and 6098 in polyhumic) and glucosidase (Vmax 41 nmol l–1 h–1 in oligo- and 49 in polyhumic) were in the SMLs in both lakes. Phosphatase activity was higher in the oligohumic SML than in SSW (Vmax 632 vs. 339 nmol l–1 h–1) while in polyhumic lake was higher in SSW (Vmax 2258 nmol l–1 h–1 vs. 1908 nmol l–1 h–1). Aminopeptidase activity in the SSW in both lakes was higher than in SMLs (Vmax 2117 in oligo- and 1213 nmol l–1 h–1 in polyhumic). It seems that solar radiation does inhibit neuston microbial community as a whole because secondary production and the share of active bacteria in total bacteria number were higher in SSW. However, in the oligohumic lake the abundance of bacteria in the SML was always higher than in the SSW (4.07 vs. 2.69 × 106 cells ml–1) while in the polyhumic lake was roughly equal (4.48 vs. 4.33 × 106 cells ml–1) in both layers. Results may also suggest that surface communities are not supplemented by immigration from bulk communities. The SML of humic lakes may act as important sinks for allochthonous nutrient resources and may then generate considerable energy pools for microbial food webs.
Co-expression analysis identifies long noncoding RNA SNHG1 as a novel predictor for event-free survival in neuroblastoma

Despite of the discovery of protein therapeutic targets and advancement in multimodal therapy, the survival chance of high-risk neuroblastoma (NB) patients is still less than 50%. MYCN amplification is a potent driver of NB, which exerts its oncogenic activity through either activating or inhibiting the transcription of target genes. Recently, long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs) are reported to be altered in cancers including NB. However, lncRNAs that are altered by MYCN amplification and associated with outcome in high-risk NB patients are limitedly discovered. Herein, we examined the expression profiles of lncRNAs and protein-coding genes between MYCN amplified and MYCN non-amplified NB from microarray (n = 47) and RNA-seq datasets (n = 493). We identified 6 lncRNAs in common that were differentially expressed (adjusted P ≤ 0.05 and fold change ≥ 2) and subsequently validated by RT-qPCR. The co-expression analysis reveals lncRNA, SNHG1 and coding gene, TAF1D highly co-expressed in NB. Kaplan-Meier analysis shows that higher expression of SNHG1 is significantly associated with poor patient survival. Importantly, multivariate analysis confirms high expression of SNHG1 as an independent prognostic marker for event-free survival (EFS) (HR = 1.58, P = 2.36E-02). In conclusion, our study unveils that SNHG1 is up-regulated by MYCN amplification and could be a potential prognostic biomarker for high-risk NB intervention.
Carbonic Anhydrase Is Essential for Streptococcus pneumoniae Growth in Environmental Ambient Air

ABSTRACT The respiratory tract pathogen Streptococcus pneumoniae needs to adapt to the different levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) it encounters during transmission, colonization, and infection. Since CO2 is important for various cellular processes, factors that allow optimal CO2 sequestering are likely to be important for pneumococcal growth and survival. In this study, we showed that the putative pneumococcal carbonic anhydrase (PCA) is essential for in vitro growth of S. pneumoniae under the CO2-poor conditions found in environmental ambient air. Enzymatic analysis showed that PCA catalyzes the reversible hydration of CO2 to bicarbonate (HCO3−), an essential step to prevent the cellular release of CO2. The addition of unsaturated fatty acids (UFAs) reversed the CO2-dependent in vitro growth inhibition of S. pneumoniae strains lacking the pca gene (Δpca), indicating that PCA-mediated CO2 fixation is at least associated with HCO3 −-dependent de novo biosynthesis of UFAs. Besides being necessary for growth in environmental ambient conditions, PCA-mediated CO2 fixation pathways appear to be required for intracellular survival in host cells. This effect was especially pronounced during invasion of human brain microvascular endothelial cells (HBMEC) and uptake by murine J774 macrophage cells but not during interaction of S. pneumoniae with Detroit 562 pharyngeal epithelial cells. Finally, the highly conserved pca gene was found to be invariably present in both CO2-independent and naturally circulating CO2-dependent strains, suggesting a conserved essential role for PCA and PCA-mediated CO2 fixation pathways for pneumococcal growth and survival.
The hypothesis of neuronal interconnectivity as a function of brain size—a general organization principle of the human connectome

Twenty years ago, Ringo and colleagues proposed that maintaining absolute connectivity in larger compared with smaller brains is computationally inefficient due to increased conduction delays in transcallosal information transfer and expensive with respect to the brain mass needed to establish these additional connections. Therefore, they postulated that larger brains are relatively stronger connected intrahemispherically and smaller brains interhemispherically, resulting in stronger functional lateralization in larger brains. We investigated neuronal interconnections in 138 large and small human brains using diffusion tensor imaging-based fiber tractography. We found a significant interaction between brain size and the type of connectivity. Structural intrahemispheric connectivity is stronger in larger brains, whereas interhemispheric connectivity is only marginally increased in larger compared with smaller brains. Although brain size and gender are confounded, this effect is gender-independent. Additionally, the ratio of interhemispheric to intrahemispheric connectivity correlates inversely with brain size. The hypothesis of neuronal interconnectivity as a function of brain size might account for shorter and more symmetrical interhemispheric transfer times in women and for empirical evidence that visual and auditory processing are stronger lateralized in men. The hypothesis additionally shows that differences in interhemispheric and intrahemispheric connectivity are driven by brain size and not by gender, a finding contradicting a recently published study. Our findings are also compatible with the idea that the more asymmetric a region is, the smaller the density of interhemispheric connections, but the larger the density of intrahemispheric connections. The hypothesis represents an organization principle of the human connectome that might be applied also to non-human animals as suggested by our cross-species comparison.
A synchronization method of visual and tactile information by virtual slave model in bilateral control

This paper proposes a synchronization method of visual and tactile information by using a virtual slave model in a bilateral control. Considering an actual remote-operated system, an operator operates a master system while watching visual information that is sent from a slave side. However, transmission of position, force, and visual information has communication delay. This is because the slave system on the image moves later than the actual slave system. This communication delay gives a bad effect on operability in the bilateral control. Therefore, the synchronization method of visual and tactile information is important. From this viewpoint, visual and tactile information in bilateral control is synchronized by using the virtual slave model. This virtual slave model is overlaid on the image from the slave side. The operator operates the master system while watching the virtual slave model overlaid on the image. As a result, the operability is improved, since the virtual slave model helps the communication delay of visual information. The effectiveness of the proposed system was confirmed form the experimental results.
Mutational heterogeneity in cancer and the search for new cancer genes

Major international projects are now underway aimed at creating a comprehensive catalog of all genes responsible for the initiation and progression of cancer. These studies involve sequencing of matched tumor–normal samples followed by mathematical analysis to identify those genes in which mutations occur more frequently than expected by random chance. Here, we describe a fundamental problem with cancer genome studies: as the sample size increases, the list of putatively significant genes produced by current analytical methods burgeons into the hundreds. The list includes many implausible genes (such as those encoding olfactory receptors and the muscle protein titin), suggesting extensive false positive findings that overshadow true driver events. Here, we show that this problem stems largely from mutational heterogeneity and provide a novel analytical methodology, MutSigCV, for resolving the problem. We apply MutSigCV to exome sequences from 3,083 tumor-normal pairs and discover extraordinary variation in (i) mutation frequency and spectrum within cancer types, which shed light on mutational processes and disease etiology, and (ii) mutation frequency across the genome, which is strongly correlated with DNA replication timing and also with transcriptional activity. By incorporating mutational heterogeneity into the analyses, MutSigCV is able to eliminate most of the apparent artefactual findings and allow true cancer genes to rise to attention. , , ,
Trend to equilibrium and particle approximation for a weakly selfconsistent Vlasov-Fokker-Planck equation

We consider a Vlasov-Fokker-Planck equation governing the evolution of the density of interacting and diffusive matter in the space of positions and velocities. We use a probabilistic interpretation to obtain convergence towards equilibrium in Wasserstein distance with an explicit exponential rate. We also prove a propagation of chaos property for an associated particle system, and give rates on the approximation of the solution by the particle system. Finally, a transportation inequality for the distribution of the particle system leads to quantitative deviation bounds on the approximation of the equilibrium solution of the equation by an empirical mean of the particles at given time.
Comparison of crop yield sensitivity to ozone between open‐top chamber and free‐air experiments

Assessments of the impacts of ozone (O3) on regional and global food production are currently based on results from experiments using open‐top chambers (OTCs). However, there are concerns that these impact estimates might be biased due to the environmental artifacts imposed by this enclosure system. In this study, we collated O3 exposure and yield data for three major crop species—wheat, rice, and soybean—for which O3 experiments have been conducted with OTCs as well as the ecologically more realistic free‐air O3 elevation (O3‐FACE) exposure system; both within the same cultivation region and country. For all three crops, we found that the sensitivity of crop yield to the O3 metric AOT40 (accumulated hourly O3 exposure above a cut‐off threshold concentration of 40 ppb) significantly differed between OTC and O3‐FACE experiments. In wheat and rice, O3 sensitivity was higher in O3‐FACE than OTC experiments, while the opposite was the case for soybean. In all three crops, these differences could be linked to factors influencing stomatal conductance (manipulation of water inputs, passive chamber warming, and cultivar differences in gas exchange). Our study thus highlights the importance of accounting for factors that control stomatal O3 flux when applying experimental data to assess O3 impacts on crops at large spatial scales.