Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Treatment of allicin improves maturation of immature oocytes and subsequent developmental ability of preimplantation embryos

Summary Allicin (AL) regulates the cellular redox, proliferation, viability, and cell cycle of different cells against extracellular-derived stress. This study investigated the effects of allicin treatment on porcine oocyte maturation and developmental competence. Porcine oocytes were cultured in medium supplemented with 0 (control), 0.01, 0.1, 1, 10 or 100 μM AL, respectively, during in vitro maturation (IVM). The rate of polar body emission was higher in the 0.1 AL-treated group (74.5% ± 2.3%) than in the control (68.0% ± 2.6%) (P < 0.1). After parthenogenetic activation, the rates of cleavage and blastocyst formation were significantly higher in the 0.1 AL-treated group than in the control (P < 0.05). The reactive oxygen species level at metaphase II did not significantly differ among all groups. In matured oocytes, the expression of both BAK and CASP3, and BIRC5 was significantly lower and higher, respectively, in the 0.1 AL-treated group than in the control. Similarly, the expression of BMP15 and CCNB1, and the activity of phospho-p44/42 mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK), significantly increased. These results indicate that supplementation of oocyte maturation medium with allicin during IVM improves the maturation of oocytes and the subsequent developmental competence of porcine oocytes.
Morphology control for nano-phase separation structures

In recent years, morphology control has emerged as an important research topic in many fields such as chemistry, biology, and medicine for the development of highly efficient materials and functional structures of devices based on organic and inorganic materials and their hybrids. Once developed, these techniques will pave the way for a wide range of possibilities such as the creation of highly efficient novel functional structures in many research fields. Here, I describe the methods for morphology control of nano-phase separation structures in the photoactive layer of organic thin-film solar cells and organic-inorganic hybrid thin-film solar cells from the viewpoint of chemical engineering and electrochemical fields [1-3].
The Mouse Crx 5′-Upstream Transgene Sequence Directs Cell-Specific and Developmentally Regulated Expression in Retinal Photoreceptor Cells

Crx, an Otx-like homeobox gene, is expressed primarily in the photoreceptors of the retina and in the pinealocytes of the pineal gland. The CRX homeodomain protein is a transactivator of many photoreceptor/pineal-specific genes in vivo, such as rhodopsin and the cone opsins. Mutations inCrx are associated with the retinal diseases, cone–rod dystrophy-2, retinitis pigmentosa, and Leber's congenital amaurosis, which lead to loss of vision. We have generated transgenic mice, using 5′- and/or 3′-flanking sequences from the mouse Crxhomeobox gene fused to the β-galactosidase (lacZ) reporter gene, and we have investigated the promoter function of the cell-specific and developmentally regulated expression ofCrx. All of the independent transgenic lines commonly showed lacZ expression in the photoreceptor cells of the retina and in the pinealocytes of the pineal gland. We characterized the transgenic lines in detail for cell-specific lacZexpression patterns by 5-bromo-4-chloro-3-indolyl β-d-galactoside staining and lacZimmunostaining. The lacZ expression was observed in developing and developed photoreceptor cells. This observation was confirmed by coimmunostaining of dissociated retinal cells with thelacZ and opsin antibodies. The ontogeny analysis indicated that the lacZ expression completely agrees with a temporal expression pattern of Crx during retinal development. This study demonstrates that the mouse Crx5′-upstream genomic sequence is capable of directing a cell-specific and developmentally regulated expression of Crx in photoreceptor cells.
The role of social support on the relationship of depressive symptoms to medication adherence and self-care activities in adults with type 2 diabetes.

AIM To examine the mediating role of social support on the relationship of depressive symptoms to medication adherence and self-care activities in Korean adults. BACKGROUND Recent evidence suggests that higher levels of social support are associated with improved medication adherence and self-care activities; however, the role of social support on the relationship of depressive symptoms to medication adherence and self-care activities is less well understood. DESIGN A cross-sectional survey. METHODS The data were collected from 311 Korean adults with type 2 diabetes who were taking hypoglycaemic agents in the period 2012-2013. Depressive symptoms, social support, medication adherence and self-care activities were assessed using structured questionnaires. Multiple regression analysis with adjustment for covariates and the Sobel test were used to examine the mediating effect of social support on the relationship of depressive symptoms to medication adherence and self-care activities. RESULTS There were statistically significant differences by subgroups with and without depressive symptoms in social support, medication adherence and self-care activities of diet, physical activity and stress management. The Sobel test confirmed that social support mediated the effect of depressive symptoms on medication adherence and self-care activities of diet, physical activity and stress management. CONCLUSION The evidence from this study suggests that social support-enhancing interventions that also manage depressive symptoms may be more timely and effective than interventions that target depressive symptoms alone in promoting adherence to medication adherence and self-care activities in this population.
Malware Detection using Windows Api Sequence and Machine Learning

onitoring the behavior of program execution at run-time is widely used to differentiate benign and malicious processes executing in the host computer. Most of the existing run-time malware detection methods use the information available in Windows Application Programming Interface (API) calls. The proposed malware detection system uses the Windows API call sequence. A 3rd order Markov chain (i.e. 4-grams) is used to model the API calls. This composite feature set is provided as an input to the malware detection system to raise the final alarm. Association mining based classification is used because it yields higher detection accuracy than previous data mining based detection systems which employed Naive Bayes, Support Vector Machine and Decision Tree techniques. A minimal subset of API categories is monitored while maintaining high detection accuracy. The number of generated rules is reduced, by removing the redundant rules, to make the malware analysis efficient. The key novelty of the proposed malware detection system is the iterative learning process combined with the run-time monitoring of program execution behavior which makes this as a dynamic malware detection system. The performance of the proposed malware detection system is evaluated for accuracy of malware detection system and compared with the existing data mining based detection systems. It is inferred that the proposed malware detection system outperforms the existing malware detection systems.
Protein Chips for Detection of Salmonella spp. from Enrichment Culture

Food pathogens are the cause of foodborne epidemics, therefore there is a need to detect the pathogens in food productions rapidly. A pre-enrichment culture followed by selective agar plating are standard detection methods. Molecular methods such as qPCR have provided a first rapid protocol for detection of pathogens within 24 h of enrichment culture. Biosensors also may provide a rapid tool to individuate a source of Salmonella contamination at early times of pre-enrichment culture. Forty mL of Salmonella spp. enrichment culture were processed by immunoseparation using the Pathatrix, as in AFNOR validated qPCR protocols. The Salmonella biosensor combined with immunoseparation showed a limit of detection of 100 bacteria/40 mL, with a 400 fold increase to previous results. qPCR analysis requires processing of bead-bound bacteria with lysis buffer and DNA clean up, with a limit of detection of 2 cfu/50 μL. Finally, a protein chip was developed and tested in screening and identification of 5 common pathogen species, Salmonella spp. , E. coli, S. aureus, Campylobacter spp. and Listeria spp. The protein chip, with high specificity in species identification, is proposed to be integrated into a Lab-on-Chip system, for rapid and reproducible screening of Salmonella spp. and other pathogen species contaminating food productions.
Assessment of virulence factors, antibiotic resistance and amino‐decarboxylase activity in Enterococcus faecium MXVK29 isolated from Mexican chorizo

Enterococcus faecium MXVK29 has the ability to produce an antimicrobial compound that belongs to Class IIa of the Klaenhammer classification, and could be used as part of a biopreservation technology through direct inoculation of the strain as a starter or protective culture. However, Enterococcus is considered as an opportunistic pathogen, hence, the purpose of this work was to study the food safety determinants of E. faecium MXVK29. The strain was sensitive to all of the antibiotics tested (penicillin, tetracycline, vancomycin, erythromycin, chloramphenicol, gentamicin, neomycin, kanamycin and netilmicin) and did not demonstrate histamine, cadaverine or putrescine formation. Furthermore, tyrosine‐decarboxylase activity was detected by qualitative assays and PCR. Among the virulence factors analysed for the strain, only the genes encoding the sexual pheromone cCF10 precursor lipoprotein (ccf) and cell‐wall adhesion (efaAfm) were amplified. The presence of these genes has low impact on pathogenesis, as there are no other genes encoding for virulence factors, such as aggregation proteins. Therefore, Enterococcus faecium could be employed as part of a bioconservation method, because it does not produce risk factors for consumer's health; in addition, it could be used as part of the hurdle technology in foods.
Biosynthesis of titin in cultured skeletal muscle cells

Although significant progress has been made regarding the structure and function of titin, little data exist on the biosynthesis of this large protein in developing muscle. Using pulse-labeling with [35S]methionine and immunoprecipitation with an anti-titin mAb, we have examined the biosynthesis of titin in synchronized cultures of skeletal muscle cells derived from day 12 chicken embryos. We find that: (a) titin synthesis increases greater than 4-fold during the first week in culture and during this same time period, synthesis of muscle-specific myosin heavy chain increases greater than 12-fold; (b) newly synthesized titin has a t1/2 of approximately 70 h; (c) titin is resistant to extraction with Triton X-100 both during and immediately after its synthesis. These observations suggest that newly synthesized titin molecules are stable proteins that rapidly associate with the cytoskeleton of developing myotubes.
Experimental evidence of band gaps in periodic structures

The appearance of band gaps in periodic media is a well known phenomenon. In the past 15 years an increasing attention was payed to sonic crystals, as the properties of such arrangements could lead to the design of innovative noise barriers. In fact, sonic crystal barriers exhibit good insulation properties at some frequencies and could be tuned in order to cause stop bands in a frequency range centred at 1 kHz, classic for road traffic noise pollution. In this paper measurements are described that were conducted over an array of cylinders arranged in a square lattice, whose Bragg band gap was centred at about 900 Hz. Measurements were conducted in accordance with EN 1793-6. Together with measurements, FE simulations were carried out in order to address and verify the procedure. In the simulations, cylinders were assumed to be infinitely rigid and the system was investigated in a 2d domain. The first hypothesis is consistent with the high contrast between the acoustic properties of air and PVC. The second one is consistent with the measurement method, as the windowing of the IRs leads to an evaluation of the attenuation due only to the BG without comprising any effect from ground reflections. Simulation and measurements are compared and discussed over a variety of cases.
Adaptive-weighted total variation minimization for sparse data toward low-dose x-ray computed tomography image reconstruction

Previous studies have shown that by minimizing the total variation (TV) of the to-be-estimated image with some data and other constraints, piecewise-smooth x-ray computed tomography (CT) can be reconstructed from sparse-view projection data without introducing notable artifacts. However, due to the piecewise constant assumption for the image, a conventional TV minimization algorithm often suffers from over-smoothness on the edges of the resulting image. To mitigate this drawback, we present an adaptive-weighted TV (AwTV) minimization algorithm in this paper. The presented AwTV model is derived by considering the anisotropic edge property among neighboring image voxels, where the associated weights are expressed as an exponential function and can be adaptively adjusted by the local image-intensity gradient for the purpose of preserving the edge details. Inspired by the previously reported TV-POCS (projection onto convex sets) implementation, a similar AwTV-POCS implementation was developed to minimize the AwTV subject to data and other constraints for the purpose of sparse-view low-dose CT image reconstruction. To evaluate the presented AwTV-POCS algorithm, both qualitative and quantitative studies were performed by computer simulations and phantom experiments. The results show that the presented AwTV-POCS algorithm can yield images with several notable gains, in terms of noise-resolution tradeoff plots and full-width at half-maximum values, as compared to the corresponding conventional TV-POCS algorithm.
Super-Resolution of License Plate Images using Algebraic Reconstruction Technique

In this paper, an iterative super-resolution reconstruction method is introduced for license plate recognition. A high-resolution image of the license plate is reconstructed by fusing the information derived from a set of subpixel shifted low-resolution images. The reconstruction problem is formulated as a system of linear equations that is solved by using the simultaneous algebraic reconstruction technique (SIRT). Simulation experiments show that SIRT can reconstruct a HR image with superior quality compared to conventional super-resolution reconstruction methods. 
Dietary saturated fat modulates the association between STAT3 polymorphisms and abdominal obesity in adults.

Signal transducer and activator of transcription 3 (STAT3) plays a key role in body weight regulation and glucose homeostasis, 2 important determinants of metabolic syndrome (MetS). Dietary fat is a key environmental factor that may interact with genotype to affect MetS risk. In this study, we investigated the relationship between STAT3 polymorphisms and MetS phenotypes and determined potential interactions with dietary fatty acids. STAT3 polymorphisms (rs8069645, rs744166, rs2306580, rs2293152, and rs10530050), biochemical measurements, and dietary fat composition were determined in the LIPGENE-SU.VI. MAX study of MetS cases and matched controls (n = 1754). STAT3 polymorphisms were not associated with MetS risk. However, minor G allele carriers for rs8069645, rs744166, and rs1053005 and major GG homozygotes for rs2293152 had increased risk of abdominal obesity compared with noncarriers [odds ratio (OR) = 2.22, P = 0.0005; OR = 2.08, P = 0.0017; OR = 2.00, P = 0.0033; and OR = 1.95, P = 0.028, respectively]. The number of risk alleles additively increased obesity risk (P = 0.0003). Dietary SFA intake exacerbated these effects; among all participants with the highest SFA intake (> or =15.5% of energy), individuals carrying >2 risk alleles had further increased risk of obesity (OR = 3.30; 95% CI = 1.50-7.28; P = 0.0079) compared with those carrying < or =1 risk allele. Interaction analysis confirmed this gene-nutrient interaction whereby increasing SFA intake was predictive of increased waist circumference (P = 0.038). In conclusion, STAT3 gene polymorphisms influenced the risk of abdominal obesity, which is modulated by dietary SFA intake, suggesting novel gene-nutrient interactions.
Worksite Translation of the Diabetes Prevention Program

This article summarizes formative research and pilot study findings from a workplace translation of the Diabetes Prevention Program (DPP). The overarching goal was to devise a relatively straightforward weight management intervention suitable for use in a wide array of work settings. This project was conducted in conjunction with Union Pacific Railroad at one of their locomotive maintenance facilities. Participating employees were predominately male and middle-aged. Formative data were collected through stakeholder interviews, focus groups, and direct observation of the work environment. These results were used to adapt the DPP into a largely self-directed intervention augmented by peer health coaches and the on-site nurse. A small pilot test of the adapted program (n = 67) produced modest but statistically significant weight reductions at both 6 (core intervention period) and 12 months (maintenance period). These results are discussed in terms of the original DPP and other DPP translation studies.
Cutting Edge: Tubulin α Functions as an Adaptor in NFAT–Importin β Interaction

Upon T cell stimulation, NFAT is dephosphorylated by calcineurin, leading to nuclear translocation via NFAT–importin β interaction. Whereas the process of NFAT dephosphorylation has been well researched, the molecular mechanism of NFAT–importin β interaction remains unknown. In contrast to NF-κB and STAT, no importin α family members have been reported as adaptor proteins for NFAT. Our study shows that tubulin α, but not tubulin β, binds to the N-terminal region of NFAT containing the regulatory and Rel homology domains. Importin β interacts with the NFAT–tubulin α complex rather than NFAT or tubulin α alone, resulting in cotranslocation of NFAT and tubulin α into the nucleus. Furthermore, the interaction is suppressed by acetate-induced tubulin α acetylation at lysine 40. In conclusion, tubulin α functions as an adaptor in NFAT–importin β interaction, and this function is regulated by acetate-induced acetylation.
Species Boundaries of Astreopora Corals (Scleractinia, Acroporidae) Inferred by Mitochondrial and Nuclear Molecular Markers

The genus Astreopora is a small but ancestral group in Acroporidae, which is one of the most diverse and dominant families of scleractinian coral in Indo-Pacific reefs. We estimated the species boundaries of Astreopora corals using two molecular markers: a mitochondrial non-coding region and a nuclear ribosomal 5.8S region. Seven species (59 specimens) commonly observed around Japan (Astreopora expansa, A. gracilis, A. incrustans, A. listeri, A. myriophthalma, A. cf. suggesta, and Astreopora sp.1) were investigated, and we observed no genetic divergence in the mitochondrial marker, suggesting that these species are closely related, consistent with a species complex or recent divergence, although genotyping by the marker is not so sensitive. In the nuclear 5.8S region, 121 clones consisted of six species were divided into the four major genetic groups. Although there were no monophyletic clades, the two dominant species A. myriophthalma and A. gracilis rarely shared the same haplotypes, suggesting that gene flow is limited between them. However, A. incrustans frequently shared the same haplotypes with A. gracilis although the distributions do not overlap. We found that the ancestral genus Astreopora in Acroporidae shows less genetic variation than traditionally identified morphospecies. Although further research on fertilization rate among these species is required to determine if there are reproductive barriers, the low level of genetic diversification in this genus hints that some ecological differences among acroporid corals play a role in the evolution of scleractinian corals, considering that the other members of this family, Acropora and Montipora, are highly diversified.
Energy estimation for MPI broadcasting algorithms in large scale HPC systems

Future supercomputers will gather hundreds of millions of communicating cores. The movement of data in such systems will be very energy consuming. We address in this paper the issue of energy consumption of data broadcasting in such large scale systems. To this end, we propose a framework to estimate the energy consumed by different MPI broadcasting algorithms for various execution settings. Validation results show that our estimations are highly accurate and allow to select the least consuming broadcasting algorithm.
Children with autism are neither systematic nor optimal foragers

It is well established that children with autism often show outstanding visual search skills. To date, however, no study has tested whether these skills, usually assessed on a table-top or computer, translate to more true-to-life settings. One prominent account of autism, Baron-Cohen's “systemizing” theory, gives us good reason to suspect that they should. In this study, we tested whether autistic children's exceptional skills at small-scale search extend to a large-scale environment and, in so doing, tested key claims of the systemizing account. Twenty school-age children with autism and 20 age- and ability-matched typical children took part in a large-scale search task in the “foraging room”: a purpose-built laboratory, with numerous possible search locations embedded into the floor. Children were instructed to search an array of 16 (green) locations to find the hidden (red) target as quickly as possible. The distribution of target locations was manipulated so that they appeared on one side of the midline for 80% of trials. Contrary to predictions of the systemizing account, autistic children's search behavior was much less efficient than that of typical children: they showed reduced sensitivity to the statistical properties of the search array, and furthermore, their search patterns were strikingly less optimal and less systematic. The nature of large-scale search behavior in autism cannot therefore be explained by a facility for systemizing. Rather, children with autism showed difficulties exploring and exploiting the large-scale space, which might instead be attributed to constraints (rather than benefits) in their cognitive repertoire.