Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
MHC‐Peptide Tetramers to Visualize Antigen‐Specific T Cells

Mature T lymphocytes of the CD8 or CD4 classes bear αβ T cell receptors (TCR) that are specific for a molecular complex consisting of a major histocompatibility complex class I or II (MHC class I or II) molecule bound to a unique self or foreign peptide. Until recently, methods for monitoring antigen‐specific T cell immune responses were restricted primarily to functional assays based on limiting dilution analysis, because the lack of specific molecular reagents to identify clonal T cells obviated approaches to identify and enumerate specific T cells. Development of efficient methods to express and refold MHC class I molecules with synthetic peptides coincided with identification of specific protein sequences that provide the substrate for enzymatic biotinylation. This combination has led to the development of a straightforward method for generating synthetic TCR ligands, making them tetravalent to provide increased avidity, and labeling them through a streptavidin moiety with useful fluorescent tags such as allophycocyanin or R‐phycoerythrin. This unit describes the preparation of MHC class I/peptide tetramers in detail, including bacterial expression and refolding of the MHC class I light chain, β2‐microglobulin (β2m), as well as the formation of a complex consisting of the MHC class I heavy chain of interest, β2m, and a chosen peptide. © 2016 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Evaluation of a frequency agile direct RF ADC based on mixed-signal OFDM simulation

Rapid developments and emergence of diverse wireless systems call for radio frontends with agile and multistandard properties. Within this publication the performance of a direct RF digitizing ΣΔ-modulator based analog-to-digital converter (ADC) is evaluated based on orthogonal frequency division multiplex (OFDM) system simulation on the bitstream layer. The necessary transmit and receive building blocks are introduced as well as the previously developed reconfigurable ADC under test. The proposed approach allows flexible testing of different ADCs by analyzing the influence of the ADC's noise shaping on performance indicators like error vector magnitude (EVM) and symbol error rate (SER). The necessary steps for the combination of the OFDM signal generation and the system level simulation of the ΣΔ-modulator-ADC into a multi-domain simulation are introduced and discussed.
Taxa interna de retorno da educação: uma análise não paramétrica para o Rio Grande do Sul

Este artigo busca calcular a TIR nao parametrica para o Rio Grande do Sul, a partir dos dados das PNADs de 2002 a 2014. Os resultados obtidos apontam que (1) a TIR decresceu ao longo do tempo, provavelmente, devido a expansao da escolaridade e a piora da qualidade da educacao; (2) os valores das TIRs para mulheres e para negros sao inferiores em comparacao com os valores das TIRs para homens e para brancos, respectivamente; (3) a maior TIR e encontrada no ensino superior em comparacao com o ensino medio. Palavras-chave Retorno da educacao; regressao linear local; modelo de Mincer Titulo em ingles: Internal rate of return to education: a nonparametric analysis for Rio Grande do Sul Abstract This article seeks to calculate the nonparametric IRR for Rio Grande do Sul, based on PNAD data from 2002 to 2014. The results show that (1) the IRR has decreased over time, probably due to the expansion of schooling and the deterioration of the quality of education; (2) the IRR values for women and for blacks are lower compared to the values for men and for whites, respectively; (3) the highest IRR is found in higher education compared to high school. Keywords Returns to schooling; local linear regression; Mincer model Classificacao JEL: I20, I26.
Sequence of the S-layer gene of Thermus thermophilus HB8 and functionality of its promoter in Escherichia coli

The nucleotide sequence of the slpA gene, which is responsible for the synthesis of the S-layer protein of Thermus thermophilus HB8, is described. This gene is transcribed as a unit in which the coding region is preceded by a 127-base-long leader mRNA sequence. The promoter region is also recognized by the RNA polymerase of Escherichia coli because of the presence of homologous -35 and -10 boxes. Homologies with other promoters from Thermus spp. are also presented.
Nanoelectronics lab based on nanogap fabrication

Nanotechnologies have a large application to different fields of science and technology, and it is possible to find, in a nanodevice or nanosystem development, some common needs and technical solutions. Aim of this work is to setup a novel approach to prepare a general device for management of nanostructures production and management, giving to researchers the opportunity to work on their specific application and having an already prepared working base, ready to be extended and customized to specific design needs. The idea is to develop this new concept starting from a real application in which authors have an already matured experience ([1]-[4]), nanogap fabrication for nanoelectronics and sensors [5]-[11]).
Polymorphismes de l'ADN et histoire du peuplement humain: apports de l'étude des marqueurs RFLP

Notre comprehension de l'histoire du peuplement humain provient, en grande partie, de l'etude de la variabilite genetique des populations actuelles. Ici, des marquers RFLP ont ete utilises pour detecter le polymorphisme humain au niveau de l'ADN. Deux ensembles de donnees ont ete recoltes, puis analyses, et ont permis d'observer une forte correlation entre les distances genetiques et les distances geographiques qui separent les populations. L'existence d'une telle correlation suggere que les populations humaines ont maintenu, entre elles, des flux migratoires importants tout au long de l'histoire de leur diversification. Ces donnees suggerent aussi que les populations humaines se sont differenciees genetiquement et linguistiquement de maniere concomitante, car les affinites genetiques entre populations refletent fortement les relations de parente entre les langues qu'elles parlent. Si, comme le supposent actuellement les linguistes, la diversification des grandes familles de langues humaines est d'origine tres recente, la differenciation genetique des populations humaines l'est aussi.
Anorexia: The female identity from holy misticism to the new social feminine mystique

In recent times, the word "meaning" has become increasingly popular as times of uncertainty and chaos awaken in society a need for affirmation of its values and beliefs. This article attempts to extend scientific existential psychology by revealing the vitality and creativity of experimental social psychology in terms of existentialism. It presents the results of studies carried out using Analysis of Lexical Correspondence (ACL) on letters of mystics of the past (Caterina Benincasa, Simone Weil) who are today considered to have been anorexic, and contemporary women who suffer from anorexia nervosa. Considering anorexia as a Culture Bound Syndrome (CBS), the research is part of the perspective of cultural social psychology and cultural psychiatry, and thus analyses the relationship between the culture of the epoch to which the writings belong and the ultimate ends for which the choice of fasting was made by the authors. Specific attention is given to the self-representation of these women, in light of the meaning of the sacrifice offered by them as a function of health-salvation, socially interpreted as an expression of "mysticism". This theme brings us to consider the evolution of the female role in Western history as well as the significance attributed to the body.
Gadoxetic Acid-Enhanced Magnetic Resonance Imaging for Differentiating Small Hepatocellular Carcinomas (≤2 cm in Diameter) From Arterial Enhancing Pseudolesions: Special Emphasis on Hepatobiliary Phase Imaging

Objectives:To determine the characteristic enhancing features of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) and arterial-enhancing pseudolesion (AEP) on gadoxetic acid (Primovist®)-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and to assess its performance compared with that of multirow detector computed tomography (MDCT) for differentiating small HCC (≤2 cm in diameter) from AEP in cirrhotic liver. Materials and Methods:A total of 69 patients with 97 small, arterial enhancing hepatic lesions (0.5–2 cm in diameter), ie, 44 HCCs and 53 AEPs, detected on gadoxetic acid-enhanced MRI, were included in this study. HCCs were diagnosed either through histopathology confirmation (n = 16) or by a combination of liver computed tomography (CT), angiographic findings, lipiodol CT, and AFP levels (n = 28). AEPs were diagnosed either through histopathology confirmation (n = 2) or were based on the angiographic findings, liver CT, and follow-up imaging (n = 51). Two radiologists jointly analyzed the morphologic features and the enhancement characteristics on the gadoxetic acid-enhanced MRI. Of the 69 study patients, 42 patients with 60 arterial enhancing lesions underwent quadruple-phase CT in addition to their MRI examination within 4 weeks before or after the MRI, and 2 other radiologists who were blinded to the final diagnosis independently reviewed the MRI and CT images in random order, at an interval of 2 weeks. Diagnostic performance was evaluated using receiver operating characteristics. The Kappa test was used to evaluate interobserver agreement. Results:Among 44 HCCs, 42 (95.4%) demonstrated low signal intensity (SI) and only 2 showed iso- or high SI on the hepatobiliary phase of gadoxetic acid-enhanced MRI. Alternatively, most AEPs showed iso SI on the hepatobiliary (n = 50, 94.3%) phase, and only 2 AEPs showed low SI. Compared with the diagnostic performance of the 2 imaging modalities, the mean areas under the receiver-operator characteristic curves on MR imaging were 0.975 for reviewer 1 and 0.966 for reviewer 2, whereas those of CT imaging were 0.892 for reviewer 1 and 0.888 for reviewer 2 (P = 0.069 and P = 0.106, respectively). The sensitivity for each reviewer with MR imaging (93.9% and 90.9%, respectively) was significantly higher than that with multiphasic CT (54.5%, in both) (P = 0.001 and 0.0018, respectively). Conclusion:HCCs and AEPs show different enhancing features on the delayed dynamic and hepatobiliary phases of gadoxetic acid-enhanced MRI. Gadoxetic acid-enhanced MRI may, therefore, help to differentiate between HCC and AEP.
Cycle Synchronizing Approach for Sleep Mode Operation in WiMAX System

Based on the "green concepts", lots of research has been performed to efficiently reduce the power consumption of mobile communication systems. Correspondingly, IEEE 802.16e has specified sleep mode operations depending on different types of power saving class for the purpose of energy saving. To solve the inefficient problem of multiple power saving classes over the same MS, this paper proposes a cycle synchronizing method to minimize the energy consumption of the MS while keeping the QoS requirements satisfied. The analytical models are derived for performance evaluation of the parallel power saving classes in sleep mode operation. Furthermore, performance improvement of the proposed method has been validated in a developed WiMAX simulation platform based on ns-2 network simulator.
Bio-Inspired Sensing and Imaging of Polarization Information in Nature

Abstract : Our unaided eyes can detect two of the characteristics of image-forming visible light from a scene, namely, the intensity and the wavelength, which can then be encoded into perceptual qualities of brightness and color. Our eyes, however, are effectively blind to the third characteristic of light, its polarization. It is well known, however, that several species of animals have visual systems capable of detecting light's polarization and using the information so extracted. Understanding the biophysical mechanism behind the polarization vision and reverse engineering its functionality and utility leads to exciting novel methods and techniques in sensing and imaging with various applications. Motivated and inspired by the features of polarization-sensitive visual systems in nature, in our group we have been developing various man-made, non-invasive imaging methodologies, sensing schemes, camera systems, and visualization and display schemes that have shown exciting and that have shown exciting and promising outcomes with useful applications in system design.
RESULTS The Ability of CCN 2 to Bind to the Cell Surface of Adult Human Dermal Fibroblasts Is

*Centre for Rheumatology, Royal Free and University College Medical School, University College London (Royal Free Campus), Hampstead, London NW3 2PF, United Kingdom; ‡Centre for Cardiovascular Biology and Medicine, King’s College London, London SE1 1UL, United Kingdom; and §Departments of Biological Chemistry and Orthopedic Surgery, David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, University of California, Los Angeles, CA 90095
Secondary Metabolites of Flustra foliacea and Their Influence on Bacteria

ABSTRACT The North Sea bryozoan Flustra foliacea was investigated to determine its secondary metabolite content. Gas chromatography-mass spectrometry analysis of a dichloromethane extract of the bryozoan enabled 11 compounds to be identified. Preparative high-performance liquid chromatography of the extract resulted in the isolation of 10 brominated alkaloids (compounds 1 to 10) and one diterpene (compound 11). All of these compounds were tested to determine their activities in agar diffusion assays against bacteria derived from marine and terrestrial environments. Compounds 1, 3 to 7, 10, and 11 exhibited significant activities against one or more marine bacterial strains originally isolated from F. foliacea but only weak activities against all of the terrestrial bacteria. By using the biosensors Pseudomonas putida(pKR-C12), P. putida(pAS-C8), and Escherichia coli(pSB403) the antagonistic effect on N-acyl-homoserine lactone-dependent quorum-sensing systems was investigated. Compounds 8 and 10 caused reductions in the signal intensities in these bioassays ranging from 50 to 20% at a concentration of 20 μg/ml.
GALS-based LPSP: Performance Analysis of a Novel Architecture for Low Power High Performance Security Processors

The past two decades have witnessed a revolution in the use of electronic devices in our daily activities. Increasingly, such activities involve the exchange of personal and sensitive data by means of portable and light weight devices. This implied the use of security applications in devices with tight processing capability and low power budget. Current architectures for processors that run security applications are optimized for either high-performance or low energy consumption. We propose an implementation for an architecture that not only provides high performance and low energy consumption but also mitigates security attacks on the cryptographic algorithms which are running on it. The proposed architecture of the Globally-Asynchronous Locally-Synchronous-based Low Power Security Processor (GALS-based LPSP) inherits the scheduling freedom and high performance from the dataflow architectures and the low energy consumption and flexibility from the GALS systems. In this paper, a prototype of the GALS-based LPSP is implemented as a soft core on the Virtex-5 (xc5-vlx155t) FPGA. The architectural features that allow the processor to mitigate Side-Channel attacks are explained in detail and tested on the current encryption standard, the AES. The performance analysis reveals that the GALS-based LPSP achieves two times higher throughput with one and a half times less energy consumption than the currently used embedded processors.
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

In this paper, we introduce a new type of tree-based regression method, reinforcement learning trees (RLT), which exhibits signiﬁcantly improved performance over traditional methods such as random forests (Breiman, 2001). The innovations are three-fold. First, the new method implements reinforcement learning at each selection of a splitting variable during the tree construction processes. By splitting on the variable that brings the greatest future improvement in later splits, rather than choosing the one with largest marginal effect from the immediate split, the constructed tree utilizes the available samples in a more efﬁcient way. Moreover, such an approach can be adapted to make high-dimensional cuts available at a relatively small computational cost. Second, we propose a variable screening method that progressively mutes noise variables during the construction of each individual tree. The muting procedure also takes advantage of reinforcement learning and prevents noise variables from being considered in the search for splitting rules, so that towards a terminal node when the sample size is small, the splitting rules are still constructed from only strong variables. Last, we investigate asymptotic properties of the proposed method. We can show that under the proposed splitting variable selection procedure, the constructed trees are consistent. The error bounds for the proposed RLT are shown to depend on a pre-selected number p 0 , where p 0 is an educated guess of the number of strong variables which is usually much smaller than the total number of variables p but at least as large as the true number of strong variables p 1 . Hence when p 0 is properly chosen, the error bounds can be signiﬁcantly improved.
Isolation and Characterization of Vacuoles from the Ergot Fungus Claviceps purpurea

Protoplasts of Claviceps purpurea were prepared by treatment of mycelium with a lytic mixture of snail gut enzyme and cellulase from Trichoderma viride. Such protoplasts could be efficiently lysed by Triton X-100 treatment at high osmotic pressure without Ca2+ or Mg2+, allowing the release of intact vacuoles in high yields. Vacuoles obtained from cells grown in modified Vogel medium (vegetative-type cells not producing alkaloids) were isolated and purified by centrifugation from a 5% Ficoll 400 (wt/vol) phase into the interphase between two layers, one containing 0.25 M each of mannitol and sucrose, and one containing 0.5 M mannitol. Vacuoles derived from cells grown in a medium favoring ergot alkaloid synthesis (sclerotia-like cells) were isolated by gentle centrifugation of filtered protoplast lysates without addition of Ficoll 400. Biochemical analyses of the vacuole fraction isolated from either kind of cell revealed their function as compartments harboring several hydrolytic enzymes. However, the enrichment of free amino acids in vacuoles of sclerotia-like cells was less pronounced than that in vacuoles of vegetative-type cells, indicating a difference in metabolic compartmentation in the two types of cells.
The Topological Analysis for Undirected Complex Network Based on Enron Email Database

In this paper, a new measure of correlation is introduced in undirected network. In order to get accurately degree distribution for the vertex at the end of a randomly chosen edge, we considered the information of edge, rather than just the degree distribution of node. We analysis the Enron Email Network with the three measures via degree-degree correlation, and get more information than the traditional method.
Impedance matching of a frequency- and pattern-reconfigurable antenna

The authors have recently proposed a frequency- and pattern-reconfigurable antenna based on center-shorted patch antenna, which is tuned with six stub-loaded varactors. This antenna has the capability of switching between a broadside radiation pattern and monopole-like omni-directional pattern across a frequency tuning range of 2.7 GHz to 3.5 GHz. Using a single tuning bias voltage, the measured return loss was between 9.8 dB and 15 dB at the resonance frequencies across the tuning range. It will be demonstrated in this paper that the return loss at the resonance frequencies can be significantly improved to more than 30 dB with virtually no cost by using two reverse bias voltages controlling two groups of three tuning varactors. It is noted that the antenna design employing open-circuited loading stubs allows the use of different bias voltages on different varactors.
Lyapunov stability theory for linear repetitive processes — The 1D equation approach

This paper reports further development of the so-called 1D Lyapunov equation based approach to the stability analysis of differential linear repetitive processes. In particular, it is shown that this approach leads to stability tests which can be implemented by computations with matrices which have constant entries, and that if the example under consideration is stable then physically meaningful information concerning one key aspect of `transient' performance is available for no extra cost. The computational efficiency of these new stability tests against alternatives is also discussed and some areas for short to medium term further research briefly noted.
Combining Feature-based Kernel with Tree kernel for Extracting Relations

This report proposes a composite kernel method of semantic relation extraction between named entities within natural language documents. Using two kernel methods, the benets from both are combined to gain an increase in performance compared to earlier approaches. 1) A linear kernel processing linguistic features, such as word-span, orderof-entities and word-type. 2) A tree kernel computing the similarity of a relation type with the shortest path-enclosed tree between a pair of candidate entities. Experiments are done using previous implemented methods, such as context sensitiveness and latent annotations to measure their impact on the performance. Evaluating on a dataset for the relation extraction task at the Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning from 2004, the results obtained are on par with previous state-of-the-art approaches on the same dataset.
Comparison Between Minimally Invasive and Open Gastrectomy for Gastric Cancer in Europe: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis

Aims: We compared laparoscopic and robotic gastrectomies with open gastrectomies and with each other that were held for gastric cancer in Europe. Methods: We searched for studies conducted in Europe and published up to 20 February 2015 in the PubMed database that compared laparoscopic or robotic with open gastrectomies for gastric cancer and with each other. Results: We found 18 original studies (laparoscopic vs open: 13; robotic vs open: 3; laparoscopic vs robotic: 2). Of these, 17 were non-randomized trials and only 1 was a randomized controlled trial. Only four studies had more than 50 patients in each arm. No significant differences were detected between minimally invasive and open approaches regarding the number of retrieved lymph nodes, anastomotic leakage, duodenal stump leakage, anastomotic stenosis, postoperative bleeding, reoperation rates, and intraoperative/postoperative mortality. Nevertheless, laparoscopic procedures provided higher overall morbidity rates when compared with open ones, but robotic approaches did not differ from open ones. On the contrary, blood loss was less and hospital stay was shorter in minimally invasive than in open approaches. However, the results were controversial concerning the duration of operations when comparing minimally invasive with open gastrectomies. Additionally, laparoscopic and robotic procedures provided equivalent results regarding resection margins, duodenal stump leakage, postoperative bleeding, intraoperative/postoperative mortality, and length of hospital stay. On the contrary, robotic operations had less blood loss, but lasted longer than laparoscopic ones. Finally, there were relatively low conversion rates in laparoscopic (0%–6.7%) and robotic gastrectomies (0%–5.6%) in most studies. Conclusion: Laparoscopic and robotic gastrectomies may be considered alternative approaches to open gastrectomies for treating gastric cancer. Minimally invasive operations are characterized by less blood loss and shorter hospital stay than open ones. In addition, robotic procedures have less blood loss, but last longer than laparoscopic ones.