Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Effect of Lactobacillus GG and conditioned media on IL-1beta-induced IL-8 production in Caco-2 cells.

OBJECTIVE To evaluate the anti-inflammatory effect of Lactobacillus casei rhamnosus GG (LGG) and its conditioned media (CM) in stimulated Caco-2 cells and to characterize the components of LGG that have the anti-inflammatory effect. MATERIAL AND METHODS Caco-2 cells were stimulated with IL-1beta with or without LGG or LGG-CM. Production of IL-8 was measured by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA). The transcriptional activities of the IL-8 gene and the NF-kappaB-responsive gene were evaluated by a transient transfection of the luciferase reporter gene. The effect on IkappaBalpha degradation was evaluated by Western blot analysis. To determine the nature of the immunomodulatory molecules, the LGG was modified to the following: treated with antibiotics, 4% formaldehyde, incubation at 95 degrees C, or sonication. RESULTS We demonstrated that the pretreatment of Caco-2 cells with LGG significantly inhibited IL-1beta-induced IL-8 production. Furthermore, LGG attenuated the IL-1beta-induced transcriptional activation of the IL-8 gene and the NF-kappaB-responsive gene, and attenuated the IL-1beta-induced IkappaBalpha degradation. Formaldehyde-fixed or antibiotics-treated LGG maintained the inhibitory effect, but heated LGG lost this effect. Sonicated LGG debris had a similar inhibitory effect with whole bacterial cells. LGG-CM attenuated IL-1beta-induced IL-8 production. This effect was maintained even when the conditioned media were heated. CONCLUSIONS LGG inhibited IL-1beta-induced IL-8 production in Caco-2 and this effect occurred at the transcriptional level, at least in part, by inhibition of the NF-kappaB signaling pathway. Both the structural material of LGG and the soluble factor secreted from LGG inhibited the IL-1beta-induced IL-8 production, and thus different substances may cause the effects.
Suppressor genes for malignant and anchorage-independent phenotypes located on human chromosome 9 have no dosage effects

We have previously shown that microcell-mediated transfer of a der(9)t(X;9) human chromosome (HSA), derived from human fibroblast strain GM0705, into the Syrian hamster cell line BHK-191-5C produced only near-tetraploid hybrids, although the recipient cell line contained a 1:1 ratio of near-diploid and near-tetraploid cells. However, the tumorigenicity and the anchorage independence could be suppressed in the near-tetraploid hybrids with one copy of the der(9)t(X;9) chromosome. The introduction of an HSA X chromosome did not suppress either of these phenotypes. We concluded that in addition to two suppressor genes, one for tumorigenicity and another for anchorage independence, HSA 9 might carry a third gene capable of inhibiting cellular growth in vitro, which had dosage effects. In the present study, keeping one copy of the der(9)t(X;9) chromosome, we have increased the hamster background chromosome number beyond hexaploid level by fusing two microcell-generated hybrid cell lines, where both malignant and anchorage-independent phenotypes were suppressed, with the parental malignant BHK-191-5C cell line. Tests with nude mice showed that hybrids containing one copy of the der(9)t(X;9) chromosome against the increased background of chromosomes of malignant parental origin were still suppressed for both phenotypes. These results suggest that the suppressor genes for malignancy and for anchorage independence have no dosage effects, in contrast to the suppressor gene(s) for cellular growth.
E2F Proteins Are Posttranslationally Modified Concomitantly with a Reduction in Nuclear Binding Activity in Cells Infected with Herpes Simplex Virus 1

ABSTRACT The transition from G1 to S phase in the cell cycle requires sequential activation of cyclin-dependent kinase 4 (cdk4) and cdk2, which phosphorylate the retinoblastoma protein, causing the release of E2F. Free E2F upregulates the transcription of genes involved in S phase and cell cycle progression. Recent studies from this and other laboratories have shown that herpes simplex virus 1 stabilizes cyclin D3 early in infection and that early events in viral replication are sensitive to inhibitors of some cdks. On the other hand cdk2 is not activated. Here we report studies on the status of members of E2F family in cycling HEp-2 and HeLa cells and quiescent serum-starved, contact-inhibited human lung fibroblasts. The results show that (i) at 8 h postinfection or thereafter, E2F-1 and E2F-5 were posttranslationally modified and/or translocated from nucleus to the cytoplasm, (ii) E2F-4 was hyperphophorylated, and (iii) overall, E2F binding to cognate DNA sites was decreased at late times after infection. These results concurrent with those cited above indicate that late in infection activation of S-phase genes is blocked both by posttranslational modification and translocation of members of E2F family to inactive compartments and by the absence of active cdk2. The observation that E2F were also posttranslationally modified in quiescent human lung fibroblasts that were not in S phase at the time of infection suggests that specific viral gene products are responsible for modification of the members of E2F family and raises the possibility that in infected cells, activation of the S phase gene is an early event in viral infection and is then shut off at late times. This is consistent with the timing of stabilization of cyclin D3 and the events blocked by inhibitors of cdks.
TreeMos: a high-throughput phylogenomic approach to find and visualize phylogenetic mosaicism

SUMMARY TreeMos is a novel high-throughput graphical analysis application that allows the user to search for phylogenetic mosaicism among one or more DNA or protein sequence multiple alignments and additional unaligned sequences. TreeMos uses a sliding window and local alignment algorithm to identify the nearest neighbour of each sequence segment, and visualizes instances of sequence segments whose nearest neighbour is anomalous to that identified using the global alignment. Data sets can include whole genome sequences allowing phylogenomic analyses in which mosaicism may be attributed to recombination between any two points in the genome. TreeMos can be run from the command line, or within a web browser allowing the relationships between taxa to be explored by drill-through. AVAILABILITY http://www2.warwick. ac.uk/fac/sci/whri/research/archaeobotany.
Family Form as Cultural Assimilation: Variations of Extended Household by Ethnicity and Immigration Generational Status

Past research showed a century-long decline followed by a recent rise in extended households in the US, and attributed the rise to immigration. However, no researchers of family structure have studied the changing trends as a process of immigrant assimilation. From the classical assimilation theory to the more recent segmented assimilation theory, we know that assimilation has different dimensions and directions, and affect groups of various backgrounds differently. Conceptualizing the change in household composition as a cultural assimilation, we study the process of acculturating one‘s family structure over immigration generations. We analyze data from the 1960 and 1970 US censuses as well as the 1994, 1999, 2004, 2009 March Current Population Surveys, via the hierarchical age-period-cohort model that properly estimates age, period, and cohort effects. We aim to answer three major research questions: (1) whether family structure as a cultural value is assimilated over three immigrant generations, based on classical assimilation theory; (2) whether certain immigrant groups in terms of place of origin experience a slower process in such assimilation, based on segmented assimilation theory and social psychological theory on assimilation; (3) whether the tempo of such assimilation would be faster for immigrants with a higher degree of education, based on classical sociological theory. By answering these questions, we can as well obtain an estimated period trend, controlling the effects of immigration.
Cruising for Olivia: lesbian celebrity and the cultural politics of coming out in sport

This paper explores issues of sport, sponsorship, and consumption by critically interrogating the mass-mediated “coming out” narratives of professional golfer, Rosie Jones, and professional basketball player, Sheryl Swoopes. Both athletes came out publicly as gay in light of endorsements received by Olivia Cruises and Resorts—a company that serves lesbian travelers—thus marking a significant shift in the relationship between lesbian subjectivity, sport, and sponsorship. A concern with a neoliberal-infused GLBT politics underscores our analysis, and a close reading of these narratives raises complex questions about the corporatization of coming out and the existence of lesbian celebrity in sport.
Distant functional connectivity for bimanual finger coordination declines with aging: an fMRI and SEM exploration

Although bimanual finger coordination is known to decline with aging, it still remains unclear how exactly the neural substrates underlying the coordination differ between young and elderly adults. The present study focused on: (1) characterization of the functional connectivity within the motor association cortex which is required for successful bimanual finger coordination, and (2) to elucidate upon its age-related decline. To address these objectives, we utilized functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in combination with structural equation modeling (SEM). This allowed us to compare functional connectivity models between young and elderly age groups during a visually guided bimanual finger movement task using both stable in-phase and complex anti-phase modes. Our SEM exploration of functional connectivity revealed significant age-related differences in connections surrounding the PMd in the dominant hemisphere. In the young group who generally displayed accurate behavior, the SEM model for the anti-phase mode exhibited significant connections from the dominant PMd to the non-dominant SPL, and from the dominant PMd to the dominant S1. However, the model for the elderly group's anti-phase mode in which task performance dropped, did not exhibit significant connections within the aforementioned regions. These results suggest that: (1) the dominant PMd acts as an intermediary to invoke intense intra- and inter-hemispheric connectivity with distant regions among the higher motor areas including the dominant S1 and the non-dominant SPL in order to achieve successful bimanual finger coordination, and (2) the distant connectivity among the higher motor areas declines with aging, whereas the local connectivity within the bilateral M1 is enhanced for the complex anti-phase mode. The latter may underlie the elderly's decreased performance in the complex anti-phase mode of the bimanual finger movement task.
MentalChronometryofWorkingMemoryRetrieval:A CombinedFunctionalMagneticResonanceImagingand Event-RelatedPotentialsApproach

We used the combination of functional magnetic resonance imaging and event-related potentials to decompose the processing stages (mentalchronometry)ofworkingmemoryretrieval.Ourresultsrevealanearlytransientactivationofinferotemporalcortex,whichwas accompanied by the onset of a sustained activation of posterior parietal cortex. We furthermore observed late transient responses in ventrolateralprefrontalcortexandlatesustainedactivityinmedialfrontalandpremotorareas.Weproposethattheseneuralsignatures reflectthecognitivestagesoftaskprocessing,perceptualevaluation(inferotemporalcortex),storagebufferoperations(posteriorparietal cortex), active retrieval (ventrolateral prefrontal cortex), and action selection (medial frontal and premotor cortex). This is also supportedbytheirdifferentialtemporalcontributiontospecificsubcomponentsoftheP300cognitivepotential.
Carcass Quality of Different Meat - Typed Chickens When Achieve a Common Physiological Body Weight

This experiment was conducted to compare carcass characteristics of native quality chicken white Lueyang (WL), modern commercial broiler strain Arbor Acres breeder (AA) and their respective F cross when 1 achieve a common live body weight. A total of 300 day-old chicks were allotted to three groups and reared under the same conditions until they reached market weight (1800±20 g) respectively, then ten of individual male birds from each group were killed for measuring. There were significant differences in carcass and meat characteristics for breeds at a common market weight. WL had a large age to market weight, lower abdominal fat weight, lower breast meat yield, higher leg meat yield (P<0.05 or P<0.01). moisture and lipids of both breast muscle and thigh muscle were lower for WL than AA (P<0.01), but protein and ash components of both breast muscle and thigh muscle were higher for WL than AA (P<0.05 or P<0.01). Muscle pH was higher for WL than AA (P<0.05). WL had a lower L* value than AA and their F (P<0.05), but a higher 24h 1 a* value and b* value (P<0.01). The F crosses appeared to have characteristics more like AA for carcass 1 and meat characteristics.
ACTIVITIES OF BOKO HARAM AND INSECURITY QUESTION IN NIGERIA

The cycle of violence being unleashed on Nigerians by the fundamentalist group, Boko Haram has heightened fears among the populace and the international community that the hostility has gone beyond religions or political colouration. Going by the latest report from the Human Rights Watch (HRW), about 935 has been killed since 2009 when the sect began its onslaught on the country. The dangerous dimension the insecurity challenge has become a great source of worry as security experts affirm that what is on ground has shifted to the realm of terrorism, a global phenomenon where no one is safe. It is lamentable, however, that the security organizations have failed to tackle the challenges, even as they have become the target of terrorists who have never hidden their disdain for the intelligence and law enforcement community. By seemingly clueless, but promises are not enough. The populace demands a respite from this state of fear and insecurity. The coordinated assaults from the Boko Haram sect in the northern part of the country, besides making life miserable for Nigerians, is a danger to the unity and corporate existence of Nigeria. A multidimensional approach to tackle their threat must be urgently launched by the government.
Technological pedagogical content knowledge in teacher education: in search of a new curriculum

The aim of this study was to explore the ways in which teacher education institutions (TEI) prepare pre-service teachers for integrating information and communication technology (ICT) in their classroom practise. Specifically, a multiple case study was conducted to examine the ways in which the development of technological pedagogical content knowledge (TPACK) was promoted in the existing curriculum of three TEI in Flanders. In the three cases, data were drawn from semi-structured interviews with the heads of the department and the ICT coordinators. Focus group discussions collected the perspectives of pre-service teachers and teacher educators. The results indicate that (1) the three institutions are moving from ICT as a ‘stand-alone’ course towards embedding ICT across the curriculum and (2) three approaches were adopted for developing pre-service teachers’ TPACK, each representing different ways of understanding the place of ICT in the curriculum. The discussion will focus on the challenges and opportunities inherent in understanding how to develop pre-service teachers’ TPACK in the curriculum of TEI.
Arabic Textual Entailment with Word Embeddings

Determining the textual entailment between texts is important in many NLP tasks, such as summarization, question answering, and information extraction and retrieval. Various methods have been suggested based on external knowledge sources; however, such resources are not always available in all languages and their acquisition is typically laborious and very costly. Distributional word representations such as word embeddings learned over large corpora have been shown to capture syntactic and semantic word relationships. Such models have contributed to improving the performance of several NLP tasks. In this paper, we address the problem of textual entailment in Arabic. We employ both traditional features and distributional representations. Crucially, we do not depend on any external resources in the process. Our suggested approach yields state of the art performance on a standard data set, ArbTE, achieving an accuracy of 76.2 % compared to state of the art of 69.3 %.
Protein Side-chain Packing Problem: A Maximum Edge-weight Clique Algorithmic Approach

"Protein Side-chain Packing" has an ever-increasing application in the field of bio-informatics, dating from the early methods of homology modeling to protein design and to the protein docking. However, this problem is computationally known to be NP-hard. In this regard, we have developed a novel approach to solve this problem using the notion of a maximum edge-weight clique. Our approach is based on efficient reduction of protein side-chain packing problem to a graph and then solving the reduced graph to find the maximum clique by applying an efficient clique finding algorithm developed by our co-authors. Since our approach is based on deterministic algorithms in contrast to the various existing algorithms based on heuristic approaches, our algorithm guarantees of finding an optimal solution. We have tested this approach to predict the side-chain conformations of a set of proteins and have compared the results with other existing methods. We have found that our results are favorably comparable or better than the results produced by the existing methods. As our test set contains a protein of 494 residues, we have obtained considerable improvement in terms of size of the proteins and in terms of the efficiency and the accuracy of prediction.
Supporting synchronous social q&a throughout the question lifecycle

Synchronous social Q&A systems exist on the Web and in the enterprise to connect people with questions to people with answers in real-time. In such systems, askers' desire for quick answers is in tension with costs associated with interrupting numerous candidate answerers per question. Supporting users of synchronous social Q&A systems at various points in the question lifecycle (from conception to answer) helps askers make informed decisions about the likelihood of question success and helps answerers face fewer interruptions. For example, predicting that a question will not be well answered may lead the asker to rephrase or retract the question. Similarly, predicting that an answer is not forthcoming during the dialog can prompt system behaviors such as finding other answerers to join the conversation. As another example, predictions of asker satisfaction can be assigned to completed conversations and used for later retrieval. In this paper, we use data from an instant-messaging-based synchronous social Q&A service deployed to an online community of over two thousand users to study the prediction of: (i) whether a question will be answered, (ii) the number of candidate answerers that the question will be sent to, and (iii) whether the asker will be satisfied by the answer received. Predictions are made at many points of the question lifecycle (e.g., when the question is entered, when the answerer is located, halfway through the asker-answerer dialog, etc.). The findings from our study show that we can learn capable models for these tasks using a broad range of features derived from user profiles, system interactions, question setting, and the dialog between asker and answerer. Our research can lead to more sophisticated and more useful real-time Q&A support.
On-chip testing of blind and open-sleeve TSVs for 3D IC before bonding

Pre-bond test is preferred for a three-dimensional integrated circuit (3D IC), since it reduces stacking yield loss and thus saves cost. In this paper, we present two schemes for testing through-silicon vias (TSVs) by performing on-chip screening before wafer thinning and bonding. The first scheme is for blind TSVs, which have one end floating, using a charge-sharing technique commonly seen in DRAM. The second scheme is for open-sleeve TSVs, which have one end shorted to the substrate, using a voltage-dividing technique commonly seen in ROM. By virtue of the inherent capacitive and resistive characteristics, we detect the TSVs out of a specified range as anomalies, taking into account the effects of process variations in the detection circuitry. The statistical design by Monte Carlo simulation using TSMC 65nm low-power process shows that for blind TSVs, the best overkill ratio is below 6%. For open-sleeve TSVs, inherent limitations restrict the applicability, so more work needs to be done in the future. Our implementation enjoys little area overhead, requiring only a simple sense amplifier and a write buffer that are shared among a number of TSVs. Reducing the number of TSVs that share a test module will reduce the test time, but increase the area overhead. For blind TSVs, the parallelism also affects the overkill and escape rates.
BER performance of MIMO OFDM-CDMA system in ricean fading channel

In this paper, bit error rate (BER) performance of the MIMO OFDM-CDMA system, in case of Ricean frequency selective fading, is evaluated using originally developed computer simulation. The assumed system uses space-time block coding applied to two, three and four transmit antennas and has arbitrary number of receive antennas. Channel estimation is performed by implementing pilot sequences at each transmit antenna. The results are compared with BER results of the competitive OFDM-CDMA down link system with threshold detection combining (optimum TDC). The results show that the presented system provides lower BER, even when less subcarriers are used for transmitting single data symbol, than its competitive solution.
Promise and Prospects

Building on Tennis's comments, the authors identify various factors that must be considered in order to put the development and application of the alpha, beta, gamma change typology in perspective. In doing so, they argue that the change typology's birth and growth shows a strong similarity to that of "normal science. " After commenting on the small number of investigators involved in research on the change typology and the limited set of outlets in which this research has been published, the authors address the question of what needs to be done to accelerate the advancement of the typology and its acceptance by consultants and practitioners.