Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Structure and developmental regulation of a wheat gene encoding the major chlorophyll a/b-binding polypeptide

A genomic clone for a major chlorophyll a/b-binding polypeptide of the light-harvesting complex has been sequenced from wheat. This gene, whAB1.6, encodes a 70-nucleotide 5'-nontranslated spacer, a 34-amino-acid NH2-terminal extension, i.e., the transit peptide, and a mature coding protein of 232 amino acid residues. The exact molecular weight of the precursor polypeptide is 28,560. The transit peptide is basic and is rich in serines. No intervening sequences are found in this gene. The transcription start site of the whAB1.6 gene occurs at AAAC as determined by S1 nuclease analysis. Putative regulatory sequences occur upstream of the gene at -25 (TTTAAATA) and at -72 (CCAACCA). Northern blots show a single RNA species estimated to be 1,100 nucleotides. Heterogeneity of the RNA population is demonstrated in S1 nuclease analyses with a 5'-end-labeled fragment that extends 191 nucleotides into the mature protein coding sequence. At least seven different transcripts can be recognized. The highest levels of RNA transcribed from the whAB1.6 gene are found in the basal segments of the wheat leaf, whereas other chlorophyll a/b-binding transcripts in the cell show a different pattern of abundance. As a control, we show that roots do not contain chlorophyll a/b-binding RNA. The most abundant RNA species shows an interrupted homology with the whAB1.6 gene at the start of the mature protein coding sequence; another species shows homology beginning at the start of the transit peptide and does not include the nontranslated region. Chlorophyll a/b-binding polypeptides accumulate toward the tip of the leaf as shown by Western blot analysis of total thylakoid proteins.
Quantitative clinical pharmacology for size and age scaling in pediatric drug development: A systematic review

The establishment of drug dosing in children is often hindered by the lack of actual pediatric efficacy and safety data. To overcome this limitation, scaling approaches are frequently employed to leverage adult clinical information for informing pediatric dosing. The objective of this review is to provide a comprehensive overview of the different scaling approaches used in pediatric pharmacotherapy as well as their proper implementation in drug development and clinical use. We will start out with a brief overview of the current regulatory requirements in pediatric drug development, followed by a review of the most commonly employed scaling approaches in increasing order of complexity ranging from simple body weight‐based dosing to physiologically‐based pharmacokinetic (PBPK) modeling approaches. Each of the presented approaches has advantages and limitations, which will be highlighted throughout the course of the review by the use of clinically‐relevant examples. The choice of the approach employed consequently depends on the clinical question at hand and the availability of sufficient clinical data. The main effort while establishing and qualifying these scaling approaches should be directed towards the development of safe and effective dosing regimens in children rather than identifying the best model, ie models should be fit for purpose.
Virtual Automation Networks

Industrial automation has been dominated by fieldbuses for several decades. Legacy fieldbuses, such as Profibus, were able to provide the required functions, as they were precisely tailored to automation needs. Fieldbuses represent a complex communication solution for automation, and they define automation-specific physical and link layers and a dedicated communication object model. Nevertheless, Ethernet-based communication ubiquitously appearing in offices fostered temptations to bring Ethernet to production. Ethernet provides market-proven cost-effective hardware components with high data rates and immense integration and network management support using the overlaid management protocols. However, Ethernet has not been designed for industrial applications and would fail to fulfill requirements of industrial automation in its generic form. Hence, adaptations in both end devices and sometimes even switching devices had to be carried out. Finally, various industrial requirements were met, and Ethernet-based fieldbuses became state-of-the-art technologies competing with legacy fieldbuses.
Direct Serogrouping of Streptococcus pneumoniae Strains in Clinical Samples by Use of a Latex Agglutination Test

ABSTRACT Pneumotest-Latex (Statens Seruminstitut) was evaluated for direct serogrouping of Streptococcus pneumoniae strains in clinical samples from patients with invasive disease. The technique was accurate to its level of discrimination for 62 of 67 clinical samples (92.5%). Pneumotest-Latex would be a useful alternative for direct serogrouping of pneumococci in clinical samples.
Localization of Nitric Oxide Synthases and Nitric Oxide Production in the Rat Mammary Gland

We investigated nitric oxide (NO) production and the presence of nitric oxide synthase (NOS) in the mammary gland by use of an organ culture system of rat mammary glands. Mammary glands were excised from the inguinal parts of female Wistar-MS rats primed by implantation with pellets of 17β-estradiol and progesterone and were diced into approximately 3-mm cubes. Three of these cubes were cultured with 2 ml of 10% FCS/ DMEM plus carboxy-PTIO (an NO scavenger, 100μM) in the presence or absence of LPS (0.5μg/ml) for 2 days. The amount of NO produced spontaneously by the cultured mammary glands was relatively minute at the end of the 2-day culture period, and the NO production was significantly enhanced by the presence of LPS. This enhancement of NO production was completely eliminated by addition of hydrocortisone (3μM), an inhibitor of inducible NOS (iNOS), to the incubation medium. Immunoblot analyses with specific antisera against NOS isoforms such as iNOS, endothelial NOS (eNOS), and brain NOS (bNOS) showed immunoreactive bands of iNOS (122 ± 2 kD) and eNOS (152 ± 3 kD) in extracts prepared from the mammary glands in the culture without LPS. The immunoreactive band of iNOS was highly intense after the treatment of mammary glands with LPS, whereas the corresponding eNOS immunoreactive band was faded. The immunohistochemical study of anti-iNOS antiserum on frozen sections of the cultured mammary glands showed that an immunoreactive substance with the antiserum was localized to the basal layer (composed of myoepithelial cells of alveoli and lactiferous ducts) of the mammary epithelia and to the endothelium of blood vessels that penetrated into the interstitium of the mammary glands. Histochemical staining for NADPH-diaphorase activity, which is identical to NOS, showed localization similar to that of iNOS in the mammary glands. Similar observations were noted in the immunohistochemistry of eNOS. In contrast, the immunoreactive signal with the bNOS antiserum was barely detected in the epithelial parts of alveoli and lactiferous ducts of the mammary glands. These observations demonstrate that three isoforms of NOS are present not only in the endothelium of blood vessels but also in the parenchymal cells (the glandular epithelium) of the rat mammary gland, such as epithelial cells and myoepithelial cells, and suggest that NO may have functional roles in the physiology of the mammary glands.
Mining User Interests for Personalized Tweet Recommendation on Map-Reduce Framework

The tremendous growth of micro-blogging systems in recent years poses some key challenges for recommender systems, such as how to process tweet big data under distributed environment, how to striking a balance between high accurate recommendations and efficiency, and how to produce diverse recommendations for millions of users. In our opinion, accurately, instantly, and completely capturing user preferences over time is the key point for personalized tweet recommendation. Therefore, we introduce three features to model personal user interests and its evolution for tweet recommendation, including textual information, user behaviors, and time. We then offer two enhanced recommendation models: Topic-STG (Session-based Temporal Graph) model and SVD (Singular Value Decomposition) model, combining these features to learn user preference and recommend personalized tweet. To further improve the algorithm efficiency for micro-blogging big data, we provide the parallel algorithm implementation for Topic-STG and SVD models based on Hadoop Map-Reduce framework. Experiments on a large scale of microblogging dataset illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed models and algorithms.
Hormonal Markers of Metabolic Dysregulation in Patients With Severe Mental Disorders After Olanzapine Treatment Under Real-Life Conditions

Objective: Dyslipidemia independent of body mass has previously been reported in humans after antipsychotic treatment. The present study investigated the levels of several metabolic regulatory hormones in psychiatric outpatients treated with different antipsychotics under real-life conditions. Methods: The study included cross-sectional data from 234 subjects on stable monotherapy with any of the following: olanzapine (n = 72), any other antipsychotic (n = 80), or no medications (n = 82). Groups were well matched for sex, body mass index (BMI), ethnicity, and smoking. After adjustment for differences in age and illness duration, groups were compared for the insulin resistance index (homeostatic model assessment of insulin resistance) and fasting concentrations of glucose, lipids, insulin, sex hormone-binding globulin (SHBG), adiponectin, leptin, and cortisol. Correlations were examined between serum olanzapine and hormonal levels, and between leptin concentrations and BMI in both sexes. Results: Significant intergroup differences in concentrations of insulin (P = 0.025), SHBG (P = 0.001), adiponectin (P = 0.017), and cortisol (P = 0.003) but no significant difference for homeostatic model assessment of insulin resistance (P = 0.051) were found, independent of body mass. Olanzapine-treated subjects had the highest insulin concentrations and the lowest SHBG, adiponectin, and cortisol concentrations. Olanzapine-treated female subjects had significantly higher leptin (P = 0.005) and lower SHBG (P = 0.023) concentrations than other subjects. In female subjects, serum olanzapine concentrations were correlated with hormonal levels, and a significant proportion of olanzapine-treated female subjects had abnormal correlations between serum leptin levels and BMI. Conclusions: Alterations in several interrelated metabolic hormonal markers were associated with olanzapine treatment, independent of body mass, particularly in female subjects.
An Efficient Locally Adaptive Wavelet Denoising Method Based on Bayesian MAP Estimation

An efficient locally adaptive wavelet denoising method is proposed by exploiting the correlation among image wavelet coefficients in a sub-band. Firstly, under the rule of Bayesian maximum a posteriori (MAP), we investigate Laplacian prior distribution based MAP estimator formula and sub-band adaptive MapShrink threshold. In order to make this threshold locally adaptive, a new stochastic model for wavelet coefficients is presented, in which each coefficient in a sub-band is assumed to be Laplacian with different marginal standard deviation, and these marginal standard deviations are modeled as random variables with high local correlation and thus can be estimated from a local neighborhood. Experiment results demonstrate the effectiveness of the presented algorithm, compared with the state of the art wavelet based image denoising methods
Future bottlenecks in international river basins: where transboundary institutions, population growth and hydrological variability intersect

ABSTRACT Using global data, this article examines the nexus of transboundary flood events and future social vulnerability. Which international river basins are forecast to experience an increase in both hydrological variability and population in the future, but currently lack institutional provisions to deal with these shared events? Concentrations of elevated risk are found in several basins in Central Asia, Central America and Central Africa. The article ends by highlighting transboundary basins that merit further investigation and possibly additional institution building to reduce urban flood risk.
The Effects of Relative Resource Configuration, Organizational Legitimacy, and Integration on Divestiture Decisions among Health Systems

This study examines the determinants of divestiture in health systems. Financial performance is a common indicator of a hospital's value. However, health systems may consider other factors that influence a hospital's value to the system. To enhance our understanding of hospital divestiture, we identify factors that enhance a hospital's value to the system and thus its likelihood of being retained. Our findings support previous studies that financial performance influences divestiture decisions. At the same time, our results identify three other factors influencing divestiture decisions relative resource configuration, legitimacy, and integration.
Relationships between extrapyramidal signs and cognitive function in a community‐dwelling cohort of patients with Parkinson's disease and normal elderly individuals

The relationship between extrapyramidal sign(DPS) severity and cognitive funcition was investigated in 184 patients with indiopathic Parkinson's disease (PD) and 301 normal elderly individuasls from a community‐dwelling cohort in northern Manhattan, New York City. Fifiy‐six of the patients with PD met criteria for dementia of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders third edition, revised, and of the National Institute of Neurological and Communicative Disorders and Stroke‐Alzbeimer's Disease and Related Disorders Association. EPS were rated according to the Unified Parkinson's Disease Rating Scale. Cognitive function was assessed by neuropsychological rests of memory, orientation, abstract reasoning, language, construcion, and psychomotor speed. Significant associations were found between EPS and neuropsychological performance in PD partients without dementia. Yet EPS severity was unable to account for the pronounced cognitive impairment in PD dementia. Individuals in the normal group with subtle EPS, but withtout overt idiopathic PD, showed widespread cognitive changes, including imparment in most of the tests that differentiated PD patients from normal subjects. Prospective follow‐up of these individuals will determine whether this represents a preclinical stage of PD or constitutes an early manifestation of dementia.
Evolutionary re-wiring of p63 and the epigenomic regulatory landscape in keratinocytes and its potential implications on species-specific gene expression and phenotypes

Abstract Although epidermal keratinocyte development and differentiation proceeds in similar fashion between humans and mice, evolutionary pressures have also wrought significant species-specific physiological differences. These differences between species could arise in part, by the rewiring of regulatory network due to changes in the global targets of lineage-specific transcriptional master regulators such as p63. Here we have performed a systematic and comparative analysis of the p63 target gene network within the integrated framework of the transcriptomic and epigenomic landscape of mouse and human keratinocytes. We determined that there exists a core set of ∼1600 genomic regions distributed among enhancers and super-enhancers, which are conserved and occupied by p63 in keratinocytes from both species. Notably, these DNA segments are typified by consensus p63 binding motifs under purifying selection and are associated with genes involved in key keratinocyte and skin-centric biological processes. However, the majority of the p63-bound mouse target regions consist of either murine-specific DNA elements that are not alignable to the human genome or exhibit no p63 binding in the orthologous syntenic regions, typifying an occupancy lost subset. Our results suggest that these evolutionarily divergent regions have undergone significant turnover of p63 binding sites and are associated with an underlying inactive and inaccessible chromatin state, indicative of their selective functional activity in the transcriptional regulatory network in mouse but not human. Furthermore, we demonstrate that this selective targeting of genes by p63 correlates with subtle, but measurable transcriptional differences in mouse and human keratinocytes that converges on major metabolic processes, which often exhibit species-specific trends. Collectively our study offers possible molecular explanation for the observable phenotypic differences between the mouse and human skin and broadly informs on the prevailing principles that govern the tug-of-war between evolutionary forces of rigidity and plasticity over transcriptional regulatory programs.
Building and optimizing declarative networked systems

In the face of progressively diverse networking technologies and application traffic, it is increasingly infeasible to custom engineer networked systems for each scenario. Moreover, an expanding class of networks, networked embedded systems, are very difficult to program, yet require a high degree of per-deployment programming customization. We investigate a declarative approach to building and optimizing networked systems, with emphasis on networked embedded systems. Our findings indicate that ideas from data management may yield dividends for the design of networked systems in two key areas: (1) declarative interfaces for simplicity yet breadth of expressiveness, and (2) automatic optimizations for automatic performance improvements on the users' behalf. This dissertation reports on three efforts. First, we designed and implemented DSN: a declarative language, runtime and compiler for networked embedded systems. The new logic-based language in DSN has been highly intuitive for programming—in one case, an algorithm designers' pseudocode mapped nearly line-for-line to working DSN code. Typically, lines-of-code are reduced by an order of magnitude vs. implementations in traditional embedded languages. We built a complementary compiler and runtime that showed negligible performance drop off vs. hand-tuned C implementations. As a result, we have been able to build whole system stacks—save for device drivers—entirely declaratively in under a hundred lines of code. Next, we designed and implemented netopt, a network optimizer that relieves programmers from having to manually solve two general networking problems: rendezvous and proxy selection. As part of this effort, we created novel program analysis and transformation algorithms to automatically select optimal communication rendezvous and proxies based on traffic and network conditions. When combined with either the DSN system, or similar systems for PC-class devices, user programs get 1–2 orders of magnitude performance improvement without need for programmers' assistance. Lastly, we designed and implemented wireless-netopt, an extension of netopt for wireless networking. wireless-netopt includes three wireless network optimizations from different layers of the networking stack. We show that the declarative interface readily supports such new domain-specific optimizations. Furthermore, these optimizations can be applied automatically and without added programmer effort, benefiting programs by 2× in energy savings.
In Vitro Effects of Sera From Children With Acute Liver Failure on Metabolic and Synthetic Activity of Cryopreserved Human Hepatocytes

Objective: The aim of the study was to investigate the in vitro effects of sera from children with acute liver failure (ALF) who had received N-acetylcysteine (NAC) on the metabolic and synthetic activity of cryopreserved human hepatocytes. Materials and Methods: Cryopreserved human hepatocytes were plated on collagen-coated culture plates and incubated in cell culture medium containing pooled sera at 20% (v/v) obtained from children with ALF (ALF) who received treatment with NAC (ALF + NAC), no treatment with NAC and from normal controls (normal sera [NS]). The effects of the sera on cell metabolic functions were assessed using methylthiazolyldiphenyltetrazolium bromide, [14C]-leucine incorporation, and cytochrome P-450 (CYP1A1/2) activity assays. Results: The overall hepatocyte metabolic activity was lower with ALF sera than with NS and ALF + NAC sera. [14C]-leucine incorporation was higher with both ALF sera (ALF and ALF + NAC) than with NS sera. There was a slightly higher activity of cytochrome P450 (CYP1A1/2 activity) in cultures treated with ALF and ALF + NAC than with normal sera treated hepatocyte cultures. Conclusions: Sera from children with ALF who received NAC did not impair the overall cell metabolic activity of cryopreserved human hepatocyte in vitro, which is encouraging for the use of hepatocytes transplantation in these patients.
Assessment of the reliability of central and peripheral fatigue after sustained maximal voluntary contraction of the quadriceps muscle

The aim of the present study was to further confirm the validity of measurements for characterizing neuromuscular alterations by establishing their reliability both before and after fatigue. Thirteen men (28 ± 5 years) volunteered to participate in two separate identical sessions requiring the performance of a sustained maximal voluntary contraction (MVC) with the quadriceps muscle for 2 min. MVC and transcutaneous electrical stimulations were used before and immediately after the fatiguing contraction to investigate the reliability of MVC torque, central activation, and peripheral variables (M‐wave properties, peak twitch, peak doublet) within and between sessions. Based on previous and present results, we advise the use of (1) voluntary activation level with potentiated doublet as a reference to describe central fatigue, (2) electromyographic activity of vastus lateralis muscle as a surrogate for quadriceps for both voluntary and evoked contraction, and (3) potentiated peak doublet amplitude to investigate contractile fatigue. These findings can be useful in the choice of the parameters describing central and peripheral fatigue of the quadriceps muscle in future studies. Muscle Nerve, 2007
The regulation of muscle glycogen: the granule and its proteins

Despite decades of studying muscle glycogen in many metabolic situations, surprisingly little is known regarding its regulation. Glycogen is a dynamic and vital metabolic fuel that has very limited energetic capacity. Thus its regulation is highly complex and multifaceted. The stores in muscle are not homogeneous and there appear to be various metabolic pools. Each granule is capable of independent regulation and fundamental aspects of the regulation appear to be associated with a complex set of proteins (some are enzymes and others serve scaffolding roles) that associate both with the granule and with each other in a dynamic fashion. The regulation includes altered phosphorylation status and often translocation as well. The understanding of the roles and the regulation of glycogenin, protein phosphatase 1, glycogen targeting proteins, laforin and malin are in their infancy. These various processes appear to be the mechanisms that give the glycogen granule precise, yet dynamic regulation.