Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Characterization of a Putative Spindle Assembly Checkpoint Kinase Mps1, Suggests Its Involvement in Cell Division, Morphogenesis and Oxidative Stress Tolerance in Candida albicans

In Saccharomyces cerevisiae MPS1 is one of the major protein kinase that governs the spindle checkpoint pathway. The S. cerevisiae structural homolog of opportunistic pathogen Candida albicans CaMPS1, is indispensable for the cell viability. The essentiality of Mps1 was confirmed by Homozygote Trisome test. To determine its biological function in this pathogen conditional mutant was generated through regulatable MET3 promoter. Examination of heterozygous and conditional (+Met/Cys) mps1 mutants revealed a mitosis specific arrest phenotype, where mutants showed large buds with undivided nuclei. Flowcytometry analysis revealed abnormal ploidy levels in mps1mutant. In presence of anti-microtubule drug Nocodazole, mps1 mutant showed a dramatic loss of viability suggesting a role of Mps1 in Spindle Assembly Checkpoint (SAC) activation. These mutants were also defective in microtubule organization. Moreover, heterozygous mutant showed defective in-vitro yeast to hyphae morphological transition. Growth defect in heterozygous mutant suggest haploinsufficiency of this gene. qRT PCR analysis showed around 3 fold upregulation of MPS1 in presence of serum. This expression of MPS1 is dependent on Efg1and is independent of other hyphal regulators like Ras1 and Tpk2. Furthermore, mps1 mutants were also sensitive to oxidative stress. Heterozygous mps1 mutant did not undergo morphological transition and showed 5-Fold reduction in colony forming units in response to macrophage. Thus, the vital checkpoint kinase, Mps1 besides cell division also has a role in morphogenesis and oxidative stress tolerance, in this pathogenic fungus.
Operating procedure synthesis: science or art?

In this paper, we provide a review of concepts and developments in operating procedure synthesis (OPS), starting from its early development through to its current state. Operating procedure synthesis is a problem in which a set of equipment manipulations and their orderings must be generated to take the process from an initial state to a goal state. While there has been ongoing research for about 30 years in this area, only a few systems have been reported to be industrially deployed. The approach taken in this paper is, first, to describe the problem in general terms; second, to discuss previous work in this area; and, finally, to present ideas and directions for future work.
dsReliM: Power-constrained reliability management in Dark-Silicon many-core chips under process variations

Due to the tight power envelope, in the future technology nodes it is envisaged that not all cores in a many-core chip can be simultaneously powered-on (at full performance level). The power-gated cores are referred to as Dark Silicon. At the same time, growing reliability issues due to process variations and soft errors challenge the cost-effective deployment of future technology nodes. This paper presents a reliability management system for Dark Silicon chips (dsReliM) that optimizes for reliability of on-chip systems while jointly accounting for soft errors, process variations and the thermal design power (TDP) constraint. Towards the TDP-constrained reliability optimization, dsReliM leverages multiple reliable application versions that can potentially execute on different cores with frequency variations and supporting differenst voltage-frequency levels, thus facilitating distinct power, reliability and performance tradeoffs at run time. Experiments show that our dsReliM system provides up to 20% reliability improvements under different TDP constraints when compared to a state-of-the-art technique. Also, compared to an ideal-case optimal solution, dsReliM deviates up to 2.5% in terms of reliability efficiency, but speeds up the reliability management decision time by a factor of up to 3100.
Interaction between Hepatitis B Virus Core Protein and Reverse Transcriptase

ABSTRACT Previous mutagenesis studies with hepatitis B virus (HBV) suggest that continued interactions with core are required for several steps in genomic replication. To examine core-polymerase (Pol) interactions, insect cells were coinfected with baculovirus constructs that independently expressed core and Pol. The results demonstrated several features with implications that core plays an interactive role with HBV Pol: (i) core coprecipitated with constructs expressing full-length Pol as well as the terminal protein (TP), reverse transcriptase (RT) and RNase H domains of Pol, independently; (ii) coprecipitation of core was not dependent on the presence of an epsilon stem-loop sequence; and (iii) core-Pol complexes migrated as intact capsid particles, as detected by sucrose gradient analysis. To analyze the structural and sequence requirements of core in recognition of Pol, a series of core mutants with two- to four-amino-acid insertions or carboxy-terminal deletions were assessed for Pol interaction. The results indicated that capsid formation is required but not sufficient for interaction with Pol and that the TP and RT domains of Pol have different requirements for interaction with core. To map the core binding sites on Pol, a panel of amino- and carboxy-terminal deletion mutants of the TP and RT domains of Pol were analyzed for interaction with core. At least three separate core binding sites on Pol were detected. This analysis begins to define basic requirements for core-Pol interactions, but further study is necessary to delineate the effects of these interactions on encapsidation and genome replication.
Advocating the Implementation of Mastery Learning in Higher Education to Increase Student Learning and Retention.

The purpose of this paper was three-fold: (1) to review mastery learning and criterion-based assessment; (2) to advocate extending these concepts to higher education; and (3) to invite MSERA members to join in research projects examining mastery learning in higher education. The authors used Guskey's (2001) definition of mastery learning from his paper on the educational contributions of Benjamin Bloom. The essential elements were the feedback, corrective, and enrichment process; and congruence among instructional components. The theoretical framework for this paper is presented as an annotated bibliography of mastery learning. The authors advocated extending the principles of mastery learning and criterionreferenced assessment to higher education to increase both student learning and student retention. A heuristic for creating a congruent classroom assessment with objectives and questions matching in content and cognitive level is presented in the Appendix. Teaching for Mastery 3 Advocating the Implementation of Mastery Learning in Higher Education to Increase Student Learning and Retention Definitions of mastery learning vary widely. The authors of this paper used the definition presented in Guskey's (2001) paper on the educational contributions of Benjamin Bloom. Guskey described the conceptualization of "Mastery Learning" by Bloom (cited in Guskey, 2001) With this in mind, Bloom outlined an instructional strategy to make use of this feedback and corrective procedure. He labeled the strategy "Learning for Mastery" (Bloom, 1968), and later shortened it to simply, "Mastery Learning. " By this strategy, the important concepts students are to learn are first organized into instructional units, each taking about a week or two of instructional time. Following initial instruction on the unit concepts, a quiz or assessment is administered. Instead of signifying the end of the unit, however, this assessment is used primarily to give students information or feedback on their learning. To emphasize this new purpose, Bloom suggested calling it a formative assessment, meaning "to inform or provide information. " A formative assessment identifies for students exactly what they have learned well to that point and what they need to learn better. Included with the formative assessment are explicit suggestions to students on what they should do to correct their learning difficulties.In other words, the correctives are "individualized. ". With the feedback and corrective information gained from a formative assessment, each student has a detailed prescription of what more needs to be done to master the concepts or desired learning concepts of the unit.
Estimation of Gini Index within Pre-Specified Error Bound

Gini index is a widely used measure of economic inequality. This article develops a theory and methodology for constructing a confidence interval for Gini index with a specified confidence coefficient and a specified width without assuming any specific distribution of the data. Fixed sample size methods cannot simultaneously achieve both specified confidence coefficient and fixed width. We develop a purely sequential procedure for interval estimation of Gini index with a specified confidence coefficient and a specified margin of error. Optimality properties of the proposed method, namely first order asymptotic efficiency and asymptotic consistency properties are proved under mild moment assumptions of the distribution of the data.
Dual roles of zygotic and maternal Scribble1 in neural migration and convergent extension movements in zebrafish embryos

In the developing vertebrate hindbrain, the characteristic trajectory of the facial (nVII) motor nerve is generated by caudal migration of the nVII motor neurons. The nVII motor neurons originate in rhombomere (r) 4, and migrate caudally into r6 to form the facial motor nucleus. In this study, using a transgenic zebrafish line that expresses green fluorescent protein (GFP) in the cranial motor neurons, we isolated two novel mutants, designated landlocked (llk) and off-road (ord), which both show highly specific defects in the caudal migration of the nVII motor neurons. We show that the landlocked locus contains the gene scribble1 (scrb1), and that its zygotic expression is required for migration of the nVII motor neurons mainly in a non cell-autonomous manner. Taking advantage of the viability of the llk mutant embryos, we found that maternal expression of scrb1 is required for convergent extension (CE) movements during gastrulation. Furthermore, we show a genetic interaction between scrb1 and trilobite(tri)/strabismus(stbm) in CE. The dual roles of the scrb1 gene in both neuronal migration and CE provide a novel insight into the underlying mechanisms of cell movement in vertebrate development.
Gawky is a component of cytoplasmic mRNA processing bodies required for early Drosophila development

In mammalian cells, the GW182 protein localizes to cytoplasmic bodies implicated in the regulation of messenger RNA (mRNA) stability, translation, and the RNA interference pathway. Many of these functions have also been assigned to analogous yeast cytoplasmic mRNA processing bodies. We have characterized the single Drosophila melanogaster homologue of the human GW182 protein family, which we have named Gawky (GW). Drosophila GW localizes to punctate, cytoplasmic foci in an RNA-dependent manner. Drosophila GW bodies (GWBs) appear to function analogously to human GWBs, as human GW182 colocalizes with GW when expressed in Drosophila cells. The RNA-induced silencing complex component Argonaute2 and orthologues of LSm4 and Xrn1 (Pacman) associated with 5′–3′ mRNA degradation localize to some GWBs. Reducing GW activity by mutation or antibody injection during syncytial embryo development leads to abnormal nuclear divisions, demonstrating an early requirement for GWB-mediated cytoplasmic mRNA regulation. This suggests that gw represents a previously unknown member of a small group of genes that need to be expressed zygotically during early embryo development.
Spreadsheets are Code: An Overview of Software Engineering Approaches Applied to Spreadsheets

Spreadsheets can be considered to be the world's most successful end-user programming language. In fact, one could say spreadsheets are programs. This paper starts with a comparison of spreadsheets to software: spreadsheets are similar in terms of applications domains, expressive power and maintainability problems. We then reflect upon what makes spreadsheets successful: liveness, directness and an easy deployment environment seem contribute largely to their success. Being a programming language, several techniques from software engineering can be applied to spreadsheets. We present an overview of such research directions, including spreadsheet testing, reverse engineering, smell detection, clone detection and refactoring. Finally, open challenges and future plans for the domain of spreadsheet software engineering are presented.
The influence of personalization on education and enjoyment in a museum

Maintaining the museum integrity as a conserving and educational institution on one hand, and making the museum more competitive and popular on the other hand, is one of the main challenges for museums. This research tried to find out if a newly designed collaborative quest was suitable to be both educative and enjoyable. Special attention was focused on the influence of personal interest on education and enjoyment. To find an answer, an experiment was conducted in Museon in which groups of four participants, with at least two children, played the quest. The quest started and ended at a multi-touch table, which was used because it was very suitable for collaboration. Between the parts at the table participants had to answer questions, which were provided at terminal computers in the main exhibition of Museon. Two conditions were compared. Participants in the normal condition got questions about subjects they had indicated as interesting at the start at the table, participants in the inverse conditions got questions about subjects they had not indicated as interesting. It showed that children in the normal condition scored higher for understanding than children in the inverse condition. For remembering and enjoyment no differences were found between the two conditions, but scores were quite high. The collaborative quest showed that it is possible to make a museum visit both educative and enjoyable.
Spinal Toxoplasmic Arachnoiditis Associated With Osteoid Formation: A Rare Presentation of Toxoplasmosis

Study Design. An extremely rare presentation of an isolated spinal toxoplasmic arachnoiditis is described. Objective. To draw attention to the fact that spinal arachnoid membranes may be a potential reservoir for Toxoplasma gondii. Summary of Background Data. Central nervous system toxoplasmosis is a common manifestation in patients who are immunodeficient. Reports on the spinal toxoplasmosis are rare and focused on spinal cord involvement. Methods. An adult patient presented with symptoms of spastic paraparesis that had begun 13 years before admission. Thoracic spinal magnetic resonance imaging showed small lesions in posterior subarachnoid space at Th7–Th8. A Th7–Th8 laminectomy was performed. Intradural-extramedullary lesions were excised. Results. Clinical, immunologic, and pathologic examinations showed adhesive spinal arachnoiditis associated with osteoid formation caused by past toxoplasmic infection. There was no impairment of the immunologic defense system. Conclusion. Where no causative factor is found in serious spinal adhesive arachnoiditis, the possibility of spinal toxoplasmosis should also be investigated.
An Iterative Algorithm for Robust Kernel Principal Component Analysis

Principal component analysis (PCA) has been proven to be an efficient method in dimensionality reduction, feature extraction and pattern recognition. Kernel principal component analysis (KPCA) can be considered as a natural nonlinear generalization of PCA, which performs linear PCA in a high dimensional space implicitly by using kernel trick. However, both conventional PCA and KPCA suffer from the deficiency of being sensitive to outliers. Existing robust KPCA has to eigen-decompose the gram matrix directly in each step and is much more computationally infeasible due to the large size of the matrix when the number of training samples is large. By extending existing robust PCA algorithm using kernel methods, we present a novel robust adaptive algorithm for calculating the kernel principal components. The proposed method not only preserves the characteristic of capturing underlying nonlinear structure of KPCA but also is robust against outliers by restraining the effect of outlying samples. Compared with existing robust KPCA methods, our method is performed without having to store the kernel matrix, which can reduce significantly the storage burden. In addition, our method shows the potential of expansibility to the incremental learning version. Experimental results on synthetic data indicate that our improved algorithm is effective and promising.
Local Learning Algorithms

Very rarely are training data evenly distributed in the input space. Local learning algorithms attempt to locally adjust the capacity of the training system to the properties of the training set in each area of the input space. The family of local learning algorithms contains known methods, like the k-nearest neighbors method (kNN) or the radial basis function networks (RBF), as well as new algorithms. A single analysis models some aspects of these algorithms. In particular, it suggests that neither kNN or RBF, nor nonlocal classifiers, achieve the best compromise between locality and capacity. A careful control of these parameters in a simple local learning algorithm has provided a performance breakthrough for an optical character recognition problem. Both the error rate and the rejection performance have been significantly improved.
From task parameters to motor synergies: A hierarchical framework for approximately optimal control of redundant manipulators

We present a hierarchical framework for approximately-optimal control of redundant manipulators. The plant is augmented with a low-level feedback controller, designed to yield input-output behavior that captures the task-relevant aspects of plant dynamics but has reduced dimensionality. This makes it possible to reformulate the optimal control problem in terms of the augmented dynamics, and optimize a high-level feedback controller without running into the curse of dimensionality. The resulting control hierarchy compares favorably to existing methods in robotics. Furthermore we demonstrate a number of similarities to (non-hierarchical) optimal feedback control. Besides its engineering applications, the new framework addresses a key unresolved problem in the neural control of movement. It has long been hypothesized that coordination involves selective control of task parameters via muscle synergies, but the link between these parameters and the synergies capable of controlling them has remained elusive. Our framework provides this missing link.
Leadership and the rise of the corporate psychopath: what can business schools do about the 'snakes inside'?

Purpose: Leadership styles are reviewed and reassessed given recent research that links destructive leadership behaviours exhibited by unscrupulous executives with traits commonly identified as indicators of corporate psychopathy. Method/approach: A review of the literature describing the various theories dealing with the nature of leadership styles and the rise of interest in corporate psychopathy and destructive leadership. Implications: This paper offers a psychological perspective for future research which provides both impetus and additional support for further analysis and exploration of such leadership styles in the business environment. One distinct advantage of this extrapolation is the articulation of insights into aspects of decision making by leaders, providing further insight into the formulation of leadership development programs in organisations and courses in business schools training future leaders.
International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity Reproducibility and Comparative Validity of a Food Frequency Questionnaire for Australian Children and Adolescents

Background: Dietary intake during childhood and adolescence is of increasing interest due to its influence on adult health, particularly obesity, cardiovascular disease and diabetes. There is a need to develop and validate dietary assessment methods suitable for large epidemiologic studies of children and adolescents. Limited large scale dietary studies of youth have been undertaken in Australia, due partly to the lack of a suitable dietary intake tool. A self-administered, semi-quantitative food-frequency questionnaire (FFQ), the 'Australian Child and Adolescent Eating Survey' (ACAES), was developed for youth aged 9-16 years. This study evaluated reproducibility and comparative validity of the ACAES FFQ using assisted food records (FRs) as the reference method.
Estimating the effects of Cry1F Bt‐maize pollen on non‐target Lepidoptera using a mathematical model of exposure

Summary 1. In farmland biodiversity, a potential risk to the larvae of non‐target Lepidoptera from genetically modified (GM) Bt‐maize expressing insecticidal Cry1 proteins is the ingestion of harmful amounts of pollen deposited on their host plants. A previous mathematical model of exposure quantified this risk for Cry1Ab protein. We extend this model to quantify the risk for sensitive species exposed to pollen containing Cry1F protein from maize event 1507 and to provide recommendations for management to mitigate this risk. 2. A 14‐parameter mathematical model integrating small‐ and large‐scale exposure was used to estimate the larval mortality of hypothetical species with a range of sensitivities, and under a range of simulated mitigation measures consisting of non‐Bt maize strips of different widths placed around the field edge. 3. The greatest source of variability in estimated mortality was species sensitivity. Before allowance for effects of large‐scale exposure, with moderate within‐crop host‐plant density and with no mitigation, estimated mortality locally was <10% for species of average sensitivity. For the worst‐case extreme sensitivity considered, estimated mortality locally was 99·6% with no mitigation, although this estimate was reduced to below 40% with mitigation of 24‐m‐wide strips of non‐Bt maize. For highly sensitive species, a 12‐m‐wide strip reduced estimated local mortality under 1·5%, when within‐crop host‐plant density was zero. Allowance for large‐scale exposure effects would reduce these estimates of local mortality by a highly variable amount, but typically of the order of 50‐fold. 4. Mitigation efficacy depended critically on assumed within‐crop host‐plant density; if this could be assumed negligible, then the estimated effect of mitigation would reduce local mortality below 1% even for very highly sensitive species. 5. Synthesis and applications. Mitigation measures of risks of Bt‐maize to sensitive larvae of non‐target lepidopteran species can be effective, but depend on host‐plant densities which are in turn affected by weed‐management regimes. We discuss the relevance for management of maize events where cry1F is combined (stacked) with a herbicide‐tolerance trait. This exemplifies how interactions between biota may occur when different traits are stacked irrespective of interactions between the proteins themselves and highlights the importance of accounting for crop management in the assessment of the ecological impact of GM plants.