Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Infectious Bursal Disease Virus Activates c-Src To Promote α4β1 Integrin-Dependent Viral Entry by Modulating the Downstream Akt-RhoA GTPase-Actin Rearrangement Cascade

ABSTRACT While the entry of infectious bursal disease virus (IBDV) is initiated by the binding of the virus to the two major receptors integrin and HSP90, the signaling events after receptor binding and how they contribute to virus entry remain elusive. We show here that IBDV activates c-Src by inducing the phosphorylation of the Y416 residue in c-Src both in DF-1 chicken fibroblasts and in vivo in the bursa of Fabricius from specific-pathogen-free (SPF) chickens. Importantly, inactivated IBDV fails to stimulate c-Src Y416 phosphorylation, and a very virulent IBDV strain induces a much higher level of c-Src Y416 phosphorylation than does an attenuated strain. Inhibition of c-Src activation by an Src kinase inhibitor or expression of a c-Src dominant negative mutant results in a significant decrease in the internalization of IBDV but has little effect on virus adhesion. Furthermore, short hairpin RNA (shRNA) downregulation of integrin, either the α4 or β1 subunit, but not HSP90 remarkably attenuates IBDV-induced c-Src Y416 phosphorylation, resulting in a decrease in IBDV internalization but not virus adhesion. Moreover, interestingly, inhibition of either c-Src downstream of the phosphatidylinositol 3-kinase (PI3K)/Akt-RhoA signaling cascade or actin rearrangement leads to a significant decrease in IBDV internalization irrespective of the IBDV-induced high levels of c-Src phosphorylation. Cumulatively, our results suggest a novel feed-forward model whereby IBDV activates c-Src for benefiting its cell entry via an integrin-mediated pathway by the activation of downstream PI3K/Akt-RhoA signaling and cytoskeleton actin rearrangement. IMPORTANCE While IBDV-caused immunosuppression is highly related to viral invasion, the molecular basis of the cellular entry of IBDV remains elusive. In this study, we demonstrate that IBDV activates c-Src by inducing the phosphorylation of the Y416 residue in c-Src to promote virus internalization but not virus adhesion. The ability to induce the level of c-Src Y416 phosphorylation correlates with the pathogenicity of an IBDV strain. IBDV-induced c-Src Y416 activation is α4β1 integrin but not HSP90 dependent and involves the activation of the downstream PI3K/Akt-RhoA GTPase-actin rearrangement cascade. Thus, our findings provide new insights into the IBDV infection process and the potential for c-Src as a candidate target for the development of IBDV therapeutic drugs.
Zimbabwe's ‘Fast Track’ Land Reform: What about women?

The wave of occupations of commercial farms in Zimbabwe starting in the year 2000 captured worldwide attention. By the end of that year, the government of Zimbabwe initiated the ‘fast track’ land reform process meant to formalize the occupations, and encourage further land appropriation and redistribution. Where are women in this process? The Women and Land Lobby Group (WLLG) was formed in 1998 by Zimbabwean women activists committed to the land issue. Since 1998 they have lobbied government to include women's interests in the design of land reform, and have made some inroads in improving women's formal rights to land as stated in policy documents. However, the current ‘fast track’ practices continue to privilege men as primary recipients of resettlement land, and the emerging role of traditional authorities in the land reform process marginalizes women. Other legal provisions that may help women struggle for changes remain weak. The contradiction between customary law, practices and attitudes and modern individual rights represents a complex battleground for women and land in Southern Africa, and calls for new feminist conceptualizations of the state as a vehicle for gender justice.
Towards Regulatory Compliance: Extracting Rights and Obligations to Align Requirements with Regulations

In the United States, federal and state regulations prescribe stakeholder rights and obligations that must be satisfied by the requirements for software systems. These regulations are typically wrought with ambiguities, making the process of deriving system requirements ad hoc and error prone. In highly regulated domains such as healthcare, there is a need for more comprehensive standards that can be used to assure that system requirements conform to regulations. To address this need, we expound upon a process called semantic parameterization previously used to derive rights and obligations from privacy goals. In this work, we apply the process to the privacy rule from the U.S. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). We present our methodology for extracting and prioritizing rights and obligations from regulations and show how semantic models can be used to clarify ambiguities through focused elicitation and to balance rights with obligations. The results of our analysis can aid requirements engineers, standards organizations, compliance officers, and stakeholders in assuring systems conform to policy and satisfy requirements
3D magnetization‐prepared imaging using a stack‐of‐rings trajectory

Efficient acquisition strategies for magnetization‐prepared imaging based on the three‐dimensional (3D) stack‐of‐rings k‐space trajectory are presented in this work. The 3D stack‐of‐rings can be acquired with centric ordering in all three dimensions for greater efficiency in capturing the desired contrast. In addition, the 3D stack‐of‐rings naturally supports spherical coverage in k‐space for shorter scan times while achieving isotropic spatial resolution. While non‐Cartesian trajectories generally suffer from greater sensitivity to system imperfections, the 3D stack‐of‐rings can enhance magnetization‐prepared imaging with a high degree of robustness to timing delays and off‐resonance effects. As demonstrated with phantom scans, timing errors and gradient delays only cause a bulk rotation of the 3D stack‐of‐rings reconstruction. Furthermore, each ring can be acquired with a time‐efficient retracing design to resolve field inhomogeneities and enable fat/water separation. To demonstrate its effectiveness, the 3D stack‐of‐rings are considered for the case of inversion‐recovery‐prepared structural brain imaging. Experimental results show that the 3D stack‐of‐rings can achieve higher signal‐to‐noise ratio and higher contrast‐to‐noise ratio within a shorter scan time when compared to the standard inversion‐recovery‐prepared sequence based on 3D Cartesian encoding. The design principles used for this specific case of inversion‐recovery‐prepared brain imaging can be applied to other magnetization‐prepared imaging applications. Magn Reson Med 63:1210–1218, 2010. © 2010 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Influence of Age and Age‐Related Diseases on Olfactory Function a

It is clear from this review that olfactory function is markedly altered in old age and in a number of age-related diseases. The deficits appear to be rather general and detectable by several types of olfactory tests. Considerable interindividual variability exists, however, and the physiologic bases of these changes are not clear. In many healthy elderly persons, smell loss appears to occur as a result of one or more causes, including viral insult, cumulated exposure to toxic fumes, head trauma, and calcification of the cribriform plate. Several reviews have appeared suggesting that the olfactory system may be a center of primary involvement in AD. Of particular interest is the hypothesis that environmental agents (related etiologically to the disease process) pass into the central nervous system via the highly active transport mechanisms of the olfactory receptors. This latter notion, although attractive, must be viewed conservatively, as it is possible that the olfactory pathways are simply selectively vulnerable to destruction by various disease processes. This may explain why Huntington's chorea and multiinfarct dementia, in addition to AD and PD, are associated with alterations in smell function. Although it is tempting to assume, as have authors such as Koss et al., that alterations in threshold function reflect peripheral olfactory dysfunction and that alterations in odor identification and other more demanding tasks reflect central olfactory dysfunction, there is little empirical support for such a simple dichotomy. Despite the fact that a peripheral/central distinction is useful in clinical audiology (where threshold loss is commonly associated with CN VIII pathology), an evaluation of the utility of this distinction in olfaction requires further research. The limited data suggest that both identification and detection deficits commonly arise from damage to the olfactory epithelium, even though identification deficits unassociated with detection deficits may occur in some central brain disorders. It is apparent from the studies reviewed in this chapter that considerable progress has been made during the last decade in elucidating the nature and prevalence of olfactory disturbances in elderly patients, as well as in patients with dementia-related diseases. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)
Multiple effects of visual format on TV news learning

Two experiments were conducted on edited TV newscast sequences to clarify effects of film accompaniment on learning from heard news text. In Experiment 1,150 British subjects viewed a sequence with either film format throughout or alternating film and ‘talking head’ format between items. Those items that were presented by ‘talking heads’ in the mixed sequence were learned better with film format, in which the heard text was accompanied by appropriate moving pictures. However, no effect of uniform context was found on the remaining items. In Experiment 2, 91 German subjects viewed one of four versions of a bulletin, one with ‘talking head’, one with film throughout, the other two having complementary mixed-format patterns. Besides confirming a beneficial effect of film presentation over ‘talking head’ which accords with the findings of all studies of learning from material in the form of national network newscasts, the results showed an impairing effect of uniform visual format. This can explain ‘contradictory’ findings, notably with atypical test material.
Evidence for the cholinergic nature of C‐terminals associated with subsurface cisterns in α‐Motoneurons of rat

C‐terminals can be distinguished at the ultrastructural level from other types of nerve endings on motoneurons by their prominent and regularly occurring postsynaptic specializations termed subsurface cisterns (SSC). We have previously shown (Yamamoto et al., 1991) that an antibody directed against a sequence within the gap junction protein connexin 32 immunolabels these motoneuronal SSCs and can therefore serve as a immunohistochemical tool to visualize indirectly the location of C‐terminals on motoneurons at the light microscope level. Here we have used this anti‐SSC antibody in combination with antibodies against choline acetyltransferase (ChAT) and acetylcholinesterase (AChE) to determine whether C‐terminals on motoneurons contain these cholinergic enzyme; markers. In sections at all major spinal cord levels and in several cranial motor nuclei examined, motoneuronal cell bodies and their proximal dendrites were studded with large ChAT‐immunoreactive (ChAT‐IR) boutons. Boutons having a similar distribution and appearance on motoneurons were also immunolabelled for AChE. In addition, motoneurons were surrounded by a dense plexus of AChE‐immunoreactive (AChE‐IR) varicose fibers and fine preterminal axons. In double‐labeled sections, AChE‐IR boutons corresponded to those immunolabeled for ChAT. In sections processed for simultaneous immunofluorescence detection of ChAT and SSCs, ChAT‐IR boutons were very often found in apposition to immunolabeled SSCs. In sections processed for simultaneous labeling of AChE and SSCs, AChE‐IR boutons were again frequently seen abutting labeled SSCs. These results provide the first strong evidence at the LM level that a large proportion, if not the entirety, of C‐terminals are cholinergic and show that these terminals consist in part of relatively large varicosities along highly varicose axons that form en passant type contacts on motoneurons. At the same time, our results substantially narrow possibilities regarding the as yet undetermined source of C‐terminals, which can now be considered to originate from cholinergic neurons, such as those located in the brainstem and/or the spinal cord. © 1993 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Image classification: No features, no clustering

In this paper, we consider the problem of satellite image classification, in which feature extraction is a critical step. One of the most prevalent methods is the Bag-of-Words (BoW) feature representation, which attains state-of-the-art performance in many applications. It has five steps: feature detection, local feature extraction, dictionary learning, feature coding, and feature pooling. In this paper, we focus on the second and third step. We propose a simple yet efficient feature extraction method within the BoW framework. It has two main advantages. Firstly, this method does not need any complex local feature extraction; instead, it uses directly the pixel values from small windows as low level features. Secondly, instead of using a time-consuming clustering algorithm for dictionary learning, a random dictionary is built and applied to feature space quantization. An extensive experimental evaluation has been performed and compared with other feature extraction methods. It is demonstrated that our feature extraction method is quite competitive for optical and SAR satellite image classification.
Multi-document topic segmentation

Multiple documents describing the same or closely related sets of events are common and often easy to obtain: for example, consider document clusters on a news aggregator site or multiple reviews of the same product or service. Even though each such document discusses a similar set of topics, they provide alternative views or complimentary information on each of these topics. We argue that revealing hidden relations by jointly segmenting the documents, or, equivalently, predicting links between topically related segments in different documents would help to visualize documents of interest and construct friendlier user interfaces. In this paper, we refer to this problem as multi-document topic segmentation. We propose an unsupervised Bayesian model for the considered problem that models both shared and document-specific topics, and utilizes Dirichlet process priors to determine the effective number of topics. We show that topic segmentation can be inferred efficiently using a simple split-merge sampling algorithm. The resulting method outperforms baseline models on four datasets for multi-document topic segmentation.
Exploiting 3D printed substrate for microfluidic SIW sensor

This paper exploits the possibility of the 3D printing for microwave sensor purposes. Because of the complex shapes allowed by this emerging technology, a fully-custom microfluidic sensor can be embedded directly during the substrate preparation. By this way, a simple approach in sensor design can be achieved together with a reduction of the manufacturing time, costs and overall complexity of the sensor. 3D printed microwave devices are very attractive for the future generation of Wireless Sensor Networks and of the Internet of Things. The proposed microfluidic sensor exploits the substrate integrated waveguide technology to keep high the quality factor and to merge the requirements of planar integration of further blocks. The aim of this sensor is a real time characterization of fluids across the lower UWB frequency band. The design, a first prototype and measurements are shown to exhibit the potentiality of this technique.
A prospective study of glycemic control during holiday time in type 2 diabetic patients.

OBJECTIVE In the U.K. Prospective Diabetes Study, A1C increased from 1.2 to 1.7% and fasting plasma glucose from 1.0 to 2.8 mmol/l over 10 years in type 2 diabetic patients. It is not known whether the blood glucose increase observed in long-term studies of type 2 diabetes results from small, steady increases throughout the year or from increases during discrete periods. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS To estimate the variation of actual glycemic control and its relation to holiday times, we measured A1C and fructosamine in 110 patients with type 2 diabetes. These measurements were performed four times at intervals of 4-6 weeks; therefore, glycemic change was determined for three periods: preholiday period (from between November 13 and December 20 to between December 20 and January 20), holiday period (from between December 20 and January 20 to between January 28 and February 28), and postholiday period (from between January 28 and February 28 to between March 1 and April 10). A final measurement of A1C was obtained from 90 subjects in the following December or January. RESULTS The mean A1C increased, but not significantly, during the preholiday (increase 0.135 +/- 0.723%, P = 0.055) and holiday (increase 0.094 +/- 0.828%, P = 0.239) periods. The mean A1C decreased, but not significantly, during the postholiday period (decrease 0.022 +/- 0.588%, P = 0.695). Altogether, the A1C change during these three periods increased significantly (increase 0.207 +/- 0.943%, P = 0.024). The mean fructosamine increased significantly during the preholiday period (increase 0.151 +/- 0.460 mmol/l, P = 0.001), but there was no significant change during the holiday period (increase 0.057 +/- 0.593 mmol/l, P = 0.321). However, fructosamine decreased significantly during the postholiday period (decrease 0.178 +/- 0.448 mmol/l, P < 0.001). Altogether, the fructosamine changes during the study periods showed no significant difference (increase 0.030 +/- 0.566 mmol/l, P = 0.579). Between March or early April and the following December or January, there was no additional change in A1C (decrease 0.009 +/- 1.039%, P = 0.935) for the 90 participants who returned for follow-up treatment. CONCLUSIONS The present study demonstrates an influence of winter holidays on the glycemic control of patients who have type 2 diabetes, and this poor glycemic control might not be reversed during the summer and autumn months. Therefore, the cumulative effects of the yearly A1C gain during the winter holidays are likely to contribute to the substantial increase in A1C that occurs every year among type 2 diabetic individuals.
On-Line Estimation of Feature Depth for Image-Based Visual Servoing Schemes

In the image-based visual servoing framework, error signals are directly computed from image feature parameters, thus obtaining control schemes which do not need neither a 3-D model of the scene, nor a perfect knowledge of the camera calibration matrix. However, the current value of the depth Z for each considered feature must be known. We propose a method to estimate on-line the value of Z for point features while the camera is moving through the scene, by using tools from nonlinear observer theory. By interpreting Z as a continuous unknown state with known dynamics, we build an estimator which asymptotically recovers the actual depth value for the selected feature.
Teacher Valuation and Use of Posters to Promote Sustainability of Wetlands in Kenya

Posters have a long history of use as tools to promote awareness on diverse issues including environmental conservation. A study was done using 39 primary school teachers in Kenya to explore their valuation and use of a wetlands poster during their teaching at school and within the community. The teachers were sampled using a non-purposive, intensity sampling technique. Semi-structured interviews were used to collect data. This article reflects upon the teacher responses to explore the relevance of posters in promotion of wetlands sustainability and areas that need to be improved in poster development, distribution, and use. The teachers' responses suggest that many of them failed to see the relevance of the wetlands poster in their teaching. Those few teachers who used the poster also failed to make the poster relevant locally and seemed not to have used it to address the pressing local wetland issues and risks. The study suggests the need to refocus on the process of development, distribution, and use of posters in promoting environmental conservation. The process needs to involve teachers so as to integrate and address issues and risks that are relevant to them locally.
Investigating the Intercellular Spreading Properties of the Foamy Virus Gag Protein

Small regions called protein transduction domains (PTDs), identified in cellular and viral proteins, have been reported to efficiently cross biological membranes. Here we show that the structural Gag protein of the prototypic foamy virus (PFV) is apparently able to move from cell to cell and to transport the green fluorescent protein (GFP) from few transfected cells to the nuclei of the entire monolayer. Deletion studies showed that this property lies within the second glycine/arginine (GRII) box in the C-terminus of the protein. We also found that uptake and nuclear accumulation of Gag GRII expressed as GFP-fusion protein in recipient cells was observed only following methanol fixation, but never in living cells or when cells were fixed with glutaraldehyde or treated with trichloroacetic acid prior to methanol fixation. Absence of intercellular spreading in vivo was further confirmed using a sensitive luciferase activity assay based on transactivation of the PFV long terminal repeats. Thus, we conclude that intercellular spreading of PFV Gag represents an artificial diffusion event occurring during cell fixation, followed by nuclear retention mediated by the chromatin-binding sequence within the Gag GRII box. In light of these results, we advise caution before defining a peptide as PTD on the basis of intercellular spreading observed by fluorescence microscopy.
Possible Involvement of Oxidative Stress in Salivary Gland of Patients with Sjögren’s Syndrome

Objective: To determine the involvement of oxidative stress in the salivary gland of patients with Sjögren’s syndrome (SS). Methods: Oxidative damage to the gland was measured by 8-hydroxy-2′-deoxyguanosine (8-OHdG) and hexanoyl-lysine (HEL) using the SS saliva. In addition, lactate dehydrogenase (LDH) and mitochondrial glutamic-oxaloacetic transaminase (m-GOT), both general markers for cell damage, were also analyzed. Results: Increased levels of 8-OHdG and HEL were found in the saliva of SS patients, but not in that of patients with other salivary gland dysfunction or of healthy individuals. Levels of LDH and m-GOT were significantly correlated with 8-OHdG and HEL levels, respectively. Furthermore, the increased levels of 8-OHdG and HEL were also correlated in the SS saliva. Conclusion: These findings suggested the involvement of oxidative stress in glandular tissue destruction in SS. It was indicated that the detection of 8-OHdG and HEL in the saliva may become a useful tool for the diagnosis of SS.