Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Urochordate Ascidians Possess a Single Isoform of Aurora Kinase That Localizes to the Midbody via TPX2 in Eggs and Cleavage Stage Embryos

Aurora kinases are key proteins found throughout the eukaryotes that control mitotic progression. Vertebrate Aurora-A and B kinases are thought to have evolved from a single Aurora-kinase isoform closest to that found in present day urochordates. In urochordate ascidians Aurora binds both TPX2 (a vertebrate AURKA partner) and INCENP (a vertebrate AURKB partner) and localizes to centrosomes and spindle microtubules as well as chromosomes and midbody during both meiosis and mitosis. Ascidian Aurora also displays this localization pattern during mitosis in echinoderms, strengthening the idea that non-vertebrate deuterostomes such as the urochordates and echinoderms possess a single form of Aurora kinase that has properties of vertebrate Aurora-kinase A and B. In the ascidian, TPX2 localizes to the centrosome and the spindle poles also as in vertebrates. However, we were surprised to find that TPX2 also localized strongly to the midbody in ascidian eggs and embryos. We thus examined more closely Aurora localization to the midbody by creating two separate point mutations of ascidian Aurora predicted to perturb binding to TPX2. Both forms of mutated Aurora behaved as predicted: neither localized to spindle poles where TPX2 is enriched. Interestingly, neither form of mutated Aurora localized to the midbody where TPX2 is also enriched, suggesting that ascidian Aurora midbody localization required TPX2 binding in ascidians. Functional analysis revealed that inhibition of Aurora kinase with a pharmacological inhibitor or with a dominant negative kinase dead form of Aurora caused cytokinesis failure and perturbed midbody formation during polar body extrusion. Our data support the view that vertebrate Aurora-A and B kinases evolved from a single non-vertebrate deuterostome ancestor. Moreover, since TPX2 localizes to the midbody in ascidian eggs and cleavage stage embryos it may be worthwhile re-assessing whether Aurora A kinase or TPX2 localize to the midbody in eggs and cleavage stage embryos.
FOOD SAFETY KNOWLEDGE, ATTITUDE AND HYGIENE PRACTICES AMONG THE STREET FOOD VENDORS IN NORTHERN KUCHING CITY, SARAWAK

Street food vending is a prevailing and distinctive part of a large informal sector in both developed and developing countries. Food safety is a key public health concern, because a large number of people take their meals outside the home and are exposed to food borne illnesses. Food handlers play an important role in ensuring food safety throughout the chain of storage, processing production, preparation and retailing. The objective of the study is to assess the level of knowledge, attitude and practice of food safety among the food vendors in Kuching City, Sarawak and to determine the factors affecting them. A cross sectional study was conducted among the street vendors in Kuching City. A total of 361 street food vendors were selected using non-probability sampling technique. Data were collected by face to face interview using a structured questionnaire. All completed questionnaires were validated manually and data analysis carried out by computer using SPSS version 19.0 software package. Multinomial regression analysis revealed that age and ethnicity appeared to be important factors for food safety knowledge (p<0.05), whereas food safety knowledge and training appeared to be influencing factors for attitude (p<0.05). On the other hand, food safety knowledge, attitude, training and age of the food vendors influence the food safety practice, but duration of food vending had an inverse relationship with food safety practice (0<0.05). Findings of this study may help in planning health intervention programs for food handlers for their improvement of knowledge, attitude and practice towards food-borne diseases and food safety. Furthermore, this will in turn reduce the morbidity and mortality of food-borne diseases.
Macroeconomic Uncertainty and the Cross-Section of Option Returns

I empirically investigate whether macroeconomic uncertainty is a priced risk factor in the cross-section of equity and index option returns. The analysis employs a non-linear factor model, estimated with the Fama-MacBeth methodology, where the macroeconomic uncertainty factor is the return on a long/short portfolio of equity options, built on the basis of how implied volatilities change around macroeconomic announcements. I find that macroeconomic uncertainty is priced in the cross-section of option returns, even after controlling for a number of relevant factors. The results are robust to alternative ways of measuring option returns, and to the non-random pattern of missing returns.
STATISTICAL METHODS AND SCIENTIFIC INDUCTION

SUMMARY THE attempt to reinterpret the common tests of significance used in scientific research as though they constituted some kind of acceptance procedure and led to "decisions" in Wald's sense, originated in several misapprehensions and has led, apparently, to several more. The three phrases examined here, with a view to elucidating the fallacies they embody, are: (i) "Repeated sampling from the same population", (ii) Errors of the "second kind", (iii) "Inductive behaviour". Mathematicians without personal contact with the Natural Sciences have often been misled by such phrases. The errors to which they lead are not always only numerical.
Antiprotozoal Diterpenes from Perovskia abrotanoides

Abstract As part of a screening for new antiparasitic natural products from Iranian plants, n-hexane and ethyl acetate extracts from the aerial parts of Perovskia abrotanoides were found to exhibit strong inhibitory activity against Trypanosoma brucei rhodesiense and Leishmania donovani. The activity was tracked by high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC)-based activity profiling. Preparative isolation by a combination of silica gel column chromatography and HPLC afforded 17 diterpenoids (1–17), including 14 abietane-, two icetexane-, and one isopimarane-type derivatives. Among these, (5R,10S)-11-hydroxy-12-methoxy-20-norabieta-8,11,13-triene (2), 12-hydroxy-norabieta-1(10),8,11,13-tetraene-1,11-furan (6), and 12-methoxybarbatusol (9) were new compounds, the structure of which was established by comprehensive spectroscopic data analysis (one- and two-dimensional nuclear magnetic resonance, high-resolution electrospray ionization mass spectrometry, electronic circular dichroism). The antiprotozoal activity of the isolated compounds was evaluated against T. b. rhodesiense, Trypanosoma cruzi, L. donovani, and Plasmodium falciparum. Selectivity indexes (SI) were calculated in comparison to cytotoxicity on rat myoblast (L6) cells. Particularly active were 7α-ethoxyrosmanol (4) with an IC50 of 0.8 µM against T. b. rhodesiense (SI 14.9) and an IC50 of 1.8 µM (SI 6.9) against L. donovani, ferruginol (8) with an IC50 of 2.9 µM (SI 19.2) against P. falciparum, and miltiodiol (10) with an IC50 of 0.5 µM (SI 10.5) against T. b. rhodesiense. None of the compounds exhibited selective toxicity against T. cruzi (SI ≤ 1.6).
Evolution of the eastward shift in the quasi-stationary minimum of the Antarctic total ozone column

The quasi-stationary pattern of the Antarctic total ozone has changed during the last 4 decades, showing an eastward shift in the zonal ozone minimum. In this work, the association between the longitudinal shift of the zonal ozone minimum and changes in meteorological fields in austral spring (September–November) for 1979–2014 is analyzed using ERA-Interim and NCEP–NCAR reanalyses. Regressive, correlative and anomaly composite analyses are applied to reanalysis data. Patterns of the Southern Annular Mode and quasi-stationary zonal waves 1 and 3 in the meteorological fields show relationships with interannual variability in the longitude of the zonal ozone minimum. On decadal timescales, consistent longitudinal shifts of the zonal ozone minimum and zonal wave 3 pattern in the middle-troposphere temperature at the southern midlatitudes are shown. Attribution runs of the chemistry–climate version of the Australian Community Climate and Earth System Simulator (ACCESS-CCM) model suggest that long-term shifts of the zonal ozone minimum are separately contributed by changes in ozone-depleting substances and greenhouse gases. As is known, Antarctic ozone depletion in spring is strongly projected on the Southern Annular Mode in summer and impacts summertime surface climate across the Southern Hemisphere. The results of this study suggest that changes in zonal ozone asymmetry accompanying ozone depletion could be associated with regional climate changes in the Southern Hemisphere in spring.
Improving culture performance and antibody production in CHO cell culture processes by reducing the Warburg effect

Lactate is one of the key waste metabolites of mammalian cell culture. High lactate levels are caused by high aerobic glycolysis, also known as the Warburg effect, and are usually associated with adverse culture performance. Therefore, reducing lactate accumulation has been an ongoing challenge in the cell culture development to improve growth, productivity, and process robustness. The pyruvate dehydrogenase complex (PDC) plays a crucial role for the fate of pyruvate, as it converts pyruvate to acetyl coenzyme A (acetyl‐CoA). The PDC activity can be indirectly increased by inhibiting the PDC inhibitor, pyruvate dehydrogenase kinase, using dichloroacetate (DCA), resulting in less pyruvate being available for lactate formation. Here, Chinese hamster ovary cells were cultivated either with 5 mM DCA or without DCA in various batch and fed‐batch bioreactor processes. In all cultures, DCA increased peak viable cell density (VCD), culture length and final antibody titer. The strongest effect was observed in a fed batch with media and glucose feeding in which peak VCD was increased by more than 50%, culture length was extended by more than 3 days, and the final antibody titer increased by more than twofold. In cultures with DCA, lactate production and glucose consumption during exponential growth were on average reduced by approximately 40% and 35%, respectively. Metabolic flux analysis showed reduced glycolytic fluxes, whereas fluxes in the tricarboxylic acid (TCA) cycle were not affected, suggesting that cultures with DCA use glucose more efficiently. In a proteomics analysis, only few proteins were identified as being differentially expressed, indicating that DCA acts on a posttranslational level. Antibody quality in terms of aggregation, charge variant, and glycosylation pattern was unaffected. Subsequent bioreactor experiments with sodium lactate and sodium chloride feeding indicated that lower osmolality, rather than lower lactate concentration itself, improved culture performance in DCA cultures. In conclusion, the addition of DCA to the cell culture improved culture performance and increased antibody titers without any disadvantages for cell‐specific productivity or antibody quality.
Improving waiting time and operational clinic flow in a tertiary diabetes center

Abstract The Singapore General Hospital Diabetes Centre (DBC) is a multidisciplinary specialist outpatient clinic which aims to provide an integrated one-stop service for diabetes. As with many tertiary academic centre clinics, DBC encounters an expanding patient load, greater patient expectations and increasingly complicated patients who require services from a multitude of health providers. Such rising demands amidst limited resources cause inefficiencies and long waiting times to consultation. This result in low patient satisfaction and an unpleasant clinic experience. A multidisciplinary team was formed to reduce the waiting time at DBC and improve communication and work processes of staff. Addressing wait-times is complicated as multiple stakeholders and operational processes are involved and interlinked. By systematically breaking down processes and identifying problem areas, targeted changes were implemented. This included a revised model of appointment scheduling, a patient reminder system, more effective communication sheets and work reassignments. The primary aim of this project was to improve the patient turn-around time (duration a patient spends at the centre for a visit). There was no documented improvement in turn-around time after project implementation ( 108.23 minutes versus 106.6 minutes) but other secondary aims were achieved. These included an increase in the percentage of patients seen by the doctor within 60 minutes from 80% to 84%, a reduction in wait-time for payment and reappointment at the cashier by 36.6% and a reduction in non-attendances of new cases to the clinic from 30.2% to 21.3%. Staff satisfaction and communication were greatly improved. To aid sustainability, personalized reports of individual doctor’s waiting times and workload were produced quarterly and tracked. As this is a first step quality improvement project, efforts to track, examine and further improve turn-around times are on-going. Future initiatives are directed at time-efficient appointment scheduling between care providers for same day appointments, a reactive SMS system for reminders and reappointments and optimization of processes and manpower allocation for clinics.
Kinetic Modeling of Corn Fermentation with S. cerevisiae Using a Variable Temperature Strategy

While fermentation is usually done at a fixed temperature, in this study, the effect of having a controlled variable temperature was analyzed. A nonlinear system was used to model batch ethanol fermentation, using corn as substrate and the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, at five different fixed and controlled variable temperatures. The lower temperatures presented higher ethanol yields but took a longer time to reach equilibrium. Higher temperatures had higher initial growth rates, but the decay of yeast cells was faster compared to the lower temperatures. However, in a controlled variable temperature model, the temperature decreased with time with the initial value of 40 ∘C. When analyzing a time window of 60 h, the ethanol production increased 20% compared to the batch with the highest temperature; however, the yield was still 12% lower compared to the 20 ∘C batch. When the 24 h’ simulation was analyzed, the controlled model had a higher ethanol concentration compared to both fixed temperature batches.
Diffusion pruning for rapidly and robustly selecting global correspondences using local isometry

Finding correspondences between two surfaces is a fundamental operation in various applications in computer graphics and related fields. Candidate correspondences can be found by matching local signatures, but as they only consider local geometry, many are globally inconsistent. We provide a novel algorithm to prune a set of candidate correspondences to those most likely to be globally consistent. Our approach can handle articulated surfaces, and ones related by a deformation which is globally nonisometric, provided that the deformation is locally approximately isometric. Our approach uses an efficient diffusion framework, and only requires geodesic distance calculations in small neighbourhoods, unlike many existing techniques which require computation of global geodesic distances. We demonstrate that, for typical examples, our approach provides significant improvements in accuracy, yet also reduces time and memory costs by a factor of several hundred compared to existing pruning techniques. Our method is furthermore insensitive to holes, unlike many other methods.
Formal Specification and Analysis of Termination Detection by Weight-throwing Protocol

Termination detection is a critical problem in distributed systems. A distributed computation is called terminated if all of its processes become idle and there are no in-transit messages in communication channels. A distributed termination detection protocol is used to detect the state of a process at any time, i.e., terminated, idle or active. A termination detection protocol on the basis of weight-throwing scheme is described in Yu-Chee Tseng, “Detecting Termination by Weight-throwing in a Faulty Distributed System”, JPDC, 15 February 1995. We apply model checking techniques to verify the protocol and for formal specification and verification the tool-set UPPAAL is used. Our results show that the protocol fails to fulfil some of its functional requirements.
Hawking radiation as quantum tunneling in Rindler coordinate

We substantiate the Hawking radiation as quantum tunneling of fields or particles crossing the horizon by using the Rindler coordinate. The thermal spectrum detected by an accelerated particle is interpreted as quantum tunneling in the Rindler spacetime. Representing the spacetime near the horizon locally as a Rindler spacetime, we find the emission rate by tunneling, which is expressed as a contour integral and gives the correct Boltzmann factor. We apply the method to non-extremal black holes such as a Schwarzschild black hole, a non-extremal Reissner-Nordstrom black hole, a charged Kerr black hole, a de Sitter space, and a Schwarzschild-anti de Sitter black hole.
Rate-reliability tradeoff for multi-connectivity

Multi-connectivity is considered to be key for enabling reliable transmissions and enhancing data rates in future wireless networks. In this work, we quantify the communication performance by the outage probability and the system throughput. We establish a remarkably simple, yet accurate analytical framework based on joint decoding to describe the outage probability and the system throughput depending on the number of links, the modulation scheme, the code rate, the bandwidth, and the received signal-to-noise ratio. To investigate the tradeoff between the outage probability and the system throughput we define two modes to either achieve low outage probabilities or high system throughput which we refer to as the diversity and the multiplexing mode, respectively. We then establish a rate-reliability tradeoff analysis based on time sharing between both modes.
Neither Boosted Elvitegravir nor Darunavir with Emtricitabine/Tenofovir Disoproxil Fumarate Increase Insulin Resistance in Healthy Volunteers: Results from the STRIBILD-IR Study

Background Insulin resistance (IR) was one of the first reported complications in HIV-positive patients who were receiving antiretroviral therapy (ART). However, the metabolic effects of newer fixed-dose ART combinations are unclear. Methods This Phase I prospective randomized open-label study evaluated the effects on IR in 30 healthy volunteers who were receiving newer fixed-dose combinations of tenofovir disoproxil fumarate, emtricitabine, elvitegravir and cobicistat (E/C/F/TDF, 10 patients) or the established ART regimens, such as tenofovir disoproxil fumarate/ emtricitabine with lopinavir/ritonavir (F/TDF+LPV/r, 9 patients) or darunavir/ritonavir (F/TDF+DRV/r, 9 patients). IR was measured before and after the 14-day treatments using the hyperinsulinemic-euglycemic clamp technique, and changes in IR were evaluated using the mean glucose disposal rate that was normalized to body weight (MBW) and lipid metabolism. Results The groups exhibited similar pretreatment IR, although MBW was significantly lower after the 14-day F/TDF+LPV/r treatment compared with baseline (12.5 ±3.3 versus 9.2 ±1.8 mg glucose/minxkg; P=0.037). No significant IR changes were observed for E/C/F/TDF (11.2 ±3.2 versus 11.3 ±2.5) or F/TDF+DRV/r (11.6 ±2.5 versus 11.3 ±2.4). Compared with baseline, F/TDF+LPV/r and F/TDF+DRV/r treatments significantly increased day 14 triglyceride levels (62 [54–73] versus 119 [77–147] mg/dl, P=0.0109; 75 [56–95] versus 96 [93–128] mg/dl, P=0.009, respectively). Conclusions Short-term treatment using fixed-dose combinations of E/C/F/TDF or F/TDF+DRV/r did not affect IR, although IR significantly increased after treatment using F/TDF+LPV/r.
Using Perturbative Least Action to Reconstruct Redshift-Space Distortions

In this paper, we present a redshift-space reconstruction scheme that is analogous to and extends the perturbative least action (PLA) method described by Goldberg & Spergel. We first show that this scheme is effective in reconstructing even nonlinear observations. We then suggest that by varying the cosmology to minimize the quadrupole moment of a reconstructed density field, it may be possible to lower the error bars on the redshift distortion parameter, β, as well as to break the degeneracy between the linear bias parameter, b, and ΩM. Finally, we discuss how PLA might be applied to realistic redshift surveys.
How Robust is the R&D - Productivity Relationship? Evidence from OECD Countries

We examine the robustness of R&D and productivity relationship in a panel of 16 OECD countries. We control for fifteen productivity determinants predicted by different theoretical models. Following the advances in non-stationary panel data econometrics, we estimate four variants of thirteen specifications. All models appear co-integrated. Results are rigorously scrutinized through extensive bootstrap simulations and sensitivity checks. R&D and human capital emerge robust in all specifications making them universal drivers of productivity across nations. Most other determinants are also significant. Productivity relationships are heterogonous across countries depending on their accumulated stocks of knowledge and human capital.