Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Polycystic ovary syndrome – Phenotypes and diagnosis

Abstract Polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) is a heterogeneous spectrum of symptoms lasting throughout the lifecycle. The syndrome combines reproductive as well as metabolic aberrations associated with increased cardiovascular risk. The presence of three different definitions for the diagnosis of PCOS reflects the phenotypic diversity of the syndrome. The clinical manifestations and the sequelae of PCOS vary throughout the lifecycle, partly depending on environmental factors which may affect the integral components of the syndrome, namely ovarian steroidogenesis, ovulation and insulin resistance. As the patient grows older, particularly in the postmenopausal period, the cardiovascular risk profile may translate into increased rates of cardiovascular morbidity.
Magnetic induction tomography: phase versus vector-voltmeter measurement techniques

In magnetic induction tomography (MIT) the in-quadrature component, and hence the phase, of the received signal contains information about the conductivity of the tissue. The quality of imaging will depend on the precision with which phase can be measured. Preliminary studies suggest that a precision of 10 m° may be required for a practical biomedical MIT system operating at 10 MHz. This paper describes the results of measurements carried out with a 16-channel, downconverting, 10 MHz, MIT system utilizing two types of data extraction techniques: direct-phase measurement and measurement of the in-phase and in-quadrature components of the signal with a vector voltmeter. The basic precision provided by each technique was 50 m°, with thermal drift representing the major limiting factor. Preliminary measurements of average conductivity and permittivity for a human thigh in vivo are given.
Vpr-induced cell cycle arrest is conserved among primate lentiviruses

We previously reported that expression of human immunodeficiency virus type 1 strain NL4-3 (HIV-1(NL4-3))vpr causes cells to arrest in the G2 phase of the cell cycle. We examined the induction of cell cycle arrest by other HIV-1 isolates and by primary lentiviruses other than HIV-1. We demonstrate that the vpr genes from tissue culture-adapted or primary isolates of HIV-1 are capable of inducing G2 arrest. In addition, we demonstrate that induction of cell cycle arrest is a conserved function of members of two other groups of primate lentiviruses, HIV-2/simian immunodeficiency virus strain sm (SIVsm)/SIVmac and SIVagm. vpr from HIV-1, HIV-2, and SIVmac induced cell cycle arrest when transfected in human (HeLa) and monkey (CV-1) cells. vpx from HIV-2 and SIVmac did not induce detectable cell cycle arrest in either cell type, and SIVagm vpx was capable of inducing arrest in CV-1 but not HeLa cells. These results indicate that induction of cell cycle perturbation is a general property of lentiviruses that infect primates. The conservation of this viral function throughout evolution suggests that it plays a key role in virus-host relationships, and elucidation of its mechanism may reveal important clues about pathology induced by primary lentiviruses.
There oughta be a law...

Perhaps we need a Sarbanes-Oxley-style federal law that requires private and public company CEOs and CFOs to annually certify (subject to criminal penalities against the executives) that they are upholding employment laws in lieu of the immoral federal and state raids hauling the poor and the undocumented off to jail, ripping families apart, and the subsequent bankruptcy of a small company providing employment in the community.
PATERNAL EFFECTS IN INHERITANCE OF A PATHOGEN RESISTANCE TRAIT IN IPOMOEA PURPUREA

For continuously variable, polygenic characters, the response to selection depends upon the proportion of phenotypic variance that is caused by additive genetic variance, or narrow‐sense heritability. Thus, a major goal of quantitative genetics is to partition phenotypic variance for a trait in a way that isolates additive genetic variance from other causes. The variance among paternal half‐sib families, which is frequently used to estimate additive variance, is commonly recognized to include additive epistatic effects. However, this variance component can also include non‐Mendelian paternal effects. We report here the results from a diallel crossing design used to isolate nonnuclear effects from the paternal nuclear contribution to disease resistance in the common morning glory, Ipomoea purpurea. In particular, we found that genetic variance for resistance to anthracnose, a disease caused by the fungal pathogen Colletotrichum dematium, was determined largely by a nonnuclear, additive paternal effect. We discuss potential mechanisms for this effect as well as some of their evolutionary implications.
Effectiveness of three antimicrobial mouthrinses on the disinfection of toothbrushes stored in closed containers: a randomized clinical investigation by DNA Checkerboard and Culture.

OBJECTIVES The aim of this in vivo study was to evaluate the efficacy of three antimicrobial solutions on the disinfection of toothbrushes after storage in closed containers. MATERIALS AND METHODS Sixteen healthy subjects were enrolled in this randomized cross-over clinical investigation. The study was conducted in four phases, in which mouthrinses (chlorhexidine gluconate-based or cetilpiridinium-based) and sterile tap water (control group) were used to individually store used toothbrushes in closed containers during 7 days of toothbrushing. Five toothbrushes were used as negative control for bacterial colonisation before contact with oral cavity. Conventional culture and DNA Checkerboard hybridization were used to detect bacterial contamination on the toothbrushes. Subsequently, the number of bacterial species on the bristles was estimated by the DNA Checkerboard method. RESULTS One toothbrush presented bacterial contamination in the negative control test. Both culture and DNA Checkerboard showed positive signals of bacterial contamination in the toothbrushes with no differences in the frequency of detection. The control group showed higher total bacterial counts when compared with the mouthrinse groups. Porphyromonas gingivalis had the highest bacterial count followed by Parvimonas micra. CONCLUSION Culture and DNA Checkerboard showed positive signals of bacterial contamination. Mouthrinses that contains 0.12% of chlorhexidine gluconate were more effective in reducing bacterial colonisation on the toothbrushes.
A comparative analysis of global shape analysis methods for the assessment of the human right ventricle

Two contemporary statistical shape analysis workflows are presented and compared with respect to analysis of the human right ventricle (RV). The methods examined include an approach that directly applies proper orthogonal decomposition to harmonically mapped surfaces (DM-POD) and an approach that expands the harmonically mapped surfaces onto spherical harmonic functions prior to further analysis (SPHARM). The structure of both workflows is elaborated upon and compared, particularly regarding the details of several key sub-steps, including the shape parameterisation, alignment and statistical decomposition. The performance is evaluated for the components of each framework at the various analysis stages, as well as for the output of the complete workflows in terms of the potential to assess right ventricular function through application to a set of RV endocardial surfaces with varying levels of pulmonary hypertension. In addition, DM-POD and SPHARM are examined with respect to different methods of utilising the available phases captured throughout a single cardiac cycle for the patient set. The DM-POD workflow is quantitatively shown to provide more anatomically consistent representations of the RV, while in general, the features produced by the two workflows are shown to be distinctly different. Furthermore, both the workflow components and the components (i.e. phases) of the cardiac cycle utilised for the shape analysis are quantitatively shown to significantly affect the pattern analysis of the patient set.
Development and Evaluation of Cetirizine HCl Taste-Masked Oral Disintegrating Tablets

The purpose of the current study was to mask the taste of cetirizine HCl and to incorporate the granules produced in oral disintegrating tablets (ODT). The bitter, active substance was coated by fluidized bed coating using Eudragit® RL30-D at levels between 15% and 40% w/w. The ODTs were developed by varying the ratio of superdisintegrants such as sodium croscarmellose, crospovidone grades and low substituted hydroxypropyl cellulose (L-HPC). A direct compression process was used to compress the ODTs under various compaction forces to optimize tablet robustness. The properties of the compressed tablets including porosity, hardness, friability and dissolution profiles were further investigated. The in vitro and in vivo evaluation of the tablet disintegration times showed almost identical rapid disintegration below 10 s at the optimal levels of each superdisintegrant. Finally, the taste and sensory evaluation in human volunteers demonstrated excellence in masking the bitter active and tablet palatability.
Comparative studies of five heat-labile toxic products of Escherichia coli

Five heat-labile, partially purified toxic products of Escherichia coli were distinguished by isoelectric focusing, molecular weight, and neutralization with homologous and heterologous antisera. Only two affected the morphology of Y-1 cells, induced fluid accumulation in rabbit ileal loops, and stimulated production of cyclic AMP in Vero cells; these two did not cross-neutralize and only one showed cross-neutralization with cholera antitoxin. The remaining three products were cytotoxic for Vero cells.
Brahms and the Variation Canon

pressed in letters to friends over a twenty-year period reveal that variations enabled him to assess his relationship to his musical forebears and contemporaries. In three often-cited letters to Joseph Joachim, Adolf Schubring, and Heinrich von Herzogenberg, Brahms consciously categorized and judged the variation in its different historical manifestations, deploring its unworthy practitioners-seemingly everyone but Bach and Beethoven-and staking his own claim. Particularly singled out for scorn were those who varied the melody of the theme, while those who cultivated a newer sort of "fan-
Performance Analysis of Alamouti Transmit Diversity with Transmit Antenna Selection for Reduced Feedback Rate

We analyze a sub-optimum transmit antenna selection (TAS) scheme in multiple input single output (MISO) systems equipped with I transmit antennas. We keep one antenna fixed and select the best among the remaining I-1 antennas. We assume spatially independent flat fading channel with perfect channel state information (CSI) at receiver and an ideal feedback link. We use Alamouti transmit diversity and derive the closed-form expressions of bit error rate (BER) and outage probability for BPSK constellation. We also compare performance of the sub-optimum scheme with performance of the optimum scheme using BER, outage probability expressions and number of feedback bits.
Morphologically Decoupled Multi-Scale Sparse Representation for Hyperspectral Image Analysis

Hyperspectral imagery has emerged as a popular sensing modality for a variety of applications, and sparsity based methods were shown to be very effective to deal with challenges coming from high dimensionality in most hyperspectral classification problems. In this work, we challenge the conventional approach to hyperspectral classification, that typically builds sparsity-based classifiers directly on spectral reflectance features or features derived directly from the data. We assert that hyperspectral image processing can benefit very significantly by decoupling data into geometrically distinct components since the resulting decoupled components are much more suitable for sparse representation based classifiers. Specifically, we apply morphological separation to decouple data into texture and cartoon-like components, which are sparsely represented using local discrete cosine bases and multiscale shearlets, respectively. In addition to providing sparser representation, this approach allows us to take advantage of the invariance properties of each basis within each geometrically distinct component of the data. Experimental results using real-world hyperspectral image datasets demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed framework for classifying multi-channel imagery under a variety of adverse conditions — in particular, small training sample size, additive noise, and rotational variabilities between training and test samples.
A Comparison of Source Code Plagiarism Detection Engines

Automated techniques for finding plagiarism in student source code submissions have been in use for over 20 years and there are many available engines and services. This paper reviews the literature on the major modern detection engines, providing a comparison of them based upon the metrics and techniques they deploy. Generally the most common and effective techniques are seen to involve tokenising student submissions then searching pairs of submissions for long common substrings, an example of what is defined to be a paired structural metric. Computing academics are recommended to use one of the two Web-based detection engines, MOSS and JPlag. It is shown that whilst detection is well established there are still places where further research would be useful, particularly where visual support of the investigation process is possible.
Comparison of Ehrlichia chaffeensisRecombinant Proteins for Serologic Diagnosis of Human Monocytotropic Ehrlichiosis

ABSTRACT Diagnosis of human monocytotropic ehrlichiosis (HME) generally depends on serology that detects the antibody response to immunodominant proteins of Ehrlichia chaffeensis. Protein immunoblotting was used to evaluate the reaction of the antibodies in patients’ sera with the recombinant E. chaffeensis 120- and 28-kDa proteins as well as the 106- and the 37-kDa proteins. The cloning of the genes encoding the latter two proteins is described in this report. Immunoelectron microscopy demonstrated that the 106-kDa protein is located at the surfaces of ehrlichiae and on the intramorular fibrillar structures associated with E. chaffeensis. The 37-kDa protein is homologous to the iron-binding protein of gram-negative bacteria. Forty-two serum samples from patients who were suspected to have HME were tested by immunofluorescence (IFA) using E. chaffeensis antigen and by protein immunoblotting using recombinant E. chaffeensisproteins expressed in Escherichia coli. Thirty-two serum samples contained IFA antibodies at a titer of 1:64 or greater. The correlation of IFA and recombinant protein immunoblotting was 100% for the 120-kDa protein, 41% for the 28-kDa protein, 9.4% for the 106-kDa protein, and 0% for the 37-kDa protein. None of the recombinant antigens yielded false-positive results. All the sera reactive with the recombinant 28- or the 106-kDa proteins also reacted with the recombinant 120-kDa protein.
Non-Intrusive Repair of Behavioral Programs

We show how, under certain conditions, programs written in the behavioral programming approach can be modified (e.g., as result of new requirements or discovered bugs) using automatically-generated code modules. Given a trace of undesired behavior, one can generate a relatively small piece of code, whose execution is interwoven at run time with the rest of the system and brings about the desired changes without modifying existing code, and without introducing new bugs. At the core of our approach is the ability of a thread of behavior to prevent the triggering of events from other threads. Our repair algorithms apply model checking to the program and transform the counterexamples produced by the model-checker into corrective modules. Our work is supported by a proof-of-concept tool, which creates understandable modules that can be further manually managed as part of ongoing incremental system development.
NMR structure of the hypothetical protein NMA1147 from Neisseria meningitidis Reveals a distinct 5‐helix bundle

Gaohua Liu, Dinesh K. Sukumaran, Duanxiang Xu, Yiwen Chiang, Thomas Acton, Sharon Goldsmith-Fischman, Barry Honig, Gaetano T. Montelione, and Thomas Szyperski* Department of Chemistry, University at Buffalo, the State University of New York, Buffalo, New York Center of Advanced Biotechnology and Medicine and Department of Molecular Biology and Biochemistry, Rutgers University, Piscataway, New Jersey Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics, Columbia University, New York, New York Northeast Structural Genomics Consortium
Systematic Diagram Refinement for Code Generation in SEAM

Model-driven development (MDD) is methodology of software construction emerging recently to counter the drawbacks of classic approaches. Apart from the well-known UML, SEAM is another MDD approach increasingly attracting attention due to its capability of regarding the whole system as a single view, thus enabling consistency maintaining during the design development. Especially, the final diagram designed in SEAM can support automatic code generation, which has been the desirable goal of software engineering. However, SEAM suffers from the disadvantage of being too complicated when the system is designed in details at last steps. To tackle this problem, in this paper we propose an approach of systematic diagram refinement which allows users to specify transition matrices in each refinement steps, instead a whole new diagrams. Thus, the diagram developments will become less complicated and more natural. We also illustrate the usefulness of our approach in a featured case-study.
Analysis of the virulence of Streptococcus mutans serotype c gtfA mutants in the rat model system

The Streptococcus mutans serotype c gtfA gene encodes a 55-kilodalton protein which catalyzes the synthesis of a small glucan (1.5 kilodaltons) from sucrose (J.P. Robeson, R.G. Barletta, and R. Curtiss III, J. Bacteriol. 153:211-221, 1983). To investigate the role of the GtfA enzyme in virulence, we constructed S. mutans gtfA mutants from three cariogenic serotype c strains. A plasmid that carried an erythromycin resistance determinant and an internal fragment of the gtfA gene but that was unable to replicate in streptococci was used to transform S. mutans. The erythromycin-resistant transformants carried a partial duplication of the internal gtfA fragment, because of the integration of plasmid sequences within the S. mutans gtfA gene, which also resulted in the inactivation of the gtfA gene. This was verified by Southern DNA hybridization analysis and Western blot studies of cellular protein extracts of the mutant strains with GtfA antiserum. Mutants were fully virulent in both germfree and conventional rats. These results do not rule out the involvement of the GtfA protein in virulence. Pucci and Macrina (M.J. Pucci and F.L. Macrina, Infect. Immun. 54:77-84, 1986) have suggested that the GtfA enzyme synthesizes a primer for water-insoluble glucans. Another S. mutans protein, presumably a glucosyltransferase, may have a similar function and, thus, may obscure the relevance of the GtfA enzyme in pathogenesis.
A Novel Signaling Intermediate, SHEP1, Directly Couples Eph Receptors to R-Ras and Rap1A*

The Eph family of receptor tyrosine kinases has been implicated in many developmental patterning processes, including cell segregation, cell migration, and axon guidance. The cellular components involved in the signaling pathways of the Eph receptors, however, are incompletely characterized. Using a yeast two-hybrid screen, we have identified a novel signaling intermediate, SHEP1 (SH2 domain-containing Eph receptor-bindingprotein 1), which is expressed in the embryonic and adult brain. SHEP1 contains an Src homology 2 domain that binds to a conserved tyrosine-phosphorylated motif in the juxtamembrane region of the EphB2 receptor and may itself be a target of EphB2 kinase activity, since it becomes heavily tyrosine-phosphorylated in cells expressing activated EphB2. SHEP1 also contains a domain similar to Ras guanine nucleotide exchange factor domains and binds to the GTPases R-Ras and Rap1A, but not Ha-Ras or RalA. Thus, SHEP1 directly links activated, tyrosine-phosphorylated Eph receptors to small Ras superfamily GTPases.
Algorithm 2 : Max-queue length scheduling algorithm

Cyber-physical systems consist of several wirelessly connected components such as sensors that monitor physical phenomena, computational entities that make decisions based on sensed information and actuators that interact with physical processes. Connecting cyber-physical systems to the Internet using IP protocols increases interoperability by avoiding the need for protocol translation gateways. Unfortunately, in this context TCP has been disregarded since it is known to perform poorly in wireless scenarios as it treats packet loss as an indicator for network congestion rather than poor link quality. In this paper, we use the Low-power Wireless Bus (LWB) as a link layer for TCP/IP, taking advantage of its reliability and its routing-free communication. We design a system that integrates LWB with a low-power IP stack and includes TCP-aware schedulers for LWB. We evaluate our system with experiments on real hardware using uIP, a popular embedded Internet protocol stack. Our results demonstrate high TCP throughput in mobile and static scenarios and, furthermore, show that mobility does not decrease TCP performance.
Anti-biofilm potential of a glycolipid surfactant produced by a tropical marine strain of Serratia marcescens

A tropical marine bacterium isolated from the hard coral, Symphyllia sp. was identified as Serratia marcescens on the basis of morphological, biochemical and 16S rDNA analysis. The bacterium showed antimicrobial activity towards the pathogens Candida albicans and Pseudomonas aeruginosa and the marine biofouling bacterium Bacillus pumilus. S. marcescens displayed biosurfactant activity as evidenced by drop collapse, blood hemolysis and surface tension reduction (52.0–27 mN m−1). The active compound was purified by solvent extraction and silicic acid chromatography. Characterization was by thin layer chromatography, gas chromatography mass spectroscopy (GC-MS), Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy and 1H as well as 13C nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) analysis. The surfactant was found to be a glycolipid composed of glucose and palmitic acid. The glycolipid prevented adhesion of C. albicans BH, P. aeruginosa PAO1 and B. pumilus TiO1. The glycolipid also disrupted preformed biofilms of these cultures in microtitre plates. Confocal laser scanning microscopy and electron microscopy confirmed the effective removal of biofilms from glass surfaces. The glycolipid derived from S. marcescens could thus serve as a potential anti-biofilm agent.