Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Novel Sulfur Metabolites of Garlic Attenuate Cardiac Hypertrophy and Remodeling through Induction of Na+/K+-ATPase Expression

Epidemiologic studies show an inverse correlation between garlic consumption and progression of cardiovascular disease. However, the molecular basis for the beneficial effect of garlic on the heart is not known. Therefore, the objective of the present study was to (1) investigate the effect of raw garlic on isoproterenol (Iso) induced cardiac hypertrophy (2) find the active metabolites of garlic responsible for the beneficial effect. Cardiac hypertrophy was induced in rats by subcutaneous single injection of Iso 5 mg kg-1 day-1 for 15 days and the effect of garlic (250 mg/kg/day orally) was evaluated. Garlic metabolites in in vivo were identified by LC/MS study. The effect of garlic and its metabolites were evaluated against hypertrophy in H9C2 cells. Garlic normalized cardiac oxidative stress after Iso administration. Cardiac pathology and mitochondrial enzyme activities were improved in hypertrophy heart after garlic administration. Decreased Na+/K+-ATPase protein level that observed in hypertrophy heart was increased after garlic administration. We identified three garlic metabolites in rat serum. To confirm the role of garlic metabolites on cardiac hypertrophy, Na+/K+-ATPase expression and intracellular calcium levels were measured after treating H9C2 cells with raw garlic and two of its active metabolites, allyl methyl sulfide and allyl methyl sulfoxide. Raw garlic and both metabolites increased Na+/K+-ATPase protein level and decreased intracellular calcium levels and cell size in Iso treated H9C2 cells. This antihypertrophic effect of garlic and its sulfur metabolites were lost in H9C2 cells in presence of Na+/K+-ATPase inhibitor. In conclusion, garlic and its active metabolites increased Na+/K+-ATPase in rat heart, and attenuated cardiac hypertrophy and associated remodeling. Our data suggest that identified new garlic metabolites may be useful for therapeutic intervention against cardiac hypertrophy.
Review of the importance of nutrition during the first 1000 days: maternal nutritional status and its associations with fetal growth and birth, neonatal and infant outcomes among African women

Maternal nutritional status (MNS) is a strong predictor of growth and development in the first 1000 days of life and may influence susceptibility to non-communicable diseases in adulthood. However, the role of nutrition during this window of developmental plasticity in Africa is unclear. This paper reviews published data to address whether maternal nutrition during the first 1000 days is important for Africa, with a focus on MNS and its associations with fetal growth and birth, neonatal and infant outcomes. A systematic approach was used to search the following databases: Medline, EMBASE, Web of Science, Google Scholar, ScienceDirect, SciSearch and Cochrane Library. In all, 26 studies met the inclusion criteria for the specific objectives. MNS in Africa showed features typical of the epidemiological transition: higher prevalences of maternal overweight and obesity and lower underweight, poor diet quality 1 and high anaemia prevalence. Maternal body mass index and greater gestational weight gain (GWG) were positively associated with birth weight; however, maternal overweight and obesity were associated with increased risk of macrosomia and intrauterine growth restriction. Maternal anaemia was associated with lower birth weight. Macro- and micronutrient supplementation during pregnancy were associated with improvements in GWG, birth weight and mortality risk. Data suggest poor MNS in Africa and confirms the importance of the first 1000 days as a critical period for nutritional intervention to improve growth, birth outcomes and potential future health risk. However, there is a lack of data beyond birth and a need for longitudinal data through infancy to 2 years of age.
StriD²FA: Scalable Regular Expression Matching for Deep Packet Inspection

Deep packet inspection (DPI) has become one of the key components of a Network Intrusion Detection System (NIDS) and it compares packet content to a set of rules written in regular expression. The need to keep up with ever-increasing line speed has forced NIDS designers to move to hardware or high-speed memory where memory resources are limited. In this paper, we present LBM, a novel accelerating scheme for regular expression matching which converts the original byte stream into much shorter integer stream and then matches it with a variant of DFA, called StriD2FA. In the instance of LBM that we realize, 10 to 15 speedup is reasonable while the memory is much smaller than traditional DFA.
Mining for Domain-specific Parallel Text from Wikipedia

Previous attempts in extracting parallel data from Wikipedia were restricted by the monotonicity constraint of the alignment algorithm used for matching possible candidates. This paper proposes a method for exploiting Wikipedia articles without worrying about the position of the sentences in the text. The algorithm ranks the candidate sentence pairs by means of a customized metric, which combines different similarity criteria. Moreover, we limit the search space to a specific topical domain, since our final goal is to use the extracted data in a domain-specific Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) setting. The precision estimates show that the extracted sentence pairs are clearly semantically equivalent. The SMT experiments, however, show that the extracted data is not refined enough to improve a strong in-domain SMT system. Nevertheless, it is good enough to boost the performance of an out-of-domain system trained on sizable amounts of data.
Analysis of hepatic gene expression in chickens with hormonally‐induced lean and fat phenotypes

The purpose of this project was to use microarray analysis to unravel the genetic circuits controlling deposition and metabolism of fat in a hormonally‐induced obesity model. The abdominal fat content and free fatty acid levels of four‐week‐old chickens were dramatically altered after chronic infusion (two weeks) of exogenous corticosterone (CS) or thyroid hormone (T3), producing a fat and lean phenotype, respectively. Our Del‐Mar 14K Chicken Integrated Systems Microarray (Geo Platform GPL1731) was used to identify differentially expressed hepatic genes (i.e., 1.4‐fold difference). In the contrast of fat (CS) and lean (T3) phenotypes, 136 genes were up‐regulated by CS, whereas 64 genes were up‐regulated by T3. An additional study was designed to examine gene response to acute hormone infusion (six days) of CS or T3, alone or in combination. Both studies revealed several transcription factors (Spot14, CEBP2, etc.), metabolic enzymes (malic enzyme, fatty acid synthase, etc.) and transport proteins (LFABP, adipophilin, etc.) that control lipogenic (CS induced) and lipolytic (T3 induced) pathways. This project provides new insight into genetic control of metabolic disorders, such as diabetes and obesity.
Balanced Cache: Reducing Conflict Misses of Direct-Mapped Caches

Level one cache normally resides on a processor's critical path, which determines the clock frequency. Direct-mapped caches exhibit fast access time but poor hit rates compared with same sized set-associative caches due to non-uniform accesses to the cache sets, which generate more conflict misses in some sets while other sets are underutilized. We propose a technique to reduce the miss rate of direct mapped caches through balancing the accesses to cache sets. We increase the decoder length and thus reduce the accesses to heavily used sets without dynamically detecting the cache set usage information. We introduce a replacement policy to direct-mapped cache design and increase the access to the underutilized cache sets with the help of programmable decoders. On average, the proposed balanced cache, or B-cache, achieves 64.5% and 37.8% miss rate reductions on all 26 SPEC2K benchmarks for the instruction and data caches, respectively. This translates into an average IPC improvement of 5.9%. The B-cache consumes 10.5% more power per access but exhibits 2% total memory access related energy saving due to the miss rate reductions and hence the reduction to applications' execution time. Compared with previous techniques that aim at reducing the miss rate of direct-mapped caches, our technique requires only one cycle to access all cache hits and has the same access time of a direct-mapped cache
The mitochondrial carrier SLC25A10 regulates cancer cell growth

Dysregulation of cell metabolism is critical for the growth properties of cancer cells. The purpose of this study was to understand the role of substrate transport across the mitochondrial membrane to sustain the metabolic shift and redox defense in cancer cells. Mitochondrial carrier SLC25A10 is up-regulated in a variety of tumors and is involved in regulating intracellular levels of reactive oxygen species. We show that knockdown of SLC25A10 in A549 cells changed the growth properties to a less malignant phenotype and casued increased glutamine dependency and sensitivity to oxidative stress. The metabolic alteration was linked to an energy metabolic shift from glycolysis to mitochondrial oxidative phosphorylation illustrated by increased expression of glutamate dehydrogenase, decreased expression of lactate dehydrogenase due to down-regulation of hypoxia inducible factor 1α. We identified effects on NADPH production linked to the growth changes observed in SLC25A10 knockdown cells, demonstrated by decreased NADPH production in cells deprived of glutamine. The contribution of SLC25A10 to reprogram cell metabolism and to regulate cell growth suggests SLC25A10 as a novel target for anti-cancer strategies.
The role of tags for recommendation: A survey

Social tagging is an innovative and powerful mechanism introduced with Web 2.0: it shifts the task of classifying resources from a reduced set of knowledge engineers to the wide set of Web users. Users of social tagging systems define personal classifications which can be used by other peers for browsing available resources. However, due to the absence of rules for managing the tagging process, and to the lack of predefined schemas or structures for inserting metadata and relationships among tags, current user generated classifications dop not produce sound taxonomies. This is a strong limitation which prevents an effective and informed resource sharing. For this reason researchers are modeling innovative recommender systems capable to better support tagging, browsing, and searching for new resources. This paper is a survey which discusses the role of tags in recommender systems: starting from social tagging systems, we analyze various techniques for suggesting content and we introduce the approaches exploited for proposing tags for classifying resources, considering both personalized and not-personalized recommendation.
Channel Eigenvalue Distribution and Ergodic Capacity Analysis of Outdoor-Indoor MIMO Measured Channel

This paper analyzes the channel eigenvalue distribution and the ergodic channel capacity of correlated multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) channels. These eigenvalue densities can be represented by complex hypergeometric functions of matrix arguments, which can be expressed in terms of complex zonal polynomials. A realistic propagation environment in the presence of spatial fading correlation under an outdoor-indoor scenario at 5.25 GHz, which has important applications for data transmission in future cellular as well as wireless local area networks (WLAN) systems, is taken into account to compare to the analytic results. We show that the measured channel matrices of the most practical case of outdoor-indoor can be approximately modelled by the complex Gaussian random matrices with arbitary transmit (TX) covariance matrices. The results from the analytic calculations are in good agreement with those obtained from the measurements.
Towards a Voice Conversion System Based on Frame Selection

The subject of this paper is the conversion of a given speaker's voice (the source speaker) into another identified voice (the target one). We assume we have at our disposal a large amount of speech samples from source and target voice with at least a part of them being parallel. The proposed system is built on a mapping function between source and target spectral envelopes followed by a frame selection algorithm to produce final spectral envelopes. Converted speech is produced by a basic LP analysis of the source and LP synthesis using the converted spectral envelopes. We compared three types of conversion: without mapping, with mapping and using the excitation of the source speaker and finally with mapping using the excitation of the target. Results show that the combination of mapping and frame selection provide the best results, and underline the interest to work on methods to convert the LP excitation.
Symptoms, the Nature of Fibromyalgia, and Diagnostic and Statistical Manual 5 (DSM-5) Defined Mental Illness in Patients with Rheumatoid Arthritis and Fibromyalgia

Purpose To describe and evaluate somatic symptoms in patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and fibromyalgia, determine the relation between somatization syndromes and fibromyalgia, and evaluate symptom data in light of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual-5 (DSM-5) criteria for somatic symptom disorder. Methods We administered the Patient Health Questionnaire-15 (PHQ-15), a measure of somatic symptom severity to 6,233 persons with fibromyalgia, RA, and osteoarthritis. PHQ-15 scores of 5, 10, and 15 represent low, medium, and high somatic symptom severity cut-points. A likely somatization syndrome was diagnosed when PHQ-15 score was ≥10. The intensity of fibromyalgia diagnostic symptoms was measured by the polysymptomatic distress (PSD) scale. Results 26.4% of RA patients and 88.9% with fibromyalgia had PHQ-15 scores ≥10 compared with 9.3% in the general population. With each step-wise increase in PHQ-15 category, more abnormal mental and physical health status scores were observed. RA patients satisfying fibromyalgia criteria increased from 1.2% in the PHQ-15 low category to 88.9% in the high category. The sensitivity and specificity of PHQ-15≥10 for fibromyalgia diagnosis was 80.9% and 80.0% (correctly classified = 80.3%) compared with 84.3% and 93.7% (correctly classified = 91.7%) for the PSD scale. 51.4% of fibromyalgia patients and 14.8% with RA had fatigue, sleep or cognitive problems that were severe, continuous, and life-disturbing; and almost all fibromyalgia patients had severe impairments of function and quality of life. Conclusions All patients with fibromyalgia will satisfy the DSM-5 “A” criterion for distressing somatic symptoms, and most would seem to satisfy DSM-5 “B” criterion because symptom impact is life-disturbing or associated with substantial impairment of function and quality of life. But the “B” designation requires special knowledge that symptoms are “disproportionate” or “excessive,” something that is uncertain and controversial. The reliability and validity of DSM-5 criteria in this population is likely to be low.
Human motion segmentation by data point classification

Contemporary physiotherapy and rehabilitation practice uses subjective measures for motion evaluation and requires time-consuming supervision. Algorithms that can accurately segment patient movement would provide valuable data for progress tracking and on-line patient feedback. In this paper, we propose a two-class classifier approach to label each data point in the patient movement data as either a segment point or a non-segment point. The proposed technique was applied to 20 healthy subjects performing lower body rehabilitation exercises, and achieves a segmentation accuracy of 82%.
Spectral density of complex networks with a finite mean degree

In order to clarify the statistical features of complex networks, the spectral density of adjacency matrices has often been investigated. Adopting a static model introduced by Goh, Kahng and Kim, we analyse the spectral density of complex scale free networks. For this purpose, we utilize the replica method and effective medium approximation (EMA) in statistical mechanics. As a result, we identify a new integral equation which determines the asymptotic spectral density of scale free networks with a finite mean degree p. In the limit p → ∞, known asymptotic formulae are rederived. Moreover, the 1/p corrections to known results are analytically calculated by a perturbative method.
The platelet interior revisited : electron tomography reveals tubular-granule subtypes

We have used (cryo) electron tomography to provide a 3-dimensional (3D) map of the intracellular membrane organization of human platelets at high spatial resolution. Our study shows that the open canalicular system and dense tubular system are highly intertwined and form close associations in specialized membrane regions. 3D reconstructions of individual -granules revealed large heterogeneity in their membrane organization. On the basis of their divergent morphology, we categorized -granules into the following subtypes: spherical granules withelectron-denseandelectron-lucentzone containing 12-nm von Willebrand factor tubules, subtypes containing a multitude of luminal vesicles, 50-nm-wide tubular organelles, and a population with 18.4-nm crystalline cross-striations. Low-dose (cryo) electron tomography and 3D reconstruction of whole vitrified platelets confirmed the existence of long tubular granules with a remarkably curved architecture. Immunoelectron microscopy confirmed that these extended structures represent -granule subtypes. Tubular -granules represent approximately 16% of the total -granule population and are detected in approximately half of the platelet population. They express membrane-bound proteins GLUT3 and IIb3 integrin and contain abundant fibrinogen and albumin but low levels of -thromboglobulin and no von Willebrand factor. Our 3D study demonstrates that, besides theexistenceofmorphologicallydifferent -granule subtypes, high spatial segregation of cargo exists within individual -granules. (Blood. 2010;116(7):1147-1156)
Corrosion of steel in cracked concrete: a microscale study

The influence of concrete cracking upon reinforcement corrosion is complex. Cracks allow fast penetration of chlorides, potentially leading to a shorter initiation period of reinforcement corrosion. Structural regulations control acceptable crack width values based on the exposure class of the structure. These regulations are limited to crack width values at the concrete surface but do not account for the influence of cracks at the concrete-steel interface. Research studies on corrosion of reinforcement embedded in cracked concrete have shown that the correlation between cracks and corrosion is rather complex. Studying the condition of pitting in steel reinforcement embedded in cracked concrete from a microscopic approach could lead to insights on the mechanisms of corrosion under this condition. In this research, reinforced concrete specimens were subject to cracking. Subsequently, the specimens were exposed to salt-dry cycles with a chloride solution while continuously monitoring of open circuit potential (OCP), linear polarization resistance (LPR) and electrical resistance of concrete. Visual analysis of corrosion pits of steel bars showed that a correlation between crack width and pit dimensions was found
Toward PCR-free mutation detection based on surface-enhanced Raman scattering

The development of an assay for the detection of gene mutations has been attempted based on surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS). Using multiplexing property and high sensitivity of SERS technique, the detection of all mutation possibilities on one given spot is achievable. To test the feasibility of approach, SNPs and other types of mutations such as insertion and deletion are investigated. The PCR amplified and isolated genomic DNA without PCR amplification is immobilized on poly-L/D-lysine coated glass surface after denaturing with heating. The SERS probes are prepared by simultaneous attachment of oligonucleotides complementary to the target mutation regions and Raman active dyes to 13 nm gold nanoparticles (GNPs). After the hybridization of SERS probes on the poly-L/D-lysine surfaces, it was stained with silver colloidal nanoparticles for further enhancement of Raman scattering. In the second approach, Raman active dyes are chemically attached on gold nanoparticles and a thin layer of silver film is deposited on top of it to prepare core-shell nanoparticles. The complementary oligonucleotides to the target regions of the gene are chemically attached to silver surfaces of the nanoparticles. The promising results indicate that it is possible to detect certain mutation types without PCR amplification using the approach.
Machine Translation for Entity Recognition across Languages in Biomedical Documents

We report on our experiments for the CLEF 2013 Entity Recognition Challenge. Our approach is based on a combination of machine translation and NE tagging techniques. The Silver Standard Corpus (SSC) is used to obtain a corresponding annotated corpus in the target language. The plain text of the SSC is translated and a mapping is created between entities in the original and phrases in the translation, to which are associated the same CUIs as in the original. This produces a Bronze Standard Corpus (BSC) in the target language. A dictionary of entities is also created, which associates to each pair (entity text, semantic group) the corresponding CUIs that appeared in the SSC. The BSC is used to train a model for a Named Entity tagger. The model is used for tagging entities in sentences in the target language with the proper semantic group and the entity dictionary is used for associating CUIs to each of them.
Genetic Diversity of Plasmodium falciparum in Haiti: Insights from Microsatellite Markers

Hispaniola, comprising Haiti and the Dominican Republic, has been identified as a candidate for malaria elimination. However, incomplete surveillance data in Haiti hamper efforts to assess the impact of ongoing malaria control interventions. Characteristics of the genetic diversity of Plasmodium falciparum populations can be used to assess parasite transmission, which is information vital to evaluating malaria elimination efforts. Here we characterize the genetic diversity of P. falciparum samples collected from patients at seven sites in Haiti using 12 microsatellite markers previously employed in population genetic analyses of global P. falciparum populations. We measured multiplicity of infections, level of genetic diversity, degree of population geographic substructure, and linkage disequilibrium (defined as non-random association of alleles from different loci). For low transmission populations like Haiti, we expect to see few multiple infections, low levels of genetic diversity, high degree of population structure, and high linkage disequilibrium. In Haiti, we found low levels of multiple infections (12.9%), moderate to high levels of genetic diversity (mean number of alleles per locus = 4.9, heterozygosity = 0.61), low levels of population structure (highest pairwise Fst = 0.09 and no clustering in principal components analysis), and moderate linkage disequilibrium (ISA = 0.05, P<0.0001). In addition, population bottleneck analysis revealed no evidence for a reduction in the P. falciparum population size in Haiti. We conclude that the high level of genetic diversity and lack of evidence for a population bottleneck may suggest that Haiti’s P. falciparum population has been stable and discuss the implications of our results for understanding the impact of malaria control interventions. We also discuss the relevance of parasite population history and other host and vector factors when assessing transmission intensity from genetic diversity data.