Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Deciphering von Hippel-Lindau (VHL/Vhl)-Associated Pancreatic Manifestations by Inactivating Vhl in Specific Pancreatic Cell Populations

The von Hippel-Lindau (VHL) syndrome is a pleomorphic familial disease characterized by the development of highly vascularized tumors, such as hemangioblastomas of the central nervous system, pheochromocytomas, renal cell carcinomas, cysts and neuroendocrine tumors of the pancreas. Up to 75% of VHL patients are affected by VHL-associated pancreatic lesions; however, very few reports in the published literature have described the cellular origins and biological roles of VHL in the pancreas. Since homozygous loss of Vhl in mice resulted in embryonic lethality, this study aimed to characterize the functional significance of VHL in the pancreas by conditionally inactivating Vhl utilizing the Cre/LoxP system. Specifically, Vhl was inactivated in different pancreatic cell populations distinguished by their roles during embryonic organ development and their endocrine lineage commitment. With Cre recombinase expression directed by a glucagon promoter in α-cells or an insulin promoter in β-cells, we showed that deletion of Vhl is dispensable for normal functions of the endocrine pancreas. In addition, deficiency of VHL protein (pVHL) in terminally differentiated α-cells or β-cells is insufficient to induce pancreatic neuroendocrine tumorigenesis. Most significantly, we presented the first mouse model of VHL-associated pancreatic disease in mice lacking pVHL utilizing Pdx1-Cre transgenic mice to inactivate Vhl in pancreatic progenitor cells. The highly vascularized microcystic adenomas and hyperplastic islets that developed in Pdx1-Cre;Vhl f/f homozygous mice exhibited clinical features similar to VHL patients. Establishment of three different, cell-specific Vhl knockouts in the pancreas have allowed us to provide evidence suggesting that VHL is functionally important for postnatal ductal and exocrine pancreas, and that VHL-associated pancreatic lesions are likely to originate from progenitor cells, not mature endocrine cells. The novel model systems reported here will provide the basis for further functional and genetic studies to define molecular mechanisms involved in VHL-associated pancreatic diseases.
TORSCHE Scheduling toolbox for Matlab

This paper presents a Matlab based scheduling toolbox TORSCHE (time optimization of resources, scheduling). The toolbox offers a collection of data structures that allow the user to formalize various off-line and online scheduling problems. Algorithms are simply implemented as Matlab functions with fixed structure allowing users to implement new algorithms. A more complex problem can be formulated as an integer linear programming problem or satisfiability of Boolean expression problem. The toolbox is intended mainly as a research tool to handle control and scheduling co-design problems. Therefore, we provide an interface to a real-time Matlab/Simulik based simulator TrueTime and a code generator allowing to generate parallel code for FPGA
A Routine PET/CT Protocol with Streamlined Calculations for Assessing Cardiac Amyloidosis Using 18F-Florbetapir

Introduction Cardiac amyloidosis is a rare condition characterized by the deposition of well-structured protein fibrils, proteoglycans, and serum proteins as amyloid. Recent work has shown that it may be possible to use 18F-Florbetapir to image cardiac amyloidosis. Current methods for assessment include invasive biopsy techniques. This work enhances foundational work by Dorbala et al. by developing a routine imaging and analysis protocol using 18F-Florbetapir for cardiac amyloid assessment. Methods Eleven patients, three healthy controls and eight myloid positive patients, were imaged using 18F-Florbetapir to assess cardiac amyloid burden. Four of the patients were also imaged using 82Rb-Chloride to evaluate possible 18F-Florbetapir retention because of reduced myocardial blood flow. Quantitative methods using modeling, SUVs and SUV ratios were used to define a new streamlined clinical imaging protocol that could be used routinely and provide patient stratification. Results Quantitative analysis of 18F-Florbetapir cardiac amyloid data were compiled from a 20-min listmode protocol with data histogrammed into two static images at 0–5, 10–15, or 15–20 min. Data analysis indicated the use of SUVs or ratios of SUVs calculated from regions draw in the septal wall were adequate in identification of all healthy controls from amyloid positive patients in this small cohort. Additionally, we found that it may be possible to use this method to differentiate patients suffering from AL vs. TTR amyloid. Conclusion This work builds on the seminal work by Dorbala et al. by describing a short 18F-Florbetapir imaging protocol that is suitable for routine clinical use and uses a simple method for quantitative analysis of cardiac amyloid disease.
"In vivo" toxicity of a truncated version of the Drosophila Rst-IrreC protein is dependent on the presence of a glutamine-rich region in its intracellular domain.

The roughest-irregular chiasm C ( rst-irreC) gene of Drosophila melanogaster encodes a transmembrane glycoprotein containing five immunoglobulin-like domains in its extracellular portion and an intracytoplasmic tail rich in serine and threonine as well some conserved motifs suggesting signal transduction activity. In the compound eye, loss-of-function rst-irreC mutants lack the characteristic wave of programmed cell death happening in early pupa and which is essential for the elimination of the surplus interommatidial cells. Here we report an investigation on the role played by the Rst-irreC molecule in triggering programmed cell death. "In vivo" transient expression assays showed that deletion of the last 80 amino acids of the carboxyl terminus produces a form of the protein that is highly toxic to larvae. This toxicity is suppressed if an additional 47 amino acid long, glutamine-rich region ("opa-like domain"), is also removed from the protein. The results suggest the possibility that the opa-like domain and the carboxyl terminus act in concert to modulate rst-irreC function in apoptosis, and we discuss this implication in the context of the general mechanisms causing glutamine-rich neurodegenerative diseases in humans.
Long-term effects of different fat sources and vitamin E supplementation on growth performance, antioxidant status, carcass characteristics, meat quality, and immune capacity of pigs with heavy slaughter weight up to 150 kg

OF DISSERTATION Long-term effects of different fat sources and vitamin E supplementation on growth performance, antioxidant status, carcass characteristics, meat quality, and immune capacity of pigs with heavy slaughter weight up to 150 kg Two experiments were used to evaluate the potential interaction of fat source and vitamin E (VE) in heavy slaughter weight pigs. In Experiment 1, a total of 64 individually-fed pigs (28.41 ± 0.83 kg) were randomly assigned to 8 dietary treatments in a 4×2 factorial arrangement. Fat treatments included cornstarch (CS), tallow (TW), corn-oil (CO), and coconut-oil (CN). VE treatments were dietary α-tocopheryl acetate (ATA) at 11 and 200 ppm. In Experiment 2, a total of 72 individually fed pigs (28.55 ± 1.16 kg) were randomly assigned to 12 dietary treatments in a 2 × 6 factorial arrangement. Fat treatments were TW and CO. VE treatments included four levels of ATA (11, 40, 100, and 200 ppm) and two levels of mixed tocopherols (primarily γ-tocopherol; 40 and 100 ppm). VE deposition, growth performance, and meat quality were measured in both experiments. In both experiments, interaction between fat sources and VE were detected (P < 0.01) on plasma VE concentration, which increased (P < 0.01) with time and with increasing dietary VE, but increased faster (P < 0.05) in pigs fed with CN and TW compared to pigs fed CS and CO. Compared to CO, more saturated dietary fat sources (CN and TW) led to firmer belly (P < 0.01), which had more (P < 0.01) SFA and MUFA while less (P<0.01) PUFA. In Experiment 1, increasing dietary ATA decreased (P < 0.05) Feed/Gain in Phase 4 and Phase 5. In Experiment 2, increasing dietary ATA increased overall ADG (linear, P = 0.02), with an interaction (P < 0.05) with fat sources on cumulative ADG during Phase 1-4, wherein pigs fed CO, but not TW, had increased ADG with increasing dietary ATA. Increasing dietary ATA increased (quadratic, P < 0.05) liver SOD activity, and decreased (quadratic, P < 0.05) liver MDA content. The oxidative stability of loin was improved (P < 0.01) when dietary ATA increased over 40 ppm. In summary, both dietary fat source and VE supplementation affected the response measures.
JC Virus Agnoprotein Inhibits In Vitro Differentiation of Oligodendrocytes and Promotes Apoptosis

ABSTRACT Productive infection of oligodendrocytes, which are responsible for the formation of myelin sheath in the central nervous system, with the human neurotropic virus JC virus (JCV) causes the fatal demyelinating disease progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy (PML). In addition to encoding T antigen and the capsid proteins, which are produced at the early and late phases of the infection cycle, respectively, JCV encodes a small regulatory protein named agnoprotein that is important for successful completion of the virus life cycle. Here we used bipotential CG-4 cells to examine the impact of agnoprotein on oligodendrocyte differentiation and survival in the absence of JCV lytic infection. We demonstrate that the expression of agnoprotein delayed the formation of complex outgrowth networks of the cells during oligodendrocyte differentiation. These alterations were accompanied by high levels of DNA damage, induction of proapoptotic proteins, and suppression of prosurvival signaling. Accordingly, apoptosis was significantly increased upon the induction of CG-4 cells toward differentiation in cells expressing agnoprotein. These observations provide the first evidence for the possible involvement of agnoprotein, independent from its role in viral replication, in a series of biological events that may contribute to the pathological features seen in PML lesions.
Industrial Power Systems Using Dry Low Emission Turbines

Gas turbines often provide the power necessary for the process at production sites. These power systems are much different from the utility grid. Being smaller, they are subject to large disturbances causing wide variations in turbine power over short periods of time. These power swings can have negative effects on some types of turbines designed to have low emission of nitrogen oxides. Such turbines use different firing methods at low and high values of power. The transition between these ranges and firing methods can lead to flameout. Turbines struggling to maintain power system stability at an industrial facility may succumb to the disturbance, resulting in a system collapse and loss of production. Regulations concerning emissions are becoming more severe, so this problem will become more challenging. Turbine firing techniques that allow low emissions for all values of output power are reviewed. The benefits this offers to the power system and the design of the power management system are also discussed. Using only one firing technique eliminates the risk of flameout and enhances power system availability. Another advantage of this firing technique is better parallel operation of turbines, particularly when machines have different ratings. Operating all turbines at the same relative power improves stability since all machines will react by the same amount during disturbances.
Differential Effects on Survival, Humoral Immune Responses and Brain Lesions in Inbred BALB/C, CBA/CA, and C57BL/6 Mice Experimentally Infected with Neospora caninum Tachyzoites

C57BL/6, BALB/c, and CBA/Ca mouse strains with different MHC-I haplotypes were compared with respect to susceptibility to Neospora caninum infection. Groups of 5 mice received 1 × 106, 5 × 106, or 25 × 106 tachyzoites of the NC-Liverpool isolate by intraperitoneal injection and were observed for disease symptoms. Humoral responses, splenocyte interferon-γ (IFN-γ) production, cerebral parasite loads, and histopathology were evaluated at human end points or the latest at 34 days postinfection (PI). The mortality rates in C57BL/6 mice were the highest, and relatively high levels of IgG1 antibodies were detected in those mice surviving till 34 days PI. In lymphocyte proliferation assays, spleen cells from C57BL6 mice stimulated with N. caninum antigen extract exhibited large variations in IFN-γ production. In BALB/c mice mortality was 0% at the lowest and 100% at the highest infection dose. Serologically they responded with high levels of both IgG2a and IgG1 subclasses, and lymphocyte proliferation assays of surviving mice yielded lower IFN-γ levels. CBA/Ca mice were the most resistant, with no animal succumbing to infection at a dose of 1 × 106 and 5 × 106 tachyzoites, but 100% mortality at 25 × 106 tachyzoites. High IgG2a levels as well as increased IFN-γ in lymphocyte proliferation assays were measured in CBA/Ca mice infected with 1 × 106 tachyzoites.
Extending string similarity join to tolerant fuzzy token matching

String similarity join that finds similar string pairs between two string sets is an essential operation in many applications and has attracted significant attention recently in the database community. A significant challenge in similarity join is to implement an effective fuzzy match operation to find all similar string pairs which may not match exactly. In this article, we propose a new similarity function, called fuzzy-token-matching-based similarity which extends token-based similarity functions (e.g., jaccard similarity and cosine similarity) by allowing fuzzy match between two tokens. We study the problem of similarity join using this new similarity function and present a signature-based method to address this problem. We propose new signature schemes and develop effective pruning techniques to improve the performance. We also extend our techniques to support weighted tokens. Experimental results show that our method achieves high efficiency and result quality and significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches.
FS2You: Peer-Assisted Semipersistent Online Hosting at a Large Scale

It has been widely acknowledged that online file hosting systems within the “cloud” of the Internet have provided valuable services to end users who wish to share files of any size. Such online hosting services are typically provided by dedicated servers, either in content distribution networks (CDNs) or large data centers. Server bandwidth costs, however, are prohibitive in these cases, especially when serving large volumes of files to a large number of users. Though it seems intuitive to take advantage of peer upload bandwidth to mitigate such server bandwidth costs in a complementary fashion, it is not trivial to design and fine-tune important aspects of such peer-assisted online hosting in a real-world large-scale deployment. This paper presents FS2You, a large-scale and real-world online file hosting system with peer assistance and semipersistent file availability. FS2You is designed to dramatically mitigate server bandwidth costs. In this paper, we show a number of key challenges involved in such a design objective, our architectural and protocol design in response to these challenges, as well as an extensive measurement study at a large scale to demonstrate the effectiveness of our design, using real-world traces that we have collected. To our knowledge, this paper represents the first attempt to design, implement, and evaluate a new peer-assisted semipersistent online file hosting system at a realistic scale. Since the launch of FS2You, it has quickly become one of the most popular online file hosting systems in mainland China, and a favorite in many online forums across the country.
Semi-Automatic Image Annotation Using Event and Torso Identification

Annotation is important for personal photo collections because acquired metadata plays a crucial role in image management and retrieval. Bulk annotation, where multiple images are annotated at once, is a desired feature for image management tools because it reduces users’ burden when making annotations. This paper describes an approach for automatically creating meaningful image clusters for efficient bulk annotation. These techniques are not perfect and so are integrated into a bulk annotation interface where users can manually correct errors. We present hierarchical event clustering and torso based human identification techniques. Hierarchical event clustering provides multiple levels of “event” groups. For identifying people in images, we introduce a new technique which uses torso information rather than human facial features.
0.5-V 70-nW Rail-to-Rail Operational Amplifier Using a Cross-Coupled Output Stage

We develop and fabricate a 0.5-V rail-to-rail operational amplifier (op-amp) with ultralow-power operation in a 0.18-μm standard complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor process. The op-amp has a two-stage structure that comprises a complementary input stage and a novel cross-coupled output stage. The cross-coupled output stage increases the transconductances of the metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistors of the output stage without requiring an additional chip area. Hence, it increases the gain of the op-amp and drivability for a capacitive load. Our experimental results showed that the dc gain was 77 dB at the common-mode input voltage of 0.25 V with a supply voltage of 0.5 V. DC gains of more than 40 dB were obtained for common-mode input voltages ranging 50-450 mV. Furthermore, the unity-gain frequency was 4.0 kHz and the phase margin was 56°, with a capacitive load of 40 pF. The power consumption was 70 nW, including all bias circuits.
Large Multi-lingual, Multi-level and Multi-genre Annotation Corpus

High accuracy for automated translation and information retrieval calls for linguistic annotations at various language levels. The plethora of informal internet content sparked the demand for porting state-of-art natural language processing (NLP) applications to new social media as well as diverse language adaptation. Effort launched by the BOLT (Broad Operational Language Translation) program at DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) successfully addressed the internet information with enhanced NLP systems. BOLT aims for automated translation and linguistic analysis for informal genres of text and speech in online and in-person communication. As a part of this program, the Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) developed valuable linguistic resources in support of the training and evaluation of such new technologies. This paper focuses on methodologies, infrastructure, and procedure for developing linguistic annotation at various language levels, including Treebank (TB), word alignment (WA), PropBank (PB), and co-reference (CoRef). Inspired by the OntoNotes approach with adaptations to the tasks to reflect the goals and scope of the BOLT project, this effort has introduced more annotation types of informal and free-style genres in English, Chinese and Egyptian Arabic. The corpus produced is by far the largest multi-lingual, multi-level and multi-genre annotation corpus of informal text and speech.
Identification of nonlinear process models in an LPV framework

Abstract Driven by the current economical needs, developments in process design and control point out that deliberate operation of chemical process requires better models and control designs than what is offered by the traditional Linear Time-Invariant (LTI) framework. In this paper an identification approach based on Linear Parameter-Varying (LPV) models is introduced for process systems which enables the use of powerful LPV control synthesis tools. LPV systems represent an intermediate step between LTI and nonlinear descriptions as they are capable of describing the system over its whole operating range but preserve many advantages of LTI descriptions. Estimation of LPV models is efficiently solvable by using series expansion type of model structures, like orthonormal basis function models. Advantageous properties of this approach and modeling paradigm are investigated with respect to process models and the added value over LTI models is demonstrated via an example of a continuous stirred tank reactor.
Anti-Gout Agent Allopurinol Exerts Cytotoxicity to Human Hormone-Refractory Prostate Cancer Cells in Combination with Tumor Necrosis Factor–Related Apoptosis-Inducing Ligand

Allopurinol has been used for the treatment of gout and conditions associated with hyperuricemia for several decades. We explored the potential of allopurinol on cancer treatment. Allopurinol did not expose cytotoxicity as a single treatment in human hormone refractory prostate cancer cell lines, PC-3 and DU145. However, allopurinol drastically induced apoptosis of PC-3 and DU145 in combination with tumor necrosis factor–related apoptosis-inducing ligand (TRAIL), which is a promising candidate for anticancer agent but its efficacy is limited by the existence of resistant cancer cells. We examined the underlying mechanism by which allopurinol overcomes the resistance of prostate cancer cells to TRAIL. Allopurinol up-regulated the expression of a proapoptotic TRAIL receptor, death receptor 5 (DR5). Allopurinol increased DR5 protein, mRNA, and promoter activity. Using DR5 small interfering RNA (siRNA), we showed that allopurinol-mediated DR5 up-regulation contributed to the enhancement of TRAIL effect by allopurinol. Furthermore, we examined the mechanism of allopurinol-mediated DR5 up-regulation. DR5 promoter activity induced by allopurinol was diminished by a mutation of a CAAT/enhancer binding protein homologous protein (CHOP)-binding site. In addition, allopurinol also increased CHOP expression, suggesting that allopurinol induced DR5 expression via CHOP. Allopurinol possesses the activity of a xanthine oxidase (XO) inhibitor. We used XO siRNA instead of allopurinol. XO siRNA also up-regulated DR5 and CHOP expression and sensitized the prostate cancer cells to TRAIL-induced apoptosis. Here, we show the novel potential of allopurinol in cancer treatment and indicate that the combination of allopurinol with TRAIL is effective strategy to expand the TRAIL-mediated cancer therapy. (Mol Cancer Res 2008;6(12):1852–60)
Tax Options, Clienteles, and Adverse Selection: The Case of Convertible Exchangeable Preferred Stock

Firms that issue convertible exchangeable preferred stock can later exchange it for debt with identical conversion and cash flow rights, thus capturing interest tax deductions when they can benefit from them. Despite tax and transaction-cost advantages, many issuers forego this innovative security in favor of otherwise identical, traditional convertible preferred stock. Tests of two potential explanations are presented, that issuers of the traditional security: specialize in serving an investor clientele that wants to avoid owning convertible bonds, or signal that they expect to force conversion into common equity earlier, implying a higher firm value. The evidence favors the clientele explanation.