Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Development of an innovative in vitro method for mass production of Verticillium dahliae microsclerotia

The soil-borne fungal plant pathogen Verticillium dahliae can infect more than 300 plant species including important economic crops, causing great economic loses. V. dahliae can persist and survive more than 14 years in the soil by resistance structures, known as microsclerotia, which constitute the primary inoculum in the field. In vitro mass production of microsclerotia is essential for performing many pathological assays. Nevertheless to harvest the microsclerotia is not an easy task and several protocols have been described although none of them is completely satisfying for different reasons. here we present a new protocol that is reproducible, robust, simple and fast allows to overcome the difficulties for obtaining massive amounts of microsclerotia. In summary, we developed a new culture medium that we called Pluronic Potato Medium (PPM) because it is essentially potato dextrose media with the hydrogel, Pluronic F127 as a solidifying agent. The microsclerotia collected in form PPM were infectious in tomato plants were they were able to reproduce the disease and we recovered and quantitated V. dahliae in infected plants.
Phylogeography of a species complex of lowland Neotropical rain forest trees (Carapa, Meliaceae)

Aim Many tropical tree species have poorly delimited taxonomic boundaries and contain undescribed or cryptic species. We examined the genetic structure of a species complex in the tree genus Carapa in the Neotropics in order to evaluate age, geographic patterns of diversity and evolutionary relationships, and to quantify levels of introgression among currently recognized species.
A Semiautomated Analysis Method for Catecholamines, Indoleamines, and Some Prominent Metabolites in Microdissected Regions of the Nervous System: An Isocratic HPLC Technique Employing Coulometric Detection and Minimal Sample Preparation

The application of a commercially available coulometric electrochemical detector to the automated HPLC analysis of some monoamines and their metabolites in microdissected areas of the rat nervous system is described. Apart from the stability and high sensitivity of the system, other appealing features of the technique are the facile sample preparation and long‐term sample storage characteristics which show minimal analyte degradation. Basal values of some regional monoamine and metabolite concentration are listed together with a brief appendix that serves as a user's guide to the operation and maintenance of the detection system.
Cognition-Based Control and Optimization Algorithms for Optimizing Human-Robot Interactions in Power-Assisted Object Manipulation

This article investigates the necessity of inclusion of cognitive information regarding weight perception in the control algorithm of a power assist robotic system (PARS) for object manipulation, and presents optimization algorithms to determine optimum humanrobot interactions (HRI) and manipulation performance for the system. Two dynamics models for lifting objects with the system are derived. One model does not include weight perception, but another model does include it. Two different admittance control algorithms based on two dynamics models are derived. A comprehensive evaluation scheme is derived to evaluate the system for HRI and manipulation performance, and optimization algorithms are derived to determine the optimum HRI and performance. A test-bed PARS is developed to verify the control and the optimization algorithms. During the experiments, the human subjects lift an object with the system for each control algorithm separately. Results show that the system characteristics are unsatisfactory, power assistance is unclear and optimum HRI is not achievable for the control that does not include weight perception. However, power assistance is quantified clearly and optimum HRI is achieved with satisfactory manipulation performance when the control includes weight perception. We then propose to use the results to develop control algorithms of power assist robots to assist humans manipulating heavy objects in industries that may provide optimum HRI and performance.
Carbenoxolone sodium in the treatment of gastric ulcer with special reference to side-effects.

In 1962, Doll, Hill, Hutton, and Underwood reported the results of a clinical trial of a triterpenoid liquorice compound, carbenoxolone sodium (Biogastrone), in the treatment of gastric and duodenal ulcer. They suggested that carbenoxolone sodium promotes the healing of gastric ulcers. The results in patients with duodenal ulcer were not significantly different from those receiving placebo tablets. Of 58 patients who were given the active drug in a dose of 100 mg. three times daily for four weeks, 10 (17 %) developed oedema. In 1965, Doll, Hill, and Hutton, in a further series, re-affirmed the value of carbenoxolone sodium in promoting the reduction in size of gastric ulcers. Twenty-four patients were treated as out-patients using doses of 75 to 100 mg. three times daily of carbenoxolone sodium. In this series, a liability to fluid retention was again noted: 21 % of patients developed oedema of the ankles and showed a rapid gain in weight. During the later stages of the second trial the blood pressure was recorded weekly and in a number of patients significant elevation of the systolic and diastolic blood pressure was noted. The mean maximum increase of pressure over the pretreatment reading was 20 mm.Hg systolic and 12 mm.Hg diastolic for the carbenoxolone sodium group. In one patient the increase in diastolic pressure was 30 mm.Hg. This communication describes our experience using carbenoxolone sodium in doses of 100 mg. three times daily and 50 mg. three times daily in the treatment of patients with gastric ulcer. Special attention was paid to the incidence of side-effects.
Occurrence of allergic bronchopulmonary mycosis in patients with asthma: An Eastern India experience

Background: Allergic bronchopulmonary mycosis (ABPM) is a clinical syndrome associated with immune sensitivity to various fungi notably Aspergillus spp. that colonize the airways of asthmatics. Early diagnosis and treatment with systemic corticosteroids is the key in preventing the progression of the disease to irreversible lung fibrosis. Aims: To study the occurrence of ABPM among asthma patients with fungal sensitization attending a chest clinic of a tertiary hospital of eastern India. The clinico-radiological and aetiological profiles are also described. Materials and Methods: All consecutive patients with asthma presenting to the chest clinic over a period of one year were screened for cutaneous hypersensitivity to 12 common fungal antigens. The skin test positive cases were further evaluated for ABPM using standard criteria. Results: One hundred and twenty-six asthma patients were screened using twelve common fungal antigens; forty patients (31.74%) were found to be skin test positive, and ABPM was diagnosed in ten patients (7.93%). Of the 10 cases of ABPM, nine cases were those of allergic bronchopulmonary aspergillosis (ABPA) and one case was identified as caused by sensitization to Penicillium spp. A majority of the cases of ABPM had advanced disease and had significantly lower FEV1 compared to non-ABPM skin test positive asthmatics. Central bronchiectasis on high resolution CT scan was the most sensitive and specific among the diagnostic parameters. Conclusion: There is a significant prevalence of ABPM in asthma patients attending our hospital and this reinforces the need to screen asthma patients for fungal sensitisation. This will help in early diagnosis and prevention of irreversible lung damage.
Martingale Theory-Based Optimal Task Allocation in Heterogeneous Vehicular Networks

Intelligent transportation systems (ITSs), which can fulfill people’s increasing requirements on mobility, have arisen as a popular research area. In order to implement the ITSs, a large amount of data needs to be executed within requested time. Due to the remote locations, cloud centers are no longer sufficient in data off-loading. A heterogeneous vehicular network, which consists of three kinds of computation resources, i.e., a cloud center, an edge node, and multiple vehicles, is, therefore, constructed to solve the aforementioned issues. First, considering the heterogeneity of each computation resource, the delay bound can be derived based on the martingale theory. Especially, data off-loading to the cloud center or to the edge node is assisted by road side units (RSUs). The communication link from the source node to the cloud center or to the edge node is modeled as a two-hop one. By utilizing the min-plus algebra, the two-hop link can be abstracted and analyzed in an equivalent single system further. Then, given a requested delay time, the maximum off-loading capacity of each resource can be obtained from the derived delay bound. When the tasks are smaller than the network available off-loading capacity, an optimal task allocation problem can, therefore, be constructed to minimize the overall delay violation probability. The numerical results are presented to show the performance of the proposed task allocation scheme in the heterogeneous vehicular networks. In addition, it can be verified that the proposed optimal task allocation scheme performs better than the benchmarks in the literature.
Improvement of BER performance by tilting receiver plane for indoor visible light communications with input-dependent noise

In this paper, an indoor visible light communication (VLC) system with the input-dependent noise is considered. In the system, the main noise is caused by Gaussian noise, however, with a noise variance depending on the current input signal strength. In the presence of the input-dependent noise, the theoretical expression of the bit error rate (BER) for the VLC using on-off keying is derived. Based on the derived BER, an optimization problem is formulated to improve the BER performance by tilting the receiver plane. The proposed optimization problem is proven to be a convex optimization problem, which can be efficiently solved by using the specialized solver such as the CVX toolbox for MATLAB. To verify the accuracy of the derived expression of the BER, all theoretical results are thoroughly confirmed by using the Monte-Carlo simulations. Moreover, simulation results show that the larger the variance of the input-dependent noise is, the worse the BER performance becomes. Additionally, the BER performance can be dramatically improved by tilting the receiver plane properly.
Biomarkers in inflammatory bowel diseases: insight into diagnosis, prognosis and treatment

Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) is a chronic disease of unknown etiology which mostly involves the intestine and requires a personalized approach for treatment. IBD represents a heterogeneous group of patients with inherently variable disease courses. Hence, the heterogeneity of patient populations may delay the diagnosis, clinical practice and initiation of appropriate treatment. Use of biomarkers for diagnosis and management of IBD is still necessary. Descriptions of the immunological pathway abnormalities in IBD improve assessment to identify the patient’s disease status, and relative risk of progression to complicated disease behaviors, and this information may ultimately influence therapeutic decisions. In this study, we try to explain the role of biomarkers in early diagnosis, estimating prognosis, and target agents for correct managements of IBD’s patients. This information might be important to provide insight into emerging panels of multiple IBD biomarkers and highlighting the essential role of personalizes panel for each patient.
Wideband circularly polarized slot antenna over meta-surface

A wideband, unidirectional, metasurface backed slot antenna is proposed and studied for the circularly polarized radiation. Proposed antenna consists of a wide octagonal-shaped slot backed by metasurface. Conventional L-shaped stub feed with an impedance transformer is used to excite the octagonal-shaped slot radiator. The measured results of the antenna prototype are 40.2% (4.70-7.11 GHz) for 3-dB axial ratio bandwidth, 41.7% (4.95-7.45 GHz) for 10-dB return loss bandwidth, and around 6.0 dBic for the gain at the boresight. The antenna exhibits an overall volume of 0. 72λ<sub>o</sub> × 0. 60λ<sub>o</sub> × 0. 28λ<sub>o</sub> at 6.0 GHz.
Asian water monitors (Varanus salvator) remain common in Peninsular Malaysia, despite intense harvesting

Abstract Context. Each year, between 50 000 and 120 000 Asian water monitors (Varanus salvator, to >2 m total length) are harvested from the wild in Peninsular Malaysia for their skins. Under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), international trade is allowable only if it is sustainable. Aims. To assess the sustainability of Malaysia’s harvest of water monitors by quantifying the abundance and demography of V. salvator in the wild, and to develop cost-effective methods for estimating the parameters needed to evaluate sustainability. Methods. We conducted trapping surveys to determine the abundance, population demography and density of V. salvator in four habitat types in five states in Peninsular Malaysia in 2010, 2011, 2012 and 2018. Key results. Of 1025 lizards captured, only 63% (mostly females) were within the preferred body-size range exploited for commercial trade. Densities were high (37–372 lizards km–2 based on estimated population sizes; 1–35 lizards km–2 based on number of animals captured). Anthropogenic habitats (e.g. oil palm plantations) contained denser populations of monitors than did natural habitats where no hunting occurs, but mean body sizes were smaller. Conclusions. Despite intensive harvesting for many decades, V. salvator remains abundant and widespread. Harvesting alters the demographic structure of lizard populations, but harvests of V. salvator in Malaysia are likely to be sustainable because a significant proportion of the population is not exploited. Implications. Ongoing monitoring is required to continually reassess harvest sustainability. For this purpose, relatively simple population approaches, such as line-trapping transects to elucidate relative abundances, can provide important data on the makeup of hunted populations of water monitors more cost-effectively than can mark–recapture studies for assessments of sustainable use of these economically important lizards.
Explorer The pectic disaccharides lepidimoic acid and-d-xylopyranosyl-( 13 )-d-galacturonic acid occur in cress-seed exudate but lack allelochemical activity

•Background and aims Cress-seed (Lepidium sativum) exudate exerts an allelochemical effect, promoting excessive hypocotyl elongation and inhibiting root growth in neighbouring Amaranthus caudatus seedlings. We investigated acidic disaccharides present in cress-seed exudate, testing the proposal that the allelochemical is an oligosaccharin — lepidimoic acid (LMA; 4-deoxy--L-threo-hex-4-enopyranuronosyl-
Concurrent hepatitis B and C virus infection: Is hepatitis C virus stronger?

showing HCV suppression by HBV. The reasons of this discrepancy have not been addressed. It is worth noting that studies with different conclusions have included different study populations. Studies comparing patients with chronic HBV infection alone versus those with concurrent HCV infection invariably showed a suppressive effect of HCV over HBV. In contrast, studies comparing patients with chronic HCV infection alone versus patients with concurrent HBV infection invariably showed the contrary. It appears that such a difference in study design or population may be one of the reasons responsible for the contradictory conclusions. Nevertheless, these contradictory results derived from the use of a different study design may also suggest that either HBV or HCV may dominant over the other.This notion is supported by longitudinal studies showing alternating dominance in replication of one or the other virus. The chronologic sequence of hepatitis virus infection may also influence the interaction between HBV and HCV. Given the finding that acute non-A, non-B virus (HCV) superinfection suppresses pre-existing chronic HBV infection in chimpanzees, it is reasonable to suspect that the newcomer may have an advantage to suppress the pre-existing virus in patients with HBV/HCV dual infection. The impact of a newcomer on the pre-existing virus has been best demonstrated by the de novo acute HCV superinfection in a patient with pre-existing chronic HBV infection, and de novo acute HBV superinfection in several patients with preexisting chronic HCV infection. As chronic HBV infection in endemic areas such as Taiwan and Hong Kong are usually acquired perinatally or at early infancy, it is very likely that patients with concurrent HBV and HCV infection in such areas have had chronic HBV infection before they were superinfected with HCV. The reverse may be true in other countries, including Japan. Perhaps this can explain why longituSee article on page 636
Reexamination of the dorsal root projection to the spinal dorsal horn including observations on the differential termination of coarse and fine fibers

Primary afferent fibers in the lumbar, sacral, and caudal spinal segments of several mammals (rat, cat, monkey) were stained by applying horseradish peroxidase to the proximal part of cut dorsal rootlets and reacting the tissue histochemically after several hours of survival. The stained fibers' pattern of termination in the dorsal horn was similar in all three species, with many bouton‐like enlargements in the ipsilateral marginal zone, substantia gelatinosa, and nucleus proprius, as well as a few projections at each level to the dorsal commissure and contralaterally to the ventral border of the nucleus proprius. Partial lesions of dorsal rootlets in monkey revealed that the thin fibers comprising the lateral division end principally in the marginal zone and substantia gelatinosa, while the thick fibers of the medial division terminate in the nucleus proprius and deeper regions, contributing little to the substantia gelatinosa and marginal zone. On the basis of the termination patterns observed for whole and partly sectioned rootlets, the superficial dorsal horn can be divided into at least four regions. (1) The marginal zone (lamina I of cat) appears to receive terminations from intermediate (smaller myelinated) fibers; (2) the outer substantia gelatinosa (outer lamina II) receives many terminations from the very finest afferent fibers; (3) the inner substantia gelatinosa (inner lamina II) receives endings from some of the finest fibers and also from intermediate (smaller myelinated) fibers; and (4) the superficial part of the nucleus proprius (lamina III) receives endings from intermediate and large diameter dorsal root fibers.
The first Gulf War and pre‐emptive therapy for virology

The news media has been full of the 25th anniversary of the first Gulf War ‘Desert Storm’, but none of them has mentioned the link with virology [1–3]. In 1991, Dr Bob Rubin was asked to write an editorial to accompany an article that had been accepted in The New England Journal of Medicine. The investigators were attempting to control CMV pneumonitis following allogeneic stem cell transplantation [4]. Typically, CMV pneumonitis occurred in the second month post-transplant once a patient’s new marrow had engrafted. CMV pneumonitis was known to have a high mortality, and the diagnosis could only be made by lung biopsy [5]. Although this technique was invasive, it did allow histological sections to reveal the underlying pathological processes. Lymphocytes were seen infiltrating the lung parenchyma and increasing the distance that oxygen had to diffuse after leaving respiratory cells and before reaching the endothelial cells of blood vessels. This diffusion path is normally short because the blood vessels of the lung are in close approximation to alveoli. Patients typically succumbed from hypoxia, but without suffering damage to the epithelium of their respiratory tract. This pattern of pathogenesis is consistent with immunopathology rather than virus-induced lysis of cells, and although controversial, it remains likely that CMV pneumonitis has an immunopathological component [6]. At that time, ganciclovir was becoming available. This drug potently inhibited the replication of CMV in vitro but was too toxic to the newly engrafted marrow to be given prophylactically to bone marrow transplant patients and had little apparent effect on established cases of CMV pneumonitis [5]. The investigators reasoned that a better outcome might be achieved if they gave the drug to patients who had evidence of active CMV infection before full-blown disease was evident. They chose to sample the lungs, using
Preparation of an epithelium-free mammary fat pad and subsequent mammogenesis in ewes.

The objective of this study was to develop a surgical procedure for the preparation of an epithelium-free mammary fat pad (cleared mammary fat pad; CFP) in ewes. At 7 to 10 d of age, ewe lambs (n = 43, mean BW 9.2 +/- .2 kg at 14 d) were sedated and one mammary gland was locally anesthetized. An incision circumscribing the base of the teat was made and blunt dissection was performed through the extraneous mammary fat pad tissue to enable the parenchyma and teat to be wholly removed. Failure to completely remove the epithelium enabled it to regenerate and grow into the mammary fat pad. Mean diameter of the parenchymal rudiment at 7 to 10 d of age was 8.9 +/- . 5 mm (range of 5 to 16 mm). The excision site was closed with wound clips and recovered lambs returned to their dams. The contralateral mammary gland remained intact, allowing it to undergo normal development. Live weight gain was unaffected by this procedure. Ewes were subsequently slaughtered in groups at various stages of prepuberty, puberty, gestation, and lactation. Of 39 operated glands recovered, only one demonstrated epithelial outgrowth within the CFP. Parenchyma within the contralateral, intact gland underwent phases of rapid growth in prepuberty, puberty, and late gestation and was capable of milk synthesis after steroid induction or parturition. Change in weight of the CFP paralleled that of the intact mammary gland to 100 d of pregnancy. Sham CFP surgery was performed on four additional ewes wherein the parenchyma was completely excised and immediately replaced. Sham-operated epithelium populated the mammary fat pad and synthesized milk that could be expressed from the teat. A CFP in sheep will be a useful model for future investigations into the local growth regulatory mechanisms associated with ruminant mammogenesis.