Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Specificity of 130‐kDa Leech Sensory Afferent Proteins Is Encoded by Their Carbohydrate Epitopes

Abstract: From early development through adulthood in the leech, sensory afferents, glial cells, and connective tissue express different epitopes located on a group of 130‐kDa glycoproteins. The sensory epitope [reactive with monoclonal antibody (mAb) Lan3–2] is shared by the peripheral sensory afferents of different sensory modalities. In contrast, three other immunocytochemically distinct epitopes (reactive with mAbs Laz2–369, Laz7–79, and Laz6–212) differentiate these sensory afferents according to their sensory modalities. The glial epitope (mAb Laz6–297) is expressed on all macroglial processes, and the connective tissue epitope (mAb Laz9–84) is located on connective tissue surrounding the CNS. as well as in the peripheral tissues. The hydrophilic‐hydrophobic nature of the 130‐kDa sensory afferent and glial proteins was determined by phase separation with Triton X‐114 and hypoosmotic extraction. They behave as peripheral membrane proteins. Deglycosylation of 130‐kDa glycoproteins with N‐Glycanase or preincubation of their respective mAbs with α‐methylmannoside showed that the sensory epitope contains mannose, whereas the modality epitopes are of an undefined carbohydrate character. Immunoprecipitation and a peptide mapping experiment confirmed the existence of four distinct sensory afferent epitopes. Previous studies provided evidence that the mannose‐containing Lan3–2 epitope mediates normal sensory afferent growth in the synaptic neuropile. We, therefore, postulate that the carbohydrate epitopes on sensory afferent glycoproteins participate in synapse formation.
NG2‐positive cells generate A2B5‐positive oligodendrocyte precursor cells

Cellular specification of the oligodendrocyte lineage occurs through a series of stages identified by expression of distinct biochemical characteristics. The best characterized oligodendrocyte progenitor cell (OPC) in vitro is the bipotential O2‐A progenitor, identified by labeling with monoclonal antibody A2B5, which proliferates predominantly in response to platelet derived growth factor (PDGF). The cellular ancestors of O2‐A progenitor cells are currently unclear. In vivo OPCs can be identified by expression of the cell surface markers NG2 (a sulfated proteoglycan) and platelet derived growth factor receptor αR). Substantial evidence supports the generation of oligodendrocytes from NG2+, PDGFαR+ cells both in vivo and in vitro. The developmental relationship between NG2+ cells and A2B5− positive cells is unknown and it is unclear whether they represent identical, partially overlapping or nonoverlapping populations of cells. Here we show that in cultures of developing brain NG2+ and A2B5+ cells arise from overlapping cell populations. NG2+ cells appear prior to the expression of A2B5+ cells and generate A2B5+ cells. We propose that during development NG2+/A2B5− cells (pre‐OPCs) represent the direct ancestor to A2B5+ O2A progenitor cells (OPCs). © 2007 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Early intervention in literacy : a study of implementation in six Scottish primary schools

OF THESIS This investigation studied a cluster of six primary schools during a period when they undertook a classroom-based early intervention initiative aimed at raising literacy standards. The schools were situated in, or close to, an urban area of multi-disadvantage. The aim was to discover more about the impact of early intervention in literacy for socio-economically disadvantaged children; the process of school involvement in the intervention and participants' experiences and perceptions of any change processes that took place. A mixed-method research design was employed where both quantitative and qualitative methodologies were used. The study was longitudinal in design. The sample numbered 665 children and 57 adult participants in total. The intervention had the most positive impact for children tested on entry to Primary 2. During their first year at school the more socio-economically advantaged children were more likely than their less advantaged peers to have benefited from involvement in the intervention. It is possible that children needed to have reached a certain point in the continuum of literacy learning to benefit. It is likely that, this finding coupled with the differential on entry to school in terms of their baseline scores has important implications for the nature of literacy intervention at the Primary 1 stage. Small group and individual approaches facilitated by the recruitment of teams of personnel working within the classroom setting, an approach initiated by schools in this study, may be a strategy worthy of development and further research. The metacognitive process of 'thinking about thinking' (Jacob and Paris, 1987) was apparent in children's accounts. A range of evidence suggests that the children had a developing understanding of the purpose of their literacy instruction and the benefits of learning to read and write: a finding that seems to contradict the conclusions of earlier studies. There was evidence to suggest that aspects of multi-level change had taken place during the intervention. Some changes were planned for as part of the intervention, while others were unexpected, emerging as the dynamic of the intervention got underway. It seems that collaboration between a cluster of schools and external agents may be a particularly powerful combination that strengthens and supports individual headteacher's capacity for initiating and implementing change. Schools had varied potential for this type of development work and there was an indication that this was positively linked to experiencing a 'cycle of success'. Worthy of future research is a model of intervention that involves cluster activity and also acknowledges contextual differences amongst schools by offering differentiated approaches and teacher
The Impact of Workers’ Remittances on Economic Growth: Panel Data Approach for Selected Country Group

Recent decade has witnessed the growing importance of remittances as a source of foreign income for many developing countries. Thus, as the value of remittances around the world increases, many researchers attempt to analyze the remittances’ effects on economic performance. Yet, real effect of remittances on economic growth rate is still controversial issue in the literature. Therefore, main objective of this study is to analyze the linkage between economic growth rates and remittance inflows into eight largest recipient countries of the global remittances by employing panel data analysis for the period 1990-2015. Our findings reveal that there is no significant relationship between remittances and growth. Yet, the study has empirically proved that growth is positively associated with gross capital formations and GDP per capita while it is negatively related with inflation and openness index.
Contribution of both olfactory and systemic pathways for brain targeting of nimodipine-loaded lipo-pluronics micelles: in vitro characterization and in vivo biodistribution study after intranasal and intravenous delivery

Abstract Nimodipine (NM) is the only FDA-approved drug for treating subarachnoid hemorrhage induced vasospasm. NM has poor oral bioavailability (5–13%) due to its low aqueous solubility, and extensive first pass metabolism. The objective of this study is to develop radiolabeled NM-loaded LPM and to test its ability prolong its circulation time, reduce its frequency of administration and eventually target it to the brain tissue. NM was radiolabeled with 99mTc by direct labeling method using sodium dithionite. Different reaction conditions that affect the radiolabeling yield were studied. The in vivo pharmacokinetic behavior of the optimum NM-loaded LPM formulation in blood, heart, and brain tissue was compared with NM solution, after intravenous and intranasal administration. Results show that the radioactivity percentage (%ID/g) in the heart of mice following administration of 99mTc-NM loaded LPM were lower compared with that following administration of 99mTc-NM solution, which is greatly beneficial to minimize the cardiovascular side effects. Results also show that the %ID/g in the blood, and brain following intravenous administration of 99mTc-NM-loaded LPM were higher at all sampling intervals compared with that following intravenous administration of 99mTc-NM solution. This would be greatly beneficial for the treatment of neurovascular diseases. The drug-targeting efficiency of NM to the brain after intranasal administration was calculated to be 1872.82%. The significant increase in drug solubility, enhanced drug absorption and the long circulation time of the NM-loaded LPM could be promising to improve nasal and parenteral delivery of NM.
Optimization of feature subset using HABC for automatic speaker verification

Automatic Speaker Verification is the authentication of a claimed identity based on characteristics of voice. A speaker verification system compares a person's voice with a speaker model or stored voiceprint captured during enrollment as well as an imposter model of different voices, genders and phone types. The system then assigns a confidence score and then makes a decision whether to let the person proceed, to ask for additional voice samples or to refuse entry. Feature subset selection is one of the most concerned processes in the overall classification process of a particular problem. It was also named as dimensionality reduction, attribute subset selection and variable subset selection. For automatic speaker verification (ASV), feature subset selection is one of the first modules. The objective of the paper is to select a most relevant subset of features for error-free optimized classification in the speech domain. In this paper a novel method for speaker verification is proposed using Hybrid Ant Bee Colony optimization to increase the verification rate. Equal Error Rate (EER) is the standard measure which evaluates the projected procedure. Speaker verification system's accuracy rates surpassed the results of traditional systems after applying proposed optimization algorithm; the optimized feature subset was 85% with an average accuracy rate of 95.27%.
Hydroxyl radical formation in human gastric juice

The hydroxyl radical is the most potent free radical derived from oxygen, and has been implicated in damage caused to the gastroduodenal mucosa. The ability of human gastric juice to generate hydroxyl radicals has been investigated in 54 adults with endoscopically normal gastroduodenal mucosa and in 39 patients with chronic duodenal ulcer. Hydroxyl radical production was measured by the formation of formaldehyde from dimethylsulfoxide. Unlike other body fluids, this reaction could proceed without the extraneous addition of catalysts such as hydrogen peroxide (H2O2), ascorbate and iron. Measurement of H2O2, iron and ascorbate showed that these catalysts are already present in the gastric juice. There was no significant difference in the concentration of these components in gastric juice between normal subjects and patients with duodenal ulcer, except that H2O2 levels were slightly higher in duodenal ulcer patients. Although generation of free radicals has been investigated in other body fluids, this is the first reported case regarding the production of these active species in normal human gastric juice. Since hydroxyl production is not significantly enhanced in duodenal ulcer, we suggest that attention may be turned to mucosal antioxidant defences in this disease.
Impact of timing jitter on the performance of carrier amplitude and phase modulation

Carrier amplitude and phase modulation (CAP) is a highly spectral-efficient multilevel modulation scheme renowned for its implementation simplicity as it offers a low complexity approach to increase spectral efficiency and system throughput. These characteristics has seen CAP being implemented as an alternative to the well-known discrete multitone (DMT). However, the sensitivity of CAP to timing jitter is high due to its use of pulse shaping which eliminate the need for carrier modulation and carrier frequency recovery in its tranceiver architecture. In this paper, the impact of timing jitter on the performance of CAP technique is investigated. It is shown that with increasing timing jitter, the bit error rate (BER) performance of CAP-4 degrades and reaches an error floor when the timing jitter (τ) reaches 20% of the symbol duration, T. Although the timing jitter effect is observed to reduce with increasing roll-off factor, α, the resulting performance degradation increases with the data constellation size. With a 0.02T timing jitter, CAP with 64 data constellation points (CAP-64) and 0.15 roll-off factor reaches an error floor at a BER of 2 × 101. The results of this paper show that although CAP offer implementation simplicity, timing synchronization is a critical requirement in its receiver design.
Cys residues of the hepatitis B virus capsid protein are not essential for the assembly of viral core particles but can influence their stability

In the spherical capsid of hepatitis B virus (HBV), intermolecular disulfide bonds cross-link the approximately 180 p21.5 capsid protein subunits into a stable lattice. In this study, we used mutant capsid proteins to investigate the role that disulfide bonds and the four p21.5 Cys residues (positions 48, 61, 107, and 185) play in capsid assembly and/or stabilization. p21.5 Cys residues were either replaced by Ala or removed (Cys-185) by carboxyl-terminal truncation, creating Cys-minus mutants which were expressed in Xenopus oocytes via microinjected synthetic mRNAs. Fractionation of radiolabeled oocyte extracts on 10 to 60% sucrose gradients revealed that Cys-minus core proteins resolved into the nonparticulate and capsid forms seen for wild-type p21.5. On 5 to 30% sucrose gradients, nonparticulate Cys-minus core proteins sedimented as dimers of approximately 40 kDa. We conclude that Cys residues and disulfides are not required for the assembly of either HBV capsids or the dimers that provide the precursors for capsid assembly. Since assembly presumably demands an appropriate p21.5 tertiary structure, it is unlikely that Cys residues are required for proper p21.5 folding. However, Cys residues stabilize isolated p21.5 structures, as evidenced by the marked reduction in stability of Cys-minus dimers and capsids (i) in nonreducing sodium dodecyl sulfate-polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis and (ii) upon protease digestion. We discuss these results in the context of the HBV life cycle and the role of Cys residues in other proteins.
Paradoxical Role of DNA Methylation in Activation of FoxA2 Gene Expression during Endoderm Development*

Background: The transcription factor FoxA2 is a key mediator of endoderm development and pancreas gene expression. Results: DNA methylation is paradoxically associated with active expression of the FoxA2 gene. Conclusion: Developmental control genes such as FoxA2 may be regulated by a novel genetic mechanism. Significance: Clarification of this mechanism may provide a better understanding of how developmental pathways are activated. The transcription factor FoxA2 is a master regulator of endoderm development and pancreatic beta cell gene expression. To elucidate the mechanisms underlying the activation of the FoxA2 gene during differentiation, we have compared the epigenetic status of undifferentiated human embryonic stem cells (hESCs), hESC-derived early endoderm stage cells (CXCR4+ cells), and pancreatic islet cells. Unexpectedly, a CpG island in the promoter region of the FoxA2 gene displayed paradoxically high levels of DNA methylation in expressing tissues (CXCR4+, islets) and low levels in nonexpressing tissues. This CpG island region was found to repress reporter gene expression and bind the Polycomb group protein SUZ12 and the DNA methyltransferase (DNMT)3b preferentially in undifferentiated hESCs as compared with CXCR4+ or islets cells. Consistent with this, activation of FoxA2 gene expression, but not CXCR4 or SOX17, was strongly inhibited by 5-aza-2′-deoxycytidine and by knockdown of DNMT3b. We hypothesize that in nonexpressing tissues, the lack of DNA methylation allows the binding of DNA methyltransferases and repressing proteins, such as Polycomb group proteins; upon differentiation, DNMT activation leads to CpG island methylation, causing loss of repressor protein binding. These results suggest a novel and unexpected role for DNA methylation in the activation of FoxA2 gene expression during differentiation.
Cell‐Cell Interaction Mediated by Cadherin‐11 Directly Regulates the Differentiation of Mesenchymal Cells Into the Cells of the Osteo‐Lineage and the Chondro‐Lineage

We studied cadherin‐11 function in the differentiation of mesenchymal cells. Teratomas harboring the cadherin‐11 gene generated bone and cartilage preferentially. Cadherin‐11 transfectants of C2C12 cells and cadherin‐11 and/or N‐cadherin transfectants of L cells showed that cadherin‐11 together with N‐cadherin‐induced expression of ALP and FGF receptor 2. These results suggest that cadherin‐11 directly regulates the differentiation of mesenchymal cells into the cells of the osteo‐lineage and the chondro‐lineage in a different manner from N‐cadherin.
Optimal life-cycle profiles of fertility and labor supply.

A model of life cycle fertility is developed using the language and framework of optimal control theory. The chief characteristic of children that distinguishes them from other consumer durables is, in the language of the optimal growth theory, the "irreversibility of investment. " As the good does not depreciate in the ordinary sense, the stock must be monotonically nondecreasing over time. The optimal profile of fertility is, for this reason, characterized by the same type of "bang-bang" behavior found in many optimal growth problems. Yet, the fertility decision is complicated considerably by several other factors. Chief among these is the intrinsic relation to the labor-supply decision, for having children implies inevitable constraints on the mother's or father's time. Thus, optimal labor-supply decisions also must be considered. The model is developed in stages, proceeding from very simple to the more complex models. 1 section introduces the impact of fertility on the future demands for home time. It is shown that optimal fertility profiles follow turnpike paths similar to those in the growth-theory literature. A subsequent section introduces labor-supply and human-captial considerations. As the models become more complex, solutions become harder to derive and are often only outlined. The analysis provides some theoretical basis for expecting certain shapes of the life-cycle profiles of fertility, labor supply, and wages. Fertility profiles may be of 2 shapes--one beginning at a high rate, falling to a lower rate, then to zero; and one beginning at zero, rising to a moderate rate, then falling back down to zero. Labor supply profiles can be of a number of different shapes, but the impact of childbearing is to lower hours worked during the early childrearing period. As the children mature, hours worked rise (or at least fall more slowly) as home time responsibilities lessen, although the level to which they rise will probably be lower than before the 1st birth. Log-wage profiles rise during the period before the 1st birth, then either fall or rise more slowly during the early years of childbearing, and then rise again as the children mature. These shapes have been inferred from a control-theory model that is quite complex and which could use considerably more delineation than has been achieved here. Closed-form solutions to the model have not been obtained, nor have any formal comparative dynamics been performed. As the model stands it is too complex to be empirically implemented. Such implementation would be desirable.
Audiovisual Speech Integration Does Not Rely on the Motor System: Evidence from Articulatory Suppression, the McGurk Effect, and fMRI

Visual speech influences the perception of heard speech. A classic example of this is the McGurk effect, whereby an auditory /pa/ overlaid onto a visual /ka/ induces the fusion percept of /ta/. Recent behavioral and neuroimaging research has highlighted the importance of both articulatory representations and motor speech regions of the brain, particularly Broca's area, in audiovisual (AV) speech integration. Alternatively, AV speech integration may be accomplished by the sensory system through multisensory integration in the posterior STS. We assessed the claims regarding the involvement of the motor system in AV integration in two experiments: (i) examining the effect of articulatory suppression on the McGurk effect and (ii) determining if motor speech regions show an AV integration profile. The hypothesis regarding experiment (i) is that if the motor system plays a role in McGurk fusion, distracting the motor system through articulatory suppression should result in a reduction of McGurk fusion. The results of experiment (i) showed that articulatory suppression results in no such reduction, suggesting that the motor system is not responsible for the McGurk effect. The hypothesis of experiment (ii) was that if the brain activation to AV speech in motor regions (such as Broca's area) reflects AV integration, the profile of activity should reflect AV integration: AV > AO (auditory only) and AV > VO (visual only). The results of experiment (ii) demonstrate that motor speech regions do not show this integration profile, whereas the posterior STS does. Instead, activity in motor regions is task dependent. The combined results suggest that AV speech integration does not rely on the motor system.
A Novel Amino Acids Oral Supplementation in Hemodialysis Patients: a Pilot Study

Background: Protein malnutrition and lowering serum albumin is frequent in hemodialysis patients. A special amino acid formulation has recently been used with favorable effects in elderly people but no data exist in renal patients. Aim: To assess the effects of this novel amino acid formulation in stable hemodialysis patients with reduced albumin levels. Methods: Thirty stable hemodialysis patients with serum albumin levels <3.5 g/dL, normalized protein nitrogen appearance (nPNA) <1.1 g/kg/d, and body mass index (BMI) >20 kg/m2 were selected: 15 patients were randomized to oral amino acid supplementation (4 g thrice a day) for 3 months and 15 patients comparable for age, gender, and dialysis durations formed the control group. Biochemistry and bioimpedentiometry parameters were measured at baseline and at the end of treatment. Results: No difference was observed between study group and control group at baseline. At the end of the study period, no change occurred in the studied parameters in the control group, whereas increase in serum albumin (3.1 ± 0.3 vs. 3.6 ± 0.2 g/dL, p < 0.001) and in total proteins (5.7 ± 0.4 vs. 6.4 ±0.7 g/dL, p < 0.001) occurred in the study group. Hemoglobin rose from 10.7 ± 0.9 to 11.7 ± 0.8 g/dL (p < 0.05) at the same erythropoiesis-stimulating agent (ESA) dosage. C-Reactive protein (CRP) levels decreased in the study group (8.7 ± 7.3 vs. 3.8 ± 3.1 mg/L, p < 0.01). Increase of body weight and of equilibrated protein catabolic rate (ePCR) was observed in the study group. Conclusions: Oral amino acids supplementation was able to improve albumin and total protein in hypoalbuminemia hemodialysis patients. This effect was associated with reduction of CRP levels that is with lowering of pro-inflammatory status and anemia improvement.