Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
MicroRNA-200 Is Induced by Thioredoxin-interacting Protein and Regulates Zeb1 Protein Signaling and Beta Cell Apoptosis*

Background: Beta cell apoptosis is a key factor in diabetes, but the mechanisms are not well understood. Results: Beta cell miR-200 is induced by thioredoxin-interacting protein (TXNIP) and diabetes, directly targets Zeb1, up-regulates E-cadherin, and promotes apoptosis. Conclusion: This novel TXNIP/miR-200/Zeb1/E-cadherin signaling pathway links miR-200 to beta cell apoptosis, control of epithelial-mesenchymal transition, and diabetes. Significance: The results provide new insight into microRNA biology and the regulation of beta cell apoptosis. Small noncoding microRNAs have emerged as important regulators of cellular processes, but their role in pancreatic beta cells has only started to be elucidated. Loss of pancreatic beta cells is a key factor in the pathogenesis of diabetes, and we have demonstrated that beta cell expression of thioredoxin-interacting protein (TXNIP) is increased in diabetes and causes beta cell apoptosis, whereas TXNIP deficiency is protective against diabetes. Recently, we found that TXNIP also impairs beta cell function by inducing microRNA (miR)-204. Interestingly, using INS-1 beta cells and primary islets, we have now discovered that expression of another microRNA, miR-200, is induced by TXNIP and by diabetes. Furthermore, we found that miR-200 targeted and decreased Zeb1 (zinc finger E-box-binding homeobox 1) and promoted beta cell apoptosis as measured by cleaved caspase-3 levels, Bax/Bcl2 ratio, and TUNEL. In addition, Zeb1 knockdown mimicked the miR-200 effects on beta cell apoptosis, suggesting that Zeb1 plays an important role in mediating miR-200 effects. Moreover, miR-200 increased beta cell expression of the epithelial marker E-cadherin, consistent with inhibition of epithelial-mesenchymal transition, a process thought to be involved in beta cell expansion. Thus, we have identified a novel TXNIP/miR-200/Zeb1/E-cadherin signaling pathway that, for the first time, links miR-200 to beta cell apoptosis and diabetes and also beta cell TXNIP to epithelial-mesenchymal transition. In addition, our results shed new light on the regulation and function of miR-200 in beta cells and show that TXNIP-induced microRNAs control various processes of beta cell biology.
Global Regulation and Institutional Change in European Governance

The literature on institutional innovation in European governance has been dominated by an inward-looking focus on the European integration process. However, in the context of a highly integrated and interdependent world, it is not possible to understand the evolution of European governance without taking into account developments in the international institutional environment. This article aims to contribute to the study of the interaction between global and European modes of governance by examining the impact of EU's engagement with the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB), and its predecessor the International Accounting Standards Committee (IASC) on the institutions of European accounting regulation. Following an analysis of the politics of international accounting harmonisation, it is demonstrated that EU's decisions to adopt the standards produced by the IASB, and to establish a new, differentiated European accounting regulatory mechanism, were driven by its desire to bolster European influence in the context of the IASC/IASB.
Selected Fertility Indices of Topsoil Impacted By Early Stage Erosion in Four Local Government Areas of Abia State Nigeria

The study evaluated the effect of rill erosion on soil fertility in Isuikwuato, Ohafia, Ukwa East and Ikwuano LGAs in Abia state, Nigeria. In each location, five composite topsoil samples of 0 – 20 cm depth were collected from sites which exhibited surface erosion and compared with non eroded soils of the same location. Soil fertility indices were significantly reduced in eroded soils, with mean values of organic carbon at 3.3% in non eroded areas, and only 1.9% in eroded soils. Nitrogen was also significantly lower in eroded soils (0.06% mean) than in non eroded soils (0.07%). Sodium Adsorption Ratio was significantly higher in eroded soils than non- eroded sites across all four locations (8.36 and 6.17 respectively), although salt concentrations were below salinity levels. There was no significant differences in pH, P, K, Ca, exchangeable acidity and effective cation exchange capacity (ECEC) due to rill erosion, even though the values were lower in eroded soils.
Mechanism of escape of endogenous murine leukemia virus emv-14 from recognition by anti-AKR/Gross virus cytolytic T lymphocytes

It was previously shown that spleen cells from endogenous ecotropic murine leukemia virus emv-14+ AKXL-5 mice fail to stimulate an anti-AKR/Gross virus cytolytic T-lymphocyte (CTL) response in a mixed lymphocyte culture with primed C57BL/6 responder spleen cells, whereas spleen cells from AKXL strains carrying the very similar emv-11 provirus do stimulate a response (Green and Graziano, Immunogenetics 23:106-110, 1986). We wished to determine whether the lack of response with AKXL-5 spleen cells was at the level of recognition between effector cell and target cell and whether the relevant mutation was within the emv-14 provirus. It is shown here that EMV-negative SC-1 fibroblast cells transfected with the major histocompatibility complex class I Kb gene and infected with virus isolated from the AKXL-5 strain (SC.Kb/5 cells) were not lysed by H-2b-restricted anti-AKR/Gross virus CTL. SC.Kb cells infected with virus isolated from emv-11+ strains, however, were efficiently lysed by anti-AKR/Gross virus CTL, indicating that there is nothing intrinsic to EMV-infected SC.Kb cells that would prevent them from being recognized and lysed efficiently by anti-AKR/Gross virus CTL. Analysis of virus expression for the infected SC.Kb cells by XC plaque assay and by flow cytometry indicated that emv-14 virus expression for SC.Kb/5 cells was not significantly different from that for emv-11-containing SC.Kb/9 or SC.Kb/21 cells. These data show that the mutation responsible for the lack of CTL recognition and lysis is at the level of recognition between target cell and effector cell. Furthermore, these data strongly suggest that the mutation is within the emv-14 genome. Flow cytometry experiments with monoclonal antibodies against a number of viral determinants indicated that there was no gross mutation detectable in the viral determinants analyzed. The data suggest that the relevant mutation may be a point mutation or a small insertion or deletion within a coding sequence that is critical for CTL recognition.
Brownian Dynamic Simulation to Predict the Stock Market Price

Stock Prices have been modeled using a variety of techniques such as neural networks, simple regression based models and so on with limited accuracy. We attempt to use Random Walk method to model movements of stock prices with modifications to account for market sentiment. A simulator has been developed as part of the work to experiment with actual NASDAQ100 stock data and check how the actual stock values compare with the predictions. In cases of short and medium term prediction (1-3 months), the predicted prices are close to the actual values, while for longer term (1 year), the predictions begin to diverge. The Random Walk method has been compared with linear regression, average and last known value across four periods and has that the Random Walk method is no better that the conventional methods as at 95% confidence there is no significant difference between the conventional methods and Random Walk model.
The state of things

For the global economy, a recovery in activity commenced shortly thereafter. It has turned out, contrary to widely held expectations two years ago, to be quite a robust one overall. Real GDP for the world is estimated by the IMF to have grown by 5 per cent in 2010, well above the medium-term trend of a touch under 4 per cent. As of the most recent published forecasts, the IMF expects the world economy to grow by almost 41⁄2 per cent this year – still above trend.
An Adaptive Sampling Based Parallel Volume Rendering Algorithm

In this paper, a parallel ray-casting volume rendering algorithm based on adaptive sampling is presented for visualizing TB-scale time-varying scientific data. The algorithm samples a data field adaptively according to its inner variation, and thus sets sampling points only in important positions. In order to integrate adaptive sampling into the parallel rendering framework, an efficient method is proposed to handle the resulting unstructured sampling data. The experiments demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can be used to effectively render inner data features in high quality.
Three Distinct Blue-Green Color Pathways in a Mammalian Retina

In mammalian retinae, the first steps in the process of discrimination of color are mediated by color-opponent neurons that respond with opposite polarity to signals from short (S, blue) and longer wavelength (M, green or L, red) cones. Primates also contain a second system that is different from M and L cones. Although pathways responding to the onset of S-cone stimulation (S-ON) are well known, the existence of bipolar cells and retinal ganglion cells that respond to the offset of S-cone stimulation (S-OFF) has been controversial. We have recorded from and stained three different types of S/M color-opponent ganglion cells in the rabbit retina that are distinguished by the polarity of their responses to S-cone stimulation, the stratification pattern of their dendrites, and the distinct mechanisms underlying their color-opponent responses. We describe an S-ON and an S-OFF pathway formed by amacrine cells inverting the S-ON signal. Most importantly, we also provide both anatomical and physiological evidence for a direct S-OFF pathway dependent on an S-OFF cone bipolar cell. The results indicate a greater diversity of pathways for processing of signals from S-cones than previously suspected.
Categorical signals in a single-trial neuron activity of the inferotemporal cortex

We developed an algorithm that decodes categorical signals from the single-trial activity of a neuronal population in the monkey inferotemporal cortex. We defined a global category (i.e. human faces vs. monkey faces vs. shape) and fine categories (i.e. human identity, monkey expression, and shape form) from the single-trial activity. The accuracy of estimation for the trials was roughly 100% for the global category and 88.1% for the fine categories. The accuracy of stimulus identification for the trials was 70.4%. These results suggest that signals concerning global and fine categories as well as object identification can be decoded using the single-trial activity of a neuronal population in the inferotemporal cortex.
Does Preoperative Paresis Influence Intraoperative Monitoring of the Motor Cortex?

Summary Intraoperative monitoring of motor function by means of motor evoked potentials (MEPs) is a new method. The current study examines the influence of preoperative paresis on the feasibility and reliability of this method. Intraoperative monitoring of MEPs was performed in 58 patients during surgery in the central region. The patients were divided into three groups according to their preoperative strength (group I, muscle strength less than or equal to grade 4 according to the British Medical Research Council grading system [n = 17]; group II, normal strength (n = 36); and group III, muscle strength less than grade 5 but not worse than grade 4 [n = 5]). The motor cortex was stimulated directly with a high-frequency monopolar anodal train. In groups II and III, MEPs were elicited in all patients on cortical stimulation, whereas in group I a response was obtained in only 88% of patients. The MEP parameters in all groups had a broad interindividual range of variation. A correlation between individual intraoperative potential changes and surgical maneuvers was observed in seven patients in group II and in four patients in group I. No MEP changes were recorded in group III. Irreversible MEP changes (groups I and II) resulted in postoperative clinical deterioration. No postoperative deterioration of motor function was observed in patients with reversible MEP changes. Preoperative paresis reduces the feasibility of the method; however, it has no influence on the intraoperative pattern and reaction of the MEPs.
Coalitional Game Theory for Distributed Cooperation in Next Generation Wireless Networks

Next generation wireless networks are bound to go beyond the classical point-to-point or point-to-multipoint communication paradigms of traditional networks such as cellular networks. For instance, next generation networks will witness a highly complex and dynamic environment whereby the nodes can interact and cooperate for improving their performance. In this context, cooperation has emerged as a novel communication paradigm that can yield tremendous performance gains from the physical layer all the way up to the application layer. Consequently, a significant amount of research efforts has been dedicated to studying cooperation in wireless networks. The main research in this area has focused on examining the performance gains that cooperation can entail, in different scenarios. For example, on one hand, it was demonstrated that, by cooperating, a group of single-antenna nodes can exploit the highly acclaimed performance gains of multiple-input-multipleoutput (MIMO) systems in terms of throughput and bit error rate. On the other hand, it has been shown that, by forwarding each others packets, the wireless nodes can increase their throughput and improve the connectivity of the network. However, most of the cooperative systems proposed so far are based on ideal cooperation, e.g., with no cost, and are mostly concerned with studying the benefits from cooperation, while giving little attention to the impact of cooperation on the network’s structure and the users’ behavior. Hence, there is a need for well-designed cooperative algorithms that can reap the numerous gains from cooperation while taking into account the costs for cooperation as well as its impact on the overall network structure and dynamics. Designing such efficient cooperation algorithms faces numerous challenges. First, cooperation entails various costs, such as power, that can limit its benefits or even impair the users’ performance. Second, wireless network users tend to be selfish in nature. Therefore, deriving a fair and practical cooperation algorithm where the decision to cooperate does not degrade the performance of any of the cooperating users is a challenging
Linking Investment and Fiscal Policies

We assess the relevance of budgetary components for private and public investment using data for a panel of 95 countries for the period 1970-2008, and accounting for the usually encountered econometric pitfalls. Our results show a positive effect attributed to total government expenditures and to public investment in fostering private investment, and negative effects of government expenditure on wages and government consumption spending on private investment. Interest payments and subsidies have a negative effect on both types of investment (particularly in the emerging economies sub-group). Social security spending has a negative effect on private investment for the full and OECD samples, whereas government health spending has a positive and significant impact on private investment.
Phosphatidylinositol 3′-Kinase/AKT Signaling Is Activated in Medulloblastoma Cell Proliferation and Is Associated with Reduced Expression of PTEN

Purpose: Medulloblastomas represent the most frequent malignant brain tumors of childhood. They are supposed to originate from cerebellar neural precursor cells. Recently, it has been shown that Sonic Hedgehog–induced formation of medulloblastoma in an animal model is significantly enhanced by activation of the phosphatidylinositol 3′-kinase (PI3K) signaling pathway. Experimental Design: To examine a role for PI3K/AKT signaling in the molecular pathogenesis of human medulloblastoma, we did an immunohistochemical study of the expression of Ser473-phosphorylated (p)-AKT protein in 22 medulloblastoma samples: All samples displayed p-AKT expression. To investigate if an activated PI3K/AKT pathway is required for medulloblastoma cell growth, we treated five human medulloblastoma cell lines with increasing concentrations of the PI3K inhibitor LY294002 and analyzed cellular proliferation and apoptosis. The antiproliferative effect could be antagonized by overexpressing constitutively active AKT. As the activation of PI3K/AKT signaling may be associated with alterations of the PTEN gene located at 10q23.3, a chromosomal region subject to frequent allelic losses in medulloblastoma, we screened PTEN for mutations and mRNA expression. Results: Proliferation of all of the medulloblastoma cell lines was dependent on PI3K/AKT signaling, whereas apoptosis was not prominently affected. Allelic loss was detected in 16% of the cases. One medulloblastoma cell line was found to carry a truncating mutation in the PTEN coding sequence. Even more important, PTEN mRNA and protein levels were found to be significantly lower in medulloblastomas compared with normal cerebellar tissue of different developmental stages. Reduction of PTEN expression was found to be associated with PTEN promoter hypermethylation in 50% of the tumor samples. Conclusions: We conclude that activation of the PI3K/AKT pathway constitutes an important step in the molecular pathogenesis of medulloblastoma and that dysregulation of PTEN may play a significant role in this context.
Anti‐myeloperoxidase antibodies in systemic vasculitis

Anti‐neutrophil cytoplasmic antibodies (ANCA) are important diagnostic markers in vasculitic disorders. In a study of 164 patients with various clinical syndromes associated with vasculitis, 60 were found to have the antibody, as detected by indirect immunofluorescence; 23 had the so‐called perinuclear antibody pattern, and of these, 15 had antibodies to neutrophil myeloperoxidase in an ELISA. These patients had multi‐system involvement, and 14 of the 15 had histological evidence of small‐vessel arteritis in the kidneys. In preliminary experiments, the isolated IgG from one patient was shown to inhibit luminol‐dependent chemiluminescence of fluid phase myeloperoxidase.
Determining the Parking Fee Using the Contingent Valuation Methodology

Implementing new parking facilities amounts to an urban sustainable planning and development problem. A significant part of this problem is the estimation of the appropriate fee prior the new parking services go in operation. This paper describes the framework for estimating the value drivers place on parking facilities and uses a Greek tourist town as an illustrative case study. Alternative fee scenarios for establishing new parking facilities are formulated using the contingent valuation method with a double bound dichotomous choice question format for potential user’s willingness to pay (WTP) for these new services. Moreover, the WTP can be adopted as an effective tool to determine the parking fee in cases where demand-price curve and value of time are unknown. This approach helps also pinpoint and evaluate variables that influence the decision of potential users to pay for a parking fee. It relates WTP with the users’ socioeconomic characteristics, urban attitudes, the residence area, and the opinion .
Enrichment and characterization of ferritin for nanomaterial applications

Ferritin is a ubiquitous iron storage protein utilized as a nanomaterial for labeling biomolecules and nanoparticle construction. Commercially available preparations of horse spleen ferritin, widely used as a starting material, contain a distribution of ferritins with different iron loads. We describe a detailed approach to the enrichment of differentially loaded ferritin molecules by common biophysical techniques such as size exclusion chromatography and preparative ultracentrifugation, and characterize these preparations by dynamic light scattering, and analytical ultracentrifugation. We demonstrate a combination of methods to standardize an approach for determining the chemical load of nearly any particle, including nanoparticles and metal colloids. Purification and characterization of iron content in monodisperse ferritin species is particularly critical for several applications in nanomaterial science.
VAD-measure-embedded decoder with online model adaptation

We previously proposed a decoding method for automatic speech recognition utilizing hypothesis scores weighted by voice activity detection (VAD)-measures. This method uses two Gaussian mixture models (GMMs) to obtain confidence measures: one for speech, the other for non-speech. To achieve good search performance, we need to adapt the GMMs properly for input utterances and environmental noise. We describe a new unsupervised on-line GMM adaptation method based on MAP estimation. The robustness of our method is further improved by weighting updating parameters of GMMs according to the confidence measure for the adaptation data. We also describe an approach to accelerate the adaptation by caching statistical values to adapt GMMs. Experimental results on Drivers’ Japanese Speech Corpus in a Car Environment (DJSC) show that the adaptation with decoding method significantly improves the word accuracy from 54.8% to 59.6%. Moreover, the weighting method improves the robustness of the unsupervised adaptation, and the cache method greatly accelerates the decoding process. Consequently, our adaptive decoding method significantly improves the word accuracy in a noisy environment with only a minor increase in the computational cost. Index Terms: speech recognition, voice activity detection, Gaussian mixture model adaptation
Malignant insulinoma: Report of 6 patients and literature review.

OBJECTIVE Patients with malignant insulinoma always present with symptoms of severe hypoglycemia and have poor life expectancy. In addition, inoperable metastatic malignant insulinomas are very difficult to manage. The aim of this report is to present our successful experiences in diagnosis and treatment of this disease in 6 patients. PATIENTS/METHODS Six patients (male 2, female 4) with malignant insulinomas were admitted into our hospital. Their clinical histories, including clinical presentations, endocrine evaluations, radiological images, pathological examination and treatments, were reviewed. RESULTS The diagnosis of malignant insulinoma combined with liver metastases was confirmed in all patients by endocrine evaluation and radiological images. Patients 1-3 underwent surgical management. The primary and metastasized tumors were completely resected. After successful surgery, no hypoglycemia recurred. Patients 4-6 did not undergo surgery because of systemic disease and poor health. Instead, they were administrated with diazoxide 50 mg Three Times a Day (TID), with final doses up to 200-300 mg TID. These 3 patients had good responses to diazoxide administration. After treatment, the frequency and severity of hypoglycemia were improved significantly. All 6 patients had better life quality than previously expected. CONCLUSION Combination of surgical and medical approaches can improve life quality and prolong survival of patients with malignant insulinomas.