Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Assessment of Interactions between Cisplatin and Two Histone Deacetylase Inhibitors in MCF7, T47D and MDA-MB-231 Human Breast Cancer Cell Lines – An Isobolographic Analysis

Histone deacetylase inhibitors (HDIs) are promising anticancer drugs, which inhibit proliferation of a wide variety of cancer cells including breast carcinoma cells. In the present study, we investigated the influence of valproic acid (VPA) and suberoylanilide hydroxamic acid (SAHA, vorinostat), alone or in combination with cisplatin (CDDP) on proliferation, induction of apoptosis and cell cycle progression in MCF7, T47D and MDA-MB-231 human breast carcinoma cell lines. The type of interaction between HDIs and CDDP was determined by an isobolographic analysis. The isobolographic analysis is a very precise and rigorous pharmacodynamic method, to determine the presence of synergism, addition or antagonism between different drugs with using variety of fixed dose ratios. Our experiments show that the combinations of CDDP with SAHA or VPA at a fixed-ratio of 1:1 exerted additive interaction in the viability of MCF7 cells, while in T47D cells there was a tendency to synergy. In contrast, sub-additive (antagonistic) interaction was observed for the combination of CDDP with VPA in MDA-MB-231 “triple-negative” (i.e. estrogen receptor negative, progesterone receptor negative, and HER-2 negative) human breast cancer cells, whereas combination of CDDP with SAHA in the same MDA-MB-231 cell line yielded additive interaction. Additionally, combined HDIs/CDDP treatment resulted in increase in apoptosis and cell cycle arrest in all tested breast cancer cell lines in comparison with a single therapy. In conclusion, the additive interaction of CDDP with SAHA or VPA suggests that HDIs could be combined with CDDP in order to optimize treatment regimen in some human breast cancers.
The design and implementation of a workflow analysis tool

Motivated by the use of scientific workflows as a user-oriented mechanism for building executable scientific data integration and analysis applications, this article introduces a framework and a set of associated methods for analysing the execution properties of scientific workflows. Our framework uses a number of formal modelling techniques to characterize the process and data behaviour of workflows and workflow components and to reason about their functional and execution properties. We use the framework to design the architecture of a customizable tool that can be used to analyse the key execution properties of scientific workflows at authoring stage. Our design is generic and can be applied to a wide variety of scientific workflow languages and systems, and is evaluated by building a prototype of the tool for the Discovery Net system. We demonstrate and discuss the utility of the framework and tool using workflows from a real-world medical informatics study.
Simian virus 40-permissive cell interactions: selection and characterization of spontaneously arising monkey cells that are resistant to simian virus 40 infection

A fraction of permissive cells survive simian virus 40 (SV40) infection. The frequency of such surviving cells depends only upon the concentration of infecting virus, both parental and progeny, to which the cells are exposed during the course of selection. Surviving clones, which can be freed of virus by cloning in the presence of SV40 antiserum, are indistinguishable from parental cells in their growth of characteristics and display no SV40 antigen; thus they are not transformed. Most surviving clones are less than 10% as susceptible as parental cells to SV40 infection; 5 to 10% are less than 1% as susceptible. None of these SV40-resistant clones is absolutely resistant to SV40 infection. Analysis of 16 independently arising resistant clones indicates that they all block SV40 infection at an early stage after adsorption and eclipse but before full uncoating. Viral mutants have been isolated that partially overcome the block to infection in these cells; these host range viruses plaque on resistant lines fivefold more efficiently than wild-type SV40 and have a characteristic plaque morphology. Fluctuation analysis indicates that resistant cells arise spontaneously during the growth of normally susceptible permissive cells. Thus, SV40-resistant cells are selected for, not induced by, SV40 infection.
Food Availability and Maternal Immunization Affect Transfer and Persistence of Maternal Antibodies in Nestling Pigeons

The ability of mothers to transfer antibodies (Abs) to their young and the temporal persistence of maternal Abs in offspring constitute important life-history traits that can impact the evolution of host-parasite interactions. Here, we examined the effects of food availability and parental immunization on the transfer and persistence of maternal antibodies in nestling pigeons (Columba livia). This species can transmit maternal Abs to offspring before hatching through the egg yolk and potentially after hatching through crop milk. However, the role of this postnatal substance in immunity remains elusive. We used a full cross-fostering design to disentangle the effects of food limitation and parental immunization both before and after hatching on the levels and persistence of maternal Abs in chicks. Parents were immunized via injection with keyhole limpet hemocyanin antigens. Using an immunoassay that specifically detected the IgY antibodies that are known to be transmitted via the yolk, we found that the levels of anti-KLH Abs in newly hatched chicks were positively correlated with the levels of anti-KLH Abs in the blood of their biological mothers. However, this correlation was not present between chicks and their foster parents, suggesting limited IgY transfer via crop milk to the chick’s bloodstream. Interestingly, biological mothers subjected to food limitation during egg laying transferred significantly fewer specific maternal Abs, which suggests that the transfer of antibodies might be costly for them. In addition, the persistence of maternal Abs in a chick’s bloodstream was not affected by food limitation or the foster parents’ anti-KLH Ab levels; it was only affected by the initial level of maternal anti-KLH Abs that were present in newly hatched chicks. These results suggest that the maternal transfer of Abs could be costly but that their persistence in an offspring’s bloodstream may not necessarily be affected by environmental conditions.
Outside-in monocular IR camera based HMD pose estimation via geometric optimization

Accurately tracking a Head Mounted Display (HMD) with a 6 degree of freedom is essential to achieve a comfortable and a nausea free experience in Virtual Reality. Existing commercial HMD systems using synchronized Infrared (IR) camera and blinking IR-LEDs can achieve highly accurate tracking. However, most of the off-the-shelf cameras do not support frame synchronization. In this paper, we propose a novel method for real time HMD pose estimation without using any camera synchronization or LED blinking. We extended over the state of the art pose estimation algorithm by introducing geometrically constrained optimization. In addition, we propose a novel system to increase robustness to the blurred IR-LEDs patterns appearing at high-velocity movements. The quantitative evaluations showed significant improvements in pose stability and accuracy over wide rotational movements as well as a decrease in runtime.
Vasoactive systems in L-NAME hypertension: the role of inducible nitric oxide synthase

Objectives The contribution of the renin–angiotensin system (RAS) and the sympathetic nervous system (SNS) to blood pressure (BP) maintenance was evaluated in rats with Nω-nitro-l-arginine methyl ester (L-NAME) hypertension. Furthermore, we studied the extent of nitric oxide (NO) synthesis inhibition and the participation of remaining NO in the counterbalance of pressor systems, with a special reference to inducible nitric oxide synthase (iNOS). Methods Wistar rats subjected to chronic L-NAME treatment (40 mg/kg per day for 4 weeks) were used. A consecutive blockade of RAS (captopril) and SNS (pentolinium) was followed by acute L-NAME injection. Dimethylguanidine or aminoguanidine were used to affect NO synthesis by iNOS. Results L-NAME hypertensive rats had borderline augmentation of depressor response to captopril injection, but their BP fall after pentolinium was considerably enhanced compared with controls. Residual BP (recorded after simultaneous blockade of the RAS and the SNS) was elevated by 20–40% in hypertensive rats. Pronounced inhibition of NO synthase activity (50% reduction in the aorta and myocardium) was detected in L-NAME hypertensive rats in which the BP rise elicited by acute L-NAME injection was considerably attenuated (by 60–80%). In contrast, acute administration of dimethylguanidine [mixed endothelial NO synthase (eNOS)/iNOS inhibitor] to hypertensive rats induced a major BP rise similar to that caused by L-NAME injection in controls. Aminoguanidine (a selective iNOS inhibitor) caused a substantial BP rise in L-NAME hypertensive rats only. Conclusion The contribution of SNS to BP maintenance in L-NAME hypertension is more important than that of RAS. In L-NAME hypertensive rats the iNOS becomes a major source of hemodynamically important NO production, which is still insufficient to compensate prevailing vasoconstriction.
Female Snub-Nosed Monkeys Exchange Grooming for Sex and Infant Handling

Allogrooming in primates has acquired an important social function beyond its original hygienic function and can be exchanged either for itself or used as a currency to obtain other benefits such as copulations, access to infants or agonistic support. We explore the strategic use of grooming as a social tool in semi-wild golden snub-nosed monkeys (Rhinopithecus roxellana) in central China, a species where two desirable resources, viz. reproductive males and infants, are restricted to the mating and birth season, respectively. We predict that females expend their grooming selectively to different individuals according to their “value”. Our results show that in the mating season, females devoted more grooming to the resident male than in the birth season, and this effect was particularly strong in non-mothers (females without newborn infants). Moreover, females were more likely to groom the resident male after copulation than during baseline social conditions. In the birth season, females devoted more grooming to other females than in the mating season, and mothers (females with newborn infants) were the most valuable grooming partners. The mean rate of contact by non-mothers toward infants of other females was significantly higher after grooming the mothers than in baseline social conditions. In conclusion, our findings lend credence to the notion that primate females use grooming as a strategic tool to obtain limited resources such as males and infants and vary preference for particular individuals depending on the seasonal availability of valuable resources.
MPIPP: an automatic profile-guided parallel process placement toolset for SMP clusters and multiclusters

SMP clusters and multiclusters are widely used to execute message-passing parallel applications. The ways to map parallel processes to processors (or cores) could affect the application performance significantly due to the non-uniform communicating cost in such systems. It is desired to have a tool to map parallel processes to processors (or cores) automatically.Although there have been various efforts to address this issue, the existing solutions either require intensive user intervention, or can not be able to handle the situation of multiclusters well.In this paper, we propose a profile-guided approach to find the optimized mapping automatically to minimize the cost of point-to-point communications for arbitrary message passing applications. The implemented toolset is called MPIPP (MPI Process Placement toolset), and it includes several components:1) A tool to get the communication profile of MPI applications2) A tool to get the network topology of target clusters3) An algorithm to find optimized mapping, which is especially more effective than existing graph partition algorithms for multiclusters.We evaluated the performance of our tool with the NPB benchmarks and three other applications in several clusters. Experimental results show that the optimized process placement generated by our tools can achieve significant speedup.
Omega-conotoxin GVIA binding to a high-affinity receptor in brain: characterization, calcium sensitivity, and solubilization

We describe unique, high-affinity binding sites for omega[125I]conotoxin GVIA in membranes from rat brain and rabbit sympathetic ganglia which appear to be primarily associated with N-type voltage-dependent calcium channels. The dissociation constant (KD) for the toxin in rat brain membranes is 60 pM. Physiologic extracellular concentrations of calcium inhibit toxin binding noncompetitively (IC50 = 0.2 mM). The regional distribution of the binding sites in rat brain differs markedly from that of dihydropyridine calcium antagonist receptors associated with L-type calcium channels. In detergent- solubilized brain membranes, toxin binding retains the same affinity, specificity, and ionic sensitivity as in particulate preparations.
Duplicate bug reports considered harmful … really?

In a survey we found that most developers have experienced duplicated bug reports, however, only few considered them as a serious problem. This contradicts popular wisdom that considers bug duplicates as a serious problem for open source projects. In the survey, developers also pointed out that the additional information provided by duplicates helps to resolve bugs quicker. In this paper, we therefore propose to merge bug duplicates, rather than treating them separately. We quantify the amount of information that is added for developers and show that automatic triaging can be improved as well. In addition, we discuss the different reasons why users submit duplicate bug reports in the first place.
Insatisfacción corporal en estudiantes de medicina de la Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia medida con el Body Shape Questionnaire.

La bibliografia cientifica informa que la mayoria de las mujeres estan insatisfechas con su apariencia. El interes hacia la insatisfaccion corporal surge debido a que es un factor modificable, predisponente, perpetuante y pronostico de los desordenes alimentarios y otros trastornos. Objetivo: Determinar el porcentaje de insatisfaccion corporal en estudiantes universitarias, asi como su relacion con otros factores como la edad, actividad fisica e indice de masa corporal. Materiales y metodos: Se hizo un estudio transversal descriptivo donde participaron 124 estudiantes universitarias de la escuela de Medicina de edades entre 19 y 27 anos. Los instrumentos de evaluacion utilizados fueron el cuestionario sobre insatisfaccion corporal (BSQ), el cuestionario de actividad fisica (IPAQ), y el Indice de Masa Corporal (IMC). Resultados: Un 60.4% de las universitarias presento valores compatibles con insatisfaccion corporal, ademas a medida que aumenta el IMC fue mayor la insatisfaccion corporal en las jovenes universitarias. Por otro lado, considerando que los resultados no fueron estadisticamente significativos, no podemos concluir asociacion entre la insatisfaccion corporal y la edad, asi como con el nivel de actividad fisica. Conclusiones: El porcentaje de insatisfaccion corporal en mujeres es similar al hallado en otros estudios. Ademas se encontro asociacion positiva y significativa al asociar el IMC e insatisfaccion corporal. El elevado porcentaje de insatisfaccion corporal impone el desarrollo de estrategias de prevencion en grupos mas vulnerables al desarrollo de trastornos asociados.
EEG Mouse:A Machine Learning-Based Brain Computer Interface

The main idea of the current work is to use a wireless Electroencephalography (EEG) headset as a remote control for the mouse cursor of a personal computer. The proposed system uses EEG signals as a communication link between brains and computers. Signal records obtained from the PhysioNet EEG dataset were analyzed using the Coif lets wavelets and many features were extracted using different amplitude estimators for the wavelet coefficients. The extracted features were inputted into machine learning algorithms to generate the decision rules required for our application. The suggested real time implementation of the system was tested and very good performance was achieved. This system could be helpful for disabled people as they can control computer applications via the imagination of fists and feet movements in addition to closing eyes for a short period of time. Keywords—EEG; BCI; Data Mining; Machine Learning; SVMs; NNs; DWT; Feature Extraction
Joint Segmentation and Tracking of Object Surfaces in Depth Movies along Human/Robot Manipulations

A novel framework for joint segmentation and tracking in depth videos of object surfaces is presented. Initially, the 3D colored point cloud obtained using the Kinect camera is used to segment the scene into surface patches, defined by quadratic functions. The computed segments together with their functional descriptions are then used to partition the depth image of the subsequent frame in a consistent manner with respect to the precedent frame. This way, solutions established in previous frames can be reused which improves the efficiency of the algorithm and the coherency of the segmentations along the movie. The algorithm is tested for scenes showing human and robot manipulations of objects. We demonstrate that the method can successfully segment and track the human/robot arm and object surfaces along the manipulations. The performance is evaluated quantitatively by measuring the temporal coherency of the segmentations and the segmentation covering using ground truth. The method provides a visual front-end designed for robotic applications, and can potentially be used in the context of manipulation recognition, visual servoing, and robot-grasping tasks
CloudMonitor: Profiling Power Usage

In Cloud Computing platforms the addition of hardware monitoring devices to gather power usage data can be impractical or uneconomical due to the large number of machines to be metered. CloudMonitor, a monitoring tool that can generate power models for software-based power estimation, can provide insights to the energy costs of deployments without additional hardware. Accurate power usage data leads to the possibility of Cloud providers creating a separate tariff for power and therefore incentivizing software developers to create energy-efficient applications.
What Makes the Difference? Black Women's Undergraduate and Graduate Experiences in Mathematics

Abstract:Despite the increase of women earning degrees in STEM fields, there continues to remain a dearth in the number of women pursuing terminal degrees in mathematics. Additionally, Black women are nearly invisible in the field. This qualitative study examined the undergraduate and graduate experiences of twelve Black women mathematicians. A Black feminist framework embedded with a grounded theory approach was implemented. Variations were discovered for the women who attended an HBCU versus those who attended a non-HBCU for their undergraduate degree. Mentorship, a supportive program, and study groups were prime indicators that the women attributed to their success. Future implications suggest finding ways to minimize feelings of isolation from doctoral programs in mathematics and allowing further opportunities for mentorship.
GROBNER-SHIRSHOV BASES FOR REPRESENTATION THEORY

In this paper, we develop the Gr6bner-Shirshov basis theory for the representations of associative algebras by introducing the notion of Gr6bner-Shirshov pairs. Our result can be applied to solve the reduction problem in representation theory and to con­ struct monomial bases of representations of associative algebras. As an illustration, we give an explicit construction of Gr6bner-Shirshov pairs and monomial bases for finite dimensional ir:-educible repre­ sentations of the simple Lie algebra Sl3' Each of these monomial bases is in 1-1 corr3spondence with the set of semistandard Young tableaux with a given shape.
Selective immunolesions of hippocampal cholinergic input fail to impair spatial working memory

The septo‐hippocampal cholinergic pathway has traditionally been thought of as essential for spatial memory. Recent studies have demonstrated intact spatial learning following removal of this pathway with an immunotoxin selective for cholinergic neurons. In the present experiment, rats with selective removal of hippocampal cholinergic input were tested in a delayed nonmatching‐to‐position task in a water version of the radial arm maze. This allowed us to increase and parametrically vary the memory load compared with the standard Morris water maze (by varying the delay between the initial four choices and the final four choices) to determine if this would reveal a deficit in rats with lesions of septo‐hippocampal cholinergic projections. Male Long‐Evans rats were given injections of 192 lgG‐saporin, a selective immunotoxin for cholinergic neurons, into the medial septum/vertical limb of the diagonal band (MS/VDB) to remove cholinergic projections to the hippocampus, or a control surgery. The rats were trained on the radial maze task following surgery. An escape platform was located at the end of each arm of the maze and was removed after an arm was utilized for escape. After initial training, a delay was interposed between the first four trials and the second four trials. Errors during the second four‐trial component were scored in two categories: retroactive (reentering an arm chosen before the delay) and proactive (reentering an arm chosen after the delay). Retroactive errors increased as delay increased (from 60 s to 6 h) but were equivalent in control and MS/VDB‐lesion groups. Proactive errors did not vary with delay and were also unaffected by the lesion. Radioenzymatic assays for choline acetyltransferase activity in the hippocampus of lesioned rats confirmed a significant loss of cholinergic input from the MS/VDB. These results indicate that normal spatial working memory is possible after substantial loss of septo‐hippocampal cholinergic projections. Hippocampus 7:130–136, 1997. © 1997 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.