Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Expressing Biologically Active Membrane Proteins in a Cell-Free Transcription-Translation Platform

Cell-free transcription-translation platforms have been widely utilized to express soluble proteins in basic synthetic biological circuit prototyping. From a synthetic biology point of view, it is critical to express membrane proteins in cell-free transcription-translation systems, and use them directly in biocircuits, considering the fact that histidine kinases, G-protein coupled receptors (GPCRs) and other important biosensors are all membrane proteins. Previous studies have expressed membrane proteins in cell-free systems with the help of detergents, liposomes or nanodiscs, but have not demonstrated the ability to prototype circuit behavior for the purpose of testing more complex circuit functions involving membrane-bound proteins. Built on previous efforts, in this work we demonstrated that we could co-translationally express solubilized and active membrane proteins in our cell-free TX-TL platform with membrane-like materials. We first tested the expression of several constructs with β1 and β2 adrenergic receptors in TX-TL and observed significant insoluble membrane protein production. The addition of nanodiscs to the cell free expression system enabled solubilization of membrane proteins. Nanodisc is lipoprotein-based membrane-like material. The activity of β2 adrenergic receptor was tested with both fluorescence and Surface Plasmon Resonance (SPR) binding assays by monitoring the specific binding response of small-molecule binders, carazolol and norepinephrine. Our results suggest that it is promising to use cell-free expression systems to prototype synthetic biocircuits involving single chain membrane proteins without extra procedures. This data made us one step closer to testing complex membrane protein circuits in cell-free environment.
Normal onset, but prolonged expression, of Sry gene in the B6.YDOM sex-reversed mouse gonad.

When the Y chromosome of the Mus musculus domesticus mouse (Tirano, Italy) is placed onto the C57BL/6J (B6) background, the XY progeny (B6.YDOM) develop only ovaries or ovotestes in fetal life. In the present study, we examined transcription of genes known to be involved in gonadal sex differentiation in the B6.YDOM gonad. RNA was isolated from each gonad at 10 to 18 days of gestation and subjected to RT-PCR analysis. The results indicate that the onset of Sry, a putative testis-determining gene, transcription was normal, whereas its inactivation was delayed in all B6.YDOM gonads. Transcripts of Müllerian inhibiting substance, the earliest biochemical product of fetal Sertoli cells, appeared in the B6.YDOM ovotestis slightly later than in the control B6,XY gonad, whereas they were either absent or detected transiently in the B6.YDOM ovary. Transcription of 3 beta-hydroxysteroid dehydrogenase and 17 alpha-hydroxylase, essential for testosterone synthesis, were equally delayed in the B6.YDOM ovotestis and completely absent in the B6.YDOM ovary. P450 aromatase (P450arom), which converts androgens to estrogens, was transcribed in both control XX and XY gonads at the onset of morphological sexual differentiation. The overall pattern of P450arom transcription was delayed by 1 day in both B6.YDOM ovotestes and ovaries. In conclusion, the testis-determining pathway in the B6.YDOM gonad appears to be impaired downstream of Sry transcription, resulting in persistent Sry transcripts and a delay in onset of other genes involved in testicular differentiation.
The role of public sector enterprises in Spain: Room for a shadow government?

The main objective of this paper consists of analyzing regional public sector enterprises (PSEs) in Spain. We provide a general overview of Spanish Autonomous Communities� (ACs) financial resources in the context of the Stability and Growth Pact and Budgetary Stability Act. From 2002, such regulation imposes several constraints on ACs� indebtedness. We investigate the role of PSEs as an alternative to traditional debt mechanisms given that, in line with Eurostat criteria, PSEs� debt can be taken off the public sector�s consolidated budget. Descriptive and econometric results confirm our expectations. ACs� have used public enterprises to avoid the stringent financial rules. Additionally, it seems that low productivity ACs are accumulating more public debt outside the scope of consolidation.
Dissemination in health promotion in Australia

Issue addressed: Increasing population benefits of health promotion effort requires the widespread dissemination and implementation of effective practice. We need to go beyond health promotion as a short-term, one-off initiatives and seek to extend the impact of cost-effective health promotion programs. Discussion: There is a lack of information about dissemination practices in health promotion in Australia. We do not know how different practice conditions and methods of dissemination combine to produce the best results in terms of program uptake. We have a funding system which has perhaps over-invested in one-off demonstration projects and under- invested in building ongoing capacity for implementing health promotion. So what? These challenges need to be addressed in both research and practice contexts. In particular, dissemination requires systems for linking researchers and practitioners at all stages of a program development cycle. There is a need for more local research about dissemination practices as well as a strategic approach to developing collaboration between research and practice groups. A comprehensive national program in dissemination research should be a high priority. (author abstract)
The Myriapoda and Onychophora collection (MY) of the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle (MNHN, Paris)

Abstract The Myriapoda and Onychophora collection dataset inventories the occurrence records of the collection of myriapods and onychophorans in the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle, Paris. The dataset currently consists of 202 lots of onychophorans, representing all of those present, and almost ten thousand (9 795) lots of myriapods, representing 33 to 40% of the MNHN Myriapoda collection. This collection, which is of key historic importance, represents the results of two centuries of myriapod and onychophoran studies. The sources of the collection are worldwide, with a high representation for metropolitan France for the myriapods. None of the occurrences are yet georeferenced. Access to the dataset via the data portals of the MNHN and the GBIF has been made possible through the e-ReColNat project (ANR-11-INBS-0004). The Myriapoda and Onychophora collection of MNHN is actively expanding, hence both the collection and dataset are in continuous growth. The dataset can be accessed through the portals of GBIF at http://www.gbif. org/dataset/3287044c-8c48-4ad6-81d4-4908071bc8db and the MNHN at http://science.mnhn. fr/institution/mnhn/collection/my/item/search/form.
Fault Modeling and Worst-Case Test Vectors for Delay Failures Induced by Total Dose in ASICs

We analyzed the delay failure induced in standard-cell ASICs by total-ionizing dose. We developed a novel cell-level fault model for delay failures. We used this fault model to identify worst-case test vectors (WCTV) for delay failures induced in ASIC devices exposed to total ionizing dose. The fault model was experimentally validated using SPICE simulation and total dose data. We introduced a fast search algorithm based on directed graph and genetic algorithms to help identify WCTV for large ASICs within reasonable search time. The methodology was validated using ASIC test chip and Cobalt 60 facility.
DREAMS Toolchain: Model-Driven Engineering of Mixed-Criticality Systems

Mixed-criticality systems (MCS) aim at boosting the integration density in safety-critical systems, resulting into efficient systems, while simultaneously providing increased performance. The DREAMS project provides a cross-domain architectural style for MCS based on networked, virtualized multi-cores controlled by hierarchical resource managers. However, the availability of a platform is only one side of the coin: deploying mixed-critical applications to shared resources typically requires design-time configurations (e.g., to ensure real-time constraints or separation constraints mandated by safety regulations). These configurations are the outcome of complex optimization problems which are intractable in a manual process that also hardly can guarantee the consistency of all deployable artefacts nor their traceability to the requirements. However, existing toolchains lack support for MCS integration, and particularly DREAMS' advanced platform capabilities. We present an integrated model-driven toolchain and the underlying metamodels covering all relevant aspects of MCS including applications, timing, platforms, deployments, configurations and annotations for extra-functional properties such as safety. The approach focuses on the left branch of the V-cycle, and ranges from product-line and design space exploration to resource allocation and configuration generation. We report on the integration of exploration tools and a reconfiguration graph synthesizer, and evaluate the resulting toolchains in two use cases consisting of a product-line of wind power control applications and an avionic subsystem respectively.
How important is firm behaviour to understand employment?: evidence from Spain

Traditional macroeconomic analyses of the Spanish labor market have not been successful in accounting for Spain’s high unemployment rates. In this paper, we take a microeconomic perspective, studying the entry and exit behavior of Spanish …rms and, hence, their behavior concerning job creation and job destruction. We calibrate a model economy with entry and exit to Spanish data and we …nd that the reduction of the dismissal tax from the equivalent of one year of wages to zero increases employment by 8.13 per cent, and productivity by 2.28 per cent. (JEL L11, L16, D21)
Future-proof optical-mobile converged access network based on integration of PON with RoF technologies

Although there have been a lot of efforts to converge optical access network and mobile access network for reducing the CAPEX and OPEX of telecom operators, we are still seeking to ultimate cost-effective solution for merged access network architecture. So we introduced future-proof optical-mobile converged access network architectures based on integration of PON with RoF technologies and discussed their characteristics and possibility of realization.
The University of Vienna experience in heart transplantation.

Since the University of Vienna Cardiac Transplant Program began in 1984, 892 heart transplant procedures have been performed through the end of 2001. One- and five-year survival has increased steadily over time to 80% and 75%, respectively, in the most recent cohort. Ten-year survival is 55%. Over the past 10 years our program has seen dramatic changes in patient selection, accepting now patients with more risk factors (age, diabetes, elevated pulmonary resistance,.). Developments in immunosuppression have decreased the incidence of infection, rejection and graft arteriosclerosis continuously. Our program continues to pursue novel strategies to improve the survival and quality of life of our heart transplant patients.
Financial Contagion in Industrial Clusters: A Dynamical Analysis and Network Simulation

In this work we analyse the resilience of industrial districts to exogenous economic shocks. Firstly, we define a basic industrial district through a set of assumptions which prove to be critical for systemic risk in the event of a financial shock. In the course of the work we progressively relax the assumptions to make room for more complex representations. Consequently, depending on two dimensions of complexity (structure of economic interactions and the degree of heterogeneity of the industrial population), we develop three different models of industrial clusters, employing non-linear ordinary differential equations and percolation dynamics in graph theory. A mechanism of financial contagion is introduced and a threshold condition is derived in order to study each model’s resilience. Eventually, we prove that it is the structure of economic interactions which produces a structural change in the threshold characterization.
Study of Degradation Profile and Development of Stability Indicating Methods for Cefixime Trihydrate

The degradation behavior of cefixime trihydrate was investigated under different stress conditions of acidic hydrolysis, alkaline hydrolysis and oxidation using spectrophotometry. Stability indicating spectrophotometric methods were developed that could separate the drug from its degradation products formed under these stress conditions. The UV spectral characteristics of the drug and degraded products were quite different and zero and first order derivative ultraviolet spectrophotometric methods were used to study the extent of degradation. Cefixime trihydrate was found to degrade extensively under experimental conditions. The methods were validated by establishing the linearity, inter and intraday precision, accuracy, selectivity and specificity.
Feature-Level Decision Fusion for Audio-Visual Word Prominence Detection

Common fusion techniques in audio-visual speech processing operate on the modality level. I.e. they either combine the features extracted from the two modalities directly or derive a decision for each modality separately and then combine the modalities on the decision level. We investigate the audio-visual processing of linguistic prosody, more precisely the extraction of word prominence. In this context the different features for each modality can be assumed to be only partially dependent. Hence we propose to train a classiﬁer for each of these features, acoustic and visual modality, and then combine them on a decision level. We compare this approach with conventional fusion methods, i.e. feature fusion and decision fusion on the modality level. Our results show that the feature-level decision fusion clearly outperforms the other approaches, in particular when we also additionally integrate the features resulting from the feature fusion. Compared to a detection based only on the full audio stream we obtain relative improvements from the audio-visual detection of 19% for clean audio and up to 50% for noisy audio.
Gray Neural Network Forecasting Model of Power Load Based on Ant Colony Algorithm Method

Because power loads are influenced by various factors, and the changes of power load presents are complicate, the traditional forecasting methods are always not satisfied. According to the random-increase and non-linearity fluctuation of residual series, gray neural network forecasting can reflect the increase character and non-linearity relationship. This paper using the improved ACO method as the basis of combination weight making, so as to achieve the goal of optimizing the whole forecasting precision and find the combination weight that can exhibit the high consistency and high precision for the series values, finally the whole forecasting accuracy can be improved obviously. Through the calculation of the power loads in a province which is compared with other algorithms, the results prove that this method can effectively improve the accuracy of power load forecasting.
Response Patterns of Children with Learning Disabilities: Is Impulsivity a Stable Response Style?

A correlational analysis was conducted to assess the relationship among various assessment instruments, including Kagan, Rosman, Day, Albert, and Phillips's (1964) Matching Familiar Figures Test (MFFT), and actual classroom performance vis-$aG-vis impulsive responding. Subjects were 22 children (16 male, 6 female), ages 5 to 11 years, enrolled in an academic remediation program. The results do not support a relationship between impulsivity, as measured by the MFFT, and academic progress in a classroom setting. Implications for task-specific measures of impulsivity and remediation are discussed.
Interaction of the major inflammatory bowel disease susceptibility alleles in Crohn's disease patients.

AIM To investigate the interaction of interleukin-23 receptor (IL23R) (rs1004819 and rs2201841), autophagy-related 16-like 1 (ATG16L1) (rs2241880), caspase recruitment domain-containing protein 15 (CARD15) genes, and IBD5 locus in Crohn's disease (CD) patients. METHODS A total of 315 unrelated subjects with CD and 314 healthy controls were genotyped. Interactions and specific genotype combinations of a total of eight variants were tested. The variants of IBD5 locus (IGR2198a_1 rs11739135 and IGR2096a_1 rs12521868), CARD15 (R702W rs2066845 and L1007fs rs2066847), ATG16L1 (rs2241880) and IL23R (rs1004819, rs2201841) genes were genotyped by PCR-RFLP, the G908R (rs2066844) in CARD15 was determined by direct sequencing. RESULTS The association of ATG16L1 T300A with CD was confirmed [P = 0.004, odds ratio (OR) = 1.69, 95% CI: 1.19-2.41], and both IL23R variants were found to represent significant risk for the disease (P = 0.008, OR = 2.05, 95% CI: 1.20-3.50 for rs1004819 AA; P < 0.001, OR = 2.97, 95% CI: 1.65-5.33 for rs2201841 CC). Logistic regression analysis of pairwise interaction of the inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) loci indicated that IL23R, ATG16L1, CARD15 and IBD5 (IGR2198a_1) contribute independently to disease risk. We also analysed the specific combinations by pair of individual ATG16L1, IL23R rs1004819, rs2201841, IGR2198a_1, IGR2096a_1 and CARD15 genotypes for disease risk influence. In almost all cases, the combined risk of susceptibility pairs was higher in patients carrying two different risk-associated gene variants together than individuals with just one polymorphism. The highest OR was found for IL23R rs2201841 homozygous genotype with combination of positive CARD15 status (P < 0.001, OR = 9.15, 95% CI: 2.05-40.74). CONCLUSION The present study suggests a cumulative effect of individual IBD susceptibility loci.
TaskMaster: A Tool for Determining When Subjects Are on Task

In this Tutorial, we introduce a tool that allows researchers to track subjects’ on- and off-task activity on Qualtrics’ online survey platform. Our TaskMaster tool uses JavaScript to create several arrayed variables representing the frequency with which subjects enter and leave an active survey window and how long they remain within a given window. We provide code and instructions that will allow researchers to both implement the TaskMaster and analyze its output. We detail several potential applications, such as in studies of persistence and cheating, and studies that require sustained attention to experimental outcomes. The TaskMaster is designed to be accessible to researchers who are comfortable designing studies in Qualtrics, but who may have limited experience using programming languages such as JavaScript.
Commodity Future Price Premiums – Case EU ETS

Author: Olli Hamalainen Tittle: Commodity Future Price Premiums – Case EU ETS Faculty: Lappeenranta School of Business Major: Finance Year: 2014 Examiners: Professor Eero Patari Associate Professor Kashif Saleem Master’s Thesis LUT School of Business 61 pages, 12 figures, 20 equations, 12 tables, 2 appendixes
Application of the PharmPrint Methodology to Two Protein Kinases

The PharmPrint methodology developed by McGregor and Muskal1,2 was used to construct quantitative structure-activity relationship (QSAR) models for the prediction of cyclin-dependent kinase-2 (CDK2) and vascular endothelial growth factor receptor-2 (VEGFR2) inhibition. The QSAR models were constructed based on a binary description of biological activity--a value of zero for inactive and one for active compounds. Subsets of "active" kinase inhibitors (that is, inhibitors with pIC50 > or = 6.0) along with a subset of MDDR3 compounds serving as the recommended set of inactive compounds were used for model development. The predicted activities for the training set compounds were in excellent agreement with the assigned binary activities with greater than 92% of the compounds correctly classified. However, when the QSAR models were applied to the subsets of "inactive" kinase inhibitors (that is, inhibitors with pIC50 < 6.0), greater than 67% were incorrectly predicted to be active. Identical results were obtained with our CDK2 and VEGFR2 validation sets, where the majority of the inactive kinase inhibitors were predicted to be active. In efforts to improve the predictive performance of the QSAR models, simple, but important modifications were made to the PharmPrint methodology. On the basis of these modifications, a second set of QSAR models was constructed and applied to our validation sets to assess their predictive performance. Significant improvements were seen with the modified version of PharmPrint over the original. The results from both versions of PharmPrint are compared and discussed.
Fusion Splicing Holey Fibers and Single-Mode Fibers: A Simple Method to Reduce Loss and Increase Strength

We demonstrate a novel method for low-loss splicing Ge-doped holey fibers (HF) with subwavelength core size and high numerical aperture fibers by using a conventional fusion splicer. We found that a large overlap distance of the fibers during fusion would decrease the splice loss and increase the splice strength. The lowest splice loss achieved for a fiber with a core diameter of 1.27 mu m and air-filling fraction of >0.95 was ~ 1 dB at 1550 nm, with a bend failure radius of 0.8 cm. With the same method, we also observed improvement in terms of loss and strength with larger core size HF.
Validity and Reliability of the Chinese Hamilton Depression Rating Scale

The reliability and validity of the Chinese version of the 17-item Hamilton Depression Rating Scale (CHDS) was assessed. Interrater reliability was excellent, the item total-score correlations were good, and the internal reliability was satisfactory. The concurrent validity was tested by correlating the CHDS score with the Global Assessment Scale score; the strong negative correlation found indicated that the CHDS reflects the overall level of disability. Five distinct factors were generated by principle-component analysis; these factors account for 52.4% of the total variance. Rigorous evaluation of the numerous translated scales being used in clinical and research settings of non-Western countries is important.
TEMPORAL LOBECTOMY IN ACUTE COMPLICATED HERPES SIMPLEX ENCEPHALITIS: TECHNICAL CASE REPORT

OBJECTIVEHerpes virus encephalitis is a rare, life-threatening complication of therapy in patients with brain tumors. A surgical therapeutic approach may be needed because the infection can be resistant to acyclovir in immunocompromised patients, and complications and long-term sequelae are frequent. CLINICAL PRESENTATIONWe present the case of a right-handed, 6-year-old girl with a brainstem tumor who had herpes virus encephalitis with refractory seizures while on immunosuppressive treatment. The virus was resistant to acyclovir but responded to gancyclovir. The patient developed local refractory brain edema with right uncal herniation. INTERVENTIONTo reduce the intracranial pressure, internal decompressive craniotomy was performed, which consisted of a right temporal lobectomy that allowed us to remove the focal necrotic-hemorrhagic tissue, decrease inflammation, and avoid subsequent chronic gliotic scarring. Clinical improvement was clear with prompt recovery and acute control of seizures. The only remaining deficits were mild memory and attention impairments. Seizures did not recur in the next 6 months. CONCLUSIONAntiviral resistance should be suspected in immunocompromised patients with herpes virus encephalitis if there is no early response to acyclovir. If uncal herniation of the nondominant temporal lobe develops, temporal lobectomy, as an internal decompressive procedure, can be lifesaving. Lobectomy stopped the acute refractory seizures and can be considered a good approach to prevent later epilepsy, with only mild residual cognitive deficits.