Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Modulation of calcium-activated chloride current via pH-induced changes of calcium channel properties in cone photoreceptors

The activity of calcium-activated chloride channels is controlled through the complex interaction of cellular mechanisms affecting calcium entry, buffering, and extrusion, and an unknown stoichiometric relation between intracellular Ca concentration and Cl channel activation. Here, we show that calcium-activated chloride current [ICl(Ca)] in cone photoreceptors is also highly sensitive to external pH, being strongly reduced by acidification and enhanced by alkylinization of the bathing medium. We propose that this modulation is accounted for by the pH sensitivity of Ca channel activation and permeation, already well characterized in other cells, which we now extend to cone photoreceptor Ca channels. Acidification of the external medium from a control pH of 7.4 shifts the Ca channel activation range positively by about 10 mV at pH 6.8, reducing the magnitude of calcium current with a consequent reduction of chloride current. Alkylinization shifts the Ca channel activation range negatively by about 8 mV at pH 8 and produces larger calcium currents during step depolarizations that in turn elicit larger chloride tail currents. Modulation of ICl(Ca) by pH suggests other consequences of the pH-induced shift in Ca channel gating, for one, modification of Ca-dependent transmitter release, which could be especially significant in photoreceptors where the cell's operating voltage range overlaps only the lower end of the Ca channel activation range.
Cardiac Hypertrophy Induced by Mitogen-activated Protein Kinase Kinase 7, a Specific Activator for c-Jun NH2-terminal Kinase in Ventricular Muscle Cells*

Activation of stress-activated protein kinases, including the p38 and the c-Jun NH2-terminal kinases (JNK), have been associated with the onset of cardiac hypertrophy and cell death in response to hemodynamic overload and ischemia/reperfusion injury. Upon infection of cultured neonatal rat cardiac myocytes with recombinant adenoviral vectors expressing a wild type and a constitutively active mutant of MKK7 (or JNKK2), JNK was specifically activated without affecting other mitogen-activated protein kinases, including extracellular signal-regulated protein kinases and p38. Specific activation of the JNK pathway in cardiac myocytes induced characteristic features of hypertrophy, including an increase in cell size, elevated expression of atrial natriuretic factor, and induction of sarcomere organization. In contrast, co-activation of both JNK (by MKK7) and p38 (by MKK3 or MKK6) in cardiomyocytes led to an induction of cytopathic responses and suppression of hypertrophic responses. These data provide the first direct evidence that activation of JNK alone is sufficient to induce characteristic features of cardiac hypertrophy, thereby supporting an active role for the JNK pathway in the development of cardiac hypertrophy. The cytopathic response, as a result of co-activation of both JNK and p38, may contribute to the loss of contractile function and viability of cardiomyocytes following hemodynamic overload and cardiac ischemia/reperfusion injury.
Flexible Natural Language Access to Community-Driven Metadata

A key issue in the Semantic Web is providing easy access to metadata for non-computer scientists. We believe that natural language is the best medium for this, and that the metadata framework should be open-ended in nature. We discuss four challenges: what type of interface to use, how to associate linguistic information with ontologies, how to achieve open-endedness, and how to stimulate collaboration. A metadata elicitation tool is described that uses natural language generation to shape the interface, and integrates dynamic ontologies with folksonomies. Finally, we argue for a new annotation mechanism which associates linguistic information with ontology resources.
Tick Surveillance for Relapsing Fever Spirochete Borrelia miyamotoi in Hokkaido, Japan

During 2012–2013, a total of 4325 host-seeking adult ticks belonging to the genus Ixodes were collected from various localities of Hokkaido, the northernmost island of Japan. Tick lysates were subjected to real-time PCR assay to detect borrelial infection. The assay was designed for specific detection of the Relapsing fever spirochete Borrelia miyamotoi and for unspecific detection of Lyme disease-related spirochetes. Overall prevalence of B. miyamotoi was 2% (71/3532) in Ixodes persulcatus, 4.3% (5/117) in Ixodes pavlovskyi and 0.1% (1/676) in Ixodes ovatus. The prevalence in I. persulcatus and I. pavlovskyi ticks were significantly higher than in I. ovatus. Co-infections with Lyme disease-related spirochetes were found in all of the tick species. During this investigation, we obtained 6 isolates of B. miyamotoi from I. persulcatus and I. pavlovskyi by culture in BSK-M medium. Phylogenetic trees of B. miyamotoi inferred from each of 3 housekeeping genes (glpQ, 16S rDNA, and flaB) demonstrated that the Hokkaido isolates were clustered with Russian B. miyamotoi, but were distinguishable from North American and European B. miyamotoi. A multilocus sequence analysis using 8 genes (clpA, clpX, nifS, pepX, pyrG, recG, rplB, and uvrA) suggested that all Japanese B. miyamotoi isolates, including past isolates, were genetically clonal, although these were isolated from different tick and vertebrate sources. From these results, B. miyamotoi-infected ticks are widely distributed throughout Hokkaido. Female I. persulcatus are responsible for most human tick-bites, thereby I. persulcatus is likely the most important vector of indigenous relapsing fever from tick bites in Hokkaido.
Mobile CDN enhancements for QoE-improved content delivery in mobile operator networks

With the popularity of YouTube and other video services (e.g., VoD), video content is becoming a dominant traffic type in mobile networks and will soon form the major bulk of the traffic. This poses a serious challenge to mobile network operators when it comes to delivering video content to multiple users in a wireless environment, where the quality of experience of each user must be met as per user expectation. To this end, mobile content distribution networks (mCDNs) are gaining attraction as one possibility to enable controllable and resource-efficient delivery of video content. In this article we motivate the deployment of mCDN serving point (mCSP) nodes in an mCDN infrastructure and describe its benefits for a mobile network operator who wishes to employ an mCDN system in their existing mobile network architecture. In this respect we highlight the key features and requirements of such an mCSP node and the advantages it offers. One particularly beneficial feature of our proposed mCSP node is to ensure fairness during the delivery of progressive video streaming services employed by the likes of YouTube, Daily Motion, and others. In this regard we first highlight the unfairness issue when delivering progressive video streaming services over TCP to multiple users over a wireless network infrastructure and its effect on the user perceived QoE. We then demonstrate, as a proof of concept, the effectiveness of employing application-level scheduling in an mCSP node to ensure fairness among multiple simultaneous progressive video sessions in scenarios where the backhaul link in a mobile network infrastructure may become congested.
Pseudotype-Based Neutralization Assays for Influenza: A Systematic Analysis

The use of vaccination against the influenza virus remains the most effective method of mitigating the significant morbidity and mortality caused by this virus. Antibodies elicited by currently licensed influenza vaccines are predominantly hemagglutination-inhibition (HI)-competent antibodies that target the globular head of hemagglutinin (HA) thus inhibiting influenza virus entry into target cells. These antibodies predominantly confer homosubtypic/strain specific protection and only rarely confer heterosubtypic protection. However, recent academia or pharma-led R&D toward the production of a “universal vaccine” has centered on the elicitation of antibodies directed against the stalk of the influenza HA that has been shown to confer broad protection across a range of different subtypes (H1–H16). The accurate and sensitive measurement of antibody responses elicited by these “next-generation” influenza vaccines is, however, hampered by the lack of sensitivity of the traditional influenza serological assays HI, single radial hemolysis, and microneutralization. Assays utilizing pseudotypes, chimeric viruses bearing influenza glycoproteins, have been shown to be highly efficient for the measurement of homosubtypic and heterosubtypic broadly neutralizing antibodies, making them ideal serological tools for the study of cross-protective responses against multiple influenza subtypes with pandemic potential. In this review, we will analyze and compare literature involving the production of influenza pseudotypes with particular emphasis on their use in serum antibody neutralization assays. This will enable us to establish the parameters required for optimization and propose a consensus protocol to be employed for the further deployment of these assays in influenza vaccine immunogenicity studies.
Information Geometric Approach to Bayesian Lower Error Bounds

Information geometry describes a framework where probability densities can be viewed as differential geometry structures. This approach has shown that the geometry in the space of probability distributions that are parameterized by their covariance matrices is linked to the fundamental concepts of estimation theory. In particular, prior work proposes a Riemannian metric - the distance between the parameterized probability distributions - that is equivalent to the Fisher Information Matrix, and helpful in obtaining the deterministic Cramér-Rao lower bound (CRLB). Recent work in this framework has led to establishing links with several practical applications. However, classical CRLB is useful only for unbiased estimators and inaccurately predicts the mean square error in low signal-to-noise (SNR) scenarios. In this paper, we propose a general Riemannian metric that, at once, is used to obtain both Bayesian CRLB and deterministic CRLB along with their vector parameter extensions. We also extend our results to the Barankin bound, thereby enhancing their applicability to low SNR situations.
The Folate Precursor p-Aminobenzoate Is Reversibly Converted to Its Glucose Ester in the Plant Cytosol*

Plants synthesize p-aminobenzoate (pABA) in chloroplasts and use it for folate synthesis in mitochondria. It has generally been supposed that pABA exists as the free acid in plant cells and that it moves between organelles in this form. Here we show that fruits and leaves of tomato and leaves of a diverse range of other plants have a high capacity to convert exogenously supplied pABA to its β-D-glucopyranosyl ester (pABA-Glc), whereas yeast and Escherichia coli do not. High performance liquid chromatography analysis indicated that much of the endogenous pABA in fruit and leaf tissues is esterified and that the total pool of pABA (free plus esterified) varies greatly between tissues (from 0.2 to 11 nmol g–1 of fresh weight). UDP-glucose:pABA glucosyltransferase activity was readily detected in fruit and leaf extracts, and the reaction was found to be freely reversible. p-Aminobenzoic acid β-D-glucopyranosyl ester esterase activity was also detected in extracts. Subcellular fractionation indicated that the glucosyltransferase and esterase activities are predominantly if not solely cytosolic. Taken together, these results show that reversible formation of pABA-Glc in the cytosol is interposed between pABA production in chloroplasts and pABA consumption in mitochondria. As pABA is a hydrophobic weak acid, its uncharged form is membrane-permeant, and its anion is consequently prone to distribute itself spontaneously among subcellular compartments according to their pH. Esterification of pABA may eliminate such errant behavior and provide a readily reclaimable storage form of pABA as well as a substrate for membrane transporters.
CloudIQ: a framework for processing base stations in a data center

The cellular industry is evaluating architectures to distribute the signal processing in radio access networks. One of the options is to process the signals of all base stations on a shared pool of compute resources in a central location. In this centralized architecture, the existing base stations will be replaced with just the antennas and a few other active RF components, and the remainder of the digital processing including the physical layer will be carried out in a central location. This model has potential benefits that include a reduction in the cost of operating the network due to fewer site visits, easy upgrades, and lower site lease costs, and an improvement in the network performance with joint signal processing techniques that span multiple base stations. Further there is a potential to exploit variations in the processing load across base stations, to pool the base stations into fewer compute resources, thereby allowing the operator to either reduce energy consumption by turning the remaining processors off or reducing costs by provisioning fewer compute resources. We focus on this aspect in this paper. Specifically, we make the following contributions in the paper. Based on real-world data, we characterise the potential savings if shared homogeneous compute resources are used to process the signals from multiple base stations in the centralized architecture. We show that the centralized architecture can potentially result in savings of at least 22 % in compute resources by exploiting the variations in the processing load across base stations. These savings are achievable with statistical guarantees on successfully processing the base station's signals. We also design a framework that has two objectives: (i) partitioning the set of base stations into groups that are simultaneously processed on a shared homogeneous compute platform for a given statistical guarantee, and (ii) scheduling the set of base stations allocated to a platform in order to meet their real-time processing requirements. This partitioning and scheduling framework saves up to 19 % of the compute resources for a probability of failure of one in 100 million. We refer to this solution as CloudIQ. Finally we implement and extensively evaluate the CloudIQ framework with a 3GPP compliant implementation of 5 MHz LTE.
Bundle Methods for Machine Learning

We present a globally convergent method for regularized risk minimization problems. Our method applies to Support Vector estimation, regression, Gaussian Processes, and any other regularized risk minimization setting which leads to a convex optimization problem. SVMPerf can be shown to be a special case of our approach. In addition to the unified framework we present tight convergence bounds, which show that our algorithm converges in O(1/∊) steps to ∊ precision for general convex problems and in O(log(1/∊)) steps for continuously differentiable problems. We demonstrate in experiments the performance of our approach.
Knowledge Engineering in a Temporal Semantic Web Context

The emergence of Web 2.0 and the semantic Web as established technologies is fostering a whole new breed of Web applications and systems. These are often centered around knowledge engineering and context awareness. However, adequate temporal formalisms underlying context awareness are currently scarce. Our focus in this paper is two-fold. We first introduce a new OWL-based temporal formalism - TOWL - for the representation of time, change, and state transitions. Based hereon we present a financial Web-based application centered around the aggregation of stock recommendations and financial data.
Possible Role for Adenosine in Local Regulation of Absorptive Hyperemia in Rat Intestine

To test whether extracellular adenosine participates in the local regulation of intestinal blood flow during nutrient absorption, the serosa of the jejunum was continuously suffused with adenosine deaminase (7 μg protein/ml) or theophylline (10-4 M) in Ringer's solution. Using video microscopy, blood flow was calculated in submucosal arterioles from diameter and red cell velocity measurements. After a steady-state baseline, oleic acid (20 mM) + glucose (56 mM) were added to a bile salt solution suffusing the mucosa. Baseline arteriolar diameters and blood flows were 52 ± 2 μm and 20 ± 2 nl/sec with the serosal suffusate containing Ringer's; these values were not significantly altered by theophylline or deaminase treatment. During suffusion of the mucosa with a nutrient solution, diameter and blood flow transiently increased and these responses were not altered by deaminase or theophylline. Thereafter, diameter and blood flow stabilized at lower values for the duration of absorption. Diameter and blood flow were increased to 111 ± 1% and 134 ± 5% of control during absorption with Ringer's; the corresponding values were significantly lower with deaminase or theophylline. After absorption, diameter and blood flow stabilized near baseline with Ringer's within 7–12 minutes; the corresponding values were significantly lower with deaminase or theophylline for at least 30 minutes. Since deaminase and theophylline produced similar effects on absorptive hyperemia, adenosine might participate with other factors in the local regulation of that response. Adenosine applied to the serosa caused dose-dependent increases in calculated blood flow with a threshold near 10-5 M and a maximum near 10-3 M. In contrast, even 10-2 M adenosine in the mucosal suffusate did not increase blood flow above baseline. Until the mechanism for this regional difference between the mucosa and serosa is defined, it will be difficult to localize the site of action of adenosine within the intestinal wall or estimate its concentration in the perivascular space of intestinal arterioles.
A new bioactive thiophenolic glycoside from the leaf of Massularia acuminata (g. Don Bullock) ex Hoyle (Rubiaceae).

BACKGROUND Massularia acuminata is a small tree or shrub of tropical rainforest. The leaves are used in Nigerian ethno-medicine for the treatment of microbial infections and pharmacological report suggested the leaf extract as possessing antioxidant activity. This study was therefore carried out to determine the most antioxidant and antimicrobial active fraction(s) of Massularia acuminata leaf and the constituent(s) responsible for the activities. MATHERIALS AND METHODS The leaf of Massularia acuminata was investigated for in vitro antioxidant and antimicrobial activities, using a 2,2-diphenyl-1-picrylhydrazyl (DPPH) radical scavenging assay and agar dilution method respectively. RESULTS The ethyl acetate fraction demonstrated the best activities among the partitioned fractions tested. Bioassay guided purification of the most active ethyl acetate fraction led to isolation of a new thiophenolic glycoside, characterized as 4-(3',3'-dihydroxy-1-mercaptopropyl)phenyl glycosylpyranoside. CONCLUSION The isolated compound from the leaf of Massularia acuminata demonstrated antioxidant and antimicrobial activities and may be responsible for the activities of leaf extract and its ethyl acetate fraction, hence this may justify its ethnomedicinal use.
Mutations in orbit/mast reveal that the central spindle is comprised of two microtubule populations, those that initiate cleavage and those that propagate furrow ingression

We address the relative roles of astral and central spindle microtubules (MTs) in cytokinesis of Drosophila melanogaster primary spermatocytes. Time-lapse imaging studies reveal that the central spindle is comprised of two MT populations, “interior” central spindle MTs found within the spindle envelope and “peripheral” astral MTs that probe the cytoplasm and initiate cleavage furrows where they contact the cortex and form overlapping bundles. The MT-associated protein Orbit/Mast/CLASP concentrates on interior rather than peripheral central spindle MTs. Interior MTs are preferentially affected in hypomorphic orbit mutants, and consequently the interior central spindle fails to form or is unstable. In contrast, peripheral MTs still probe the cortex and form regions of overlap that recruit the Pav-KLP motor and Aurora B kinase. orbit mutants have disorganized or incomplete anillin and actin rings, and although cleavage furrows initiate, they ultimately regress. Our work identifies a new function for Orbit/Mast/CLASP and identifies a novel MT population involved in cleavage furrow initiation.
Classification of home appliance electricity consumption using power signature and harmonic features

A method of classifying home appliance electricity consumption is proposed in this paper. With the information retrieved from power signatures and harmonic features, the method excels at its systematic grouping capability of home appliances. It is also beneficial for residents to comprehend their home electricity variations. This proposed approach has been prototyped with hardware realization. Experimental results based on the tested appliance shows its potential of development for the application considered.
A method for overlapping and erasure of lists

An important property of the Newell Shaw-Simon scheme for computer storage of lists is that data having multiple occurrences need not be stored at more than one place in the computer. That is, lists may be “overlapped. ” Unfortunately, overlapping poses a problem for subsequent erasure. Given a list that is no longer needed, it is desired to erase just those parts that do not overlap other lists. In LISP, McCarthy employs an elegant but inefficient solution to the problem. The present paper describes a general method which enables efficient erasure. The method employs interspersed reference counts to describe the extent of the overlapping.
Robust expert ranking in online communities - fighting Sybil Attacks

Nowadays, many online communities provide means for users to contribute in the evaluation of community created media by tagging, commenting and rating. Judging the users expertise in such collaborative systems is an important issue. As these systems are becoming increasingly popular, they are attackable, e.g. by Sybil Attacks. Thus, an effective expert ranking strategy must be robust to such attacks. In this paper, we propose MHITS, an algorithm to rank users' expertise by exploiting the number of users' fair ratings and direct trust users gain in the online community. We integrate SumUp, a Sybil-resilient algorithm, into MHITS algorithm as a robust ranking strategy. Experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed method, which can ensure that the highly ranked experts are highly trusted users and provide the high number of fair ratings for the relevant media. We contribute to the experimental evaluation of algorithms for online systems, fighting malicious behavior.
Effects of Aerobic Exercise on Body Composition and Muscle Strength in Over-Weight to Obese Old Women with Intellectual Disability: A Pilot Study

Aim: To examine the effect of treadmill walking on over-weight to obese females with unspecified mild ID (intellectual disability). Method: Randomized assignment to an aerobic exercise group (G1, n = 6) and control group (G2, n = 3). The G1 performed mild to moderate intensity walking for 25-45 minutes per exercise session, 3-5 times per week up to a weekly walking of 150 minutes, for 32 consecutive weeks. The G2 maintained routine daily activities. Results: The mean age of the study subjects was 57.2 ±7.5 year, BMI was significantly decreased at the conclusion of the intervention (P = 0.005). In the G1, the subcutaneous fat area was also significantly decreased (P = 0.005) but not in G2. No change was there in the visceral fat area of both groups. The quadriceps muscle maximal isometric muscle strength of the G1 and G2 did not change. Conclusion: Long term mild to moderate intensity of aerobic physical exercise for over-weight to obese women with ID is a feasible and effective plan in reducing subcutaneous fat mass, while muscle strength remains unchanged.