Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Amino-Terminal Extensions of the Longer Sendai Virus C Proteins Modulate pY701-Stat1 and Bulk Stat1 Levels Independently of Interferon Signaling

ABSTRACT The Sendai virus (SeV) C proteins are known to interact with Stat1 to prevent interferon (IFN)-induced pY701-Stat1 formation and IFN signaling. Nevertheless, pY701-Stat1 levels paradoxically increase during SeV infection. The C proteins also induce bulk Stat1 instability in some cells, similar to rubulavirus V proteins. We have found that SeV infection increases pY701-Stat1 levels even in cells in which bulk Stat1 levels strongly decrease. Remarkably, both the decrease in bulk Stat1 levels and the increase in pY701-Stat1 levels were found to be independent of the IFN signaling system, i.e., these events occur in mutant cells in which various components of the IFN signaling system have been disabled. Consistent with this, the C-induced decrease in Stat1 levels does not require Y701 of Stat1. We present evidence that C interacts with Stat1 in two different ways, one that prevents IFN-induced pY701-Stat1 formation and IFN signaling that has already been documented, and another that induces pY701-Stat1 formation (while decreasing bulk Stat1 levels) in a manner that does not require IFN signaling. These two types of Stat1 interaction are also distinguishable by C gene mutations. In particular, the IFN signaling-independent Stat1 interactions specifically require the amino-terminal extensions of the longer C proteins. The actions of the SeV C proteins in counteracting the cellular antiviral response are clearly more extensive than previously appreciated.
[Enzymatic resistance to beta lactam antibiotics within the genus Proteus and evaluation of Proteus mirabilis phenotypes and genotypes for resistance to third- and fourth-generation cephalosporins].

INTRODUCTION The aim of this study was to evaluate betalactam resistance within the genus Proteus and characterize the betalactamases responsible for this resistance. METHODS We analyzed 99 strains (87, P. mirabilis; 10 P. vulgaris, and 2, P. penneri) isolated from patients at one University Hospital. Antibiotic susceptibility tests were performed according to NCCLS recommendations. Presence of extended spectrum betalactamases (ESBL) was inferred by both double disk diffusion tests and minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) of third and fourth generation cephalosporins alone and in the presence of clavulanic acid. Isoelectric points (pI) of the enzymes were estimated by isoelectrofocusing and the presence of the encoding genes was confirmed by polymerase chain reaction (PCR). RESULTS A broad spectrum betalactamase could be detected in those isolates (28%) resistant to penicillin and first generation cephalosporins while CTX-M-2 enzyme could be detected in P. mirabilis isolates resistant to third and fourth generation cephalosporins (18%). One of the P. vulgaris displayed reduced susceptibility to cefotaxime due to an enzyme of pI 7.4, while resistance to cefotaxime in one P. penneri was related to an enzyme of pI 6.8. Both enzymes were active on cefotaxime (1,000 mg/l) in the iodometric assay. CONCLUSION The broad extended spectrum betalactamase within genus Proteus was TEM-1, while CTX-M-2 was the ESBL responsible for the third and fourth generation cephalosporins in P. mirabilis. In P. vulgaris and P. penneri this resistance was associated with the hyperproduction of the chromosomal encoded betalactamase.
Sensitivity of cervical carcinoma cells to vesicular stomatitis virus‐induced oncolysis: Potential role of human papilloma virus infection

High‐risk carcinogenic subtypes of human papilloma virus (HPV) are associated with the development of squamous cell carcinomas of the cervix (CC) and a subset of head and neck (HNSCC). Recurrent metastatic diseases of these sites display a dismal prognosis. Therefore, there is an urgent need to uncover innovative therapeutic strategies in this clinical setting. Oncolytic viruses, including vesicular stomatitis virus (VSV), were identified due to their ability to specifically target tumor cells that generally display defects in interferon (IFN) signaling. HPV expressed proteins can inhibit IFN signaling; therefore, HPV‐infected cells may be particularly sensitive to VSV oncolysis. In this study, we evaluated the sensitivity of four CC (HPV+) and four HNSCC (HPV−) derived cell lines to VSV oncolysis. Interestingly, the CC cell lines were consistently more sensitive to VSV cytotoxicity than the HNSCC cell lines tested. Exogenous IFN addition or infection with two attenuated VSV variants that are more susceptible to IFN inhibition failed to attenuate VSV oncolysis in hypersensitive CC cell lines. Furthermore, the expression of HPV‐E6, that inhibits IFN receptor signaling, in the VSV‐resistant HNSCC cell line SCC25 attenuated VSV‐induced IFN response and significantly enhanced VSV cytotoxicity. Finally, differential VSV infection and replication was confirmed in xenograft murine tumor models and explant tumor tissues from two patients with CC. Taken together, these results demonstrate that HPV‐infected cells are susceptible to oncolytic virus therapy and that this approach may represent a novel therapeutic approach in HPV positive CC and HNSCC patients.
LINGUISTIC ACCULTURATION ASSOCIATED WITH HIGHER MARIJUANA AND POLYDRUG USE AMONG HISPANIC ADOLESCENTS

Hispanic sixth and seventh graders in 22 New York City middle schools (mean age: 12.66 years) completed self-report questionnaires with items related to drug use (cigarette smoking, alcohol use, and marijuana) use and linguistic acculturation at two assessments (N= 1299 at baseline; N = 1038 at 1-year follow-up). Adolescents who spoke English with their parents smoked marijuana more frequently than those who spoke Spanish with their parents at both surveys.By the 1-year follow-up, students who spoke English with their parents and bilingual students who spoke English and Spanish with their parents engaged in greater polydrug use than those who spoke Spanish with their parents.
Towards Adaptive Commons: A Case Study of Agro-Pastoral Dams in Northern Ghana

Agro-pastoral dams (APDs) are an increasingly popular method of adaptation interventions improving communal water supply in rural West Africa. However, APDs are often constructed in areas where culturally heterogeneous pastoralists and farmers compete for similar land and water resources. Lifting open access water abundance is likely to change if not intensify ongoing tensions between farmers and settling Fulani herders. The extent of collective action and inclusivity of 6 APDs in Northern Ghana are analysed, combining theory from common-pool resource management and equity and justice in climate change adaptation into a proposed Inclusive Collective Action (ICA) model. Practically, the article demonstrates that neither fully excluding Fulani pastoralists nor making dams openly accessible results in inclusive APD usage and management where collective action is successful, and more dynamic forms of regional inclusion and exclusion are needed. Theoretically, the article identifies some of the limitations of applying the enabling conditions for collective action of common-pool resource theory as it tends to overlook negative aspects of excluding certain user groups in culturally heterogeneous contexts from managing and using a commons.
Long- and Short-Run Components of Factor Betas: Implications for Stock Pricing

We propose a new model that estimates the long- and short-run components of the variances and covariances. The advantage of our model to the existing DCC-based models is that it uses the same form for both the variances and covariances and that it estimates these moments simultaneously. We apply this model to obtain long- and short-run factor betas for industry test portfolios, where the risk factors are the market, SMB, and HML portfolios. We use these betas in cross-sectional analysis of the risk premia. Among other things, we find that the risk premium related to the short-run market beta is significantly positive, irrespective of the choice of test portfolio. Further, the risk premia for the short-run betas of all the risk factors are significant outside recessions.
Age-dependent trends in postoperative mortality and preoperative comorbidity in isolated coronary artery bypass surgery: a nationwide study.

OBJECTIVES An increasing number of octogenarians are being subjected to coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG). The purpose of this study was to examine age-dependent trends in postoperative mortality and preoperative comorbidity over time following CABG. METHODS All patients who underwent isolated CABG surgery between January 1996 and December 2012 in Denmark were included. Patients were identified through nationwide administrative registers. Age was categorized into five different groups and time into three periods to see if mortality and preoperative comorbidity had changed over time. Predictors of 30-day mortality were analysed in a multivariable Cox proportional-hazard models and survival at 1 and 5 years was estimated by Kaplan-Meier curves. RESULTS A total of 38 830 patients were included; the median age was 65.4 ± 9.5 years, increasing over time to 66.6 ± 9.5 years. Males comprised 80%. The number of octogenarians was 1488 (4%). The median survival was 14.7 years (60-69 years), 10.7 years (70-74 years), 8.9 years (75-79 years) and 7.2 years (≥80 years). The 30-day mortality rate was 3%, increasing with age (1% in patients <60 years, 8% in octogenarians). The long-term mortality rate at 1 and 5 years was 2 and 7% (age <60 years) and 14 and 36% (age >80 years), respectively. The proportion of patients >75 years increased from 10 to 20% during the study period as well as the proportion of patients undergoing urgent or emergency surgery. The burden of comorbidities increased over time, e.g. congestive heart failure 13-17%, diabetes 12-21%, stroke 9-11%, in all age groups. Age and emergency surgery were the main predictors of 30-day mortality: age >80 years [hazard ratio (HR): 5.75, 95% confidence interval (CI): 4.41-7.50], emergency surgery (HR: 5.23, 95% CI: 4.38-6.25). CONCLUSION Patients are getting older at the time of surgery and have a heavier burden of comorbidities than before. The proportion of patients undergoing urgent or emergency surgery increased with age and over time. Despite this, the 30-day mortality decreased over time and long-term survival increased, except in octogenarians where it was stable. Octogenarians had substantially higher 30-day mortality compared with younger patients but surgery can be performed with acceptable risks and good long-term outcomes.
Context-Aware Scheduling in Personal Data Collection From Multiple Wearable Devices

Due to the prevalence of smartphones and various wearable devices, the collection of rich personal data that can be used for human activity recognition, user modeling, and personalized services has become feasible. Because of its popularity and high accessibility, the smartphone has not only become an effective terminal in personal data collection, but also a gateway connecting wearable devices and gathering various types of personal data from these wearables. In most current applications, such wearables operate to collect data according to a fixed schedule, often preset manually by a user. The main problems in the data collection arising from such fixed scheduling are weak adaptiveness to wearables’ state changes, a high level of redundancy in collected data, and possible mismatches in the dynamic precision requirements of data capture. Therefore, we propose a context-aware scheduler, that is able to dynamically adjust a data collection schedule based on contingent situations in the condition of wearables, system resource availability, and user behavior. This paper is focused on context data detection and data collection scheduling in a smartphone-based client-server system. The smartphone functions as not only a gateway gathering data from multiple wearables, but also a terminal for the performance of a context-aware scheduler. A context-aware engine is implemented to handle different contextual information. The data quality and system performance have been evaluated and verified in practical experimental tests.
Reproductive character displacement and environmental filtering shape floral variation between sympatric sister taxa

Divergence in reproductive traits between closely related species that co‐occur contributes to speciation by reducing interspecific gene flow. In flowering plants, greater floral divergence in sympatry than allopatry may reflect reproductive character displacement (RCD) by means of divergent pollinator‐mediated selection or mating system evolution. However, environmental filtering (EF) would prevail for floral traits under stronger selection by abiotic factors than pollination, and lead to sympatric taxa being more phenotypically similar. We determine whether floral UV pigmentation and size show signatures of RCD or EF using a biogeographically informed sister taxa comparison. We determine whether 35 sister pairs in the Potentilleae tribe (Rosaceae) are allopatric or sympatric and confirm that sympatric sisters experience more similar bioclimatic conditions, an assumption of the EF hypothesis. We test whether interspecific differences are greater in allopatry or sympatry while accounting for divergence time. For UV pigmentation, sympatric sisters are more phenotypically similar than allopatric ones. For flower size, sympatric sisters show increased divergence with time since speciation but allopatric ones do not. We conclude that floral UV pigmentation shows a signature of EF, whereas flower size shows a signature of RCD. Discordant results between the traits suggest that the dominant selective agent differs between them.
Support Vector Machine Using k-Spatial Medians Clustering and Recovery Process

Even though support vector machine has been successfully applied to various classification problems with its flexibility and high classification accuracy, it is not suitable for classification of large data sets because its computational complexity grows rapidly as the size of data set increases. SVM using k-means clustering (KM-SVM) is a fast algorithm which has been developed to accelerate both computation and prediction of SVM classifiers. However, it seems likely that the data set is contaminated by outliers in real-world situations, and k-means clustering is sensitive to these outliers. Therefore, we propose to combine k-spatial medians clustering with SVM (KS-SVM) since k-spatial medians clustering is robust for outliers. In order to improve the classification accuracy in KS-SVM, furthermore, a recovery process based on KS-SVM (RKS-SVM) is also proposed in this article. Experiments show that KS-SVM can improve the performance of KM-SVM in terms of classification accuracy and number of support vector. It is also shown that the classification accuracy of RKS-SVM is better than one of KS-SVM, but there is a tradeoff between classification accuracy and the number of support vectors.
Exploration of a Crack Use Setting and Its Impact on Drug Users’ Risky Drug Use and Sexual Behaviors: The Case of Piaules in a Montréal Neighborhood

From July 2011, a one-year study based on ethnographic methodology was carried out in “crack houses” in the neighborhood of Hochelaga-Maisonneuve in Montréal, Canada. The study aimed to explore the operational style of a specific indoor drug use setting and its impact on users’ risky sexual and drug use behaviors in a context of drug market change. A thematic analysis of observational and interview notes was conducted. This study stresses the importance to examine the role of environmental factors in relation to crack smoking's health-related risks and to complement individual-based interventions with structural strategies. The study's limitations are noted.
Impact of Feedback Phosphorylation and Raf Heterodimerization on Normal and Mutant B-Raf Signaling

ABSTRACT The B-Raf kinase is a Ras pathway effector activated by mutation in numerous human cancers and certain developmental disorders. Here we report that normal and oncogenic B-Raf proteins are subject to a regulatory cycle of extracellular signal-regulated kinase (ERK)-dependent feedback phosphorylation, followed by PP2A- and Pin1-dependent dephosphorylation/recycling. We identify four S/TP sites of B-Raf phosphorylated by activated ERK and find that feedback phosphorylation of B-Raf inhibits binding to activated Ras and disrupts heterodimerization with C-Raf, which is dependent on the B-Raf pS729/14-3-3 binding site. Moreover, we find that events influencing Raf heterodimerization can alter the transforming potential of oncogenic B-Raf proteins possessing intermediate or impaired kinase activity but have no significant effect on proteins with high kinase activity, such as V600E B-Raf. Mutation of the feedback sites or overexpression of the Pin1 prolyl-isomerase, which facilitates B-Raf dephosphorylation/recycling, resulted in increased transformation, whereas mutation of the S729/14-3-3 binding site or expression of dominant negative Pin1 reduced transformation. Mutation of each feedback site caused increased transformation and correlated with enhanced heterodimerization and activation of C-Raf. Finally, we find that B-Raf and C-Raf proteins containing mutations identified in certain developmental disorders constitutively heterodimerize and that their signaling activity can also be modulated by feedback phosphorylation.
An Opportunity for the Working Class with Increased Markups

This article presents an analysis based on a comparison of stationary states. With technology and relative markups among industries taken as exogenous, the long-period trade-off between wages and rates of profits is determined. A long-period change in relative markups among industries can create a switch point exhibiting capital-reversing. Around such a switch point, a higher wage is associated with firms wanting to employ more labor for a given net output – a favorable occurrence for organized labor.
Variation of Human Salivary O-Glycome

The study of saliva O-glycosylation is receiving increasing attention due to the potential of glycans for disease biomarkers, but also due to easy access and non-invasive collection of saliva as biological fluid. Saliva is rich in glycoproteins which are secreted from the bloodstream or produced by salivary glands. Mucins, which are highly O-glycosylated proteins, are particularly abundant in human saliva. Their glycosylation is associated with blood group and secretor status, and represents a reservoir of potential disease biomarkers. This study aims to analyse and compare O-glycans released from whole human mouth saliva collected 3 times a day from a healthy individual over a 5 days period. O-linked glycans were released by hydrazinolysis, labelled with procainamide and analysed by ultra-high performance liquid chromatography with fluorescence detection (UHPLC-FLR) coupled to electrospray ionization mass spectrometry (ESI-MS/MS). The sample preparation method showed excellent reproducibility and can therefore be used for biomarker discovery. Our data demonstrates that the O-glycosylation in human saliva changes significantly during the day. These changes may be related to changes in the salivary concentrations of specific proteins.
Consensus statement for the prevention and management of pain in the newborn.

OBJECTIVE To develop evidence-based guidelines for preventing or treating neonatal pain and its adverse consequences. Compared with older children and adults, neonates are more sensitive to pain and vulnerable to its long-term effects. Despite the clinical importance of neonatal pain, current medical practices continue to expose infants to repetitive, acute, or prolonged pain. DESIGN Experts representing several different countries, professional disciplines, and practice settings used systematic reviews, data synthesis, and open discussion to develop a consensus on clinical practices that were supported by published evidence or were commonly used, the latter based on extrapolation of evidence from older age groups. A practical format was used to describe the analgesic management for specific invasive procedures and for ongoing pain in neonates. RESULTS Recognition of the sources of pain and routine assessments of neonatal pain should dictate the avoidance of recurrent painful stimuli and the use of specific environmental, behavioral, and pharmacological interventions. Individualized care plans and analgesic protocols for specific clinical situations, patients, and health care settings can be developed from these guidelines. By clearly outlining areas where evidence is not available, these guidelines may also stimulate further research. To use the recommended therapeutic approaches, clinicians must be familiar with their adverse effects and the potential for drug interactions. CONCLUSION Management of pain must be considered an important component of the health care provided to all neonates, regardless of their gestational age or severity of illness.
MZB1 is a GRP94 cochaperone that enables proper immunoglobulin heavy chain biosynthesis upon ER stress

MZB1 (pERp1) is a B-cell-specific and endoplasmic reticulum (ER)-localized protein implicated in antibody secretion and integrin-mediated cell adhesion. Rosenbaum et al. discovered that MZB1 deletion impairs humoral immune responses and antibody secretion in plasma cells that naturally undergo ER stress. Experimental induction of ER stress in mice results in a block of pro-B-cell to pre-B-cell differentiation in Mzb1 knockout mice. MZB1 associates directly with GRP94 and is required for the interaction of GRP94 with immunoglobulin µ heavy chains upon ER stress.
ReqML-catalog: The road to a requirements catalog for mobile learning applications

Mobile learning has emerged as a new and promising learning modality, providing more interactivity and flexibility to learners, tutors and teachers in carrying out educational activities and practices. However, in spite of the benefits, the existing applications still have several issues and challenges to be addressed, such as the quality evaluation of the resulting mobile learning applications. Aiming to bridge this gap, in our work we have defined a set of requirements for mobile learning applications, by means of a mobile learning catalog proposal, entitled ReqML-Catalog. The current catalog is an evolution of other previous versions with several improvements. It was firstly established from the results of systematic literature reviews previously conducted and also based on the knowledge of domain specialists. In order to improve and evolve the catalog, more domain specialists and already established models were considered aiming to standardize the terms used. In general, users were enthusiastic and positive about the ReqML-Catalog and its importance, indicating positive evidence on its use. The adoption of ReqML-Catalog can assist in the design and evaluation of mobile learning applications, definition of reliable software tests that show the applications' limitations and drawbacks and elaboration of requirements for the applications. Using ReqML-Catalog, it is also possible to compare different mobile learning applications, verifying which catalog items are included in each one.