Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Novel activating mutations of the calcium-sensing receptor: the calcilytic NPS-2143 mitigates excessive signal transduction of mutant receptors.

CONTEXT AND OBJECTIVE Activating mutations in the calcium-sensing receptor (CaSR) gene cause autosomal dominant hypocalcemia (ADH). The aims of the present study were the functional characterization of novel mutations of the CaSR found in patients, the comparison of in vitro receptor function with clinical parameters, and the effect of the allosteric calcilytic NPS-2143 on the signaling of mutant receptors as a potential new treatment for ADH patients. METHODS Wild-type and mutant CaSR (T151R, P221L, E767Q, G830S, and A844T) were expressed in human embryonic kidney cells (HEK 293T). Receptor signaling was studied by measuring intracellular free calcium in response to different concentrations of extracellular calcium ([Ca(2+)](o)) in the presence or absence of NPS-2143. RESULTS All ADH patients had lowered serum calcium ranging from 1.7 to 2.0 mm and inadequate intact PTH and urinary calcium excretion. In vitro testing of CaSR mutations from these patients revealed exaggerated [Ca(2+)](o)-induced cytosolic Ca(2+) responses with EC(50) values for [Ca(2+)](o) ranging from 1.56 to 3.15 mM, which was lower than for the wild-type receptor (4.27 mM). The calcilytic NPS-2143 diminished the responsiveness to [Ca(2+)](o) in the CaSR mutants T151R, E767Q, G830S, and A844T. The mutant P221L, however, was only responsive when coexpressed with the wild-type CaSR. CONCLUSION Calcilytics might offer medical treatment for patients with autosomal dominant hypocalcemia caused by calcilytic-sensitive CaSR mutants.
Categorical Climate Forecasts through Regularization and Optimal Combination of Multiple GCM Ensembles

Abstract A Bayesian methodology is used to assess the information content of categorical, probabilistic forecasts of specific variables derived from a general circulation model (GCM) forecast ensemble, and to combine a “prior” forecast (climatological probabilities of each category) with a categorical probabilistic forecast derived from a GCM ensemble to develop posterior, or “regularized” categorical probabilities. The combination algorithm assigns a weight to a particular model forecast and to climatology. The ratio of the sample likelihood of the model based on the posterior categorical probabilities, to that based on climatological probabilities, computed over the period of record of historical forecasts, provides a measure of the skill or information content of a candidate model. The weight given to a GCM forecast serves as a secondary indicator of its information content. Model weights are determined by maximizing the likelihood ratio. Results using the so-called ranked probability skill score as an.
An Enhanced Localization Method for Moving Targets in Coal Mines Based on Witness Nodes

An enhanced localization method based on witness nodes (WitEnLoc) is proposed, in which some sensing nodes are selected as witness nodes to confirm the existence of the target at the site given by the initial localization value and improve the accuracy of the existing localization system. WitEnLoc is primarily comprised of three stages: initial value calculation, target node searching, and search result correction. During the initial value calculation stage, the initial value is obtained using the existing localization system, and witness nodes are determined using the IoT (Internet of Things) control platform. In the target node searching stage, inward and/or outward searches are conducted in order to reduce the scope of each target node. During the search result correction stage, the search results are used to correct the initial value in order to obtain a more accurate final value. The simulation results indicate that the proposed WitEnLoc method can significantly improve the accuracy of the existing localization system.
Adaptive receive antenna selection for orthogonal space-time block codes with channel estimation errors

Decoding orthogonal space-time block codes (OSTBC) requires channel state information at the receiver for coherent detection. However, in practical systems, channel estimation errors are inevitable and may degrade the system performance more as the number of antennas increases. This paper shows that, using less receive antennas probably enhances the performance of OSTBC systems in presence of channel estimation errors. Moreover, a novel adaptive receive antenna selection scheme, which adaptively adjusts the number of receive antennas, is proposed. Performance evaluation and numerical examples show that the proposed scheme improves the performance to a great extent
How to Compile a Bilingual Collocational Lexicon . Automatically

These sentences are extracted from a corpus of the proccedings of the Canadian Parliament, also called the Hansards corpus. As required by law, the Hansards corpus have both the English and the French for each sentence.The corpus consists of a number of pairs of files, one written in English and the other one in French. We used a version of the Hansards in which the sentences have been aligned with their translations as described in [Church91] 2. Sentence (If) is thus the translation in French of Sentence (le). 3
Suppression of vinculin expression by antisense transfection confers changes in cell morphology, motility, and anchorage-dependent growth of 3T3 cells

The expression of vinculin, a major component of adhesion plaques and cell-cell junctions, is markedly modulated in cells during growth activation, differentiation, motility and cell transformation. The stimulation of quiescent cells by serum factors and the culturing of cells on highly adhesive matrices induce vinculin gene expression, whereas the transformation of fibroblast and epithelial cells often results in decreased vinculin expression (reviewed in Rodriguez Fernandez, J. L., B. Geiger, D. Salomon, I. Sabanay, M. Zoller, and A. Ben-Ze'ev. 1992. J. Cell Biol. 119:427). To study the effect of reduced vinculin expression on cell behavior, 3T3 cells were transfected with an antisense vinculin cDNA construct, and clones displaying decreased vinculin levels down to 10-30% of control levels were isolated. These cells showed a round phenotype with smaller and fewer vinculin-positive plaques localized mostly at the cell periphery. In addition, they displayed an increased motility compared to controls, manifested by a faster closure of "wounds" introduced into the monolayer, and by the formation of longer phagokinetic tracks. Moreover, the antisense transfectants acquired a higher cloning efficiency and produced larger colonies in soft agar than the parental counterparts. The results demonstrate that the regulation of vinculin expression in cells can affect, in a major way, cell shape and motility, and that decreased vinculin expression can induce cellular changes reminiscent of those found in transformed cells.
Oxidative bioactivation of the lactol prodrug of a lactone cyclooxygenase-2 inhibitor.

The lactol derivative of a lactone cyclooxygenase-2 inhibitor (DFU) was evaluated in vivo and in vitro for its potential suitability as a prodrug. DFU-lactol was found to be 10 to 20 times more soluble than DFU in a variety of aqueous vehicles. After administration of DFU-lactol at 20 mg kg-1 p.o. in rats, a Cmax of 7.5 microM DFU was reached in the plasma. After oral administration, the ED50s of DFU-lactol in the carrageenan-induced paw edema and lipopolysaccharide-induced pyresis assays in rats are comparable with the ED50s observed when dosing with DFU. Incubations of DFU-lactol with rat and human hepatocytes demonstrated that the oxidation of DFU-lactol can be mediated by liver enzymes and that a competing pathway is direct glucuronidation of the DFU-lactol hydroxyl group. Assays with subcellular fractions from rat liver indicated that most of the oxidation of DFU-lactol occurs in the cytosolic fraction and requires NAD(P)+. Human liver cytosol can also support the oxidation of DFU-lactol to DFU when NAD(P)+ is added to the incubations. Fractionation of human liver cytosolic proteins showed that at least three enzymes are capable of efficiently effecting the oxidation of DFU-lactol to DFU. Incubations with commercially available dehydrogenases suggest that alcohol and hydroxysteroid dehydrogenases are involved in this oxidative process. These data together suggest that lactols may represent useful prodrugs for lactone-containing drugs.
An anthropometric survey of British drivers.

Abstract Although British drivers are not as diverse a population as those of the United Stales, they are not a homogeneous group. Nor are they necessarily representative of the population as a whole. The British car industry has a potential home market of I 25 million cars. It is therefore important to identify the driving population, as the design of many aspects of the car depends on their anthropometric characteristics. An anthropometric survey was carried out by MIRA to provide details of drivers specifically related to the design of cars. The drivers were sampled over a set of survey points throughout England, Scotland and Wales, and a brief measurement session was held in a mobile laboratory. This has made a data bank available, from which to answer specific design problems, particularly those related to multiple dimensions. The measurements have shown that the driving population differs from the US civilian statistics currently used in much design and legislation. Dimensional models are suggested .
Transform-Invariant Recognition by Association in a Recurrent Network

Objects can be reconized independently of the view they present, of their position on the retina, or their scale. It has been suggested that one basic mechanism that makes this possible is a memory effect, or a trace, that allows associations to be made between consecutive views of one object. In this work, we explore the possibility that this memory trace is provided by the sustained activity of neurons in layers of the visual pathway produced by an extensive recurrent connectivity. We describe a model that contains this high recurrent connectivity and synaptic efficacies built with contributions from associations between pairs of views that is simple enough to be treated analytically. The main result is that there is a change of behavior as the strength of the association between views of the same object, relative to the association within each view of an object, increases. When its value is small, sustained activity in the network is produced by the views themselves. As it increases above a threshold value, the network always reaches a particular state (which represents the object) independent of the particular view that was seen as a stimulus. In this regime, the network can still store an extensive number of objects, each defined by a finite (although it can be large) number of views.
Evolutionary approach to produce classifier ensemble based on weighted voting

Combining classifiers are nowadays one of the most promising direction in pattern recognition. There are many methods of decision making which could be used by the ensemble of classifiers. The most popular are methods that have their origin in voting, where the decision of the common classifier is a combination of individual classifiers' outputs, i.e. classifiers' responses (class numbers) or values of discriminants. This work presents classifiers' weights establish via evolutionary approach. We propose such method for classifier ensemble which could produce classifiers better than Oracle classifier what was shown in the previous works of author.
AUTOMATIC SEGMENTATION OF NUCLEI IN 3D MICROSCOPY IMAGES OF C.ELEGANS

Automatic segmentation of nuclei in 3D microscopy images is essential for many biological studies including high throughput analysis of gene expression level, morphology, and phenotypes in single cell level. The complexity and variability of the microscopy images present many difficulties to the traditional image segmentation methods. In this paper, we present a new method based on 3D watershed algorithm to segment such images. By using both the intensity information of the image and the geometry information of the appropriately detected foreground mask, our method is robust to intensity fluctuation within nuclei and at the same time sensitive to the intensity and geometrical cues between nuclei. Besides, the method can automatically correct potential segmentation errors by using several post-processing steps. We tested this algorithm on the 3D confocal images of C.elegans, an organism that has been widely used in biological studies. Our results show that the algorithm can segment nuclei in high accuracy despite the non-uniform background, tightly clustered nuclei with different sizes and shapes, fluctuated intensities, and hollow-shaped staining patterns in the images
Detection of Alpha-Rod Protein Repeats Using a Neural Network and Application to Huntingtin

A growing number of solved protein structures display an elongated structural domain, denoted here as alpha-rod, composed of stacked pairs of anti-parallel alpha-helices. Alpha-rods are flexible and expose a large surface, which makes them suitable for protein interaction. Although most likely originating by tandem duplication of a two-helix unit, their detection using sequence similarity between repeats is poor. Here, we show that alpha-rod repeats can be detected using a neural network. The network detects more repeats than are identified by domain databases using multiple profiles, with a low level of false positives (<10%). We identify alpha-rod repeats in approximately 0.4% of proteins in eukaryotic genomes. We then investigate the results for all human proteins, identifying alpha-rod repeats for the first time in six protein families, including proteins STAG1-3, SERAC1, and PSMD1-2 & 5. We also characterize a short version of these repeats in eight protein families of Archaeal, Bacterial, and Fungal species. Finally, we demonstrate the utility of these predictions in directing experimental work to demarcate three alpha-rods in huntingtin, a protein mutated in Huntington's disease. Using yeast two hybrid analysis and an immunoprecipitation technique, we show that the huntingtin fragments containing alpha-rods associate with each other. This is the first definition of domains in huntingtin and the first validation of predicted interactions between fragments of huntingtin, which sets up directions toward functional characterization of this protein. An implementation of the repeat detection algorithm is available as a Web server with a simple graphical output: http://www.ogic. ca/projects/ard. This can be further visualized using BiasViz, a graphic tool for representation of multiple sequence alignments.
TANL-1: Coreference Resolution by Parse Analysis and Similarity Clustering

Our submission to the Semeval 2010 task on coreference resolution in multiple languages is based on parse analysis and similarity clustering. The system uses a binary classifier, based on Maximum Entropy, to decide whether or not there is a relationship between each pair of mentions extracted from a textual document. Mention detection is based on the analysis of the dependency parse tree.
Implementation and Characterization of a Medical Ultrasound Phased Array Probe With New Pb-Free Soldering Materials

The application of the European Directive on the Restriction of Hazardous Substances, named RoHS, and correlated documents concerning the restriction of the use of hazardous substances in electrical and electronic equipment is critical and expensive, above all when the use of new substances needs to review consolidated production processes. The use of innovative materials (Sn-Ag-Cu alloys or electrically conductive adhesives (ECAs), for instance) instead of the traditional Sn-Pb solder joints and the design review of the electronic equipment when “not-RoHS-compliant” components must not on sale in the market are typical examples. In this context, this paper takes into account a new soldering production process with a conductive adhesive. In particular, we focus on the soldering phase with the adhesive for the design and implementation of ultrasound transducers for an industrial biomedical application. The use of new Pb-free soldering materials, such as a silver conductive adhesive, is considered in this paper in order to implement an ultrasound array transducer. With this component being fundamental for the functionality of the equipment (echocardiography system), a measurement system for the electroacoustic probe characterization is proposed, and some results, in terms of both joint performance and electrical properties of the new electronic device with Pb-free solder joints, are presented. This paper shows the use of conductive adhesives for the implementation of a medical phased array probe, where the soldering material is located among a platelet of the piezoelectric and fingers. A comparison between electroacoustic measures on the elements soldered with an ECA and with the traditional technology Sn-Pb will be also shown. Moreover, in the field of biomedical application, it is also fundamental to assure that the performances of the transducer are maintained in the time. To this aim, some laboratory tests for the evaluation of the reliability performances of the new Pb-free soldering material are proposed, and the preliminary results are presented in this paper.
Validation of an Objective Assessment Instrument for Non-Surgical Treatments of Chest Wall Deformities

Depending on the severity of the condition and associated risk, surgical intervention may not always be the first choice. This is true for treating chest wall deformities such as pectus excavatum and pectus carinatum. For both conditions, novel non-surgical treatments have been developed to gradually alleviate the malformation making use of the elastic nature of the costal cartilages at an early age of the patient. To quantify the performance of such treatments, this paper introduces and discusses the development of a software-based instrument that utilizes 3D chest optical images (surface scans) as input and uses registration techniques to produce an objective gauge of a patient's physical improvement after undergoing treatments. Further discussed is an experiment designed to investigate the construct validity of the developed instrument.
Effects on EEG of Low (1Hz) and High (15Hz) Frequency Repetitive Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation of the Visual Cortex: A Study in the Anesthetized Cat

Here we confirm our earlier findings that showed 1Hz rTMS over the primary visual cortex of the anesthetized cat, known to cause inhibition of the cortex, induces an increase in power in the slow, delta band of the EEG. We also demonstrate that these inhibitory effects of 1Hz rTMS may be measured as changes of spatiotemporal receptive field pa- rameters at the single cell level. We extend these observations to show that higher frequency stimulation of the cortex at 15Hz has the opposite effect of decreasing delta activity, which was also accompanied by significant increases in theta, alpha and beta bands. This highly reproducible EEG change may be useful as a simple marker to predict inhibitory or ex- citatory rTMS effects known to be dependent upon stimulation frequency.
Polarimetric decomposition of multi-angular SAR data for soil moisture retrieval over agricultural fields

This study investigates the polarimetric decomposition of multi-angular polarimetric UAVSAR (Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar) time series, for soil moisture retrieval over the vegetated agricultural fields. The volume scattering component was respectively removed from different incidence angle data. The resulting multiple dominant surface or dihedral scattering components were then integrated as a multi-angular cost function, from which the soil moisture was retrieved. The retrieval performances of single-angular and multi-angular methods were compared, and validated with the ground measurements. The results indicated that, due to the incidence angle combination, the retrieval RMSE decreased, and the level depends on the phenological stage. A significantly high retrieval rate of 90% can be obtained by the multi-angular approach, compared to that of 50% in the single-angular method.
Chronic lymph flow responses to hyperproteinemia

Manning, R. Davis, Jr. Chronic lymph flow responses to hyperproteinemia. Am. J. Physiol. 275 (Regulatory Integrative Comp. Physiol. 44): R135–R140, 1998. —The long-term responses of lymph flow, lymph protein transport, and the permeability-surface area (PS) product to hyperproteinemia have been studied in conscious dogs. Plasma protein concentration (PPC) was increased by daily intravenous infusion of previously collected autologous plasma for 9 days. Lymph flow was determined by collecting lymph chronically from a lymphatic afferent to the popliteal node in the hind leg. Compared with the average value during the normal-PPC period, the following changes occurred during 10 days of high PPC: lymph flow decreased from 12.3 6 1.1 to 3.8 6 0.6 μl/min, lymph protein transport decreased from 241 6 24 to 141 6 21 μg/min, PS product decreased from 4.7 6 0.5 to 3.0 6 0.5 μl/min, PPC increased from 7.1 6 0.1 to 8.8 6 0.4 g/dl, lymph protein concentration increased from 1.9 6 0.1 to 3.8 6 0.1 g/dl, plasma colloid osmotic pressure increased from 18.6 6 0.8 to 24.2 6 2.1 mmHg, and lymph colloid osmotic pressure increased from 4.8 6 0.2 to 10.4 6 0.7 mmHg. In conclusion, long-term hyperproteinemia in dogs resulted in chronic decreases in lymph flow, lymph protein transport, and the PS product and chronic increases in lymph protein concentration and lymph colloid osmotic pressure. The marked decrease in lymph flow during hyperproteinemia decreased lymph protein transport and thus contributed to the increase in lymph protein concentration. In addition, the decreases in PS product and lymph protein transport suggest that transcapillary protein flux decreases during hyperproteinemia.
Guiding agent-oriented requirements elicitation: HOMER

There has been a surge of interest in agent-oriented software engineering in recent years. The key area of requirements engineering for agent-based systems has received considerable attention. However, while notations and models for requirements have been discussed, there has been little attention focused on techniques for elicitation. This paper introduces HOMER, an approach for requirements elicitation that is explicitly agent-oriented. HOMER can be used with existing approaches for agent-oriented software engineering. In this paper, we show how HOMER may be integrated with a specific agent-oriented software engineering approach, ROADMAP. HOMER is aimed to increase the ease with which people may readily design and develop agent-based systems.