Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Population genetic analysis of Bromus tectorum (Poaceae) indicates recent range expansion may be facilitated by specialist genotypes.

PREMISE OF THE STUDY The mechanisms for range expansion in invasive species depend on how genetic variation is structured in the introduced range. This study examined neutral genetic variation in the invasive annual grass Bromus tectorum in the Intermountain Western United States. Patterns of microsatellite (SSR) genotype distribution in this highly inbreeding species were used to make inferences about the roles of adaptively significant genetic variation, broadly adapted generalist genotypes, and facultative outcrossing in the recent range expansion of B. tectorum in this region. METHODS We sampled 20 individuals from each of 96 B. tectorum populations from historically and recently invaded habitats throughout the region and used four polymorphic SSR markers to characterize each individual. KEY RESULTS We detected 131 four-locus SSR genotypes; however, the 14 most common genotypes collectively accounted for 79.2% of the individuals. Common SSR genotypes were not randomly distributed among habitats. Instead, characteristic genotypes sorted into specific recently invaded habitats, including xeric warm and salt desert as well as mesic high-elevation habitats. Other SSR genotypes were common across a range of historically invaded habitats. We observed very few heterozygous individuals (0.58%). CONCLUSIONS Broadly adapted, generalist genotypes appear to dominate historically invaded environments, while recently invaded salt and warm desert habitats are dominated by distinctive SSR genotypes that contain novel alleles. These specialist genotypes are not likely to have resulted from recombination; they probably represent more recent introductions from unknown source populations. We found little evidence that outcrossing plays a role in range expansion.
Neuronanomedicine: An Up-to-Date Overview

The field of neuronanomedicine has recently emerged as the bridge between neurological sciences and nanotechnology. The possibilities of this novel perspective are promising for the diagnosis and treatment strategies of severe central nervous system disorders. Therefore, the development of nano-vehicles capable of permeating the blood–brain barrier (BBB) and reaching the brain parenchyma may lead to breakthrough therapies that could improve life expectancy and quality of the patients diagnosed with brain disorders. The aim of this review is to summarize the recently developed organic, inorganic, and biological nanocarriers that could be used for the delivery of imaging and therapeutic agents to the brain, as well as the latest studies on the use of nanomaterials in brain cancer, neurodegenerative diseases, and stroke. Additionally, the main challenges and limitations associated with the use of these nanocarriers are briefly presented.
The membrane with polylactide and hyaluronic fibers for skin substitute.

PURPOSE Skin substitutes are heterogeneous group of scaffolds (natural or synthetic) and cells. We hypothesize that nanofibers with layer composition made of polylactide (PLA) and sodium hyaluronate (HA) obtained using electrospinning method are a good matrix for cell adhesion and proliferation. METHODS Optimal conditions of electrospinning of PLA and HA nanofibers to create layered compositions (PLA membrane covered with HA nonwovens) were determined by modifying parameters such as the appropriate amount of solvents, polymer concentration, mixing temperature and electrospinning process conditions. By changing the parameters, it was possible to control the diameter and properties of both polymer fibers. The spinning solution were characterized by surface tension and rheology. A scanning electron microscope (SEM) was used to determine the morphology and fiber diameters: PLA and HA. Structure of the PLA/HA nonwoven was analyzed using spectroscopy (FTIR/ATR). Biocompatibility of the nonwoven with fibroblasts (ECM producers) was assessed in the in vitro conditions. RESULTS The results showed that stable conditions for the formation of submicron PLA fibers were obtained using a 13% wt. solution of the polymer, dissolved in a 3:1 mixture of DCM:DMF at 45 °C. The hyaluronic fibers were prepared from a 12% wt. solution of the polymer dissolved in a 2:1 mixture of ammonia water and ethyl alcohol. All materials were biocompatible but to a different degree. CONCLUSIONS The proposed laminate scaffold was characterized by a hydrophobic-hydrophilic domain surface with a maintained fiber size of both layers. The material positively underwent biocompatibility testing in contact with fibroblasts.
Role of the endocannabinoid system in the dorsal hippocampus in the cardiovascular changes and delayed anxiety-like effect induced by acute restraint stress in rats

Background: The dorsal hippocampus has a central role in modulating cardiovascular responses and behavioral adaptation to stress. The dorsal hippocampus also plays a key role in stress-associated mental disorders. The endocannabinoid system is widely expressed in the dorsal hippocampus and modulates defensive behaviors under stressful conditions. The endocannabinoid anandamide activates cannabinoid type 1 receptors and is metabolized by the fatty acid amide hydrolase enzyme. Aims: We sought to verify whether cannabinoid type 1 receptors modulate stress-induced cardiovascular changes, and if pharmacological fatty acid amide hydrolase inhibition in the dorsal hippocampus would prevent the cardiovascular responses and the delayed anxiogenic-like behavior evoked by restraint stress in rats via cannabinoid type 1 receptors. Methods: Independent groups received intra-dorsal-hippocampal injections of N-(piperidin-1yl)-5-(4-iodophenyl)-1-(2,4-dichlorophenyl)-4-methyl-hpyrazole-3-carboxamide (AM251; cannabinoid type 1 receptor antagonist/inverse agonist, 10–300 pmol) and/or cyclohexyl carbamic acid 3′-carbamoyl-biphenyl-3-yl ester (URB597; fatty acid amide hydrolase inhibitor, 10 pmol) before the restraint stress session. Cardiovascular response during restraint stress or later behavioral parameters were evaluated. Results: Acute restraint stress altered the cardiovascular response, characterized by increased heart rate and mean arterial pressure, as well as decreased tail cutaneous temperature. It also induced a delayed anxiogenic-like effect, evidenced by reduced open arm exploration in the elevated plus maze 24 h after stress. AM251 exacerbated the stress-induced cardiovascular responses after injection into the dorsal hippocampus. In contrast, local injection of URB597 prevented the cardiovascular response and the delayed (24 h) behavioral consequences of restraint stress, effects attenuated by pretreatment with AM251. Conclusion: Our data corroborate previous results indicating that the hippocampal endocannabinoid system modulates the outcome of stress exposure and suggest that this could involve modulation of the cardiovascular response during stress exposure.
Inferring Drug-Protein–Side Effect Relationships from Biomedical Text

Background: Although there are many studies of drugs and their side effects, the underlying mechanisms of these side effects are not well understood. It is also difficult to understand the specific pathways between drugs and side effects. Objective: The present study seeks to construct putative paths between drugs and their side effects by applying text-mining techniques to free text of biomedical studies, and to develop ranking metrics that could identify the most-likely paths. Materials and Methods: We extracted three types of relationships—drug-protein, protein-protein, and protein–side effect—from biomedical texts by using text mining and predefined relation-extraction rules. Based on the extracted relationships, we constructed whole drug-protein–side effect paths. For each path, we calculated its ranking score by a new ranking function that combines corpus- and ontology-based semantic similarity as well as co-occurrence frequency. Results: We extracted 13 plausible biomedical paths connecting drugs and their side effects from cancer-related abstracts in the PubMed database. The top 20 paths were examined, and the proposed ranking function outperformed the other methods tested, including co-occurrence, COALS, and UMLS by P@5-P@20. In addition, we confirmed that the paths are novel hypotheses that are worth investigating further. Discussion: The risk of side effects has been an important issue for the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). However, the causes and mechanisms of such side effects have not been fully elucidated. This study extends previous research on understanding drug side effects by using various techniques such as Named Entity Recognition (NER), Relation Extraction (RE), and semantic similarity. Conclusion: It is not easy to reveal the biomedical mechanisms of side effects due to a huge number of possible paths. However, we automatically generated predictable paths using the proposed approach, which could provide meaningful information to biomedical researchers to generate plausible hypotheses for the understanding of such mechanisms.
Near-eye light field holographic rendering with spherical waves for wide field of view interactive 3D computer graphics

Holograms display a 3D image in high resolution and allow viewers to focus freely as if looking through a virtual window, yet computer generated holography (CGH) hasn't delivered the same visual quality under plane wave illumination and due to heavy computational cost. Light field displays have been popular due to their capability to provide continuous focus cues. However, light field displays must trade off between spatial and angular resolution, and do not model diffraction. We present a light field-based CGH rendering pipeline allowing for reproduction of high-definition 3D scenes with continuous depth and support of intra-pupil view-dependent occlusion. Our rendering accurately accounts for diffraction and supports various types of reference illuminations for hologram. We avoid under- and over-sampling and geometric clipping effects seen in previous work. We also demonstrate an implementation of light field rendering plus the Fresnel diffraction integral based CGH calculation which is orders of magnitude faster than the state of the art [Zhang et al. 2015], achieving interactive volumetric 3D graphics. To verify our computational results, we build a see-through, near-eye, color CGH display prototype which enables co-modulation of both amplitude and phase. We show that our rendering accurately models the spherical illumination introduced by the eye piece and produces the desired 3D imagery at the designated depth. We also analyze aliasing, theoretical resolution limits, depth of field, and other design trade-offs for near-eye CGH.
Nephrogenic systemic fibrosis: incidence, associations, and effect of risk factor assessment--report of 33 cases.

PURPOSE To describe the presentation and clinical course of patients with nephrogenic systemic fibrosis (NSF) at a large acute-care hospital, to evaluate the overall incidence of NSF, and to assess the effect of a hospital-wide policy regarding gadolinium-based contrast agent (GBCA) use on NSF incidence. MATERIALS AND METHODS A review of all cases of NSF observed at an institution from 2003 to 2008 was conducted. This HIPAA-compliant study was approved by the institutional review board. The informed consent requirement was waived. Demographics, medical history, and associated conditions were recorded. Radiologic procedures were evaluated if they were performed within 1 year prior to NSF onset. GBCA use was assessed by checking the electronic database for each procedure. The incidence of NSF was compared before and after implementation of an institutional policy designed to assess risk of NSF prior to GBCA use. RESULTS All 33 patients with NSF (mean age, 49 years; age range, 15-78 years) had advanced renal failure (estimated glomerular filtration rate < 15 mL/min/1.73 m(2)) when the GBCA was injected. Twenty-six patients had severe chronic or end-stage renal disease, and seven had acute renal failure. The mean interval between contrast material injection and NSF onset was 29 days +/- 25 (standard deviation) (range, 4-112 days). The overall incidence of NSF was 36.5 cases per 100,000 gadolinium-enhanced magnetic resonance (MR) examinations between 2003 and 2006 and four cases per 100,000 gadolinium-enhanced MR examinations between 2007 and 2008 after screening for NSF risk was instituted (Fisher exact test, P = .001). Five patients developed NSF in the peritransplant period, and four underwent a catheter-based radiographic procedure with administration of a GBCA. CONCLUSION Common associations of GBCA MR imaging and NSF were acute and severe chronic renal failure and liver or renal transplantation. Screening procedures performed before MR imaging to determine which patients were at risk of developing NSF appear to reduce the incidence of this complication and further support the belief that NSF is associated with GBCA administration.
The complete mitochondrial genome of Asiotmethis jubatus (Uvarov, 1926) (Orthoptera: Acridoidea: Pamphagidae)

Abstract The complete mitochondrial genome of Asiotmethis jubatus (Uvarov, 1926), which was collected from the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region of China, is reported here. It is 15,669 bp in length and contains 72.3% AT. All Asiotmethis jubatus protein-coding sequences start with a typical ATN codon, excluding cox1 and nad6. The usual termination codon (TAN) and incomplete stop codons (T) were found from 13 protein-coding genes. All tRNA genes could be folded into the typical cloverleaf secondary structure, excluding trnS(AGN) which forms another structure. The sizes of the large and small ribosomal RNA genes are 1315 and 852 bp, respectively. The AT content of the A + T-rich region is 81.9%.
Hospitalisations and outpatient visits for undifferentiated fever attributable to scrub typhus in rural South India: Retrospective cohort and nested case-control study

Background The burden of scrub typhus in endemic areas is poorly understood. This study aimed at estimating the proportion of hospitalisations and outpatient visits for undifferentiated fever in the community that may be attributable to scrub typhus. Methodology and principal findings The study was a retrospective cohort with a nested case-control study conducted in the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu. We conducted house-to-house screening in 48 villages (42965 people, 11964 households) to identify hospitalised or outpatient cases due to undifferentiated fever during the preceding scrub typhus season. We used scrub typhus IgG to determine past infection. We calculated adjusted odds ratios for the association between IgG positivity and case status. Odds ratios were used to estimate population attributable fractions (PAF) indicating the proportion of hospitalised and outpatient fever cases attributable to scrub typhus. We identified 58 cases of hospitalisation and 236 outpatient treatments. 562 people were enrolled as control group to estimate the background IgG sero-prevalence. IgG prevalence was 20.3% in controls, 26.3% in outpatient cases and 43.1% in hospitalised cases. The PAFs suggested that 29.5% of hospitalisations and 6.1% of outpatient cases may have been due to scrub typhus. In villages with a high IgG prevalence (defined as ≥15% among controls), the corresponding PAFs were 43.4% for hospitalisations and 5.6% for outpatients. The estimated annual incidence of scrub typhus was 0.8/1000 people (0.3/1000 in low, and 1.3/1000 in high prevalence villages). Evidence for recall error suggested that the true incidences may be about twice as high as these figures. Conclusions The study suggests scrub typhus as an important cause for febrile hospitalisations in the community. The results confirm the adequacy of empirical treatment for scrub typhus in hospitalised cases with undifferentiated fever. Since scrub typhus may be rare among stable outpatients, the use of empirical treatment remains doubtful in these.
First isolation of Leishmania infantum by blood culture in bovines from endemic area for canine visceral leishmaniasis

Abstract Leishmaniasis is considered a parasitic disease that still causes serious consequences for mankind, because it presents a high mortality rate worldwide. Considered multi-hosts, the parasites of the genus Leishmania are able of infecting a wide variety of animal species. The dog was considered the main source of infection of visceral leishmaniasis (VL), in the urban area. However, the role of other animal species in the epidemiological cycle of the disease, such as cattle, remains unclear. Therefore, the aim of the present study was to evaluate the occurrence of Leishmania spp. in 100 bovines (Bos taurus) from an area endemic for canine VL, using blood culture and molecular analysis. By the sequencing analysis, one sample showed 100% similarity with Leishmania infantum. The results provide the first case of L. infantum isolation in one bovine from the periurban areas of Bauru, state of São Paulo, Brazil.
Adaptive Rate-Compatible Non-Binary LDPC Coding Scheme for the B5G Mobile System

This paper studies an adaptive coding scheme for B5G (beyond 5th generation) mobile system-enhanced transmission technology. Different from the existing works, the authors develop a class of rate-compatible, non-binary, low-density parity check (RC-NB-LDPC) codes, which expresses the strong connection between the algebra-based and graph-theoretic-based constructions. The constructed codes can not only express rate-compatible (RC) features, but also possess a quasi-cyclic (QC) structure that facilitates the encoding implementation. Further, in order to achieve the code rate-adaptive allocation scheme, the authors propose using the K-means++ clustering algorithm to cluster different channel environments, considering various factors that affect channel characteristics. Finally, in order to present the advantages of the adaptive coding scheme, the authors construct a coding scheme for image transmission. The numerical results demonstrate that the developed code can obtain better waterfall performance in a larger code rate range, which is more suitable for data transmission; the adaptive coding transmission scheme can obtain higher reconstructed image quality compared to the fixed code rate-coding scheme. Moreover, when considering unequal error protection (UEP), the proposed scheme can further improve the reconstructed image quality.
Design of a low‐cost culture medium based in whey permeate for biomass production of enological Lactobacillus plantarum strains

The production of malolactic starter cultures requires the obtention of suitably large biomass at low‐cost. In this work it was possible to obtain a good amount of biomass, at laboratory scale, of two enological strains of Lb. plantarum, by formulating a culture medium based on whey permeate (WP), a by‐product of the cheese industry usually disposed as waste, when this was supplemented with yeast extract (Y), salts (S) and Tween 80 (T) (WPYST). Bacteria grown in WPYST medium exhibited good tolerance to stress conditions of synthetic wine (pH 3.5, ethanol 13% vol/vol). However, when WPYST was added with 8% vol/vol ethanol, cultures inoculated in synthetic wine, showed a lower viability and capacity to consume L‐malic acid than when they were cultured in WPYST without ethanol. Subsequently, strains grown in WPYST were inoculated in sterile wine samples (final stage of alcoholic fermentation) of the red varietals Merlot and Pinot noir, and incubated at laboratory scale. Cultures from WPYST, inoculated in Pinot noir wine, showed a better performance than bacteria grown in MRS broth, and exhibited a consumption of L‐malic acid higher than 90%. However, cultures from WPYST or from MRS broth, inoculated in sterile Merlot wine, showed a lower survival. This study allowed the formulation of a low‐cost culture medium, based on a by‐product of the food industry, which showed to be adequate for the growth of two enological strains of Lb. plantarum, suggesting their potentiality for application in the elaboration of malolactic starter cultures.
Enhancing Mobility With Quasi-Passive Variable Stiffness Exoskeletons

Shoes were invented to provide user comfort using rubber soles, despite marginal improvement in human mobility. Unlike shoes, current lower-limb exoskeletons use fixed stiffness springs to store and recycle energy to improve mobility. However, the maximum kinetic energy a human can accumulate when augmented with a fixed stiffness spring is limited by the maximum deflection and the ability of the limbs to generate force; tying the advantage of fixed stiffness exoskeletons to biological constraints. Here, we propose a method for improving mobility using quasi-passive variable stiffness spring exoskeletons, where the maximum kinetic energy accumulated by a human is independent of the limb deflection and the ability of the limb to generate force. This is achieved by a variable stiffness augmentation of the human, where the exoskeleton does not provide mechanical work. The theoretical advantage provided by this new augmentation method can be useful in demanding tasks, where humans could benefit from increased speed and reduced energy cost of motion.
Coincidence of Dental Midline with Facial Midline in a Sample of Pakistani Population.

OBJECTIVE To determine the frequency of coincidence of facial and dental midlines in a sample of Pakistani subjects. STUDY DESIGN Cross-sectional study. PLACE AND DURATION OF STUDY Department of Prosthodontics, Fatima Jinnah Dental College and Hospital, Karachi, from October to December 2017. METHODOLOGY Subjects of either gender (n=117) were selected from pool of otherwise healthy dental students. Facial portrait photographs using a DSLR camera were obtained while keeping the teeth in maximum inter-cuspation position. Auto-CAD software was used to analyse the coincidence of facial, maxillary and mandibular midlines. SPSS Version 23.0 was used for data analysis. The coincidence of the midlines were determined using Pearson correlation test. Level of significance was set at 0.05. RESULTS The coincidence of maxilla-mandible midlines was 64.1% (75/117); whereas, coincidence of facial midline with maxillary and mandibular midlines were 47.9% (56/117) and 46.1% (54/117), respectively. Left sided deviations of dental midlines were more frequent than the right side. CONCLUSION The coincidence of inter-maxillary midlines was seen in two-thirds of the participants only. The dental midlines were coincident with the facial midline in less than half of the sample.