Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Interventions to improve self-management of adults living with HIV on Antiretroviral Therapy: A systematic review

Introduction Since its initial recognition, HIV has been responsible for around 35 million deaths globally. The introduction of Antiretroviral Therapy has helped to reduce mortality from HIV. However, the resulting increased longevity has influenced the experience of people living with HIV, which now manifests as a chronic condition requiring effective self-management. This review aimed to identify and evaluate the effectiveness of interventions to improve self-management of adults living with HIV on Antiretroviral therapy. Methods The review included published experimental studies addressing interventions to improve self-management of adults living with HIV on Antiretroviral Therapy. Studies were included if they addressed two or more outcomes of self-management, as defined by the Theory of Individual and Family Self-Management. The search covered four databases and was limited to papers published in the English language from 2001 to March 30, 2019. The reference lists of included studies were further searched for additional studies. Two independent reviewers using the Joanna Briggs Institute Meta-Analysis of Statistics Assessment and Review Instrument (JBI SUMARI) assessed the methodological quality of the reviewed papers. Data extraction was undertaken using the JBI SUMARI standardized data extraction tool. As the included papers were not homogeneous, it was not possible to conduct a meta-analysis. A narrative synthesis was undertaken to synthesize the findings of the included studies. Results The search identified 337 articles from which 10 experimental and 2 quasi-experimental studies were included. The total participant sample in the included studies was 1661 adults living with HIV. The overall evidence quality of the findings was considered moderate. Many of the studies included in this review comprised multi-component interventions to improve self-management. Skills training, in conjunction with other forms of interventions, particularly phone counseling, was commonly employed and generally effective in improving self-management outcomes. Counseling with a symptom management manual was another employed and effective intervention, followed by technology-assisted self-management interventions. The most common outcomes measured were maintaining medication adherence and quality of life, followed by symptom management, self-efficacy, coping, and social support. Conclusions Interventions to improve self-management varied across studies. However, promising outcomes achieved in the majority of studies through interventions comprising a combination of skills training, phone counseling, counseling with symptom management manuals, and technology-assisted interventions.
Effects of Chromium Picolinate Supplementation on Cardiometabolic Biomarkers in Patients with Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus: a Randomized Clinical Trial

Type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) is a serious public health problem accompanies with several complications. This study was conducted to evaluate the effects of chromium picolinate (CrPic) supplementation on the glycemic status and lipid profile in patients with T2DM. The patients with T2DM (n = 52) were randomly allocated into 2 groups. One group received 400 µg CrPic per day and the other group took placebo; the intervention duration was 8 weeks. Anthropometric indices and metabolic factors were measured at the beginning, and at end of the study. The patients were recommended not to change their normal diet, life style and medication. No significant changes were observed for weight, body mass index, and fasting blood glucose (FBG) in both groups; while intra-groups changes in homeostatic model assessment for insulin resistance (HOMA-IR) value was significant (p < 0.05). Results of analysis of covariance showed that there were significance differences between groups in total cholesterol, low density lipoprotein cholesterol and HOMA-IR at the end of the intervention adjusting for baseline levels (p = 0.035, 0.030 and < 0.001, respectively). In this study, oral supplementation with 400 µg CrPic for eight weeks did not alter FBG concentration as well as anthropometric parameters in individuals with T2DM. However, the modest beneficial effects of chromium supplementation on insulin resistance as indicated by HOMA-IR and lipid profile were found.
The Physiological Measure of Competition

The measure of physiological responses to competition, at least in part, can often fulfil these requirements. This line of inquiry, however, has not been widely used, and of course it is clear at the outset that it is not always feasible. Where competitive outcome requires many generations, sufficiently sensitive physiological measures would be highly inconvenient if indeed possible. A second limitation often lies in the general nature of animal physiology which is less likely to be adapted for competition than for specific features of the environment (Beament, 1961). Also, evolution may favor behavioral mechanisms for avoiding competition instead of mechanisms for surviving or winning it. Therefore, it is not surprising that a physiological analysis of competition has not been applied with much success in any organisms. A notable exception is the historically very significant work of Gause some thirty years ago. Basically, Gause's experiments consisted of growing, separately and together, two species of yeast which differed somewhat in fermentative and oxidative capacities. Growth curves for both species were of the classical S-form. In aerobic culture, the relative effects of both species on each other's growth coincided exactly with the relative rates of ethanol production; in anaerobic competition, the outcome depended on some other metabolite(s) along with alcohol. In both cases, the metabolites presumably acted by the destruction of young buds. For the purposes of his model, definition of the limiting biochemical factors was not necessary; it was required only that they existed, and, for the simple case, were not replaced by another set. Growth measures alone could describe empirically the entire process. However, Gause's approach allowed insight into the mechanisms involved and made possible detailed descriptions of several competitive situations (Gause, 1934). Stipulating the proviso that a higher animal has a more complex behavioral and ecological repertoire, it is possible here also to pursue Gause's line of attack. The recent studies in Alberta on the mechanism of competition between fish populations is one such attempt.
The osteoglossid kidney: correlations of structure, function, and metabolism with transition to air breathing

The cell composition, ultrastructure, ion-activated ATPase content, and metabolic enzyme activities of the kidneys in water- and air-breathing osteoglossids were compared. In both, the nephron consisted of three main segments. The first segment contained a well-developed brush border, numerous lysosomes, numerous mitochondria localized primarily in the basal two-thirds of the cell, and many apical tubules. The most striking feature of the second segment was a highly infolded basilar membrane, laying in close laminar association with large, elongate mitochondria, localized to the basal two-thirds of the cell. Particularly in Arapaima, cells of the third segment formed the longest homogeneous region of the nephron. In both species, the ultrastructure of the third segment was remarkably similar to that of the teleost chloride cell. The kidney in Osteoglossum, a water breather, was divided into head and trunk regions with nephrons only in the latter; in the air breather, the kidney was three- to four-fold lar.
Estimating phosphorus loss from New Zealand grassland soils

Abstract The potential for phosphorus (P) loss from New Zealand grassland soils was assessed using a combination of measured soil chemical properties and concentrations of dissolved reactive P (DRP) determined in drainage and overland flow from simulated rainfall experiments. Soil analyses included Olsen P, calcium chloride (0.01M CaCl2) and water extractable DRP, P sorption index (PSI), and % P retention. Results confirmed that DRP concentrations in drainage and overland flow were closely related to CaCl2‐ and water‐extractable DRP in soil, respectively. The preliminary data indicated that the potential concentration of DRP in subsurface and overland flow from pasture soils that have not been recently grazed and at a small scale (e.g., overland flow from 1‐m lengths) could be estimated from Olsen P and PSI (or P retention) data according to the following equations: DRP (subsurface flow) = 1.480 (Olsen P/PSI) = 0.069 (Olsen P/P retention) + 0.007 DRP (overland flow) = 0.495 (Olsen P/PSI) = 0.024 (Olsen P/P retention) + 0.024.
Formation of an hERα–COUP‐TFI complex enhances hERα AF‐1 through Ser118 phosphorylation by MAPK

The enhancement of the human estrogen receptor α (hERα, NR3A1) activity by the orphan nuclear receptor COUP‐TFI is found to depend on the establishment of a tight hERα–COUP‐TFI complex. Formation of this complex seems to involve dynamic mechanisms different from those allowing hERα homodimerization. Although the hERα–COUP‐TFI complex is present in all cells tested, the transcriptional cooperation between the two nuclear receptors is restricted to cell lines permissive to hERα activation function 1 (AF‐1). In these cells, the physical interaction between COUP‐TFI and hERα increases the affinity of hERα for ERK2/p42MAPK, resulting in an enhanced phosphorylation state of the hERα Ser118. hERα thus acquires a strengthened AF‐1 activity due to its hyperphosphorylation. These data indicate an alternative interaction process between nuclear receptors and demonstrate a novel protein intercommunication pathway that modulates hERα AF‐1.
Studies on Thermophilic Bacteria

1. Eighty-nine strains of bacteria, studied according to the index number as expressed on the descriptive chart of the Society of American Bacteriologists, fell into twelve classes. All of these separations are based upon unessential characteristics of classification. In the light of this fact, the thermophilic group seems to be a homogeneous one, the members having in common all of the important characteristics used in classification. 2. A tentative separation of bacteria into groups on the basis of reaction to temperature has been presented. 3. The ability to grow at high temperatures seems to be a somewhat relative function, depending on the conditions of incubation. The so-called strict thermophilic bacteria, however, show a much more rapid growth at 55°C. than at lower temperatures. They must be distinguished from thermo-tolerant bacteria. 4. The thermal resistance of eighteen strains of thermophilic bacteria was studied. At the higher temperatures, 115°C and 120°C. , the thermal death points fell within narrower time limits than those at the lower temperatures, 100°, 105°, and 110°C. 5. The "index number" is a distinct improvement upon the old "group number," although some of the points in the "index number" would be difficult to determine. For instance, the function of pathogenicity could not be determined without a great deal of experimental work. 6. The character of the media influenced the temperatures for the growth of thermophiles.
Impact of Intensive Lifestyle Treatment (Diet Plus Exercise) on Endothelial and Vascular Function, Arterial Stiffness and Blood Pressure in Stage 1 Hypertension: Results of the HINTreat Randomized Controlled Trial

Lifestyle modification is an important component of essential hypertension (EH) therapy. The aim of the Hypertension Intensive Nutrition Treatment (HINTreat) parallel, randomized controlled trial was to examine the effect of a 6-month intensive lifestyle treatment (ILT) (diet plus exercise with monthly visits) compared to the usual care. A total of 76 adults with stage 1 EH were randomized (38 in each group). Dietary analysis, anthropometry, physical activity, biochemical and urine profile, blood pressure (BP), asymmetric dimethylarginine (ADMA), central hemodynamics, β-stiffness index and carotid intima media-thickness were evaluated. The dietary inflammatory index (DII) was calculated for each participant from the intake of 29 nutrients/food components. At the end of the trial, participants in the ILT group reduced their 24h urinary Na excretion (p ≤ 0.001), daytime systolic BP (p ≤ 0.048) and mean carotid β-stiffness index (p ≤ 0.005) and ameliorated their lipidemic profile compared to the standard care. Univariate analysis for the total sample showed a strong association between DII and ADMA levels (β = 0.089, p ≤ 0.01). ILT is effective in improving the inflammatory components of the diet and selected cardiometabolic parameters, including arterial stiffness.
Robust Estimation of Absolute Camera Pose via Intersection Constraint and Flow Consensus

Estimating the absolute camera pose requires 3D-to-2D correspondences of points and/or lines. However, in practice, these correspondences are inevitably corrupted by outliers, which affects the pose estimation. Existing outlier removal strategies for robust pose estimation have some limitations. They are only applicable to points, rely on prior pose information, or fail to handle high outlier ratios. By contrast, we propose a general and accurate outlier removal strategy. It can be integrated with various existing pose estimation methods originally vulnerable to outliers, and is applicable to points, lines, and the combination of both. Moreover, it does not rely on any prior pose information. Our strategy has a nested structure composed of the outer and inner modules. First, our outer module leverages our intersection constraint, i.e., the projection rays or planes defined by inliers intersect at the camera center. Our outer module alternately computes the inlier probabilities of correspondences and estimates the camera pose. It can run reliably and efficiently under high outlier ratios. Second, our inner module exploits our flow consensus. The 2D displacement vectors or 3D directed arcs generated by inliers exhibit a common directional regularity, i.e., follow a dominant trend of flow. Our inner module refines the inlier probabilities obtained at each iteration of our outer module. This refinement improves the accuracy and facilitates the convergence of our outer module. Experiments on both synthetic data and real-world images have shown that our method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in terms of accuracy and robustness.
Dynamic genetic architecture of yeast response to environmental perturbation shed light on origin of cryptic genetic variation

Cryptic genetic variation could arise from, for example, Gene-by-Gene (G-by-G) or Gene-by-Environment (G-by-E) interactions. The underlying molecular mechanisms and how they influence allelic effects and the genetic variance of complex traits is largely unclear. Here, we empirically explored the role of environmentally influenced epistasis on the suppression and release of cryptic variation by reanalysing a dataset of 4,390 haploid yeast segregants phenotyped on 20 different media. The focus was on 130 epistatic loci, each contributing to segregant growth in at least one environment and that together explained most (69–100%) of the narrow sense heritability of growth in the individual environments. We revealed that the epistatic growth network reorganised upon environmental changes to alter the estimated marginal (additive) effects of the individual loci, how multi-locus interactions contributed to individual segregant growth and the level of expressed genetic variance in growth. The estimated additive effects varied most across environments for loci that were highly interactive network hubs in some environments but had few or no interactors in other environments, resulting in changes in total genetic variance across environments. This environmentally dependent epistasis was thus an important mechanism for the suppression and release of cryptic variation in this population. Our findings increase the understanding of the complex genetic mechanisms leading to cryptic variation in populations, providing a basis for future studies on the genetic maintenance of trait robustness and development of genetic models for studying and predicting selection responses for quantitative traits in breeding and evolution.
Proteolytic hydrolysis of muscle proteins of harp seal (Phoca groenlandica)

Protein hydrolysates were prepared from mechanically separated seal meat (MSSM) using commercially available microbial enzymes Alcalase and Neutrase. The enzyme in each case was inactivated by acidification with 4 N HCl to pH 4.0. Heme groups were removed, and the hydrolyzed proteins were bleached with charcoal, neutralized to pH 7.0, and dehydrated. The yield of hydrolysate (YH) and the degree of hydrolysis (DH) using Alcalase, under optimum conditions, were 92.75% and 19.5%, respectively. The YH for Neutrase-assisted hydrolysis of MSSM was 72.85%. The dehydrated seal protein hydrolysate (SPH) contained 77.3% crude proteins, 0.74% lipid, and 20.67% minerals, mainly sodium chloride
HMMs for Anomaly Detection in Autonomous Robots

Detection of anomalies and faults is a key element for long-term robot autonomy, because, together with subsequent diagnosis and recovery, allows to reach the required levels of robustness and persistency. In this paper, we propose an approach for detecting anomalous behaviors in autonomous robots starting from data collected during their routine operations. The main idea is to model the nominal (expected) behavior of a robot system using Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) and to evaluate how far the observed behavior is from the nominal one using variants of the Hellinger distance adopted for our purposes. We present a method for online anomaly detection that computes the Hellinger distance between the probability distribution of observations made in a sliding window and the corresponding nominal emission probability distribution. We also present a method for o � ine anomaly detection that computes a variant of the Hellinger distance between two HMMs representing nominal and observed behaviors. The use of the Hellinger distance positively impacts on both detection performance and interpretability of detected anomalies, as shown by results of experiments performed in two real-world application domains, namely, water monitoring with aquatic drones and socially assistive robots for elders living at home. In particular, our approach improves by 6% the area under the ROC curve of standard online anomaly detection methods. The capabilities of our o � ine method to discriminate anomalous behaviors in real-world applications are statistically proved.
Anaerobic bacterial metabolism of hydrocarbons

The capacity of some bacteria to metabolize hydrocarbons in the absence of molecular oxygen was first recognized only about ten years ago. Since then, the number of hydrocarbon compounds shown to be catabolized anaerobically by pure bacterial cultures has been steadily increasing. This review summarises the current knowledge of the bacterial isolates capable of anaerobic mineralization of hydrocarbons, and of the biochemistry and molecular biology of enzymes involved in the catabolic pathways of some of these substrates. Several alkylbenzenes, alkanes or alkenes are anaerobically utilized as substrates by several species of denitrifying, ferric iron-reducing and sulfate-reducing bacteria. Another group of anaerobic hydrocarbon degrading bacteria are ‘proton reducers’ that depend on syntrophic associations with methanogens. For two alkylbenzenes, toluene and ethylbenzene, details of the biochemical pathways involved in anaerobic mineralization are known. These hydrocarbons are initially attacked by novel, formerly unknown reactions and oxidized further to benzoyl-CoA, a common intermediate in anaerobic catabolism of many aromatic compounds. Toluene degradation is initiated by an unusual addition reaction of the toluene methyl group to the double bond of fumarate to form benzylsuccinate. The enzyme catalyzing this first step has been characterized at both the biochemical and molecular level. It is a unique type of glycyl-radical enzyme, an enzyme family previously represented only by pyruvate-formate lyases and anaerobic ribonucleotide reductases. Based on the nature of benzylsuccinate synthase as a radical enzyme, a hypothetical reaction mechanism for the addition of toluene to fumarate is proposed. The further catabolism of benzylsuccinate to benzoyl-CoA and succinyl-CoA appears to occur via reactions of a modified β-oxidation pathway. Ethylbenzene is first oxidized at the methylene carbon to 1-phenylethanol and subsequently to acetophenone, which is then carboxylated to 3-oxophenylpropionate and converted to benzoyl-CoA and acetyl-CoA. Anaerobic mineralization of alkanes involves an oxygen-independent oxidation to fatty acids, followed by β-oxidation. In one strain of an alkane-mineralizing sulfate-reducing bacterium, the activation appears to proceed via a chain-elongation, possibly by addition of a C1-group at the terminal methyl group of the alkane. Finally, aspects concerned with the regulation and ecological significance of anaerobic hydrocarbon catabolic pathways are discussed.
Diversity of macrobenthic community in the Negombo estuary, Sri Lanka with special reference to environmental conditions

Benthic animals are generally considered to be good indicators of environmental conditions of aquatic ecosystems. The present study was undertaken to study the spatial variation of macrobenthic community in Negombo estuary (7° 6' - 7° 12' N; 79° 49' - 79° 53' E), which is subjected to a variety of anthropogenic activities. Benthic samples were obtained from 25 randomly selected sites in Negombo estuary in March 2003 and the macrobenthos were separated by wet sieving and identified as much as possible. The diversity of macrobenthos was determined using Shannon-Wiener index and the similarities among the macrobenthic communities at different sites were determined using Bray-Curtis similarity coefficient. Seventy-six species of benthic invertebrates belonging to 41 families were recorded during the study. Of the gastropods, those belonging to families Assimineidae, Cerithiidae, Haminoeidae and Hydrobiidae were the most abundant. The most abundant polychaete families were Pilargidiidae and Heterospionidae. Among amphipods, aorids were recorded in most of the sampling sites. The sampling sites were separated into several clusters based on the diversity of macrobenthos. The major environmental factors that influenced the separation of these clusters appeared to be salinity, presence of mangroves and soil texture. DOI: 10.4038/sljas.v11i0. 2222 Sri Lanka J. Aquat. Sci. 11 (2006): 43-61