Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Comparative Proteomic Analysis of Histoplasma capsulatum Yeast and Mycelium Reveals Differential Metabolic Shifts and Cell Wall Remodeling Processes in the Different Morphotypes

Histoplasma capsulatum is a thermally dimorphic fungus distributed worldwide, but with the highest incidence in the Americas within specific geographic areas, such as the Mississippi River Valley and regions in Latin America. This fungus is the etiologic agent of histoplasmosis, an important life-threatening systemic mycosis. Dimorphism is an important feature for fungal survival in different environments and is related to the virulence of H. capsulatum, and essential to the establishment of infection. Proteomic profiles have made important contributions to the knowledge of metabolism and pathogenicity in several biological models. However, H. capsulatum proteome studies have been underexplored. In the present study, we report the first proteomic comparison between the mycelium and the yeast cells of H. capsulatum. Liquid chromatography coupled to mass spectrometry was used to evaluate the proteomic profile of the two phases of H. capsulatum growth, mycelium, and yeast. In summary, 214 and 225 proteins were only detected/or preferentially abundant in mycelium or yeast cells, respectively. In mycelium, enzymes related to the glycolytic pathway and to the alcoholic fermentation occurred in greater abundance, suggesting a higher use of anaerobic pathways for energy production. In yeast cells, proteins related to the tricarboxylic acid cycle and response to temperature stress were in high abundance. Proteins related to oxidative stress response or involved with cell wall metabolism were identified with differential abundance in both conditions. Proteomic data validation was performed by enzymatic activity determination, Western blot assays, or immunofluorescence microscopy. These experiments corroborated, directly or indirectly, the abundance of isocitrate lyase, 2-methylcitrate synthase, catalase B, and mannosyl-oligosaccharide-1,2-alpha-mannosidase in the mycelium and heat shock protein (HSP) 30, HSP60, glucosamine-fructose-6-phosphate aminotransferase, glucosamine-6-phosphate deaminase, and N-acetylglucosamine-phosphate mutase in yeast cells. The proteomic profile-associated functional classification analyses of proteins provided new and interesting information regarding the differences in metabolism between the two distinct growth forms of H. capsulatum.
The rs12617336 and rs17574 Dipeptidyl Peptidase-4 Polymorphisms Are Associated With Hypoalphalipoproteinemia and Dipeptidyl Peptidase-4 Serum Levels: A Case-Control Study of the Genetics of Atherosclerotic Disease (GEA) Cohort

Dipeptidyl peptidase-4 (DPP4) can influence lipid homeostasis and atherosclerosis progression. We aimed to assess the association of DPP4 gene polymorphisms with hypoalphalipoproteinemia and DPP4 serum levels, in a cohort of Mexican individuals. Five DPP4 polymorphisms (rs12617336, rs12617656, rs1558957, and rs3788979, and rs17574) were genotyped in 748 participants with and 745 without hypoalphalipoproteinemia. The associations were evaluated using logistic regression analyses. Under inheritance models adjusted for confounding variables, the rs12617336 (OR = 0.22, Pheterozygote = 0.001) and rs17574 (OR = 0.78, Padditive = 0.022; OR = 0.73, Pdominant = 0.012; OR = 0.73, Pheterozygote = 0.017; OR = 0.72, Pcodominant1 = 0.014) minor alleles were associated with a low risk of hypoalphalipoproteinemia. After the correction for multiple comparisons, the associations were marginal except the association of the rs12617336 that remaining significant. Additionally, both DPP4 minor alleles were associated with protection for the presence of insulin resistance (IR) (OR = 0.17, Pheterozygote = 0.019 for rs12617336 and OR = 0.75, Padditive = 0.049 for rs17574). The rs12617336 minor allele was also associated with a low risk of hyperinsulinemia (OR = 0.11, Pheterozygote = 0.006). Differences in DPP4 levels were observed in individuals with rs17574 genotypes, the rs17574 GG genotype individuals had the lowest levels. Our data suggest that rs12617336 and rs17574 DPP4 minor alleles could be envisaged as protective genetic markers for hypoalphalipoproteinemia, IR, and hyperinsulinemia. The rs17574 GG genotype was associated with the lowest DPP4 levels.
GT198 Is a Target of Oncology Drugs and Anticancer Herbs

Tumor angiogenesis is a hallmark of cancer. Therapeutic drug inhibitors targeting angiogenesis are clinically effective. We have previously identified GT198 (gene symbol PSMC3IP, also known as Hop2) as an oncoprotein that induces tumor angiogenesis in human cancers, including oral cancer. In this study, we show that the GT198 protein is a direct drug target of more than a dozen oncology drugs and several clinically successful anticancer herbs. GT198 is a DNA repair protein that binds to DNA. Using an in vitro DNA-binding assay, we tested the approved oncology drug set VII from the National Cancer Institute containing 129 oncology drugs. Identified GT198 inhibitors include but are not limited to mitoxantrone, doxorubicin, paclitaxel, etoposide, dactinomycin, and imatinib. Paclitaxel and etoposide have higher binding affinities, whereas doxorubicin has higher binding efficacy due to competitive inhibition. GT198 shares protein sequence homology with DNA topoisomerases, which are known drug targets, so that GT198 is likely a new drug target previously unrecognized. To seek more powerful GT198 inhibitors, we further tested several anticancer herbal extracts. The positive anticancer herbs with high affinity and high efficacy are all clinically successful ones, including allspice from Jamaica, Gleditsia sinensis or honey locust from China, and BIRM from Ecuador. Partial purification of allspice using an organic chemical approach demonstrated great feasibility of natural product purification, when the activity is monitored by the in vitro DNA-binding assay using GT198 as a target. Together, our study reveals GT198 as a new targeting mechanism for existing oncology drugs. The study also delivers an excellent drug target suitable for compound identification and natural product purification. In particular, this study opens an opportunity to rapidly identify drugs with high efficacy and low toxicity from nature.
Intolerance of Uncertainty and Fear of COVID-19 Moderating Role in Relationship Between Job Insecurity and Work-Related Distress in the Republic of Serbia

The COVID-19 outbreak in Serbia was followed by strict restrictions that negatively affected the economy, particularly small size companies. The complete lockdown and the prohibition of certain services have led to an unstable employment situation. Only several studies investigated the job insecurity and its consequences during COVID-19 pandemic, and some of them highlight the fear of COVID-19 as a significant moderator of mental health. Other studies emphasize the huge effect that intolerance of uncertainty could have in explaining distress, especially during pandemic. In addition, intolerance of uncertainty was considered as a possible moderator of the relationship between the objective and subjective job threat, as well their consequences for mental health. This study aimed to examine the presence of job insecurity and work related distress in Serbia during the first wave of COVID-19. We wanted to measure the effect of the job insecurity on experienced work distress, as well the moderation potential of the intolerance of uncertainty as an individual-level and the fear of coronavirus as a situation-dependent variable. Five hundred and twenty five employed participants took part in an online study during the first wave of coronavirus infection in Serbia. To measure job insecurity, we used Perception of job insecurity scale (PJIS), while distress was assessed with Distress scale from 4DSQ. Fear of COVID-19 was measured on three items. The intolerance of uncertainty was measured by the IUS-11 scale. The results showed that 30.4% of the participants consider their employment as moderately or highly insecure, and 15.1% thought they can lose their jobs. 63.4% of participants expressed increased levels of distress. The moderation analysis revealed that the effect of job insecurity on distress can be moderated by interaction of intolerance of uncertainty and COVID-related fear. In general, distress scores were increasing with increasing job insecurity, intolerance of uncertainty and fear of COVID-19. This pattern is not observed only when fear and intolerance of uncertainty were both low, when job instability could not influence distress. This study also showed that emotional appraisal of the job threat had higher impact on distress than the perceived threat, that shed the light on the importance of considering general resilience capabilities as a protective factor in the work environment in the time of crisis.
Inflammasomes and Fibrosis

Fibrosis is the final common pathway of inflammatory diseases in various organs. The inflammasomes play an important role in the progression of fibrosis as innate immune receptors. There are four main members of the inflammasomes, such as NOD-like receptor protein 1 (NLRP1), NOD-like receptor protein 3 (NLRP3), NOD-like receptor C4 (NLRC4), and absent in melanoma 2 (AIM2), among which NLRP3 inflammasome is the most studied. NLRP3 inflammasome is typically composed of NLRP3, ASC and pro-caspase-1. The activation of inflammasome involves both “classical” and “non-classical” pathways and the former pathway is better understood. The “classical” activation pathway of inflammasome is that the backbone protein is activated by endogenous/exogenous stimulation, leading to inflammasome assembly. After the formation of “classic” inflammasome, pro-caspase-1 could self-activate. Caspase-1 cleaves cytokine precursors into mature cytokines, which are secreted extracellularly. At present, the “non-classical” activation pathway of inflammasome has not formed a unified model for activation process. This article reviews the role of NLRP1, NLRP3, NLRC4, AIM2 inflammasome, Caspase-1, IL-1β, IL-18 and IL-33 in the fibrogenesis.
Continuous Monitoring and Future Projection of Ocean Warming, Acidification, and Deoxygenation on the Subarctic Coast of Hokkaido, Japan

As the ocean absorbs excessive anthropogenic CO2 and ocean acidification proceeds, it is thought to be harder for marine calcifying organisms, such as shellfish, to form their skeletons and shells made of calcium carbonate. Recent studies have suggested that various marine organisms, both calcifiers and non-calcifiers, will be affected adversely by ocean warming and deoxygenation. However, regardless of their effects on calcifiers, the spatiotemporal variability of parameters affecting ocean acidification and deoxygenation has not been elucidated in the subarctic coasts of Japan. This study conducted the first continuous monitoring and future projection of physical and biogeochemical parameters of the subarctic coast of Hokkaido, Japan. Our results show that the seasonal change in biogeochemical parameters, with higher pH and dissolved oxygen (DO) concentration in winter than in summer, was primarily regulated by water temperature. The daily fluctuations, which were higher in the daytime than at night, were mainly affected by daytime photosynthesis by primary producers and respiration by marine organisms at night. Our projected results suggest that, without ambitious commitment to reducing CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions, such as by following the Paris Agreement, the impact of ocean warming and acidification on calcifiers along subarctic coasts will become serious, exceeding the critical level of high temperature for 3 months in summer and being close to the critical level of low saturation state of calcium carbonate for 2 months in mid-winter, respectively, by the end of this century. The impact of deoxygenation might often be prominent assuming that the daily fluctuation in DO concentration in the future is similar to that at present. The results also suggest the importance of adaptation strategies by local coastal industries, especially fisheries, such as modifying aquaculture styles.
Research on Intention Flexible Mapping Algorithm for Elderly Escort Robot

With the development of science and technology and the intensification of the aging of the world’s population, elderly care robots have begun to enter people’s lives. However, the current elderly care system lacks intelligence and is just a simple patchwork of some traditional elderly products, which is not conducive to the needs of the elderly for easy understanding and easy operation. Therefore, this paper proposes a flexible mapping algorithm (FMFD), that is, a gesture can correspond to a flexible mapping of multiple semantics in the same interactive context. First, combine the input gesture with the surrounding environment to establish the current interactive context. Secondly, when the user uses the same gesture to express different semantics, the feature differences formed due to different cognitions are used as the basis to realize the mapping from one gesture to multiple semantics. Finally, four commonly used gestures are designed to demonstrate the results of flexible mapping. Experiments show that compared with the traditional gesture-based human-computer interaction, the proposed flexible mapping scheme greatly reduces the number of gestures that users need to remember, improves the fault tolerance of gestures in the human-computer interaction process, and meets the concept of elderly caregiver robots.
Security-Oriented Network Architecture

Internet benefits societies by constantly connecting devices and transmitting data across the world. However, due to the lack of architectural built-in security, the pervasive network attacks faced by the entire information technology are considered to be unending and inevitable. As Internet evolves, security issues are regularly fixed according to a patch-like strategy. Nevertheless, the patch-like strategy generally results in arms races and passive situations, leaving an endless lag in both existing and emerging attacking surface. In this paper, we present NAIS (Network Architecture with Intrinsic Security)—a network architecture towards trustworthiness and security. By solving stubborn security issues like IP spoofing, MITM (man-in-the-middle) attacks, and DDoS (distributed denial of service) attacks at architectural level, NAIS is envisioned to provide the most secure end-to-end communication in the network layer. This paper first presents a comprehensive analysis of network security at Internet range. Then, the system design of NAIS is elaborated with particular design philosophies and four security techniques. Such philosophies and techniques intertwine internally and contribute to a communication environment with authenticity, privacy, accountability, confidentiality, integrity, and availability. Finally, we evaluate the security functionalities on the packet forwarding performance, demonstrating that NAIS can efficiently provide security and trustworthiness in Internet end-to-end communication.
Anonymous Data Reporting Strategy with Dynamic Incentive Mechanism for Participatory Sensing

Participatory sensing is often used in environmental or personal data monitoring, wherein a number of participants collect data using their mobile intelligent devices for earning the incentives. However, a lot of additional information is submitted along with the data, such as the participant’s location, IP and incentives. This multimodal information implicitly links to the participant’s identity and exposes the participant’s privacy. In order to solve the issue of these multimodal information associating with participants’ identities, this paper proposes a protocol to ensure anonymous data reporting while providing a dynamic incentive mechanism simultaneously. The proposed protocol first establishes a submission schedule by anonymously selecting a slot in a vector by each member where every member and system entities are oblivious of other members’ slots and then uses this schedule to submit the all members’ data in an encoded vector through bulk transfer and multiplayer dining cryptographers networks (DC-nets) . Hence, the link between the data and the member’s identity is broken. The incentive mechanism uses blind signature to anonymously mark the price and complete the micropayments transfer. Finally, the theoretical analysis of the protocol proves the anonymity, integrity, and efficiency of this protocol. We implemented and tested the protocol on Android phones. The experiment results show that the protocol is efficient for low latency tolerable applications, which is the cases with most participatory sensing applications, and they also show the advantage of our optimization over similar anonymous data reporting protocols.
Technology Transfer Oriented to Sustainable Development: Barriers and Opportunities

The process of technology transfer is complex and involves a series of factors and variables. Within this process, it is common that transferor and transferee might face several barriers. Furthermore, processes involving innovation and technology transfer must consider the impacts for the sustainable development. Taking these aspects into account, this paper aims to identify the barriers and opportunities in technology transfer oriented to sustainable development. To reach this goal, a systematic review of literature was carried out using the methodology Methodi Ordinatio. A portfolio composed of 107 scientific articles was built. The results demonstrate the main barriers, among which we can mention unavailability of financial resources or subsidies to obtain or implement a certain technology, and bureaucracy to obtain these resources. On the other hand, some opportunities can also be found, like Clean Development Mechanism and policies and regulations that favour the adoption and diffusion of clean technologies. Thus, this paper contributes to the academy by exploring the interconnections of Technology Transfer and Sustainable Development in the literature. This paper also contributes to the presentation of knowledge resources — information regarding barriers and opportunities to technology transfer oriented to sustainable development — so that governments and decision makers could define policies and strategies for a more effective process.
Revisiting a Multifactor Authentication Scheme in Industrial IoT

Nowadays, as one of the key applications of Internet of*ings, Industry IoT (IIoT) has recently received significant attention and has facilitated our life. In IIoTenvironments, an amount of data generally requires to be transmitted between the user and sensing devices in an open channel. In order to ensure safe transmission of these data, it is necessary for the user and sensing devices to authenticate each other and establish a secure channel between them. Recently, a multifactor authenticated key agreement scheme for IIoTwas proposed, which aims to tackle this problem and provide solutions for user multiple sensing devices’ access. *is work claims that the proposed scheme is secure against vario us attacks and has less communication and computational costs than other existing related schemes. Unfortunately, we find that this scheme cannot resist smart card attack and sensing device capture attack. Furthermore, we show that this scheme fails to provide forward secrecy, which is essential for a secure multifactor authentication scheme.
BIOAVAILABILITY OF METFORMIN HYDROCHLORIDE IN ENTERIC-SOLUBLECAPSULE FORM USING A NEW REVERSE - PHASE HIGH - PERFORMANCELIQUID CHROMATOGRAPHY ASSAY METHOD

To study the bioavailability of metformin enteric - soluble capsule, a new rapid andsensitive HPLC method was established. Eleven young healthy volunteers received a single dose of metformin hydrochloride 1000 mg in enteric - soluble capsule and tablet forms. Plasma concentrations were determined by HPLC in samples collected prior to and 0.33,0.67,1,1. 5,2,3,4,6,8 and 10 hours after dosing. Experimental results showed that the concentration-time curve of two dosage forms were both fitted to one compartment model. T1/2 α of enteric - soluble casule and tablet were 0. 97±0. 28 and 0. 83±0. 37 h, T1/2 were 1.74±0.49 and 1.98±0.76h, Tpeak were 2. 28± 0. 38 and 2. 03±0. 40 h, Cmax were 2.52 ± 0.90 and 2. 38±0. 74 mg /l and AUC were 12. 74± 4. 28 and 12. 70 ±5. 03 mg · h-1 · L-1. Pharmacokinetic parameters indicated no significant differece between enteric - soluble capsule and tablet forms. The bioavailability of the two dosage forms was similar.
Synergistic effect of cumin (Cuminum cyminum L.) decoction alongside with three-drug and four-drug treatment protocols on Helicobacter pylori eradication

Background: Helicobacter pylori is a major cause of peptic ulcer. On the other hand, cumin (Cuminum cyminum L.) is an effective medicinal plant for the treatment of gastrointestinal disease in traditional Persian medicine. This study aimed at investigating the synergistic effect of the decoction of cumin with the three- and four-drug protocols against H. pylori in patients with peptic ulcer. Patients with peptic ulcer infected with H. pylori were treated with cumin decoction, three- and four-drug protocols, and their co-administration to eradicate H. pylori. Materials and Methods: Patients were randomly divided into five groups, including group (1) omeprazole with cumin decoction, (2) cumin decoction with the three-protocol treatment, (3) cumin decoction with the four-drug protocol treatment, and (4 and 5) three- and four-drug protocols alone. The cumin fruit powder was given to patients in 3-g packages and decoction was prepared according to the traditional Iranian medicine guidelines. H. pylori eradication was measured by the 14C–urea breath test (14C-UBT) after 4 weeks of intervention. The Kolmogorov–Smirnov test, χ2 test, logistic regression, and ANOVA (SPSS, 11.5) were used for data analyses. Results: In total, 75 patients (48 male and 27 female patients) participated in this study. The results showed that eradication of H. pylori was observed in all five study groups. Eradication of H. pylori in cumin decoction with the three-drug protocol group was more than the other groups (85.72%), although this difference was not statistically significant. In addition, this eradication was 61.5% in the cumin + omeprazole group, while the H. pylori eradication rates for the three-drug and four-drug protocols were 77.8% and 58.33%, respectively. Conclusions: The results showed that decoction of cumin could be used as a complementary treatment alongside conventional medicine therapy to increase the H. pylori eradication.