Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Methylation and Acetylation Enhanced the Antidiabetic Activity of Some Selected Flavonoids: In Vitro, Molecular Modelling and Structure Activity Relationship-Based Study

Flavonoids have been reported to exert antihyperglycemic effects and have potential to enhance the current therapy options against type 2 diabetes mellitus. However, the structure activity relationships (SAR) studies of flavonoids against this disease have not been thoroughly comprehended. Hence, in the present study, 14 structurally related flavonoids viz. wogonin, techtochrysin, norwogonin, isoscutellarein, hypolaetin, kaempferol, quercetin, methyl ether of wogonin, acetate of wogonin, acetate of norwogonin, 8-hydroxy-7-methoxyflavone, chrysin, (+)-catechin and (-)-epicatechin were taken into account for in vitro antidiabetic evaluation. Cell viability of RIN-5F pancreatic cells and 3T3-L1 pre-adipocyte cells was initially tested, then an insulin secretion assay of RIN-5F as well as adipogenesis and glucose uptake measurements of adipocyte were investigated. Subsequently, protein expressions study through adipokines measurement (leptin, adiponectin, TNF-α, RBP-4) via enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) kit, Western blotting analysis against GLUT4 and C/EBP-α as well as molecular docking against GLUT1 were analyzed. The results from cell culture antidiabetic assays (insulin secretion, adipogenesis, and glucose uptake), protein expressions and molecular docking pointed that the methoxy group at position C-8 is responsible for antidiabetic property of selected flavonoids via glucose uptake mechanism indicated by up regulation of GLUT4 and C/EBP-α expressions. The mechanism could be enhanced by the addition of an acetate group at C-5 and C-7 of the flavone skeleton.
Associations of Brain Reactivity to Food Cues with Weight Loss, Protein Intake and Dietary Restraint during the PREVIEW Intervention

The objective was to assess the effects of a weight loss and subsequent weight maintenance period comprising two diets differing in protein intake, on brain reward reactivity to visual food cues. Brain reward reactivity was assessed with functional magnetic resonance imaging in 27 overweight/obese individuals with impaired fasting glucose and/or impaired glucose tolerance (HOMA-IR: 3.7 ± 1.7; BMI: 31.8 ± 3.2 kg/m2; fasting glucose: 6.4 ± 0.6 mmol/L) before and after an 8-week low energy diet followed by a 2-year weight maintenance period, with either high protein (HP) or medium protein (MP) dietary guidelines. Brain reactivity and possible relationships with protein intake, anthropometrics, insulin resistance and eating behaviour were assessed. Brain reactivity, BMI, HOMA-IR and protein intake did not change differently between the groups during the intervention. In the whole group, protein intake during weight maintenance was negatively related to changes in high calorie images>low calorie images (H > L) brain activation in the superior/middle frontal gyrus and the inferior temporal gyrus (p < 0.005, corrected for multiple comparisons). H > L brain activation was positively associated with changes in body weight and body-fat percentage and inversely associated with changes in dietary restraint in multiple reward, gustatory and processing regions (p < 0.005, corrected for multiple comparisons). In conclusion, changes in food reward-related brain activation were inversely associated with protein intake and dietary restraint during weight maintenance after weight loss and positively associated with changes in body weight and body-fat percentage.
A glimpse into the genetic diversity of the Peruvian seafood sector: Unveiling species substitution, mislabeling and trade of threatened species

Peru is one of the world’s leading fishing nations and its seafood industry relies on the trade of a vast variety of aquatic resources, playing a key role in the country’s socio-economic development. DNA barcoding has become of paramount importance for systematics, conservation, and seafood traceability, complementing or even surpassing conventional identification methods when target organisms show similar morphology during the early life stages, have recently diverged, or have undergone processing. Aiming to increase our knowledge of the species diversity available across the Peruvian supply chain (from fish landing sites to markets and restaurants), we applied full and mini-barcoding approaches targeting three mitochondrial genes (COI, 16S, and 12S) and the control region to identify samples purchased at retailers from six departments along the north-central Peruvian coast. DNA barcodes from 131 samples were assigned to 55 species (plus five genus-level taxa) comprising 47 families, 24 orders, and six classes including Actinopterygii (45.03%), Chondrichthyes (36.64%), Bivalvia (6.87%), Cephalopoda (6.11%), Malacostraca (3.82%), and Gastropoda (1.53%). The identified samples included commercially important pelagic (anchovy, bonito, dolphinfish) and demersal (hake, smooth-hound, Peruvian rock seabass, croaker) fish species. Our results unveiled the marketing of protected and threatened species such as whale shark, Atlantic white marlin, smooth hammerhead (some specimens collected during closed season), shortfin mako, and pelagic thresher sharks. A total of 35 samples (26.72%) were mislabeled, including tilapia labeled as wild marine fish, dolphinfish and hake labeled as grouper, and different shark species sold as “smooth-hounds”. The present study highlights the necessity of implementing traceability and monitoring programs along the entire seafood supply chain using molecular tools to enhance sustainability efforts and ensure consumer choice.
Simultaneous Robot–World and Hand–Eye Calibration without a Calibration Object

An extended robot–world and hand–eye calibration method is proposed in this paper to evaluate the transformation relationship between the camera and robot device. This approach could be performed for mobile or medical robotics applications, where precise, expensive, or unsterile calibration objects, or enough movement space, cannot be made available at the work site. Firstly, a mathematical model is established to formulate the robot-gripper-to-camera rigid transformation and robot-base-to-world rigid transformation using the Kronecker product. Subsequently, a sparse bundle adjustment is introduced for the optimization of robot–world and hand–eye calibration, as well as reconstruction results. Finally, a validation experiment including two kinds of real data sets is designed to demonstrate the effectiveness and accuracy of the proposed approach. The translation relative error of rigid transformation is less than 8/10,000 by a Denso robot in a movement range of 1.3 m × 1.3 m × 1.2 m. The distance measurement mean error after three-dimensional reconstruction is 0.13 mm.
Probing inhibition mechanisms of adenosine deaminase by using molecular dynamics simulations

Adenosine deaminase (ADA) catalyzes the deamination of adenosine, which is important in purine metabolism. ADA is ubiquitous to almost all human tissues, and ADA abnormalities have been reported in various diseases, including rheumatoid arthritis. ADA can be divided into two conformations based on the inhibitor that it binds to: open and closed forms. Here, we chose three ligands, namely, FR117016 (FR0), FR221647 (FR2) (open form), and HDPR (PRH, closed form), to investigate the inhibition mechanism of ADA and its effect on ADA through molecular dynamics simulations. In open forms, Egap and electrostatic potential (ESP) indicated that electron transfer might occur more easily in FR0 than in FR2. Binding free energy and hydrogen bond occupation revealed that the ADA-FR0 complex had a more stable structure than ADA-FR2. The probability of residues Pro159 to Lys171 of ADA-FR0 and ADA-FR2 to form a helix moderately increased compared with that in nonligated ADA. In comparison with FR0 and FR2 PRH could maintain ADA in a closed form to inhibit the function of ADA. The α7 helix (residues Thr57 to Ala73) of ADA in the closed form was mostly unfastened because of the effect of PRH. The number of H bonds and the relative superiority of the binding free energy indicated that the binding strength of PRH to ADA was significantly lower than that of an open inhibitor, thereby supporting the comparison of the inhibitory activities of the three ligands. Alanine scanning results showed that His17, Gly184, Asp295, and Asp296 exerted the greatest effects on protein energy, suggesting that they played crucial roles in binding to inhibitors. This study served as a theoretical basis for the development of new ADA inhibitors.
Different pre-implantation phenotypes of bovine blastocysts produced in vitro.

Embryo transfer in cattle is performed with blastocysts produced in vivo or in vitro using defined media. However, outdated systems such as those that use serum and co-culture remain of interest for research purposes. Here, we investigated the effect of additional culture time on in vitro-produced embryos. Specifically, we compared embryos that formed a blastocoel at different times after fertilisation to those that stayed in culture for up to two additional days with respect to their development in vivo after temporary transfer to oestrus-synchronised recipients. A pre-transfer set (D6, D6+1, D6+2, D7, D7+1, D8) was examined using microarray analyses, and correlated with a post-transfer set that included two different days of transfer (D6-T6, D6+2-T8, D7+1-T8, D8-T8). All surviving conceptuses reached primitive-streak stages and filamentous sizes similarly to in vivo (D18) or in vitro controls (D7/T7). The recovery rate differed between D6 and D8 embryos that were immediately transferred (58% vs 25%). With an intermediate survival rate (33%), the D6 embryos with two additional days in culture produced 9 times more IFN-tau at D18 than the D6 embryos that were immediately transferred. At the end of culture, D6 and D6+2 embryos displayed the highest number of gene expression differences. Despite a mortality of 40-60%, no signature was detectable in any of the transferred groups that would account for the embryos' fates. Initially reputed to be beneficial in producing more blastocysts our culture system of B2 medium plus serum and co-culture generated blastocysts that were distinct from those developed in vivo (D7).
Deep Refinement Network for Natural Low-Light Image Enhancement in Symmetric Pathways

Due to the cost limitation of camera sensors, images captured in low-light environments often suffer from low contrast and multiple types of noise. A number of algorithms have been proposed to improve contrast and suppress noise in the input low-light images. In this paper, a deep refinement network, LL-RefineNet, is built to learn from the synthetical dark and noisy training images, and perform image enhancement for natural low-light images in symmetric—forward and backward—pathways. The proposed network utilizes all the useful information from the down-sampling path to produce the high-resolution enhancement result, where global features captured from deeper layers are gradually refined using local features generated by earlier convolutions. We further design the training loss for mixed noise reduction. The experimental results show that the proposed LL-RefineNet outperforms the comparative methods both qualitatively and quantitatively with fast processing speed on both synthetic and natural low-light image datasets.
Chitosan Oleate Salt as an Amphiphilic Polymer for the Surface Modification of Poly-Lactic-Glycolic Acid (PLGA) Nanoparticles. Preliminary Studies of Mucoadhesion and Cell Interaction Properties

Most of the methods of poly-lactic-glycolic acid (PLGA) preparation involve the passage through the emulsification of a PLGA organic solution in water followed by solvent evaporation or extraction. The choice of the droplet stabilizer during the emulsion step is critical for the dimensions and the surface characteristics of the nanoparticles (NPs). In the present work, a recently described ionic amphiphilic chitosan derivative, chitosan oleate salt (CS-OA), was proposed for the first time to prepare PLGA NPs. A full factorial design was used to understand the effect of some formulation and preparation parameters on the NP dimensions and on encapsulation efficiency (EE%) of Nile red, used as a tracer. On the basis of the DoE study, curcumin loaded NPs were prepared, having 329 ± 42 nm dimensions and 68.75% EE%. The presence of a chitosan coating at the surface was confirmed by positive zeta potential and resulted in mucoadhesion behavior. The expected improvement of the interaction of the chitosan surface modified nanoparticles with cell membrane surface was confirmed in Caco-2 cell culture by the internalization of the loaded curcumin.
The influence of the nylon balloon stiffness on the efficiency of the intra‐aortic balloon occlusion

In interventional procedures, the balloon inflation is used to occlude the artery and thus reduce bleeding. There is no practically accepted measure of the procedure efficiency. A finite element method model with state‐of‐the‐art modelling techniques was built in order to predict the occlusion levels under the influence of different balloon inflation and its material stiffness. The geometries of a healthy human thoracic aorta and an occlusion balloon were idealized. The non‐linear constitutive material of Gasser‐Ogden‐Holzapfel model was employed for the thoracic aorta; the balloon was model as the hyperelastic model. The realistic physiological blood pressure and the balloon inflation pressures were applied to simulate the different occlusion levels. The final outcome shows an important influence of the material stiffness on the balloon deformation and thus the occlusion efficiency.
A Semi-Supervised Model for Top-N Recommendation

Top-N recommendation is an important recommendation technique that delivers a ranked top-N item list to each user. Data sparsity is a great challenge for top-N recommendation. In order to tackle this problem, in this paper, we propose a semi-supervised model called Semi-BPR (Semi-Supervised Bayesian Personalized Ranking). Our approach is based on the assumption that, for a given model, users always prefer items ranked higher in the generated recommendation list. Therefore, we select a certain number of items ranked higher in the recommendation list to construct an intermediate set and optimize the metric Area Under the Curve (AUC). In addition, we treat the intermediate set as a teaching set and design a semi-supervised self-training model. We conduct a series of experiments on three popular datasets to compare the proposed approach with several state-of-the-art baselines. The experimental results demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms the other methods for all evaluation metrics, especially for sparse datasets.
Expert-level sleep scoring with deep neural networks

Abstract Objectives Scoring laboratory polysomnography (PSG) data remains a manual task of visually annotating 3 primary categories: sleep stages, sleep disordered breathing, and limb movements. Attempts to automate this process have been hampered by the complexity of PSG signals and physiological heterogeneity between patients. Deep neural networks, which have recently achieved expert-level performance for other complex medical tasks, are ideally suited to PSG scoring, given sufficient training data. Methods We used a combination of deep recurrent and convolutional neural networks (RCNN) for supervised learning of clinical labels designating sleep stages, sleep apnea events, and limb movements. The data for testing and training were derived from 10 000 clinical PSGs and 5804 research PSGs. Results When trained on the clinical dataset, the RCNN reproduces PSG diagnostic scoring for sleep staging, sleep apnea, and limb movements with accuracies of 87.6%, 88.2% and 84.7% on held-out test data, a level of performance comparable to human experts. The RCNN model performs equally well when tested on the independent research PSG database. Only small reductions in accuracy were noted when training on limited channels to mimic at-home monitoring devices: frontal leads only for sleep staging, and thoracic belt signals only for the apnea-hypopnea index. Conclusions By creating accurate deep learning models for sleep scoring, our work opens the path toward broader and more timely access to sleep diagnostics. Accurate scoring automation can improve the utility and efficiency of in-lab and at-home approaches to sleep diagnostics, potentially extending the reach of sleep expertise beyond specialty clinics.
Chinese Sexual Minority Male Adolescents’ Suicidality and Body Mass Index

Excess weight status may increase the risk of suicidality among sexual minority females, but few studies have examined this suicidality disparity in sexual minority males. This study examined the association between sexual minority status and suicide attempts in Chinese male adolescents and tested whether body mass index (BMI) had a moderating effect on that association. Data were collected from 7th to 12th graders from seven randomly selected provinces of China in the 2015 School-Based Chinese Adolescents Health Survey. In total, 72,409 male students completed the questionnaires regarding sexual attraction, self-reported weight and height, and suicide attempts. After adjustment for covariates, sexual minority status was associated with suicide attempts among male students (AOR = 1.74, 95% CI = 1.57–1.93). Stratification analyses showed that BMI category moderated this association; compared with the results before stratification analyses, sexual minority males who were obese had increased risk of suicide attempts (AOR = 2.15, 95% CI = 1.09–4.24), sexual minority males who were overweight had reduced odds of suicide attempts (AOR = 1.40, 95% CI = 1.01–1.92), and no significant association change was found in sexual minority males who were underweight (AOR = 1.82, 95% CI = 1.43–2.33). Our study indicated that BMI moderated the risk of suicide attempts in sexual minority males. Suicide prevention targeting sexual minority males should be focused on weight status disparity and the creation of a positive climate to reduce minority stressors due to body image.
Clonal expansion and horizontal transmission of epidemic F2: A1 B1 plasmids involved in co-spread of rmtB with qepA and blaCTX-M-27 in extensively drug-resistant Salmonella enterica serovar Indiana isolates

Objectives To investigate the prevalence and transmission of 16S rRNA methylase genes among Salmonella isolates from food animals in China. Methods A total of 310 Salmonella isolates collected from food animals in seven provinces of China during 2016-17 were screened for 16S RMTase genes. The clonal relationship of the 16S RMTase-producing isolates and their plasmid contents were also characterized. Results rmtB and armA were respectively identified in 12 and 1 Salmonella enterica serovar Indiana (Salmonella Indiana) isolates from farmed ducks. These 13 isolates concurrently expressed high-level resistance to amikacin, cefotaxime and ciprofloxacin. They were assigned to seven distinct PFGE patterns and the high similarity among 10 of the 12 rmtB-carrying isolates suggests clonal expansion. The rmtB gene was co-transferred with blaCTX-M-27-qepA and qepA in eight and two of the isolates, respectively, and was located on F2:A1:B1 plasmids with sizes of 135 and 100 kb, respectively. These 10 rmtB-bearing plasmids showed four restriction patterns with a high similarity. Four representative rmtB-bearing plasmids were fully sequenced and they exhibited remarkable similarity and possessed typical FII backbones. The primary differences were located in the region between blaTEM-1 and ycgA. Furthermore, a novel MDR region (13.5 kb) was identified that contained qepA, rmtB and blaCTX-M-27. Conclusions This is the first report, to our knowledge, of the prevalence and complete sequences of plasmids simultaneously containing rmtB, qepA and blaCTX-M-27. These findings underscore a major public health threat posed by epidemic F2:A1:B1 plasmids bearing qepA-rmtB-blaCTX-M-27 that are circulating in XDR Salmonella Indiana clonal isolates from waterfowl husbandry.
Lifestyle behaviours and health measures of women at increased risk of breast cancer taking chemoprevention.

Women at increased breast cancer (BC) risk are eligible for chemoprevention. Healthy lifestyles are potentially important for these women to improve efficacy and minimise side effects of chemoprevention and reduce the risk of BC and other lifestyle-related conditions. We investigated whether women taking chemoprevention adhere to healthy lifestyle recommendations, how their lifestyle risk factors and health measures compare to women in the general population, and whether these change whilst taking chemoprevention. Lifestyle risk factors and health measures in 136 premenopausal women taking tamoxifen for prevention of BC (Tam-Prev study) were compared to both national recommendations and an age-matched female population from the Health Survey for England 2012. The Tam-Prev population had high rates of overweight and obesity (59.2%) and low adherence to physical activity recommendations (30.6%) which were comparable to the general population (55.2 and 35.1%, respectively). Fewer Tam-Prev participants were current smokers (10.5 vs. 18.2%, P=0.032), but more exceeded alcohol recommendations (45.0 vs. 18.7%, P<0.001). Tam-Prev participants had suboptimal diets; proportions not meeting fibre, saturated fat and non-milk extrinsic sugar recommendations were 87.8, 64.9 and 21.4% respectively. Many Tam-Prev participants had markers of cardiovascular disease risk and the metabolic syndrome. Health behaviours did not change during the first year on tamoxifen. Women taking chemoprevention had a high prevalence of unhealthy lifestyle behaviours and health measures, similar to an age-matched English cohort. Improving these measures in women at increased BC risk could significantly decrease rates of BC and other noncommunicable diseases.
An Adaptive Filtering Approach Based on the Dynamic Variance Model for Reducing MEMS Gyroscope Random Error

To improve the dynamic random error compensation accuracy of the Micro Electro Mechanical System (MEMS) gyroscope at different angular rates, an adaptive filtering approach based on the dynamic variance model was proposed. In this paper, experimental data were utilized to fit the dynamic variance model which describes the nonlinear mapping relations between the MEMS gyroscope output data variance and the input angular rate. After that, the dynamic variance model was applied to online adjustment of the Kalman Filter measurement noise coefficients. The proposed approach suppressed the interference from the angular rate in the filtering results. Dynamic random errors were better estimated and reduced. Turntable experiment results indicated that the adaptive filtering approach compensated for the MEMS gyroscope dynamic random error effectively both in the constant angular rate condition and the continuous changing angular rate condition, thus achieving adaptive dynamic random error compensation.