Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Modeling Infection and Tropism of Human Parainfluenza Virus Type 3 in Ferrets

HPIV-3 is an important cause of pediatric disease and significantly impacts the elderly. Increasing numbers of immunocompromised patients suffer from HPIV-3 infections, often related to problems with viral clearance. ABSTRACT Human parainfluenza virus type 3 (HPIV-3) is a significant cause of lower respiratory tract infections, with the most severe disease in young infants, immunocompromised individuals, and the elderly. HPIV-3 infections are currently untreatable with licensed therapeutics, and prophylactic and therapeutic options are needed for patients at risk. To complement existing human airway models of HPIV-3 infection and develop an animal model to assess novel intervention strategies, we evaluated infection and transmission of HPIV-3 in ferrets. A well-characterized human clinical isolate (CI) of HPIV-3 engineered to express enhanced green fluorescent protein (rHPIV-3 CI-1-EGFP) was passaged on primary human airway epithelial cells (HAE) or airway organoids (AO) to avoid tissue culture adaptations. rHPIV3 CI-1-EGFP infection was assessed in vitro in ferret AO and in ferrets in vivo. Undifferentiated and differentiated ferret AO cultures supported rHPIV-3 CI-1-EGFP replication, but the ferret primary airway cells from AO were less susceptible and permissive than HAE. In vivo rHPIV-3 CI-1-EGFP replicated in the upper and lower airways of ferrets and targeted respiratory epithelial cells, olfactory epithelial cells, type I pneumocytes, and type II pneumocytes. The infection efficiently induced specific antibody responses. Taken together, ferrets are naturally susceptible to HPIV-3 infection; however, limited replication was observed that led to neither overt clinical signs nor ferret-to-ferret transmission. However, in combination with ferret AO, the ferret model of HPIV-3 infection, tissue tropism, and neutralizing antibodies complements human ex vivo lung models and can be used as a platform for prevention and treatment studies for this important respiratory pathogen. IMPORTANCE HPIV-3 is an important cause of pediatric disease and significantly impacts the elderly. Increasing numbers of immunocompromised patients suffer from HPIV-3 infections, often related to problems with viral clearance. There is a need to model HPIV-3 infections in vitro and in vivo to evaluate novel prophylaxis and treatment options. Currently existing animal models lack the potential for studying animal-to-animal transmission or the effect of immunosuppressive therapy. Here, we describe the use of the ferret model in combination with authentic clinical viruses to further complement human ex vivo models, providing a platform to study approaches to prevent and treat HPIV-3 infection. Although we did not detect ferret-to-ferret transmission in our studies, these studies lay the groundwork for further refinement of the ferret model to immunocompromised ferrets, allowing for studies of severe HPIV-3-associated disease. Such models for preclinical evaluation of prophylaxis and antivirals can contribute to reducing the global health burden of HPIV-3.
Trends in Environmental Management Systems Research. A Content Analysis

Abstract Environmental Management Systems (EMS) represent a solid opportunity for companies that voluntarily undertake a path towards the adoption of environmental protection policies. Many studies investigated the link between EMS and improvement of environmental performance, demonstrating how the adoption of an international standard as ISO 14000 or EMAS guarantees the company an improvement in its performance and an increase in transparency towards stakeholders. However, scientific research in this field reflects the strong variability due to the breadth and diversity of sectors in which the two international standards can be adopted. The aim of this work is to analyse, through textual statistics and text mining methods, the trends that characterize scientific production, highlighting most debated topics useful for developing new research perspectives in this research field.
Monocyte distribution width (MDW) as a screening tool for early detecting sepsis: a systematic review and meta-analysis

Abstract Objectives Monocyte distribution has recently emerged as a promising biomarker of sepsis, especially in acute setting, such as Emergency Department and Intensive Care Unit. This study aimed to evaluate the accuracy of monocyte distribution width (MDW) for early detecting patients with sepsis by performing a systemic review and meta-analysis of published studies. Methods Relevant publications were identified by a systematic literature search on PubMed and Google Scholar from inception to September 07, 2021. Studies were divided into two groups based on the sepsis criteria applied, namely sepsis-2 or sepsis-3. Results Ten studies including 9,475 individuals, of whom 1,370 with sepsis (742 according Sepsis-2 and 628 according to Sepsis-3), met the inclusion criteria for our meta-analysis. The pooled sensitivity and specificity were 0.789 and 0.777 for Sepsis-2 criteria, 0.838 and 0.704 for Sepsis-3 criteria. Conclusions MDW represents a reliable biomarker for sepsis screening.
Effects of Pine Forest Management Practices on Bat Functional Traits in a Subtropical Region

Changes in landscape environmental characteristics may influence habitat use by bat species as well as species composition and community functional structure. Landscape features may drive the functional role variability of bat species on the ecosystems. Consequently, landscapes may change the degree of functional differentiation between species. We have evaluated the effect of pine forest monoculture and their environmental characteristics on the distribution and functional attributes of bat species. We sampled bat communities in areas with high (three sites) and low (three sites) forest land use management practices including six mist-netting locations in order to sample for bats at each site. In addition, we have also measured temperature, humidity, percentage of land use coverage (managed forest, agriculture, and native forest), and percentage of canopy openness at each site. We captured 87 bats belonging to eight species representing two families: Phyllostomidae and Vespertilionidae. For the functional analysis, we used three functional attributes to describe wing morphology: wing loading, aspect ratio, and forearm length. No significant effect of any environmental variable was observed on bat species composition. However, bat species distribution was driven by the ability associated with their functional attributes to occupy the space. Moreover, forearm length was positively correlated with forest cover, canopy openness, and humidity. Species with similar wing morphology have responded in a similar way to environmental variables in the studied areas. Functional dispersion was high in the native forest. The monoculture of exotic species may increase the functional attributes related with vulnerability as described by bat wing morphology. Therefore, the native forest conversion to pine forest monoculture may increase the loss of functional attributes in the bat community.
PathTracer: Understanding Response Time of Signal Processing Applications on Heterogeneous MPSoCs

In embedded and cyber-physical systems, the design of a desired functionality under constraints increasingly requires parallel execution of a set of tasks on a heterogeneous architecture. The nature of such parallel systems complicates the process of understanding and predicting performance in terms of response time. Indeed, response time depends on many factors related to both the functionality and the target architecture. State-of-the-art strategies derive response time by examining the operations required by each task for both processing and accessing shared resources. This procedure is often followed by the addition or elimination of potential interference due to task concurrency. However, such approaches require an advanced knowledge of the software and hardware details, rarely available in practice. This work presents an alternative “top-down” strategy, called PathTracer, aimed at understanding software response time and extending the cases in which it can be analyzed and estimated. PathTracer leverages on dataflow-based application representation and response time estimation of signal processing applications mapped on heterogeneous Multiprocessor Systems-on-a-Chip (MPSoCs). Experimental results demonstrate that PathTracer provides (i) information on the nature of the application (work-dominated, span-dominated, or balanced parallel), and (ii) response time modeling which can reach high accuracy when performed post-execution, leading to prediction errors with average and standard deviation under 5% and 3% respectively.
The Role of miR-21 on the Expression of β2-Microglobulin in Steroid-resistant Nephrotic Syndrome Children

Nephrotic syndrome (NS) in children has some mysterious prognosis in the perspective of its therapeutic response. This study aims to determine the role of miR-21 in β-2 microglobulin (B2M) expression among SRNS children. The open-prospective cohort study was conducted at Hasan Sadikin General Hospital, Indonesia. A total of 24 children (age 1–18 years) with NS were enrolled in this study. Meanwhile, blood samples were collected prior to any treatment. The whole blood samples were collected from 12 SRNS and control. Moreover, RNA isolation was carried out with blood plasma samples stored in a cooler at -800C, while miR-21 expression was measured using qRT-PCR. The difference between miRNAs expression analyzed with Livak and the correlation between B2M and miR-21 expression were analyzed using Spearman correlation analysis. Based on the results, there were notable upregulation of miR-21 in SRNS compared to SSNS 2-ΔΔCt > 1. However, no correlation was observed between B2M expression with the upregulation of miR-21 ( -1 < rs < 1, p > 0.05). The miR-21 is upregulated in children with SRNS. This indicates that the expression level of this miRNA potentially applicable as a predictor for SRNS development in children.
User Behavior Simulation for Search Result Re-ranking

Result ranking is one of the major concerns for Web search technologies. Most existing methodologies rank search results in descending order of relevance. To model the interactions among search results, reinforcement learning (RL algorithms have been widely adopted for ranking tasks. However, the online training of RL methods is time and resource consuming at scale. As an alternative, learning ranking policies in the simulation environment is much more feasible and efficient. In this article, we propose two different simulation environments for the offline training of the RL ranking agent: the Context-aware Click Simulator (CCS) and the Fine-grained User Behavior Simulator with GAN (UserGAN). Based on the simulation environment, we also design a User Behavior Simulation for Reinforcement Learning (UBS4RL) re-ranking framework, which consists of three modules: a feature extractor for heterogeneous search results, a user simulator for collecting simulated user feedback, and a ranking agent for generation of optimized result lists. Extensive experiments on both simulated and practical Web search datasets show that (1) the proposed user simulators can capture and simulate fine-grained user behavior patterns by training on large-scale search logs, (2) the temporal information of user searching process is a strong signal for ranking evaluation, and (3) learning ranking policies from the simulation environment can effectively improve the search ranking performance.
The Survey of Image Generation from EEG Signals based on Deep Learning

China has become a high-risk region of stroke. Most patients with stroke suffer regular bouts of post-stroke limb dyskinesia. Nowa-days, there isn’t an effective treatment for these patients. Brain computer interface (BCI) establishes a new pathway to connect human brains and device, which provide an innovation method to repair the human brain nervous systems through rehabilitation training. However, one of the mainly brain activity recordings, Electroencephalogram (EEG), cannot be represented accurately by other algorithms. With the development of deep learning techniques, the topic of EEG signals’ representation by image generation technique has become an important research area. This paper we introduced the basic concepts of BCI systems first, then we give a survey of image generation techniques from EEG signals. At last, we proposed an experimental scheme of dataset establishment which is used for post-stroke patients with upper limb dyskinesia
Use of statistical analysis and logistic regression to study the length of stay in an Emergency Medicine Department in CoViD-19 era

Since the first case recorded in China in 2019, CoViD-19 has overwhelmed the health systems of all countries. The highly complex request for assistance combined with the fear of contagion have changed the normal activity of hospitals. Conversely, as the pandemic spreads, fewer people are going to the Emergency Department (ED) for non-CoViD diseases. In this study, logistic regression and statistical analysis were used to investigate how the pandemic changed the activity of the Emergency Medicine Department of "San Giovanni di Dio and Ruggi d'Aragona" University Hospital of Salerno (Italy). Patients admitted in 2020 have a higher Length of Stay (LOS) and the mode of discharge is mostly "at home". While the discharge modality 'transferred to another regime in the same hospital' had significantly decreased in order to counter the internal contagion.
Is violet LED light-based PDT efficient to treat superficial lesions such as a low-grade cervical intraepithelial neoplasia?

Photosensitizers utilized in photodynamic therapy (PDT) can be exited with light of any wavelengths matching their absorption bands. Thus, superficial lesions, such as those involved in cervical intraepithelial neoplasias (CINs) might be treated with a light of shorter wavelength than red despite the smaller penetration depth in tissue. We review basic aspects of PDT and some investigations related to the use of light-emitting diodes (LEDs) of different wavelength mainly applied to superficial lesions, and highlight the benefits of the use of violet light and cellular spheroids as a PDT dosage model. Our previous results from spheroids of cervix carcinoma cells, suggest that the violet light from a LED source is appropriate for performing PDT of neoplastic lesions involving about 300 μm in depth. In this work we present a high fluence light source emitting at 420 nm and apply it to perform PDT treatment of a HeLa cell tumor model implanted in BALB/c nude mice. The photodynamic reaction is inferred from the fluorescence evolution measured at the tumor and the temperature evolution of the treated surface. Violet LED light could be a promising alternative for treating CINs involving superficial dysplasia, with reduced side effects.
Shear-induced modulation on thermal convection over rough plates

Abstract External modulation on thermal convection has been studied extensively to achieve the control of flow structures and heat-transfer efficiency. In this paper, we carry out direct numerical simulations on Rayleigh–Bénard convection accounting for both the modulation of wall shear and roughness over the Rayleigh number range $1.0 \times 10^6 \le Ra \le 1.0 \times 10^8$, the wall shear Reynolds number range $0 \le Re_w \le 5000$, the aspect-ratio range $2 \le \varGamma \le 4{\rm \pi}$, and the dimensionless roughness height range $0 \le h \le 0.2$ at fixed Prandtl number $Pr = 1$. Under the combined actions of wall shear and roughness, with increasing $Re_w$, the heat flux is initially enhanced in the buoyancy-dominant regime, then has an abrupt transition near the critical shear Reynolds number $Re_{w,cr}$, and finally enters the purely diffusion regime dominated by shear. Based on the crossover of the kinetic energy production between the buoyancy-dominant and shear-dominant regimes, a physical model is proposed to predict the transitional scaling behaviour between $Re_{w,cr}$ and $Ra$, i.e. $Re_{w,cr} \sim Ra^{9/14}$, which agrees well with our numerical results. The reason for the observed heat-transport enhancement in the buoyancy-dominant regime is further explained by the fact that the moving rough plates introduce an external shear to strengthen the large-scale circulation (LSC) in the vertical direction and serve as a conveyor belt to increase the chances of the interaction between the LSC and secondary flows within cavities, which triggers more thermal plumes, efficiently transports the trapped hot (cold) fluids outside cavities.
Characterising the mechanics of cell–cell adhesion in plants

Abstract Abstract Cell–cell adhesion is a fundamental feature of multicellular organisms. To ensure multicellular integrity, adhesion needs to be tightly controlled and maintained. In plants, cell–cell adhesion remains poorly understood. Here, we argue that to be able to understand how cell–cell adhesion works in plants, we need to understand and quantitatively measure the mechanics behind it. We first introduce cell–cell adhesion in the context of multicellularity, briefly explain the notions of adhesion strength, work and energy and present the current knowledge concerning the mechanisms of cell–cell adhesion in plants. Because still relatively little is known in plants, we then turn to animals, but also algae, bacteria, yeast and fungi, and examine how adhesion works and how it can be quantitatively measured in these systems. From this, we explore how the mechanics of cell adhesion could be quantitatively characterised in plants, opening future perspectives for understanding plant multicellularity.
On the electric field components in the collisionless plasmoid instability

Using two-dimensional particle-in-cell simulations of collsionless plasmoid instability, the spatial and temporal variations of electric field components are investigated. The initial magnetic field is a Harris sheet which is added by a non-uniform perpendicular magnetic field (guide field). The effects of weak and medium guide field on the evolution of plasmoid instability and associated electric field are discussed with the input parameters of the solar corona with the condition $\omega _{{\rm pe}}/\omega _{{\rm ce}}>1$. As the current sheet elongates, magnetic reconnection in an X-point transits into the plasmoid instability, in which secondary X-points are formed and the consequent magnetic islands coalesce and form larger islands. During the instability, electric field components show two types of disturbances. (1) Transient waves, being excited very early, propagate mainly perpendicular to the current sheet and become damped as the instability proceeds to the nonlinear stage. Fourier analysis reveals that electromagnetic right- and left-hand polarized modes parallel to the initial magnetic field and also the extraordinary mode perpendicular to the current sheet are excited. Additionally, electron Langmuir and slow magnetosonic waves are observed in both directions. (2) Inside the current sheet, an electric field is generated by the plasmoid-dominated reconnection and grows in amplitude as the plasmoid instability proceeds. Moreover, in our study, the effects of amplitude-varying guide field on the spatial structure of electric field components outside and inside the current sheet are discussed. This study is valuable because understanding the spatial and temporal variation of the electric field is an essential prerequisite for the issue of particle acceleration in plasmoid-dominated magnetic reconnection.
Putative ITS2 secondary structure model and multi‐gene phylogenies of tetrahymenids (Ciliophora, Hymenostomatia) parasitizing planarians and crayfish worms

Tetrahymena comprises over 80 free‐living as well as facultative or obligate histophagous species parasitizing especially invertebrates and fishes. Because of the comparatively high morphological conservativeness of tetrahymenids, their identification is primarily based on the gene coding for cytochrome c oxidase subunit I (COI). In addition to this mitochondrial barcoding marker, we tested here also the species discriminatory power of the highly variable nuclear ITS region, using the secondary structure of the ITS2 molecules and the compensatory base change (CBC) analysis. ITS2 secondary structures were proposed for 25 distinct ribotypes of 13 taxa, including three Tetrahymena species parasitizing planarians and crayfish worms, with the free‐energy minimization approach and the homology modelling. Although the majority of Tetrahymena species pairs can be reliably separated by one to six hemi‐CBCs localized especially in the third and fourth helix of the ITS2 molecules, some ITS region sequences might transcend species boundaries. In other words, intraspecies and interspecies p‐distances of ITS region sequences might overlap. This fact weakens the discriminatory power and the usage of the ITS region in the molecular taxonomy of Tetrahymena. On the other hand, there was always a distinct barcoding gap at about 4% sequence divergence in the case of the COI gene. Despite the slightly lower delimitation power of the ITS region, this molecular marker helped to recognize multiple previous misidentifications that were subsequently verified by comparing COI sequences.