Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Functional Characterization of UDP-apiose Synthases from Bryophytes and Green Algae Provides Insight into the Appearance of Apiose-containing Glycans during Plant Evolution*

Apiose is a branched monosaccharide that is present in the cell wall pectic polysaccharides rhamnogalacturonan II and apiogalacturonan and in numerous plant secondary metabolites. These apiose-containing glycans are synthesized using UDP-apiose as the donor. UDP-apiose (UDP-Api) together with UDP-xylose is formed from UDP-glucuronic acid (UDP-GlcA) by UDP-Api synthase (UAS). It was hypothesized that the ability to form Api distinguishes vascular plants from the avascular plants and green algae. UAS from several dicotyledonous plants has been characterized; however, it is not known if avascular plants or green algae produce this enzyme. Here we report the identification and functional characterization of UAS homologs from avascular plants (mosses, liverwort, and hornwort), from streptophyte green algae, and from a monocot (duckweed). The recombinant UAS homologs all form UDP-Api from UDP-glucuronic acid albeit in different amounts. Apiose was detected in aqueous methanolic extracts of these plants. Apiose was detected in duckweed cell walls but not in the walls of the avascular plants and algae. Overexpressing duckweed UAS in the moss Physcomitrella patens led to an increase in the amounts of aqueous methanol-acetonitrile-soluble apiose but did not result in discernible amounts of cell wall-associated apiose. Thus, bryophytes and algae likely lack the glycosyltransferase machinery required to synthesize apiose-containing cell wall glycans. Nevertheless, these plants may have the ability to form apiosylated secondary metabolites. Our data are the first to provide evidence that the ability to form apiose existed prior to the appearance of rhamnogalacturonan II and apiogalacturonan and provide new insights into the evolution of apiose-containing glycans.
[Detection of severe acute respiratory syndrome probable patients' virus RNA in Hangzhou by using a two loci and a modified nested real-time reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction].

OBJECTIVE To detect the RNA of severe acute respiratory syndrome virus (SARS-CoV) by using reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) targeted for a two loci and a modified nested real-time RT-PCR as to improving the reliability and sensitivity of tests. METHODS A nested RT-PCR was used for detecting one fragment of SARS-CoV RNA in oropharyngeal swabs from 3 SARS probable patients, 4 SARS suspect patients and other 27 patients with fever in Hangzhou, and the nested RT-PCR product from one SARS probable patient was sequenced. Meanwhile in these 3 SARS probable patients, other three RT-PCR methods, including a hemi-nested RT-PCR targeted for another fragment of SARS-CoV RNA, a real-time RT-PCR and a modified nested real-time RT-PCR, were employed to detect SARS-CoV RNA. RESULTS Two positives were found in the 3 SARS probable patients, and none positive in 4 SARS suspect patients and other 27 patients with fever, using the nested RT-PCR. The sequence of the nested RT-PCR product from one SARS probable patient was identified with the counterpart of SARS-CoV genomes published in public database. The results of the hemi-nested RT-PCR, the real-time RT-PCR and the modified nested real-time RT-PCR in the 3 SARS patients were consistent with the one of the nested RT-PCR. During detecting specimen with low copies of RNA, a weak positive signal was produced after about 35 cycles in the real-time RT-PCR, but a strong positive signal was found only after 10 cycles in the modified nested real-time RT-PCR. CONCLUSION It might improve the reliability of test by employing RT-PCR targeted for two or more fragments in SARS-CoV genome. The modified nested real-time RT-PCR might have higher sensitivity than the routine real-time RT-PCR.
Wireless power and data transfer system for station-based autonomous underwater vehicles

Autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) has widely been used for underwater explorations. However, AUV requires frequent launch and recovery processes for power feeding and data extraction. In order to solve these problems, we propose wireless power and data transfer system, which uses a pair of coils and transfer power and signal by using electromagnetic induction. We designed a system that can cover both power and communication signal transferring, and evaluated its performance by experiments. The obtained results suggest that the designed system can support high efficiency power transfer (>80%), high communication quality (with BER of 0.1%), and high data rate (>40kbps). It was confirmed that underwater wireless power and data transfer system can archived using single hardware.
Totally laparoscopic versus open total gastrectomy for gastric cancer

Abstract Although surgical outcomes of totally laparoscopic total gastrectomy (TLTG) have been reported from several centers, the effectiveness of this technique has not been conclusively established. The aim of this study was to investigate the feasibility, safety, and efficacy of TLTG for gastric cancer. A prospectively collected and retrospectively analyzed data were used by comparing the short-term surgical outcomes of 124 patients who underwent TLTG with those of 124 patients who underwent open total gastrectomy (OTG) between March 2007 and March 2016. The 2 groups were well matched with respect to age, sex, body mass index, ASA score, and tumor stage. There was no significant difference with regard to the operation time but TLTG showed significantly less intraoperative blood loss (115.5 ± 70.2 vs 210.5 ± 146.7 mL, P < .01). Total numbers of retrieved lymph nodes were similar in the 2 groups. Postoperatively, no significant differences were found for morbidity or mortality. The time to first flatus, initiate oral intake, and postoperative hospital stay were significantly shorter in the TLTG group than in the OTG group (3.2 ± 1.0 vs 4.1 ± 1.2 days; 4.4 ± 1.2 vs 5.6 ± 2.0 days; and 8.9 ± 3.1 vs 11.3 ± 4.5 days, respectively; P < .01). TLTG for gastric cancer is technically safe, feasible, and minimally invasive compared with OTG. A prospective randomized trial is needed to establish the value of TLTG.
ITER disruption mitigation requirements and development of gas cartridge concept

ITER is designed to withstand a certain number of full scale plasma disruptions. Each disruption event induces excessive thermal loads, electromagnetic (EM) loads and runaway electrons onto the vacuum vessel and in-vessel components; the consequences of unmitigated events are extremely serious in terms of component lifetimes. This paper describes the preliminary requirements for the disruption mitigation system (DMS), possible approaches to mitigate the disruption in ITER, the schemes compatible with ITER operation and an on-going pre-conceptual study on gas cartridge DMS, which is one of the massive gas injection DMS schemes.
Postmortem molecular screening for cardiac ryanodine receptor type 2 mutations in sudden unexplained death: R420W mutated case with characteristics of status thymico-lymphatics.

BACKGROUND Mutations of the cardiac ryanodine receptor type 2 (RyR2) gene are known to cause effort-induced polymorphic ventricular arrhythmia, syncope and sudden death. METHODS AND RESULTS The possible mutations in the RyR2 gene were examined in 18 autopsy cases of sudden unexplained death (SUD). Two cases were found to have the heterozygous missense mutation in exon 14 (nucleotide change C1258T, coding effect R420W). Both cases showed mild fatty infiltration of the right ventricular apex. Interestingly, 1 case showed an enlarged thymus with accompanying hypertrophy of the tonsils and mesenteric lymph nodes. In addition, a narrowing of the aorta was observed in this case. These phenotypic characteristics are consistent with status thymico-lymphaticus, which combines sudden death with an enlargement of lymphoid organs and hypoplasia of the cardiovascular system. The second case also displayed some characteristics of status thymico-lymphaticus. CONCLUSION The R420W mutation has already been reported in families with juvenile sudden death and may be causative of sudden death in our cases. Postmortem molecular screening of the RyR2 gene could be useful for investigation for cause of death in SUD. The possible association of the RyR2 mutation with status thymico-lymphaticus is discussed.
Use of Ultrasonic Force Microscopy to Image the Interior Nanoparticles in ${\rm YBa}_{2}{\rm Cu}_{3}{\rm O}_{7-{\rm x}}$ Films

Nanoparticles present in the interior of YBa2Cu3O7-x (YBCO) films were successfully imaged for the first time by using an ultrasonic force microscope (UFM), which can also operate as a conventional atomic force microscope (AFM). Nanoparticles of Y2BaCuO5 and BaSnO3 were introduced into YBCO films using pulsed laser ablation to improve critical current density via enhanced flux pinning. The scanning speed and ultrasonic frequencies in the range of 300-500 kHz were optimized for each sample such that the nanometer sized particles on the surface as well as from the film interior can be imaged with good contrast and resolution. UFM and AFM scans taken of the same locations were compared to show the advantages of using UFM over AFM. We demonstrate that UFM can be used nondestructively to both characterize the interior nanoparticles introduced in YBCO films and provide high resolution images of the screw dislocation induced terraces present in the films.
Spline approximation-based data compression for sensor arrays in the wireless hydrologic monitoring system

A sensor array produces lots of bits of data every sample period, which may cause a heavy burden on the long-distance wireless data transmission, especially in the scenarios of wireless sensor networks. A lossy but error-bounded sensor array data compression algorithm is proposed, in which the major part of the sensor array data are approximated by the Catmull-Rom spline curve and the residual errors are quantized and encoded with Huffman coding. The performance of this algorithm has been evaluated with a real data set from the wireless hydrologic monitoring system deployed in Qinhuangdao Port of China. The results show that the algorithm performs well for the hydrologic sensor array data.
How to Learn Knowledge from Foreign Partner: A Case Study of Japanese Joint Venture in Indonesia

This research focuses on how local partner learn knowledge from foreign partner in Japanese joint venture in emerging economies context. Contribution of this research is as follows. First, by distinguishing the type and characteristics of each process, this typology enhances our understanding about JV as useful organizational learning mechanism, particularly in Japanese joint venture in emerging economies and about the source of firm’s heterogeneity underlying learning process. Second, this extensive in-depth case study provides the clear evidences of the importance of internal learning capability process to improve technological capability, absorptive capacity, and relational rents generated from resource sharing mechanism. Third, this study, to best knowledge, is a pioneer research in Indonesia since technological issues have been paid little attention from scholars.
Characterization of symptomatic and asymptomatic carotid plaques using high‐resolution real‐time ultrasonography

High‐resolution ultrasonography was used to classify carotid plaques into five different types in 72 patients with symptoms and in 49 without, and with stenosis of the origin of the internal carotid artery < 70 per cent. There were 72 plaques in the symptomatic group and 75 in the asymptomatic group. Type 1 plaques were uniformly echolucent, type 2 predominantly echolucent, type 3 predominantly echogenic, type 4 uniformly echogenic and type 5 consisted of plaques that could not be classified owing to heavy calcification and acoustic shadows. Type 1 Plaque was found in 90 per cent of patients with symptoms and in 10 per cent of those without, type 2 plaque was found in 53 and 47 per cent, type 3 in 34 and 66 per cent, and type 4 in 5 and 95 per cent respectively. The preponderance of echolucent plaques in symptomatic patients with stenosis < 70 per cent supports the hypothesis that this type of plaque is unstable and tends to embolize. In contrast, in patients without symptoms there is preponderance of echogenic plaques.
DNSSEC Operational Practices

This document describes a set of practices for operating the DNS with security extensions (DNSSEC). The target audience is zone administrators deploying DNSSEC. The document discusses operational aspects of using keys and signatures in the DNS. It discusses issues of key generation, key storage, signature generation, key rollover, and related policies. This document obsoletes RFC 2541, as it covers more operational ground and gives more up-to-date requirements with respect to key sizes and the new DNSSEC specification. This memo provides information for the Internet community.
Who Benefits Most from College?

In this article, we consider how the economic return to a college education varies across members of the U.S. population. Based on principles of comparative advantage, scholars commonly presume that positive selection is at work, that is, individuals who are most likely to select into college also benefit most from college. Net of observed economic and noneconomic factors influencing college attendance, we conjecture that individuals who are least likely to obtain a college education benefit the most from college. We call this theory the negative selection hypothesis. To adjudicate between the two hypotheses, we study the effects of completing college on earnings by propensity score strata using an innovative hierarchical linear model with data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 and the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study. For both cohorts, for both men and women, and for every observed stage of the life course, we find evidence suggesting negative selection. Results from auxiliary analyses lend further support to the negative selection hypothesis.
Self-efficacy and depression in late life: A primary prevention proposal

Feelings of sadness and loneliness are ubiquitous in late life and a risk factor for depression and perhaps other mental illnesses in late life. Targeting sadness and loneliness for an intervention addresses both primary risk reduction for depressive disorders and promotion of overall mental health in the elderly. Nevertheless, few studies document the efficacy of primary prevention efforts in preventing depressive disorders in the elderly. The author argues that the attainment of positive mental health depends in considerable part upon an individual's self-efficacy - the belief that one can organize and execute the courses of action required to develop and enhance a person's belief that he or she can act in ways that lead to a desired goal. Self-efficacy is strengthened, not by some general or abstract instruction, but rather by the experience of successfully dealing with and thus overcoming specific problems.The extant literature suggests that many potential approaches may be available to develop and enhance self-efficacy in the elderly - approaches that potentially could be broadly applicable in community settings.
Bermuda: An Efficient MapReduce Triangle Listing Algorithm for Web-Scale Graphs

Triangle listing plays an important role in graph analysis and has numerous graph mining applications. With the rapid growth of graph data, distributed methods for listing triangles over massive graphs are urgently needed. Therefore, the triangle listing problem has been studied in several distributed infrastructures including MapReduce. However, existing algorithms suffer from generating and shuffling huge amounts of intermediate data, where interestingly, a large percentage of this data is redundant. Inspired by this observation, we present the "Bermuda" method, an efficient MapReducebased triangle listing technique for massive graphs. Different from existing approaches, Bermuda effectively reduces the size of the intermediate data via redundancy elimination and sharing of messages whenever possible. As a result, Bermuda achieves orders-of-magnitudes of speedup and enables processing larger graphs that other techniques fail to process under the same resources. Bermuda exploits the locality of processing, i.e., in which reduce instance each graph vertex will be processed, to avoid the redundancy of generating messages from mappers to reducers. Bermuda also proposes novel message sharing techniques within each reduce instance to increase the usability of the received messages. We present and analyze several reduce-side caching strategies that dynamically learn the expected access patterns of the shared messages, and adaptively deploy the appropriate technique for better sharing. Extensive experiments conducted on real-world large-scale graphs show that Bermuda speeds up the triangle listing computations by factors up to 10x. Moreover, with a relatively small cluster, Bermuda can scale up to large datasets, e.g., ClueWeb graph dataset (688GB), while other techniques fail to finish.
A geostatistically based inverse model for electrical resistivity surveys and its applications to vadose zone hydrology

A sequential, geostatistical inverse approach was developed for electrical resistivity tomography (ERT). Unlike most ERT inverse approaches, this new approach allows inclusion of our prior knowledge of general geological structures of an area and point electrical resistivity measurements to constrain the estimate of the electrical resistivity field. This approach also permits sequential inclusion of different data sets, mimicking the ERT data collection scheme commonly employed in the field survey. Furthermore, using the conditional variance concept, the inverse model quantifies uncertainty of the estimate caused by spatial variability and measurement errors. Using this approach, numerical experiments were conducted to demonstrate the effects of bedding orientation on ERT surveys and to show both the usefulness and uncertainty associated with the inverse approach for delineating the electrical resistivity distribution using down‐hole ERT arrays. A statistical analysis was subsequently undertaken to explore the effects of spatial variability of the electrical resistivity‐moisture relation on the interpretation of the change in water content in the vadose zone, using the change in electrical resistivity. Core samples were collected from a field site to investigate the spatial variability of the electrical resistivity‐moisture relation. Numerical experiments were subsequently conducted to illustrate how the spatially varying relations affect the level of uncertainty in the interpretation of change of moisture content based on the estimated change in electrical resistivity. Other possible complications are also discussed.
An addressing and routing scheme based on modified Euclidean space for hexagonal networks

The addressing and routing algorithm on hexagonal networks is still an open problem so far. Although many related works have been done to resolve this problem to some extent, the properties of hexagonal networks are still not explored adequately. In this paper, we first create an oblique coordinate system and redefine the Euclidean space to address the hexagonal nodes. Then an optimal routing algorithm using vectors and angles of the redefined Euclidean space is developed. Compared with the traditional 3-directions scheme and the Cayley graph method, the proposed routing algorithm is more efficient and totally independent of the scale of networks with two-tuples addresses. We also prove that the path(s) obtained by this algorithm is always the shortest one(s).
Cardioembolism as the unsuspected missing link between migraine and ischemic stroke

First identified in 1975, the relationship between migraine and stroke has received considerable attention.1 Forty years later, solid evidence indicates that those with migraine have a 1.5-fold to 2.5-fold increased risk of stroke.2–4 However, the strength of this relationship varies based on the subtypes of migraine (with vs without aura) and stroke (hemorrhagic vs ischemic). While the majority of data support an increased risk of ischemic stroke in those with migraine, the association between migraine without aura and ischemic stroke seems weaker and more controversial, possibly due to methodologic heterogeneity across studies.2,3
THE REPLICATION OF R‐FACTOR DNA IN ESCHERICHIA COLI K‐12 FOLLOWING CONJUGATION *

Transmissible multiple drug resistance in the Enterobacteriaceae is mediated by extrachromosomal elements known as R factors. R factors are composite genetic elements composed of up to seven drug-resistant genes and a transfer or sex factor component (RTF) . The presence of an R factor in a bacterial cell is manifested by effects other than drug resistance. One of these is the ability of the cell to act as a genetic donor. Another major effect is that the cell produces specific cell appendages that appear in the electron microscope as fine filaments. These proteinaceous filaments are called sex pili. Recent s t u d i e ~ ~ ~ , ~ ~ divide sex pili into two types, F-like and I-like, depending upon whether they resemble the pili seen in cells harboring the classical F factor of Escherichia coli K-12 or the colicin I determinant. The distinction between F-like or I-like pili is made with respect to both morphological and phage adsorption characteristics. Approximately 85% of the R factors and other transmissible plasmids studied thus far fall unequivocally into one or the other of these two major classes. TABLE 1 shows the nucleotide sequence relationships that have been determined in our laboratory between the DNA of an F-like R factor and the DNA of several other plasmids. These data indicate that, in addition to a similarity in pilus structure, all of the F-like transmissible plasmids studied show a significant degree of nucleotide sequence relationships. There is, however, only a relatively low degree of relationship between the F-like R factor and any I-like element that was studied. These data (still very limited) suggest that many members of the F-like group are related phylogenetically. By the same token, the data also indicate that extrachromosomal elements sharing the same pilus type are by no means necessarily identical but rather can differ in physiochemical organization in important ways.
Meeting Three Challenges in Risk Communication

Risk communication takes many forms, can serve a number of different purposes, and can inform people about a wide variety of risks. We outline three challenges that must often be met when communicating about risk, irrespective of the form or purpose of that communication, or the type of risk that this involves. The first challenge is how best to help people understand the phenomenology of the risks that they are exposed to: The nature of the risk, the mechanism(s) by which they arise, and, therefore, what can be done to manage these risks. Each risk has its own phenomenology; therefore, rather than offering generic guidance, we illustrate with the case of climate change risk how evidence from behavioral science can guide the design of messages about risk. The second challenge is how best to present quantitative risk information about risk probabilities. Here, there is potential for: Ambiguity, difficulty in evaluating quantitative information, and weak numeracy skills among those being targeted by a message. We outline when each of these difficulties is most likely to arise as a function of the precision of the message and show how messages that cover multiple levels of precision might ameliorate these difficulties. The third challenge is the role played by people’s emotional reactions to the risks that they face and to the messages that they receive about these risks. Here, we discuss the pros and cons of playing up, or playing down, the emotional content of risk communication messages.