Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Capillary-Force-Assisted Clean-Stamp Transfer of Two-Dimensional Materials.

A simple and clean method of transferring two-dimensional (2D) materials plays a critical role in the fabrication of 2D electronics, particularly the heterostructure devices based on the artificial vertical stacking of various 2D crystals. Currently, clean transfer techniques rely on sacrificial layers or bulky crystal flakes (e.g., hexagonal boron nitride) to pick up the 2D materials. Here, we develop a capillary-force-assisted clean-stamp technique that uses a thin layer of evaporative liquid (e.g., water) as an instant glue to increase the adhesion energy between 2D crystals and polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) for the pick-up step. After the liquid evaporates, the adhesion energy decreases, and the 2D crystal can be released. The thin liquid layer is condensed to the PDMS surface from its vapor phase, which ensures the low contamination level on the 2D materials and largely remains their chemical and electrical properties. Using this method, we prepared graphene-based transistors with low charge-neutral concentration (3 × 1010 cm-2) and high carrier mobility (up to 48 820 cm2 V-1 s-1 at room temperature) and heterostructure optoelectronics with high operation speed. Finally, a capillary-force model is developed to explain the experiment.
Fungus-Specific Sirtuin HstD Coordinates Secondary Metabolism and Development through Control of LaeA

ABSTRACT The sirtuins are members of the NAD+-dependent histone deacetylase family that contribute to various cellular functions that affect aging, disease, and cancer development in metazoans. However, the physiological roles of the fungus-specific sirtuin family are still poorly understood. Here, we determined a novel function of the fungus-specific sirtuin HstD/Aspergillus oryzae Hst4 (AoHst4), which is a homolog of Hst4 in A. oryzae yeast. The deletion of all histone deacetylases in A. oryzae demonstrated that the fungus-specific sirtuin HstD/AoHst4 is required for the coordination of fungal development and secondary metabolite production. We also show that the expression of the laeA gene, which is the most studied fungus-specific coordinator for the regulation of secondary metabolism and fungal development, was induced in a ΔhstD strain. Genetic interaction analysis of hstD/Aohst4 and laeA clearly indicated that HstD/AoHst4 works upstream of LaeA to coordinate secondary metabolism and fungal development. The hstD/Aohst4 and laeA genes are fungus specific but conserved in the vast family of filamentous fungi. Thus, we conclude that the fungus-specific sirtuin HstD/AoHst4 coordinates fungal development and secondary metabolism via the regulation of LaeA in filamentous fungi.
Vaccination Decision-Making and HPV Knowledge: How Informed and Engaged Are Young Adult HPV Vaccine Recipients in Australia?

Objectives. To date, there has been limited research on the decision-making process of HPV vaccine recipients. This study aimed to explore HPV-related knowledge, vaccination decision-making, and post vaccination attitudes about sexual behaviour in women who participated in the Australian school- and population-based HPV vaccine program. Materials and Methods. 102 female university students who had received the HPV vaccine (<27 years) completed scales on knowledge, vaccination decision-making, and post vaccination sexual attitudes. Results. HPV-related knowledge was low (%), and women felt moderately involved in the vaccination decision (%). Most women had not changed their sexual attitudes as a consequence of vaccination; however, some reported that since vaccination they feel less concerned about sexual health (19%). There were no significant differences between school- and population-based recipients on HPV knowledge () or post vaccination sexual attitudes (). School-based recipients were significantly less autonomous in their decision-making (). Conclusion. Poor knowledge indicates a need for provision of information about HPV and post vaccination sexual health. Additionally, policy makers and health professionals may benefit from reiterating the importance of continued sexual health practices to HPV vaccine recipients. Future research should assess whether young women need to be more involved in the informed decision-making process for HPV vaccination.
Influence Maximization in Trajectory Databases

In this paper, we study a novel problem of influence maximization in trajectory databases that is very useful in precise location-aware advertising. It finds <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$k$</tex-math><alternatives> <inline-graphic xlink:href="zhang-ieq1-2621038.gif"/></alternatives></inline-formula> best trajectories to be attached with a given advertisement and maximizes the expected influence among a large group of audience. We show that the problem is NP-hard and propose both exact and approximate solutions to find the best set of trajectories. In the exact solution, we devise an expansion-based framework that enumerates trajectory combinations in a best-first manner and propose three types of upper bound estimation techniques to facilitate early termination. In addition, we propose a novel trajectory index to reduce the influence calculation cost. To support large <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$k$</tex-math><alternatives><inline-graphic xlink:href="zhang-ieq2-2621038.gif"/> </alternatives></inline-formula>, we propose a greedy solution with an approximation ratio of (1 − 1/e), whose performance is further optimized by a new proposed cluster-based method. We also propose a threshold method that can support any approximation ratio <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\epsilon \in (0,1]$</tex-math> <alternatives><inline-graphic xlink:href="zhang-ieq3-2621038.gif"/></alternatives></inline-formula>. In addition, we extend our problem to support the scenario when there are a group of advertisements. In our experiments, we use real datasets to construct user profiles, motion patterns, and trajectory databases. The experimental results verified the efficiency of our proposed methods.
Media ’ s Ability to Reinforce Campaign Messages

In this article, the author examines whether network news coverage of a campaign advertisement’s issue can reinforce the ad’s basic message for the public and alter individual candidate assessments. The author uses the 1988 Willie Horton ad to investigate this question, combining data from the 1988 American National Election Study with content analysis from the Vanderbilt Television News Archives. Results show that general campaign coverage of race and crime issues as well as coverage of Horton influenced individual ideological perceptions of Dukakis. In line with Zaller’s theory of public opinion, this influence was limited to certain individuals within the population, namely, media coverage affects individuals with moderate levels of political awareness who have weaker initial predispositions. Combined, these results demonstrate that media can exert both significantly and substantively significant influence on the public.
Ineffective Phosphorylation of Mitogen-Activated Protein Kinase Hog1p in Response to High Osmotic Stress in the Yeast Kluyveromyces lactis

ABSTRACT When treated with a hyperosmotic stimulus, Kluyveromyces lactis cells respond by activating the mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK) K. lactis Hog1 (KlHog1) protein via two conserved branches, SLN1 and SHO1. Mutants affected in only one branch can cope with external hyperosmolarity by activating KlHog1p by phosphorylation, except for single ΔKlste11 and ΔKlste50 mutants, which showed high sensitivity to osmotic stress, even though the other branch (SLN1) was intact. Inactivation of both branches by deletion of KlSHO1 and KlSSK2 also produced sensitivity to high salt. Interestingly, we have observed that in ΔKlste11 and ΔKlsho1 ΔKlssk2 mutants, which exhibit sensitivity to hyperosmotic stress, and contrary to what would be expected, KlHog1p becomes phosphorylated. Additionally, in mutants lacking both MAPK kinase kinases (MAPKKKs) present in K. lactis (KlSte11p and KlSsk2p), the hyperosmotic stress induced the phosphorylation and nuclear internalization of KlHog1p, but it failed to induce the transcriptional expression of KlSTL1 and the cell was unable to grow in high-osmolarity medium. KlHog1p phosphorylation via the canonical HOG pathway or in mutants where the SHO1 and SLN1 branches have been inactivated requires not only the presence of KlPbs2p but also its kinase activity. This indicates that when the SHO1 and SLN1 branches are inactivated, high-osmotic-stress conditions activate an independent input that yields active KlPbs2p, which, in turn, renders KlHog1p phosphorylation ineffective. Finally, we found that KlSte11p can alleviate the sensitivity to hyperosmotic stress displayed by a ΔKlsho1 ΔKlssk2 mutant when it is anchored to the plasma membrane by adding the KlSho1p transmembrane segments, indicating that this chimeric protein can substitute for KlSho1p and KlSsk2p.
Exposure to Host Ligands Correlates with Colocalization of Gal/GalNAc Lectin Subunits in Lipid Rafts and Phosphatidylinositol (4,5)-Bisphosphate Signaling in Entamoeba histolytica

ABSTRACT Entamoeba histolytica is an intestinal parasite that causes dysentery and liver abscess. Parasite cell surface receptors, such as the Gal/GalNAc lectin, facilitate attachment to host cells and extracellular matrix. The Gal/GalNAc lectin binds to galactose or N-acetylgalactosamine residues on host components and is composed of heavy (Hgl), intermediate (Igl), and light (Lgl) subunits. Although Igl is constitutively localized to lipid rafts (cholesterol-rich membrane domains), Hgl and Lgl transiently associate with this compartment in a cholesterol-dependent fashion. In this study, trophozoites were exposed to biologically relevant ligands to determine if ligand binding influences the submembrane distribution of the subunits. Exposure to human red blood cells (hRBCs) or collagen, which are bona fide Gal/GalNAc lectin ligands, was correlated with enrichment of Hgl and Lgl in rafts. This enrichment was abrogated in the presence of galactose, suggesting that direct lectin-ligand interactions are necessary to influence subunit location. Using a cell line that is able to attach to, but not phagocytose, hRBCs, it was shown that physical attachment to ligands was not sufficient to induce the enrichment of lectin subunits in rafts. Additionally, the mutant had lower levels of phosphatidylinositol (4,5)-bisphosphate (PIP2); PIP2 loading restored the ability of this mutant to respond to ligands with enrichment of subunits in rafts. Finally, intracellular calcium levels increased upon attachment to collagen; this increase was essential for the enrichment of lectin subunits in rafts. Together, these data provide evidence that ligand-induced enrichment of lectin subunits in rafts may be the first step in a signaling pathway that involves both PIP2 and calcium signaling.
A Comprehensive Study on Social Network Mental Disorders Detection via Online Social Media Mining

The explosive growth in popularity of social networking leads to the problematic usage. An increasing number of social network mental disorders (SNMDs), such as Cyber-Relationship Addiction, Information Overload, and Net Compulsion, have been recently noted. Symptoms of these mental disorders are usually observed passively today, resulting in delayed clinical intervention. In this paper, we argue that mining online social behavior provides an opportunity to actively identify SNMDs at an early stage. It is challenging to detect SNMDs because the mental status cannot be directly observed from online social activity logs. Our approach, new and innovative to the practice of SNMD detection, does not rely on self-revealing of those mental factors via questionnaires in Psychology. Instead, we propose a machine learning framework, namely, Social Network Mental Disorder Detection (SNMDD), that exploits features extracted from social network data to accurately identify potential cases of SNMDs. We also exploit multi-source learning in SNMDD and propose a new SNMD-based Tensor Model (STM) to improve the accuracy. To increase the scalability of STM, we further improve the efficiency with performance guarantee. Our framework is evaluated via a user study with 3,126 online social network users. We conduct a feature analysis, and also apply SNMDD on large-scale datasets and analyze the characteristics of the three SNMD types. The results manifest that SNMDD is promising for identifying online social network users with potential SNMDs.
Identification of Genes Upregulated by the Transcription Factor Bcr1 That Are Involved in Impermeability, Impenetrability, and Drug Resistance of Candida albicans a/α Biofilms

ABSTRACT Candida albicans forms two types of biofilm, depending upon the configuration of the mating type locus. Although architecturally similar, a/α biofilms are impermeable, impenetrable, and drug resistant, whereas a/a and α/α biofilms lack these traits. The difference appears to be the result of an alternative matrix. Overexpression in a/a cells of BCR1, a master regulator of the a/α matrix, conferred impermeability, impenetrability, and drug resistance to a/a biofilms. Deletion of BCR1 in a/α cells resulted in the loss of these a/α-specific biofilm traits. Using BCR1 overexpression in a/a cells, we screened 107 genes of interest and identified 8 that were upregulated by Bcr1. When each was overexpressed in a/a biofilms, the three a/α traits were partially conferred, and when each was deleted in a/α cells, the traits were partially lost. Five of the eight genes have been implicated in iron homeostasis, and six encode proteins that are either in the wall or plasma membrane or secreted. All six possess sites for O-linked and N-linked glycosylation that, like glycosylphosphatidylinositol (GPI) anchors, can cross-link to the wall and matrix, suggesting that they may exert a structural role in conferring impermeability, impenetrability, and drug resistance, in addition to their physiological functions. The fact that in a screen of 107 genes, all 8 of the Bcr1-upregulated genes identified play a role in impermeability, impenetrability, and drug resistance suggests that the formation of the a/α matrix is highly complex and involves a larger number of genes than the initial ones identified here.
NAIS: Neural Attentive Item Similarity Model for Recommendation

Item-to-item collaborative filtering (aka.item-based CF) has been long used for building recommender systems in industrial settings, owing to its interpretability and efficiency in real-time personalization. It builds a user's profile as her historically interacted items, recommending new items that are similar to the user's profile. As such, the key to an item-based CF method is in the estimation of item similarities. Early approaches use statistical measures such as cosine similarity and Pearson coefficient to estimate item similarities, which are less accurate since they lack tailored optimization for the recommendation task. In recent years, several works attempt to learn item similarities from data, by expressing the similarity as an underlying model and estimating model parameters by optimizing a recommendation-aware objective function. While extensive efforts have been made to use shallow linear models for learning item similarities, there has been relatively less work exploring nonlinear neural network models for item-based CF. In this work, we propose a neural network model named Neural Attentive Item Similarity model (NAIS) for item-based CF. The key to our design of NAIS is an attention network, which is capable of distinguishing which historical items in a user profile are more important for a prediction. Compared to the state-of-the-art item-based CF method Factored Item Similarity Model (FISM) [1] , our NAIS has stronger representation power with only a few additional parameters brought by the attention network. Extensive experiments on two public benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of NAIS. This work is the first attempt that designs neural network models for item-based CF, opening up new research possibilities for future developments of neural recommender systems.
Living Arrangements, Depression, and Health Status Among Elderly Russian-Speaking Immigrants

Abstract This study examines the relationship between living arrangements, depression, and health status in a community-based sample of 300 elderly Russian-speaking immigrants. Data were collected via a self-administered questionnaire survey method. The questionnaire was designed to investigate various aspects of health, mental health, health services utilization, and health behaviors. A team of bilingual professionals was involved in the construction and translation of the survey instrument. The sample consists of 150 females and 150 males. The respondents' average age was 73.2 years. The regression analysis reveals that elderly Russian-speaking immigrants who live alone are more likely to experience a higher level of depression than those living with others. This relationship remains statistically significant after controlling for age, education, income, ability to speak English, years residing in the United States, gender, and health status. Since health status appears to influence depression, we performed further regression analyses and found that living arrangements had no statistically significant relationship with health status. Health status serves as an intermediate variable between the block of demographic variables and depression. Implications for future research are discussed.
Lysine Acetylation Is Widespread on Proteins of Diverse Function and Localization in the Protozoan Parasite Toxoplasma gondii

ABSTRACT While histone proteins are the founding members of lysine acetylation substrates, it is now clear that hundreds of other proteins can be acetylated in multiple compartments of the cell. Our knowledge of the scope of this modification throughout the kingdom of life is beginning to emerge, as proteome-wide lysine acetylation has been documented in prokaryotes, Arabidopsis thaliana, Drosophila melanogaster, and human cells. Using liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS) to identify parasite peptides enriched by immunopurification with acetyl-lysine antibody, we produced the first proteome-wide analysis of acetylation for a protozoan organism, the opportunistic apicomplexan parasite Toxoplasma gondii. The results show that lysine acetylation is abundant in the actively proliferating tachyzoite form of the parasite, which causes acute toxoplasmosis. Our approach successfully identified known acetylation marks on Toxoplasma histones and α-tubulin and detected over 400 novel acetylation sites on a wide variety of additional proteins, including those with roles in transcription, translation, metabolism, and stress responses. Importantly, an extensive set of parasite-specific proteins, including those found in organelles unique to Apicomplexa, is acetylated in the parasite. Our data provide a wealth of new information that improves our understanding of the evolution of this vital regulatory modification while potentially revealing novel therapeutic avenues. We conclude from this study that lysine acetylation was prevalent in the early stages of eukaryotic cell evolution and occurs on proteins involved in a remarkably diverse array of cellular functions, including those that are specific to parasites.
Spatial Reorganization of Saccharomyces cerevisiae Enolase To Alter Carbon Metabolism under Hypoxia

ABSTRACT Hypoxia has critical effects on the physiology of organisms. In the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, glycolytic enzymes, including enolase (Eno2p), formed cellular foci under hypoxia. Here, we investigated the regulation and biological functions of these foci. Focus formation by Eno2p was inhibited temperature independently by the addition of cycloheximide or rapamycin or by the single substitution of alanine for the Val22 residue. Using mitochondrial inhibitors and an antioxidant, mitochondrial reactive oxygen species (ROS) production was shown to participate in focus formation. Focus formation was also inhibited temperature dependently by an SNF1 knockout mutation. Interestingly, the foci were observed in the cell even after reoxygenation. The metabolic turnover analysis revealed that [U-13C]glucose conversion to pyruvate and oxaloacetate was accelerated in focus-forming cells. These results suggest that under hypoxia, S. cerevisiae cells sense mitochondrial ROS and, by the involvement of SNF1/AMPK, spatially reorganize metabolic enzymes in the cytosol via de novo protein synthesis, which subsequently increases carbon metabolism. The mechanism may be important for yeast cells under hypoxia, to quickly provide both energy and substrates for the biosynthesis of lipids and proteins independently of the tricarboxylic acid (TCA) cycle and also to fit changing environments.
A MORN Repeat Protein Facilitates Protein Entry into the Flagellar Pocket of Trypanosoma brucei

ABSTRACT The parasite Trypanosoma brucei lives in the bloodstream of infected mammalian hosts, fully exposed to the adaptive immune system. It relies on a very high rate of endocytosis to clear bound antibodies from its cell surface. All endo- and exocytosis occurs at a single site on its plasma membrane, an intracellular invagination termed the flagellar pocket. Coiled around the neck of the flagellar pocket is a multiprotein complex containing the repeat motif protein T. brucei MORN1 (TbMORN1). In this study, the phenotypic effects of TbMORN1 depletion in the mammalian-infective form of T. brucei were analyzed. Depletion of TbMORN1 resulted in a rapid enlargement of the flagellar pocket. Dextran, a polysaccharide marker for fluid phase endocytosis, accumulated inside the enlarged flagellar pocket. Unexpectedly, however, the proteins concanavalin A and bovine serum albumin did not do so, and concanavalin A was instead found to concentrate outside it. This suggests that TbMORN1 may have a role in facilitating the entry of proteins into the flagellar pocket.
Organic Ice Resists.

Electron-beam lithography (EBL) is the backbone technology for patterning nanostructures and manufacturing nanodevices. It involves processing and handling synthetic resins in several steps, each requiring optimization and dedicated instrumentation in cleanroom environments. Here, we show that simple organic molecules, e.g. alcohols, condensed to form thin-films at low temperature demonstrate resist-like capabilities for EBL applications and beyond. The entire lithographic process takes place in a single instrument, and avoids exposing users to chemicals and the need of cleanrooms. Unlike EBL that requires large samples with optically flat surfaces, we patterned on fragile membranes only 5 nm-thin, and 2 × 2 mm2 diamond samples. We created patterns on the nanometer to sub-millimeter scale, as well as three-dimensional structures by stacking layers of frozen organic molecules. Finally, using plasma etching, the organic ice resist (OIR) patterns are used to structure the underlying material, and thus enable nanodevice fabrication.