Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Spermine/spermidine is expressed by retinal glial (Müller) cells and controls distinct K+ channels of their membrane.

There is recent evidence that polyamines such as spermine (spm) and spermidine (spd) may act as endogenous modulators of the activity of inwardly rectifying K+ channels. This type of K+ channels is abundantly expressed by retinal glial (Müller) cells where they are involved in important glial cell functions such as the clearance of excess extracellular K+ ions. This prompted us to study the following questions, i) do mammalian Müller cells contain endogenous spm/spd? ; ii) do Müller cells possess the enzymes (e.g., ornithine decarboxylase, ODC) necessary to produce spm/spd? ; and iii) does application of exogenous spm/spd exert specific effects onto inwardly rectifying K+ channels of Müller cells? Immunocytochemical studies were performed on histological sections of guinea-pig, rabbit, porcine, and human retinae, and on enzymatically dissociated Müller cells. Whole-cell and patch-clamp recordings were performed on enzymatically dissociated porcine and guinea-pig Müller cells. All above-mentioned questions could be answered with "yes. " Specifically, the majority of Müller cells were labeled with antibodies directed to spm/spd, both within retinal sections and enzymatically isolated from retinal tissue. Müller cells in normal retinae express low levels of ODC but increase this expression markedly in cases of retinal pathology such as experimental epiretinal melanoma. Externally applied polyamines (1 mM) reduce (predominantly inward) whole-cell K+ currents, with the efficacies being spm > spd > put. If applied at the inside of membrane patches, spm (1 mM) blocks completely the outward currents through inwardly rectifying K+ channels but fails to affect the activity of large conductance, Ca2+-activated K+ channels. It is concluded that Müller cells contain endogenous channel-active polyamines, the synthesis of which may be up-regulated in pathological situations, and which may be involved in the control of both glial function and cell proliferation.
Screening of an E. coli O157:H7 Bacterial Artificial Chromosome Library by Comparative Genomic Hybridization to Identify Genomic Regions Contributing to Growth in Bovine Gastrointestinal Mucus and Epithelial Cell Colonization

Enterohemorrhagic E. coli (EHEC) O157:H7 can cause serious gastrointestinal and systemic disease in humans following direct or indirect exposure to ruminant feces containing the bacterium. The main colonization site of EHEC O157:H7 in cattle is the terminal rectum where the bacteria intimately attach to the epithelium and multiply in the intestinal mucus. This study aimed to identify genomic regions of EHEC O157:H7 that contribute to colonization and multiplication at this site. A bacterial artificial chromosome (BAC) library was generated from a derivative of the sequenced E. coli O157:H7 Sakai strain. The library contains 1152 clones averaging 150 kbp. To verify the library, clones containing a complete locus of enterocyte effacement (LEE) were identified by DNA hybridization. In line with a previous report, these did not confer a type III secretion (T3S) capacity to the K-12 host strain. However, conjugation of one of the BAC clones into a strain containing a partial LEE deletion restored T3S. Three hundred eighty-four clones from the library were subjected to two different selective screens; one involved three rounds of adherence assays to bovine primary rectal epithelial cells while the other competed the clones over three rounds of growth in bovine rectal mucus. The input strain DNA was then compared with the selected strains using comparative genomic hybridization (CGH) on an E. coli microarray. The adherence assay enriched for pO157 DNA indicating the importance of this plasmid for colonization of rectal epithelial cells. The mucus assay enriched for multiple regions involved in carbohydrate utilization, including hexuronate uptake, indicating that these regions provide a competitive growth advantage in bovine mucus. This BAC-CGH approach provides a positive selection screen that complements negative selection transposon-based screens. As demonstrated, this may be of particular use for identifying genes with redundant functions such as adhesion and carbon metabolism.
From R&D brassboards to navigation grade FOG-based INS: the experience of Photonetics/Ixsea

This paper gives a review of the development of FOG (fiber optic gyroscope) technology from the perspective of the Photonetics/Ixsea company. It discusses FOG performance improvements over time, and outlines their uses for attitude detection and positioning and in inertial navigation systems (INS). Product ranges for both marine and space applications are described.
Improved herbivore resistance in cultivated tomato with the sesquiterpene biosynthetic pathway from a wild relative

Tomato breeding has been tremendously efficient in increasing fruit quality and quantity but did not focus on improving herbivore resistance. The biosynthetic pathway for the production of 7-epizingiberene in a wild tomato was introduced into a cultivated greenhouse variety with the aim to obtain herbivore resistance. 7-Epizingiberene is a specific sesquiterpene with toxic and repellent properties that is produced and stored in glandular trichomes. We identified 7-epizingiberene synthase (ShZIS) that belongs to a new class of sesquiterpene synthases, exclusively using Z-Z-farnesyl-diphosphate (zFPP) in plastids, probably arisen through neo-functionalization of a common ancestor. Expression of the ShZIS and zFPP synthases in the glandular trichomes of cultivated tomato resulted in the production of 7-epizingiberene. These tomatoes gained resistance to several herbivores that are pests of tomato. Hence, introduction of this sesquiterpene biosynthetic pathway into cultivated tomatoes resulted in improved herbivore resistance.
A New Fully Distributed Model of Nitrate Transport and Removal at Catchment Scale

Hydrological water quality models have gained wide acceptance from environmental scientists and water managers to address deterioration of surface water quality. Higher spatiotemporal accuracy of such models is increasingly required for better understanding the functional heterogeneity of catchments and improving management decisions at different governance levels. However, balancing spatial representation and model complexity remains challenging. We present a new flexibly designed, fully distributed nitrate transport and removal model (mHM‐Nitrate) at catchment scale. The model was developed mainly based on the mesoscale Hydrological Model (mHM) and the Hydrological Predictions for the Environment (HYPE) model. The mHM‐Nitrate model was tested in the Selke catchment (Central Germany), which is characterized by heterogeneous physiographic and land‐use conditions, using adequate observed hydrological and nitrate data at three nested gauging stations. Long term (1997–2015) daily simulations showed that the model well reproduced the seasonal dynamics of biweekly nitrate observations in forested, agricultural and urban areas. High‐frequency measurements (2010‐2015) were additionally used to validate model performance of simulating short‐term changes in stream‐water concentrations that reflect changes in runoff partitioning and event‐based dilution effects. Uncertainty analysis confirmed the model's robustness. Moreover, model calculations showed that mean terrestrial nitrate input/output (in total 105 kg ha−1 yr−1) and in‐stream removal (8% of mean nitrate load) were in comparable ranges with literature, respectively. The new mHM‐Nitrate model is capable of providing detailed spatial information on nitrate concentrations and fluxes, which can motivate more specific catchment investigations on nitrate transport processes and provide guidance on spatially differentiated agricultural practices and measures.
Particle Swarm Optimization of Weighted Fuzzy Neural Network Model

Particle Swarm Optimization has been applied in many optimization problems. In this paper, we proposed a new algorithm based on PSO and applied to optimal the weighted fuzzy neural network. It takes some measures to avoid the algorithm into a local convergence and determine the structure of the fuzzy neural network based on the effective rules. Satisfactory results through experiments are obtained.
Cyclic GMP from the surrounding somatic cells regulates cyclic AMP and meiosis in the mouse oocyte

Mammalian oocytes are arrested in meiotic prophase by an inhibitory signal from the surrounding somatic cells in the ovarian follicle. In response to luteinizing hormone (LH), which binds to receptors on the somatic cells, the oocyte proceeds to second metaphase, where it can be fertilized. Here we investigate how the somatic cells regulate the prophase-to-metaphase transition in the oocyte, and show that the inhibitory signal from the somatic cells is cGMP. Using FRET-based cyclic nucleotide sensors in follicle-enclosed mouse oocytes, we find that cGMP passes through gap junctions into the oocyte, where it inhibits the hydrolysis of cAMP by the phosphodiesterase PDE3A. This inhibition maintains a high concentration of cAMP and thus blocks meiotic progression. LH reverses the inhibitory signal by lowering cGMP levels in the somatic cells (from ∼2 μM to ∼80 nM at 1 hour after LH stimulation) and by closing gap junctions between the somatic cells. The resulting decrease in oocyte cGMP (from ∼1 μM to ∼40 nM) relieves the inhibition of PDE3A, increasing its activity by ∼5-fold. This causes a decrease in oocyte cAMP (from ∼700 nM to ∼140 nM), leading to the resumption of meiosis.
Conditions and Patterns for Achieving Convergence in OT-Based Co-Editors

In this paper, we report our discovery of general transformation conditions and patterns underlying a range of Operational Transformation (OT) systems for achieving convergence. Based on these conditions and patterns, we have established convergence correctness of seven existing OT systems, and designed two new OT systems with a unique combination of novel features for supporting advanced collaborative applications. These results contribute to the advancement of OT knowledge, technology, and OT-based collaboration editing systems.
Verification of asynchronous circuits using time Petri net unfolding

This paper describes a novel approach to timing analysis and verification of asynchronous circuits with bounded delays. The method is based on the time-driven unfolding of a time Petri net model of a circuit. Each reachable state, together with its timing constraints is represented implicitly. Our method is used to verify freedom from hazards in asynchronous circuits consisting of micropipeline components and logic gates.
Priming and re-drying improve the survival of mature seeds of Digitalis purpurea during storage.

BACKGROUND AND AIMS Most priming studies have been conducted on commercial seed lots of unspecified uniformity and maturity, and subsequent seed longevity has been reported to both increase and decrease. Here a seed lot of Digitalis purpurea L. with relatively uniform maturity and known history was used to analyse the effects of priming on seed longevity in air-dry storage. METHODS Seeds collected close to natural dispersal and dried at 15% relative humidity (RH), 15 degrees C, were placed into experimental storage (60% RH, 45 degrees C) for 14 or 28 d, primed for 48 h at 0, -1, -2, -5, -10 or -15 MPa, re-equilibrated (47% RH, 20 degrees C) and then returned to storage. Further seed samples were primed for 2 or 48 h at -1 MPa and either dried at 15% RH, 15 degrees C or immediately re-equilibrated for experimental storage. Finally, some seeds were given up to three cycles of experimental storage and priming (48 h at -1 MPa). KEY RESULTS Priming at -1 MPa had a variable effect on subsequent survival during experimental storage. The shortest lived seeds in the control population showed slightly increased life spans; the longer lived seeds showed reduced life spans. In contrast, seeds first stored for 14 or 28 d before priming had substantially increased life spans. The increase tended to be greatest in the shortest lived fraction of the seed population. Both the period of rehydration and the subsequent drying conditions had significant effects on longevity. Interrupting air-dry storage with additional cycles of priming also increased longevity. CONCLUSIONS The extent of prior deterioration and the post-priming desiccation environment affect the benefits of priming to the subsequent survival of mature seeds. Rehydration-dehydration treatments may have potential as an adjunct or alternative to the regeneration of seed accessions maintained in gene banks for plant biodiversity conservation or plant breeding.
Solute Coupled Diffusion in Osmotically Driven Membrane Processes

Forward osmosis (FO) is an emerging water treatment technology with potential applications in desalination and wastewater reclamation. In FO, water is extracted from a feed solution using the high osmotic pressure of a hypertonic solution that flows on the opposite side of a semipermeable membrane; however, solutes diffuse simultaneously through the membrane in both directions and may jeopardize the process. In this study, we have comprehensively explored the effects of different operating conditions on the forward diffusion of solutes commonly found in brackish water and seawater, and reverse diffusion of common draw solution solutes. Results show that reverse transport of solutes through commercially available FO membranes range between 80 mg to nearly 3,000 mg per liter of water produced. Divalent feed solutes have low permeation rates (less than 1 mmol/m2-hr) while monovalent ions and uncharged solutes exhibit higher permeation. Findings have significant implications on the performance and sustainability of the FO process.
Land Use in Renewable Energy Planning

Author(s): Wu, Grace C | Advisor(s): Torn, Margaret | Abstract: All forms of energy generation can have intensive or extensive land use requirements, causing habitat and biodiversity loss in sensitive and diverse ecosystems globally. With the rapid transformation and growth of the energy sector in countries worldwide, understanding the impacts of past practices and charting the trajectory of future development projects is imperative for preventing negative environmental consequences. This dissertation contributes modeling strategies for integrating environmental impacts in renewable energy planning processes and spatially-explicit empirical methods for identifying and quantifying land use and land cover impacts related to renewable energy development.To explore land use and energy conflicts in a jurisdiction that is in the midst of a large-scale low-carbon energy transition, I ask the following: (1) is it possible to meet California's ambitious renewable energy targets without using high conservation-value land? (2) what are the system costs of low-impact renewable energy development? I find that while trade-offs between conservation value and renewable resource quality exist, restricting development to low-impact land is not only possible, but incurs only negligible economic cost increases. Given this possibility, I use California as a case study to identify decision-making opportunities in energy planning processes for integrating conservation and land use values and avoiding conservation-climate conflicts.Extending the spatial methods developed for California to countries in Africa that are planning renewable energy expansion, I ask, what is the potential for low-environmental-impact, socially-responsible, and cost-effective development of wind and solar energy in emerging economies in Africa? Using a multi-criteria analysis approach, I find that "no-regrets'' options---specifically areas that are low-cost, low-environmental impact, and highly accessible--exist such that significant fractions of demand can be quickly served with low-impact resources without large additional cost. Despite the magnitude and pace of hydropower expansion in highly biodiverse aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems in Southeast Asia, Africa, and Latin America, the potential indirect land use and land cover change resulting from hydropower development is poorly understood. To fill this gap, I ask, what are the indirect deforestation and land use impacts of utility-scale hydropower development in the Brazilian Amazon? Do siting choices and pre-existing land use and land cover affect the extent of the impact? Using scalable remote sensing and spatial econometric methods for causal inference, I find a 11-59% increase in indirect deforestation due to hydropower development. These findings can contribute to estimates of potential future terrestrial impacts from the hundreds of hydropower plants planned and proposed in relatively intact areas of the Brazilian Amazon.
Metamaterial Waveguide Devices for Integrated Optics

We show the feasibility of controlling the magnetic permeability of optical semiconductor devices on InP-based photonic integration platforms. We have achieved the permeability control of GaInAsP/InP semiconductor waveguides by combining the waveguide with a metamaterial consisting of gate-controlled split ring resonators. The split-ring resonators interact magnetically with light travelling in the waveguide and move the effective relative permeability of the waveguide away from 1 at optical frequencies. The variation in permeability can be controlled with the gate voltage. Using this variable-permeability waveguide, we have built an optical modulator consisting of a GaInAsP/InP Mach–Zehnder interferometer for use at an optical communication wavelength of 1.55 μm. The device changes the permeability of its waveguide arm with controlling gate voltage, thereby varying the refractive index of the arm to modulate the intensity of light. For the study of variable-permeability waveguide devices, we also propose a method of extracting separately the permittivity and permeability values of devices from the experimental data of light transmission. Adjusting the permeability of optical semiconductors to the needs of device designers will open the promising field of ‘permeability engineering’. Permeability engineering will facilitate the manipulation of light and the management of photons, thereby contributing to the development of novel devices with sophisticated functions for photonic integration.
Learning to retrieve out-of-vocabulary words in speech recognition

Many Proper Names (PNs) are Out-Of-Vocabulary (OOV) words for speech recognition systems used to process diachronic audio data. To help recovery of the PNs missed by the system, relevant OOV PNs can be retrieved out of the many OOVs by exploiting semantic context of the spoken content. In this paper, we propose two neural network models targeted to retrieve OOV PNs relevant to an audio document: (a) Document level Continuous Bag of Words (D-CBOW), (b) Document level Continuous Bag of Weighted Words (D-CBOW2). Both these models take document words as input and learn with an objective to maximise the retrieval of co-occurring OOV PNs. With the D-CBOW2 model we propose a new approach in which the input embedding layer is augmented with a context anchor layer. This layer learns to assign importance to input words and has the ability to capture (task specific) key-words in a bag-of-word neural network model. With experiments on French broadcast news videos we show that these two models outperform the baseline methods based on raw embeddings from LDA, Skip-gram and Paragraph Vectors. Combining the D-CBOW and D-CBOW2 models gives faster convergence during training.
A randomized phase III study evaluating the efficacy and safety of NEPA, a fixed-dose combination of netupitant and palonosetron, for prevention of chemotherapy-induced nausea and vomiting following moderately emetogenic chemotherapy

NEPA is an oral single, fixed-dose combination of netupitant, a new highly selective NK1 RA and palonosetron (PALO), a pharmacologically/clinically distinct 5-HT3 RA. It delivers antiemetic guideline-recommended prophylaxis by targeting two critical molecular pathways associated with chemotherapy-induced nausea/vomiting. This Phase III study demonstrated the superiority of NEPA compared with PALO.
The Management of Ulcerative Colitis and Crohn's Disease

The sufferer from ulcerative colitis, however well he feels, can never be sure that the disease is cured or that it will never recur. The Patient, even if he has had his colon removed ~nd a well-functioning ileostomy established, Is liable to a variety of upsets in his life. He is likely to see as much of the medical profession as the tubercular did in times past, and for the physician the problems of managelt! ent are involved, stressful and continuous. What sort of a disease is ulcerative colitis? 0 have a conception of the aetiology is as IltJportant to the physician as it is to the Worried and baffled patient who seeks an Understanding of his own affliction. Many Years ago, I suggested (Naish 1952) that ulcerative colitis might be regarded as 'eczema of the colon '. The similarities are there : , Constitutional background of race, family and
Neurocognitive phenomics: examining the genetic basis of cognitive abilities

Cognitive deficits are core to the disability associated with many psychiatric disorders. Both variation in cognition and psychiatric risk show substantial heritability, with overlapping genetic variants contributing to both. Unsurprisingly, therefore, these fields have been mutually beneficial: just as cognitive studies of psychiatric risk variants may identify genes involved in cognition, so too can genome-wide studies based on cognitive phenotypes lead to genes relevant to psychiatric aetiology. The purpose of this review is to consider the main issues involved in the phenotypic characterization of cognition, and to describe the challenges associated with the transition to genome-wide approaches. We conclude by describing the approaches currently being taken by the international consortia involving many investigators in the field internationally (e.g. Cognitive Genomics Consortium; COGENT) to overcome these challenges.
Evaluation of induced electric currents in strip-wound amorphous cores

A mathematical homogenization technique is applied to the computation of eddy currents in strip-wound amorphous cores. The results are compared with a standard finite-element (FE) solution of a test problem. The method is applied to the analysis of an amorphous core in a frequency range up to 1 MHz, with main emphasis on energy loss prediction.
Dynamic Fault Tolerance in Fat Trees

Fat trees are a very common communication architecture in current large-scale parallel computers. The probability of failure in these systems increases with the number of components. We present a routing method for deterministically and adaptively routed fat trees, applicable to both distributed and source routing, that is able to handle several concurrent faults and that transparently returns to the original routing strategy once the faulty components have recovered. The method is local and dynamic, completely masking the fault from the rest of the system. It only requires a small extra functionality in the switches to handle rerouting packets around a fault. The method guarantees connectedness and deadlock and livelock freedom for up to k -1 benign simultaneous switch and/or link faults where k is half the number of ports in the switches. Our simulation experiments show a graceful degradation of performance as more faults occur. Furthermore, we demonstrate that for most fault combinations, our method will even be able to handle significantly more faults beyond the k -1 limit with high probability.