Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Vav1/Rac-dependent actin cytoskeleton reorganization is required for lipid raft clustering in T cells

Formation of the immunological synapse (IS) in T cells involves large scale molecular movements that are mediated, at least in part, by reorganization of the actin cytoskeleton. Various signaling proteins accumulate at the IS and are localized in specialized membrane microdomains, known as lipid rafts. We have shown previously that lipid rafts cluster and localize at the IS in antigen-stimulated T cells. Here, we provide evidence that lipid raft polarization to the IS depends on an intracellular pathway that involves Vav1, Rac, and actin cytoskeleton reorganization. Thus, lipid rafts did not translocate to the IS in Vav1-deficient (Vav1 − /−) T cells upon antigen stimulation. Similarly, T cell receptor transgenic Jurkat T cells also failed to translocate lipid rafts to the IS when transfected with dominant negative Vav1 mutants. Raft polarization induced by membrane-bound cholera toxin cross-linking was also abolished in Jurkat T cells expressing dominant negative Vav1 or Rac mutants and in cells treated with inhibitors of actin polymerization. However, Vav overexpression that induced F-actin polymerization failed to induce lipid rafts clustering. Therefore, Vav is necessary, but not sufficient, to regulate lipid rafts clustering and polarization at the IS, suggesting that additional signals are required.
Dopamine modulates in a differential fashion T- and L-type calcium currents in bass retinal horizontal cells

White bass (Roccus chrysops) retinal horizontal cells possess two types of voltage-activated calcium currents which have recently been characterized with regard to their voltage dependence and pharmacology (Sullivan, J., and E. M. Lasater. 1992. Journal of General Physiology. 99:85-107). A low voltage-activated transient current was identified which resembles the T-type calcium current described in a number of other preparations, along with a sustained high threshold, long-lasting calcium current that resembles the L-type calcium current. Here we report on the modulation of horizontal cell calcium channels by dopamine. Under whole-cell voltage clamp conditions favoring the expression of both calcium currents, dopamine had opposing actions on the two types of voltage-sensitive calcium currents in the same cone- type horizontal cell. The L-type calcium current was significantly potentiated by dopamine while the T-type current was simultaneously reduced. Dopamine had no effect on calcium currents in rod-type horizontal cells. Both of dopamine's actions were mimicked with the D1 receptor agonist, SKF 38393, and blocked by application of the D1 specific antagonist, SCH 23390. Dopamine's actions on the two types of calcium currents in white bass horizontal cells are mimicked by the cell membrane-permeant cyclic AMP derivative, 8-(4-chlorophenylthio)- cyclic AMP, suggesting that dopamine's action is linked to a cAMP- mediated second messenger system. Furthermore, the inhibitor of cAMP- dependent protein kinase blocked both of dopamine's actions on the voltage-dependent calcium channels when introduced through the patch pipette. This indicates that protein phosphorylation is involved in modulating horizontal cell calcium channels by dopamine. Taken together, these results show that dopamine has differential effects on the voltage-dependent calcium currents in retinal horizontal cells. The modulation of these currents may play a role in shaping the response properties of horizontal cells.
Values as Guiding Principles of Motivation: A Two Factor Model

Title of Dissertation / Thesis: VALUES AS GUIDING PRINCIPLES OF MOTIVATION: A TWO FACTOR MODEL. Scott Paul Leary, M.A., 2004 Dissertation / Thesis Directed By: Professor Charles Stangor, Deparment of Psychology Although people use stereotypes and prejudices to arrive at preferred conclusions, individual differences determine the extent and direction to which these intergroup attitudes color judgments. Research demonstrates that numerous personality variables act as predictors of the use of stereotypes and prejudice. Some attempts have been made to organize these measures into underlying values systems. I tested the hypotheses that values influence perceptions of ingroups and outgroups. In Study 1, participants completed individual difference measures. Factor analysis revealed two independent factors: Egalitarianism, which predicted positive judgments of outgroups, and Conservatism, which predicted positive judgments of ingroups. In Study 2, participants read a story describing either a gay or heterosexual man. I predicted that participants would vary their interpretation of the target based on their value orientations. Although Egalitarianism and Conservatism did not predict ratings of the target individual, they did predict free responses of the target, homophobia, and behaviors. VALUES AS GUIDING PRINCIPLES OF MOTIVATION: A TWO FACTOR MODEL
Increased renal resistive index in patients with essential hypertension: a marker of target organ damage.

BACKGROUND Increased renal resistance detected by ultrasound (US) Doppler has been reported in severe essential hypertension (EH) and recently was shown to correlate with the degree of renal impairment in hypertensive patients with chronic renal failure. However, the pathophysiological significance of this finding is still controversial. METHODS In a group of 211 untreated patients with EH, we evaluated renal resistive index (RI) by US Doppler of interlobar arteries and early signs of target organ damage (TOD). Albuminuria was measured as the albumin to creatinine ratio (ACR) in three non-consecutive first morning urine samples. Left ventricular mass was evaluated by M-B mode echocardiography, and carotid wall thickness (IMT) by high resolution US scan. RESULTS RI was positively correlated with age (r=0.25, P=0.003) and systolic blood pressure (SBP) (r=0.2, P=0.02) and with signs of early TOD, namely ACR (r=0.22, P=0.01) and IMT (r=0.17, P<0.05), and inversely correlated with renal volume (r=-0.22, P=0.01) and diastolic blood pressure (r=-0.23, P=0.006). Multiple linear regression analysis demonstrated that age, gender, ACR and SBP independently influence RI and together account for approximately 20% of its variations (F=8.153, P<0.0001). When clinical data were analysed according to the degree of RI, the patients in the top quartile were found to be older (P<0.05) and with higher SBP (P<0.05) as well as early signs of TOD, namely increased ACR (P<0.002) and IMT (P<0.005 by ANOVA), despite similar body mass index, uric acid, fasting blood glucose, lipid profile and duration of hypertension. Furthermore, patients with higher RI showed a significantly higher prevalence of microalbuminuria (13 vs 12 vs 3 vs 33% chi2=11.72, P=0.008) and left ventricular hypertrophy (40 vs 43 vs 32 vs 60%, chi2=9.25, P<0.05). CONCLUSIONS Increased RI is associated with early signs of TOD in EH and could be a marker of intrarenal atherosclerosis.
Menstrual physiology: implications for endometrial pathology and beyond

BACKGROUND Each month the endometrium becomes inflamed, and the luminal portion is shed during menstruation. The subsequent repair is remarkable, allowing implantation to occur if fertilization takes place. Aberrations in menstrual physiology can lead to common gynaecological conditions, such as heavy or prolonged bleeding. Increased knowledge of the processes involved in menstrual physiology may also have translational benefits at other tissue sites. METHODS Pubmed and Cochrane databases were searched for all original and review articles published in English until April 2015. Search terms included ‘endometrium’, ‘menstruation’, ‘endometrial repair’, ‘endometrial regeneration’ ‘angiogenesis’, ‘inflammation’ and ‘heavy menstrual bleeding’ or ‘menorrhagia’. RESULTS Menstruation occurs naturally in very few species. Human menstruation is thought to occur as a consequence of preimplantation decidualization, conferring embryo selectivity and the ability to adapt to optimize function. We highlight how current and future study of endometrial inflammation, vascular changes and repair/regeneration will allow us to identify new therapeutic targets for common gynaecological disorders. In addition, we describe how increased knowledge of this endometrial physiology will have many translational applications at other tissue sites. We highlight the clinical applications of what we know, the key questions that remain and the scientific and medical possibilities for the future. CONCLUSIONS The study of menstruation, in both normal and abnormal scenarios, is essential for the production of novel, acceptable medical treatments for common gynaecological complaints. Furthermore, collaboration and communication with specialists in other fields could significantly advance the therapeutic potential of this dynamic tissue.
Joint Gaussian Based Measures for Multiple-Instance Learning

As an actively investigated topic in machine learning, Multiple-Instance Learning (MIL) has many proposed solutions, including both supervised and unsupervised methods. Most of these solutions are restricted to the original assumption that comes with the notion of MIL: the label of a multipleinstance object is directly determined by the labels of its instances. However, this assumption faces adverse circumstances when there is no clear relation between the over-all label and the labels of instances. Most previous approaches avoid this problem in practice by taking each multiple-instance object as a whole instead of starting with learning in instance spaces, but they either lose information or are time consuming. In this paper, we introduce two joint Gaussian based measures for MIL, Joint Gaussian Similarity (JGS) and Joint Gaussian Distance (JGD), which require no prior knowledge of relations between the labels of multiple-instance objects and their instances. JGS is a measure of similarity while JGD is a metric of which the properties are necessary for many techniques like clustering and embedding. JGS and JGD take all the information into account and many traditional machine learning methods can be introduced to MIL. Extensive experimental evaluations on various real-world data demonstrate the effectiveness of both measures, and better performances than state-of-the-art MIL algorithms on benchmark tasks.
Felzenszwalb-Baum-Welch: Event Detection by Changing Appearance

We propose a method which can detect events in videos by modeling the change in appearance of the event participants over time. This method makes it possible to detect events which are characterized not by motion, but by the changing state of the people or objects involved. This is accomplished by using object detectors as output models for the states of a hidden Markov model (HMM). The method allows an HMM to model the sequence of poses of the event participants over time, and is effective for poses of humans and inanimate objects. The ability to use existing object-detection methods as part of an event model makes it possible to leverage ongoing work in the object-detection community. A novel training method uses an EM loop to simultaneously learn the temporal structure and object models automatically, without the need to specify either the individual poses to be modeled or the frames in which they occur. The E-step estimates the latent assignment of video frames to HMM states, while the M-step estimates both the HMM transition probabilities and state output models, including the object detectors, which are trained on the weighted subset of frames assigned to their state. A new dataset was gathered because little work has been done on events characterized by changing object pose, and suitable datasets are not available. Our method produced results superior to that of comparison systems on this dataset.
Hypoxia-inducible Factor 1 Activation by Aerobic Glycolysis Implicates the Warburg Effect in Carcinogenesis*

Cancer cells display high rates of aerobic glycolysis, a phenomenon known historically as the Warburg effect. Lactate and pyruvate, the end products of glycolysis, are highly produced by cancer cells even in the presence of oxygen. Hypoxia-induced gene expression in cancer cells has been linked to malignant transformation. Here we provide evidence that lactate and pyruvate regulate hypoxia-inducible gene expression independently of hypoxia by stimulating the accumulation of hypoxia-inducible Factor 1α (HIF-1α). In human gliomas and other cancer cell lines, the accumulation of HIF-1α protein under aerobic conditions requires the metabolism of glucose to pyruvate that prevents the aerobic degradation of HIF-1α protein, activates HIF-1 DNA binding activity, and enhances the expression of several HIF-1-activated genes including erythropoietin, vascular endothelial growth factor, glucose transporter 3, and aldolase A. Our findings support a novel role for pyruvate in metabolic signaling and suggest a mechanism by which high rates of aerobic glycolysis can promote the malignant transformation and survival of cancer cells.
Ontogeny of mantle musculature and implications for jet locomotion in oval squid Sepioteuthis lessoniana

SUMMARY We examined the relationship between mantle muscle structure and mantle kinematics in an ontogenetic series (5-85 mm dorsal mantle length) of oval squid, Sepioteuthis lessoniana. Thick filament length increased during growth in the mantle muscle fibres that power jet locomotion (i.e. the circular muscles). The thick filament length of both the superficial mitochondria-rich (SMR; analogous to vertebrate red muscle fibres) and central mitochondria-poor (CMP; analogous to vertebrate white muscle fibres) circular muscles increased significantly during ontogeny. Thick filaments in the SMR circular muscle fibres of newly hatched squid (N=5) ranged from 0.7 to 1.4 μm and averaged 1.0 μm, while the thick filaments of the SMR fibres of the largest squids (N=4) studied ranged from 1.2 to 3. 4μ m and averaged 1.9 μm. The ontogeny of thick filament length in the CMP circular muscle fibres showed a similar trend. The range for hatchling CMP circular muscles was 0.7-1.4 μm, with an average of 1.0 μm, whereas the range and average for the largest squids studied were 0.9-2.2 μm and 1. 5μ m, respectively. Within an individual hatchling, we noted no significant differences between the thick filament lengths of the SMR and CMP fibres. Within an individual juvenile, the thick filaments of the SMR fibres were∼ 25% longer than the CMP fibres. The change in thick filament length may alter the contractile properties of the circular muscles and may also result in a decrease in the rate of mantle contraction during jetting. In escape-jet locomotion, the maximum rate of mantle contraction was highest in newly hatched squid and declined during ontogeny. The maximum rate of mantle contraction varied from 7-13 muscle lengths per second in newly hatched squid (N=14) and from 3-5 muscle lengths per second in the largest squids (N=35) studied.
Evidencias para una transformación y complejización del modelo chileno de evaluación docente

This article presents the results of a study conducted in 2012 and 2013 which sought to investigate the effectiveness of the teacher performance evaluation implemented in Chile with teachers from public schools in order to improve the learning outcomes of Chilean students. The research was conducted using the quantitative paradigm. In order to relate the results of students with the teacher evaluated, we selected cohorts of students in the fourth year of primary education who had been taught Language and Communication and Mathematics by the teacher evaluated. The relation was established using a multivariate model. The results obtained allow us to argue that there is no significant relationship between participating in the assessment of teacher performance and the learning outcomes of students. Therefore, it is necessary to analyze not only the effectiveness of the process but also the official argument of the benefits of teachers undergoing this type of evaluation. Finally, this study’s results, in addition to international evidence, support the need for complexifying the Chilean evaluation model by means of the concepts of decentralization, contextualization and participation, which are absent from the process currently implemented.
Virtual memory support for multiple page sizes

The advent of computers with 64-bit virtual address spaces and giga-bytes of physical memory will provide applications with many more orders of magnitude of memory than is possible today. However, to tap the potential of this new hardware, we need to re-examine how virtual memory is traditionally managed. We concentrate in this note on two aspects of virtual memory: software support for multiple page sizes, and memory management policies tuned to large amounts of physical memory. We argue for the need to examine these areas, and we identify several questions that need to be answered. In particular, we show that providing support for multiple page sizes is not as straightforward as may initially appear. <<ETX>>
Data uncertainty management in path planning for underwater ocean gliders

The special characteristics of the ocean gliders propulsion scheme endows these vehicles with an extremely high endurance, at the cost of a relatively low surge speed. Hence, gliders' trajectory is highly influenced by ocean currents, which can even exceed the vehicle's nominal velocity. This calls for intelligent path planning algorithms, fact that reflects in the high number of solutions proposed by researchers that can be found in recent bibliography. In this paper we propose a novel method to combine multiple ocean forecast models in order to feed the glider path-planner with as reliable as possible source information. The scheme is configured as a multi-evidence fusion that integrates factors such as sensor vs model validation, forecast stability and model historic performance.
Adapting effects of emotional expression in anxiety: Evidence for an enhanced Late Positive Potential

An adaptation paradigm was used to investigate the influence of a previously experienced visual context on the interpretation of ambiguous emotional expressions. Affective classification of fear-neutral ambiguous expressions was performed following repeated exposure to either fearful or neutral faces. There was a shift in the behavioral classification of morphs toward “fear” following adaptation to neutral compared to adaptation to fear with a nonsignificant trend toward the high-anxiety group compared to the low being more influenced by the context. The event-related potential (ERP) data revealed a more pronounced late positive potential (LPP), beginning at ~400 ms poststimulus onset, in the high but not the low-anxiety group following adaptation to neutral compared to fear. In addition, as the size of the behavioral adaptation increased, there was a linear increase in the magnitude of the late-LPP. However, context-sensitivity effects are not restricted to trait anxiety, with similar effects observed with state anxiety and depression. These data support the proposal that negative moods are associated with increased sensitivity to visual contextual influences from top-down elaborative modulations, as reflected in an enhanced LPP deflection.
The Nimble XML data integration system

For better or for worse, XML has emerged as a de facto standard for data interchange. This consensus is likely to lead to increased demand for technology that allows users to integrate data from a variety of applications, repositories, and partners, which are located across the corporate intranet or on the Internet. Nimble Technology has spent two years developing a product to service this market. Originally conceived after decades of person-years of research on data integration, the product is now being deployed at several Fortune-500 beta-customer sites. The article reports on the key challenges faced in the design of our product and highlights some issues which require more attention from the research community. In particular we address architectural issues arising from designing a product to support XML as its core representation, choices in the design of the underlying algebra, on-the-fly data cleaning and caching and materialization policies.
Inactivation of Pasteurella(Mannheimia) haemolytica Leukotoxin Causes Partial Attenuation of Virulence in a Calf Challenge Model

ABSTRACT The leukotoxin of Pasteurella (Mannheimia)haemolytica is believed to play a significant role in pathogenesis, causing cell lysis and apoptosis that lead to the lung pathology characteristic of bovine shipping fever. Using a system for Cre-lox recombination, a nonpolar mutation within thelktC transacylase gene of the leukotoxin operon was created. The lktC locus was insertionally inactivated using a loxP-aph3-loxP cassette, and then the aph3marker was excised from the chromosome by Cre recombinase expressed from a P. haemolytica plasmid. The resultinglktC strain (SH2099) secretes inactive leukotoxin and carries no known antibiotic resistance genes. Strain SH2099 was tested for virulence in a calf challenge model. We inoculated 3 × 108 or 3 × 109 CFU of wild-type or mutant bacteria into the lungs of healthy, colostrum-deprived calves via transthoracic injection. Animals were observed for clinical signs and for nasal colonization for 4 days, after which they were euthanized and necropsied. The lower inoculum (3 × 108 CFU) caused significantly fewer deaths and allowed lung pathology to be scored and compared, while the 3 × 109 CFU dose of either the wild-type or mutant was lethal to ≥50% of the calves. The estimated 50% lethal dose of SH2099 was four times higher than that of the wild-type strain. Lung lesion scores were reduced twofold in animals inoculated with the mutant, while clinical scores were nearly equivalent for both strains. The wild-type and mutant strains were equally capable of colonizing the upper respiratory tracts of the calves. In this study, the P. haemolytica lktC mutant was shown to be less virulent than the parent strain.
Quick as a BLINK: An ultrarapid analogue of Iowa Gambling Task decision making

Over the past decade, the decision-making task of Bechara, Damasio, Damasio, and Anderson (1994), otherwise known as the Iowa Gambling Task (or IGT), has been employed in several hundred published studies. This task has helped to elucidate the nature of normal and abnormal decision making. However, the IGT has also proven time consuming to administer and difficult to employ in some clinical settings. The present study presents a novel measure that drastically reduces the time required for task administration: the Bangor Learning Intuitive and Nonverbal Kaleidoscope Task—BLINK—which employs immediate, nonverbal, visual feedback that allows participants to incorporate win/loss information within several hundred milliseconds. The present study demonstrates that BLINK is approximately 25 times faster than the IGT and also has a lower false-positive rate. In addition, we use expectancy–valence models to fit performance on our task, and we demonstrate that BLINK appears to depend on psychological mechanisms similar to those involved in IGT performance. We discuss several important theoretical and applied implications of the BLINK task.