Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Proliferating NG2-Cell-Dependent Angiogenesis and Scar Formation Alter Axon Growth and Functional Recovery After Spinal Cord Injury in Mice

Spinal cord injury (SCI) induces a centralized fibrotic scar surrounded by a reactive glial scar at the lesion site. The origin of these scars is thought to be perivascular cells entering lesions on ingrowing blood vessels and reactive astrocytes, respectively. However, two NG2-expressing cell populations, pericytes and glia, may also influence scar formation. In the periphery, new blood vessel growth requires proliferating NG2+ pericytes; if this were also true in the CNS, then the fibrotic scar would depend on dividing NG2+ pericytes. NG2+ glial cells (also called oligodendrocyte progenitors or polydendrocytes) also proliferate after SCI and accumulate in large numbers among astrocytes in the glial scar. Their effect there, if any, is unknown. We show that proliferating NG2+ pericytes and glia largely segregate into the fibrotic and glial scars, respectively; therefore, we used a thymidine kinase/ganciclovir paradigm to ablate both dividing NG2+ cell populations to determine whether either scar was altered. Results reveal that loss of proliferating NG2+ pericytes in the lesion prevented intralesion angiogenesis and completely abolished the fibrotic scar. The glial scar was also altered in the absence of acutely dividing NG2+ cells, displaying discontinuous borders and significantly reduced GFAP density. Collectively, these changes enhanced edema, prolonged hemorrhage, and impaired forelimb functional recovery. Interestingly, after halting GCV at 14 d postinjury, scar elements and vessels entered the lesions over the next 7 d, as did large numbers of axons that were not present in controls. Collectively, these data reveal that acutely dividing NG2+ pericytes and glia play fundamental roles in post-SCI tissue remodeling. SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT Spinal cord injury (SCI) is characterized by formation of astrocytic and fibrotic scars, both of which are necessary for lesion repair. NG2+ cells may influence both scar-forming processes. This study used a novel transgenic mouse paradigm to ablate proliferating NG2+ cells after SCI to better understand their role in repair. For the first time, our data show that dividing NG2+ pericytes are required for post-SCI angiogenesis, which in turn is needed for fibrotic scar formation. Moreover, loss of cycling NG2+ glia and pericytes caused significant multicellular tissue changes, including altered astrocyte responses and impaired functional recovery. This work reveals previously unknown ways in which proliferating NG2+ cells contribute to endogenous repair after SCI.
Differential regulation of extracellular matrix protein expression in carcinoma-associated fibroblasts by TGF-β1 regulates cancer cell spreading but not adhesion

Cancer progression is characterized by a complex reciprocity between neoplastic epithelium and adjacent stromal cells. In ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS) of the breast, both reduced stromal decorin expression and myxoid stroma are correlated with increased recurrence risk. In this study, we aimed to investigate paracrine regulation of expression of decorin and related extracellular matrix (ECM) proteins in cancer-associated fibroblasts (CAFs). Transforming growth factor-β1 (TGF-β1) was identified as a competent ECM modulator, as it reduced decorin and strongly enhanced versican, biglycan and type I collagen expression. Similar but less pronounced effects were observed when fibroblasts were treated with basic fibroblast growth factor (bFGF). Despite this concerted ECM modulation, TGF-β1 and bFGF differentially regulated alpha-smooth muscle actin (α-SMA) expression, which is often proposed as a CAF-marker. Cancer cell-derived secretomes induced versican and biglycan expression in fibroblasts. Immunohistochemistry on twenty DCIS specimens showed a trend toward periductal versican overexpression in DCIS with myxoid stroma. Cancer cell adhesion was inhibited by decorin, but not by CAF-derived matrices. Cancer cells presented significantly enhanced spreading when seeded on matrices derived from TGF-β1-treated CAF. Altogether these data indicate that preinvasive cancerous lesions might modulate the composition of surrounding stroma through TGF-β1 release to obtain an invasion-permissive microenvironment.
The CURB-65 scoring system in severity assessment of Eastern Nigerian patients with community-acquired pneumonia: a prospective observational study

Background: Community-acquired pneumonia (CAP) is a major cause of morbidity and mortality in Nigeria. Severity assessment is a major starting point in the proper management of CAP. The BTS guideline for managing this condition is simple and does not require sophisticated equipment. Adherence to this guideline will improve CAP management in Nigeria. Aims: To assess the usefulness of the CURB-65 score in the management of CAP patients in Nigeria and to determine the outcome in relation to the degree of severity using CURB-65. Methods: A prospective observational study of 80 patients with CAP was carried out in the University of Nigeria Teaching Hospital Enugu, Nigeria from December 2008 to June 2009. The patients were classified into three risk groups and the ability of the CURB-65 score to predict the 30-day mortality rate and the need for ICU admission was determined. Results: Eighty patients were recruited, 39 of whom were men, giving a male to female ratio of 1:1.05. The mean age was 56±18 years. Thirty-seven patients (46.3%) were outpatients, 13 with CURB score 0, 21 with CURB score 1, two with CURB score 2, and one with CURB score 3. Of the 43 patients (53.7%) admitted to hospital, six, 13, 14, and 10 had scores of 4, 3, 2, and 1, respectively. The ICU admission rate was 10%. Twelve patients died, 2.2% in the low-risk group, 12.5% in the intermediate-risk group, and 45% in the high-risk group. Conclusions: The CURB-65 score is a simple method of assessing and risk stratifying CAP patients. It is particularly useful in a busy emergency department because of its ability to identify a reasonable proportion of low-risk patients for potential outpatient care.
Light-dependent Translocation of a Phytochrome B-GFP Fusion Protein to the Nucleus in Transgenic Arabidopsis

Phytochrome is a ubiquitous photoreceptor of plants and is encoded by a small multigene family. We have shown recently that a functional nuclear localization signal may reside within the COOH-terminal region of a major member of the family, phytochrome B (phyB) (Sakamoto, K., and A. Nagatani. 1996. Plant J. 10:859–868). In the present study, a fusion protein consisting of full-length phyB and the green fluorescent protein (GFP) was overexpressed in the phyB mutant of Arabidopsis to examine subcellular localization of phyB in intact tissues. The resulting transgenic lines exhibited pleiotropic phenotypes reported previously for phyB overexpressing plants, suggesting that the fusion protein is biologically active. Immunoblot analysis with anti-phyB and anti-GFP monoclonal antibodies confirmed that the fusion protein accumulated to high levels in these lines. Fluorescence microscopy of the seedlings revealed that the phyB-GFP fusion protein was localized to the nucleus in light grown tissues. Interestingly, the fusion protein formed speckles in the nucleus. Analysis of confocal optical sections confirmed that the speckles were distributed within the nucleus. In contrast, phyB-GFP fluorescence was observed throughout the cell in dark-grown seedlings. Therefore, phyB translocates to specific sites within the nucleus upon photoreceptor activation.
Deacylated lipopolysaccharides inhibit biofilm formation by Gram-negative bacteria

Abstract The extracellular polysaccharides of Vibrio vulnificus play different roles during biofilm development. Among them, the effect of lipopolysaccharide (LPS), which is crucial for bacterial adherence to surfaces during the initial stage of biofilm formation, on the formation process was examined using various types of LPS extracts. Exogenously added LPS strongly inhibited biofilm formation in a dose-dependent manner. In addition, the exogenous addition of a deacylated form of LPS (dLPS) also inhibited biofilm formation. However, an LPS fraction extracted from a mutant not able to produce O-antigen polysaccharides (O-Ag) did not have an inhibitory effect. Furthermore, biofilm formation by several Gram-negative bacteria was inhibited by dLPS addition. In contrast, biofilm formation by Gram-positive bacteria was not influenced by dLPS but was affected by lipoteichoic acid. Therefore, this study demonstrates that O-Ag in LPS is important for inhibiting biofilm formation and may serve an efficient anti-biofilm agent specific for Gram-negative bacteria.
Nonsmooth Finite-Time Synchronization of Switched Coupled Neural Networks

This paper is concerned with the finite-time synchronization (FTS) issue of switched coupled neural networks with discontinuous or continuous activations. Based on the framework of nonsmooth analysis, some discontinuous or continuous controllers are designed to force the coupled networks to synchronize to an isolated neural network. Some sufficient conditions are derived to ensure the FTS by utilizing the well-known finite-time stability theorem for nonlinear systems. Compared with the previous literatures, such synchronization objective will be realized when the activations and the controllers are both discontinuous. The obtained results in this paper include and extend the earlier works on the synchronization issue of coupled networks with Lipschitz continuous conditions. Moreover, an upper bound of the settling time for synchronization is estimated. Finally, numerical simulations are given to demonstrate the effectiveness of the theoretical results.
CloudKit: Structured Storage for Mobile Applications

CloudKit is Apple's cloud backend service and application development framework that provides strongly-consistent storage for structured data and makes it easy to synchronize data across user devices or share it among multiple users. Launched more than 3 years ago, CloudKit forms the foundation for more than 50 Apple apps, including many of our most important and popular applications such as Photos, iCloud Drive, Notes, Keynote, and News, as well as many third-party apps. To deliver this at large scale, CloudKit explicitly leverages multi-tenancy at the application level as well as at the user level to guide efficient data placement and distribution. By using CloudKit application developers are free to focus on delivering the application front-end and logic while relying on CloudKit for scale, consistency, durability and security. CloudKit manages petabytes of data and handles hundreds of millions of users around the world on a daily basis.
microbial biotechnology

This journal publishes papers of original research reporting significant advances in any aspect of microbial applications, including, but not limited to biotechnologies related to: -Green chemistry -Primary metabolites -Food, beverages and supplements -Secondary metabolites and natural products -Pharmaceuticals -Diagnostics -Agriculture -Bioenergy -Biomining, including oil recovery and processing -Bioremediation -Biopolymers, biomaterials -Bionanotechnology -Biosurfactants and bioemulsifiers -Compatible solutes and bioprotectants -Biosensors, monitoring systems, quantitative microbial risk assessment -Technology development -Protein engineering -Functional genomics -Metabolic engineering -Metabolic design -Systems analysis, modelling -Process engineering -Biologically-based analytical methods -Microbially-based strategies in public health -Microbially-based strategies to influence global processes
Metaphase to Anaphase (mat) Transition–Defective Mutants inCaenorhabditis elegans

The metaphase to anaphase transition is a critical stage of the eukaryotic cell cycle, and, thus, it is highly regulated. Errors during this transition can lead to chromosome segregation defects and death of the organism. In genetic screens for temperature-sensitive maternal effect embryonic lethal (Mel) mutants, we have identified 32 mutants in the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans in which fertilized embryos arrest as one-cell embryos. In these mutant embryos, the oocyte chromosomes arrest in metaphase of meiosis I without transitioning to anaphase or producing polar bodies. An additional block in M phase exit is evidenced by the failure to form pronuclei and the persistence of phosphohistone H3 and MPM-2 antibody staining. Spermatocyte meiosis is also perturbed; primary spermatocytes arrest in metaphase of meiosis I and fail to produce secondary spermatocytes. Analogous mitotic defects cause M phase delays in mitotic germline proliferation. We have named this class of mutants “mat” for metaphase to anaphase transition defective. These mutants, representing six different complementation groups, all map near genes that encode subunits of the anaphase promoting complex or cyclosome, and, here, we show that one of the genes, emb-27, encodes the C. elegans CDC16 ortholog.
Oral 9-cis-retinoic acid versus 13-cis-retinoic acid in acne therapy.

BACKGROUND 9-cis-Retinoic acid (9-cis-RA) is as active as 13-cis-retinoic acid (13-cis-RA) in inhibiting the proliferation of cultured human sebocytes and in reducing the size of sebaceous glands of hamsters. OBJECTIVE Evaluate the anti-acne effect of 9-cis-RA compared to that of 13-cis-RA in a pilot study. METHODS Four young male patients with acne were treated in an open study consecutively with 9-cis-RA and 13-cis-RA given at similar doses. RESULTS No beneficial effects were observed with 9-cis-RA in any of the patients whereas all responded favorably to 13-cis-RA. CONCLUSION For the two retinoids tested, the anti-acne effect correlates with the sebosuppressive effect in humans.
Lifting of the Landau level degeneracy in graphene devices in a tilted magnetic field

We report on transport and capacitance measurements of graphene devices in magnetic fields up to 30 T. In both techniques, we observe the full splitting of Landau levels and we employ tilted field experiments to address the origin of the observed broken symmetry states. In the lowest energy level, the spin degeneracy is removed at filling factors $\nu=\pm1$ and we observe an enhanced energy gap. In the higher levels, the valley degeneracy is removed at odd filling factors while spin polarized states are formed at even $\nu$. Although the observation of odd filling factors in the higher levels points towards the spontaneous origin of the splitting, we find that the main contribution to the gap at $\nu= -4,-8$, and $-12$ is due to the Zeeman energy.
Cardioprotective potential of carvedilol.

Carvedilol is a multiple-action cardiovascular agent that is a nonselective beta-adrenoceptor antagonist and a vasodilator. beta-Adrenoceptor antagonists reduce myocardial work, secondary to reductions in heart rate and contractility, both in animals and in humans. For these reasons, carvedilol may improve survival of acutely ischemic myocardium. The additional vasodilating activity of carvedilol, further reducing myocardial work by decreasing afterload and ventricular wall tension, may provide additional salvage over that afforded by beta-adrenoceptor blockade alone. The comparative ability of carvedilol and propranolol to reduce infarct size in experimental models of acute myocardial infarction in the rat, pig and dog has been investigated utilizing a variety of experimental techniques. In the pig, the calcium channel antagonist, diltiazem, was also included as a second comparator agent. Infarct size was examined on stained tissue sections using quantitative image analysis. In the rat, carvedilol (1 mg/kg) reduced infarct size by 47% (p < 0.01, n = 11), and in the pig, carvedilol, at doses of 0.3 and 1 mg/kg, reduced infarct size by 46% (p < 0.05, n = 6) and 89% (p < 0.001, n = 6), respectively. In dogs subjected to ischemia and reperfusion, carvedilol (1 mg/kg) reduced infarct size by 78% (p < 0.02, n = 6), and in dogs subjected to permanent left anterior descending coronary artery occlusion, carvedilol, at doses of 0.3 and 1 mg/kg, reduced infarct size by 46 and 63%, respectively (p < 0.02, n = 12-16). In all studies, the extent of myocardial survival on carvedilol exceeded that on propranolol. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)
Compound Heterozygous Variants in the Coiled-Coil Domain Containing 40 Gene in a Chinese Family with Primary Ciliary Dyskinesia Cause Extreme Phenotypic Diversity in Cilia Ultrastructure

Purpose: Primary ciliary dyskinesia (PCD) is a rare genetic disorder manifested with recurrent infections of respiratory tract and infertility. Mutations in more than 20 genes including the Coiled-Coil Domain Containing 40 (CCDC40) gene are associated with PCD. A Chinese proband with a clinical diagnosis of PCD was analyzed for mutations in these genes to identify the genetic basis of the disease in the family. The proband showed altered mucociliary clearance of the airways, various degree of hyperemia and edema of the mucous membrane, left/right body asymmetry, infertility and ultrastructural abnormality of cilia in both sperm and bronchioles. Methods: The DNA from the proband was analyzed for genetic variation in a subset of genes known to cause PCD using targeted next generation sequencing in order to understand the molecular and genetic basis of the PCD in present family. The result of targeted next generation sequencing has been validated by Sanger sequencing and q-PCR. Results: Targeted next-generation sequencing identified two novel mutations (c.1259delA and EX17_20 deletion) in CCDC40 gene that causes abnormal CCDC40 mRNA expression. These two novel variants cause disorganization of axoneme filaments, which resulted in reduction of sperm motility and phenotypic diversity in ultrastructure of cilia in the proband. Conclusion: These findings highlight the significance of the mutations in CCDC40 as novel candidates for genetic testing in PCD patients as well as the key role of ICSI treatment for the families affected by this ciliary dysmotility. Our findings showed that our work enriched the performance of cilia ultrastructure which were not previously reported in PCD patients.
Combining Treg therapy with mixed chimerism

Deliberate establishment of donor-specific immunologic tolerance is considered to be the "Holy Grail" in transplantation medicine, but clinical tolerance protocols for routine organ transplantation are still an unmet need. Mixed hematopoietic chimerism is an attractive tolerance strategy with considerable potential. Recent pilot trials provide proof-of-principle that mixed chimerism can induce tolerance in renal transplant recipients. Routine clinical translation, however, is impeded by the side effects of the cytotoxic recipient conditioning necessary for the transient engraftment of HLA-mismatched BM. In murine studies recently published in The American Journal of Transplantation, we demonstrated that the therapeutic application of polyclonal recipient regulatory T cells (Tregs) leads to engraftment of practicable doses of fully allogeneic BM and to donor-specific tolerance without any cytotoxic conditioning. Thereby a major impediment for the clinical translation of the mixed chimerism strategy was eliminated in the experimental setting. The background and the implications of these findings are discussed.
I2R-NUS submission to oriental language recognition AP16-OL7 challenge

This paper presents a detailed description and analysis of a joint submission of Institute for Infocomm Research (I2R) and National University of Singapore (NUS), which is the top performing system to AP16-OL7 Challenge. The submitted system was a fusion of two sub-systems: the i-vector system and GMM-SVM system, both based on state-of-the-art bottleneck feature. Central to our work presented in this paper is a language-dependent UBM GMM-SVM system and traditional i- vector polynomials expansion with SVM classifier. The FoCal toolkit was used for sub-system fusion. Experimental results show that the proposed approach achieves significant improvement over the baseline system on the development and evaluation sets. Our final submission achieve EER 0.440%, 1.09% and identification rates 98.9%, 97.6% on the development set and evaluation set, respectively.
Mobility and Popularity-Aware Coded Small-Cell Caching

In heterogeneous cellular networks with caching capability, due to mobility of users and storage constraints of small-cell base stations (SBSs), users may not be able to download all of their requested content from the SBSs within the delay deadline of the content. In that case, the users are directed to the macro-cell base station (MBS) in order to satisfy the service quality requirement. Coded caching is exploited here to minimize the amount of data downloaded from the MBS, taking into account the mobility of the users as well as the popularity of the contents. An optimal distributed caching policy is presented when the delay deadline is below a certain threshold, and a distributed greedy caching policy is proposed when the delay deadline is relaxed.
Dynamic Changes of Mitochondrial Fusion and Fission in Brain Injury after Cardiac Arrest in Rats

Mitochondria change their morphology dynamically by continual fusion and fission processes to fulfill their function. However, little is known about the effect of cardiac arrest on mitochondrial dynamics. This study aimed to investigate time-dependent change of the mitochondrial dynamics after brain ischemic injury in rats of cardiac arrest. After resuscitation, obvious neuronal injury, reduced adenosine triphosphate (ATP) levels, excessive reactive oxygen species (ROS) generation, decreased mitochondrial membrane potential (MMP), and increased release of mitochondrial cytochrome c were observed at 12 h and 24 h after cardiac arrest. Moreover, we found that elongation of mitochondria was observed at 4 h after cardiac arrest, whereas fragmented mitochondria were significantly increased, along with concomitant increase in the fission proteins Drp1 and Fis1 and a reduction in the fusion proteins Mfn1 and Mfn2 at 12 h and 24 h after cardiac arrest. Taken together, these findings suggest that imbalance in mitochondrial dynamics probably contributes to brain injury after cardiac arrest.
‘Metrical’ Factors in the Scaling of Sentence-Initial Accent Peaks

Abstract Past studies of declination make contradictory claims about the relationship between the length of an utterance and the height of its first accent peak (P1): Some find a large increase in P1 with increased length, others find little or no increase. A possible explanation for this contradiction is that large increases in P1 occur when the first major constituent of the sentence increases from one accented item to more than one, but not as a function of overall length alone. In an experiment, 1 of 2 speakers behaved in the way just outlined; data from the 2nd speaker supported the more general hypothesis that ‘metrical’ constituent structure is relevant to P1.
A New Record of Morula anaxares with a Description of the Radula of Three Other Species from Goa, Central West Coast of India (Gastropoda: Muricidae)

The present paper describes a new record of Morula anaxares (Kiener 1835) (Muricidae) from Goa, Central West coast of India aided by spiral cord ontogeny, aperture morphology of shell and SEM of radula. This species was previously reported from Andaman, Nicobar, Lakshadweep and Madras coasts. In addition, detailed structures of radula of other three species namely Orania subnodulosa (Melvill 1893), Semiricinula konkanensis (Melvill 1893) and Purpura bufo Lamarck 1822 from Goa are described for the first time using SEM photographs.