Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Do pheromones reveal male immunocompetence?

Pheromones function not only as mate attractors, but they may also relay important information to prospective mates. It has been shown that vertebrates can distinguish, via olfactory mechanisms, major histocompatibility complex types in their prospective mates. However, whether pheromones can transmit information about immunocompetence is unknown. Here, we show that female mealworm beetles (Tenebrio molitor) prefer pheromones from males with better immunocompetence, indicated by a faster encapsulation rate against a novel antigen, and higher levels of phenoloxidase in haemolymph. Thus, the present study indicates that pheromones could transmit information about male's parasite resistance ability and may work as a reliable sexual ornament for female choice.
Alcohol and Risks for HIV/AIDS Among Sexually Transmitted Infection Clinic Patients in Cape Town, South Africa

Abstract Alcohol use is prevalent in South Africa and alcohol use may be associated with higher risk for HIV transmission. This paper reports a study of the association between alcohol use and HIV risk-related behavior among 134 men and 92 women receiving sexually transmitted infection (STI) clinic services in Cape Town, South Africa. Participants completed anonymous surveys of demographic information, substance use, and sexual risk behaviors. Results showed that problem drinking was common among STI clinic patients; 58% of men and 28% of women scored above a cut-off of 9 on the Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test (AUDIT) suggesting possible problem drinking and 46% of men and 19% of women scored above 12 on the AUDIT indicating probable drinking problems. For men, heavier alcohol use was associated with having multiple sex partners in the past month, less condom use, and having a history of sexually assaulting women. Among women, higher scores on the AUDIT were also related to having multiple sex partners as well as a history of exchanging sex for money or materials. The association between alcohol use and sexual risk behaviors in a population at high-risk for HIV transmission demonstrates the need for integrating alcohol risk reduction counseling with HIV prevention counseling among STI clinic patients in South Africa.
Papillomas of the teats and udder of cattle and their causal viruses

An abattoir survey was carried out on 1657 cattle to determine the incidence and parameters of teat and udder papillomas and their causal viruses. Recent research has characterised six different bovine papillomaviruses of which three have been found to be particularly associated with teat tumours. Of the population studied 37.3 per cent had teat warts and 86.2 per cent of these had multiple infections; 28.4 per cent had papillomas attributed to bovine papillomavirus 1, 88.5 per cent to bovine papillomavirus 5 and 92.3 per cent to bovine papillomavirus 6. There was no predilection site between teats. Herefords and their crosses dominated the breed incidence and showed the highest numbers of warts but it was not possible to make a realistic comparison with other breeds. Dairy cattle were poorly represented. Bovine papillomavirus 4 was never found and from this it was concluded that there is no association between alimentary and teat papillomas. The implications of these findings in terms of prophylaxis and control are discussed.
Music Classification Using Kolmogorov Distance

Abstract. We evaluate the music composer classification using an approximation of the Kolmogorov distance between different music pieces. The distance approximation has recently been suggested by Vitanyi and his colleagues. They use a clustering method to evalute the distance metric. However the clustering is too slow for large (>60) data sets. We suggest using the distance metric together with a k-nearest neighbor classifier. We measure the performance of the distance metric based on the test classification accuracy of the classifier. A classification accuracy of 79% is achieved for a training data set of 57 midi files from three different classical composers. We find out that the classification accuracy increases with training set size. The performance of the metric seems to also depend on different pre-processing methods, hence domain knowledge and input representation could make a difference on how the distance metric performs.
HMG-CoA Reductase Inhibitors Improve Endothelial Dysfunction in Normocholesterolemic Hypertension via Reduced Production of Reactive Oxygen Species

3-Hydroxy-3-methylglutaryl coenzyme A (HMG-CoA) reductase inhibitors (statins) significantly reduce cardiovascular mortality associated with hypercholesterolemia. There is evidence that statins exert beneficial effects in part through direct effects on vascular cells independent of lowering plasma cholesterol. We characterized the effect of a 30-day treatment with atorvastatin in normocholesterolemic, spontaneously hypertensive rats (SHR). Systolic blood pressure was significantly decreased in atorvastatin-treated rats (184±5 versus 204±6 mm Hg for control). Statin therapy improved endothelial dysfunction, as assessed by carbachol-induced vasorelaxation in aortic segments, and profoundly reduced angiotensin II-induced vasoconstriction. Angiotensin type 1 (AT1) receptor, endothelial cell NO synthase (ecNOS), and p22phox mRNA expression were determined with quantitative reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction. Atorvastatin treatment downregulated aortic AT1 receptor mRNA expression to 44±12% of control and reduced mRNA expression of the essential NAD(P)H oxidase subunit p22phox to 63±7% of control. Aortic AT1 receptor protein expression was consistently decreased. Vascular production of reactive oxygen species was reduced to 62±12% of control in statin-treated SHR, as measured with lucigenin chemiluminescence assays. Accordingly, treatment of SHR with the AT1 receptor antagonist fonsartan improved endothelial dysfunction and reduced vascular free-radical release. Moreover, atorvastatin caused an upregulation of ecNOS mRNA expression (138±7% of control) and an enhanced ecNOS activity in the vessel wall (209±46% of control). Treatment of SHR with atorvastatin causes a significant reduction of systolic blood pressure and a profound improvement of endothelial dysfunction mediated by a reduction of free radical release in the vasculature. The underlying mechanism could in part be based on the statin-induced downregulation of AT1 receptor expression and decreased expression of the NAD(P)H oxidase subunit p22phox, because AT1 receptor activation plays a pivotal role for the induction of this redox system in the vessel wall.
A pilot study on the use of accelerometer sensors for monitoring post acute stroke patients

The high incidence of stroke has raised a major concern among health professionals in recent years. Concerted efforts from medical and engineering communities are being exercised to tackle the problem at its early stage. In this direction, a pilot study to analyze and detect the affected arm of the stroke patient based on hand movements is presented. The premise is that the correlation of magnitude of the activities of the two arms vary significantly for stroke patients from controls. Further, the cross-correlation of right and left arms for three axes are differentiable for patients and controls. A total of 22 subjects (15 patients and 7 controls) were included in this study. An overall accuracy of 95.45% was obtained with sensitivity of 1 and specificity of 0.86 using correlation based method.
The Use of Description Logics as Database Query Languages

Description Logics are knowledge representation languages set up by the development of the Kl-One system 1]. They are used to capture the taxonomy of an application domain and to describe the application domain itself in terms of this taxonomy. These speciic logics employ user-friendly variable-free notations. One of their major characteristics is their clear semantics. Without such a formal semantics , it would be impossible to state what exactly is represented by a particular representation. In other words, without formal semantics, representations would have no meaning outside the particular system in which they reside|preventing the knowledge xed in the representation from being re-used. The line of research set up by the Kl-One project can be called successful in the long run. An indication for its success certainly is that the most recent successor of Kl-One, AT&T's Classic system, eventually reached the realm of a large-scale industrial application 6]. This success, however, should not obscure the fact that there is a fundamental dilemma from which all description logics suuer. In fact, despite their limited expressive power, basic in-ferential services such as classifying new terms into a taxonomy cannot be implemented eeciently. In particular, it is known that even in the very smallest description logic's setting, basic inferences are co-NP-hard 2]. In 4] we have shown that this fundamental dilemma can in principle be circumvented. In particular , we were able to demonstrate that tractabil-ity can generally be obtained just by eliminating any incompleteness from a knowledge base while the tax-onomy is left unchanged. This remains true even for the most powerful description logic ever considered. The description logic we have paid attention to can be called with full right universal in that it encompasses all language repositories known from traditional description logics. This enables the universal description logic to deene many standard data structures such as trees or directed acyclic graphs in an elegant way. In addition to traditional constructs, the universal description logic includes a general means of recursion. As is not unusual in computer science , we handled recursion with the help of least and greatest xed-point operators. The technique employed is actually a generalization of the technique presented in 3]. These xed-point operators turned out to be indispensable as soon as more involved concepts such as balanced trees are to be modeled. As it stands, this tractability result is of great importance. Actually, it is the very rst …
“Rational Vaccine Design” for HIV Should Take into Account the Adaptive Potential of Polyreactive Antibodies

The long-standing quest for the development of vaccines that confer protection against highly mutable viruses such as HIV, hepatitis C, and influenza has elicited numerous structural and functional studies on virus-neutralizing human antibodies. These studies have aimed at translating the knowledge acquired on broadly neutralizing antibodies to the design of better immunogens for the induction of specific and protective immune responses. The last few months were marked by several seminal articles that investigate HIV-neutralizing human antibodies. These studies have characterized essential mechanistic details of the neutralization of HIV and imply that both exquisite specificity and degeneracy of the specificity of antibodies may be equally important for HIV neutralization. In this Opinion, we highlight and further discuss the potential of polyreactive (promiscuous) antibodies in defense against promptly evolving viruses. Despite having been somewhat neglected by mainstream immunologists in the last 20 years, polyreactive antibodies may come to light as new weapons against HIV.
Reproductive and transgenerational effects of methylmercury or Aroclor 1268 on Fundulus heteroclitus

This research determined the potential for methylmercury or Aroclor 1268 to disrupt reproduction and sexual differentiation in Fundulus heteroclitus. The research determined whether fish that are exposed to mercury or Aroclor 1268 survive and successfully reproduce; whether offspring of exposed fish hatch, survive, produce eggs, and fertilize them; and whether the secondgeneration offspring of exposed fish hatch and survive. Fundulus heteroclitus were exposed to mercury or Aroclor 1268 via contaminated food. Endpoints evaluated included survival, growth, fecundity, fertilization success, hatch success, larval survival, sex ratios, and the prevalence of gonadal abnormalities. In general, polychlorinated biphenyls were highly bioavailable and accumulated well through feeding. The only statistically significant effect observed as a result of treatment with Aroclor 1268 was an increase in growth in the offspring of exposed fish. Mercury was accumulated in a dose‐dependent fashion via food exposures. Exposure to mercury in food increased mortality in male F. heteroclitus, which possibly occurred as a result of behavioral alterations. Increased mortality was observed at body burdens of 0.2 to 0.47 μg/g. Offspring of F. heteroclitus fed mercury‐contaminated food were less able to successfully reproduce, with reduced fertilization success observed at egg concentrations of 0.01 to 0.63 μg/g, which corresponds with parent whole‐body concentrations of 1.1 to 1.2 μg/g. Offspring of exposed fish also had altered sex ratios, with treatment at moderate concentrations producing fewer females and treatment at the highest concentration producing more females than expected. Alterations in sex ratios were observed at concentrations of less than 0.01 μg/g in eggs or between 0.44 and 1.1 μg/g in parents. Offspring of mercury‐exposed fish also had increased growth in moderate treatments, when egg concentrations were less than 0.02 μg/g, or when parent whole bodies contained 0.2 to 0.47 μg/g. In summary, exposure to mercury reduced male survival, reduced the ability of offspring to successfully reproduce, and altered sex ratios in offspring. Both direct effects on exposed fish and transgenerational effects were observed.
1 Polymorphisms in CYP 1 A 1 and Ethnic-Specific Susceptibility to Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia in Children

Department of Pediatrics and Hamon Center for Therapeutic Oncology Research, University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas TX; Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA; Department of Pediatrics, University of Texas Health Science Center, San Antonio, TX; Lehigh Valley Health Network, Bethlehem, PA; Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, University of Texas Health Science Center, San Antonio, TX
Induction of Apoptosis in Human Esophageal Cancer Cells by Sequential Transfer of the Wild-Type p 53 and E 2 F-1 Genes : Involvement of p 53 Accumulation via ARF-mediated MDM 2 Down-Regulation 1

Transcriptional factor E2F-1 as well as tumor suppressor p53 have been shown to cause apoptosis independently in some types of human cancer cells when overexpressed. Here we report that sequential transfer of the wild-type p53 and E2F-1 genes efficiently induces apoptosis in human esophageal cancer cells and that E2F-1 overexpression directly activates expression of p14 (ARF), which inhibits MDM2mediated p53 degradation, resulting in the stabilization of p53. Infection of human esophageal cancer cell lines T.Tn and TE8 with adenovirus vector-expressing E2F-1 (AdE2F-1) enhanced mRNA and protein expression of ARF and decreased MDM2 protein expression. Transfection of ARF plasmid decreased MDM2 protein expression, which in turn increased p53 protein expression. Infection of T.Tn and TE8 cells first with adenovirus-expressing wild-type p53 (Adp53) and then with Ad-E2F-1 resulted in rapid induction of apoptosis; in contrast, simultaneous infection with AdE2F-1 and Ad-p53 had no significant antitumor effect. As shown by Western blot analysis, infection with suboptimal concentrations of Ad-E2F-1 induced the accumulation of exogenous p53 transduced by suboptimal concentrations of Ad-p53. Moreover, Ad-E2F-1-mediated ARF expression inhibited the up-regulation of MDM2 by overexpressed p53 in TE8 cells. Thus, overexpression of ectopic E2F-1 protein may stabilize endogenous as well as ectopic p53 protein via the E2F-1/ARF/MDM2/p53 regulatory pathway and, in this way, render cells more sensitive to apoptosis, an outcome that has important implications for the treatment of human esophageal cancers.
The Lupus Susceptibility Locus Sle1 Breaches Peripheral B Cell Tolerance at the Antibody-Forming Cell and Germinal Center Checkpoints1

We have described a line of VH knock-in mice termed HKIR in which the transgenic Igh locus partially encodes “dual-reactive” antichromatin and anti-p-azophenylarsonate (Ars) BCRs. HKIR B cells termed canonical, expressing a particular Vκ L chain, evade central tolerance by down-regulating BCR levels. Canonical HKIR B cells can be recruited into the primary germinal center (GC) and Ab-forming cell (AFC) compartments via Ars immunization. However, their participation in the GC response rapidly wanes and they do not efficiently contribute to the memory compartment, indicating that they are regulated by a GC tolerance checkpoint. We analyzed the influence of the Sle1 genetic interval, shown to break tolerance of chromatin-reactive B cells, on the behavior of HKIR B cells during the anti-Ars response. Canonical B cells from congenic HKIR.Sle1 mice gave rise to elevated short and long-lived AFC responses, and the attenuated GC and memory responses characteristic of these B cells were relieved in adoptive, wild-type recipients. HKIR GC B cells containing Sle1 expressed increased levels of Bcl-2 and c-FLIP and decreased levels of Fas RNA compared with HKIR controls, suggesting direct alteration of the regulation of the GC response by Sle1. High titers of canonical and anti-dsDNA Abs spontaneously developed in many aged HKIR.Sle1 mice. Together, these data indicate that Sle1 perturbs the action of peripheral tolerance checkpoints operative on antinuclear Ag B cells in both the AFC and GC pathways in a cell autonomous fashion.
Locate a Pin in a Haystack before the Customer Finds

Software testing is becoming as much vital today as is taking meals everyday. Researchers say that testing a day, keeps errors at the bay. Literature suggests that software testing should be done during requirements analysis phase, software design phase, software coding phase and also during software maintenance phase. Different types, different models and different layers of testing have been proposed in literature. The need is to test the software at every stage by any means. Testing may vary from documents testing (static testing) to code testing (dynamic testing). And finally, during maintenance phase also regression testing must be done. But locating errors in the source code is as much difficult as much is locating a pin in a haystack.
Passive forgery detection using discrete cosine transform coefficient analysis in JPEG compressed images

Abstract. Passive forgery detection aims to detect traces of image tampering without the need for prior information. With the increasing demand for image content protection, passive detection methods able to identify image tampering areas are increasingly needed. However, most current passive approaches either work only for image-level JPEG compression detection and cannot localize region-level forgery, or suffer from high-false detection rates in localizing altered regions. This paper proposes an effective approach based on discrete cosine transform coefficient analysis for the detection and localization of altered regions of JPEG compressed images. This approach can also work with altered JPEG images resaved in JPEG compressed format with different quality factors. Experiments with various tampering methods such as copy-and-paste, image completion, and composite tampering, show that the proposed approach is able to effectively detect and localize altered areas and is not sensitive to image contents such as edges and textures.
Putting MRFs on a Tensor Train

In the paper we present a new framework for dealing with probabilistic graphical models. Our approach relies on the recently proposed Tensor Train format (TT-format) of a tensor that while being compact allows for efficient application of linear algebra operations. We present a way to convert the energy of a Markov random field to the TT-format and show how one can exploit the properties of the TT-format to attack the tasks of the partition function estimation and the MAP-inference. We provide theoretical guarantees on the accuracy of the proposed algorithm for estimating the partition function and compare our methods against several state-of-the-art algorithms.
Ribonucleotide reductases: essential enzymes for bacterial life

Ribonucleotide reductase (RNR) is a key enzyme that mediates the synthesis of deoxyribonucleotides, the DNA precursors, for DNA synthesis in every living cell. This enzyme converts ribonucleotides to deoxyribonucleotides, the building blocks for DNA replication, and repair. Clearly, RNR enzymes have contributed to the appearance of genetic material that exists today, being essential for the evolution of all organisms on Earth. The strict control of RNR activity and dNTP pool sizes is important, as pool imbalances increase mutation rates, replication anomalies, and genome instability. Thus, RNR activity should be finely regulated allosterically and at the transcriptional level. In this review we examine the distribution, the evolution, and the genetic regulation of bacterial RNRs. Moreover, this enzyme can be considered an ideal target for anti-proliferative compounds designed to inhibit cell replication in eukaryotic cells (cancer cells), parasites, viruses, and bacteria.
MARVELD1 Inhibits Nonsense-Mediated RNA Decay by Repressing Serine Phosphorylation of UPF1

We have observed low expression levels of MARVELD1, a novel tumor repressor, in multiple tumors; however, its function in normal cells has not been explored. We recently reported that MARVELD1 interacts with importin β1, which plays an important role in nonsense-mediated RNA decay(NMD). Here, we demonstrate that MARVELD1 substantially inhibits nonsense-mediated RNA decay by decreasing the pioneer round of translation but not steady-state translation, and we identify MARVELD1 as an important component of the molecular machinery containing UPF1 and Y14. Furthermore, we determined the specific regions of MARVELD1 and UPF1 responsible for their interaction. We also showed that MARVELD1 promotes the dissociation of SMG1 from UPF1, resulting in the repression of serine phosphorylation of UPF1, and subsequently blocks the recruitment of SMG5, which is required for ensuing SMG5-mediated exonucleolytic decay. Our observations provide molecular insight into the potential function of MARVELD1 in nonsense-mediated RNA decay.