Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Interaction between pathogenic amebas and fibronectin: substrate degradation and changes in cytoskeleton organization

Invasion of human tissues by the parasitic protozoan Entamoeba histolytica is a multistep process involving, as a first step, the recognition of surface molecules on target tissues by the amebas or trophozoites. This initial contact is followed by the release of proteolytic and other activities that lyse target cells and degrade the extracellular matrix. In other parasitic diseases, as well as in certain cancers, the interaction of invasive organisms or cells with fibronectin (FN) through specific receptors has been shown to be the initial step in target cell recognition. Interaction with FN triggers the release of proteolytic activities necessary for the effector cell migration and invasion. Here, we describe the specific interaction of Entamoeba histolytica trophozoites with FN, and identify a 37-kD membrane peptide as the putative receptor for FN. The interaction between the parasite and FN leads to a response reaction that includes the secretion of proteases that degrade the bound FN and the rearrangement of amebic actin into "adhesion plates" at sites of contact with FN-coated surfaces. The kinetics of the interaction was determined by measuring the binding of soluble 125I-FN to the trophozoites and visualization of the bound protein using specific antibodies. Degradation of FN was measured by gel electrophoresis and the release of radioactivity into the incubation medium. Focal degradation of FN was visualized as black spots under the trophozoites at contact sites with fluorescent FN. We conclude that the interaction of E. histolytica with FN occurs through a specific surface receptor. The interaction promotes amebic cytoskeleton changes and release of proteases from the parasite. The binding and degradation of extracellular matrix components may facilitate the migration and penetration of amebas into tissues, causing the lesions seen in human hosts.
The Induction of Heme Oxygenase 1 Decreases Painful Diabetic Neuropathy and Enhances the Antinociceptive Effects of Morphine in Diabetic Mice

Painful diabetic neuropathy is a common complication of diabetes mellitus which is poorly controlled by conventional analgesics. This study investigates if treatment with an heme oxygenase 1 (HO-1) inducer, cobalt protoporphyrin IX (CoPP), could modulate the allodynia and hyperalgesia induced by diabetes and enhanced the antinociceptive effects of morphine. In a diabetic mice model induced by the injection of streptozotocin (STZ), we evaluated the antiallodynic and antihyperalgesic effects produced by the intraperitoneal administration of 5 and 10 mg/kg of CoPP at several days after its administration. The antinociceptive actions produced by the systemic administration of morphine alone or combined with CoPP were also evaluated. In addition, the effects of CoPP treatment on the expression of HO-1, the microglial activation marker (CD11b/c), the inducible nitric oxide synthase (NOS2) and μ-opioid receptors (MOR), were also assessed. Our results showed that the administration of 10 mg/kg of CoPP during 5 consecutive days completely blocked the mechanical and thermal hypersensitivity induced by diabetes. These effects are accompanied by the increased spinal cord, dorsal root ganglia and sciatic nerve protein levels of HO-1. In addition, the STZ-induced activation of microglia and overexpression of NOS2 in the spinal cord were inhibited by CoPP treatment. Furthermore, the antinociceptive effects of morphine were enhanced by CoPP treatment and reversed by the administration of an HO-1 inhibitor, tin protoporphyrin IX (SnPP). The spinal cord expression of MOR was also increased by CoPP treatment in diabetic mice. In conclusion, our data provide the first evidence that the induction of HO-1 attenuated STZ-induced painful diabetic neuropathy and enhanced the antinociceptive effects of morphine via inhibition of microglia activation and NOS2 overexpression as well as by increasing the spinal cord levels of MOR. This study proposes the administration of CoPP alone or combined with morphine as an interesting therapeutic approach for the treatment of painful diabetic neuropathy.
Poly(lactide-co-glycolide)/Hydroxyapatite Porous Scaffold with Microchannels for Bone Regeneration

Mass transfer restrictions of scaffolds are currently hindering the development of three-dimensional (3D), clinically viable, and tissue-engineered constructs. For this situation, a 3D poly(lactide-co-glycolide)/hydroxyapatite porous scaffold, which was very favorable for the transfer of nutrients to and waste products from the cells in the pores, was developed in this study. The 3D scaffold had an innovative structure, including macropores with diameters of 300–450 μm for cell ingrowth and microchannels with diameters of 2–4 μm for nutrition and waste exchange. The mechanical strength in wet state was strong enough to offer structural support. The typical structure was more beneficial for the attachment, proliferation, and differentiation of rabbit bone marrow mesenchymal stem cells (rBMSCs). The alkaline phosphatase (ALP) activity and calcium (Ca) deposition were evaluated on the differentiation of rBMSCs, and the results indicated that the microchannel structure was very favorable for differentiating rBMSCs into maturing osteoblasts. For repairing rabbit radius defects in vivo, there was rapid healing in the defects treated with the 3D porous scaffold with microchannels, where the bridging by a large bony callus was observed at 12 weeks post-surgery. Based on the results, the 3D porous scaffold with microchannels was a promising candidate for bone defect repair.
Figurative Language Comprehension in Schizophrenia and Its Neural Basis

Schizophrenia is a kind of serious mental disease, which may cause major impairment in patients’ social-cognitive ability. It has been found that pragmatic ability in schizophrenic patients is often impaired, especially for figurative language comprehension. Figurative language refers to irony, metaphor, idiom and the like. People with schizophrenia tend to interpret figurative language as its literal meaning, which is called schizophrenic concretism. By reviewing extant literature, we found that the literature concerning this topic mainly consists of two parts: behavioral studies and brain-imaging studies. The behavioral studies mainly explore how clinical factors and cognitive ability have an impact on figurative language comprehension. Brain-imaging studies mainly discuss hemisphere lateralization in schizophrenia and whether theory of mind network in schizophrenic patients is different from that of normal groups. We conclude that future research should further explore the relationship among figurative language comprehension, cognitive ability and clinical factors, and also reveal related neural mechanism.
A low power high performance PLL with temperature compensated VCO in 65nm CMOS

This paper presents a fully integrated, low power, low noise Phase-Locked Loop (PLL) implementing a temperature compensated class-C dual-core Voltage Controlled Oscillator (VCO) achieving state of the art phase noise performance. The PLL exhibits low integrated noise enabling the integration of low jitter clocks for high performance data converters supporting GSM requirements for Wireless Infrastructure applications. Implemented in 65 nm CMOS process, the 8 GHz VCO achieves Phase Noise of -140 dBc/Hz at 1 MHz offset measured at 2 GHz output. The PLL exhibits -60 dBc rms noise integrated from 10 kHz to 20 MHz, while maintaining lock for the ambient temperature range -40°C to 105°C, and dissipating ≈ 140 mW.
Parametrically Tunable Audio Shelving And Equalizing Ladder Wave Digital Filters

Parametrically tunable audio equalizers are conventionally realized using allpass digital filter networks. They consist of first-order shelving filters and second-order equalizing filters. In this paper, ladder wave digital filters (WDFs) with parametrically tunable coefficients are proposed as shelving and equalizing filters. Similar to the allpass realization, the transfer function power complementary property of WDFs is used to obtain efficient shelving and equalizing filters. However, unlike the allpass structures, the transfer function and the tunable parameters of the ladder WDF are derived from the analog filter equivalent of the digital shelving and equalizing filters. For the shelving WDF, the cut-off frequency and gain are tunable, while for the equalizing WDF, the tunable parameters are the center frequency, 3-dB bandwidth and gain. The transfer functions are derived and shown in terms of the tunable coefficients for both the shelving and equalizing WDFs.
Linguistic, Extralinguistic and Paralinguistic Abilities in Patients with Right Hemisphere Damage (RHD)

Patients with right hemisphere damage (RHD) often show communicative-pragmatic deficits involving different expressive modalities, i.e. linguistic, extralinguistic and paralinguistic. Most previous research has evaluated pragmatic ability using linguistic tasks only, while the extralinguistic aspects of communication have received less attention. The aim of the present study was to provide a multifocal assessment of communicative abilities in RHD patients, describing their communicative impairment and abilities, both in comprehension and production. The study revealed communicative deficits in RHD patients in all the expressive modalities investigated, i.e. linguistic, extralinguistic and paralinguistic, with patients performing worse in extralinguistic tasks than in linguistic tasks.
A Vanishing Excess Density Limit of the Becker-Döring Equations

The Becker-Döring equations serve as a model for the nucleation of a new thermodynamic phase in a first order phase transformation. This corresponds to the case, that the total density of monomers exceeds a critical value and the excess density is contained in larger and larger clusters as time proceeds. It has been derived in [13, 8] that the evolution of these large clusters is described by a nonlocal transport equation coupled with the constraint that the total volume of new phase is conserved. For specific coefficients this equation is well-known as a classical mean-field model for coarsening. In the present paper we consider a sequence of solutions for which the excess density vanishes. We show that an appropriate scaling limit gives another variant of the classical model where total mass is preserved.
Upregulation of &bgr;3-Adrenoceptors and Altered Contractile Response to Inotropic Amines in Human Failing Myocardium

BackgroundContrary to &bgr;1- and &bgr;2-adrenoceptors, &bgr;3-adrenoceptors mediate a negative inotropic effect in human ventricular muscle. To assess their functional role in heart failure, our purpose was to compare the expression and contractile effect of &bgr;3-adrenoceptors in nonfailing and failing human hearts. Methods and ResultsWe analyzed left ventricular samples from 29 failing (16 ischemic and 13 dilated cardiomyopathic) hearts (ejection fraction 18.6±2%) and 25 nonfailing (including 12 innervated) explanted hearts (ejection fraction 64.2±3%). &bgr;3-Adrenoceptor proteins were identified by immunohistochemistry in ventricular cardiomyocytes from nonfailing and failing hearts. Contrary to &bgr;1-adrenoceptor mRNA, Western blot analysis of &bgr;3-adrenoceptor proteins showed a 2- to 3-fold increase in failing compared with nonfailing hearts. A similar increase was observed for G&agr;i-2 proteins that couple &bgr;3-adrenoceptors to their negative inotropic effect. Contractile tension was measured in electrically stimulated myocardial samples ex vivo. In failing hearts, the positive inotropic effect of the nonspecific amine isoprenaline was reduced by 75% compared with that observed in nonfailing hearts. By contrast, the negative inotropic effect of &bgr;3-preferential agonists was only mildly reduced. ConclusionsOpposite changes occur in &bgr;1- and &bgr;3-adrenoceptor abundance in the failing left ventricle, with an imbalance between their inotropic influences that may underlie the functional degradation of the human failing heart.
An improved K-nearest-neighbor algorithm using genetic algorithm for sentiment classification

Sentiment classification is to find the polarity of product or user reviews. Supervised machine learning algorithms are used for opinion mining such as Navie Bayes, K-nearest neighbor and Support vector machine. KNN is simple algorithm but less efficient classification algorithm. In this paper we propose an improved KNN algorithm, genetic algorithm is developed which is a hybrid genetic algorithm that incorporates the information gain for feature selection and combined with KNN to improve its classification performance. Specifically, we compared other supervised machine learning approaches such as Navie Bayes and traditional kNN for Sentiment Classification of movie reviews and book reviews. The experimental results using genetic algorithm with improved indicate high performance levels with Fmeasure of over 87% on the movie reviews.
Biomedical research involving prisoners: ethical values and legal regulation.

Until the early 1970's, approximately 90% of all pharmaceutical research was conducted on prisoners, who were also subjected to biochemical research, including studies involving dioxin and chemical warfare agents. By the mid-1970's, biomedical research in prisons sharply declined as knowledge of the exploitation of prisoners began to emerge and the National Commission for the protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical Research was formed. Federal regulations to protect human subjects of research were established in 1974. Special protections for prisoners were added in 1978, severely limiting research involving prisoners. However, the US correctional system has undergone major changes since the adoption of the federal regulations, making it appropriate to reexamine the ethical framework for research involving prisoners. While the history of prisoner exploitation cautions against allowing research, modern science might be able to improve understanding of the intractable problems faced by prisoners. Finding a balance between encouraging beneficial research and safeguarding prisoners is challenging and politically controversial. This commentary presents a series of proposals, based on the recommendations of Institute of Medicine Committee on Ethical Considerations for Research Involving Prisoners. If adopted, the following proposals would provide such a system of safeguards while allowing responsible research. 1) Expand the Definition of Prisoner to include non-custodial prisoners, comprehensively covering all individuals whose autonomy and liberty are restricted by the justice system. 2) Ensure Universal, Consistent Ethical Protection of prisoners by regulating all research on prisoners uniformly, irrespective of the source of funding, supporting agency, or type of correctional facility. 3) Create a National Database of Prisoner Research to permit greater accountability, provide a scientific methodology for assessing the success of research projects, and facilitate the implementation of beneficial research findings to prisoner populations. 4) Shift from a Category-Based to a Risk-Benefit Approach to Research Review to ensure that research with prisoners should be conducted only if it offers a distinctly favorable benefit-to-risk ratio, not because prisoners are a convenient source of research participants or have no access to therapeutic treatment. 5) Update the Ethical Framework to Include Collaborative Responsibility meaning that, to the extent possible, stakeholders (e.g., prisoners, correctional officers, medical staff) should participate in the design, planning, and implementation of research. 6) Enhance Systematic Oversight of Research by strengthening safeguards, making them consistent, and applying them in relation to the levels of risk and restriction of liberty experienced by prisoner-subjects.
Dempster-Shafer Theory as an Inference Method for Corresponding Geometric Distorted Images

This paper presents further results of the application of DempsterShafer Theory for uncertainty reasoning as a computation model to correspond distorted images in Computer Vision. In previous work (Silva and Simoni, 2002), the model was applied to correspond images that presented differences in brightness and contrast, as an extension of the work in (Silva and Simoni, 2001b). The results showed the effectiveness and robustness of the method in corresponding non-equalized pairs of images and led to new experiments in which the model is applied to distorted images, that is, pairs of images in which one is rotated in relation to the other. The right image was rotated in 7 different angles (0.5; 1; 1.5; 2; 2.5; 3; and 3.5 degrees). The model was applied to correspond only point in the images and it successfully established the correspondence for the rotated images, except for the 3.5 degrees rotation. The correspondence is based on contextual and structural features of a point, treated as corresponding evidences whose combination is performed by a modified version of Dempster ́s rule of combination. A search process maximizes the Belief on the combined evidences.
Developing malware evaluation infrastructure

Malware evaluation is a key factor in security. It supposed to be safe and accurate. The contemporary malware is very sophisticated. Usually it uses complex distributed infrastructure an investigation of which is a very challenging task. In the paper, the development of the testbeds toward malware and its infrastructure evaluation is presented. Based on the real-life experience with the subsequent CryptoWall generations analysis, the MESS evaluation system is introduced. A rich set of analytical results is discussed. A new methods of visualization for malware artefacts analysis are given.
Test Quality Analysis and Improvement for an Embedded Asynchronous FIFO

Embedded first-in first-out (FIFO) memories are increasingly used in many IC designs. We have created a new full-custom embedded FIFO module with asynchronous read and write clocks, which is at least a factor two smaller and also faster than SRAM-based and standard-cell-based counterparts. The detection qualities of the FIFO test for both hard and weak resistive shorts and opens have been analyzed by an IFA-like method based on analog simulation. The defect coverage of the initial FIFO test for shorts in the bit-cell matrix has been improved by inclusion of an additional data background and low-voltage testing; for low-resistant shorts, 100% defect coverage is obtained. The defect coverage for opens has been improved by a new test procedure which includes waiting periods
Multilingual opinion holder and target extraction using knowledge-poor techniques

We describe an approach to multilingual sentiment analysis, in particular opinion holder and opinion target extraction, wich requires no annotated data and minimal language-specific input. The approach is based on un supervised, knowledge-poor techniques wich facilitate adaptation to new languages and domains. The system's result are comparable to those of supervised, languaje-specific systems previously applied to the NTCIR-7 MOAT evaluation data.
Integrity of the core mitochondrial RNA-binding complex 1 is vital for trypanosome RNA editing

Trypanosoma brucei is the causative agent of the human and veterinarian diseases African sleeping sickness and nagana. A majority of its mitochondrial-encoded transcripts undergo RNA editing, an essential process of post-transcriptional uridine insertion and deletion to produce translatable mRNA. Besides the well-characterized RNA editing core complex, the mitochondrial RNA-binding 1 (MRB1) complex is one of the key players. It comprises a core complex of about six proteins, guide RNA-associated proteins (GAPs) 1/2, which form a heterotetramer that binds and stabilizes gRNAs, plus MRB5390, MRB3010, and MRB11870, which play roles in initial stages of RNA editing, presumably guided by the first gRNA:mRNA duplex in the case of the latter two proteins. To better understand all functions of the MRB1 complex, we performed a functional analysis of the MRB8620 core subunit, the only one not characterized so far. Here we show that MRB8620 plays a role in RNA editing in both procyclic and bloodstream stages of T. brucei, which reside in the tsetse fly vector and mammalian circulatory system, respectively. While RNAi silencing of MRB8620 does not affect procyclic T. brucei fitness when grown in glucose-containing media, it is somewhat compromised in cells grown in the absence of this carbon source. MRB8620 is crucial for integrity of the MRB1 core, such as its association with GAP1/2, which presumably acts to deliver gRNAs to this complex. In contrast, GAP1/2 is not required for the fabrication of the MRB1 core. Disruption of the MRB1 core assembly is followed by the accumulation of mRNAs associated with GAP1/2.
Financial Conditions Index in Middle Income Countries

During the last few years, there has been a widespread debate about the role of asset prices in the determination of monetary policy. Monetary authorities have traditionally used a Monetary Conditions Index, which is a weighted average between the interest rate and the exchange rate, in order to assess the conditions of the market to determine the correspondent changes in policy. Goodhart (2001) proposed a Financial Condition index for the G-7 countries where some weight could be assigned to asset prices and housing prices. This Financial Conditions Index is found by using a reduced form coefficient estimates and a VAR model. This paper pretends to find this Financial conditions Index for a group of middle income countries. The idea is to compare the role of asset prices in less developed economies in forecasting inflation. It has been found that the effect of financial assets is small, but housing prices are particularly important in most of them, especially Mexico, Turkey and Colombia. The Financial Conditions index is good predictor for prices in Chile, Mexico and Colombia.
The helicity constraint in turbulent dynamos with shear

ABSTRA C T The evolution of magnetic fields is studied using simulations of forced helical turbulence with strong imposed shear. After some initial exponential growth, the magnetic field develops a large-scale travelling wave pattern. The resulting field structure possesses magnetic helicity, which is conserved in a periodic box by the ideal magnetohydrodynamics equations and can hence only change on a resistive time-scale. This strongly constrains the growth time of the large-scale magnetic field, but less strongly constrains the length of the cycle period. Comparing this with the case without shear, the time-scale for large-scale field amplification is shortened by a factor Q, which depends on the relative importance of shear and helical turbulence, and which also controls the ratio of toroidal to poloidal field. The results of the simulations can be reproduced qualitatively and quantitatively with a mean-field aV-dynamo model with alpha-effect and turbulent magnetic diffusivity coefficients that are less strongly quenched than in the corresponding a 2 -dynamo.