Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Dynamic Cross-linking by α-Actinin Determines the Mechanical Properties of Actin Filament Networks*

We used smooth muscle α-actinin to evaluate the contribution of cross-linker dynamics to the mechanical properties of actin filament networks. Recombinant actin-binding domain (residues 2–269) binds actin filaments with a K d of 1 μm at 25 °C, 20 times stronger than actin-binding domain produced by thermolysin digestion of native α-actinin (residues 25–257). Between 8 and 25 °C the rate constants for recombinant actin-binding domain to bind to (0.8–2.7 μm −1 s−1) and dissociate from (0.2–2.4 s−1) actin filaments depend on temperature. At 8 °C actin filaments cross-linked with α-actinin are stiff and nearly solid, whereas at 25 °C the mechanical properties approach those of actin filaments alone. In these experiments, high actin concentrations kept most of the α-actinin bound to actin and temperature varied a single parameter, cross-linker dynamics, because the mechanical properties of pure actin filaments (a viscoelastic gel) or biotinylated actin filaments cross-linked irreversibly by avidin (a stiff viscoelastic solid) depend little on temperature. These results show that the rate of exchange of dynamic cross-links between actin filaments is an important determinant of the mechanical properties of the networks.
Die Steigung der Amplitudenwachstumsfunktion von Summenaktionspotentialen als Elektrodenselektionskriterium

Morsnowski, A; Conway, M; Craddock, L; Cullington, H; Dillier, N; Lai, W K; Stecker, M; Steffens, T; Müller-Deile, J Morsnowski, A; Conway, M; Craddock, L; Cullington, H; Dillier, N; Lai, W K; Stecker, M; Steffens, T; Müller-Deile, J (2008). Die Steigung der Amplitudenwachstumsfunktion von Summenaktionspotentialen als Elektrodenselektionskriterium. In: 11. Jahrestagung der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Audiologie, Kiel, 05 March 2008 08 March 2008, 1-5. Postprint available at: http://www.zora. uzh.ch
Reconceptualizing the work-family interface: an ecological perspective on the correlates of positive and negative spillover between work and family.

Ecological theory was used to develop a more expanded conceptualization of the work-family interface and to identify significant correlates of multiple dimensions of work-family spillover. Using data from employed adults participating in the National Survey of Midlife Development in the United States (N = 1,986), negative spillover from work to family, positive spillover from work to family, negative spillover from family to work, and positive spillover from family to work were found to be distinct work-family experiences. Analyses indicated that work and family factors that facilitated development (e.g., decision latitude, family support) were associated with less negative and more positive spillover between work and family. By contrast, work and family barriers (e.g., job pressure, family disagreements) were associated with more negative spillover and less positive spillover between work and family. In some cases, results differ significantly by gender.
Production and characterization of monoclonal antibodies to type 8 lipooligosaccharide of Neisseria meningitidis

Eight monoclonal antibodies (MAbs) to lipooligosaccharides (LOSs) of Neisseria meningitidis were produced by immunizing mice with purified LOS from group A meningococcal strain A1. The specificities of the MAbs were examined by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA), immunodot assay, and ELISA inhibition by using the homologous A1 LOS, 12 immunotype LOSs of N. meningitidis (L1 through L12), and LOSs or lipopolysaccharides from other gram-negative bacteria. Two of the MAbs, 4385G7 (immunoglobulin G2b [IgG2b]) and 4387A5 (IgG2a), had the strongest reactivities with the homologous A1 LOS, moderate reactivities with the M978 (L8) LOS, but no reactivity with other LOSs. The other six MAbs (4 IgM and 2 IgG3) reacted with the A1 LOS and with several or many of the 12 LOSs. ELISA inhibition at 50% showed that the inhibitory activities of the LOSs from strains A1 and BB431 (a group B strain) to the specific MAb 4387A5 were about 10 to 20 times greater than that of the M978 (L8) LOS. When compared with MAb 2-1-L8 (L8) by Western blot (immunoblot) analysis and ELISA inhibition, the two specific MAbs recognized a different epitope in the 3.6-kDa LOSs of strains A1 and BB431. We propose that the new epitope is L8a, since the MAbs also reacted with the M978 (L8) LOS. The expression of the L8a epitope in the A1 LOS requires a few monosaccharide residues in its oligosaccharide moiety, and the fatty acid residues in its lipid A moiety also play a role. In a whole-cell ELISA, the two specific MAbs bound specifically to the homologous strain A1 and the L8 prototype strain M978 but not to any other LOS prototype strains. These results suggest that the two specific MAbs can be used for LOS typing of N. meningitidis.
Graphene oxide scaffold accelerates cellular proliferative response and alveolar bone healing of tooth extraction socket

Graphene oxide (GO) consisting of a carbon monolayer has been widely investigated for tissue engineering platforms because of its unique properties. For this study, we fabricated a GO-applied scaffold and assessed the cellular and tissue behaviors in the scaffold. A preclinical test was conducted to ascertain whether the GO scaffold promoted bone induction in dog tooth extraction sockets. For this study, GO scaffolds were prepared by coating the surface of a collagen sponge scaffold with 0.1 and 1 µg/mL GO dispersion. Scaffolds were characterized using scanning electron microscopy (SEM), physical testing, cell seeding, and rat subcutaneous implant testing. Then a GO scaffold was implanted into a dog tooth extraction socket. Histological observations were made at 2 weeks postsurgery. SEM observations show that GO attached to the surface of collagen scaffold struts. The GO scaffold exhibited an interconnected structure resembling that of control subjects. GO application improved the physical strength, enzyme resistance, and adsorption of calcium and proteins. Cytocompatibility tests showed that GO application significantly increased osteoblastic MC3T3-E1 cell proliferation. In addition, an assessment of rat subcutaneous tissue response revealed that implantation of 1 µg/mL GO scaffold stimulated cellular ingrowth behavior, suggesting that the GO scaffold exhibited good biocompatibility. The tissue ingrowth area and DNA contents of 1 µg/mL GO scaffold were, respectively, approximately 2.5-fold and 1.4-fold greater than those of the control. Particularly, the infiltration of ED2-positive (M2) macrophages and blood vessels were prominent in the GO scaffold. Dog bone-formation tests showed that 1 µg/mL GO scaffold implantation enhanced bone formation. New bone formation following GO scaffold implantation was enhanced fivefold compared to that in control subjects. These results suggest that GO was biocompatible and had high bone-formation capability for the scaffold. The GO scaffold is expected to be beneficial for bone tissue engineering therapy.
Using Closed Sets of Rules for the Entailment of Literals

Entailment that is based on the application of simple production rules, of the form c← a1, . , an (n ≥ 0) is weaker than the propositional entailment that would be yielded by translating these rules into material implications. In this paper, we show that rulebased entailment coincides with the propositional entailment of literals, when the set of rules is closed under transposition, transitivity and antecedent cleanup.
Who Are the Long-QT Syndrome Patients Who Receive an Implantable Cardioverter-Defibrillator and What Happens to Them?: Data From the European Long-QT Syndrome Implantable Cardioverter-Defibrillator (LQTS ICD) Registry

Background— A rapidly growing number of long-QT syndrome (LQTS) patients are being treated with an implantable cardioverter-defibrillator (ICD). ICDs may pose problems, especially in the young. We sought to determine the characteristics of the LQTS patients receiving an ICD, the indications, and the aftermath. Methods and Results— The study population included 233 patients. Beginning in 2002, data were collected prospectively. Female patients (77%) and LQT3 patients (22% of genotype positive) were overrepresented; mean QTc was 516±65 milliseconds; mean age at implantation was 30±17 years; and genotype was known in 59% of patients. Unexpectedly, 9% of patients were asymptomatic before implantation. Asymptomatic patients, almost absent among LQT1 and LQT2 patients, represented 45% of LQT3 patients. Patients with cardiac symptoms made up 91% of all study participants, but only 44% had cardiac arrest before ICD implantation. In addition, 41% of patients received an ICD without having first been on LQTS therapy. During follow-up, 4.6±3.2 years, at least 1 appropriate shock was received by 28% of patients, and adverse events occurred in 25%. Appropriate ICD therapies were predicted by age <20 years at implantation, a QTc >500 milliseconds, prior cardiac arrest, and cardiac events despite therapy; within 7 years, appropriate shocks occurred in no patients with none of these factors and in 70% of those with all factors. Conclusions— Reflecting previous concepts, ICDs were implanted in some LQTS patients whose high risk now appears questionable. Refined criteria for implantation, reassessment of pros and cons, ICD reprogramming, and consideration for other existing therapeutic options are necessary.
Iron – A Key Nexus in the Virulence of Aspergillus fumigatus

Iron is an essential but, in excess, toxic nutrient. Therefore, fungi evolved fine-tuned mechanisms for uptake and storage of iron, such as the production of siderophores (low-molecular mass iron-specific chelators). In Aspergillus fumigatus, iron starvation causes extensive transcriptional remodeling involving two central transcription factors, which are interconnected in a negative transcriptional feed-back loop: the GATA-factor SreA and the bZip-factor HapX. During iron sufficiency, SreA represses iron uptake, including reductive iron assimilation and siderophore-mediated iron uptake, to avoid toxic effects. During iron starvation, HapX represses iron-consuming pathways, including heme biosynthesis and respiration, to spare iron and activates synthesis of ribotoxin AspF1 and siderophores, the latter partly by ensuring supply of the precursor, ornithine. In accordance with the expression pattern and mode of action, detrimental effects of inactivation of SreA and HapX are confined to growth during iron sufficiency and iron starvation, respectively. Deficiency in HapX, but not SreA, attenuates virulence of A. fumigatus in a murine model of aspergillosis, which underlines the crucial role of adaptation to iron limitation in virulence. Consistently, production of both extra and intracellular siderophores is crucial for virulence of A. fumigatus. Recently, the sterol regulatory element binding protein SrbA was found to be essential for adaptation to iron starvation, thereby linking regulation of iron metabolism, ergosterol biosynthesis, azole drug resistance, and hypoxia adaptation.
Climatologies of nighttime upper thermospheric winds measured by ground‐based Fabry‐Perot interferometers during geomagnetically quiet conditions: 1. Local time, latitudinal, seasonal, and solar cycle dependence

[1] We analyze ground-based Fabry-Perot interferometer observations of upper thermospheric (∼250 km) horizontal neutral winds derived from Doppler shifts in the 630.0 nm (red line) nightglow. The winds were measured over the following locations: South Pole (90°S), Halley (76°S, 27°W), Arequipa (17°S, 72°W), Arecibo (18°N, 67°W), Millstone Hill (43°N, 72°W), Sondre Stromfjord (67°N, 51°W), and Thule (77°N, 68°W). We derive climatological quiet time (Kp 150). The seasonal dependence of the winds is generally annual, but there are isolated cases in which a semiannual variation is observed. Within the austral winter, winds measured from the South Pole show a substantial intraseasonal variation only along longitudes directed toward the magnetic pole. IMF effects are described in a companion paper.
Licensing of killer dendritic cells in mouse and humans: Functional similarities between IKDC and human blood γδ T-lymphocytes

Dendritic cells are characterized by the ability to induce primary antigen-specific immune responses in both major histocompatibility complex (MHC) Class I-restricted CD8 cells and MHC Class II-restricted CD4 cells. This professional antigen presentation function is associated with the up-regulation of co-stimulatory molecules and Class II MHC. While it has been recognized that several types of innate lymphocytes in mouse and humans can express co-stimulatory molecules and present antigen, the property of antigen presentation to elicit responses in naïve cells has been considered the exclusive domain of the dendritic cell. This concept has been challenged through the description of innate lymphocytes, capable of killing using NK receptors, but also up-regulating co-stimulatory molecules and driving the antigen-specific proliferation of naïve lymphocytes to the same extent as dendritic cells. Interferon (IFN)-γ secreting killer dendritic cells (IKDC) have been described in mice and share immunophenotypic properties of both dendritic cells and natural killer cells. Human blood γδ T-lymphocytes have innate tumor cell killing properties by both antibody-dependent and natural killer receptor-dependent mechanisms. This article reviews data from the authors’ own laboratory showing a particular feature in common between the mouse IKDC and human blood γδ T-lymphocytes; namely their requirement for interaction with a target cell for specific licensing for professional antigen presentation.
Reasoning about High-Level Robot Behaviors by Model Checking and Local Validity Tests

In this paper we explore a research direction in reasoning about actions stemming from the Robot-Tino Project at the University of Rome. We introduce a logical formalism that combines a very expressive logic of programs, the modal mu-calculus, with a special use of a minimal knowledge operator. Reasoning in such formalism can be done by integrating model checking for modal mu-calculus and propositional inference. This allows for exploiting existing model checking techniques and systems for reasoning about complex highlevel robot behaviors, without renouncing to deal with incomplete information on the initial state and both the preconditions and the effects of actions.
Impact of Psychosocial Stress on Pineal Structure of Male Gerbils (Meriones unguiculatus, Cricetidae)

Stress responses were investigated in 5‐month‐old male gerbils. Breeders having no pubescent litters served as controls. The first experimental group never left their parents’cage and were thereby fought by higher‐ranking males; the second and third groups were stressed for a week by four daily 1‐minute encounters with trained fighters, the second group during daytime, the third during the dark period. The first and second groups developed signs of gonadal regression, the third did not. The adrenals of the first group weighed the same as those of controls; the adrenals of both other groups were increased in weight. In the adrenal medulla of all experimental groups, a large number of cells were densely packed with noradrenaline‐containing vesicles. In each experimental group the pineal changes included a remarkable decrease in nuclear size of pinealocytes, an increased number of colloidal cysts, and a reduction of that portion of the plasmalemma that is lined by subsurface cisterns. All these changes are interpreted in terms of pineal activation, as are the increased number of membrane whirls found in the first group. The third group exhibited an additional decrease in the size of mitochondria and in the number of “synaptic” structures. This finding and the day‐night differences in the gonadal response indicate that stress interferes with the metabolic cyclicity of the pineal gland. However, it remains indiscernible whether the pineal stress reaction signals a general activation of the gland or a change in it's temporal activity patterns.
Observability for Switched Linear Systems: Characterization and Observer Design

This paper presents a characterization of observability and an observer design method for switched linear systems with state jumps. A necessary and sufficient condition is presented for observability, globally in time, when the system evolves under predetermined mode transitions. Because this characterization depends upon the switching signal under consideration, the existence of singular switching signals is studied alongside developing a sufficient condition that guarantees uniform observability with respect to switching times. Furthermore, while taking state jumps into account, a relatively weaker characterization is given for determinability, the property that concerns with recovery of the original state at some time rather than at all times. Assuming determinability of the system, a hybrid observer is designed for the most general case to estimate the state of the system and it is shown that the estimation error decays exponentially. Since the individual modes of the switched system may not be observable, the proposed strategy for designing the observer is based upon a novel idea of accumulating the information from individual subsystems. Contrary to the usual approach, dwell-time between switchings is not necessary, but the proposed design does require persistent switching. For practical purposes, the calculations also take into account the time consumed in performing computations.
Statistical Voice Conversion Based on Noisy Channel Model

This paper describes a novel framework of voice conversion effectively using both a joint density model and a speaker model. In voice conversion studies, approaches based on the Gaussian mixture model (GMM) with probabilistic densities of joint vectors of a source and a target speakers are widely used to estimate a transform function between both the speakers. However, to achieve sufficient quality, these approaches require a parallel corpus which contains plenty of utterances with the same linguistic content spoken by both the speakers. In addition, the joint density GMM methods often suffer from overtraining effects when the amount of training data is small. To compensate for these problems, we propose a voice conversion framework, which integrates the speaker GMM of the target with the joint density model using a noisy channel model. The proposed method trains the joint density model with a few parallel utterances, and the speaker model with nonparallel data of the target, independently. It can ease the burden on the source speaker. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, especially when the amount of the parallel corpus is small.
Domain Shuffling Has Been the Main Mechanism Forming New Hominoid Killer Cell Ig-Like Receptors1

The killer cell Ig-like receptor (KIR) gene family encodes MHC class I-specific receptors, which regulate NK cell responses and are also expressed on subpopulations of T cells. KIR haplotypes vary in gene content, which, in combination with allelic polymorphism, extensively diversifies the KIR genotype both within and between human populations. Species comparison indicates that formation of new KIR genes and loss of old ones are frequent events, so that few genes are conserved even between closely related species. In this regard, the hominoids define a time frame that is particularly informative for understanding the processes of KIR evolution and its potential impact on killer cell biology. KIR cDNA were characterized from PBMC of three gorillas, and genomic DNA were characterized for six additional individuals. Eleven gorilla KIR genes were defined. With attainment of these data, a set of 75 KIR sequences representing five hominoid species was assembled, which also included rhesus monkey, cattle, and rodent KIR. Searching this data set for recombination events, and phylogenetic analysis using Bayesian methods, demonstrated that new KIR were usually the result of recombination between loci in which complete protein domains were shuffled. Further phylogenetic analysis of the KIR sequences after removal of confounding recombined segments showed that only two KIR genes, KIR2DL4 and KIR2DL5, have been preserved throughout hominoid evolution, and one of them, KIR2DL4, is also common to rhesus monkey and hominoids. Other KIR genes represent recombinant forms present in a minority of species, often only one, as exemplified by 8 of the 11 gorilla KIR genes.
Interdiction Branching

This paper introduces interdiction branching, a new branching method for binary integer programs that is designed to overcome the difficulties encountered in solving problems for which branching on variables is inherently weak. Unlike traditional methods, selection of the disjunction in interdiction branching takes into account the best feasible solution found so far. In particular, the method is based on computing an improving solution cover, which is a set of variables of which at least one must be nonzero in any improving solution. From an improving solution cover, we can obtain a branching disjunction with desirable properties. Any minimal such cover yields a disjunction in which multiple variables are fixed in each child node and for which each child node is guaranteed to contain at least one improving solution. Computing a minimal improving solution cover amounts to solving a discrete bilevel program, which is difficult in general. In practice, a solution cover, although not necessarily minimal nor improving, can be found using a heuristic that achieves a profitable trade-off between the size of the enumeration tree and the computational burden of computing the cover. An empirical study on a test suite of difficult binary knapsack and stable set problems shows that an implementation of the method dramatically reduces the size of the enumeration tree compared to branching on variables, yielding significant savings in running times.
A surface wave-assisted azimuth-pattern reconfigurable antenna with enhanced bandwidth

A bandwidth-enhanced pattern reconfigurable antenna (PRA) based on surface waves is presented. The PRA consists of a surface-wave guide (SWG), a windmill-shaped feeding network (WSFN) and four groups of parasitic strips. Two resonances are generated by the feeding network and the parasitic strips, and thus the impedance bandwidth is enhanced. Besides, by controlling the feeding network, four endfire radiation patterns in the azimuth plane which benefit from the surface-wave diffraction can be obtained and switched. A fabricated prototype of the designed PRA is simulated and measured, and the measured results show that the PRA can steer its endfire beam in a frequency range from 2.98 to 3.66 GHz (about 20.5).