Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Proteomic and Phytohormone Analysis of the Response of Maize (Zea mays L.) Seedlings to Sugarcane Mosaic Virus

Background Sugarcane mosaic virus (SCMV) is an important virus pathogen in crop production, causing serious losses in grain and forage yields in susceptible cultivars. Control strategies have been developed, but only marginal successes have been achieved. For the efficient control of this virus, a better understanding of its interactions and associated resistance mechanisms at the molecular level is required. Methodology/Principal Findings The responses of resistant and susceptible genotypes of maize to SCMV and the molecular basis of the resistance were studied using a proteomic approach based on two-dimensional polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis (2-DE) and matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization time of flight mass spectrometry (MALDI-TOF-MS/MS) analysis. Ninety-six protein spots showed statistically significant differences in intensity after SCMV inoculation. The classification of differentially expressed proteins showed that SCMV-responsive proteins were mainly involved in energy and metabolism, stress and defense responses, and photosynthesis. Most of the proteins identified were located in chloroplasts, chloroplast membranes, and the cytoplasm. Analysis of changes in phytohormone levels after virus inoculation suggested that salicylic acid, abscisic acid, jasmonic acid, and azelaic acid may played important roles in the maize response to SCMV infection. Conclusions/Significance Among these identified proteins, 19 have not been identified previously as virus-responsive proteins, and seven were new and did not have assigned functions. These proteins may be candidate proteins for future investigation, and they may present new biological functions and play important roles in plant-virus interactions. The behavioural patterns of the identified proteins suggest the existence of defense mechanisms operating during the early stages of infection that differed in two genotypes. In addition, there are overlapping and specific phytohormone responses to SCMV infection between resistant and susceptible maize genotypes. This study may provide important insights into the molecular events during plant responses to virus infection.
"Interkulturelle Kompetenz erwirbt man nicht in einem Semester!": empirische Ergebnisse eines interkulturellen Seminars

An der international ausgerichteten Europa-Universitat Viadrina wird interkulturelle Kompetenz in Lehre und Studium gefordert. Vor diesem Hintergrund belegen Studierende ein einfuhrendes Theorieseminar zu den Grundlagen der Interkulturellen Kompetenz. Um zu uberprufen, ob es zu einem Kompetenzzuwachs bezuglich der zugrunde gelegten Lernziele kommt, wird ein standardisiertes Evaluationsverfahren eingesetzt. Die Ergebnisse dieser Evaluation werden vorgestellt und kritisch analysiert. Daruber hinaus wird deren Bedeutung fur die Weiterentwicklung des Faches Interkulturelle Kompetenz und der Qualitat in der Hochschullehre diskutiert.
Damping oscillations improvement by fuzzy power system stabilizers tuned by Genetic Algorithms

A very important matter of discussion in power system operation is the oscillations damping problem. As an issue, new more effective power system stabilizers (PSSs) have been implemented, based on non linear control laws and/ or non conventional control techniques such as those provided by use of fuzzy logic and neural networks. Because of simultaneous presence of several PSSs in the power system, the problem of their coordination arises. For this reason, in this paper the authors utilize Genetic Algorithms to coordinate power system stabilizers based on fuzzy logic previously proposed by the authors. The co-ordination technique has been tested on the well- known New England power system and its effectiveness has been confirmed by the obtained results.
Application Development Using Objects1

Much of the cost of developing and maintaining applications can be attributed to our disposition to build systems largely from scratch. An application development support system would shift the emphasis from programming of arbitrary systems to configuration of certain classes of applications from pre-packaged software. In order for this style of application development to be successful, we argue that it should be carried out in an object-oriented software environment. Such an environment would consist of an object-oriented language and system that integrates various object-oriented approaches, user interface tools for monitoring and interacting with active objects, object design tools, and support for evolving application-oriented objects.
Drowsy power management

Portable computing devices have fast multi-core processors, large memories, and many on-board sensors and radio interfaces, but are often limited by their energy consumption. Traditional power management subsystems have been extended for smartphones and other portable devices, with the intention of maximizing the time that the devices are in a low-power "sleep" state. The approaches taken by these subsystems prove inefficient for many short-lived tasks common to portable devices, e.g., querying a sensor or polling a cloud service. We introduce Drowsy, a new power management state that replaces "awake. " In the Drowsy state, not all system components are woken up, only the minimal set required for a pending task(s). Drowsy constructs and maintains the minimal task set by dynamically and continuously inferring dependencies between system components at run-time. We have implemented Drowsy within Android, and our results show a significant improvement (1.5-5x) in energy efficiency for common short-lived tasks.
Predictive Model for Human-Unmanned Vehicle Systems

Advances in automation are making it possible for a single operator to control multiple unmanned vehicles. However, the complex nature of these teams presents a difficult and exciting challenge for designers of human–unmanned vehicle systems. To build such systems effectively, models must be developed that describe the behavior of the human–unmanned vehicle team and that predict how alterations in team composition and system design will affect the system’s overall performance. In this paper, we present a method for modeling human–unmanned vehicle systems consisting of a single operator and multiple independent unmanned vehicles. Via a case study, we demonstrate that the resulting models provide an accurate description of observed human-unmanned vehicle systems. Additionally, we demonstrate that the models can be used to predict how changes in the human-unmanned vehicle interface and the unmanned vehicles’ autonomy alter the system’s performance.
Chapter # 17 CREATING , MODELING , AND VISUALIZING METABOLIC NETWORKS FCModeler and PathBinder for Network Modeling and Creation

Metabolic networks combine metabolism and regulation. These complex networks are difficult to understand and create due to the diverse types of information that need to be represented. This chapter describes a suite of interlinked tools for developing, displaying, and modeling metabolic networks. The metabolic network interactions database, MetNetDB, contains information on regulatory and metabolic interactions derived from a combination of web databases and input from biologists in their area of expertise. PathBinderA mines the biological “literaturome” by searching for new interactions or supporting evidence for existing interactions in metabolic networks. Sentences from abstracts are ranked in terms of the likelihood that an interaction is described and combined with evidence provided by other sentences. FCModeler, a publicly available software package, enables the biologist to visualize and model metabolic and regulatory network maps. FCModeler aids in the development and evaluation of hypotheses, and provides a modeling framework for assessing the large amounts of data captured by high-throughput gene expression experiments.
Transport via the regulated secretory pathway in semi-intact PC12 cells: role of intra-cisternal calcium and pH in the transport and sorting of secretogranin II

To gain insight into the mechanisms governing protein sorting, we have developed a system that reconstitutes both the formation of immature secretory granules and their fusion with the plasma membrane. Semi- intact PC12 cells were incubated with ATP and cytosol for 15 min to allow immature granules to form, and then in a buffer containing 30 microM [Ca2+]free to induce exocytosis. Transport via the regulated pathway, as assayed by the release of secretogranin II (SgII) labeled in the TGN, was inhibited by depletion of ATP, or by the inclusion of 100 microM GTP gamma S, 50 microM AlF3-5 or 5 micrograms/ml BFA. When added after immature granules had formed, GTP gamma S stimulated rather than inhibited exocytosis. Thus, exocytosis of immature granules in this system resembles the characteristics of fully matured granules. Transport of SgII via the regulated pathway occurred at a fourfold higher efficiency than glycosaminoglycan chains, indicating that SgII is sorted to some extent upon exit from the TGN. Addition of A23187 to release Ca2+ from the TGN had no significant effect on sorting of SgII into immature granules. In contrast, depletion of lumenal calcium inhibited the endoproteolytic cleavage of POMC and proinsulin. These results establish the importance of intra-cisternal Ca2+ in prohormone processing, but raise the question whether lumenal calcium is required for proper sorting of SgII into immature granules. Disruption of organelle pH gradients with an ionophore or a weak base resulted in the inhibition of transport via both the constitutive and the regulated pathways.
Weibull-gamma composite distribution: alternative multipath/shadowing fading model

The Weibull-gamma (WG) distribution, which is appropriate for modelling fading environments when multipath is superimposed on shadowing, is introduced and studied. For this composite distribution the probability density, cumulative distribution, characteristic functions and the moments are derived in closed form. Furthermore, the average bit error and outage probabilities of a receiver operating over WG fading channels are assessed and compared with the corresponding performances obtained using other composite distributions.
Phytases: crystal structures, protein engineering and potential biotechnological applications

Phytases are a group of enzymes capable of releasing phosphates from phytates, one of the major forms of phosphorus (P) in animal feeds of plant origin. These enzymes have been widely used in animal feed to improve phosphorus nutrition and to reduce phosphorus pollution in animal waste. This review covers the basic nomenclature and crystal structures of phytases and emphasizes both the protein engineering strategies used for the development of new, effective phytases with improved properties and the potential biotechnological applications of phytases.
Evaluation of Authors and Journals

A method is presented for evaluating authors on the basis of citations. It assigns to each author a citation score which depends upon the number of times he is cited, and upon the scores of the citers. The scores are found to be the components of an eigenvector of a normalized citation matrix. The same method can be applied to citation of journals by other journals, to evaluating teams in a league [1], etc.
DNA Microarray Data Analysis

A DNA microarray consists of a solid surface – which can be a glass slide, a nylon filter, or a quartz wafer – on which single strands of complementary DNA (cDNA) are immobilized on spots at fixed locations in a regular, often rectangular pattern (Figure 1). The number of spotted cDNA probes on a single array varies between a few hundred to over 30,000. Each spot is related to a single gene, although multiple spots can represent the same gene. From a sample of interest, the mRNA is then extracted, reverse transcribed to cDNA, labeled, and washed over the array. The target cDNA binds to those probes that have complementary base sequences, in a process known as hybridization. Measuring the labeling intensity of each spot then gives a value that should be proportional to the abundance of the corresponding mRNA transcript in the sample.
Predictive information and emergent cooperativity in a chain of mobile robots

Measures of complexity are of immediate interest for the field of autonomous robots both as a means to classify the behavior and as an objective function for the autonomous development of robot behavior. In the present paper we consider predictive information in sensor space as a measure for the behavioral complexity of a chain of two-wheel robots which are passively coupled and controlled by a closed-loop reactive controller for each of the individual robots. The predictive information, the mutual information between the past and the future of a time series, is approximated by restricting the time horizons to a single time step. This is exact for Markovian systems but seems to work well also for our robotic system which is strongly non-Markovian.When in a maze with many obstacles, the approximated predictive information of the sensor values of an individual robot is found to have a clear maximum for a controller which realizes the spontaneous cooperation of the robots in the chain so that large areas of the maze can be visited.
A Graph Theoretic Optimisation of Temporal Abductive Validation

Abductive validation for a theory T expressed in language LQCM is known to be exponential. Despite this, abductive validation over LQCM using the HT4 abductive inference engine is a useful technique for a large range of real-world theories. However, doubts persist about LTQCM: a time-based variant of LQCM. In LTQCM, abductive validation is executed for for theories used in long time-based simulations. Here we show that, in the special case where (i) the theory is only measured at a few time intervals and (ii) LTQCMis restricted to L ? TQCM (which contains only bi-state objects connected by symmetrical relations) then temporal abductive validation is practical.
Manycore processing of repeated range queries over massive moving objects observations

The ability to timely process significant amounts of continuously updated spatial data is mandatory for an increasing number of applications. Parallelism enables such applications to face this data-intensive challenge and allows the devised systems to feature low latency and high scalability. In this paper we focus on a specific data-intensive problem, concerning the repeated processing of huge amounts of range queries over massive sets of moving objects, where the spatial extents of queries and objects are continuously modified over time. To tackle this problem and significantly accelerate query processing we devise a hybrid CPU/GPU pipeline that compresses data output and save query processing work. The devised system relies on an ad-hoc spatial index leading to a problem decomposition that results in a set of independent data-parallel tasks. The index is based on a point-region quadtree space decomposition and allows to tackle effectively a broad range of spatial object distributions, even those very skewed. Also, to deal with the architectural peculiarities and limitations of the GPUs, we adopt non-trivial GPU data structures that avoid the need of locked memory accesses and favour coalesced memory accesses, thus enhancing the overall memory throughput. To the best of our knowledge this is the first work that exploits GPUs to efficiently solve repeated range queries over massive sets of continuously moving objects, characterized by highly skewed spatial distributions. In comparison with state-of-the-art CPU-based implementations, our method highlights significant speedups in the order of 14x-20x, depending on the datasets, even when considering very cheap GPUs.
Stochastic Resonance in Retinomorphic Neural Networks with Nonidentical Photoreceptors and Noisy McCulloch-Pitts Neurons

We propose a simple retinomorphic neural network that consists of photoreceptors generating nonuni- form outputs for common optical inputs with random o! - sets, an ensemble of noisy McCulloch-Pitts neurons each of which has random threshold values, local synaptic connec- tions between the photoreceptors and the neurons with vari- able receptive fields (RFs), output cells, and local synaptic connections between the neurons and output cells. Through numerical simulations, we observed stochastic resonance among the proposed pixels. We calculated correlation val- ues between the optical inputs and the outputs as a function of the RF size and intensities of the random components in photoreceptors and the McCulloch-Pitts neurons, and then found nonzero optimal RF sizes as well as optimal noise in- tensities of the neurons under the nonidentical photorecep- tors. This implies that SR-based night-scope image sensors with an array of nonidentical photosensors would be devel- oped with less e! orts to implement uniform pixel devices.
Receptor and STAT1 b a Dependent on IFN-Independent of Both TLR2 and TLR4 but -Infected Macrophages Is tuberculosis Mycobacterium Important Genes in Expression of Many Immunologically

Macrophages respond to several subcellular products of Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb) through TLR2 or TLR4. However, primary mouse macrophages respond to viable, virulent Mtb by pathways largely independent of MyD88, the common adaptor molecule for TLRs. Using microarrays, quantitative PCR, and ELISA with gene-disrupted macrophages and mice, we now show that viable Mtb elicits the expression of inducible NO synthase, RANTES, IFN-inducible protein 10, immune-responsive gene 1, and many other key genes in macrophages substantially independently of TLR2, TLR4, their combination, or the TLR adaptors Toll-IL-1R domain-containing adapter protein and Toll-IL-1R domain-containing adapter inducing IFN- (cid:2) . Mice deﬁcient in both TLR2 and TLR4 handle aerosol infection with viable Mtb as well as congenic controls. Viable Mtb also up-regulates inducible NO synthase, RANTES, IFN-inducible protein 10, and IRG1 in macrophages that lack mannose receptor, complement receptors 3 and 4, type A scavenger receptor, or CD40. These MyD88, TLR2/4-independent transcriptional responses require IFN- (cid:1)(cid:2) R and STAT1, but not IFN- (cid:3) . Conversely, those genes whose expression is MyD88 dependent do not depend on IFN- (cid:1)(cid:2) R or STAT1. Transcriptional induction of TNF is TLR2/4, MyD88, STAT1, and IFN- (cid:1)(cid:2) R independent, but TNF protein release requires the TLR2/4-MyD88 pathway. Thus, macrophages respond transcriptionally to viable Mtb through at least three pathways. TLR2 mediates the responses of a numerically minor set of genes that collectively do not appear to affect the course of infection in mice; regulation of TNF requires TLR2/4 for post-transcriptional control, but not for transcriptional induction; and many responding genes are regulated through an unknown, TLR2/4-independent pathway that may involve IFN- (cid:1)(cid:2) R and STAT1. The Journal of Immunology, 2005, 175: 3318–3328.
GPU accelerated AES-CBC for database applications

Data warehouses and database applications use encryption to protect and secure sensitive data. Encryption and decryption of data during query processing can incur a significant system overhead and reduces the overall throughput of the system as the CPU must perform the operations. Graphic processing units (GPUs) have been shown to improve query processing and compression by executing some of the operations instead of the CPU. In this work, we show that it is possible to use a low-cost GPU as a cryptographic co-processor that significantly reduces the time required while freeing the CPU for other tasks. Database applications process data in pages, and page-level encryption/decryption is fully parallelisable if the pages are independently encrypted. Our GPU implementation is between 3 and 14 times faster than a commonly used CPU implementation and has encryption and decryption bandwidth over 3 times higher.
A structured approach for the definition of the semantics of active databases

Active DBMSs couple database technology with rule-based programming to achieve the capability of reaction to database (and possibly external) stimuli, called events. The reactive capabilities of active databases are useful for a wide spectrum of applications, including security, view materialization, integrity checking and enforcement, or heterogeneous database integration, which makes this technology very promising for the near future. An active database system consists of a (passive) database and a set of active rules; the most popular form of active rule is the so-called event-condition-action (ECA) rule, which specifies an action to be executed upon the occurrence of one or more events, provided that a condition holds. Several active database systems and prototypes have been designed and partially or completely implemented. Unfortunately, they have been designed in a totally independent way, without the support of a common theory dictating the semantics of ECA rules, and thus often show different behaviors for rules with a similar form. In this article we consider a number of different possible options in the behavior of an active DBMS, based on a broad analysis of some of the best known implemented systems and prototypes. We encode these options in a user-readable form, called Extended ECA. A rule from any existing system can be rewritten in this formalism making all the semantic choices apparent. Then an EECA rule can be automatically translated into an internal (less readable) format, based on a logical style, which is called core format: the execution semantics of core rules is specified as the fixpoint of a simple transformation involving core rules. As an important premise to this research, a semantics for database updates and transactions has also been established, with respect to a notion of state that comprises both data and events. The article also presents an extensive bibliography on the subject of active databases.
Murine epidermal xanthine oxidase activity: correlation with degree of hyperplasia induced by tumor promoters.

Topical application of the tumor promoter 12-O-tetradecanoylphorbol-13-acetate (TPA) to SENCAR mouse skin results within 48 h in a 3-fold elevation of xanthine oxidase (XO) activity, an enzyme capable of generating the reactive oxygen species superoxide and hydrogen peroxide. The antiinflammatory steroid fluocinolone acetonide, an inhibitor of TPA-induced hyperplasia, as well as the multiple stages of tumor promotion as defined in SENCAR mice (Stages I and II), inhibited the TPA-dependent elevation of epidermal XO activity. Neither tosylphenylalanyl chloromethyl ketone nor retinoic acid, inhibitors of promotion Stages I and II, respectively, had significant effects on TPA-induced hyperplasia or elevated XO activity. The nonpromoting but hyperplasiogenic agents ethyl phenylpropiolate and acetic acid significantly elevated XO activity within 48 h of topical application. The non-phorbol ester tumor promoter benzoyl peroxide also elevated XO activity consistent with the degree of induced hyperplasia. Multiple treatments with TPA or ethyl phenylpropiolate resulted in a sustained elevation of XO activity which peaked at five treatments and then declined. Sustained inhibition of XO activity by p.o. administration of allopurinol did not inhibit the TPA-induced hyperplasia as determined histologically. These results suggest that the TPA-dependent elevation of epidermal XO activity is associated with the hyperplasia induced by the agent, and is a consequence of the hyperplasia rather than the cause of it.