Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
p21-Activated Kinase 3 (PAK3) Is an AP-1 Regulated Gene Contributing to Actin Organisation and Migration of Transformed Fibroblasts

Activating Protein 1 (AP-1) plays a vital role in cell proliferation, differentiation and apoptosis. While de-regulation of AP-1 has been linked to many cancers, little is known regarding its downstream transcriptional targets that associate with cellular transformation. Previous studies identified PAK3, a serine/threonine kinase, as a potential AP-1 target gene. PAK3 has been implicated in a variety of pathological disorders and over-expression of other PAK-family members has been linked to cancer. In this study, we investigate AP-1 regulation of PAK3 expression and the role of PAK3 in cJun/AP-1-associated cellular transformation. Our results showed elevated PAK3 expression at both the mRNA and protein level in cJun-over-expressing Rat1a fibroblasts, as well as in transformed human fibroblasts. Elevated PAK3 expression in cJun/AP-1 over-expressing cells associated with a significant increase in PAK3 promoter activation. This increased promoter activity was lost when a single putative Jun binding site, which can bind AP-1 directly both in vitro and in vivo, was mutated. Further, inhibition of PAK3 using siRNA showed a regression in the cell morphology, migratory potential and actin organisation associated with AP-1 transformed cells. Our study is a first to describe a role for AP-1 in regulating PAK3 expression and suggest that PAK3 is an AP-1 target required for actin organization and migration observed in transformed cells.
Relationship between Rad51 G135C and G172T Variants and the Susceptibility to Cancer: A Meta-Analysis Involving 54 Case-Control Studies

Background The associations between Rad51 gene polymorphisms (G135C and G172T) and risk of cancer have been investigated, but the results were inconclusive. To get a comprehensive evaluation of the association above, we performed a meta-analysis of published studies. Methods A computerized search of PubMed, Embase and Web of Knowledge databases for all relevant studies was performed and the data were analyzed in a meta-analysis. The overall odds ratio (OR) with the 95% confidence interval (95% CI) was calculated to assess the strength of the association between Rad51 polymorphisms and cancer risk. Data were analyzed using fixed- or random-effects model when appropriate. Sensitivity analysis and publication bias test were also estimated. Results Overall, a total of 54 case-control studies were included in the current meta-analysis, among which 42 studies with 19,142 cases and 20,363 controls for RAD51 G135C polymorphism and 12 studies with 6,646 cases and 6,783 controls for G172T polymorphism. For G135C polymorphism, the pooled results indicated that significantly increased risk was found in overall cancers (homozygote model: OR = 1.776, 95% CI = 1.288–2.449; allelic genetic model: OR = 1.169, 95% CI = 1.016–1.345; recessive model: OR = 1.946, 95% CI = 1.336–2.835), especially in breast cancer (homozygote model: OR = 1.498, 95% CI = 1.026–2.189; recessive model: OR = 1.732, 95% CI = 1.170–2.562). For G172T polymorphism, a decreased cancer risk was observed in head and neck cancer (homozygote model: OR = 0.621, 95% CI = 0.460–0.837; allelic genetic model: OR = 0.824, 95% CI = 0.716–0.948; recessive model: OR = 0.639, 95% CI = 0.488–0.837). Conclusions Our results suggested that the Rad51 G135C polymorphism is a candidate for susceptibility to overall cancers, especially to breast cancer, and that the Rad51 G172T might play a protective role in the development of head and neck cancer.
Evaluating the Short Run Effects of U.S. Crude Oil Inventory Levels on WTI Crude Oil Price from 1993 – 2013

The focus of this research was to investigate the short-term influence of U.S. crude oil inventories on WTI crude oil prices from 1993 to 2013. This study is important for policy makers who wish to reduce the persistent and growing price volatility of crude oil and its related products as well as businesses such as airline companies who wish to make annual budgetary sales decisions. Using OLS multiple regression, cointegration, VECM and Ex-post forecast techniques; we provide evidence of an inelastic relationship in which a 1% increase in U.S. crude oil inventories is associated with 0.46% decrease in WTI crude oil prices; however this was only valid for 22% of WTI crude oil price variation. We also find that past data on U.S. crude oil inventories could be used to predict future WTI crude oil prices movement. Contrary to literature, the results of the VECM analysis indicate there is no short-run relationship between both variables over the trajectory.
Biogasification of Municipal Solid Wastes

A series of experiments on the anaerobic digestion of the organic fraction of municipal refuse was performed. The refuse fraction used in the study was one of the portions segregated in a resource recovery system developed at the University of California, Berkeley. The scale of experiments includes 4, 9, and 1600-L digesters. The refuse used as feed was enriched by the addition of raw sewage sludge in various ratios, i.e., from 0-100% of the total volatile solids. No other sources of nutrients or chemicals for pH control were introduced into the reactors. Organic loading rates ranging from 1.1 to 6.4 g of volatile solids/Ld were obtained. Typical hydraulic detention times were 15 to 30 days. Temperatures were kept within the range of 72 to 104 F (22 to 40 C). Digestion efficiency was based on energy conversion and gas production.
Seismic triggering of landslides, Part A: Field evidence from the Northern Tien Shan

Landslides triggered by strong earthquakes often caused most of the global damage and most of all casualties related to the events, such as shown by the M = 7.7 Peru earthquake in 1970, by the M = 7.6 El Salvador earthquake in 2001 or by the M = 7.4 Khait (Tajikistan) earthquake in 1949. The obvious impact of a landslide on the popula- tion is directly related to its movement. Yet, prediction of future failure potential and hence future risk to population is necessary in order to avoid further catastrophes and in- volves the analyses of the origin of seismic instability. The seismic landslide potential is mainly determined by the inter- action between the regional seismic hazard and local geolog- ical conditions. At a local scale, seismic factors interfering with geological conditions can produce site-specific ground motions. The influence of such Site Effects on instability is the principal topic of this paper, which is divided into two parts, A and B. The present Part A is concerned with the cor- relation of field data with observed instability phenomena. Field data were obtained on mainly three landslide sites in the Northern Tien Shan Mountains in Kyrgyzstan, Central Asia. Geophysical prospecting, earthquake recordings, ge- ological observation, trenching and geotechnical tests were the main investigation tools. The collected information gives an insight in the geological background of the slope failure and allows us to roughly infer failure mechanisms from field evidence. A detailed analysis of the susceptibility of a mech- anism to specific geological conditions will be shown in Part B.
MODIS Time Series to Detect Anthropogenic Interventions and Degradation Processes in Tropical Pasture

The unavoidable diet change in emerging countries, projected for the coming years, will significantly increase the global consumption of animal protein. It is expected that Brazilian livestock production, responsible for close to 15% of global production, be prepared to answer to the increasing demand of beef. Consequently, the evaluation of pasture quality at regional scale is important to inform public policies towards a rational land use strategy directed to improve livestock productivity in the country. Our hypothesis is that MODIS images can be used to evaluate the processes of degradation, restoration and renovation of tropical pastures. To test this hypothesis, two field campaigns were performed covering a route of approximately 40,000 km through nine Brazilian states. To characterize the sampled pastures, biophysical parameters were measured and observations about the pastures, the adopted management and the landscape were collected. Each sampled pasture was evaluated using a time series of MODIS EVI2 images from 2000–2012, according to a new protocol based on seven phenological metrics, 14 Boolean criteria and two numerical criteria. The theoretical basis of this protocol was derived from interviews with producers and livestock experts during a third field campaign. The analysis of the MODIS EVI2 time series provided valuable historical information on the type of intervention and on the biological degradation process of the sampled pastures. Of the 782 pastures sampled, 26.6% experienced some type of intervention, 19.1% were under biological degradation, and 54.3% presented neither intervention nor trend of biomass decrease during the period analyzed.
Is There a Correlation Between DAS28/RADAI in a Cohort of Rheumatoid Arthritis Patients Treated with Biological Therapy

C l i n M e d International Library Citation: Corominas H, García-Diaz S, Campos S, Sánchez-Serrano S, Iniesta S, et al. (2017) Is There a Correlation Between DAS28/RADAI in a Cohort of Rheumatoid Arthritis Patients Treated with Biological Therapy. J Rheum Dis Treat 3:044 Received: October 07, 2016: Accepted: January 27, 2017: Published: January 31, 2017 Copyright: © 2017 Corominas H, et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Is There a Correlation Between DAS28/RADAI in a Cohort of Rheumatoid Arthritis Patients Treated with Biological Therapy Hèctor Corominas1*, Silvia García-Diaz1, Salvador Campos2, Silvia Sánchez-Serrano3, Silvia Iniesta3, Isabel Padró3, Lucinda Sanchez-Eslava4, Elena Fernández-Casado5, Montse Sesma5, Cristina Saura6, Mari Carmen Rodríguez7, Maria Rusiñol8 and Montse Jordana9
A PTAS for the Multiple Depot Vehicle Routing Problem

We design a simple PTAS for a multi depot capacitated vehicle routing problem. In this problem a set of customers and set of depots are represented by points in the Euclidean plane. Vehicles have capacities expressed in the number of customers that can be visited on one route starting and ending in a depot. The objective is to determine a set of routes such that all customers are visited and the total length of the routes is minimized. Our results extend the results by Haimovich and Rinnooy Kan [6].
Pathological gambling caused by drugs used to treat Parkinson disease.

BACKGROUND Pathological gambling is a rare potential complication related to treatment of Parkinson disease (PD). However, the etiology of this behavior is poorly understood. OBJECTIVE To examine the relationship between medical therapy for PD and pathological gambling. METHODS In our routine movement disorders practice (2002-2004), we encountered 11 patients with idiopathic PD who had recently developed pathological gambling. We assessed the relationship to their medical therapy and compared them with cases identified by systematic review of the existing literature on pathological gambling and PD. RESULTS All 11 patients with PD and pathological gambling were taking therapeutic doses of a dopamine agonist; 3 of these patients were not treated with levodopa. In 7 patients, pathological gambling developed within 3 months of starting to take or escalating the dose of the agonist; in the other 4 with a longer latency, gambling resolved after the agonist use was discontinued. Pramipexole dihydrochloride was the agonist in 9 of 11 cases in our series and 10 of 17 in the literature (68% in total). CONCLUSIONS Dopamine agonist therapy was associated with potentially reversible pathological gambling, and pramipexole was the medication predominantly implicated. This may relate to disproportionate stimulation of dopamine D(3) receptors, which are primarily localized to the limbic system.
What is precision medicine?

The term “precision medicine” has become very popular over recent years, fuelled by scientific as well as political perspectives. Despite its popularity, its exact meaning, and how it is different from other popular terms such as “stratified medicine”, “targeted therapy” or “deep phenotyping” remains unclear. Commonly applied definitions focus on the stratification of patients, sometimes referred to as a novel taxonomy, and this is derived using large-scale data including clinical, lifestyle, genetic and further biomarker information, thus going beyond the classical “signs-and-symptoms” approach. While these aspects are relevant, this description leaves open a number of questions. For example, when does precision medicine begin? In which way does the stratification of patients translate into better healthcare? And can precision medicine be viewed as the end-point of a novel stratification of patients, as implied, or is it rather a greater whole? To clarify this, the aim of this paper is to provide a more comprehensive definition that focuses on precision medicine as a process. It will be shown that this proposed framework incorporates the derivation of novel taxonomies and their role in healthcare as part of the cycle, but also covers related terms. Precision medicine is defined as a process involving the derivation of novel taxonomies based on deep phenotyping http://ow.ly/WHna30dNNOZ
Defect-induced enhanced photocatalytic activities of reduced α-Fe2O3 nanoblades

Bicrystalline α-Fe2O3 nanoblades (NBs) synthesized by thermal oxidation of iron foils were reduced in vacuum, to study the effect of reduction treatment on microstructural changes and photocatalytic properties. After the vacuum reduction, most bicrystalline α-Fe2O3 NBs transform into single-layered NBs, which contain more defects such as oxygen vacancies, perfect dislocations and dense pores. By comparing the photodegradation capability of non-reduced and reduced α-Fe2O3 NBs over model dye rhodamine B (RhB) in the presence of hydrogen peroxide, we find that vacuum-reduction induced microstructural defects can significantly enhance the photocatalytic efficiency. Even after 10 cycles, the reduced α-Fe2O3 NBs still show a very high photocatalytic activity. Our results demonstrate that defect engineering is a powerful tool to enhance the photocatalytic performance of nanomaterials.
$\textsf{LoPub}$ : High-Dimensional Crowdsourced Data Publication With Local Differential Privacy

High-dimensional crowdsourced data collected from numerous users produces rich knowledge about our society; however, it also brings unprecedented privacy threats to the participants. Local differential privacy (LDP), a variant of differential privacy, is recently proposed as a state-of-the-art privacy notion. Unfortunately, achieving LDP on high-dimensional crowdsourced data publication raises great challenges in terms of both computational efficiency and data utility. To this end, based on the expectation maximization (EM) algorithm and Lasso regression, we first propose efficient multi-dimensional joint distribution estimation algorithms with LDP. Then, we develop a local differentially private high-dimensional data publication algorithm (LoPub) by taking advantage of our distribution estimation techniques. In particular, correlations among multiple attributes are identified to reduce the dimensionality of crowdsourced data, thus speeding up the distribution learning process and achieving high data utility. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that our multivariate distribution estimation scheme significantly outperforms existing estimation schemes in terms of both communication overhead and estimation speed. Moreover, LoPub can keep, on average, 80% and 60% accuracy over the released datasets in terms of support vector machine and random forest classification, respectively.
Simulated performance intensity functions

Measuring speech intelligibility for different hearing aid fitting methods in a simulated environment would allow rapid prototyping and early design assessment. A simulated performance intensity function (SPIF) test methodology has been developed to allow experimentation using an auditory nerve model to predict listeners' phoneme recognition. The test discriminates between normal hearing and progressively degrading levels of sensorineural hearing loss. Auditory nerve discharge patterns, presented as neurograms, can be subjectively ranked by visual inspection. Here, subjective inspection is substituted with an automated ranking using a new image similarity metric that can quantify neurogram degradation in a consistent manner. This work reproduces the test results of a real human listener with moderate hearing loss, in unaided and aided scenarios, using a simulation. The simulated results correlate within comparable error margins to the real listener test performance intensity functions.
Silencing of Oxidative Stress Response in Mycobacterium tuberculosis: Expression Patterns of ahpC in Virulent and Avirulent Strains and Effect ofahpC Inactivation

ABSTRACT Intracellular pathogens such as Mycobacterium tuberculosis are able to survive in the face of antimicrobial products generated by the host cell in response to infection. The product of the alkyl hydroperoxide reductase gene (ahpC) of M. tuberculosis is thought to be involved in protecting the organism against both oxidative and nitrosative stress encountered within the infected macrophage. Here we report that, contrary to expectations, ahpC expression in virulent strains of M. tuberculosis and Mycobacterium bovis grown in vitro is repressed, often below the level of detection, whereas expression in the avirulent vaccine strainM. bovis BCG is constitutively high. The repression of the ahpC gene of the virulent strains is independent of the naturally occurring lesions of central regulatoroxyR. Using a green fluorescence protein vector (gfp)-ahpC reporter construct we present data showing that repression of ahpC of virulentM. tuberculosis also occurred during growth inside macrophages, whereas derepression in BCG was again seen under identical conditions. Inactivation of ahpC on the chromosome ofM. tuberculosis by homologous recombination had no effect on its growth during acute infection in mice and did not affect in vitro sensitivity to H2O2. However, consistent with AhpC function in detoxifying organic peroxides, sensitivity to cumene hydroperoxide exposure was increased in theahpC::Kmr mutant strain. The preservation of a functional ahpC gene in M. tuberculosis in spite of its repression under normal growth conditions suggests that, while AhpC does not play a significant role in establishing infection, it is likely to be important under certain, as yet undefined conditions. This is supported by the observation that repression of ahpC expression in vitro was lifted under conditions of static growth.
INPUT VERSUS OUTPUT TAXATION IN AN EXPERIMENTAL INTERNATIONAL ECONOMY

This paper is concerned with a policy oriented macroeconomic experiment involving an 'international' economy with a relatively small 'home' country and a large 'foreign' country. It compares the economic performance of two alternative tax systems as a means to finance unemployment benefits: a sales-tax-cum-labor-subsidy system versus a wage tax system. The two systems are applied to the home country, while the wage tax system always obtains in the foreign country. In stark contrast with expectations of experts the sales tax system clearly outperforms the wage tax system, using standard economic indicators. It is argued that producers' reluctance to incur costs up-front while being uncertain about product prices can explain this outcome. Several pieces of evidence are provided to support this claim. The results strongly suggest that behavioral aspects have to be taken into account also in applied macroeconomic models. This paper uses data generated by a research project commissioned by the Dutch Ministry of Social Affairs and Employment, see van Winden, Riedl, Wit, and van Dijk (1999). Financial support by the Ministry and comments and suggestions by its Steering Committee are gratefully acknowledged. We would like to thank Frans van Dijk and Jörgen Wit who were both involved in the experimental design of the project, and, in addition, Jörgen Wit for the computation of the equilibria of the theoretical model used. Our gratitude furthermore goes to Jos Theelen for the development of the excellent software used in the experiment, and to We thank the participants for their helpful remarks. We are in particular grateful to
Oyster Reefs at Risk and Recommendations for Conservation, Restoration, and Management

Native oyster reefs once dominated many estuaries, ecologically and economically. Centuries of resource extraction exacerbated by coastal degradation have pushed oyster reefs to the brink of functional extinction worldwide. We examined the condition of oyster reefs across 144 bays and 44 ecoregions; our comparisons of past with present abundances indicate that more than 90% of them have been lost in bays (70%) and ecoregions (63%). In many bays, more than 99% of oyster reefs have been lost and are functionally extinct. Overall, we estimate that 85% of oyster reefs have been lost globally. Most of the world's remaining wild capture of native oysters (> 75%) comes from just five ecoregions in North America, yet the condition of reefs in these ecoregions is poor at best, except in the Gulf of Mexico. We identify many cost-effective solutions for conservation, restoration, and the management of fisheries and nonnative species that could reverse these oyster losses and restore reef ecosystem services.
The effect of size and density on the mean retention time of particles in the reticulorumen of cattle (Bos primigenius f. taurus), muskoxen (Ovibos moschatus) and moose (Alces alces)

Particle passage from the reticulorumen (RR) depends on particle density and size. Forage particle density and size are related and change over time in the RR. Particle density mainly influences sorting in the reticulum, whereas particle size influences particle retention in the fibre mat of stratified rumen contents (‘filter-bed’ effect). We investigated these effects independently, by inserting plastic particles of different sizes (1, 10 and 20 mm) and densities (1·03, 1·20 and 1·44 mg/ml) in the RR of cattle (Bos primigenius f. taurus) as a pilot study, and of muskoxen (Ovibos moschatus; n 4) and moose (Alces alces; n 2) both fed two diets (browse and grass). Faeces were analysed for plastic residues for 13 d after dosing to calculate mean retention times (MRT). The results confirmed previous findings of differences in absolute MRT between species. Comparing muskoxen with moose, there was no difference in the effect of particle density on the MRT between species but particle size had a more pronounced effect on the MRT in muskoxen than in moose. This indicated a stronger ‘filter-bed effect’ in muskoxen, in accord with the reports of stratified RR contents in this species v. the absence of RR content stratification in moose. Low-density particles were retained longer in both species fed on grass diets, indicating a contribution of forage type to the ‘filter-bed effect’. The results indicate that retention based on particle size may differ between ruminant species, depending on the presence of a fibre mat in the RR, whereas the density-dependent mechanism of sedimentation in the RR is rather constant across species.