Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Cell surface antigen expression by peripheral blood monocytes in allergic asthma: results of 2.5 years therapy with inhaled beclomethasone dipropionate

At present, inhaled glucocorticoids are widely accepted as the therapy of choice in chronic asthma. Treatment with inhaled glucocorticoids significantly suppresses local airway inflammation in asthmatics, but may also have systemic effects, e.g. a reduction of the number of circulating hypodense eosinophils or a down-modulation of HLA-DR antigen (Ag) expression by T lymphocytes in peripheral blood. However, the effect of long-term therapy with inhaled glucocorticoids on peripheral blood monocytes (PBM), which are the precursors of the most numerous cell type in the lung, the alveolar macrophage, have not yet been evaluated. We therefore investigated the expression of various cell surface Ag on PBM from non-smoking patients with allergic asthma who were treated for 2.5 years with a beta(2)-receptor agonist plus either an inhaled glucocorticoid (beclomethasone dipropionate, BDP) (n = 4) or an anticholinergic or placebo (n = 8). We compared the results with healthy volunteers (n = 7). Long-term treatment of allergic asthmatics with inhaled BDP, but not anticholinergic or placebo therapy, was associated with a significantly lower CDllb Ag expression (p < 0.04) and higher expression of CD13, CD14 and CD18 Ag (p < 0.05, p < 0.02 and p < 0.04, respectively) when compared with the healthy control subjects (n = 7). Most interestingly, PBM of asthmatics treated with inhaled BDP expressed an almost two-fold higher level of CD14 Ag on their cell surface than PBM of patients treated with anticholinergic or placebo (p < 0.03). No significant differences in the expression of CD16, CD23, CD25, CD32 and CD64 Ag or HLA-DR were observed between PBM from the different patient groups or healthy controls. Taken together, this study shows that long-term local therapy with inhaled BDP coincides with an altered expression of at least one cell surface Ag on PBM from allergic asthmatics.
The rising trends in asthma and allergic disease

Considerable variation in the prevalence of childhood asthma and allergic conditions has been shown in previous studies. These differences may in part be attributable to methodological problems in defining childhood asthma and wheezing illnesses. However, the results of recent surveys using identical study instruments suggest that the variation in the distribution of the disease is real. In western societies serial prevalence studies have furthermore shown an increasing trend in the prevalence of childhood asthma and airway hyperresponsiveness. A concomitant increase in the prevalence of hay fever and atopic eczema has been reported by others. Moreover, hospitalization rates for childhood wheezing illnesses have increased in affluent countries suggesting that indeed the morbidity from these causes has increased in the last decades. Interestingly, areas of low prevalence of asthma and atopic conditions have recently been identified in developing countries and in Eastern Europe. In Eastern Germany where drastic changes towards westernization of living conditions have occurred after reunification an increase in the prevalence of hay fever and atopic sensitization has been documented over the last 4–5 years in children aged between 9 and 10 years of age. The prevalence of asthma and airway hyperresponsiveness, however, remained virtually unchanged in this age group. These children spent their first 3 years of life under socialist living conditions and were exposed to a western lifestyle only after their third birthday. Therefore, environmental factors may affect an individual’s inherited susceptibility for the development of asthma and hay fever at different ages inducing changes in the prevalence of atopic diseases in populations in a time‐ and age‐dependent way.
Regulation of TLR7/9 responses in plasmacytoid dendritic cells by BST2 and ILT7 receptor interaction

Plasmacytoid dendritic cells (pDCs) produce copious type I interferon (IFN) upon sensing nucleic acids through Toll-like receptor (TLR) 7 and TLR9. Uncontrolled pDC activation and IFN production are implicated in lymphopenia and autoimmune diseases; therefore, a mechanism controlling pDC IFN production is essential. Human pDCs specifically express an orphan receptor, immunoglobulin-like transcript 7 (ILT7). Here, we discovered an ILT7 ligand expressed by human cell lines and identified it as bone marrow stromal cell antigen 2 (BST2; CD317). BST2 directly binds to purified ILT7 protein, initiates signaling via the ILT7–FcϵRIγ complex, and strongly inhibits production of IFN and proinflammatory cytokines by pDCs. Readily induced by IFN and other proinflammatory cytokines, BST2 may modulate the human pDC’s IFN responses through ILT7 in a negative feedback fashion.
Better gates can make fault-tolerant computation impossible

We consider fault-tolerant computation with formulas composed of noisy Boolean gates with two input wires. In our model all gates fail independently of each other and of the input. When a gate fails, it outputs the opposite of the correct output. It is known that if all gates fail with probability at least β2 = (3− √ 7)/4 ≈ 8.856%, faulttolerant computation is not possible. On the other hand, if all gates fail with probability < β2 and is the same for all gates, then fault-tolerant computation is possible. The assumption that all gates fail with exactly the same probability is pretty strong and unrealistic in real-world scenarios. Furthermore, one might be tempted to think that it can be removed easily, since making gates “better” should not hurt. Surprisingly, this is not the case, as we show in this work: there is a constant α2 < β2 such that almost all functions cannot be computed by formulas, if the noise rate of each individual gate is selected adversarially in the range [0, α2]. Hence, while a hardware manufacturer who consistently produces bad gates with noise rate α2 can always achieve reliable computation, a manufacturer who can only ensure that all gates have noise rates at most α2 cannot.
Tissue engineering of small diameter vascular grafts.

Tissue engineering, using either polymer or biological based scaffolds, represents the newest approach to overcoming limitations of small diameter prosthetic vascular grafts. Their disadvantages include thromboembolism and thrombosis, anticoagulant related haemorrhage, compliance mismatch, neointimal hyperplasia, as well as aneurysm formation. This current review represents an overview about previous and contemporary studies in the field of artificial vascular conduits development regarding arterial and venous autografts, allografts, xenografts, alloplastic prostheses, and tissue engineering.
Spatial-Temporal Data Collection with Compressive Sensing in Mobile Sensor Networks

Compressive sensing (CS) provides an energy-efficient paradigm for data gathering in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). However, the existing work on spatial-temporal data gathering using compressive sensing only considers either multi-hop relaying based or multiple random walks based approaches. In this paper, we exploit the mobility pattern for spatial-temporal data collection and propose a novel mobile data gathering scheme by employing the Metropolis-Hastings algorithm with delayed acceptance, an improved random walk algorithm for a mobile collector to collect data from a sensing field. The proposed scheme exploits Kronecker compressive sensing (KCS) for spatial-temporal correlation of sensory data by allowing the mobile collector to gather temporal compressive measurements from a small subset of randomly selected nodes along a random routing path. More importantly, from the theoretical perspective we prove that the equivalent sensing matrix constructed from the proposed scheme for spatial-temporal compressible signal can satisfy the property of KCS models. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme can not only significantly reduce communication cost but also improve recovery accuracy for mobile data gathering compared to the other existing schemes. In particular, we also show that the proposed scheme is robust in unreliable wireless environment under various packet losses. All this indicates that the proposed scheme can be an efficient alternative for data gathering application in WSNs.
Lipid Rafts in Mast Cell Biology

Mast cells have long been recognized to have a direct and critical role in allergic and inflammatory reactions. In allergic diseases, these cells exert both local and systemic responses, including allergic rhinitis and anaphylaxis. Mast cell mediators are also related to many chronic inflammatory conditions. Besides the roles in pathological conditions, the biological functions of mast cells include roles in innate immunity, involvement in host defense mechanisms against parasites, immunomodulation of the immune system, tissue repair, and angiogenesis. Despite their growing significance in physiological and pathological conditions, much still remains to be learned about mast cell biology. This paper presents evidence that lipid rafts or raft components modulate many of the biological processes in mast cells, such as degranulation and endocytosis, play a role in mast cell development and recruitment, and contribute to the overall preservation of mast cell structure and organization.
Towards Runtime Adaptation in a SOA Environment

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) promotes the utilization of available services to develop completely new applications in a context which has not been foreseen as these services were implemented. Unfortunately the interfaces respectively the behaviour of a service often do not fit exactly to the new domain. Slight changes would be necessary to reuse them in the new environment. This paper presents an approach to integrate dynamic AOP into a SOA platform to adapt existing services at runtime to new requirements. Services can then be reused without the need of stopping and redeployment.
Bone marrow-allograft rejection by T lymphocytes recognizing a single amino acid difference in HLA-B44.

BONE marrow from unrelated donors is increasingly being transplanted for the treatment of patients with leukemia, aplastic anemia, and lethal congenital disorders of hematopoiesis and immunologic function. National and international registries of HLA-typed volunteer donors have been developed to optimize HLA matching between unrelated donors and recipients.1 , 2 The fate of marrow grafts depends on many factors, including conditioning regimens, the composition of the cells in the graft, immunosuppression after transplantation, and the degree of histocompatibility between donor and recipient. Clinically serious graft-versus-host disease occurs in 20 to 50 percent of patients receiving marrow grafts from HLA-identical siblings, and some measure .
Sympathovagal Effects of Spinal Anesthesia Assessed by Heart Rate Variability Analysis

Heart rate variations (HRV) result from moment-to-moment changes in sympathetic and parasympathetic activity in response to many conditions. These two neural inputs to the heart can be identified by analyzing power spectra of HRV for frequency components at the vasomotor (low-frequency [LF]) and the respiratory (high-frequency [HF]) rhythms. HRV analysis has been used successfully in humans to noninvasively evaluate the autonomic responses to specific maneuvers and drugs, as well as responses to more chronic preexisting pathologic conditions. The effects of an isolated "acute" withdrawal of sympathetic activity in humans, however, have not as yet been evaluated using an autoregressive (AR) technique. We examined HRV using this technique in a group of patients receiving subarachnoid block for abdominal surgery. The sensory levels achieved were within the range of those reported to interrupt sympathetic outflow to the heart. Electrocardiograms were recorded and subjected to AR analysis. AR analysis of HRV after spinal anesthesia revealed significant decreases in both dominant frequency components (LF and HF) that occur between 0.03 Hz and 0.5 Hz. These reductions coincided with blockade of cardiac sympathetic outflow after cephalad spread of the spinal block. The power spectra were almost abolished in patients with sensory blocks reaching T1-2. The decreases in amplitude of the LF and HF components, therefore, act as markers of diminished sympathetic and parasympathetic activity to the heart, while the ratio of LF:HF indicated that sympathovagal balance was predominantly maintained during most of the block. Only during the onset of spinal block in the lumbosacral area was cardiac sympathetic activity (LF) initially increased while parasympathetic activity (HF) reflexly decreased. AR power spectral analysis of HRV provided a quantitative measure of sympathovagal activity during spinal anesthesia. (Anesth Analg 1995;80:315-21)
Neighborhood correlation image analysis technique for change detection in forest landscape

The origin of the concept of using contextual information of Correlation in neighborhood of a pixel for change detection is the simple geo-statistical fact that the same geographical area (neighborhood window) on two dates of imagery will tend to be highly correlated if no or little change has occurred and uncorrelated when change occurs. The main objective of this study is to investigate the usability of this technique for change detection in forest landscape with the use of medium spatial resolution satellite data with decision tree classification approach. This research has came to the conclusion that the NCI analysis technique does provide change information and it requires larger windows (15 x 15 pixels) for NCI information to become useful when medium resolution imagery is used for change detection in forest.
Extracellular matrix and cell shape: Potential control points for inhibition of angiogenesis

Capillary endothelial (CE) cells require two extracellular signals in order to switch from quiescence to growth and back to differentiation during angiogenesis: soluble angiogenic factors and insoluble extracellular matrix (ECM) molecules. Soluble endothelial mitogens, such as basic fibroblast growth factor (FGF), act over large distances to trigger capillary growth, whereas ECM molecules act locally to modulate cell responsiveness to these soluble cues. Recent studies reveal that ECM molecules regulate CE cell growth and differentiation by modulating cell shape and by activating intracellular chemical signaling pathways inside the cell. Recognition of the importance of ECM and cell shape during capillary morphogenesis has led to the identification of a series of new angiogenesis inhibitors. Elucidation of the molecular mechanism of capillary regulation may result in development of even more potent angiogenesis modulators in the future.
Improved discriminant nearest feature space analysis for variable lighting face recognition

To improve the discriminant nearest feature space analysis (DNFSA) methods [6], in this paper, we propose an improved DNFSA (IDNFSA) algorithm to increase the robustness for variable lighting face recognition. The IDNFSA removes the mean of each image and attempts to minimize the within-class feature space (FS) distance and maximize the between-class FS distance simultaneously. In the IDNFSA, the first n eigenvectors are dropped and a generalized whitening transformation is suggested. In the recognition phase, the projected coefficients are classified by the nearest feature space rule with the ridge regression classification algorithm. Furthermore, to achieve higher accuracy, the illumination compensation is used. Experiments on the Extended Yale B (EYB) and FERET face databases reveal that the proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods for variable lighting face recognition.
The Unique Biogeochemical Signature of the Marine Diazotroph Trichodesmium

The elemental composition of phytoplankton can depart from canonical Redfield values under conditions of nutrient limitation or production (e.g., N fixation). Similarly, the trace metal metallome of phytoplankton may be expected to vary as a function of both ambient nutrient concentrations and the biochemical processes of the cell. Diazotrophs such as the colonial cyanobacteria Trichodesmium are likely to have unique metal signatures due to their cell physiology. We present metal (Fe, V, Zn, Ni, Mo, Mn, Cu, Cd) quotas for Trichodesmium collected from the Sargasso Sea which highlight the unique metallome of this organism. The element concentrations of bulk colonies and trichomes sections were analyzed by ICP-MS and synchrotron x-ray fluorescence, respectively. The cells were characterized by low P contents but enrichment in V, Fe, Mo, Ni, and Zn in comparison to other phytoplankton. Vanadium was the most abundant metal in Trichodesmium, and the V quota was up to fourfold higher than the corresponding Fe quota. The stoichiometry of 600C:101N:1P (mol mol−1) reflects P-limiting conditions. Iron and V were enriched in contiguous cells of 10 and 50% of Trichodesmium trichomes, respectively. The distribution of Ni differed from other elements, with the highest concentration in the transverse walls between attached cells. We hypothesize that the enrichments of V, Fe, Mo, and Ni are linked to the biochemical requirements for N fixation either directly through enrichment in the N-fixing enzyme nitrogenase or indirectly by the expression of enzymes responsible for the removal of reactive oxygen species. Unintentional uptake of V via P pathways may also be occurring. Overall, the cellular content of trace metals and macronutrients differs significantly from the (extended) Redfield ratio. The Trichodesmium metallome is an example of how physiology and environmental conditions can cause significant deviations from the idealized stoichiometry.
Design And Analysis Of Processing Elements For Portable Systems

The main objective of this paper was to analyze the best possible implementation style for the data path designs so as to optimize their performance according to the application domain as well as field of use. In this project, we present the design and analysis of two new processing elements for reconfigurable computing. We also present a circuit-level implementation of the data paths in static and dynamic design styles to perform arithmetic and logical operations, and also explore the performance-power tradeoffs involved. We also Present the two data paths, the data path I proposed the architectures for different levels of granularity, the data path II proposed the architectures for improving different levels of granularity, and also proposed Floating Point Precision Element(FPPE) based on the generalized architectures. The proposed data paths and FPPE are implemented by using static, domino and datadriven dynamic logic (D3L) models for improving of delay, area, power and Power Delay Products (PDP) with different parameter variations in different technologies like 180nm, 120nm and 65nm.in this paper we presents the comparison between two data paths, Data Path I was poor performance when compared to the Data Path II in case of Power delay Product(PDP) and also Data path I was poor performance it consumes higher power compared to the Data Path II, from the above comparison the data path II was the best processing element for systems. Finally the propose FPPE was executed for floating point numbers
Expression of the Aldo-Ketoreductases AKR1B1 and AKR1B10 in Human Cancers

The American Cancer Society estimates that there will be more than 1.5 million new cases of cancer in 2011, underscoring the need for identification of new therapeutic targets and development of novel cancer therapies. Previous studies have implicated the human aldo-ketoreductases AKR1B1 and AKR1B10 in cancer, and therefore we examined AKR1B1 and AKR1B10 expression across all major human cancer types using the Oncomine cancer gene expression database (Compendia Biosciences, www.oncomine.com). Using this database, we found that expression of AKR1B1 and AKR1B10 varies greatly by cancer type and tissue of origin, including agreement with previous reports that AKR1B10 is significantly over-expressed in cancers of the lungs and liver. AKR1B1 is more broadly over-expressed in human cancers than AKR1B10, albeit at a generally lower magnitude. AKR1B1 over-expression was found to be associated with shortened patient survival in acute myelogenous leukemias and multiple myelomas. High AKR1B10 expression tends to predict less aggressive clinical course generally, notably within lung cancers, where it tends to be highly over-expressed compared to normal tissue. These findings suggest that AKR1B1 inhibitors in particular hold great potential as novel cancer therapeutics.
The effect of collagen organization on tensile strength loss in anterior cruciate ligament grafts post-reconstruction surgery

Title of Document: THE EFFECT OF COLLAGEN ORGANIZATION ON TENSILE STRENGTH LOSS IN ANTERIOR CRUCIATE LIGAMENT GRAFTS POSTRECONSTRUCTION SURGERY Team LEGS Ayushi Chandramani Matthew G. Costales Benjamin C. Garbus Joseph D. Hartstein Kelley M. Heffner Rupal S. Jain Kelly M. Klein Alicia N. McDonnell Payal V. Patel Victoria L. Stefanelli Jenny Wang Joseph T. Weinberg Tina Zhang Directed By: Dr. Adam Hsieh, Bioengineering Hyunchul Kim, Bioengineering Grafts used for anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) reconstructions fall short of restoring native mechanics. This study investigated a morphological cause for tension loss by comparing native ACL and two common grafts, bone-patellar tendonbone (BPTB) and semitendinosus/gracilis hamstring tendon (ST/G), in a cadaveric system. Tension loss during continuous passive motion was quantified via force transducer. Microstructural changes were assessed by measuring collagen crimp angles. No significant differences were found for rates of percent tension loss relative to total tension loss among grafts. However, all groups displayed exponential decay, implying rapid tension loss. The crimp angles for the unstressed grafts were significantly different from each other, suggesting innate differences. The percent change experienced by stressed grafts, normalized to their unstressed baselines, showed that ST’s crimp behavior was significantly different from that of ACL and BPTB, implying the BPTB graft is superior for ACL reconstruction because it better mimics the ACL’s morphological behavior. THE EFFECT OF COLLAGEN ORGANIZATION ON TENSILE STRENGTH LOSS IN ANTERIOR CRUCIATE LIGAMENT GRAFTS POSTRECONSTRUCTION SURGERY