Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Towards a synthetic cell model that displays receptor mediated endocytosis

This project is an iterative exploration towards a minimal synthetic cell model based on an amphiphilic glycopolymer that assembles into GUVs that display receptor mediated endocytosis. Chapter one is a general introduction chapter on the literature related to the present work including topics such as synthetic vesicles, natural cell membrane and its synthetic models, and the importance of transmembrane transport in the living cells. Chapter two includes electroformation method applications on model molecules: lipid 1, 2 - dioleoyl - sn - glycerol - 3 - phosphocholine and the block copolymer poly (butadiene - b - ethylene oxide). Electroformation studies performed with a custom - made electroformation kit were accomplished successfully. Conditions suitable for the production of giant liposomes and polymersomes were obtained and the created structures were characterised, and analysed. A Full Factorial Design of Experiment Approach applied to the electroformation experiments on block copolymer poly (butadiene - b - ethylene oxide) revealed that the most influential factor on the final self - assembly outcome is the volume of deposited amphiphilic molecule on the glass slide. Chapter three deals with giant unilamellar vesicle electroformation from the novel glycopolymer polyethylene - block - poly(ethylene glycol) β - D - glucoside and a variety of poly [N - 2 - (β - D - glucosyloxy) ethyl acrylamide] - b - (n-butylacrylate) glycopolymers with different block ratios and molar mass. Self - assembly experiments with novel amphiphilic materials were accomplished with desirable results - conditions required for giant unilamellar vesicle formation were obtained; moreover, the collected data indicated that glycosylated block copolymer poly [N - 2 - (β - D - glucosyloxy) ethyl acrylamide] - b - (n-butylacrylate) with a block ratio 1 : 10 (hydrophilic block to hydrophobic block ratio) is a suitable amphiphilic material for the synthetic cell model creation. Chapter four describes thorough studies performed on giant glycopolymersomes electroformed from polymer poly [N - 2 - (β - D - glucosyloxy) ethyl acrylamide] - b - (n-butylacrylate) with a block ratio 1 : 10. Polymersomes were reported to be stable and resistant to minor changes of osmolality and pH in their surrounding environment. Interaction studies confirmed that, despite the reported selective interactions between GUVs and PS - Con A beads, an evident uptake of nanoparticles in the glycopolymersome were not observed; however, findings presented in this chapter are promising and convincing that RME could be performed in a purely synthetic system in the near future upon applying desirable membrane modifications allowing the regulation of toughness and permeability. Chapter five presents a recap of conclusions and general suggestions for continuation and further development of the project. Chapter six describes general experimental procedures, materials and instrumentation utilised in this project.
Elevated seminal plasma protein: a characteristic of Yellow turkey semen.

Semen volume, seminal plasma color, protein concentration, and subfractions from 8 white semen (WS) and 8 yellow semen (YS) Large White turkeys were measured for 15 weeks. Average volume was . 29 +/- . 01 ml for WS and . 32 +/- . 02 ml for YS males. Plasma from WS was white and averaged 1.84 +/- . 07 g/100 ml protein, whereas YS seminal plasma was yellow with 7.03 +/- . 5 g/100 ml protein. Protein subfractions in WS and YS seminal plasma were qualitatively similar and consisted of prealbumin, albumin, alpha-1 and -2, beta-1, -2, and -3, and postbeta (gamma). The alpha proteins were more frequently seen in YS seminal plasma. The elevated protein of YS seminal plasma was due to an increased concentration of all proteins, with the possible exception of beta-3, with albumin contributing the most. Except for prealbumin and beta-3, the seminal proteins had the same electrophoretic mobility as counterpart blood proteins. Blood and seminal plasma protein concentrations were poorly correlated (+ .039; P less than or equal to .75). Blood protein concentrations from 68 toms ranged from 3.3 to 5.7 g/100 ml and averaged 4.2 g/100 ml; seminal plasma protein concentrations ranged from . 93 to 12.8 g/100 ml. Nineteen percent of the males had YS with seminal plasma protein greater than 4.0 g/100 ml. The high correlation between intensity of the yellow color in YS seminal plasma and protein concentration (+ .76; P less than or equal to .01) indicates that semen quality of turkey breeders could be improved by selection on the basis of low seminal plasma protein concentration.
Effect of Inorganic Fillers on the Friction Properties of Polyamide 66

Organic materials are those which have carbon elements in them and the inorganic materials are those which do not have carbon elements and those obtained from earth materials such as minerals and the atmosphere. The inorganic materials have advantages such as high thermal stability, chemical stability etc. Fly ash and silica fume are inorganic industrial wastes which are produced in large quantities during production of power and silicon respectively. These are the sources of land pollution and this pollution could be minimized if they are successfully reused in appropriate applications. The polymer composites are becoming suitable alternative materials for metals in various tribological applications and so wear and friction studies of these materials gain significance. Polyamide 66, also known as Nylon 66 are engineering polymers used in such applications. Nylon was reinforced with these fillers in 5 to 25 % weight fraction increasing in steps of 5%, using a twin- screw extruder. The friction tests were carried out under dry sliding conditions in a pin-on-disc type friction and wear monitoring test rig at different normal loads and at a constant sliding distance and velocity. Friction coefficient of both composites have found to be decreased than pure Nylon. The friction coefficient of fly ash reinforced Nylon is lesser than the silica fume filled nylon at all the tested conditions.
Sodium and chloride requirements of the chick: relationship to acid-base balance.

Abstract The sodium and chloride requirements of broiler-chicks have been evaluated in view of the interaction between these ionic components of the diet in the acid-base balance of the body. In the four trials conducted, all-vegetable diets and de-ionized water were given to chicks for a period of two weeks starting at the age of one week. Blood pH was found to be a sigmoidal function of the dietary ratio of Na/Cl. The requirements of sodium and chloride were interdependent; optimal growth occurred with a Na/Cl ratio (w./w.) of unity. The moisture score of the droppings indicated a positive dependence of the moisture on the total dietary sodium and on the Na/Cl ratio. With increasing levels of an optimal sodium-chloride mixture in the diet, body weight gain increased linearly to reach a peak with a diet containing 0.13% sodium and 0.13% chloride.
Modeling tension and relaxation for computer animation

The use of tension and relaxation in the muscles of real creatures gives rise to nuanced motion that conveys emotion or intent. Artists have long exploited knowledge of this in traditional animation and other areas, but it has been both overlooked and difficult to achieve in physically based animation. The robotically stiff motion that has come to typify physically based approaches belies the fact that dynamics has much to offer in facilitating far more subtle motion in which animators could freely "shape" a motion. We demonstrate that tension and relaxation can be introduced into joint-level, posture based animation. While we show that these modalities can be efficiently incorporated into traditional proportional-derivative control models, we instead formulate a more flexible and better-behaved model based on antagonistic control. This approach is more biomechanically sound, but more importantly it permits the separation of stiffness control from position control, achieving better posture interpolation, better error control, and passive and active dynamics. We introduce effective mechanisms to control the shape of a motion and describe an animation system that efficiently integrates relaxation and tension control in a physically based simulation environment.
Reducing Sedentary Time for Obese Older Adults: Protocol for a Randomized Controlled Trial

Background Older adults have high rates of obesity and are prone to chronic health conditions. These conditions are in part due to high rates of sedentary time (ST). As such, reducing ST could be an innovative strategy for improving health outcomes among obese older adults. To test this theory, we developed a novel, technology-enhanced intervention to reduce sitting time (I-STAND) and pilot tested it to assess the feasibility, acceptability, and preliminary effects of the intervention on ST and biometric outcomes. Objective The current paper aims to describe the rationale, design, and methods of the I-STAND sitting reduction pilot trial. Methods Older adults with obesity (n=60) were recruited from a large health care system and randomized to receive I-STAND or a healthy living intervention. I-STAND combined personal coaching with a technology-enhanced intervention (Jawbone UP band) to cue breaks from sitting. Participants completed self-report and biometric assessments at baseline and 3 months. Additional qualitative results were collected from a subset of I-STAND participants (n=22) to further inform the feasibility and acceptability of the interventions. The primary outcome was total hours of daily sitting time measured by the activPAL device. Secondary outcomes included sit-to-stand transitions, bouts of sitting longer than 30 minutes, physical function, blood pressure, fasting glucose, cholesterol, and depressive symptoms. Results Study enrollment has ended and data processing is underway. Conclusions Data from randomized trials on sitting reduction are needed to inform novel approaches to health promotion among older adults with obesity. Our trial will help fill this gap. The methods used in our study can guide future research on using technology-based devices to assess or prompt sedentary behavior reduction, or those interested in behavioral interventions targeting obese older adults with novel approaches Trial Registration ClinicalTrials.gov: NCT02692560; https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT02692560 (Archived by WebCite at http://www.webcitation.org/6wppLTWAl)
Augmented Black-Box Simulation and Zero Knowledge Argument for NP

The standard zero knowledge notion is formalized by requiring that for any probabilistic polynomial-time (PPT) verifier V ∗, there is a PPT algorithm (simulator) SV ∗ , such that the outputs of SV ∗ is indistinguishable from real protocol views. The simulator is not permitted to access the verifier V ∗’s private state. So the power of SV ∗ is, in fact, inferior to that of V ∗. In this paper, a new simulation method, called augmented black-box simulation, is presented by permitting the simulator to have access to the verifier’s current private state in a special manner. The augmented black-box simulator only has the same computing power as the verifier although it is given access to the verifier’s current private state. Therefore, augmented black-box simulation is a reasonable method to prove zero knowledge property, and brings results that hard to obtain with previous simulation techniques. Zero knowledge property, proved by means of augmented black-box simulation, is called augmented black-box zeroknowledge. We present a 5-round statistical augmented black-box zero-knowledge argument for Exact Cover Problem under the Decision Multilinear No-Exact-Cover Assumption. In addition, we show a 2-round computational augmented black-box zero-knowledge argument protocol for Exact Cover problem under the Decision Multilinear No-Exact-Cover Assumption and the assumption of the existence of hash functions. It is well known that 2-round zero knowledge protocols does not exist under general zero knowledge notion. Besides, following [19], we consider leakage-resilient property of augmented black-box zero knowledge, and prove that the presented statistical zero-knowledge protocol has optimal leakageresilient property. Key word: zero-knowledge proofs (arguments), black-box simulation, constantround, Exact-Cover problem, leakage-resilient.
Handgrip strength as a predictor of functional, psychological and social health. A prospective population-based study among the oldest old.

BACKGROUND muscle wasting is associated with a detrimental outcome in older people. Muscle strength measurements could be useful as part of a clinical evaluation of oldest old patients to determine who are most at risk of accelerated decline in the near future. OBJECTIVE this study aimed to assess if handgrip strength predicts changes in functional, psychological and social health among oldest old. DESIGN the Leiden 85-plus Study is a prospective population-based follow-up study. SUBJECTS five-hundred fifty-five, all aged 85 years at baseline, participated in the study. METHODS handgrip strength was measured with a handgrip strength dynamometer. Functional, psychological and social health were assessed annually. Baseline data on chronic diseases were obtained from the treating physician, pharmacist, electrocardiogram and blood sample analysis. RESULTS at age 85, lower handgrip strength was correlated with poorer scores in functional, psychological and social health domains (all, P < 0.001). Lower baseline handgrip strength predicted an accelerated decline in activities of daily living (ADL) and cognition (both, P <or= 0.001), but not in social health (P > 0.30). CONCLUSION poor handgrip strength predicts accelerated dependency in ADL and cognitive decline in oldest old. Measuring handgrip strength could be a useful instrument in geriatric practice to identify those oldest old patients at risk for this accelerated decline.
Sox2 expression in Schwann cells inhibits myelination in vivo and induces influx of macrophages to the nerve

Correct myelination is crucial for the function of the peripheral nervous system. Both positive and negative regulators within the axon and Schwann cell function to ensure the correct onset and progression of myelination during both development and following peripheral nerve injury and repair. The Sox2 transcription factor is well known for its roles in the development and maintenance of progenitor and stem cell populations, but has also been proposed in vitro as a negative regulator of myelination in Schwann cells. We wished to test fully whether Sox2 regulates myelination in vivo and show here that, in mice, sustained Sox2 expression in vivo blocks myelination in the peripheral nerves and maintains Schwann cells in a proliferative non-differentiated state, which is also associated with increased inflammation within the nerve. The plasticity of Schwann cells allows them to re-myelinate regenerated axons following injury and we show that re-myelination is also blocked by Sox2 expression in Schwann cells. These findings identify Sox2 as a physiological regulator of Schwann cell myelination in vivo and its potential to play a role in disorders of myelination in the peripheral nervous system. Summary: Sox2 promotes both Schwann cell proliferation and macrophage infiltration in peripheral nerves, demonstrating its potential involvement in disorders of myelination.
User Video Summarization Based on Joint Visual and Semantic Affinity Graph

Automatically generating summaries of user-generated videos is very useful but challenging. User-generated videos are unedited and usually only contain a long single shot which makes traditional video temporal segmentation methods such as shot boundary detection ineffective in producing meaningful video segments for summarization. To address this issue, we propose a novel temporal segmentation framework based on the clustering of joint visual and semantic affinity graph of the video frames. Based on a pre-trained deep convolutional neural network (CNN), we extract deep visual features of the frames to construct the visual affinity graph. We then construct the semantic affinity graph of the frames based on word embedding of the frames' semantic tags generated from an automatic image tagging algorithm. A dense neighbor method is then used to cluster the joint visual and semantic affinity graph to divide the video into sub-shot level segments and from which a summary of the video can be generated. Experimental results show that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, we show that the method achieves results that are similar to those performed manually.
Believing in POMDPs

Partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDP) are well-suited for realizing sequential decision making capabilities that respect uncertainty in Companion systems that are to naturally interact with and assist human users. Unfortunately, their complexity prohibits modeling the entire Companion system as a POMDP. We therefore propose an approach that makes use of abstraction to enable employing POMDPs in Companion systems and discuss challenges for applying it.
Exploiting Gene-Expression Deconvolution to Probe the Genetics of the Immune System

Sequence variation can affect the physiological state of the immune system. Major experimental efforts targeted at understanding the genetic control of the abundance of immune cell subpopulations. However, these studies are typically focused on a limited number of immune cell types, mainly due to the use of relatively low throughput cell-sorting technologies. Here we present an algorithm that can reveal the genetic basis of inter-individual variation in the abundance of immune cell types using only gene expression and genotyping measurements as input. Our algorithm predicts the abundance of immune cell subpopulations based on the RNA levels of informative marker genes within a complex tissue, and then provides the genetic control on these predicted immune traits as output. A key feature of the approach is the integration of predictions from various sets of marker genes and refinement of these sets to avoid spurious signals. Our evaluation of both synthetic and real biological data shows the significant benefits of the new approach. Our method, VoCAL, is implemented in the freely available R package ComICS.
Efficient Search in Networks Using Conductance

Decentralized search in networks is an important algorithmic problem in the study of complex networks and social networks analysis. It has a large number of practical applications, from shortest paths search in social network relationship, web pages search in WWW to querying files in peer-to-peer file sharing networks and so on. In this paper, we explore this problem from a perspective of community structure. We first find that through maximizing sample conductance, we can get high coverage sample. Based on this result, then, we propose a new decentralized search strategy named Conductance Search which tries to efficiently find the nodes belonging to different communities. We compare the strategy with other common strategies. And the results show that the conductance search outperforms others in number of steps to find the target and time complexity. Finally, we find some previous conclusions fail in many real-world networks and discuss network search-ability from the perspective of various structural properties.
Long-term broiler performance with bambermycins and bambermycins plus roxarsone.

Bambermycins and bambermycins plus roxarsone were fed to broilers in ten consecutive experiments to determine if response (measured by body weight and feed efficiency) was continuous over a long term. Bambermycins was added at 1.1 ppm (1 to 44 days) and 2.2 ppm (45 to 51 days) to both test rations. In addition, one test ration contained roxarsone (3-nitro-4-hydroxyphenylarsonic acid) at 50 ppm (1 to 44 days). Each experiment was conducted with 1,080 commercial broiler cross-run chickens. Broilers fed bambermycins and bambermycins plus roxarsone were heavier (P less than .05) than controls in every experiment. Bambermycins plus roxarsone treated broilers were heavier (P less than .05) than bambermycins treated broilers in 2 out of 10 experiments. Broilers fed bambermycins converted feed more efficiently (P less than .05) than controls in 6 of 10 experiments and were more efficient (P less than .05) than bambermycins plus roxarsone fed broilers in 1 of 10 experiments. Bambermycins plus roxarsone treated broilers were more efficient (P less than .05) than controls in 5 of 10 experiments. These findings indicate that over a long term bambermycins and bambermycins plus roxarsone consistently and significantly (P less than .05) increased broiler body weights over controls, although the addition of roxarsone was not always effective in increasing body weights or improving feed efficiency over bambermycins fed alone.
A comparison of the physiological demands of wheelchair basketball and wheelchair tennis.

PURPOSE To examine the physiological profiles of wheelchair basketball and tennis and specifically to: (a) identify if there are differences in the physiological profiles of wheelchair basketball and tennis players of a similar playing standard, (b) to determine whether the competitive physiological demands of these sports differed (c) and to explore the relationship between the blood lactate [Bla-] response to exercise and to identify the sport specific heart rate (HR) training zones. METHODS Six elite athletes (4 male, 2 female) from each sport performed a submaximal and VO2peak test in their sport specific wheelchair. Heart rate, VO2, and [Bla-] were measured. Heart rate was monitored during international competitions and VO2 was calculated from this using linear regression equations. Individual HR training zones were identified from the [Bla-] profile and time spent within these zones was calculated for each match. RESULTS Despite no differences in the laboratory assessment of HRpeak, the VO2peak was higher for the basketball players when compared with the tennis players (2.98 ± 0.91 vs 2.06 ± 0.71; P = .08). Average match HR (163 ± 11 vs 146 ± 16 beats x min(-1); P = . 06) and average VO2 (2.26 ± 0.06 vs 1.36 ± 0.42 L x min(-1); P = . 02) were higher during actual playing time of basketball when compared with whole tennis play. Consequently, differences in the time spent in the different training zones within and between the two sports existed (P < .05). CONCLUSIONS Wheelchair basketball requires predominately high-intensity training, whereas tennis training requires training across the exercise intensity spectrum.
A sleep state in Drosophila larvae required for neural stem cell proliferation

Sleep during development is involved in refining brain circuitry, but a role for sleep in the earliest periods of nervous system elaboration, when neurons are first being born, has not been explored. Here we identify a sleep state in Drosophila larvae that coincides with a major wave of neurogenesis. Mechanisms controlling larval sleep are partially distinct from adult sleep: octopamine, the Drosophila analog of mammalian norepinephrine, is the major arousal neuromodulator in larvae, but dopamine is not required. Using real-time behavioral monitoring in a closed-loop sleep deprivation system, we find that sleep loss in larvae impairs cell division of neural progenitors. This work establishes a system uniquely suited for studying sleep during nascent periods, and demonstrates that sleep in early life regulates neural stem cell proliferation.