Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Early steps in the assembly of photoreceptor ribbon synapses in the mouse retina: The involvement of precursor spheres

The retinal photoreceptor ribbon synapse is a chemical synapse structurally and functionally specialized for the tonic release of neurotransmitter. It is characterized by the presynaptic ribbon, an electron‐dense organelle at the active zone covered by hundreds of synaptic vesicles. In conventional synapses, dense‐core transport vesicles carrying a set of active zone proteins are implicated in early steps of synapse formation. In photoreceptor ribbon synapses, synaptic spheres are suggested to be involved in ribbon synapse assembly, but nothing is known about the molecular composition of these organelles. With light, electron, and stimulated emission depletion microscopy and immunocytochemistry, we investigated a series of presynaptic proteins during photoreceptor synaptogenesis. The cytomatrix proteins Bassoon, Piccolo, RIBEYE, and RIM1 appear early in synaptogenesis. They are transported in nonmembranous, electron‐dense, spherical transport units, which we called precursor spheres, to the future presynaptic site. Other presynaptic proteins, i.e., Munc13, CAST1, RIM2, and an L‐type Ca2+ channel α1 subunit are not associated with the precursor spheres. They cluster directly at the active zone some time after the first set of cytomatrix proteins has arrived. By quantitative electron microscopy, we found an inverse correlation between the numbers of spheres and synaptic ribbons in the postnatally developing photoreceptor synaptic terminals. From these results, we suggest that the precursor spheres are the transport units for proteins of the photoreceptor ribbon compartment and are involved in the assembly of mature synaptic ribbons. J. Comp. Neurol. 512:814–824, 2009. © 2008 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Bacterial Spectrum and Antimicrobial Susceptibility Patterns in Acquired and Connatal Lacrimal Duct Stenosis

Abstract Purpose: (1) To determine the current bacteriological spectrum in connatal and acquired lacrimal duct obstruction (cLDO and aLDO, respectively) and (2) to analyze the antimicrobial susceptibility patterns of the recovered isolates. Materials and Methods: In a prospective study, 463 samples (30% bilateral LDO) were obtained from the lacrimal ducts of 132 infants and 192 adult patients with symptomatic LDO between 2007 and 2012 at a tertiary eye-care center. The samples were cultured for aerobic and anaerobic bacteria, which were subsequently identified using standard microbiological techniques. Antimicrobial susceptibility testing was performed for each isolate using the disk diffusion method. Data were analyzed using SPSS and chi-square test for significance testing. Results: (1) Among 463 samples investigated, 333 samples were positive, i.e. at least one bacterial isolate was recovered. A total of 72% were recovered (97% of samples from children and 56% of samples from adults), yielding a total of 654 bacterial isolates. Co-colonization with up to five different bacterial species was observed in a large proportion of the samples from children (87%), but in only 20% of those from adults and with a maximum of three different bacteria. Gram-positive bacteria were identified in 72% of the positive samples in both aLDO and cLDO. The most common Gram-positive species in cLDO was Streptococcus pneumoniae (29%), while that in cLDO was Staphylococcus aureus (60%). The most prevalent Gram-negative species were Moraxella catarrhalis (8%) and Haemophilus influenzae (9%) in cLDO and Pseudomonas aeruginosa in aLDO (12%). (2) Susceptibility testing revealed chloramphenicol to be the most active antibiotic with resistance rates of 3% in cLDO and 6% in aLDO, followed by ciprofloxacin (1% and 6%). Erythromycin and gentamicin were the least active of all, with resistances of 41% and 22%, respectively, in cLDO, and 23% and 11% in aLDO. Conclusions: Bacterial colonization occurs regularly in LDO, with Gram-positive bacteria being found in 97% of cLDO samples and 56% of aLDO samples. A remarkable number of different species were found to co-colonize in cLDO. The most common bacteria in LDO are highly susceptible in vitro to chloramphenicol and ciprofloxacin.
Histological study on the possible protective role of Moringa Oleifera leaves extract on Paracetamol induced liver damage in adult male albino rats

Introduction: Moringa oleifera is a tropical tree whose leaves are rich in antioxidant compounds. Paracetamol hepatotoxicity is a significant public health concern. Aim: The aim of this study was to investigate the possible protective role of Moringa oleifera leaves (MOL) aqueous extract on paracetamol induced liver injury in adult male albino rats.Materials and Methods: Forty adult male albino rats were used in the current study and were divided into four equal groups,: Group I served as control; Group II were given MOL for 14 days; Group III were given water for 7 days followed by paracetamol for another seven days; Group IV were given MOL for 14 days and Paracetamol on the seventh day for 7days.All medications were given by nasogastric tube. Specimens of liver were excised and processed for histological and histochemical studies. Blood samples were collected for biochemical study. Statistical analysis of the results was done.Results: MOL administration in group II didn’t affect hepatic architecture or liver function tests. There was a significant increase in glutathione peroxidase and catalase activity and no significant difference in malondialdehyde level as compared to control. Paracetamol administration led to vacuolization of hepatocytes, cellular infiltrations and congestion in central and portal veins, with apparent increase in number of cholangiocytes. There were also significant decrease in the area percentage of PAS positive granules and significant decrease in area percentage of collagen fibers as compared to control. By electron microscope, distorted mitochondria, decrease of rough endoplasmic reticulum and increase of smooth endoplasmic reticulum & collagen fibrils were observed. Administration of Moringa before paracetamol ameliorated damaging effects of paracetamol. Minimal cellular infiltrations and apparent increase in number of cholangiocytes were still observed. Conclusion: MOL extracts could protect the liver against paracetamol effects through inhibition of lipid peroxidation and enhancement of antioxidant enzymes.
ETA: Estimated Time of Answer Predicting Response Time in Stack Overflow

Question and Answer (Q&A) sites help developers dealing with the increasing complexity of software systems and third-party components by providing a platform for exchanging knowledge about programming topics. A shortcoming of Q&A sites is that they provide no indication on when an answer is to be expected. Such an indication would help, for example, the developers who posed the questions in managing their time. We try to fill this gap by investigating whether and how answering time for a question posed on Stack Overflow, a prominent example of Q&A websites, can be predicted considering its tags. To this aim, we first determine the types of answers to be considered valid answers to the question, after which the answering time was predicted based on similarity of the set of tags. Our results show that the classification is correct in 30%-35% of the cases.
Antifungal prophylaxis for solid organ transplant recipients: seeking clarity amidst controversy.

Organ transplant recipients comprise a growing and an increasingly important group of immunocompromised hosts. Between the period 1990-1993 and the period 1994-1997, the number of transplantation procedures performed in the United States alone increased 41% for liver, 81% for kidney-pancreas, 102% for pancreas, 120% for lung, and 136% for intestinal transplantations [1]. Invasive fungal infections remain one of the most significant infectious complications among organ transplant recipients. Although mycelial fungi (e.g., phaeohyphomycetes) have emerged as important pathogens within the last decade, most invasive fungal infections in these patients are due to Aspergillus and Candida [2-4]. Management of invasive mycoses, particularly aspergillus infections, has proven remarkably challenging. Antifungal prophylaxis for solid organ transplant recipients remains a complex and controversial issue. There is a striking paucity of randomized trials in the literature. Consequently, institutional practices involving antifungal prophylaxis vary widely. Nevertheless, knowledge accrued regarding epidemiology and risk factors and published data, albeit largely from cohort studies and case series, can contribute substantially toward devising rational antifungal prophylactic strategies. In this overview, I discuss the demographic characteristics and predisposing variables for fungal infections that are the pathophysiological basis for my recommendations and the approaches I outline, the disadvantages of antifungal prophylaxis, and, finally, briefly outline directions for future studies.
Supply Chain Management with Online Customer Selection

We consider new online variants of supply chain management models, where in addition to production decisions, one also has to actively decide on which customers to serve. Specifically, customers arrive sequentially during a selection phase, and one has to decide whether to accept or reject each customer upon arrival. If a customer is rejected, then a lost-sales cost is incurred. Once the selection decisions are all made, one has to satisfy all the accepted customers with minimum possible production cost. The goal is to minimize the total cost of lost sales and production. A key feature of the model is that customers arrive in an online manner, and the decision maker does not require any information about future arrivals.We provide two novel algorithms for online customer selection problems, which are based on repeatedly solving offline subproblems that ignore previously made decisions. For many important settings, our algorithms achieve small constant competitive ratio guarantees. That is, for any sequence of arriving customers, the cost incurred by the online algorithm is within a fixed constant factor of the cost incurred by the respective optimal solution that has full knowledge upfront on the sequence of arriving customers. Finally, we provide a computational study on the performance of these algorithms when applied to the economic lot sizing and joint replenishment problems with online customer selection.
Fitness Effects of Chlorpyrifos in the Damselfly Enallagma cyathigerum Strongly Depend upon Temperature and Food Level and Can Bridge Metamorphosis

Interactions between pollutants and suboptimal environmental conditions can have severe consequences for the toxicity of pollutants, yet are still poorly understood. To identify patterns across environmental conditions and across fitness-related variables we exposed Enallagma cyathigerum damselfly larvae to the pesticide chlorpyrifos at two food levels or at two temperatures and quantified four fitness-related variables (larval survival, development time, mass at emergence and adult cold resistance). Food level and temperature did not affect survival in the absence of the pesticide, yet the pesticide reduced survival only at the high temperature. Animals reacted to the pesticide by accelerating their development but only at the high food level and at the low temperature; at the low food level, however, pesticide exposure resulted in a slower development. Chlorpyrifos exposure resulted in smaller adults except in animals reared at the high food level. Animals reared at the low food level and at the low temperature had a higher cold resistance which was not affected by the pesticide. In summary our study highlight that combined effects of exposure to chlorpyrifos and the two environmental conditions (i) were mostly interactive and sometimes even reversed in comparison with the effect of the environmental condition in isolation, (ii) strongly differed depending on the fitness-related variable under study, (iii) were not always predictable based on the effect of the environmental condition in isolation, and (iv) bridged metamorphosis depending on which environmental condition was combined with the pesticide thereby potentially carrying over from aquatic to terrestrial ecosystems. These findings are relevant when extrapolating results of laboratory tests done under ideal environmental conditions to natural communities.
Critical roles of Gi/o proteins and phospholipase C-δ1 in the activation of receptor-operated TRPC4 channels

Significance Transient Receptor Potential Canonical 4 (TRPC4) forms nonselective cation channels implicated in multiple functions in the brain, heart, vasculature, and gastrointestinal tract. However, mechanisms that govern TRPC4 channel activation remain mysterious, severely hampering their functional elucidation under physiological and pathological conditions. Uniquely, TRPC4 is activated following ligand stimulation of G protein-coupled receptors that function through either Gq/11 or Gi/o subgroups of G proteins. However, to what extent and how these two metabotropic pathways interact to regulate TRPC4 is unclear. Our study demonstrates the critical involvement of Gi/o signaling and phospholipase C activity in TRPC4 activation, providing detailed dissection of signaling steps of the phospholipase C pathway that contribute to channel gating. The mechanistic insights revealed should greatly facilitate evaluation and understanding of the physiological and pathological functions of these channels. Transient Receptor Potential Canonical (TRPC) proteins form nonselective cation channels commonly known to be activated downstream from receptors that signal through phospholipase C (PLC). Although TRPC3/C6/C7 can be directly activated by diacylglycerols produced by PLC breakdown of phosphatidylinositol 4,5-bisphosphate (PIP2), the mechanism by which the PLC pathway activates TRPC4/C5 remains unclear. We show here that TRPC4 activation requires coincident stimulation of Gi/o subgroup of G proteins and PLCδ, with a preference for PLCδ1 over PLCδ3, but not necessarily the PLCβ pathway commonly thought to be involved in receptor-operated TRPC activation. In HEK293 cells coexpressing TRPC4 and Gi/o-coupled µ opioid receptor, µ agonist elicited currents biphasically, with an initial slow phase preceding a rapidly developing phase. The currents were dependent on intracellular Ca2+ and PIP2. Reducing PIP2 through phosphatases abolished the biphasic kinetics and increased the probability of channel activation by weak Gi/o stimulation. In both HEK293 cells heterologously expressing TRPC4 and renal carcinoma-derived A-498 cells endogenously expressing TRPC4, channel activation was inhibited by knocking down PLCδ1 levels and almost completely eliminated by a dominant-negative PLCδ1 mutant and a constitutively active RhoA mutant. Conversely, the slow phase of Gi/o-mediated TRPC4 activation was diminished by inhibiting RhoA or enhancing PLCδ function. Our data reveal an integrative mechanism of TRPC4 on detection of coincident Gi/o, Ca2+, and PLC signaling, which is further modulated by the small GTPase RhoA. This mechanism is not shared with the closely related TRPC5, implicating unique roles of TRPC4 in signal integration in brain and other systems.
Aerial assisted path planning for terrestrial rover without complete environment map

There are several existing methods available for planning paths for terrestrial rovers including graph searching, artificial potential fields, neural networks, fuzzy logic, genetic algorithms and ant colony optimization. Of these, the graph search technique is the most popular due to ease of implementation on rovers which don't have a complete map of the area in which they are navigating. Regardless of the search technique, using a rover to plan out the path is expensive in terms of energy consumption and time. In a situation where the rover does not have a complete map of the environment it has no choice but to explore and discover obstacles to reach the final destination. The authors of this provide a solution to this problem by attaching a manually controlled drone to the rover. The drone will scout out the area that the robot has to travel in, identify obstacles through stereo- imaging, calculate the shortest path and instruct the rover to follow this optimized path. This approach reduces the need for various sensors on board for autonomous navigation, thus reducing power consumption of the rover and time taken for exploration, thus significantly increasing the energy efficiency.
Using compatible shape descriptor for lexicon reduction of printed Farsi subwords

This Paper presents a method for lexicon reduction of Printed Farsi subwords based on their holistic shape features. Because of the large number of Persian subwords variously shaped from a simple letter to a complex combination of several connected characters, it is not easy to find a fixed shape descriptor suitable for all subwords. In this paper, we propose to select the descriptor according to the input shape characteristics. To do this, a neural network is trained to predict the appropriate descriptor of the input image. This network is implemented in the proposed lexicon reduction system to decide on the descriptor used for comparison of the query image with the lexicon entries. Evaluating the proposed method on a dataset of Persian subwords allows one to attest the effectiveness of the proposed idea of dealing differently with various query shapes.
Hepatitis C – von der individuellen Heilung zur weltweiten Elimination?

Abstract With the implementation of highly effective direct acting antivirals (DAAs), global control or even elimination of chronic hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection might have come into reach. In fact, DAA therapy leads to complete virus elimination, defined as sustained viral response (SVR), in the vast majority of patients. Moreover, in patients without cirrhosis, the risk of developing HCC after DAA therapy is significantly reduced. For viremic patients who have already received DAA therapy, a distinction must be made between relapse and reinfection. The rate of new infections remains high and many infected individuals are undiagnosed. In order to come closer to the WHO goal of eliminating HCV worldwide by 2030, programs are needed to identify and treat all HCV-infected individuals. Strategies are missing in most countries to achieve this goal. Generic DAA therapies are available in some countries and appear to have similar cure rates compared to those obtained with the original drugs. The high variability of HCV, the numerous strategies of the virus to escape the immune response, and the lack of a suitable small animal model are key hurdles for vaccine development. Currently, the efficacy of two vaccine candidates is being investigated in clinical trials. The development of a protective vaccine is important, despite available therapy, to sustainably reduce the rate of new infections both in developing countries and in people with risk behavior.
Substance in Peripheral Nerve Which Influences Oxygen Uptake

Rat sciatic nerve contains a substance that diffuses into the surrounding medium and causes a fresh normal nerve to respire at an increased rate. Both the utilization of glucose and the increase in oxygen uptake with electrical stimulation of nerves in the presence or absence of glucose appear to be dependent on the presence of this substance.
Analysis of BvgA Activation of the Pertactin Gene Promoter in Bordetella pertussis

ABSTRACT Bordetella pertussis, the causative agent of whooping cough, regulates expression of its virulence factors via a two-component signal transduction system encoded by the bvgregulatory locus. It has been shown by activation kinetics that several of the virulence factors are differentially regulated. fhais transcribed at 10 min following an inducing signal, whileptx is not transcribed until 2 to 4 h after the inducing signal. We present data indicating that prn is transcribed at 1 h, an intermediate time compared to those offha and ptx. We have identifiedcis-acting sequences necessary for expression ofprn in B. pertussis by usingprn-lac fusions containing alterations in the sequence upstream of the prn open reading frame. In vitro transcription and DNase I footprinting analyses provided evidence to support our hypothesis that BvgA binds to this sequence upstream ofprn to activate transcription from the promoter. Our genetic data indicate that the region critical for prnactivation extends upstream to position −84. However, these data do not support the location of the prn transcription start site as previously published. We used a number of methods, includingprn-lac fusions, reverse transcriptase PCR, and 5′ rapid amplification of cDNA ends, to localize and identify thebvg-dependent 5′ end of the prn transcript to the cytosine at −125 with respect to the published start site.
A Method for Assessing Power System Security Risk

All along, countries of the world have adopted different methods to guarantee the operation security of power system. However, there were still a lot of large-area power outages in the world recently, which causing enormous economic losses. It indicates that the existing methods cannot completely guarantee the security of power system, and there is an urgent requirement to find new ways as a supplement. In this paper, an operable method for assessing power system security risk has proposed. Based on the analysis of the cooperation of the government and enterprises, the assessment process is discussed. The assessment indices are given by the Accident Tree Analysis and Analytic Hierarchy Process. Finally, we take Guangdong power grid as an example to briefly describe the practical application of the method.
COLA: Communication-censored Linearized ADMM for Decentralized Consensus Optimization

This paper proposes a communication- and computation-efficient algorithm to solve a convex consensus optimization problem defined over a decentralized network. A remarkable existing algorithm to solve this problem is the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM), in which at every iteration every node updates its local variable through combining neighboring variables and solving an optimization subproblem. The proposed algorithm, called as communication-censored linearized ADMM (COLA), leverages a linearization technique to reduce the iteration-wise computation cost of ADMM and uses a communication-censoring strategy to alleviate the communication cost. To be specific, COLA introduces successive linearization approximations to the local cost functions such that the resultant computation is first-order and light-weight. Since the linearization technique slows down the convergence speed, COLA further adopts the communication-censoring strategy to avoid transmissions of less informative messages. A node is allowed to transmit only if the distance between the current local variable and its previously transmitted one is larger than a censoring threshold. We establish convergence as well as sublinear and linear rates of convergence of COLA, and demonstrate its satisfactory communication-computation tradeoff with numerical experiments.
An Efficient Distributed Broadcasting Algorithm forWireless Ad Hoc Networks

In this paper, we propose a distributed broadcasting algorithm for wireless ad hoc networks. In the algorithm, an efficient strategy is used to determine the forward status of a node by just checking whether there exists a ring that contains all its neighbors. The proposed algorithm is more efficient than the existing broadcasting algorithms in the literatures. That is, the size of the forwarding nodes found by our algorithm is smaller and the running time is faster than other broadcasting algorithms. Reducing the number of forwarding nodes will decrease the probability of transmission collision, and hence improve the packet delivery ratio. The algorithm runs in O(d2) time, where d is the maximum node degree. The full coverage is not guaranteed but as shown by the simulation results, the probability of full coverages can be over 99 percent when the network contains 100 or more nodes.