Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Dorsoventral differences in Kv7/M‐current and its impact on resonance, temporal summation and excitability in rat hippocampal pyramidal cells

Kv7 (KCNQ/M) channels are known to control excitability and generate subthreshold M‐resonance in CA1 hippocampal pyramidal cells, but their properties and functions have not previously been compared along the dorsoventral (septotemporal) axis We used whole‐cell recordings to compare electrophysiological properties of dorsal and ventral CA1 pyramidal cells in hippocampal slices from 3‐ to 4‐week‐old rats Blockade of Kv7/M‐channels with 10,10‐bis(4‐pyridinylmethyl)‐9(10H)‐anthracenone dihydrochloride (XE991) had a stronger impact on electrical properties in dorsal than ventral pyramidal cells, including input resistance, temporal summation, M‐resonance, spike threshold, medium after‐hyperpolarization, excitability, and spike frequency adaptation. Voltage‐clamp recordings revealed a larger amplitude and left‐shifted voltage dependence of XE991‐sensitive current (IM) in dorsal vs. ventral cells. IM‐dependent differences in excitability and resonance may be important for rate and phase coding of CA1 place cells along the dorsoventral axis and may enhance epileptiform activity in ventral pyramidal cells.
Porcine Reproductive and Respiratory Syndrome Virus: Propagation and Quantification

Porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome virus (PRRSV) is a member of the family Arteriviridae, order Nidovirale. PRRSV is an enveloped, single‐stranded, positive‐sense RNA virus with a genome around 15 kb in length. For propagation of PRRSV in vitro, the MARC‐145 cell line is the most often used in a laboratory setting. Infectious cDNA clones of many PRRSV strains have been established, from which these viruses can be recovered. PRRSV titration is generally done in MARC‐145 cells. PRRSV RNA copy numbers can be assessed by reverse transcription and real‐time PCR. Here, protocols for PRRSV propagation, virus recovery from infectious cDNA clones, and quantification are presented. © 2018 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Brown eggshell fading with layer ageing: dynamic change in the content of protoporphyrin IX

ABSTRACT The dynamic change in brown eggshell color as hens age has been observed, but much uncertainty still exists. We aimed to analyze the depth of eggshell color and quantity of protoporphyrin IX throughout the laying period to explore the reasons for color variation. In this study, 120 Rhode Island Red hens were used, and two eggs were collected from each individual at 26, 34, 42, 50, 60, and 70 wk of age. The eggshell color (L*, a*, b*), egg weight, eggshell dry weight, and protoporphyrin IX quantity in eggshell were measured for individual eggs. Our results showed that the intensity of brown eggshell color weaken as hens aged from 26 to 60 wk of age (L* gradually increased from 61.43 to 68.07), while eggshell lightness recovered slightly at 70 wk (L* = 64.77). The correlation analysis indicated that the content of protoporphyrin IX deposited in the eggshell was an important factor for lightness fading with the ageing process (the average r was 0.66, P < 0.01), while the egg weight had little impact on the eggshell color (the average r was 0.07, P > 0.05). The shade of the eggshell color (L* and a*) at the early laying period (26 or 34 wk) had a low correlation with the other age points (42, 50, 60, and 70 wk). However, high correlations between the shell color at 42 wk of age and subsequent ages (50, 60, and 70 wk) were found, suggesting that the intensity of eggshell color is more stable after egg‐laying peaks (such as 42 wk of age). In conclusion, the intensity of brown eggshell color varies greatly among the whole laying cycle and breeders can choose the proper age for eggshell color measurements to ensure the degree of shell color in the late laying period.
The effect of Ginger on semen parameters and serum FSH, LH & testosterone of infertile men

Background:The chemical constituents of ginger classified to volatile oils (including borneol, camphene, citral, eucalyptol, linalool, phenllandrene, zingiberine and zingiberol penols (gingerol, zingerone and shogaol) and resin) which constitutes (1-3%) mainly of zingeberene nonvolatile pungent compounds oleo-resin constitutes (4-7.5%) mainly gigerols and other constituents with more than 50% of starch. Aim: The aim of this study is to examine the effect of ginger supplements on semen parameters & serum FSH, LH, & testosterone & of infertile men. Patients & methods: A longitudinal study comprised 75 infertile men, their ages from 19-40 years. All infertile patients were married for at least two years and had no children. The Study samples were obtained from infertile clinic in Tikrit teaching hospital, private clinics in Kirkuk city, from 1-102011 to 1-5-2012. This study involves clinical trial by treating the whole infertile patients with ginger. At least 2-3 semen analyses were done during 3 months of treatment for each patient before making a final conclusion regarding the base line sperm parameters. Serum concentrations of FSH, LH & testosterone were measured using ELISA. Results: There was significant (p<0.01) increase in sperm count of infertile men after treatment with ginger as compared with that before treatment. With a % of increase in sperm count up to 16.2%. Also, the study record a significant (p<0.01) increase in sperm motility of infertile men after treatment with ginger, as compared with before treatment with a % of increase in sperm motility was recorded was up to 47.3%. Moreover, there was significant (p<0.01) increase in sperm viability & normal sperm morphology of infertile men after treatment with ginger as compared with before treatment, with increase in percentage of sperm viability up to 40.7 %. The study observed a significant increase in ejaculate volume of infertile men after treatment with ginger, as compared with before treatment with a increase in percentage of ejaculate volume was recorded up to 36.1%. There is significantly (p<0.01) reduction in serum MDA & significant increase in serum glutathione (p<0.01) in infertile men after treatment with ginger as compared with before treatment. There were significant increases in serum FSH, LH & testosterone levels in infertile men after treatment by ginger as compared with before treatment. Conclusion: The present study conclude that after treatment with ginger, cause a significant reduction in serum MDA & significant increase in serum LH, FSH & testosterone. Treatment with ginger increase serum glutathione & reduce serum & seminal fluid MDA. The present study recommends the use of ginger by Iraqi community as a food additive.
Achieving consensus on minimum data items (including core outcome domains) for a longitudinal observational cohort study in rheumatoid arthritis

Objectives. To obtain consensus on the minimum data items for an observational cohort study in RA in the UK and to make available the process for similar studies and other rheumatic conditions. Methods. Individuals with a diverse range of expertise and backgrounds were invited to participate in a process of proposing a minimum core dataset (MCD) for research studies, commissioned by Arthritis Research UK as part of the larger INBANK project. The group included patients and representatives from clinical and academic rheumatology, outcomes science, stratified medicine, health economics, and national professional and academic bodies/committees. A process was devised based on OMERACT principles for reviewing aims/objectives, defining the scope, identifying the important research questions and selecting key domains. Results. Following the initial multistakeholder meeting, subsequent teleconferences and email communications: consensus was obtained on the most important and relevant research questions; agreement on how the OMERACT Core Areas (life impact, pathophysiological manifestations, resource use and death) could form the basis of a MCD; and consensus on 22 items for inclusion into a MCD. Workshops were undertaken for two essential items that required further exploration: work/social participation and co‐morbidity. Conclusion. Reaching a consensus for the proposed minimal data items for long‐term observational cohort studies of RA in the UK posed novel challenges and opportunities, and was largely successful. Further work is needed for selecting instruments for two important items and for achieving compatibility with other UK national initiatives, and more widely across Europe.
Adolescent Alcohol Exposure-Induced Changes in Alpha-Melanocyte Stimulating Hormone and Neuropeptide Y Pathways via Histone Acetylation in the Brain During Adulthood

Abstract Background Adolescent intermittent ethanol exposure causes long-lasting alterations in brain epigenetic mechanisms. Melanocortin and neuropeptide Y signaling interact and are affected by ethanol exposure in the brain. Here, the persistent effects of adolescent intermittent ethanol on alpha-melanocyte stimulating hormone, melanocortin 4 receptor, and neuropeptide Y expression and their regulation by histone acetylation mechanisms were investigated in adulthood. Methods Male rats were exposed to adolescent intermittent ethanol (2 g/kg, i.p.) or volume-matched adolescent intermittent saline from postnatal days 28 to 41 and allowed to grow to postnatal day 92. Anxiety-like behaviors were measured by the elevated plus-maze test. Brain regions from adult rats were used to examine changes in alpha-melanocyte stimulating hormone, melanocortin 4 receptor, and neuropeptide Y expression and the histone acetylation status of their promoters. Results Adolescent intermittent ethanol-exposed adult rats displayed anxiety-like behaviors and showed increased pro-opiomelanocortin mRNA levels in the hypothalamus and increased melanocortin 4 receptor mRNA levels in both the amygdala and hypothalamus compared with adolescent intermittent saline-exposed adult rats. The alpha-Melanocyte stimulating hormone and melanocortin 4 receptor protein levels were increased in the central and medial nucleus of the amygdala, paraventricular nucleus, and arcuate nucleus of the hypothalamus in adolescent intermittent ethanol-exposed compared with adolescent intermittent saline-exposed adult rats. Neuropeptide Y protein levels were decreased in the central and medial nucleus of the amygdala of adolescent intermittent ethanol-exposed compared with adolescent intermittent saline-exposed adult rats. Histone H3K9/14 acetylation was decreased in the neuropeptide Y promoter in the amygdala but increased in the melanocortin 4 receptor gene promoter in the amygdala and the melanocortin 4 receptor and pro-opiomelanocortin promoters in the hypothalamus of adolescent intermittent ethanol-exposed adult rats compared with controls. Conclusions Increased melanocortin and decreased neuropeptide Y activity due to changes in histone acetylation in emotional brain circuitry may play a role in adolescent intermittent ethanol-induced anxiety phenotypes in adulthood.
Myosin 10 is involved in murine pigmentation

Myosins are molecular motors that are well known for their role in cell movement and contractile functions. Although extensively studied in muscle physiology, little is known about the function of myosins in mammalian skin. As part of the Sanger Institute Mouse Genetics Project, we have identified a role for Myo10 in pigmentation, with a phenotype unlike those of Myo5a or Myo7a. Adult mice homozygous for a disrupted Myo10 allele on a C57BL/6N background displayed a high degree of penetrance for white patches on their abdomen and dorsal surface. Forepaw syndactyly and hind paw syndactyly were also observed in these mice. Tail epidermal wholemounts showed a complete lack of melanocytes in the hair follicles and interfollicular epidermis. Myo10 has previously been implicated in human pigmentation. Our current study reveals involvement of Myo10 in murine skin pigmentation.
Detecting Allergens From Black Tiger Shrimp Penaeus monodon That Can Bind and Cross-link IgE by ELISA, Western Blot, and a Humanized Rat Basophilic Leukemia Reporter Cell Line RS-ATL8

Background Black tiger shrimp Penaeus monodon is one of the common causes of shellfish allergy that is increasing worldwide. One of the important problems in the management of shellfish allergy is the lack of accurate diagnostic assay because the biological and immunological properties of allergens in black tiger shrimp have not been well characterized. This study aims to detect proteins with the ability to bind and cross-link immunoglobulin E (IgE) from black tiger shrimp by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA), Western blot, and a humanized rat basophilic leukemia reporter cell line RS-ATL8. Methods Sera from shrimp allergic subjects were subjected to ELISA and Western blots using raw or cooked shrimp extract as antigens. Pooled sera were used to sensitize the RS-ATL8 reporter cell line and cells were activated by shrimp extract. Eluted protein extracts separated by sodium dodecyl sulfate polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis (SDS-PAGE) were tested on the RS-ATL8 cell line and subjected to mass spectrometry to identify potential candidate allergens. Results Allergic sera reacted stronger to raw shrimp extract than cooked shrimp extract (P=0.009). Western blot demonstrated that major IgE reactivity protein bands were at 32–39 kDa and 91–230 kDa in both raw and cooked shrimp extracts. The eluted protein bands at the molecular weight of 38 and 115 kDa from raw shrimp extract induced IgE cross-linking as assayed by the RS-ATL8 cell line. These protein bands were subjected to mass spectrometry for analysis. Ubiquitin-activating enzyme and crustacyanin were identified as potential candidate novel shrimp allergens. Conclusions The RS-ATL8 reporter cell line can be used to identify potential new shrimp allergens that can functionally cross-link IgE and induce mast cell degranulation.
Day-ahead electricity price forecasting by modified relief algorithm and hybrid neural network

In a power market, the price of electricity is the most important signal to all market participants. However, electricity price forecast is a complex task due to non-linearity, non-stationarity and volatility of the price signal. In spite of all performed research on this area in the recent years, there is still an essential need for more accurate price forecast methods. Besides, there is a lack of robust feature selection technique for designing the input vector of electricity price forecast, which can consider the non-linearities of the price signal. In this study, a new price forecast method is proposed, which is composed of a modified version of Relief algorithm for feature selection and a hybrid neural network for prediction. The proposed approach is examined on Ontario, New England and Italian electricity markets and compared with some of the most recently published price forecast methods.
Silicon Nanowires as Biological Sensors and Highly Efficient Thermoelectric Materials

Silicon nanowires are of significant interest because of their novel properties which afford new functions. Here, we study silicon nanowires fabricated via a well established top down approach called superlattice nanowire pattern transfer (SNAP). In the first part of the thesis, nanowires are utilized for biological sensing of DNA and proteins in an electrolyte solution. Important electronic and surface properties are considered as means to optimize the device sensitivity. The removal of silicon-oxide interface is shown to improve the limit of detection by two orders of magnitude. The sensitivity can be further improved by the reduction of the doping level to 1017 cm-3. In this way, sub-femtomolar concentration of oligonucleotides in physiological conditions can be detected. While the Debye screening is circumvented by the electrostatic adsorption of primary DNA on the amine-terminated monolayer, the detection of proteins is limited by the size of the antibodies. In low ionic strength solution, ~10µM, human IL2 cytokine is detectable at 1 to 10pM concentrations. Furthermore, a model is developed which allows the determination of kinetic parameters and absolute analyte concentrations from the real-time resistance of the nanowires. This model is consistent with Langmuir model, and could, in principle, be used to determine the amount of low abundance biological molecules at concentrations below those detectable with other label-free methods, such as surface plasmon resonance technique. In addition, a novel electrochemical technique is developed which allows the spatially-selective functionalization of silicon nanowires and the construction of a small library of proteins. In the second part, the discovery of highly efficient thermoelectric materials based on silicon nanowires is discussed. A relatively simple, scalable, and single component system of silicon nanowires with figure of merit of ~1 at room temperature is developed. ZT can be tuned at various temperatures to exceed unity by varying nanowire size and/or impurity doping level. Such enhancement in ZT compared to the bulk value is achieved by significantly perturbing the phonon-mediated heat transport in a nanowire. Decreased thermal conductivities and longer lifetimes of long-wavelength phonons in a nanowire are major reasons for an increased thermoelectric efficiency of these structures.
Relaxing the maximum dc input amplitude vs. consumption trade‐off in differential‐input band‐pass biquad filters

This paper shows that an important part of the power consumption of a biquad band‐pass filter is associated with the feedback loop that fixes the high‐pass frequency and blocks the direct current (dc) input signals. The dc input amplitude that can be blocked is related to the maximum output current that one of the transconductors can provide, hence impacting on the required consumption through this effect. Then, a technique that efficiently blocks the dc input signal and fixes the high‐pass frequency is introduced and analyzed in depth. Moreover, an architecture for ultra‐low‐power differential‐input biquads is fully presented. The proposed architecture enables lowering the power consumption or blocking higher levels of dc input without jeopardizing the power consumption. Results show that the proposed architecture, compared with a traditional one, presents a 30% reduction in power consumption and more than doubles the dc input that can be blocked. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Chinese Typeface Transformation with Hierarchical Adversarial Network

In this paper, we explore automated typeface generation through image style transfer which has shown great promise in natural image generation. Existing style transfer methods for natural images generally assume that the source and target images share similar high-frequency features. However, this assumption is no longer true in typeface transformation. Inspired by the recent advancement in Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), we propose a Hierarchical Adversarial Network (HAN) for typeface transformation. The proposed HAN consists of two sub-networks: a transfer network and a hierarchical adversarial discriminator. The transfer network maps characters from one typeface to another. A unique characteristic of typefaces is that the same radicals may have quite different appearances in different characters even under the same typeface. Hence, a stage-decoder is employed by the transfer network to leverage multiple feature layers, aiming to capture both the global and local features. The hierarchical adversarial discriminator implicitly measures data discrepancy between the generated domain and the target domain. To leverage the complementary discriminating capability of different feature layers, a hierarchical structure is proposed for the discriminator. We have experimentally demonstrated that HAN is an effective framework for typeface transfer and characters restoration.
Doc2Cube: Automated Document Allocation to Text Cube via Dimension-Aware Joint Embedding

Data cube is a cornerstone architecture in multidimensional analysis of structured datasets. It is highly desirable to conduct multidimensional analysis on text corpora with cube structures for various text-intensive applications in healthcare, business intelligence, and social media analysis. However, one bottleneck to constructing text cube is to automatically put millions of documents into the right cells in such a text cube so that quality multidimensional analysis can be conducted afterwards—it is too expensive to allocate documents manually or rely on massively labeled data. We propose Doc2Cube, a method that constructs a text cube from a given text corpus in an unsupervised way . Initially, only the label names (e.g., USA, China) of each dimension (e.g., location) are provided instead of any labeled data. Doc2Cube leverages label names as weak super-vision signals and iteratively performs joint embedding of labels, terms, and documents to uncover their semantic similarities. To generate joint embeddings that are discriminative for cube construction, Doc2Cube learns dimension-tailored document representations by selectively focusing on terms that are highly label-indicative in each dimension. Furthermore, Doc2Cube alleviates label sparsity by propagating the information from label names to other terms and enriching the labeled term set. Our experiments on a real news corpus demonstrate that Doc2Cube
Geographic Expansion of Lyme Disease in Michigan, 2000–2014

Abstract Background Most Lyme disease cases in the Midwestern United States are reported in Minnesota and Wisconsin. In recent years, however, a widening geographic extent of Lyme disease has been noted with evidence of expansion eastwards into Michigan and neighboring states with historically low incidence rates. Methods We collected confirmed and probable cases of Lyme disease from 2000 through 2014 from the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services, entering them in a geographic information system. We performed spatial focal cluster analyses to characterize Lyme disease expansion. We compared the distribution of human cases with recent Ixodes scapularis tick distribution studies. Results Lyme disease cases in both the Upper and Lower Peninsulas of Michigan expanded more than 5-fold over the study period. Although increases were seen throughout the Upper Peninsula, the Lower Peninsula particularly expanded along the Indiana border north along the eastern shore of Lake Michigan. Human cases corresponded to a simultaneous expansion in established I scapularis tick populations. Conclusions The geographic distribution of Lyme disease cases significantly expanded in Michigan between 2000 and 2014, particularly northward along the Lake Michigan shore. If such dynamic trends continue, Michigan—and possibly neighboring areas of Indiana, Ohio, and Ontario, Canada—can expect a continued increase in Lyme disease cases.