Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Regulation of Anopheles gambiae male accessory gland genes influences postmating response in female

In Drosophila, the accessory gland proteins (Acps) secreted from the male accessory glands (MAGs) and transferred along with sperm into the female reproductive tract have been implicated in triggering postmating behavioral changes, including refractoriness to subsequent mating and propensity to egg laying. Recently, Acps have been found also in Anopheles, suggesting similar functions. Understanding the mechanisms underlying transcriptional regulation of Acps and their functional role in modulating Anopheles postmating behavior may lead to the identification of novel vector control strategies to reduce mosquito populations. We identified heat‐shock factor (HSF) binding sites within the Acp promoters of male Anopheles gambiae and discovered three distinct Hsf isoforms; one being significantly up‐regulated in the MAGs after mating. Through genome‐wide transcription analysis of Hsf‐silenced males, we observed significant down‐regulation in 50% of the Acp genes if compared to control males treated with a construct directed against an unrelated bacterial sequence. Treated males retained normal life span and reproductive behavior compared to control males. However, mated wild‐type females showed a ~46% reduction of egg deposition rate and a ~23% reduction of hatching rate (~58% combined reduction of progeny). Our results highlight an unsuspected role of HSF in regulating Acp transcription in A. gambiae and provide evidence that Acp down‐regulation in males leads a significant reduction of progeny, thus opening new avenues toward the development of novel vector control strategies. —Dottorini, T. , Persampieri, T. , Palladino, P., Baker, D. A. , Spaccapelo, R. , Senin, N. , Crisanti, A. Regulation of Anopheles gambiae male accessory gland genes influences postmating response in female. FASEB J. 27, 86–97 (2013). www.fasebj. org
Apprendre, faire mieux que les autres, éviter l’échec : l’influence de l’orientation des buts sur les apprentissages scolaires

Plusieurs travaux menes ces dernieres annees ont montre l'importance des connaissances et des strategies metacognitives dans la reussite scolaire (par exemple: Doudin, Martin & Albanese, 1999; Grangeat & Meirieu, 1997; Noel, 1997; Romainville, 1993). L'acquisition d'un savoir metacognitif, cependant, ne suffit pas a garantir son utilisation. Il faut aussi, par un engagement volontaire dans l'apprentissage, mobiliser de facon deliberee le savoir acquis, ce qui introduit la question des determinants motivationnels qui soutiennent son utilisation spontanee. Articuler plus etroitement motivation et cognition afin de parvenir a un modele de l'apprenant qui integre les aspects cognitif, metacognitif et motivationnel s'impose actuellement comme une exigence si l'on veut comprendre l'acte d'apprendre.
Commemorating the ‘Trojan Horse’ massacre in Cape Town: the tension between vernacular and official expressions of memory

This paper engages with the process of memorialisation in post-apartheid South Africa, focusing on the case study of the so-called Trojan Horse Massacre memorial in Athlone, Cape Town. Unveiled in 2005, this memorial is the latest of a series of attempts to publicly memorialise the three young victims of a local ambush attack organised by the South African security forces in August 1985. The paper investigates how these memorials as cultural expressions manifest the intersection of the official or monumental and the vernacular or popular, which, according to John Bodnar, always characterises public memory. It is argued that the increasing institutionalisation of the memory of this event, especially during the post-apartheid period, has resulted in an increasing shift away from the vernacular and toward the official – a development that is paralleled in many other commemorative initiatives in post-apartheid South Africa. This shift is accompanied, and perhaps defined, by the increasingly significant role accorded to visual images in the design of the memorial marker. Different products of visual representation, both fictional and documentary, are investigated for their suitability as source imagery for the public memorial. The use of visual images in public memorials is meant to allow diverse audiences to relate to the memory marker, but such visual representation arguably also solidifies hegemonic narratives and may invalidate alternative memories.
Genetic Variability of Koi Herpesvirus In vitro—A Natural Event?

Worldwide koi herpesvirus (KHV) causes high mortalities in Cyprinus carpio L. aquaculture. So far, it is unknown how the different variants of KHV have developed and how they spread in the fish, but also in the environmental water bodies. Therefore, a phylogenetic method based on variable number of tandem repeats (VNTR) was improved to gain deeper insights into the phylogeny of KHV and its possible worldwide distribution. Moreover, a VNTR-3 qPCR was designed which allows fast virus typing. This study presents a useful method for molecular tracing of diverse KHV types, variants, and lineages.
Sequential Pattern Mining : A Survey on Issues and Approaches

INTRODUCTION Sequential pattern mining deals with data represented as sequences (a sequence contains sorted sets of items). Compared to the association rule problem, a study of such data provides " inter-transaction " analysis (Agrawal and Srikant, 1995). Applications for sequential pattern extraction are numerous and the problem definition has been slightly modified in different ways. Associated to elegant solutions, these problems can match with real-life timestamped data (when association rules fail) and provide useful results.
Video-assisted thoracoscopic surgery with talc pleurodesis in the management of symptomatic hepatic hydrothorax

OBJECTIVES:Video-assisted thoracoscopic surgery with talc pleurodesis is a therapeutic option for patients with hepatic hydrothorax that is refractory to medical therapy. We report the outcomes of 15 patients who underwent this procedure for significantly symptomatic disease.METHODS:Data on 15 consecutive patients presenting to our institution between November, 1996, and June, 2000, with refractory hepatic hydrothorax was retrospectively collected. Baseline demographical and clinical characteristics and outcomes after the procedure were analyzed.RESULTS:The mean age of our cohort was 51.5 yr, and eight (53%) of the 15 patients were male. The etiologies of liver disease were hepatitis C virus and/or alcohol (n = 12) and cryptogenic cirrhosis (n = 3). Nine patients were Child-Pugh class C and six class B. Success defined as control of symptomatic hydrothorax in the first 30 days after the procedure was achieved in 11 of 15 patients (73%). Eight of these patients remained asymptomatic at a median follow-up of 5.5 months after the procedure, but three patients experienced symptomatic fluid reaccumulation 45, 61, and 62 days after the initial procedure. After a second VATS procedure, control was achieved in two of these three patients. Complications included pain around the chest tube site, low grade fever with leukocytosis, pleurocutaneous fistula and empyema, all of which responded to medical therapy. Four patients did not respond to the procedure. There were no procedure-related deaths. Overall mortality and baseline clinical characteristics were similar between responders and nonresponders to VATS with pleurodesis.CONCLUSIONS:Symptomatic hepatic hydrothorax can be controlled with a single VATS with pleurodesis in as many as 53% of patients and with two procedures in 73% with no procedure-related mortality. The procedure may be considered as a palliative alternative in patients needing frequent thoracocentesis. It also provides an alternative to transjugular intrahepatic portosystemic shunts and is a bridge toward liver transplantation.
Efficient privacy-preserving classification of ECG signals

We describe a privacy-preserving system where a server can classify an ElectroCardioGram (ECG) signal without learning any information about the ECG signal and the client is prevented from gaining knowledge about the classification algorithm used by the server. The system relies on the concept of Linear Branching Programs (LBP) and a recently proposed cryptographic protocol for secure evaluation of private LBPs. We study the trade-off between signal representation accuracy and system complexity both from practical and theoretical perspective. As a result, the inputs to the system are represented with the minimum number of bits ensuring the same classification accuracy of a plain implementation. We show how the overall system complexity can be strongly reduced by modifying the original ECG classification algorithm. Two alternatives of the underlying cryptographic protocol are implemented and their corresponding complexities are analyzed to show suitability of our system in real-life applications for current and future security levels.
Phytoplankton Chytridiomycosis: Fungal Parasites of Phytoplankton and Their Imprints on the Food Web Dynamics

Parasitism is one of the earlier and common ecological interactions in the nature, occurring in almost all environments. Microbial parasites typically are characterized by their small size, short generation time, and high rates of reproduction, with simple life cycle occurring generally within a single host. They are diverse and ubiquitous in aquatic ecosystems, comprising viruses, prokaryotes, and eukaryotes. Recently, environmental 18S rDNA surveys of microbial eukaryotes have unveiled major infecting agents in pelagic systems, consisting primarily of the fungal order of Chytridiales (chytrids). Chytrids are considered the earlier branch of the Eumycetes and produce motile, flagellated zoospores, characterized by a small size (2–6 μm), and a single, posterior flagellum. The existence of these dispersal propagules includes chytrids within the so-called group of zoosporic fungi, which are particularly adapted to the plankton lifestyle where they infect a wide variety of hosts, including fishes, eggs, zooplankton, algae, and other aquatic fungi but primarily freshwater phytoplankton. Related ecological implications are huge because chytrids can killed their hosts, release substrates for microbial processes, and provide nutrient-rich particles as zoospores and short fragments of filamentous inedible hosts for the grazer food chain. Furthermore, based on the observation that phytoplankton chytridiomycosis preferentially impacts the larger size species, blooms of such species (e.g., filamentous cyanobacteria) may not totally represent trophic bottlenecks. Besides, chytrid epidemics represent an important driving factor in phytoplankton seasonal successions. In this review, I summarize the knowledge on the diversity, community structure, quantitative importance, and functional roles of fungal chytrids, primarily those who are parasites of phytoplankton, and infer the ecological implications and potentials for the food web dynamics and properties. I reach the conclusion that phytoplankton chytridiomycosis represents an important but as yet overlooked ecological driving force in aquatic food web dynamics and network organization.
Discovery and reuse of composition knowledge for assisted mashup development

Despite the emergence of mashup tools like Yahoo! Pipes or JackBe Presto Wires, developing mashups is still non-trivial and requires intimate knowledge about the functionality of web APIs and services, their interfaces, parameter settings, data mappings, and so on. We aim to assist the mashup process and to turn it into an interactive co-creation process, in which one part of the solution comes from the developer and the other part from reusable composition knowledge that has proven successful in the past. We harvest composition knowledge from a repository of existing mashup models by mining a set of reusable composition patterns, which we then use to interactively provide composition recommendations to developers while they model their own mashup. Upon acceptance of a recommendation, the purposeful design of the respective pattern types allows us to automatically weave the chosen pattern into a partial mashup model, in practice performing a set of modeling actions on behalf of the developer. The experimental evaluation of our prototype implementation demonstrates that it is indeed possible to harvest meaningful, reusable knowledge from existing mashups, and that even complex recommendations can be efficiently queried and weaved also inside the client browser.
Haploidentical stem cell transplantation in leukemia.

In acute leukemia patients, infusing a megadose of extensively T-cell-depleted hematopoietic stem cells after an immuno-myeloablative conditioning regimen ensures sustained engraftment of full-haplotype mismatched transplants without graft-vs-host disease. Besides the conditioning regimen and the megadose of stem cells donor natural killer cell alloreactivity also plays a role in facilitating engraftment and in preventing relapse. Since our first successful pilot study, our efforts have concentrated on developing new conditioning regimens, optimizing the graft processing and improving the post-transplant immunological recovery. The results we have so far achieved in 112 very high-risk acute leukemia patients show that haploidentical transplantation is now a clinical reality. Because virtually all patients in need of a hematopoietic stem cell transplant have a full-haplotype mismatched donor, who is immediately available, a T-cell depleted mismatched transplant should be offered, not as a last resort, but as a viable option to high risk acute leukemia patients who do not have, or cannot find, a matched donor.
Role of myocardial contrast echocardiography in the clinical evaluation of acute myocardial infarction

The ultimate goal of treatment in acute myocardial infarction (AMI) is to salvage as much myocardium as possible with the least possible risk to the patient. In the immediate aftermath of reperfusion therapy, the clinician must determine whether the infarct related artery (IRA) is patent and if so whether successful myocardial reperfusion has been achieved. Addressing these questions expeditiously is important for subsequent treatment strategies—that is, if thrombolytic therapy has failed then the patient may be transferred for rescue coronary intervention. Furthermore, even when the patency of the IRA is restored, one has to determine whether microvascular perfusion is present. It is also important to identify the presence and extent of residual myocardial viability (MV) following AMI because subsequent revascularisation may not benefit patients with predominant myocardial necrosis, while those patients with significant MV are likely to benefit from revascularisation. Myocardial contrast echocardiography (MCE) is a technique that utilises microbubbles which remain entirely within the intravascular space and denotes the status of microvascular perfusion within that region.1 The myocardial signal assessed visually as contrast intensity reflects capillary blood volume.2 Furthermore, following destruction of microbubbles in the myocardium during high power imaging, the rate of replenishment of the myocardium reflects microbubble or myocardial blood velocity (β). Myocardial perfusion is defined as tissue blood flow at the capillary level. The two components of tissue blood flow—capillary blood volume and blood velocity—can be assessed by MCE. The product of these two components denotes myocardial blood flow (MBF) at the tissue level.2 Thus, MCE can detect not only capillary blood volume but by virtue of its temporal resolution can also assess MBF. The extent of myocardial necrosis after AMI is directly related to: (1) total duration of coronary occlusion; (2) the extent of myocardium subtended by the occluded artery; and (3) …
Accessing markets in creative industries—professionalization and social-spatial strategies of culturepreneurs in Berlin

Abstract The article addresses a major problem of understanding the market dynamics of so-called ‘creative industries’: how can we understand the constitution of young, newly emerged markets of creative industries? The central question deals with a substantial problem currently facing entrepreneurship and creative industries: how do young start-up entrepreneurs overcome structural paradoxes between individual professionalization and competitiveness on the one hand, and improving their entrepreneurial performances by depending on a badly needed innovation climate provided in social contexts and professional scenes on the other hand? In the following, social interactions and spatial practices of young entrepreneurial agents, so called ‘culturepreneurs’ will be conceptually and empirically presented. Networking activities they use to form professional scenes in the field of design production in Berlin's cultural industries provide insights into strategies for accessing markets. For the purposes of this paper, ‘scenes’ will be conceptually understood as a necessary prerequisite for creative milieu formations. They are considered as informal, communicatively established social constructions and are based on local narratives as well as entrepreneurial self-descriptions. Infused with local myths and everyday life stories, they serve as atmospheric stimulation for many people endeavouring to feel connected to a specific urban place — in this case Berlin — where they can launch their own entrepreneurial project. Within this context, it is possible to understand specific modes of entrepreneurial practices and the ways in which new market structures are formed in Berlin's creative industries.
Linagliptin treatment in subjects with type 2 diabetes with and without mild-to-moderate renal impairment

Renal disease is a frequent comorbidity of type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) and an important factor complicating the choice of glucose‐lowering drugs. The aim of this analysis was to evaluate the efficacy and safety of the dipeptidyl peptidase (DPP)‐4 inhibitor linagliptin (5 mg/day) in mono, dual or triple oral glucose‐lowering regimens in subjects with T2DM and mild or moderate renal impairment (RI).
Natural killer cells fertile with receptors for HLA-G?

Natural killer (NK) cells are lymphocytes involved in the innate immune response against certain microbial and parasitic infections (1, 2). These cells comprise ≈5–20% of peripheral blood lymphocytes and are present in spleen, liver, bone marrow, and thymus at a lower frequency and are rare in lymphatics and lymph nodes. However, in the mucosal decidual tissues of the maternal uterus, NK cells are the most abundant class of lymphocyte, representing up to 95% of all lymphocytes. Initially identified by their distinct morphology, NK cells in the placenta were designated “granulated metrial gland cells” in rodents (3) and “uterine granular lymphocytes” in humans (4, 5). Why do NK cells preferentially accumulate in the decidua? No clear rationale has emerged to explain this phenomenon. Given the established role of NK cells in innate immunity, protection of the fetus against transplacental infections is a good bet, but nonimmune functions involving fetal sustenance have also been proposed (6).
The interaction of psychological and physiological homeostatic drives and role of general control principles in the regulation of physiological systems, exercise and the fatigue process – The Integrative Governor theory

Abstract Either central (brain) or peripheral (body physiological system) control mechanisms, or a combination of these, have been championed in the last few decades in the field of Exercise Sciences as how physiological activity and fatigue processes are regulated. In this review, we suggest that the concept of ‘central’ or ‘peripheral’ mechanisms are both artificial constructs that have ‘straight-jacketed’ research in the field, and rather that competition between psychological and physiological homeostatic drives is central to the regulation of both, and that governing principles, rather than distinct physical processes, underpin all physical system and exercise regulation. As part of the Integrative Governor theory we develop in this review, we suggest that both psychological and physiological drives and requirements are underpinned by homeostatic principles, and that regulation of the relative activity of each is by dynamic negative feedback activity, as the fundamental general operational controller. Because of this competitive, dynamic interplay, we propose that the activity in all systems will oscillate, that these oscillations create information, and comparison of this oscillatory information with either prior information, current activity, or activity templates create efferent responses that change the activity in the different systems in a similarly dynamic manner. Changes in a particular system are always the result of perturbations occurring outside the system itself, the behavioural causative ‘history’ of this external activity will be evident in the pattern of the oscillations, and awareness of change occurs as a result of unexpected rather than planned change in physiological activity or psychological state.
Adverse Events in Orthopaedics: Is Trauma More Risky? An Analysis of the NSQIP Data

Objectives: As our healthcare system moves toward bundling payments, orthopaedic trauma surgeons will be increasingly benchmarked on perioperative complications. We therefore sought to determine financial risks under bundled payments by identifying adverse event rates for (1) orthopaedic trauma patients compared with general orthopaedic patients and (2) based on anatomic region and (3) to identify patient factors associated with complications. Design: Prospective. Setting: Multicenter. Patients/Participants: A total of 146,773 orthopaedic patients (22,361 trauma) from 2005 to 2011 NSQIP data were identified. Interventions: Minor and major adverse events, demographics, surgical variables, and patient comorbidities were collected. Main Outcome Measurements: Multivariate regressions determined significant risk factors for the development of complications. Results: The complication rate in the trauma group was 11.4% (2554/22,361) versus 4.1% (5137/124,412) in the general orthopaedic group (P = 0.001). When controlling for all variables, trauma was a risk factor for developing complications [odds ratio (OR): 1.69, 95% confidence interval (CI): 1.57–1.81]. After controlling for several patient factors, hip and pelvis patients were 4 times more likely to develop any perioperative complication than upper extremity patients (OR: 3.79, 95% CI: 3.01–4.79, P = 0.01). Lower extremity patients are 3 times more likely to develop any complication versus upper extremity patients (OR: 2.82, 95% CI: 2.30–3.46, P = 0.01). Conclusions: Our study is the first to show that orthopaedic trauma patients are 2 times more likely than general orthopaedic patients to sustain complications, despite controlling for identical risk factors. There is also an alarming difference in complication rates among anatomic regions. Orthopaedic trauma surgeons will face increased financial risk with bundled payments. Level of Evidence: Prognostic Level II. See Instructions for Authors for a complete description of levels of evidence.