Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Regulation of dihydrofolate reductase gene expression and E2F components in human diploid fibroblasts during growth and senescence

The induction of dihydrofolate reductase (DHFR), a key enzyme in DNA biosynthesis that is induced just before the onset of S phase, is markedly attenuated in senescent human fibroblasts (Pang and Chen, 1994, J. Cell. Physiol., 160:531–538). Footprinting analysis of the 365 bp promoter region of the human DHFR gene (−381 to −17) indicated that nuclear proteins bind to a cluster of cis‐elements, including two overlapping E2F binding sequences, two Sp1 sites, and one Yi sequence. Gel mobility shift assays were performed to assess the role of each cis‐element in the regulation of DHFR gene expression. We found that (1) Sp1 binding activity was constitutively expressed throughout the cell cycle in early passage and senescent cells; (2) Yi binding activity was undetectable in both early passage and senescent cells; and (3) E2F binding activity was serum‐inducible, senescence‐dependent, and prominent in presenescent cells but strikingly diminished in senescent cells. Northern blot analysis of the expression of E2F and DP family members showed that the E2F‐1, E2F‐4, and E2F‐5 mRNA was growth‐ and senescence‐dependent, whereas E2F‐3, DP‐1, and DP‐2 expression was constitutive and senescence‐independent. In contrast, E2F‐2 mRNA was not detectable in IMR‐90 or WI‐38 human fibroblasts. Western blot analysis showed that among the E2F‐associated proteins, the expression of E2F‐1, cyclin A, and cyclin B but not p107 was cell cycle‐ and senescence‐dependent. A nuclear extract mixing experiment suggested that an inhibitory factor may further reduce E2F binding activity in senescent cells. © 1996 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Valgus Laxity of the Ulnar Collateral Ligament of the Elbow in Collegiate Athletes

In this investigation, we determined the patterns of valgus laxity and acquired valgus laxity of the ulnar collateral ligament in the elbows of collegiate athletes involved in overhead and nonoverhead sports. Acquired valgus laxity of the elbow is defined as the differential amount of stress valgus opening between the dominant and nondominant elbows. Forty-eight asymptomatic male athletes involved in sports that require overhead arm movements (baseball, tennis, and swimming) and 88 asymptomatic male athletes involved in nonoverhead sports (track, lacrosse, fencing, and wrestling) underwent fluoroscan examination of both their elbows with (13 daN) and without (0 N) valgus stress. There were no statistically significant differences in the amount of valgus stress opening or in acquired valgus laxity between the two groups. In fact, 25% (34 of 136) of the athletes showed an acquired valgus laxity of more than 0.5 mm, and 51.5% (70 of 136) had an acquired valgus laxity that was actually negative. There was also no correlation between the number of years played and acquired valgus laxity. Our results show that acquired valgus laxity does not exist in asymptomatic athletes involved in overhead sports, and there is no threshold value of measurement indicative of acquired valgus laxity.
Stress echocardiography in regurgitant valve disease.

Because of its wide availability, low cost, versatility, and clinical use, stress echocardiography has become increasingly recognized as a valuable tool in the assessment of patients with regurgitant valvular heart disease. Exercise testing is favored compared with pharmacological stress testing for risk stratification in asymptomatic patients and can identify what might otherwise be considered as a moderate valve disease. It has been shown to provide insights into exertional symptoms disproportionate to resting hemodynamics in these patients and to facilitate individual risk stratification. Aggravation of valvular regurgitation severity, exercise-induced pulmonary hypertension (PHT), impaired left ventricular (LV) contractile reserve, inducible ischemia, dynamic LV dyssynchrony, and altered exercise capacity, together with the development of symptoms during exercise echocardiography, provide the clinician with straightforward prognostic information, therefore enabling a more accurate definition of the optimal timing of intervention in patients with valvular regurgitation.1,2 In contrast, dobutamine stress echocardiography has little value in cases of valvular regurgitation. Dobutamine infusion is almost systematically associated with a decrease in the severity of regurgitation; however, it might be of interest in the detection of LV contractile reserve and inducible ischemia. The most common form of exercise used in conjunction with echocardiography is immediate postexercise imaging on a treadmill or upright bicycle ergometer. However, semisupine exercise testing on an appropriate tilted table allows continuous echocardiographic monitoring, which represents an advantageous tool for quantifying changes in valvular regurgitation severity, LV function, and pulmonary pressure (Table). This exercise stress echocardiography modality (ie, per-exercise echocardiography) is the most used in Europe, and we strongly suggest this approach in the setting of valvular heart disease to detect evanescent changes. A symptom-limited graded exercise test is recommended, and ≥80% of the age-predicted upper heart rate should be reached in the absence of symptoms. The test is adapted to the clinical conditions …
NEW FINDINGS ON THE DEVELOPMENTAL PROCESS OF ASCOGREGARINA TAIWANENSIS AND ASCOGREGARINA CULICIS IN AEDES ALBOPICTUS AND AEDES AEGYPTI

ABSTRACT Infection in different stages of larvae of Aedes aegypti and Ae. albopictus with Ascogregarina taiwanensis and A. culicis, respectively, revealed that the oocysts of Ascogregarina spp. are able to infect any instar and can complete their life cycle within 9.5 ± 1 days. When early instars ingested oocysts, parasite development was synchronized to larval–pupal ecdysis and oocyst dissemination occurred at the time of adult emergence, oviposition, or both. The parasites also developed normally when infecting 2nd, 3rd, and early 4th instars and oocysts were released only during oviposition. The parasitic development stopped at the gamont stage when oocysts were ingested by late 4th instars (6 days old). The release of sporozoites in the midgut of any larval stage started within 45 min of oocyst ingestion. About 98% of oocysts of both A. taiwanensis and A. culicis were emptied within 2–3 h of their ingestion in their respective hosts. The oocysts of both species remained viable on desiccated filter paper stored at 27°C and 65 ± 5% relative humidity, indicating that the oocysts were resistant to dryness. The oocysts of A. culicis could survive up to 6 months, whereas those of A. taiwanensis survived up to 4 months. These biological characteristics relating to parasite development might enhance the distribution of Ascogregarina spp. widely in nature and facilitate the species to be considered for biological control of Aedes mosquitoes in the future.
Increasing frequency of large-scale die-off events in the Bay of Bengal: reasoning, perspectives and future approaches

The Bay of Bengal has been suffering from increasing frequency of large-Scale die-Off events for the past decades. Most frequently, these events are attributed to high-speed human development and its harmful effects on environment, which is nevertheless, the biggest challenges currently faced by the world. Increasing urbanization, environmental pollution and climate change are leading to unsustainable ecosystem exploitation and raising health and disease management challenges. Considerable modulations in major ecosystems and major disturbances in the global food chain are some of the most significant consequences of this uncontrolled urbanization. Global warming and El Nino events are few particular phenomena that drive mass deterioration of terrestrial foliages and fauna as well as aquatic organisms, respectively. We here review and discuss the die-off events occurring in the Bay of Bengal for the last decades as well as all the data obtained from the analyses of such events to provide a future perspective on potential management and monitoring strategies directed towards the protection of the flora and fauna of several major ecosystems from such die-off events.
Inventory Investment, Global Engagement, and Financial Constraints In the UK: Evidence from Micro Data

We use a panel of 9381 UK firms to study the links between firms’ global engagement status and their financial health. We estimate inventory investment equations augmented with a financial composition variable, and interpret the sensitivity of inventory investment to the latter as a measure of the strength of the financial constraints faced by firms. We find that smaller, younger, and more risky firms; and firms that do not export and are not foreign owned exhibit higher sensitivities. Moreover, global engagement substantially reduces the sensitivities displayed by the former categories of firms: this suggests that it shields firms from financial constraints.
Generating Politeness in Task Based Interaction: An Evaluation of the Effect of Linguistic Form and Culture

Politeness is an integral part of human language variation, e.g. consider the difference in the pragmatic effect of realizing the same communicative goal with either "Get me a glass of water mate! " or "I wonder if I could possibly have some water please? " This paper presents POLLy (Politeness for Language Learning), a system which combines a natural language generator with an AI Planner to model Brown and Levinson's theory of politeness (BL (2) our indirect strategies which should be the politest forms, are seen as the rudest; and (3) English and Indian native speakers of English have different perceptions of the level of politeness needed to mitigate particular face threats.
Parental Factors Associated with Child Post-traumatic Stress Following Injury: A Consideration of Intervention Targets

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms are relatively common following pediatric traumatic injury and are related to poor long-term child outcomes. However, due to concerns regarding the efficacy of early child preventive interventions, and difficulty intervening with injured and medicated children soon after the event, it is not feasible to provide early psychological interventions to children exposed to traumatic injury. Parental PTSD symptoms and reactions to the child’s traumatic injury impact child outcomes and provide potential targets for early intervention to reduce child symptom development without involving the child. The authors conducted a review of the literature using Psycinfo and Pubmed research databases (publication years = 1990–2017) and identified 65 published studies relevant to the topic of the review. The present review considers parent factors [parenting styles, parental post-traumatic pathology (PTS), adaptive and maladaptive coping strategies, and communication regarding the traumatic injury] and their impact on child PTS. We focus specifically on factors amenable to intervention. We further review moderators of these relationships (e.g., child age and gender, parent gender) and conclude that it is unlikely that a one-size-fits-all approach to treatment will be successful. Rather, it is necessary to consider the age and gender of parent child dyads in designing and providing targeted interventions to families following the traumatic injury of a child.
The Berkeley Orthokeratology Study, Part II: Efficacy and Duration

ABSTRACT Relative efficacy of orthokeratology (OK) was evaluated by assessing changes in refractive error, visual acuity, and corneal curvature in 31 treated and 28 randomized control subjects who wore conventional rigid contact lenses. The duration of changes was studied by monitoring subjects after lens wear was discontinued. After an average of 444 days of contact lens wear the treatment group showed an overall mean reduction in spherical equivalent refractive error of 1.01 D compared with 0.54 D in the control group (p = 0.02). Both groups had considerable variation in refractive error change. Corresponding mean improvements in unaided visual acuity were −0.27 and −0.20 log of the minimum angle of resolution [log (MAR)]. Corneal curvature decreased in both comparison groups, but the actual diopter value was about one‐half that of the refractive change. The changes in these characteristics tended to occur during the first 132 days of wear, and additional aggressive lens therapy during the remaining 241 days of treatment produced little additional change. The refractive error fluctuated considerably during the period of follow‐up and these fluctuations tended to be larger in those subjects who had shown greater changes in refractive error. When the lenses were removed, ocular characteristics returned steadily toward baseline levels. Ninety‐five days after discontinuing lens wear, the refractive error had returned 75 and 69% of the way to baseline levels for the treatment and control groups, respectively. Visual acuity and corneal curvature showed similar rebound after 95 days. We conclude that it is possible to reduce myopia about 1 D; however, the change is not permanent. Results indicate that the level of vision during periods of nonlens wear would be unstable, making it difficult to predict what the quality of vision would be under a retainer lens wear program.
Neuroscience Data Integration through Mediation: An (F)BIRN Case Study

We describe an application of the BIRN mediator to the integration of neuroscience experimental data sources. The BIRN mediator is a general purpose solution to the problem of providing integrated, semantically-consistent access to biomedical data from multiple, distributed, heterogeneous data sources. The system follows the mediation approach, where the data remains at the sources, providers maintain control of the data, and the integration system retrieves data from the sources in real-time in response to client queries. Our aim with this paper is to illustrate how domain-specific data integration applications can be developed quickly and in a principled way by using our general mediation technology. We describe in detail the integration of two leading, but radically different, experimental neuroscience sources, namely, the human imaging database, a relational database, and the eXtensible neuroimaging archive toolkit, an XML web services system. We discuss the steps, sources of complexity, effort, and time required to build such applications, as well as outline directions of ongoing and future research on biomedical data integration.
LineageRelationship BetweenLNCaPand LNCaP-Derived ProstateCancerCell Lines

BACKGROUND. LNCaP and its derivative cell lines, which include C4-2 (and the related C4-2B) and CL1, are used asmodels of prostate cancer. Unlike LNCaP, the other cell lines show features of progressed disease such as metastatic capability and hormone independence. Analyses were done to determine if C4-2 or CL1 cells were selected from pre-existent subpopulations in LNCaP. METHODS. Prostate cancer cells were characterized by cluster designation (CD) phenotyping. Specific cell populationswere sortedbyflowcytometry.DNAarrayanalysiswasused to probe differential gene expression. RESULTS. CD phenotyping showed that CL1 and C4-2 (and C4-2B) were very dissimilar, and C4-2 was more similar to LNCaP. One common difference between LNCaP and its derivatives was CD26, in which virtually all C4-2 or CL1 cells were CD26þ but only 10% of LNCaP cells were CD26þ. The CD26þ subpopulation of LNCaP was isolated and cultured in vitro. After culture, a high percentage of the cells (descended from the sorted cells) were CD26þ, in contrast to those sorted byCD13 orCD44. The culturedCD13 andCD44populations did not showahigh percentage of CD13þ andCD44þ cells, respectively. CD13 andCD44 aremarkers, in addition to CD26, for CL1 but not for C4-2. CONCLUSIONS. C4-2 arose probably from CD26þ LNCaP cells, while CL1 arose de novo. Prostate 60: 98–108, 2004. # 2004 Wiley-Liss, Inc.
Image Registration Accuracy of a 3‐Dimensional Transrectal Ultrasound–Guided Prostate Biopsy System

Objective. For a follow‐up prostate biopsy procedure, it is useful to know the previous biopsy locations in anatomic relation to the current transrectal ultrasound (TRUS) scan. The goal of this study was to validate the performance of a 3‐dimensional TRUS‐guided prostate biopsy system that can accurately relocate previous biopsy sites. Methods. To correlate biopsy locations from a sequence of visits by a patient, the prostate surface data obtained from a previous visit needs to be registered to the follow‐up visits. Two interpolation methods, thin‐plate spline (TPS) and elastic warping (EW), were tested for registration of the TRUS prostate image to follow‐up scans. We validated our biopsy system using a custom‐built phantom. Beads were embedded inside the phantom and were located in each TRUS scan. We recorded the locations of the beads before and after pressures were applied to the phantom and then compared them with computer‐estimated positions to measure performance. Results. In our experiments, before system processing, the mean target registration error (TRE) ± SD was 6.4 ± 4.5 mm (range, 3–13 mm). After registration and TPS interpolation, the TRE was 5.0 ± 1.03 mm (range, 2–8 mm). After registration and EW interpolation, the TRE was 2.7 ± 0.99 mm (range, 1–4 mm). Elastic warping was significantly better than the TPS in most cases (P < .0011). For clinical applications, EW can be implemented on a graphics processing unit with an execution time of less than 2.5 seconds. Conclusions. Elastic warping interpolation yields more accurate results than the TPS for registration of TRUS prostate images. Experimental results indicate potential for clinical application of this method.
Molecular Communication Among Biological Nanomachines: A Layered Architecture and Research Issues

Molecular communication is an emerging communication paradigm for biological nanomachines. It allows biological nanomachines to communicate through exchanging molecules in an aqueous environment and to perform collaborative tasks through integrating functionalities of individual biological nanomachines. This paper develops the layered architecture of molecular communication and describes research issues that molecular communication faces at each layer of the architecture. Specifically, this paper applies a layered architecture approach, traditionally used in communication networks, to molecular communication, decomposes complex molecular communication functionality into a set of manageable layers, identifies basic functionalities of each layer, and develops a descriptive model consisting of key components of the layer for each layer. This paper also discusses open research issues that need to be addressed at each layer. In addition, this paper provides an example design of targeted drug delivery, a nanomedical application, to illustrate how the layered architecture helps design an application of molecular communication. The primary contribution of this paper is to provide an in-depth architectural view of molecular communication. Establishing a layered architecture of molecular communication helps organize various research issues and design concerns into layers that are relatively independent of each other, and thus accelerates research in each layer and facilitates the design and development of applications of molecular communication.
Personality disorder, personality traits, impulsive violence, and completed suicide in adolescents.

OBJECTIVE This study was designed to assess the association between personality disorders, personality traits, impulsive violence, and suicide. METHOD Personality disorders and traits in 43 adolescent suicide victims and 43 community controls were assessed from the parents, using semistructured interviews and self-report forms. RESULTS Probable or definite personality disorders were more common in suicide victims than in controls, particularly Cluster B (impulsive-dramatic) and C type (avoidant-dependent) disorders. Suicide victims also showed greater scores on lifetime aggression, even after controlling for differences in psychopathology between suicides and controls. CONCLUSIONS Personality disorders and the tendency to engage in impulsive violence are critical risk factors for completed suicide.
Avian Clock gene polymorphism: evidence for a latitudinal cline in allele frequencies

In comparison with most animal behaviours, circadian rhythms have a well‐characterized molecular genetic basis. Detailed studies of circadian clock genes in ‘model’ organisms provide a foundation for interpreting the functional and evolutionary significance of polymorphic circadian clock genes found within free‐living animal populations. Here, we describe allelic variation in a region of the avian Clock orthologue which encodes a functionally significant polyglutamine repeat (ClkpolyQcds), within free‐living populations of two passerine birds, the migratory bluethroat (Luscinia svecica) and the predominantly nonmigratory blue tit (Cyanistes caeruleus). Multiple ClkpolyQcds alleles were found within populations of both species (bluethroat: 12 populations, 7 alleles; blue tit: 14 populations, 9 alleles). Some populations of both species were differentiated at the ClkpolyQcds locus as measured by FST and RST values. Among the blue tit, but not bluethroat populations, we found evidence of latitudinal clines in (i) mean ClkpolyQcds repeat length, and (ii) the proportions of three ClkpolyQcds genotype groupings. Parallel analyses of microsatellite allele frequencies, which are considered to reflect selectively neutral processes, indicate that interpopulation allele frequency variation at the ClkpolyQcds and microsatellite loci does not reflect the same underlying demographic processes. The possibility that the observed interpopulation ClkpolyQcds allele frequency variation is, at least in part, maintained by selection for microevolutionary adaptation to photoperiodic parameters correlated with latitude warrants further study.
Mesial temporal lobe and memory function in autism spectrum disorder: An exploration of volumetric findings

Studies have shown that individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) tend to perform significantly below typical developing individuals on standardized measures of memory, even when not significantly different on measures of IQ. The current study sought to examine within ASD whether anatomical correlates of memory performance differed between those with average-to-above-average IQ (AIQ group) and those with low-average to borderline ability (LIQ group) as well as in relations to typically developing comparisons (TDC). Using automated volumetric analyses, we examined regional volume of classic memory areas including the hippocampus, parahippocampal gyrus, entorhinal cortex, and amygdala in an all-male sample AIQ (n = 38) and LIQ (n = 18) individuals with ASD along with 30 typically developing comparisons (TDC). Memory performance was assessed using the Test of Memory and Learning (TOMAL) compared among the groups and then correlated with regional brain volumes. Analyses revealed group differences on almost all facets of memory and learning as assessed by the various subtests of the TOMAL. The three groups did not differ on any region of interest (ROI) memory-related brain volumes. However, significant size–memory function interactions were observed. Negative correlations were found between the volume of the amygdala and composite, verbal, and delayed memory indices for the LIQ ASD group, indicating larger volume related to poorer performance. Implications for general memory functioning and dysfunctional neural connectivity in ASD are discussed.