Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Effect of nutritional status on the ovarian follicular population, yield and quality of oocytes in the Ngaoundere Gudali zebu (Bos indicus)

Aim: The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of nutritional status of the Gudali cows slaughtered at the Ngaoundere abattoir on follicular population, quality, and oocytes yield. Materials and Methods: Blood and ovaries were collected from 81 cows aged 6.35±0.24 years (3-12 years old), with a body condition score (BCS) of 2.93±0.09 (1-5). In each ovary, the follicle were counted and classified as small (<3 mm), medium (3-8 mm) and large (>8 mm) using an electronic caliper. Oocytes were collected by slicing technique and classified according to the homogeneity of the cytoplasm and layers of granulosa into four groups: I, II, III, and IV. The nutritional status of the animals was determined by quantification of serum glucose, total cholesterol, total protein, albumin, globulins, urea, and phosphorus level. Results: Of the total 162 ovaries harvested, 2916 follicles were counted on the ovarian surface with an average population of 36.00±2.17 follicles/cow. According to a size distribution, 16.67±1.54 (46.3%), 18.83±1.27 (52.3%), and 0.51±0.07 (1.4%), respectively for small (<3 mm), medium (3-8 mm), and large (>8 mm) were recorded. About 1,929 oocytes were obtained, with an average recovered of 23.81±1.53 oocytes/cow. Depending on the quality, 7.79±0.55 (32.7%), 6.04±0.41 (25.3%), 4.89±0.44 (20.6%), and 5.10±0.54 (21.4%) oocytes qualities I, II, III, and IV were obtained respectively; with an average cultivable oocyte recovered of 13.83±0.89 (58%). Cows with BCS > 3 and a high albumin and phosphorus level showed a highest number of follicles and oocytes able for in vitro maturation. Conclusion: These results indicated that nutrition remains an important factor for the in vitro production of the good embryo and the BCS is a useful tool for the selection of females’ oocytes donors.
Food‐grade gene expression in lactic acid bacteria

In the 1990s, significant efforts were invested in the research and development of food‐grade expression systems in lactic acid bacteria (LAB). At this time, Lactococcus lactis in particular was demonstrated to be an ideal cell factory for the food‐grade production of recombinant proteins. Steady progress has since been made in research on LAB, including Lactococcus, Lactobacillus and Streptococcus, in the areas of recombinant enzyme production, industrial food fermentation, and gene and metabolic pathway regulation. Over the past decade, this work has also led to new approaches on chromosomal integration vectors and host/vector systems. These newly constructed food‐grade gene expression systems were designed with specific attention to self‐cloning strategies, food‐grade selection markers, plasmid replication and chromosomal gene replacements. In this review, we discuss some well‐characterized chromosomal integration and food‐grade host/vector systems used in LAB, with a special focus on sustainability, stability and overall safety, and give some attractive examples of protein expression that are based on these systems.
Echo‐planar MR imaging of human brain oxygenation changes

Echo‐planar magnetic resonance (MR) imaging was used to observe signal intensity changes in the human brain during hypoxia. Increasing arterial blood levels of deoxyhemoglobin (0%–42%) during prolonged apnea were monitored with a pulse oximeter and correlated with gray matter and white matter signal attenuation of 13% and 20%, respectively. The results suggest the possibility of using deoxyhemoglobin boluses as a physiologic, intravascular susceptibility contrast agent for assessment of local cerebral oxygen utilization.
Potential Impacts of Invasive House Crows ( Corvus Splendens ) Bird Species in Ismailia Governorate , Egypt : Ecology , Control and Risk Management

House crows (Corvus splendens) have become well-established in Ismailia Governorate, Egypt, where they pose several and serious impacts on native biodiversity, ecosystems and humans health. However, there is a lack of literature on the status and effects of invasive birds in Egypt. Over the past 10 years in Ismailia, House crow have increased at a rate approaching (60000 birds) 15% per annum; if this were allowed to continue, the population now 10909 birds and will exceed more by 2014, probably accompanied by an increase in geographical distribution in all Suez canal regions and an exacerbation of the problems caused. Population control is recommended, involving improvements in urban hygiene and the capture of adult crows using stupefying baits. Suitable baits and stupefacient doses were identified and these should be used annually, just before the breeding season. Control should be accompanied by studies of relevant aspects of the biology of house crows in Ismailia Governorate. 
Aligning Projection Images from Binary Volumes

In tomography, slight differences between the geometry of the scanner hardware and the geometric model used in the reconstruction lead to alignment artifacts. To exploit high-resolution detectors used in many applications of tomography, alignment of the projection data is essential. Markerless alignment algorithms are the preferred choice over alignment with markers, in case a fully automatic tomography pipeline is required. Moreover, marker based alignment is often not feasible or even possible. At the same time, markerless alignment methods often fail in scenarios where only a small number of projections are available. In this case, the angular separation between projection images is large and therefore the correlation between them is low. This is a property that most markerless algorithms rely on. The intermediate reconstruction problem of alignment by projection matching is highly underdetermined in the limited data case. Therefore, we propose a projection matching method that incorporates prior knowledge of the ground truth. We focus on reconstructing binary volumes. A discrete tomography algorithm is employed to generate intermediate reconstructions. This type of reconstruction algorithm does not rely heavily on correlated projection images. Our numerical results suggest that alignment using discrete tomography projection matching produces much better results in the limited angle case, when compared to a projection matching method that employs an algebraic reconstruction method.
Identification of Protein-Protein Interactions by Detecting Correlated Mutation at the Interface

Protein-protein interactions play key roles in a multitude of biological processes, such as de novo drug design, immune response, and enzymatic activity. It is of great interest to understand how proteins in a complex interact with each other. Here, we present a novel method for identifying protein-protein interactions, based on typical co-evolutionary information. Correlated mutation analysis can be used to predict interface residues. In this paper, we propose a non-redundant database to detect correlated mutation at the interface. First, we construct structure alignments for one input protein, based on all aligned proteins in the database. Evolutionary distance matrices, one for each input protein, can be calculated through geometric similarity and evolutionary information. Then, we use evolutionary distance matrices to estimate correlation coefficient between each pair of fragments from two input proteins. Finally, we extract interacting residues with high values of correlation coefficient, which can be grouped as interacting patches. Experiments illustrate that our method achieves better results than some existing co-evolution-based methods. Applied to SK/RR interaction between sensor kinase and response regulator proteins, our method has accuracy and coverage values of 53% and 45%, which improves upon accuracy and coverage values of 50% and 30% for DCA method. We evaluate interface prediction on four protein families, and our method has overall accuracy and coverage values of 34% and 30%, which improves upon overall accuracy and coverage values of 27% and 21% for PIFPAM. Our method has overall accuracy and coverage values of 59% and 63% on Benchmark v4.0, and 50% and 49% on CAPRI targets. Comparing to existing methods, our method improves overall accuracy value by at least 2%.
The ‘right time’ – negotiating the timing of interviews with vulnerable young people

Participant retention is a key factor in determining the success of longitudinal research. Challenges in re-locating and retaining participants over the long term are major issues for researchers working with young people who face adversity and experience frequent changes in circumstances. This article reports on a study of vulnerable young people and their transition into adulthood. Rather than the more conventional schedule-based approach to locating and re-interviewing young people, a relational process, the ‘right time’ framework, was used to facilitate young people's involvement in the study. Embedded in the ‘right time’ framework is recognition of the diverse and fluctuating circumstances that shape young people's availability for interviews. Several case examples are considered which amplify the way that the ‘right time’ framework allowed the research to navigate around these circumstances. The case examples highlight the value young people attached to being involved in the research, the influence on the ‘right time’ of wider relational tensions for young people and the need to negotiate researcher status as a different sort of adult. The ‘right time’ framework contributed to a high retention rate in the study generating a more representative sample and enhancing the subsequent data analysis by providing valuable insights into the lives of these vulnerable young people.
Retention of local conformational compactness in unfolding of barnase; Contribution of end-to-end interactions within quasi-modules

To understand how protein reduces the conformational space to be searched for the native structure, it is crucial to characterize ensembles of conformations on the way of folding processes, in particular ensembles of relatively long-range structures connecting between an extensively unfolded state and a state with a native-like overall chain topology. To analyze such intermediate conformations, we performed multiple unfolding molecular dynamics simulations of barnase at 498K. Some short-range structures such as part of helix and turn were well sustained while most of the secondary structures and the hydrophobic cores were eventually lost, which is consistent with the results by other experimental and computational studies. The most important novel findings were persistence of long-range relatively compact substructures, which was captured by exploiting the concept of module. Module is originally introduced to describe the hierarchical structure of a globular protein in the native state. Modules are conceptually such relatively compact substructures that are resulted from partitioning the native structure of a globular protein completely into several contiguous segments with the least extended conformations. We applied this concept of module to detect a possible hierarchical structure of each snapshot structure in unfolding processes as well. Along with this conceptual extension, such detected relatively compact substructures are named quasi-modules. We found almost perfect persistence of quasi-module boundaries that are positioned close to the native module boundaries throughout the unfolding trajectories. Relatively compact conformations of the quasi-modules seemed to be retained mainly by hydrophobic interactions formed between residues located at both terminal regions within each module. From these results, we propose a hypothesis that hierarchical folding with the early formation of quasi-modules effectively reduces search space for the native structure.
Discovering Anomalies and Root Causes in Applications via Relevant Fields Analysis

In this paper, we present a powerful end-to-end data mining system that collects application related data and provides insightful relevant fields analysis in addition to search and filtering. We present details on field extraction, indexing, relevant field processing and dynamic baseline derivation. We also propose to demonstrate the effectiveness of various scoring algorithms. Two real-world use cases show relevant fields analysis is effective to detect application anomalies and discover root causes of application incidents.
CACH-FTL: A Cache-Aware Configurable Hybrid Flash Translation Layer

Many hybrid Flash Translation Layer (FTL) schemes have been proposed to leverage the erase-before-write and limited lifetime constraints of flash memories. Those schemes try to approach page mapping performance and flexibility while seeking block mapping memory usage. Furthermore, flash-specific cache systems were designed (1) to maximize lifetime by absorbing some erase operations, and (2) to reveal sequentiality from random write operations. Indeed, random writes represent the Achilles' heel of flash memories. Both cache systems and FTL schemes were designed independently from each other. This paper presents a scalable (in terms of mapping table size) and flexible (in terms of I/O workload support) Cache-Aware Configurable Hybrid (CACH) FTL. CACH-FTL uses a common feature of flash-specific cache systems that is flushing groups of pages from the same block. CACH-FTL partitions the flash memory space into two regions: (1) a data Block Mapped Region (BMR) collecting large groups of pages from the above cache (sequential I/Os), and (2) a small Page Mapped over-provisioning Region (PMR) which purpose is to collect/buffer small groups of pages coming from the cache (random I/Os) before moving them to BMR. CACH-FTL is flexible as it offers many configuration possibilities and can be adapted according to the I/O workload. CACH-FTL approaches the ideal page mapping FTL performance as it gives less than 15% performance difference in most cases.
The Appraisal of Life Events (ALE) scale: Reliability and validity.

Objectives. Monroe & Kelley (1995) have called for the urgent development of theoretically and psychometrically robust measures of primary appraisal. This paper highlights problems with existing measures and provides detail on the psychometric development of the Appraisal of Life Events (ALE) scale. Design. Five studies are reported. The first two studies examine the factor structure of the ALE scale and confounding with social desirability (Ns=260 and 344). Studies 3 and 4 examine the test-retest reliability of the ALE scale (Ns=17 and 77). Finally, Study 5 examines the relationship between the ALE scale and the other parameters of the stress process (personality, coping and health) across two separate stressful transactions (N=268). Methods. A questionnaire methodology was used. The data were analysed using a mixture of exploratory factor analysis, confirmatory factor analysis and bivariate correlations. Results. The ALE scale demonstrated: (a) three stable factors (threat, challenge and loss), (b) no confounding with social desirability, (c) excellent internal and test-retest reliabilities, and (d) theoretically appropriate associations with various stressors, coping behaviours, personality and health measures. Conclusions. This paper has answered Monroe & Kelley's (1995) call for the urgent development of theoretically and psychometrically robust measures of primary appraisal.
Mechanism of Double-Strand DNA Cleavage Effected by Iron-Bleomycin

We have observed that in the absence of hydrogen peroxide the Fe(III)-bleomycin (BLM) complex exhibits high DNA cleavage efficiency, converting supercoiled Form I DNA (pBR322 or Φxl74) to Form II (nicked, relaxed circular); the present study may give an important clue to elucidate the fact that iron-bleomycin mediated double-strand DNA cleavage requires at least one molecule of oxygen (O2) over the amount required to form “activated bleomycin”.
Effects of Expected Communication Target Expertise and Timing of Set on Trait Use in Person Description

The effects of expecting to convey one's impression of a person to another on the tendency to use traits in person description were examined when the expected recipient of the impression was an expert in peon assessment, a peer, or a grade school child. The communication expectancy set was induced either before or after exposure to impression formation information. Results showed lessened use of traits when subjects expected to report to the expert. Tuning-set timing effects included increased reporting of specific behaviors in the preimpression condition and reduced trait use with the exert in the postimpression condition, but only on a recognition measure. Results have implications for factors affecting the general trait categorization process and for Kruglanski's lay epistemic model of motivational factor in construct formation.
Protective role of endogenous carbon monoxide in hepatic microcirculatory dysfunction after hemorrhagic shock in rats.

Maintenance of hepatic microcirculatory flow after ischemia of the liver is essential to prevent hepatic dysfunction. Thus, we determined the differential role of carbon monoxide (CO) and nitric oxide (NO) in the intrinsic control of sinusoidal perfusion, mitochondrial redox state, and bile production in the isolated perfused rat liver after hemorrhagic shock. Administration of tin protoporphyrin-IX (50 microM), a specific inhibitor of the CO generating enzyme heme oxygenase, caused a decrease in sinusoidal flow that was more pronounced after shock compared with sham shock, as determined by in situ epifluorescence microscopy. This was associated with a shift in hepatocellular redox potential to a more reduced state (increased fluorescence intensity of reduced pyridine nucleotides in hepatocytes, decreased acetoacetate/beta-hydroxybutyrate ratio in the perfusate) and a profound reduction in bile flow. In sharp contrast, the preferential inhibitor of the inducible isoform of NO synthase S-methylisothiourea sulfate (100 microM) did not affect sinusoidal flow, hepatic redox state, or function. This indicates that 1. ) endogenously generated CO preserves sinusoidal perfusion after hemorrhagic shock, 2. ) protection of the hepatic microcirculation by CO may serve to limit shock-induced liver dysfunction, and 3. ) in contrast to CO, inducible NO synthase-derived NO is of only minor importance for the intrinsic control of hepatic perfusion and function under these conditions.
A process for derivation and quantification of safety requirements for components of complex systems

This report describes a formal approach to verification and validation of safety requirements for embedded software, by application to a simple control-logic case study. The logic is formally specified in Z. System safety properties are formalised by defining The paper develops a theoretical basis for assigning safety requirements for components of complex systems, including software, in a form that integrates well with establi shed system-safety engineering processes. Safety requirements here include integrity targets, in the form of maximum acceptable failure rates. We propose a process for flowing safety requirements down to components, by integrating system hazard analysis techniques in a manner that enables functional and quantitative analysis. The originality of the process lies not so much in the individual steps as in the integration of their results within a single coherent framework. In outline, the steps of the proposed process are: 1. Definition of an appropriate system conceptual design model. 2. Identification and classification of “system hazards” : roughly, states of the system that can contribute to accidents and mishaps. Functional Failure Analysis is the suggested technique. 3. Identification of protective measures and system safety functions, by consideration of possible accident sequences arising from unsafe actions and possible component failures. Event Tree Analysis is the suggested technique. 4. Construction of a detailed cause-and-effect model, to record how faults propagate through the system, and to identify possible common causes. Fault Tree Analysis is the suggested technique. 5. Allocation of functional and quantitative safety requirements, using the models from previous steps to justify quantitative targets. A simple running example is used to illustrate the concepts, terminology and features of the process. The terminology of IEC 61508 is used where possible.
A criatividade verbal e sua importância nos ambientes educacionais

This article comments the creativity concepts along the history and its importance in educational environments, according to behavior and cognitive psychology. It presents some researches and experiences about verbal creativity, creativity skills and learning strategies. Based on the methodology and results, the creative educational programs organization will be implemented. It shows how important is to stimulate the creativity in different environments and focus on the teacher’s important role.
Coinjection with TLR2 Agonist Pam3CSK4 Reduces the Pathology of Leishmanization in Mice

Cutaneous leishmaniasis caused by Leishmania major is an emergent, uncontrolled public health problem and there is no vaccine. A promising prophylactic approach has been immunotherapy with Toll-like receptor (TLR) agonists to enhance parasite-specific immune responses. We have previously reported that vaccination of C57BL/6 mice with live L. major plus the TLR9 agonist CpG DNA prevents lesion development and confers immunity to reinfection. Our current study aims to investigate whether other TLR agonists can be used in leishmanization without induction of lesion formation. We found that live L. major plus the TLR2 agonist Pam3CSK4 reduced the pathology in both genetically resistant (C57BL/6) and susceptible (BALB/c) mouse strains. The addition of Pam3CSK4 activated dermal dendritic cells and macrophages to produce greater amounts of proinflammatory cytokines in both mouse strains. Both Th1 and Th17 responses were enhanced by leishmanization with L. major plus Pam3CSK4 in C57BL/6 mice; however, Th17 cells were unchanged in BALB/c mice. The production of IL-17 from neutrophils was enhanced in both strains infected with L. major plus Pam3CSK4. However, the sustained influx of neutrophils in sites of infection was only observed in BALB/c mice. Our data demonstrate that the mechanism behind leishmanization with TLR agonists may be very different depending upon the immunological background of the host. This needs to be taken into account for the rational development of successful vaccines against the disease.
Predictive Validity of Two Prognostic Indices for Generalized Anxiety Disorder

This paper reports an investigation of the predictive power, at posttreatment and long-term follow-up, of two prognostic indices reflecting the complexity and severity of presenting problems and the quality of the therapeutic alliance in early sessions of therapy. Of entrants to two clinical trials of cognitive behavior therapy for generalized anxiety disorder, 51% (106 of 207) were assessed 2–10 years following original treatment. Outcome measures comprised Clinical Global Severity, rated by an independent assessor, and the trait version of the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory. The two prognostic indices were broadly equivalent in predictive power at posttreatment (together explaining about 38% of the variance in outcome) but at long-term follow-up only the prognostic index reflecting complexity and severity of presenting problems was significantly associated with outcome. The potential value of refined and improved versions of these prognostic indices is discussed from a clinical and theoretical perspective.