Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Advances in Proteomic Techniques for Cytokine Analysis: Focus on Melanoma Research

Melanoma is a skin cancer with permanently increasing incidence and resistance to therapies in advanced stages. Reports of spontaneous regression and tumour infiltration with T-lymphocytes makes melanoma candidate for immunotherapies. Cytokines are key factors regulating immune response and intercellular communication in tumour microenvironment. Cytokines may be used in therapy of melanoma to modulate immune response. Cytokines also possess diagnostic and prognostic potential and cytokine production may reflect effects of immunotherapies. The purpose of this review is to give an overview of recent advances in proteomic techniques for the detection and quantification of cytokines in melanoma research. Approaches covered span from mass spectrometry to immunoassays for single molecule detection (ELISA, western blot), multiplex assays (chemiluminescent, bead-based (Luminex) and planar antibody arrays), ultrasensitive techniques (Singulex, Simoa, immuno-PCR, proximity ligation/extension assay, immunomagnetic reduction assay), to analyses of single cells producing cytokines (ELISpot, flow cytometry, mass cytometry and emerging techniques for single cell secretomics). Although this review is focused mainly on cancer and particularly melanoma, the discussed techniques are in general applicable to broad research field of biology and medicine, including stem cells, development, aging, immunology and intercellular communication.
Low-high and high-low biphasic injection forms in computed tomography examinations of the upper abdomen

Purpose: To analyze the influence of different biphasic and monophasic injection rate protocols in abdominal computed tomography (CT). Material and Methods: A randomized, consecutive, parallel group study was designed and conducted in 60 patients studied with the same CT helical protocol. Patients were randomly distributed into three groups: (A) monophasic (120 ml at 2.5 ml/s); (B) low-high biphasic (120 ml, first 60 ml at a rate of 2 ml/s, the other 60 ml at 2.5 ml/s); and (C) high-low biphasic (120 ml, first 60 ml at a rate of 2.5 ml/s, the other 60 ml at 2 ml/s). All patients were injected with 300 mg I/ml non-ionic contrast media at a fixed delay time of 55 s. Contrast enhancement efficacy was evaluated by attenuation coefficient measurements. Results: Although non-significant, monophasic protocol enhancements were higher than biphasic protocol enhancements in all measurements except aortic bifurcation (p = 0.003). At this level, biphasic protocols obtained an increased mean enhancement from 7.6% to 2.5% compared to monophasic protocols. Conclusion: Monophasic contrast agent injection in helical CT of the upper abdomen produces a higher enhancement of parenchymal and venous structures. No significant difference was observed between low-high and high-low biphasic protocols.
Signaling the Unfolded Protein Response from the Endoplasmic Reticulum*

Eukaryotic cells have a membranous labyrinth network called the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) that extends through the cytoplasm of the cell and is contiguous with the nuclear envelope. Proteins must be correctly folded and assembled in the ER prior to transit to intracellular organelles and the cell surface. As a processing plant for protein folding and posttranslational modification, the ER is exquisitely sensitive to alterations in homeostasis. A number of cellular stress conditions, such as perturbation in calcium homeostasis or redox status, elevated secretory protein synthesis, expression of misfolded proteins, sugar/glucose deprivation, altered glycosylation, and overloading of cholesterol can interfere with oxidative protein folding and subsequently lead to accumulation of unfolded or misfolded proteins in the ER lumen, which constitutes a fundamental threat to the cells. The ER has evolved highly specific signaling pathways to alter transcriptional and translational programs to cope with the accumulation of unfolded or misfolded proteins in the ER lumen. This adaptive response, which couples the ER protein folding load with the ER protein folding capacity, is termed the unfolded protein response (UPR) (1–4). Over the past 10 years, significant progress has been made in understanding the mechanisms and roles of UPR signaling. Here we discuss the basic components of the UPR pathways, the physiological roles of the UPR signaling, and the future direction of the field.
Progress in Antenna Coupled Kinetic Inductance Detectors

This paper describes the combined Dutch efforts toward the development of large wideband focal plane array receivers based on kinetic inductance detectors (KIDs). Taking into account strict electromagnetic and detector sensitivity requirements for future ground and space based observatories, this work has led to the identification of well-suited coupling strategies based on the use of lens antenna and the demonstration of their feasibility. Moreover, some specific antenna design difficulties that characterize KIDs-based designs have been investigated, and innovative feeds for the focal plane array which could allow the receivers to be sensitive over a decade of Bandwidth have been proposed.
Comparative thermodynamic and spectroscopic properties of water interaction with human stratum corneum

Background/purpose: The water content of skin has a significant impact on skin properties; sufficient hydration is necessary to keep the skin supple, flexible, and smooth. To understand more completely the water retention properties of the human skin barrier, physical macroscopic properties must be related to the structural organization of the stratum corneum (SC). Water, lipids, and natural moisturizing factor (NMF) influence the molecular structures that affect the properties of SC, including water sorption and binding enthalpy. In the research reported here, isothermal microcalorimetry was used to study the interaction of water vapor with isolated human SC in intact, delipidized, and water‐washed delipidized forms to identify the influences of the principal components of SC on water sorption. The calorimetric data are interpreted in conjunction with spectroscopic results to identify the conformational changes in keratins induced by lipid and NMF removal and to assess the influence of these changes on water binding in SC.
Cloning and Characterization of Human MMP-23, a New Matrix Metalloproteinase Predominantly Expressed in Reproductive Tissues and Lacking Conserved Domains in Other Family Members*

A cDNA encoding a new human matrix metalloproteinase (MMP), tentatively called MMP-23, has been cloned from an ovary cDNA library. This protein exhibits sequence similarity with MMPs, but displays a different domain structure. Thus, MMP-23 lacks a recognizable signal sequence and has a short prodomain, although it contains a single cysteine residue that can be part of the cysteine-switch mechanism operating for maintaining enzyme latency. The C-terminal domain is considerably shortened and shows no sequence similarity to hemopexin, whereas all human MMPs, with the exception of matrilysin, contain four hemopexin-like repeats. Furthermore, MMP-23 is devoid of structural features distinctive of the diverse MMP subclasses, including the specific residues located close to the zinc-binding site in collagenases, the transmembrane domain of membrane-type MMPs, or the fibronectin-like domain of gelatinases. Fluorescent in situ hybridization experiments showed that the human MMP-23 gene maps to 1p36, a location which differs from all MMP genes mapped to date. Recombinant MMP-23 produced inEscherichia coli exhibits low, but significant proteolytic activity against a synthetic substrate commonly used for assaying MMPs. Northern blot analysis demonstrated that MMP-23 is predominantly expressed in ovary, testis, and prostate, suggesting that this new MMP may play a specialized role in reproductive processes.
A Review of Psychosocial Outcomes for Patients Seeking Cosmetic Surgery

The authors reviewed the literature on psychological and psychosocial outcomes for individuals undergoing cosmetic surgery, to address whether elective cosmetic procedures improve psychological well-being and psychosocial functioning and whether there are identifiable predictors of an unsatisfactory psychological outcome. They conducted a search of appropriate computerized databases for studies that evaluated psychological and psychosocial status both before and after elective cosmetic surgery. They identified 37 relevant studies of varying cosmetic procedures that utilized disparate methodologies. Overall, patients appeared generally satisfied with the outcome of their procedures, although some exhibited transient and some exhibited longer-lasting psychological disturbance. Factors associated with poor psychosocial outcome included being young, being male, having unrealistic expectations of the procedure, previous unsatisfactory cosmetic surgery, minimal deformity, motivation based on relationship issues, and a history of depression, anxiety, or personality disorder. Body dysmorphic disorder was also recognized by some studies as a predictor of poor outcome, a finding reinforced by reference to the psychiatric literature. The authors conclude that although most people appear satisfied with the outcome of cosmetic surgical procedures, some are not, and attempts should be made to screen for such individuals in cosmetic surgery settings.
Does clinical supervision improve job satisfaction for qualified nurses in primary health care in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia?

Background: Clinical supervision has been widely used as a tool to improve nurses’ job satisfaction and competence through shared experiences and reflection. This study, which examined job satisfaction before and after a clinical supervision intervention in Primary Health Care (PHC) organisations in Saudi Arabia (SA), is the first of its kind in this particular context. Research Question: Does clinical supervision improve job satisfaction for qualified nurses in Primary Health Care in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia? Methodology: A mixed-methods approach was used to explore participants’ perceptions of job satisfaction before and after a clinical supervision intervention. The design and execution occurred within the ‘Plan, Do, Study, and Act’ (PDSA) quality improvement framework cycle. Methods: Quantitative data were collected using a quasi-experimental design, where a non-equivalent pre-test and post-test control group was used to determine whether clinical supervision could improve nurses’ job satisfaction in six selected PHC centres in Jeddah, SA. Subsequently, 91 nurses in the pre-test group and 78 nurses in the posttest group completed the Minnesota Satisfaction Questionnaire (MSQ). The external moderators provided supervision-training sessions, followed by six months of implementation after the pre-test, which was only provided for the intervention group, who become the supervisors and supervisees. Following the post-test process for both groups, semi-structured interviews were conducted with six participants from the intervention group only. Analysis and Results: Quantitative data was analysed via SPSS (version 22). The analysis of variance (ANOVA) and analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) statistical tests were utilised to equate and compare the two groups. Qualitative data were analysed using both NVivo software (version 11) and a manual process. Both methods’ findings were integrated to inform the study findings. Quantitative findings reported that the intervention group developed more positive job satisfaction than the non-intervention group. Qualitatively, a number of participants showed improved job satisfaction after six months of the clinical supervision intervention. Supported by both quantitative and qualitative data, the findings of this study indicate that, in this context, clinical supervision may boost job satisfaction among qualified PHC nurses as job satisfaction improved after a six-month intervention.
A Dominant Negative Fas-associated Death Domain Protein Mutant Inhibits Proliferation and Leads to Impaired Calcium Mobilization in Both T-cells and Fibroblasts*

Death domain-containing members of the tumor necrosis factor (TNF) receptor family (“death receptors”) can induce apoptosis upon stimulation by their natural ligands or by agonistic antibodies. Activated death receptors recruit death domain adapter proteins like Fas-associated death domain protein (FADD), and this ultimately leads to proteolytic activation of the caspase cascade and cell death. Recently, FADD has also been implicated in the regulation of proliferation; functional inhibition of FADD results in p53-dependent impairment of proliferation in activated T-cells. In this study we have further analyzed T-cells derived from transgenic mice expressing a dominant negative FADD mutant (FADD DN) under control of the lck promoter in vitro so as to identify the signaling pathways that become engaged upon T-cell receptor stimulation and that are regulated by death receptors. FADD DN expression inhibits T-cell proliferation, both at the G0→ S transition and in the G1 phase of continuously proliferating cells. We observe a decrease in the release of calcium from intracellular stores after T-cell receptor stimulation, whereas influx of extracellular calcium seems to be unaffected. FADD DN-expressing fibroblasts show a similarly inhibited cell growth and impaired calcium mobilization indicating that the modulation of proliferation and calcium response by death receptors is not cell type-specific.
A Comparative Analysis of Data-Driven Consolidation Policies for Energy-Efficient Clouds

Consolidation of virtual machines is one of the key strategies used to reduce the power consumption of Cloud data centers. For this reason it is extensively studied. Consolidation has the goal of allocating virtual machines on a few physical servers as possible, while satisfying the Service Level Agreement established with users. Nevertheless, the effectiveness of a consolidation strategy strongly depends on the forecast of virtual machine resource needs. To this aim, data-driven predictive models can be exploited to develop intelligent consolidation policies. This paper describes a comparative analysis of consolidation strategies of virtual machines in Cloud systems, driven by predictive data mining models. In particular, migrations are driven by the forecast of the future computational needs (CPU, RAM) of each virtual machine, in order to efficiently allocate those on the available servers. Experimental results, performed on data of a real Cloud data center, shows several insights in terms of energy saving and most efficient consolidation strategies.
An engineering approach for industrial SoA-based systems of systems

Current implemented manufacturing and continuous production process systems are strongly being influenced by the fusion of mechatronics, communication, control and information technologies. The miniaturization of control and automation devices with embedded intelligence is transforming the production systems into a very large infrastructure, where different systems interact in a structural and behavioral manner for pursuing common goals. The result is a very large complex system-of systems (SoS). The application of the service-oriented architecture (SoA) paradigm is appearing as a promising approach to develop and implement the control and management of those SoS. This paper describes an approach to support the engineering of service-oriented based Industrial System-of-Systems and presents the first results of application of the approach to a real heterogeneous system composed of a district-heating, transportation and an electrical power distribution system.
Early‐onset versus late‐onset nonanastomotic biliary strictures post liver transplantation: risk factors reflect different pathogenesis

Nonanastomotic biliary strictures (NAS) cause significant morbidity post liver transplantation. Timing of stricture development varies considerably, but the relationship between timing of stricture onset and aetiology has not been fully elucidated. Database analysis was performed on all adult patients undergoing liver transplantation between 1st January 1990 and 31st May 2008. Diagnosis of NAS required demonstration on at least two radiological studies. Early NAS were defined as developing <1 year post transplant (minimum 1‐year follow‐up) and late NAS developing >1 year post transplant (minimum 10‐year follow‐up). Ninety‐six of 397 patients developed NAS (24%); 54 were early‐onset NAS (56%) and 42 late‐onset NAS (44%). Primary sclerosing cholangitis (PSC) was the only risk factor for NAS overall (P = 0.001). However, when patients with PSC were excluded, older donor age was a significant risk for NAS (P = 0.003). Early‐onset NAS were associated with advanced donor age (P = 0.02), high MELD score (P = 0.001) and ABO‐identical grafts (P = 0.02), whereas late‐onset NAS were associated with PSC (P = 0.0008), bilio‐enteric anastomosis (P = 0.006) and tacrolimus (P = 0.0001). Advanced donor age is a significant risk for NAS in patients without PSC. Importantly, aetiology of NAS varies depending on time to stricture development, suggesting early‐onset and late‐onset NAS may have different pathogenesis.
Predictors of calcium retention in adolescent boys.

CONTEXT The relationship between calcium (Ca) intake and Ca retention in adolescent boys was recently reported. OBJECTIVE This study evaluated the influence of Ca intake, serum hormone levels, biomarkers of bone metabolism, habitual physical activity, habitual Ca intake, and physical fitness on Ca retention in the same sample. DESIGN This study was a randomized, cross-over design that consisted of two 3-wk metabolic balance periods. SETTING The study took place on a university campus as a summer camp. PATIENTS OR OTHER PARTICIPANTS A total of 31 American white boys (13-15 yr) participated in the study. INTERVENTIONS Each subject consumed a controlled diet with one of five high-low Ca intake pairs that ranged from 670-2003 mg/d, which was manipulated utilizing a fortified beverage. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES Ca retention was determined by Ca intake minus urinary and fecal Ca excretion during each balance period. RESULTS Ca intake explained 21.7% of the variability in Ca retention, and serum IGF-I concentration explained an additional 11.5%. Other serum hormone levels did not significantly add to the model. Biomarkers of bone metabolism, habitual physical activity, habitual Ca intake, and physical fitness were not significant predictors of Ca retention in adolescent boys. CONCLUSIONS IGF-I, a regulator of growth during puberty, is an important predictor of Ca retention in adolescent boys. However, dietary Ca intake is an even greater predictor of Ca retention during this period of growth.
A Novel Transmembrane Protein with Epidermal Growth Factor and Follistatin Domains Expressed in the Hypothalamo‐Hypophysial Axis of Xenopus laevis

Abstract: Through the use of a screening strategy designed to isolate novel cDNAs encoding proteins concerned with pituitary secretion in Xenopus laevis, we discovered clone X7365, which encodes a transmembrane protein with a signal peptide, two follistatin modules, a unique epidermal growth factor domain, and a short cytoplasmic region. RNA expression analyses indicated that the X7365 transcript is enriched in neuroendocrine tissues. Immunohistochemical studies demonstrated that, in addition to being expressed in the optic tectum and in astrocytes in the optic nerve, the X7365 protein is concentrated in a discrete population of hypothalamic magnocellular neurons. Axons projecting to the median eminence and the neurointermediate lobe of the pituitary were also immunopositive, suggesting that X7365 functions in the regulation of magnocellular neurosecretion.
Visual tracking by separability-maximum boosting

Abstract. Recently, visual tracking has been formulated as a classification problem whose task is to detect the object from the scene with a binary classifier. Boosting based online feature selection methods, which adopt the classifier to appearance changes by choosing the most discriminative features, have been demonstrated to be effective for visual tracking. A major problem of such online feature selection methods is that an inaccurate classifier may give imprecise tracking windows. Tracking error accumulates when the tracker trains the classifier with misaligned samples and finally leads to drifting. Separability-maximum boosting (SMBoost), an alternative form of AdaBoost which characterizes the separability between the object and the scene by their means and covariance matrices, is proposed. SMBoost only needs the means and covariance matrices during training and can be easily adopted to online learning problems by estimating the statistics incrementally. Experiment on UCI machine learning datasets shows that SMBoost is as accurate as offline AdaBoost, and significantly outperforms Oza’s online boosting. Accurate classifier stabilizes the tracker on challenging video sequences. Empirical results also demonstrate improvements in term of tracking precision and speed, comparing ours to those state-of-the-art ones.
Theory and Practice of On-the-fly and Ultra-fast VT Measurements for NBTI Degradation: Challenges and Opportunities

On-the-fly and ultra-fast VT are popular characterization techniques for analyzing NBTI degradation. We show that these techniques do not probe the intrinsic NBTI degradation directly and hence require suitable correction. The 'corrected' data allows us to explore the subtlety of relaxation dynamics by various measurements and suggest a theoretical basis for log-t relaxation consistent within R-D framework.
Genetic and molecular analyses of Escherichia coli K1 antigen genes

The plasmid pSR23, composed of a 34-kilobase E. coli chromosomal fragment inserted into the BamHI site of the pHC79 cosmid cloning vector, contains genes encoding biosynthesis of the K1 capsular polysaccharide. Deletions, subclones, and Tn5 insertion mutants were used to localize the K1 genes on pSR23. The only deletion derivative of pSR23 that retained the K1 phenotype lacked a 2.7-kilobase EcoRI fragment. Subclones containing HindIII and EcoRI fragments of pSR23 did not produce K1. Cells harboring pSR27, a subclone containing a 23-kilobase BamHI fragment, synthesized K1 that was not detectable extracellularly. Six acapsular Tn5 insertion mutants of three phenotypic classes were observed. Class I mutants synthesized K1 only when N-acetylneuraminic acid (NANA) was provided in the medium. Reduced amounts of K1 were detectable in cell extracts of class II mutants. Class III mutants did not produce detectable K1 in either extracts or when cells were provided exogenous NANA. All mutants had sialyltransferase activity. Analysis in the E. coli minicell system of proteins expressed by derivatives of pSR23 identified a minimum of 12 polypeptides, ranging in size from 18,000 to 80,000 daltons, involved in K1 biosynthesis. The 16-kilobase coding capacity required for the proteins was located in three gene clusters designated A, B, and C. We propose that the A cluster contains a NANA operon of two genes that code for proteins with apparent molecular weights of 45,000 and 50,000. The A region also includes a 2-kilobase segment involved in regulation of K1 synthesis. The B region encoding five protein species appears responsible for the translocation of the polymer from its site of synthesis on the cytoplasmic membrane to the cell surface. The C region encodes four protein species. Since the three gene clusters appear to be coordinately regulated. we propose that they constitute a kps regulon.