Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
An evaluation of the antiparasitic activities of a novel natural product and open-access Pathogen Box libraries

I LIST OF CONTENTS . III LIST OF FIGURES . VIII LIST OF TABLES . XVI ABBREVIATIONS . XVIII ACKNOWLEDEMENTS . XXI CHAPTER 1: General introduction . 1 1.1 The global impact of parasitic diseases . 1 1.2 Malaria . 3 1.2. 1 Background of the Disease . 3 1.2. 2 Life Cycle of Plasmodium falciparum . 6 1.2. 3.1 Asexual life cycle of Plasmodium falciparum . 7 a. Liver Stage/Pre-erythrocytic phase . 7 b. Erythrocyte stage . 8 c. Sexual Stage . 10 1.2. 3 Clinical manifestation and classification of malaria . 11 1.2. 3.1 Uncomplicated malaria . 13 1.2. 3.2 Severe falciparum malaria . 14 1.2. 4 Strategies for malaria control . 17 a. Vector control . 17 b. Chemoprophylaxis and chemoprevention . 18 c. Vaccination . 19 1.2. 5 Overview of Antimalarial Drugs . 20 1.2. 5.1 Chloroquine (CQ) . 21 1.2. 5.2 Quinine (QN) . 22 1.2. 5.3. Mefloquine (MQ) . 22 1.2. 5.4. Artemisinin . 24 1.3 Human African Trypanosomiasis (Sleeping Sickness) . 26 1.3.1 Background of the Disease . 26 1.3.2 The life cycle of Trypanosoma brucei . 28 1.3. 3 The clinical features of HAT . 30 1.3. 4 Pharmacological treatment of HAT . 30 1.4 Leishmaniasis . 34 1.4. 1 Background of the Disease . 34 1.4. 2 Clinical forms of Leishmaniasis . 35
The effect of adopter’s gender on shelter dog selection preferences

A retrospective analysis of dog adoption records was performed with the aim to determine the differences in preferences of male and female adopters in the Czech Republic. From January 1, 2010 to December 31, 2016, 955 dogs were adopted out of a selected shelter. Significantly (P = 0.03) more dogs were adopted by women than by men (52.6% vs 47.4%, respectively). No preference (P = 0.06) for adopting a dog of the same or opposite sex as the adopter’s was found. Women adopted more (P = 0.02) small dogs and men more (P = 0.004) large dogs, while the adoption rate of medium dogs did not differ (P = 0.16) between men and women. Significantly more (P = 0.05) older dogs were adopted by women than by men. With the exception of brown dogs (adopted more often by women) and black dogs with dark markings (adopted more often by men), dogs with different coat colors were adopted equally by men and women. No difference was found between the ratio of crossbred and purebred dogs adopted by men and women. This study fills gaps in scientific knowledge on adopters’ preferences. Women are more willing to adopt dogs including those that may require special care (older dogs). However, women are less likely to adopt large dogs. The lower number of male adopters may be the reason why large dogs are often reported to be difficult to rehome. To remedy this, shelter operators should explore ways how to address men if they have large dogs available for adoption.
Orientation Perception of Occluded Objects Is Based on Perceptually Completed Objects

The natural world is full of objects, and clearly, the human visual system is good at determining their location as well as their orientation. However, this process is not as simple as it seems. This is especially true when parts of objects are occluded, which results in objects being only partly represented at the retinal level. It seems even more complicated when objects are constructed at only a higher level of visual information processing, as is the case for subjective contour objects, such as Kanizsa figures (e.g., Gold, Murray, Bennett, & Sekuler, 2000). In the study reported here, we wanted to find out whether the visual system uses the same strategy to determine the orientation of both “real” objects and “subjective” objects. In other words, is an object’s perceived orientation determined by information available at the retinal level or at a higher level of information processing: the object’s representation? How can this be measured?
Evolved resistance to GAPDH inhibition results in loss of the Warburg Effect but retains a different state of glycolysis

Aerobic glycolysis or the Warburg Effect (WE) is characterized by increased glucose uptake and incomplete oxidation to lactate. Although ubiquitous, the biological role of the WE remains controversial and whether glucose metabolism is functionally different during fully oxidative glycolysis or during the WE is unknown. To investigate this question, we evolved resistance to koningic acid (KA), a natural product shown to be a specific inhibitor of glyceraldehyde-3-phosphate dehydrogenase (GAPDH), a rate-controlling glycolytic enzyme during the WE. We find that KA-resistant cells lose the WE but conduct glycolysis and surprisingly remain dependent on glucose and central carbon metabolism. Consequentially this altered state of glycolysis leads to differential metabolic activity and requirements including emergent activities in and dependencies on fatty acid metabolism. Together, these findings reveal that, contrary to some recent reports, aerobic glycolysis is a functionally distinct entity from conventional glucose metabolism and leads to distinct metabolic requirements and biological functions.
Diagnosis of Pulmonary Tuberculosis: Recent Advances and Diagnostic Algorithms

Pulmonary tuberculosis (TB) persists as a great public health problem in Korea. Increases in the overall age of the population and the rise of drug-resistant TB have reinforced the need for rapid diagnostic improvements and new modalities to detect TB and drug-resistant TB, as well as to improve TB control. Standard guidelines and recent advances for diagnosing pulmonary TB are summarized in this article. An early and accurate diagnosis of pulmonary TB should be established using chest X-ray, sputum microscopy, culture in both liquid and solid media, and nucleic acid amplification. Chest computed tomography, histopathological examination of biopsy samples, and new molecular diagnostic tests can be used for earlier and improved diagnoses, especially in patients with smear-negative pulmonary TB or clinically-diagnosed TB and drug-resistant TB.
Barriers to Genetic Exchange between Bacterial Species: Streptococcus pneumoniae Transformation

ABSTRACT Interspecies genetic exchange is an important evolutionary mechanism in bacteria. It allows rapid acquisition of novel functions by transmission of adaptive genes between related species. However, the frequency of homologous recombination between bacterial species decreases sharply with the extent of DNA sequence divergence between the donor and the recipient. In Bacillus andEscherichia, this sexual isolation has been shown to be an exponential function of sequence divergence. Here we demonstrate that sexual isolation in transformation between Streptococcus pneumoniae recipient strains and donor DNA from related strains and species follows the described exponential relationship. We show that the Hex mismatch repair system poses a significant barrier to recombination over the entire range of sequence divergence (0.6 to 27%) investigated. Although mismatch repair becomes partially saturated, it is responsible for 34% of the observed sexual isolation. This is greater than the role of mismatch repair inBacillus but less than that in Escherichia. The remaining non-Hex-mediated barrier to recombination can be provided by a variety of mechanisms. We discuss the possible additional mechanisms of sexual isolation, in view of earlier findings fromBacillus, Escherichia, andStreptococcus.
Physical activation and characterization of tannin-based foams enforced with boric acid and zinc chloride

In this study, tannin-furanic-based foams enforced with H 3 BO 3 and ZnCl 2 are investigated, as well as their properties such as mechanical strength, specific surface area, and pore size distribution. From an industrial point of view, the aforementioned properties of these foams play a key role when used as catalyst, adsorbent, or gas storing materials. Therefore, this study aims to prove that such enforced tannin-furanic foams are promising materials for these types of applications. According to the results, materials that are up to five times stronger can be achieved by carbonizing the foams in comparison to maturing them. With physical activation, it was possible to obtain a specific surface area as high as 845 m 2 /g with a pore volume of up to 0.35 cm 3 /g. Chemical activation, using ZnCl 2 as the activating agent, produced a specific surface area and pore volume of 737 m 2 /g and 0.31 cm 3 /g. However, the pore sizes were mostly microporous, independently of activation procedure used.
Using Situated Communication in Distributed Autonomous Mobile Robotics

When using communication in multi-robot systems it’s often not desirable to choose an abstract form of communication that separates the messages from the physical environment in which they have meaning. If the messages are separated from the environment localization information has to be encoded into the messages in order for the receiver to be able to situate the content of the messages. Here we point out that if we instead use a situated form of communication that exploits the physical properties of the signal transferring the message localization information is not needed. We demonstrate this idea by showing how an extremely simple control system that uses short range communication can keep four LEGO Mindstorms robots together in a group. It’s also discussed how this idea can be extended to make it possible to simplify path planning in multi-robot systems.
Air Traffic Forecast Empirical Research Based on the MCMC Method

Airport air traffic is one of the most important and hardest one among all the airport data forecasts. In this paper, the Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method of applied theory of statistics has been introduced into the aviation sector, and the discussion on airport air traffic forecast has been conducted taking Shanghai airport as the application background. MCMC method is designed to solve the problem parameters expectations where some baysian inference can not be directly calculated. This paper conducts the iterative computation using WinBUGS, EViews is used to estimate the initial iteration parameter of the regression model, and it is on this basis that the regression equation under the MCMC method is obtained.
Desenvolvimento de procedimentos eletroanalíticos para a determinação de fármacos em formulações farmacêuticas e fluidos biológicos empregando sensores à base de carbon black

DEVELOPMENT OF ELETROANALYTIC PROCEDURES FOR DETERMINATION OF DRUGS IN PHARMACEUTICAL FORMULATIONS AND BIOLOGICAL FLUIDS USING SENSORS BASED ON CARBON BLACK. In this work, voltammetric methods for determination of losartan potassium and ketoconazole using an electrode modified with carbon black were developed. Originally, a sensor was constructed with carbon black, chitosan and epichlorohydrin. Than, it was used for the determination of losartan. The electrochemical behavior of the losartan was studied with cyclic voltammetry in 0.2 mol L phosphate buffer solution (pH 3.0), which presented an irreversible oxidation peak at a potential of 1.28 V. The square wave voltammetry technique was selected for the quantification of losartan in commercial pharmaceutical formulations and synthetic biological samples. The following parameters were evaluated: frequency, pulse amplitude and step potential. A linear response was observed in the concentration range from 4.97 × 10 to 4.76 × 10 mol L represented by the linear regression equation: Ip (μA) = − 6.04 × 10 + 0.122 [LOS] (μmol L); r = 0.990 and with a limit of detection of 4.79 × 10 mol L. The method developed was successfully applied for the determination of losartan in pharmaceutical formulations and the comparison of these results to UV-visible spectrophotometry determination, do not presented significant difference at confidence level of 95% using a t-test student. In addition, the determination of losartan was performed in samples of synthetic biological fluids, with satisfactory results. The electrochemical behavior of the ketoconazole was performed through cyclic voltammetry using a glassy carbon electrode modified with carbon black, chitosan and gold nanoparticles in 0.2 mol L phosphate buffer (pH 10). An irreversible oxidation peak was observed at 0.65 V. The ketoconazole determination was developed using square wave voltammetry under optimized conditions. The obtained analytical curve was linear in the concentrations range Silva, L. P. Abstract xvi of ketoconazole, from 1.00 × 10 to 2.90 × 10 mol L, according to the linear regression equation: Ip (μA) = −1, 8 × 10 + 3.6 [CTO] (μmol L); r = 0.999, with a limit of detection of 4.43 × 10 mol L. In addition, the voltammetric procedures were successfully applied in the ketoconazole determination in pharmaceutical formulations and synthetic biological samples with satisfactory results. Silva, L. P. Sumário xvii
Prenatal and Postnatal Hydralazine Treatment Does Not Prevent Renal Vessel Wall Thickening in SHR Despite the Absence of Hypertension

Previous studies in our laboratory have shown that the renal blood vessels of 21-week-old Wistar-Kyoto spontaneously hypertensive rats exhibited thicker vascular walls than age matched Wistar-Kyoto normotensive rats. Morphometric analysis of the relaxed renovasculature revealed an increase in the cross-sectional area of the media, which in most cases was associated with an increase in the number of smooth muscle cell layers. To test if these structural changes occur in the absence of raised blood pressure, hydralazine was administered to spontaneously hypertensive rats and normotensive controls prior to and during pregnancy (100 ml/1 drinking water), and to the newborn males up to 21 weeks of age (16.9 mg/kg/day by gavage until weaning followed by 100 mg/1 in the drinking water). Treated animals were compared with untreated rats. Treatment prevented hypertension development in spontaneously hypertensive rats but did not alter the structural changes found in untreated animals with hypertension. At 21 weeks of age, hydralazine-treated spontaneously hypertensive rats had similar wall-to-lumen area ratios, medial cross-sectional areas and numbers of medial smooth muscle layers as untreated hypertensive rats while these parameters were greater in treated and untreated spontaneously hypertensive rats than in either treated or untreated normotensive controls. Withdrawal of hydralazine from 26-week-old spontaneously hypertensive rats that had been treated in utero and postnatally and had normal blood pressures throughout life resulted in the rapid onset of hypertension. Our results show that renal vascular wall thickening in spontaneously hypertensive rats occurs in the absence of high blood pressure and therefore is not a secondary effect of raised blood pressure.
Geometric Meditation-Based Cognitive Behavioral Therapy in Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder: A Case Study

Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD), characterized by unwanted and distressing intrusive thoughts, images, urges, doubts and ideas or sensations and repetitive mental or behavioral acts, which is regarded as an overwhelming mental disorder. Over the past few years, several studies have indicated how mindfulness-based interventions may be effectively used to remediate OCD symptoms based on which such methods are endorsed as effective complementary or alternative options to remediate OCD. The present pilot investigation assessed the effectiveness of Geometric Meditation-based Cognitive Behavior Therapy (GM-CBT) as a novel integrated approach to help OCD symptoms. Accordingly, an eight-week treatment program (90 minute sessions per week) in a single case of intractable OCD was found to result in a significant reduction in OCD symptoms, anxiety and depression as well as increased mindfulness skills and subsequent secondary outcomes. A three-month post treatment follow up suggested long-lasting beneficial effects. Such a pilot model may receive further endorsement as a holistic CBT approach for OCD.
Five Years Survival Trend and Outcome among HIV Infected Children Followed Up in the Pediatric Department in a Tertiary Hospital

Background: HIV infection still contributes significantly to high leatlity among infant and child. The aim of this work was to assess survival rate after five years of routine follow up among HIV 1-infected children in the pediatric ward of the Parakou Teaching Hospital. Patients and methods: It was a descriptive cohort study with analytical purpose covering Five years from 2011 to 2016. It focused on 89 HIV 1-infected children. Kaplan-Meier method was used to estimate the survival probabilities. The survival trends were compared with Log-rank test. Cox regression test was used to identify factors associated with child deaths. Results: The HIV1-infected children had an average age of 3 years at admission. Most of children were on first line ART and most complications were malnutrition, pneumonia, pulmonary tuberculosis and oral candidosis. The probability of survival at 60 months was 0.7637. Factors associated with their deaths were the lack of children occupation (p = 0.039); 4th WHO clinical stage (p < 0.001) with 39 fold higher risk than children at WHO clinical stage 1; poor follow-up (p = 0.007) with 5.86 times fold higher risk than children with good follow up and malnutrition (p = 0.003) with 4.92 times fold higher risk than children with normal Z score. Conclusion: This result will help clinicians to improve the survival rate of infected children through systematic screening at each contact with the health system, a rapid care of children at birth and regularity in children’s follow-up monitoring with therapeutic education.
KDD-SC: Subspace Clustering Extensions for Knowledge Discovery Frameworks

Analyzing high dimensional data is a challenging task. For these data it is known that traditional clustering algorithms fail to detect meaningful patterns. As a solution, subspace clustering techniques have been introduced. They analyze arbitrary subspace projections of the data to detect clustering structures. In this paper, we present our subspace clustering extension for KDD frameworks, termed KDD-SC. In contrast to existing subspace clustering toolkits, our solution neither is a standalone product nor is it tightly coupled to a specific KDD framework. Our extension is realized by a common codebase and easy-to-use plugins for three of the most popular KDD frameworks, namely KNIME, RapidMiner, and WEKA. KDD-SC extends these frameworks such that they offer a wide range of different subspace clustering functionalities. It provides a multitude of algorithms, data generators, evaluation measures, and visualization techniques specifically designed for subspace clustering. These functionalities integrate seamlessly with the frameworks' existing features such that they can be flexibly combined. KDD-SC is publicly available on our website.
FINGERPRINTS IMAGE COMPRESSION BY WAVE ATOMS

The fingerprint images compression based on geometric transformed presents important research topic, these last year’s many transforms have been proposed to give the best representation to a particular type of image “fingerprint image”, like classics wavelets and wave atoms. In this paper we shall present a comparative study between this transforms, in order to use them in compression. The results show that for fingerprint images, the wave atom offers better performance than the current transform based compression standard. The wave atoms transformation brings a considerable contribution on the compression of fingerprints images by achieving high values of ratios compression and PSNR, with a reduced number of coefficients. In addition, the proposed method is verified with objective and subjective testing.
Cross-lingual Text-independent Speaker Verification Using Unsupervised Adversarial Discriminative Domain Adaptation

Speaker verification systems often degrade significantly when there is a language mismatch between training and testing data. Being able to improve cross-lingual speaker verification system using unlabeled data can greatly increase the robustness of the system and reduce human labeling costs. In this study, we introduce an unsupervised Adversarial Discriminative Domain Adaptation (ADDA) method to effectively learn an asymmetric mapping that adapts the target domain encoder to the source domain, where the target domain and source domain are speech data from different languages. ADDA, together with a popular Domain Adversarial Training (DAT) approach, are evaluated on a cross-lingual speaker verification task: the training data is in English from NIST SRE04-08, Mixer 6 and Switchboard, and the test data is in Chinese from AISHELL-I. We show that with the ADDA adaptation, Equal Error Rate (EER) of the x-vector system decreases from 9.331% to 7.645%, relatively 18.07% reduction of EER, and 6.32% reduction from DAT as well. Further data analysis of ADDA adapted speaker embedding shows that the learned speaker embeddings can perform well on speaker classification for the target domain data, and are less dependent with respect to the shift in language.
Structure‐function studies on human macrophage colony‐stimulating factor (M‐CSF)

M‐CSF (CSF‐1) can be produced in a variety of structural forms that may affect function in vivo. Truncated, nonglycosylated forms of recombinant M‐CSF (rM‐CSF) from E. coli have been refolded in vitro in high yield and shown to be functionally equivalent in vitro to glycosylated rM‐CSF secreted from mammalian cells. An N‐terminal domain of 149 amino acids is produced by all of the known M‐CSF mRNA splice variants and is the region responsible for bioactivity observed in vitro. Heterodimeric rM‐CSFs from different splice variants containing this domain were produced in pure form by refolding in vitro, and are fully active, but have yet to be observed in vivo. The circulating half‐life of truncated M‐CSF forms injected intravenously into rats increased with the MW of the M‐CSF used. Large increases in half‐life in vivo were observed following chemical addition of a single molecule of 10 kD polyethylene glycol to rM‐CSF in vitro.
The V Protein of Tioman Virus Is Incapable of Blocking Type I Interferon Signaling in Human Cells

The capacity of a virus to cross species barriers is determined by the development of bona fide interactions with cellular components of new hosts, and in particular its ability to block IFN-α/β antiviral signaling. Tioman virus (TioV), a close relative of mumps virus (MuV), has been isolated in giant fruit bats in Southeast Asia. Nipah and Hendra viruses, which are present in the same bat colonies, are highly pathogenic in human. Despite serological evidences of close contacts between TioV and human populations, whether TioV is associated to some human pathology remains undetermined. Here we show that in contrast to the V protein of MuV, the V protein of TioV (TioV-V) hardly interacts with human STAT2, does not degrade STAT1, and cannot block IFN-α/β signaling in human cells. In contrast, TioV-V properly binds to human STAT3 and MDA5, and thus interferes with IL-6 signaling and IFN-β promoter induction in human cells. Because STAT2 binding was previously identified as a host restriction factor for some Paramyxoviridae, we established STAT2 sequence from giant fruit bats, and binding to TioV-V was tested. Surprisingly, TioV-V interaction with STAT2 from giant fruit bats is also extremely weak and barely detectable. Altogether, our observations question the capacity of TioV to appropriately control IFN-α/β signaling in both human and giant fruit bats that are considered as its natural host.