Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
DRK/DOS/SOS converge with Crk/Mbc/dCed-12 to activate Rac1 during glial engulfment of axonal debris

Significance Neuronal cell death or injury leads to the production of neuronal cell corpses and cellular debris that must be cleared from the nervous system to avoid inflammation or toxicity. Glia are the primary cell type responsible for clearing neuronal debris, but precisely how these cells recognize, phagocytose, and destroy this material remains poorly defined. Here we use a simple nerve injury assay to identify genes downstream of the engulfment receptor Draper that are required for efficient glial engulfment of degenerating axons. Based on the molecular and functional conservation of this pathway in mammals, this study sheds new light on pathways potentially used by mammalian glia to react to brain injury or neurodegeneration. Nervous system injury or disease leads to activation of glia, which govern postinjury responses in the nervous system. Axonal injury in Drosophila results in transcriptional up-regulation of the glial engulfment receptor Draper; there is extension of glial membranes to the injury site (termed activation), and then axonal debris is internalized and degraded. Loss of the small GTPase Rac1 from glia completely suppresses glial responses to injury, but upstream activators remain poorly defined. Loss of the Rac guanine nucleotide exchange factor (GEF) Crk/myoblast city (Mbc)/dCed-12 has no effect on glial activation, but blocks internalization and degradation of debris. Here we show that the signaling molecules downstream of receptor kinase (DRK) and daughter of sevenless (DOS) (mammalian homologs, Grb2 and Gab2, respectively) and the GEF son of sevenless (SOS) (mammalian homolog, mSOS) are required for efficient activation of glia after axotomy and internalization/degradation of axonal debris. At the earliest steps of glial activation, DRK/DOS/SOS function in a partially redundant manner with Crk/Mbc/dCed-12, with blockade of both complexes strongly suppressing all glial responses, similar to loss of Rac1. This work identifies DRK/DOS/SOS as the upstream Rac GEF complex required for glial responses to axonal injury, and demonstrates a critical requirement for multiple GEFs in efficient glial activation after injury and internalization/degradation of axonal debris.
The influence of nicotine on the population of fibroblasts in cutaneous scars in rats.

PURPOSE To study the collagen density and the population of fibroblasts in cutaneous injuries in rats under the influence of nicotine. METHODS The scars of abdominal wounds in rats were analyzed. 2 mg/kg/d of nicotine was administered to the animals in the experiment group and the solution used as a vehicle for the animals in the control group. Treatment was begun seven days prior to surgery and maintained for seven or fourteen days following surgery. The removed scars were prepared for histopathological study. Histological cuts were stained by Sirius Supra red F3BA for collagen analysis and submitted to the examination using the immunohistochemical technique, which enabled us to recognize the population of fibroblasts. RESULTS No significant difference was found in type I collagen density after seven days (p=0.912), nor after fourteen days (p=0.211). The control group had more type III collagen after seven days (p=0.004), but after fourteen days there was no significant difference (p=0,720). The total quantification of collagen, although higher in the control group, was not significantly so at any time during the study (p=0.103 after seven days and p=0.549 after fourteen days). The average of fibroblasts per field was lower after seven days (p=0.0001) and after fourteen days (p=0.0000). CONCLUSION Under the conditions of this experiment, nicotine reduced the fibroblast population without modifying collagen density significantly.
Care and support for older people and carers in Bradford : Their perspectives, aspirations and experiences

This report explores the views of older people and their carers from ten ethnic communities in relation to their needs and experiences of care and support. It addresses two central areas of government policy and practice: the accessibility and acceptability of services to older people and their carers, and the barriers and facilitators to the take-up of services. Topics were explored by 21 focus groups (137 older people; 33 carers) and in-depth interviews with 38 older people and 15 carers. The report covers the following subjects: • What older people and carers say they need in terms of care and support, including emotional support, information and translation services. • Experiences and expectations of support from family, friends and neighbours. • Experiences and expectations of support by health and social welfare services, including eligibility to entitlements, experiences of good practice and barriers to accessing services.
Metabolic effect of alkaline additives and guanosine/gluconate in storage solutions for red blood cells

Over a century of advancements in the field of additive solutions for red blood cell (RBC) storage has made transfusion therapy a safe and effective practice for millions of recipients worldwide. Still, storage in the blood bank results in the progressive accumulation of metabolic alterations, a phenomenon that is mitigated by storage in novel storage additives, such as alkaline additive solutions. While novel alkaline additive formulations have been proposed, no metabolomics characterization has been performed to date.
Approaches for Sentiment Analysis on Twitter: A State-of-Art study

Microbloging is an extremely prevalent broadcast medium amidst the Internet fraternity these days. People share their opinions and sentiments about variety of subjects like products, news, institutions, etc., every day on microbloging websites. Sentiment analysis plays a key role in prediction systems, opinion mining systems, etc. Twitter, one of the microbloging platforms allows a limit of 140 characters to its users. This restriction stimulates users to be very concise about their opinion and twitter an ocean of sentiments to analyze. Twitter also provides developer friendly streaming API for data retrieval purpose allowing the analyst to search real time tweets from various users. In this paper, we discuss the state-of-art of the works which are focused on Twitter, the online social network platform, for sentiment analysis. We survey various lexical, machine learning and hybrid approaches for sentiment analysis on Twitter.
Inhibition of glycogen synthase kinase 3 prevents synaptic long-term depression and facilitates cognition in C57BL/6J mice

Glycogen synthase kinase 3 (GSK-3) is an important molecular player involved into diverse cellular functions including metabolism, transcription, cell survival and synaptic plasticity. Here, we focused on characterization of the cognitive effects of GSK-3 inhibitor, a newly developed compound VP3.36. In particular, we assessed VP3.36 effects on working memory, episodic memory, executive functioning, spatial learning & memory and fear memory. VP3.36 (3 mg/ kg) significantly enhanced working memory and spatial object recognition in C57BL/6J mice. The GSK-3 inhibitor was able to speed up solving obstacles given to experimental animals in the Puzzle test, thereby improving their executive functions. Lastly, VP3.36 treated mice learnt faster to find the escape platform in the Morris' water maze and exhibited better spatial long-term memory than vehicle-treated animals. At the same time, GSK-3 inhibition did not affect fear memories, sensorimotor gating, emotional behavior or ambulation, suggesting that GSK-3 inhibition underlies specific cognitive processes, which are likely coupled with certain mechanisms of synaptic plasticity. Given that GSK-3 inhibition has clear effect on long-term depression (LTD), and the functional role of LTD in brain is still far from complete understanding, next, we probed effects of VP3.36 on synaptic LTD in the hippocampal CA1 subregion. We found that incubation of hippocampal slices with VP3.36 sufficiently prevented synaptic LTD, further supporting implication of GSK-3 into mechanisms of synaptic plasticity. Taken together, VP3.36 facilitated working memory, spatial episodic and long-term memory, enhanced executive functions in parallel with its ability to prevent synaptic LTD. Overall, our experiments showed implication of GSK-3 into mechanisms of synaptic plasticity and certain cognitive functions which help to deeper understand fundamental molecular-cellular mechanisms of cognitive enhancement's processes.
Performance Evaluation of A Multiuser Detection Based MAC Design for Ad Hoc Networks

In general, the performance and radio resource utilization of Ad Hoc networks are limited by half-duplex operation and possible collisions. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for MAC design that practically eliminates collisions and significantly increases the bandwidth utilization. The key element of this approach is the CDMA multiuser detection technology that allows receiving several signals in parallel without inflicting self-interference. These features give a promise of significant performance improvements. The main goal of this paper is to assess the range of this gain when compared to other existing alternatives. In particular, we compare the performance of the proposed multiuser detection based MAC design with MAC design based on IEEE 802.11 concept and with MAC design based on multi-code CDMA with one signal reception by one user at a time.
Taxon Disappearance from Microbiome Analysis Reinforces the Value of Mock Communities as a Standard in Every Sequencing Run

Despite the routine use of standards and blanks in virtually all chemical or physical assays and most biological studies (a kind of “control”), microbiome analysis has traditionally lacked such standards. Here we show that unexpected problems of unknown origin can occur in such sequencing runs and yield completely incorrect results that would not necessarily be detected without the use of standards. Assuming that the microbiome sequencing analysis works properly every time risks serious errors that can be detected by the use of mock communities. ABSTRACT Mock communities have been used in microbiome method development to help estimate biases introduced in PCR amplification and sequencing and to optimize pipeline outputs. Nevertheless, the strong value of routine mock community analysis beyond initial method development is rarely, if ever, considered. Here we report that our routine use of mock communities as internal standards allowed us to discover highly aberrant and strong biases in the relative proportions of multiple taxa in a single Illumina HiSeqPE250 run. In this run, an important archaeal taxon virtually disappeared from all samples, and other mock community taxa showed >2-fold high or low abundance, whereas a rerun of those identical amplicons (from the same reaction tubes) on a different date yielded “normal” results. Although obvious from the strange mock community results, we could have easily missed the problem had we not used the mock communities because of natural variation of microbiomes at our site. The “normal” results were validated over four MiSeqPE300 runs and three HiSeqPE250 runs, and run-to-run variation was usually low. While validating these “normal” results, we also discovered that some mock microbial taxa had relatively modest, but consistent, differences between sequencing platforms. We strongly advise the use of mock communities in every sequencing run to distinguish potentially serious aberrations from natural variations. The mock communities should have more than just a few members and ideally at least partly represent the samples being analyzed to detect problems that show up only in some taxa and also to help validate clustering. IMPORTANCE Despite the routine use of standards and blanks in virtually all chemical or physical assays and most biological studies (a kind of “control”), microbiome analysis has traditionally lacked such standards. Here we show that unexpected problems of unknown origin can occur in such sequencing runs and yield completely incorrect results that would not necessarily be detected without the use of standards. Assuming that the microbiome sequencing analysis works properly every time risks serious errors that can be detected by the use of mock communities.
Coalition game for user association and bandwidth allocation in ultra-dense mmWave networks

In future layered fifth generation (5G) wireless networks, a large number of millimeter-wave (mmWave) small cells will be covered by a microwave macrocell, where radio access links to a small cell and the backhaul link to its macrocell share a common mmWave bandwidth, which is called wireless self-backhauling. One of the major challenges in self-backhauling ultra-dense networks (UDNs) is the optimization of user association and resource allocation between the radio access links and backhaul links, which is essential to improve the network performance. This paper proposes a coalition game based joint user association and bandwidth allocation algorithm for ultradense mmWave networks (UDMNs), in which users form a set of coalitions by playing coalition games to maximize network sum rate and make the downlink traffic of small cells in current cell association period be accommodated by their wireless backhaul. Simulation results show that, the proposed scheme improves the sum rate significantly compared to the traditional minimum-distance based user association scheme, and approximates the performance of immune optimization algorithm (IOA) in terms of sum rate and has much lower computational complexity.
Localization of Glycine Neurotransmitter Transporter (GLYT2) Reveals Correlation with the Distribution of Glycine Receptor

Abstract: We studied by immunocytochemical localization, the glycine neurotransmitter transporter (GLYT2) in mouse brain, using polyclonal antibodies raised against recombinant N‐terminus and loop fusion proteins. Western analysis and immunocytochemistry of mouse brain frozen sections revealed caudal‐rostral gradient of GLYT2 distribution with massive accumulation in the spinal cord, brainstem, and less in the cerebellum. Immunoreactivity was detected in processes with varicosities but not cell bodies. A correlation was observed between the pattern we obtained and previously reported strychnine binding studies. The results indicate that GLYT2 is involved in the termination of glycine neurotransmission accompanying the glycine receptor at the classic inhibitory system in the hindbrain.
A Statement Level Bug Localization Technique using Statement Dependency Graph

Existing bug localization techniques suggest source code methods or classes as buggy which require manual investigations to find the buggy statements. Considering that issue, this paper proposes Statement level Bug Localization (SBL), which can effectively identify buggy statements from the source code. In SBL, relevant buggy methods are ranked using dynamic analysis followed by static analysis of the source code. For each ranked buggy method, a Method Statement Dependency Graph (MSDG) is constructed where each statement acts as a node of the graph. Since each of the statements contains few information, it is maximized by combining the contents of each node and its predecessor nodes in MSDG, resulting a Node Predecessor-node Dependency Graph (NPDG). To identify relevant statements for a bug, similarity is measured between the bug report and each node of the NPDG using Vector Space Model (VSM). Finally, the buggy statements are ranked based on the similarity scores. Rigorous experiments on three open source projects named as Eclipse, SWT and PasswordProtector show that SBL localizes the buggy statements with reasonable accuracies.
Transepithelial Fluid and Salt Re-Absorption Regulated by cGK2 Signals

Transepithelial fluid and salt re-absorption in epithelial tissues play an important role in fluid and salt homeostasis. In absorptive epithelium, fluid and salt flux is controlled by machinery mainly composed of epithelial sodium channels (ENaC), cystic fibrosis transmembrane conductance regulator (CFTR), Na+/H+ exchanger (NHE), aquaporin, and sodium potassium adenosine triphosphatase (Na+/K+-ATPase). Dysregulation of fluid and salt transport across epithelium contributes to the pathogenesis of many diseases, such as pulmonary edema and cystic fibrosis. Intracellular and extracellular signals, i.e., hormones and protein kinases, regulate fluid and salt turnover and resolution. Increasing evidence demonstrates that transepithelial fluid transport is regulated by cyclic guanosine monophosphate-dependent protein kinase (cGK) signals. cGK2 was originally identified and cloned from intestinal specimens, the presence of which has also been confirmed in the kidney and the lung. cGK2 regulates fluid and salt through ENaC, CFTR and NHE. Deficient cGK2 regulation of transepithelial ion transport was seen in acute lung injury, and cGK2 could be a novel druggable target to restore edematous disorder in epithelial tissues.
Benefits of plasma rich in growth factors (PRGF) in skin photodamage: Clinical response and histological assessment

Skin ageing is characterized by small and fine wrinkles, roughness, laxity, and pigmentation as a result of epidermal thinning, collagen degradation, dermal atrophy, and fewer fibroblasts. Plasma rich in growth factors (PRGF) is an autologous plasma preparation enriched in proteins obtained from patient's own blood aimed at accelerating tissue repair and regeneration. To evaluate the benefits of PRGF in skin photodamage, 10 healthy volunteers were treated with three consecutive intradermal injections of PRGF in the facial area. Clinical outcomes and histological analysis were performed. A statistically significant increase in the epidermis and papillary dermis thickness was seen after PRGF treatment (p < 0.001). Skin thickening was observed in all patients studied, being more intense in the group of patients with photodamage (p < 0.001). After PRGF treatment, a reduction of the average area fraction of solar elastosis was observed in patients with clinical and histological signs of skin photodamage (p < 0.05). No changeswere observed in the number of CD31, XIIIa factor, cKit, CD10, nor p53‐positive cells. The improvement score after PRGF use was 0.75 (9/12) for the group of patients with signs of skin photodamage. Intradermal PRGF infiltration appears to be an effective treatment for the photodamaged skin.
Detecting pseudepigraphic texts using novel similarity measures

1 The identification of pseudepigraphic texts – texts not written by the authors to which they are 2 attributed – has important historical, forensic and commercial applications. Any method for identifying 3 such pseudepigrapha must ultimately depend on some measure of a given document’s similarity to the 4 other documents in a corpus. We show that for this purpose, second-order document similarity measures 5 taken from the authorship verification literature strongly outperform standard document similarity 6 measures commonly used for outlier identification. We apply these improved methods to two famous 7 corpora suspected of including pseudepigrapha: Shakespeare’s plays and Pauline Epistles.
A Review on Synthetic Receptors for Bioparticle Detection Created by Surface-Imprinting Techniques—From Principles to Applications

The strong affinity of biological receptors for their targets has been studied for many years. Noncovalent interactions between these natural recognition elements and their ligands form the basis for a broad range of biosensor applications. Although these sensing platforms are usually appreciably sensitive and selective, certain drawbacks are associated with biological receptors under nonphysiological conditions in terms of temperature, pH, or ionic strength. Therefore, there are considerable efforts to mimic such molecular interactions with robust, synthetic receptors. Molecular imprinting is the best-known technique to obtain antibody mimics by synthesizing a polymer matrix in the presence of a template species, such as molecules or larger aggregates. Extraction of the template results in sterically and functionally adapted binding cavities in or on a porous matrix. Although in principle possible, the detection of larger bioparticles such as proteins, microorganisms, or cells remains challenging when us.
Grammatical Error Detection with Limited Training Data: The Case of Chinese

In this paper, we describe the UDS submission to the shared task on Grammatical Error Diagnosis for Learning Chinese as a Foreign Language. We designed four different experiments (runs) to approach this task. All of them are variations of a frequency-based approach using a journalistic corpus as standard corpus and comparing n-gram frequency lists to both the training and the test corpus provided by the shared task organizers. The assumption behind this approach is that comparing a standard reference corpus to a non-standard study corpus using frequency-based methods levels out non-standard features present in the study corpus. These features are very likely to be, in the case of this corpus, grammatical errors. Our system obtained 60.3% f-measure at the error detection level and 25.3% f-measure at the error diagnosis level.
Developing an adaptive model of thermal comfort and preference

The adaptive hypothesis predicts that contextual factors and past thermal history modify building occupants' thermal expectations and preferences. One of the predictions of the adaptive hypothesis is that people in warm climate zones prefer warmer indoor temperatures than people living in cold climate zones. This is contrary to the static assumptions underlying the current ASHRAE comfort standard 55-92. To examine the adaptive hypothesis and its implications for Standard 55-92, the ASHRAE RP-884 project assembled a quality-controlled database from thermal comfort field experiments worldwide (circa 21,000 observations from 160 buildings). Our statistical analysis examined the semantics of thermal comfort in terms of thermal sensation,
Score-level fusion by generalized Delaunay triangulation

This paper describes a method for score-level fusion in multi-cue two-class classification problems. Fusion based on the probability density function (PDF) of multiple scores given for each class is a promising approach because it guarantees optimality as long as the estimated PDFs are correct. Instead of lattice-type control points used in previous non-parametric density-based approaches, floating control points (FCPs) are introduced to improve scalability and the whole posterior distribution is represented by interpolation or extrapolation using generalized Delaunay triangulation. Given a set of FCPs obtained by k-means, posteriors on the FCPs are estimated by an energy minimization framework using training samples. The experiments, using both simulation data as well as several types of real data from three publicly available score databases for multi-cue biometric authentication, demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.