Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The potential of sarcospan in adhesion complex replacement therapeutics for the treatment of muscular dystrophy

Three adhesion complexes span the sarcolemma and facilitate critical connections between the extracellular matrix and the actin cytoskeleton: the dystrophin– and utrophin–glycoprotein complexes and α7β1 integrin. Loss of individual protein components results in a loss of the entire protein complex and muscular dystrophy. Muscular dystrophy is a progressive, lethal wasting disease characterized by repetitive cycles of myofiber degeneration and regeneration. Protein‐replacement therapy offers a promising approach for the treatment of muscular dystrophy. Recently, we demonstrated that sarcospan facilitates protein–protein interactions amongst the adhesion complexes and is an important potential therapeutic target. Here, we review current protein‐replacement strategies, discuss the potential benefits of sarcospan expression, and identify important experiments that must be addressed for sarcospan to move to the clinic.
Thai views of sexuality and sexual behaviour.

The authors conducted 14 focus group discussions involving 144 men and women and in-depth individual interviews with 21 men and 26 women from late 1993 through early 1994 in a study of how married Thai men and women view sexuality and sexual behavior in the context of their own lives. Almost all study participants were age 25-40 years. The focus groups were held in Bangkok with factory workers residents of organized slums and middle-class occupational groups as well as in two provincial Central Region towns and neighboring villages. All participants had been married with the majority living with their spouses at the time of the study. The authors found a clear consensus among participants that sex is more important for men than for women and that men naturally need frequent sexual release. Moreover many believe that men need a variety of sex partners. The premarital and extramarital commercial sex patronage by many Thai men is therefore consistent with these general views. Many women view their own sexuality solely as a means of satisfying their husbands needs. Occasional commercial sex patronage was largely not seen as an act of marital betrayal by either men or women but excessive patronage is thought to maybe cause financial hardship and marital conflict largely pragmatic rather than moral concerns for avoiding a certain degree and type of sexual behavior. While it is permissible for men to seek sexual release with prostitutes it is highly inappropriate for women to do so. Virginity is somewhat expected of single women but is considered abnormal for single men.
Valorization of Phosphorus Secondary Raw Materials by Acidithiobacillus ferrooxidans

This paper presents the possibility of producing phosphorus fertilizers through Acidithiobacillus ferrooxidans utilization in secondary raw materials solubilization. Phosphorus was obtained from the bones of poultry and fish as well as from Morocco phosphorite. Four doses of poultry bones and fish bones were used in the experiment (2, 4, 10 and 20 g/L) and two doses (2 and 4 g/L) of phosphorite were also used. The experimenters measured the final pH, which increased in proportion to the increase in the number of poultry bone doses, whereas in the case of fish bones it decreased in proportion to the increase in the number of fish bone doses. Only in the case of phosphorite, where 10 g/L were used, there was a slight increase in pH during solubilization observed. The highest phosphorus concentration of 1.9% (expressed as P2O5) was found for the solubilization performed on fish bones with the highest dose (20 g/L). The formulation obtained in this study meets the necessary requirements for use as a bio-fertilizer because of the relatively low content of P2O5 and the low content of toxic elements. The results confirm the utilization of Acidithiobacillus ferrooxidans in the biosolubilization of phosphorus renewable raw materials that can alleviate the problem of the world’s depleting phosphorite deposits.
Joint Symbol Timing and Channel Estimation in Two-Way Multiple Antenna Relay Networks

We present investigation results on joint estimation of symbol timing synchronization and channel response in two-way multiple antenna relay networks that utilize amplify-and-forward (AF) relay strategy. With practically unknown relay channel gains and timing offset, optimum maximum likelihood (ML) estimation for joint timing recovery and channel estimation can be prohibitively complex. We develop a new Bayesian based Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm and generalize our previous principle to a multiple antenna relay network to accomplish joint symbol timing recovery and effective channel estimation. Simulation results are provided to demonstrate the performance of the proposed algorithm.
Mechanisms of asthma in Olympic athletes – practical implications

Athletes’ symptoms may only occur in extreme conditions, which are far from normal. Exercise may increase ventilation up to 200 l/min for short periods in speed and power athletes, and for longer periods in endurance athletes such as swimmers and cross‐country skiers. Increasing proportions of young athletes are atopic, i.e. they show signs of IgE‐mediated allergy which is, along with the sport event (endurance sport), a major risk factor for asthma and respiratory symptoms. Mechanisms in the etiology and clinical phenotypes vary between disciplines and individuals, and it may be an oversimplification to discuss athlete’s asthma as a distinct and unambiguous disease. Nevertheless, the experience on Finnish Olympic athletes suggests at least two different clinical phenotypes, which may reflect different underlying mechanisms. The pattern of ‘classical asthma’ is characterized by early onset childhood asthma, methacholine responsiveness, atopy and signs of eosinophilic airway inflammation, reflected by increased exhaled nitric oxide levels. Another distinct phenotype includes late onset symptoms (during sports career), bronchial responsiveness to eucapnic hyperventilation test, but not necessarily to inhaled methacholine, and a variable association with atopic markers and nitric oxide. A mixed type of eosinophilic and neutrophilic airway inflammation seems to affect especially swimmers, ice‐hockey players, and cross‐country skiers. The inflammation may represent a multifactorial trauma, in which both allergic and irritant mechanisms play a role. There is a significant problem of both under‐ and overdiagnosing asthma in athletes and the need for objective testing is emphasized. Follow‐up studies are needed to assess the temporal relationship between asthma and competitive sporting, taking better into account individual disposition, environmental factors (exposure), intensity of training and potential confounders.
Novel Synthesis of Core-Shell Silica Nanoparticles for the Capture of Low Molecular Weight Proteins and Peptides

Silica nanoparticles were functionalized with immobilized molecular bait, Cibacron Blue, and a porous polymeric bis-acrylamide shell. These nanoparticles represent a new alternative to capture low molecular weight (LMW) proteins/peptides, that might be potential biomarkers. Functionalized core-shell silica nanoparticles (FCSNP) presented a size distribution of 243.9 ± 11.6 nm and an estimated surface charge of −38.1 ± 0.9 mV. The successful attachment of compounds at every stage of synthesis was evidenced by ATR-FTIR. The capture of model peptides was determined by mass spectrometry, indicating that only the peptide with a long sequence of hydrophobic amino acids (alpha zein 34-mer) interacted with the molecular bait. FCSNP excluded the high molecular weight protein (HMW), BSA, and captured LMW proteins (myoglobin and aprotinin), as evidenced by SDS-PAGE. Functionalization of nanoparticles with Cibacron Blue was crucial to capture these molecules. FCSNP were stable after twelve months of storage and maintained a capacity of 3.1–3.4 µg/mg.
Psychrotrophic properties of Listeria monocytogenes.

Listeria monocytogenes grew between 3 and 45C. Growth at 10C was at a rate characteristic of psychrophilic bacteria. The increase in the duration of the lag phase of growth with decreasing temperatures was expressed with a hyperbolic curve which indicated an infinite lag time at 3.3C. If this relationship between lag time and temperature is a general phenomenon, it would provide a relatively rapid method for estimating minimal temperatures of growth. Initial rates for oxygen consumption during glucose metabolism and for uptake of the nonmetabolized sugar, 2-deoxyglucose, had temperature coefficients (10–30C) of about 1.5. Growth at 10C increased the rate and the capacity of 2-deoxyglucose uptake by exponential-phase cells. Uptake and incorporation of L-leucine was relatively rapid at 10C but the temperature coefficients were greater than 2. High temperature coefficients (greater than 2.5) for nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide oxidase and lactic dehydrogenase activity in cell-free preparations indicated th.
Quality of care of a pharmacist-managed diabetes service compared to usual care in an indigent clinic.

BACKGROUND This study evaluates the quality of care of a pharmacist-managed diabetes clinic focused on an indigent population and compares that quality of care to usual care in the same health care setting. METHODS Two groups of subjects were evaluated by retrospective review of medical records. The experimental group (n = 47) consisted of patients whose care was facilitated by a clinical pharmacist (medication initiation and modification, laboratory and physical assessment) in addition to routine physician care. A control group (n = 45) consisted of patients not referred to the pharmacy service whose care was provided solely by a physician. Changes in glycemic, blood pressure, and lipid control were assessed as were use of specific medications. RESULTS After an average of 1.8 years of follow-up, a larger reduction in hemoglobin A1C was observed in the experimental group (2.0%) compared to the control group (1.2%), but the difference was not statistically different. Both groups experienced significant improvements in blood pressure control with a higher absolute increase from baseline in the experimental group compared to the control group (34% vs. 22% respectively, P < 0.001). Low-density lipoprotein-cholesterol levels in the control group fell by 2 mg/dL, while a 29 mg/dL reduction was observed in the experimental group (P < 0.001). While aspirin, angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitor, and angiotensin receptor blocker therapies were not different between the two groups, statin therapy was significantly improved in the experimental group (from 23% to 68%) compared to the control group (from 33% to 44%) (P = 0.038). CONCLUSIONS Many key diabetes quality of care outcomes in an indigent population were significantly improved in patients whose diabetes management was facilitated by a clinical pharmacist.
Recent and current Phase II clinical trials in endometrial cancer: review of the state of art

Introduction: Endometrial cancer (EC) is the most common gynecological cancer in the developed world. For women with advanced or high-risk disease, survival has remained unchanged over the last 20 years highlighting the need for better therapies. Phase II trials are critical to ascertain an estimate of benefit and determine which new agents undergo further development. Areas covered: Based on a literature search of MEDLINE and ASCO over the last 5 years, the authors present Phase II clinical trial data in the context of EC management. They highlight ongoing clinical trials from the National Cancer Institute website and suggest future directions to address ongoing questions. Expert opinion: A better understanding of EC biology and high-quality preclinical studies will inform the future design of EC Phase II studies. Inclusion of correlative studies and continued longitudinal profiling in future trials is essential to elucidate mechanisms of drug resistance and response. Targeting the phosphoinisotol-3-kinase, angiogenesis, DNA repair and metabolic pathways appear promising strategies for subsets of patients with recurrent or advanced disease. Further, investigation of maintenance strategies and radio-sensitizing agents in the frontline setting should be explored. Given the patient demographic, and frequency of co-morbidities, tolerability and quality of life are key be considerations when designing future studies.
Using Shallow Semantic Parsing and Relation Extraction for Finding Contradiction in Text

Finding contradiction text is a fundamental problem in natural language understanding. Previous work on finding contradiction in text incorporate information derived from predicate-argument structures as features in supervised machine learning frameworks. In contrast to previous work, we combine shallow semantic representations derived from semantic role labeling with binary relations extracted from sentences in a rule-based framework. Evaluation experiments conducted on standard data sets indicated that our system achieves better recall and F1 score for contradiction detection than most of baseline methods, and the same recall as a state of the art supervised method for the task.
Growth Hormone Stimulates the Tyrosine Phosphorylation and Association of p125 Focal Adhesion Kinase (FAK) with JAK2

We have demonstrated that growth hormone (GH) activates focal adhesion kinase (FAK), and this activation results in the tyrosine phosphorylation of two FAK substrates, paxillin and tensin. The activation of FAK is time-dependent (maximal activation at 5–15 min) and dose-dependent (maximal activation at 0.05 nm). FAK and paxillin are constitutively associated in the unstimulated state, remain associated during the stimulation phase, and recruit tyrosine-phosphorylated tensin to the complex after GH stimulation. Half of the carboxyl-terminal region of the GH receptor is dispensable for FAK activation, but FAK activation does require the proline-rich box 1 region of the GH receptor, indicative that FAK is downstream of JAK2. FAK associates with JAK2 but not JAK1 after GH stimulation of cells. Using FAK-replete and FAK-deficient cells, we also show that FAK is not required for STAT-mediated transcriptional activation by GH. The use of FAK in the signal transduction pathway utilized by GH may be central to many of the pleiotropic effects of GH, including cytoskeletal reorganization, cell migration, chemotaxis, mitogenesis, and/or prevention of apoptosis and gene transcription.
A Case of Aripiprazole-Induced Tardive Dyskinesia with Dramatic Evolution

Aripiprazole is reported to be a good clinical safety profile antipsychotic. However, recent data suggest that the risk of tardive dyskinesia could be higher than initially thought. We report the case of aripiprazole-induced tardive dyskinesia with dramatic evolution in a patient with several risk factors, including older age and exposure to antipsychotic over a period longer than six months. This case and its dramatic evolution, associated with other cases recently published, suggest reconsidering the real risk of tardive dyskinesia associated with aripiprazole, particularly in the elderly.
Intimacy, Sexual Desire and Differentiation in Couplehood: A Theoretical and Methodological Review

The scientific community underlines that one of the main challenges for couples is the effect of time on sexual desire. Some studies suggest that although some dimensions associated with intimacy tend to increase during the relationship, sexual desire and the related constructs tend to decrease. Some researchers have recently suggested that couples’ relationships with high degrees of sharing and fusion might be particularly detrimental for the sustenance of sexual desire. However, the authors found no empirical or theoretical studies that investigate the relations between intimacy and desire. Recovering the concept of differentiation as a possible influencing variable between intimacy and desire, this article develops reflections on this theme, which is of paramount relevance for the couple viability.
Guidelines on the diagnosis and management of acute pulmonary embolism The Task Force for the Diagnosis and Management of Acute Pulmonary Embolism of the European Society of Cardiology ( ESC ) Endorsed by the European Respiratory Society ( ERS )

Authors/Task Force Members: Stavros V. Konstantinides* (Chairperson) (Germany/ Greece), Adam Torbicki* (Co-chairperson) (Poland), Giancarlo Agnelli (Italy), Nicolas Danchin (France), David Fitzmaurice (UK), Nazzareno Galiè (Italy), J. Simon R. Gibbs (UK), Menno V. Huisman (The Netherlands), Marc Humbert† (France), Nils Kucher (Switzerland), Irene Lang (Austria), MareikeLankeit (Germany), John Lekakis (Greece), Christoph Maack (Germany), Eckhard Mayer (Germany), Nicolas Meneveau (France), Arnaud Perrier (Switzerland), Piotr Pruszczyk (Poland), Lars H. Rasmussen (Denmark), Thomas H. Schindler (USA), Pavel Svitil (Czech Republic), Anton Vonk Noordegraaf (The Netherlands), Jose Luis Zamorano (Spain), Maurizio Zompatori (Italy)
Multiscale simulations of protein landscapes: Using coarse‐grained models as reference potentials to full explicit models

Evaluating the free‐energy landscape of proteins and the corresponding functional aspects presents a major challenge for computer simulation approaches. This challenge is due to the complexity of the landscape and the enormous computer time needed for converging simulations. The use of simplified coarse‐grained (CG) folding models offers an effective way of sampling the landscape but such a treatment, however, may not give the correct description of the effect of the actual protein residues. A general way around this problem that has been put forward in our early work (Fan et al., Theor Chem Acc 1999;103:77–80) uses the CG model as a reference potential for free‐energy calculations of different properties of the explicit model. This method is refined and extended here, focusing on improving the electrostatic treatment and on demonstrating key applications. These applications include: evaluation of changes of folding energy upon mutations, calculations of transition‐states binding free energies (which are crucial for rational enzyme design), evaluations of catalytic landscape, and evaluations of the time‐dependent responses to pH changes. Furthermore, the general potential of our approach in overcoming major challenges in studies of structure function correlation in proteins is discussed. Proteins 2010. © 2009 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Extending RBAC Model to Control Sequences of CRUD Expressions

— In database applications, access control is aimed at supervising users’ requests to access sensitive data. Users’ requests are mainly formalized by Create, Read, Update and Delete (CRUD) expressions. The supervision process can be formalized at a high level, such as based on the RBAC model, but in the end the relevant aspect is the data being accessed through each CRUD expression. In critical database applications access control can be enforced not on a CRUD by CRUD basis but enforced at the level of sequences of CRUD expressions (workflow). This situation can occur whenever established security policies are based on strict procedures that define step by step the actions (sequences of CRUD expressions) to be followed. Current RBAC models do not support this type of security policies. To overcome this security gap, we leverage previous researches to propose an extension to the RBAC model to control for each role which sequences of CRUD expressions are authorized. We demonstrate empirical evidence of the effectiveness of our proposal from a use case based on Java and JDBC. Our use case is based on typed security layers built from a software architectural model and also from metadata based on the proposed RBAC model extension.
Proximity of the maxillary artery to the mandibular ramus: an anatomic study using three-dimensional reconstruction of computer tomography.

The maxillary artery (MA) is the main source of brisk bleeding during maxillectomy and procedures in the subcondylar portion of the mandible. The purpose of the study was to investigate the relationship between the MA and the mandible in the infratemporal fossa. The CT scans of 100 patients were retrospectively evaluated. The distances from the MA to bony landmarks were assessed in a three-dimensional model of the CT scan. In the cases where the MA was lateral to the LP [164 of 200 MAs (82%)], the mean shortest distances from the MA to the apex of the coronoid and condyle and the deepest portion of the mandibular notch were 13.6 ± 1.6 mm, 21.3 ± 2.0 mm, and 3.6 ± 1.0 mm, respectively. The contact point between the MA and medial surface of the mandible was measured and found to be 3.6 ± 2.2 mm posterior and 1.7 ± 1.4 mm inferior relative to the deepest portion of the mandibular notch. In the cases where the MA was medial to the LP [36 of 200 MAs (18%)], the mean shortest distances from the MA to the apex of the coronoid and condyle and the deepest portion of the mandibular notch were 19.5 ± 2.5 mm, 20.7 ± 2.4 mm, and 16.3 ± 3.7 mm, respectively. The studied measurements will help guide surgeons to determine the anatomy of the operative field in relation to the MA and minimize risks of injuring the vessel.
Mind the Gap: Learning to Choose Gaps for Question Generation

Not all learning takes place in an educational setting: more and more self-motivated learners are turning to on-line text to learn about new topics. Our goal is to provide such learners with the well-known benefits of testing by automatically generating quiz questions for online text. Prior work on question generation has focused on the grammaticality of generated questions and generating effective multiple-choice distractors for individual question targets, both key parts of this problem. Our work focuses on the complementary aspect of determining what part of a sentence we should be asking about in the first place; we call this "gap selection. " We address this problem by asking human judges about the quality of questions generated from a Wikipedia-based corpus, and then training a model to effectively replicate these judgments. Our data shows that good gaps are of variable length and span all semantic roles, i.e., nouns as well as verbs, and that a majority of good questions do not focus on named entities. Our resulting system can generate fill-in-the-blank (cloze) questions from generic source materials.
Continuum simulations of biomembrane dynamics and the importance of hydrodynamic effects

Abstract Traditional particle-based simulation strategies are impractical for the study of lipid bilayers and biological membranes over the longest length and time scales (microns, seconds and longer) relevant to cellular biology. Continuum-based models developed within the frameworks of elasticity theory, fluid dynamics and statistical mechanics provide a framework for studying membrane biophysics over a range of mesoscopic to macroscopic length and time regimes, but the application of such ideas to simulation studies has occurred only relatively recently. We review some of our efforts in this direction with emphasis on the dynamics in model membrane systems. Several examples are presented that highlight the prominent role of hydrodynamics in membrane dynamics and we argue that careful consideration of fluid dynamics is key to understanding membrane biophysics at the cellular scale.