Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Geobacillus stearothermophilus V iscS Gene, Encoding Cysteine Desulfurase, Confers Resistance to Potassium Tellurite in Escherichia coli K-12

ABSTRACT Many eubacteria are resistant to the toxic oxidizing agent potassium tellurite, and tellurite resistance involves diverse biochemical mechanisms. Expression of the iscS gene from Geobacillus stearothermophilus V, which is naturally resistant to tellurite, confers tellurite resistance in Escherichia coli K-12, which is naturally sensitive to tellurite. The G. stearothermophilus iscS gene encodes a cysteine desulfurase. A site-directed mutation in iscS that prevents binding of its pyridoxal phosphate cofactor abolishes both enzyme activity and its ability to confer tellurite resistance in E. coli. Expression of the G. stearothermophilus iscS gene confers tellurite resistance in tellurite-hypersensitive E. coli iscS and sodA sodB mutants (deficient in superoxide dismutase) and complements the auxotrophic requirement of an E. coli iscS mutant for thiamine but not for nicotinic acid. These and other results support the hypothesis that the reduction of tellurite generates superoxide anions and that the primary targets of superoxide damage in E. coli are enzymes with iron-sulfur clusters.
Protocols for Visually Guided Navigation Assessment of Efficacy of Retina-Directed Cell or Gene Therapy in Canines

There has been marked progress in recent years in developing gene delivery approaches for the treatment of inherited blinding diseases. Many of the proof-of-concept studies have utilized rodent models of retinal degeneration. In those models, tests of visual function include a modified water maze swim test, optokinetic nystagmus, and light-dark activity assays. Test paradigms used in rodents can be difficult to replicate in large animals due to their size and awareness of non-visual aspects of the test system. Two types of visual behavior assays have been utilized in canines: an obstacle avoidance course and a forced choice Y maze. Given the progress in developing cell and gene therapies in large animals, such tests will become more and more valuable. This study provides guidelines for carrying out such tests and assesses the challenges and benefits associated with each test.
Adjuvant therapy with the pineal hormone melatonin in patients with lymph node relapse due to malignant melanoma

Abstract: Several experimental studies have shown that melatonin has an oncostatic action, either by stimulating host antitumor immune defenses or by directly inhibiting the growth of some cancer histotypes, including melanoma. Our previous clinical studies demonstrated that melatonin may induce stabilization of the disease in untreatable metastatic solid tumor patients, and these results have been confirmed by others, at least in patients with metastatic melanoma. On the contrary, at present there are no data related to the possible efficacy of melatonin as an adjuvant endocrine therapy. This study was performed to investigate the impact of melatonin therapy on the disease‐free survival (DFS) in melanoma patients surgically treated for regional node recurrence. The study included 30 node‐relapsed melanoma patients, who were randomized to receive no treatment or adjuvant therapy of melatonin (20 mg/day orally in the evening) every day until disease progression. After a median follow‐up of 31 months, the percent of DFS was significantly higher in melatonin‐treated individuals than in controls. The DFS curve was also significantly longer in melatonin group than in controls. No melatonin‐related toxicity was observed. This preliminary study suggests that an adjuvant endocrine therapy with melatonin may be effective in preventing disease progression in node‐relapsed melanoma patients.
Changes in head posture after rapid maxillary expansion in patients with nasopharyngeal obstruction

Introduction: Nasopharyngeal obstruction is an important etiologic factor in the development of an extreme vertical growth facialpattern, and insufficient transversal growth of the maxilla. The treatment outcomes associated with rapid maxillary expansion in theliterature are mainly discussed in terms of changes in dentofacial morphology, without special reference to changes in the pharyngealairway, the position of the mandible, hyoid bone and the tongue. Aim: The aim of this study was to evaluate the effects of rapid maxillary expansion (RME), on changes in head posture and airway dimension. Materials and methods: The cephalometric evaluation was conducted on thirty lateral cephalograms of patients with nasopharyngeal obstruction (mean age 9.11 years; standard deviation (SD) ± 2.0; range 8-14 years) treated with appliance for rapid maxillary expansion. Patients were randomly divided into two groups: 1) study group comprised of 15 patients treated with RME immediately after the first visit; 2) a control group comprised of 15 subjects monitored for approximately 12 months prior to commencing therapy, who became untreated controls. Lateral cephalograms, taken in the natural head position, were obtained at the first visitand 6 months later for all subjects. Six angular measurements were measured to describe craniocervical angulation, and five linear measurements were measured to describe airway dimension. Results: The investigated group treated with RME shows a statistically significant decrease in craniocervical angulation, especially at the angleof interaction between palatal plane and the tangent odontoid processus (4.07 degrees, for PP/OPT angle) and angle interaction between palatal plane and the tangent of cervical vertebra (4.95 degrees for PP/CVT angle). Airway dimension in the treated group increased, especially at the levels PNS-ad1 (2.52 mm), ve-pve (2.97 mm), and uv-puv (2.88 mm). No significant changes were observed in the control group. Conclusions: RME is a treatment procedure capable of providing increased nasopharyngeal airway adequacy, changing the head posture as well as position of the mandible and tongue, creating the conditions for myofunctional balance and proper development of craniofacial complex and changing mode of respiration.
Interruption of sympathetic and vagal-mediated afferent responses by transmural myocardial infarction.

We have demonstrated previously that sympathetic and vagal afferents travel in an apical-to-basal course in the heart, and can be stimulated selectively with epicardial applications of bradykinin and nicotine, respectively. In this study we tested the hypothesis that transmural myocardial infarction interrupts sympathetic and vagal afferent fibers traveling through the infarction and produces regions of afferent denervation in areas apical to the infarction. In open-chest, chloralose-anesthetized dogs, transmural myocardial infarction was created by embolizing a diagonal branch of the left anterior descending coronary artery with a vinyl latex solution that was injected directly into the artery and hardened rapidly. The transmural nature of the infarction was verified by the nitro blue tetrazolium staining technique for dehydrogenase enzymes. Epicardial applications of bradykinin (5 micrograms) and nicotine (50 micrograms) were used to stimulate chemically sensitive sympathetic and vagal afferent nerve endings, respectively. Twenty-nine dogs were studied before and 90 min after creation of transmural myocardial infarction. In 20 dogs, epicardial bradykinin applied before production of transmural myocardial infarction produced a maximal pressor response of 13 +/- 3 mm Hg 40 sec after application (p less than .01 vs preapplication values), while topical nicotine produced a maximal depressor response of 14 +/- 2 mm Hg (p less than .01 vs preapplication values) 20 sec after application at all sites tested. Ninety minutes after production of transmural myocardial infarction, epicardial sites basal to the infarction continued to respond normally to both drugs, while sites within the area of infarction and apical to the area (noninfarcted myocardium) no longer showed a pressor response to topical bradykinin or a depressor response to topical nicotine. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)
Both the Kind and Magnitude of Stimulus Are Important in Overcoming the Negative Regulation of Macrophage Activation by PGE2

Macrophages activated for tumor cell killing by bacterial lipopolysaccharide (LPS) were shown to lose their cytolytic activity if exposed to physiological levels of prostagalandin E2 (PGE2). Increasing the LPS stimulus more than 100‐fold over the amount needed to activate the cells did not substantially increase their resistance to the negative regulatory effect of PGE2. By contrast, killing mediated by macrophages activated by a mixture of LPS and gamma interferon was maintained. The degree of resistance conferred was directly related to the magnitude of the stimulus employed, reaching the point where not even 10–5 M PGE2 would diminish killing. Killing by both activated resident and inflammatory peritoneal macrophages could be maintained, but it was easier to do so if the cells had been elicited by an inflammatory stimulus. A preparation of type I interferons produced by cells of the macrophage cell line J774A.1 behaved similarly, but was over 500 times less efficient at helping to maintain killing than gamma (type II) interferon was. Alpha interferon alone, i.e., without LPS, was capable both of activating macrophages and of maintaining the activated state in the presence of PGE2. The capacity for both activation and maintenance could be strikingly enhanced, however, by mixing alpha and gamma interferons together under conditions that were free of detectable LPS. The data reported here collectively suggest that induction and maintenance of macrophage activation may be separable mechanistically, and that the interferons are important to host defense not only because they participate in the induction of macrophage activation for tumor cell killing but also because they help to maintain the activated state once it has been induced.
Using Interceptors to Enhance CORBA

The integration of distributed computing and the object model leads to distributed object computing, in which objects rather than processes are distributed across multiple computers. A well-established standard for distributed object computing is the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA). Previously, you would have had to create-and enable the application to use-the components that provide such additional capabilities. Using these components requires specialized knowledge and understanding of problems outside the application domain. With the advent of interceptors-non-application components that can alter application behavior-you can enhance CORBA applications at runtime with components whose operation is transparent to both the application and the CORBA framework, modifying application behavior without modifying the application or the CORBA framework.
Hydrostats: A Python Package for Characterizing Errors between Observed and Predicted Time Series

Hydrologists use a number of tools to compare model results to observed flows. These include tools to pre-process the data, data frames to store and access data, visualization and plotting routines, error metrics for single realizations, and ensemble metrics for stochastic realizations to calibrate and evaluate hydrologic models. We present an open-source Python package to help characterize predicted and observed hydrologic time series data called hydrostats which has three main capabilities: Data storage and retrieval based on the Python Data Analysis Library (pandas), visualization and plotting routines using Matplotlib, and a metrics library that currently contains routines to compute over 70 different error metrics and routines for ensemble forecast skill scores. Hydrostats data storage and retrieval functions allow hydrologists to easily compare all, or portions of, a time series. For example, it makes it easy to compare observed and modeled data only during April over a 30-year period. The package includes literature references, explanations, examples, and source code. In this note, we introduce the hydrostats package, provide short examples of the various capabilities, and provide some background on programming issues and practices. The hydrostats package provides a range of tools to make characterizing and analyzing model data easy and efficient. The electronic supplement provides working hydrostats examples.
International Journal of Molecular Sciences the Complex Relationship between Metals and Carbonic Anhydrase: New Insights and Perspectives

Carbonic anhydrase is a ubiquitous metalloenzyme, which catalyzes the reversible hydration of CO 2 to HCO 3 ´ and H +. Metals play a key role in the bioactivity of this metalloenzyme, although their relationships with CA have not been completely clarified to date. The aim of this review is to explore the complexity and multi-aspect nature of these relationships, since metals can be cofactors of CA, but also inhibitors of CA activity and modulators of CA expression. Moreover, this work analyzes new insights and perspectives that allow translating new advances in basic science on the interaction between CA and metals to applications in several fields of research, ranging from biotechnology to environmental sciences.
Spontaneous Rupture of Hepatocellular Carcinoma

Forty-two cases of ruptured hepatoma with intra-abdominal haemorrhage were seen over a period of eight years in the professorial surgical unit at the Queen Mary Hospital, Hong Kong. In all, 207 cases of liver cancer were seen during this period, giving an incidence of rupture of 14·5%. There were 37 men and five women. The clinical features were the sudden onset of pain with shock and the presence of blood in the peritoneal cavity. The diagnosis was made before operation on suspicion and by a process of elimination. In cases of doubt paracentesis abdominis was performed to determine whether there was blood in the peritoneal cavity. Treatment was directed to control of haemorrhage and resection. The prognosis, although extremely poor, is no worse than the hepatocellular carcinoma that has not ruptured. There was one long-term survivor—a patient who had undergone an extensive resection. The man was alive and well after more than five years.
A Very Fast Simulator for Exploring the Many-Core Future

Although multi-core architectures with a large number of cores ("many-cores'') are considered the future of computing systems, there are currently few practical tools to quickly explore both their design and general program scalability. In this paper, we present \emph{SiMany}, a discrete-event-based many-core simulator able to support more than a thousand cores while being orders of magnitude faster than existing flexible approaches. One of the difficult challenges for a reasonably realistic many-core simulation is to model faithfully the potentially high concurrency a program can exhibit. SiMany uses a novel virtual time synchronization technique, called \emph{spatial synchronization}, to achieve this goal in a completely \emph{local} and \emph{distributed} fashion, which diminishes interactions and preserves locality. Compared to previous simulators, it raises the level of \emph{abstraction} by focusing on modeling concurrent interactions between cores, which enables fast coarse comparisons of high-level architecture design choices and parallel programs performance. Sequential pieces of code are executed \emph{natively} for maximal speed. We exercise the simulator with a set of dwarf-like task-based benchmarks with dynamic control flow and irregular data structures. Scalability results are validated through comparison with a cycle-level simulator up to 64 cores. They are also shown consistent with well-known benchmark characteristics. We finally demonstrate how SiMany can be used to efficiently compare the benchmarks' behavior over a wide range of architectural organizations, such as polymorphic architectures and network of clusters.
Using epidemiological models to estimate the health effects of diet behaviour change: the example of tailored fruit and vegetable promotion

Abstract Objective To explore the use of epidemiological modelling for the estimation of health effects of behaviour change interventions, using the example of computer-tailored nutrition education aimed at fruit and vegetable consumption in The Netherlands. Design The effects of the intervention on changes in consumption were obtained from an earlier evaluation study. The effect on health outcomes was estimated using an epidemiological multi-state life table model. Input data for the model consisted of relative risk estimates for cardiovascular disease and cancers, data on disease occurrence and mortality, and survey data on the consumption of fruits and vegetables. Results If the computer-tailored nutrition education reached the entire adult population and the effects were sustained, it could result in a mortality decrease of 0.4 to 0.7% and save 72 to 115 life-years per 100 000 persons aged 25 years or older. Healthy life expectancy is estimated to increase by 32.7 days for men and 25.3 days for women. The true effect is likely to lie between this theoretical maximum and zero effect, depending mostly on durability of behaviour change and reach of the intervention. Conclusion Epidemiological models can be used to estimate the health impact of health promotion interventions.
Application of distances between terms for flat and hierarchical data

In machine learning, distance-based algorithms, and other approaches, use information that is represented by propositional data. However, this kind of representation can be quite restrictive and, in many cases, it requires more complex structures in order to represent data in a more natural way. Terms are the basis for functional and logic programming representation. Distances between terms are a useful tool not only to compare terms, but also to determine the search space in many of these applications. This dissertation applies distances between terms, exploiting the features of each distance and the possibility to compare from propositional data types to hierarchical representations. The distances between terms are applied through the k-NN (k-nearest neighbor) classification algorithm using XML as a common language representation. To be able to represent these data in an XML structure and to take advantage of the benefits of distance between terms, it is necessary to apply some transformations. These transformations allow the conversion of flat data into hierarchical data represented in XML, using some techniques based on intuitive associations between the names and values of variables and associations based on attribute similarity. Several experiments with the distances between terms of Nienhuys-Cheng and Estruch et al. were performed. In the case of originally propositional data, these distances are compared to the Euclidean distance. In all cases, the experiments were performed with the distance-weighted k-nearest neighbor algorithm, using several exponents for the attraction function (weighted distance). It can be seen that in some cases, the term distances can significantly improve the results on approaches applied to flat representations.
Atmospheric Particulate Matter Variability during 2014 at Buenos Aires City (Argentina) Comparing Ground-Based Measurements and Satellite Data

Air pollution is a major environmental risk to health. In particular, exposure to high concentrations of small particulates (PM10 and PM2.5) is related to increased mortality and morbidity. In Argentina, only at Buenos Aires city (34.4° S 58.3° W), which together with the surrounding districts accounts for the 30% of the total country population, continuous measurements of air quality are carried out. Though ground-based stations provide very accurate PM concentration values, they have very limited spatial coverage and may not be sufficient to assess the level of population exposure. Satellite-based is a valid alternative to fill these observational gaps. In this work, the MODIS 3 km × 3 km AOD retrievals for 2014, for both Terra and Aqua, were employed to evaluate the spatio-temporal variation of atmospheric aerosols over Buenos Aires and its metropolitan area in a year period. The MODIS AOD dataset is validated using the AOD dataset reported by the CEILAP_BA AERONET station (34.5° S 58.5° W). Satellite data show some areas with higher AOD values throughout the year-period in which no PM monitoring is not actually being carried out. These areas correspond mainly to a west zone within Buenos Aires territory and two other areas, at west and south Buenos Aires districts. Buenos Aires local government and the surrounding districts should make an effort to expand the monitoring network in order to make it representative of the actual exposure to particulate matter of the whole population.
Complement deficiencies in humans and animals: Links to autoimmunity

Complement is involved in the pathogenesis of systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) in multiple ways and may act as both friend and foe. Inherited homozygous deficiency of one of the earliest components of the classical pathway is strongly associated with susceptibility to the development of SLE. However, complement is also implicated in the effector inflammatory phase of the autoimmune response that characterizes the disease. A further paradox in the links between complement and SLE is the observation that autoantibodies to some complement proteins, especially to C1q, develop as part of the autoantibody response. In this chapter, the role of the complement system in SLE is reviewed and hypotheses advanced to explain the complex relationships between complement and lupus.
Integrating Heterogeneous Grid Computing Environments

Grid computing provides integration of different environments, creating a unified system, where organizations might share, manage and access different resources regardless where they are localized. However, the lack of integration among different grid computing systems does not provide total exploitation of resources. This work investigates and develops an interface for integration of two heterogeneous grid computing environments: Globus and InteGrade. Such integration increases the computational power, transparently. Users will be able to submit jobs through both grid environments and applications will be executed into Globus, or into InteGrade or into both systems.
A Cochlear-Implant Processor for Encoding Music and Lowering Stimulation Power

Cochlear implants (CIs), or bionic ears, restore hearing in profoundly deaf (greater than -90 dB hearing loss) patients. They function by transforming frequency patterns in sound into corresponding spatial electrode-stimulation patterns for the auditory nerve. Over the past 20 years, improvements in sound-processing strategies, in the number of electrodes and channels, and in the rate of stimulation have yielded improved sentence and word recognition scores in patients. Next- generation implants will be fully implanted inside the patient's body. Consequently, power consumption requirements for signal processing will be very stringent.