Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
International Journal of Molecular Sciences the Endothelin Type a Receptor as a Potential Therapeutic Target in Preeclampsia

Preeclampsia (PE) is a disorder of pregnancy typically characterized by new onset hypertension after gestational week 20 and proteinuria. Although PE is one of the leading causes of maternal and perinatal morbidity and death worldwide, the mechanisms of the pathogenesis of the disease remain unclear and treatment options are limited. However, there is increasing evidence to suggest that endothelin-1 (ET-1) plays a critical role in the pathophysiology of PE. Multiple studies report that ET-1 is increased in PE and some studies report a positive correlation between ET-1 and the severity of symptoms. A number of experimental models of PE are also associated with elevated tissue levels of prepro ET-1 mRNA. Moreover, experimental models of PE (placental ischemia, sFlt-1 infusion, Tumor necrosis factor (TNF)-α infusion, and Angiotensin II type 1 receptor autoantibody (AT1-AA) infusion) have proven to be susceptible to Endothelin Type A (ET A) receptor antagonism. While the results are promising, further work is needed to determine whether ET antagonists could provide an effective therapy for the management of preeclampsia.
A robust open-source algorithm to detect onset and duration of QRS complexes

This paper presents a novel algorithm to detect onset and duration of QRS complexes. After low-pass filtering, the ECG signal is converted to a curve length signal by a transform in which a nonlinear scaling factor is introduced to enhance the QRS complex and to suppress unwanted noise. Adaptive thresholds are applied to the length signal to determine the onset and duration of the QRS complex. The algorithm was evaluated with the complete set of single channel ECGs (signal O) from the MIT-BlH Arrhythmia Database, and achieved a gross QRS sensitivity of 99.65% and a gross QRS positive predictive accuracy of 99.77%. The QRS onset determination is very stable and is insensitive to QRS morphology change. The noise tolerance of the algorithm was evaluated using the MIT-BIH Noise Stress Test Database. The C source code for the single-channel algorithm has been contributed to PhysioToolkit and is freely available from PhysioNet (www.physionet.org).
Mathematical Analysis of a Kinetic Model for Cell Movement in Network Tissues

Mesenchymal motion describes the movement of cells in biological tissues formed by fibre networks. An important example is the migration of tumour cells through collagen networks during the process of metastasis formation. We investigate the mesenchymal motion model proposed by T. Hillen in [14] in higher dimensions. We formulate the problem as an evolution equation in a Banach space of measure-valued functions and use methods from semigroup theory to show the global existence of mild and classical solutions. We investigate steady states of the model and show that patterns of network type exist as steady states. For the case of constant fibre distribution, we find an explicit solution and we prove the convergence to the parabolic limit.
Grip Change as an Information Side Channel for Mobile Touch Interaction

In order to reach targets with one hand on common large mobile touch displays, users tilt and shift the device in their hand. In this work, we use this grip change as a continuous information stream for detecting where the user will touch while their finger is still en-route. We refer to this as in the air prediction. We show that grip change detected using standard mobile motion sensors produces similar in the air touch point predictions to techniques that use auxiliary sensor arrays, even in varying physical scenarios such as interacting in a moving vehicle. Finally, our model that combines grip change and the resulting touch point predicted where users intended to land, lowering error rates by 41%.
Diabetes in the elderly

The prevalence of both type 2 diabetes and prediabetes increases with advancing age. The most important factors leading to hyperglycaemia are as follows: deficiency of insulin secretion developing with age, and growing insulin resistance caused by a change in body composition and sarcopaenia. Clinical features of diabetes in the elderly could be different. Diabetes in elderly people is often diagnosed with delay due to atypical symptoms (dementia, urinary incontinence) and occurrence of mainly postprandial hyperglycaemia. Elderly people are more exposed to diabetes complications, have more risk of myocardial infarction and end-stage renal disease, and are hospitalised more often due to hypoglycaemia than are younger patients. Elderly people with diabetes are a heterogeneous group with different life expectancy, concomitant of chronic diseases, and the ability to self-control blood glucose or give themselves an injection. The therapy should be individualised. Older people with long-term diabetes and numerous chronic complications need a more liberal approach to reach specific goals of therapy. Additional goals should be avoiding hypoglycaemia, safety of the therapy, and its acceptance by the patient.
Effects of odor on emotion, with implications

The sense of smell is found widely in the animal kingdom. Human and animal studies show that odor perception is modulated by experience and/or physiological state (such as hunger), and that some odors can arouse emotion, and can lead to the recall of emotional memories. Further, odors can influence psychological and physiological states. Individual odorants are mapped via gene-specified receptors to corresponding glomeruli in the olfactory bulb, which directly projects to the piriform cortex and the amygdala without a thalamic relay. The odors to which a glomerulus responds reflect the chemical structure of the odorant. The piriform cortex and the amygdala both project to the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) which with the amygdala is involved in emotion and associative learning, and to the entorhinal/hippocampal system which is involved in long-term memory including episodic memory. Evidence that some odors can modulate emotion and cognition is described, and the possible implications for the treatment of psychological problems, for example in reducing the effects of stress, are considered.
Fistula-first and catheter-last: fading certainties and growing doubts.

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The Role of Two-Component Regulation Systems in the physiology of the Bacterial Cell

Two-component regulation systems (TCRSs) are the dominant type of signal transduction system in prokaryotes that are used to inform the cellular trancriptional machinery (and additional targets for regulation, like the motility apparatus) about actual changes in the extracellular physico-chemical conditions. We now review their molecular structure and enzymatic characteristics, their mutual interactions and its implications, and their role in cellular physiology. Specific emphasis is placed on the ArcB/A system, a representative of the phosphorelay type of TCRS, and a key player in the adjustment of the cellular make-up of enterobacteria in response to alterations in the oxygen availability. Also some applied aspects of the TCRSs are discussed, i.e. their role as a target to develop new anti-bacterials and their application in biotechnology (or: ‘synthetic biology’).
Coexisting Depression and Dementia in a Community Survey of the Elderly

We report here on the coexistence of dementia and depression in a community population aged 75 years and older. Complete information about mood and cognition was available for 286 cognitively intact subjects selected for assessment because of their low scores on the Mini–Mental State, and for 158 mildly and moderately demented subjects. Severely demented subjects, who were incapable of providing information, were excluded. Five percent (8/158) of demented subjects also fulfilled criteria for major depressive disorder Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, third edition (DSM-III) compared with 9% (27/286) of cognitively intact subjects. No substantial differences existed in the symptoms reported by demented depressives and nondemented depressives, but subjects who suffered from both disorders were so markedly apathetic that their depression might easily have been overlooked had specific enquiries not been made. Depression was particularly associated with dementia secondary to multi-infarct and Parkinson's disease. When reviewed one year later, 2 of the 18 surviving depressed, nondemented subjects showed evidence of dementia. Both presented unusual diagnostic difficulties, however, and no evidence emerged that large numbers of elderly people will be misclassified in community surveys that include a mental state examination, cognitive testing, and an informant interview.
The conserved histone deacetylase Rpd3 and its DNA binding subunit Ume6 control dynamic transcript architecture during mitotic growth and meiotic development

It was recently reported that the sizes of many mRNAs change when budding yeast cells exit mitosis and enter the meiotic differentiation pathway. These differences were attributed to length variations of their untranslated regions. The function of UTRs in protein translation is well established. However, the mechanism controlling the expression of distinct transcript isoforms during mitotic growth and meiotic development is unknown. In this study, we order developmentally regulated transcript isoforms according to their expression at specific stages during meiosis and gametogenesis, as compared to vegetative growth and starvation. We employ regulatory motif prediction, in vivo protein-DNA binding assays, genetic analyses and monitoring of epigenetic amino acid modification patterns to identify a novel role for Rpd3 and Ume6, two components of a histone deacetylase complex already known to repress early meiosis-specific genes in dividing cells, in mitotic repression of meiosis-specific transcript isoforms. Our findings classify developmental stage-specific early, middle and late meiotic transcript isoforms, and they point to a novel HDAC-dependent control mechanism for flexible transcript architecture during cell growth and differentiation. Since Rpd3 is highly conserved and ubiquitously expressed in many tissues, our results are likely relevant for development and disease in higher eukaryotes.
Evidence That Transcription Factor IIB Is Required for a Post-assembly Step in Transcription Initiation*

Mutation of glutamate 62 to lysine in yeast transcription factor (TF) IIB (Sua7) causes a cold-sensitive phenotype. This mutant also leads to preferential transcription of downstream start sites on some promoters in vivo. To explore the molecular nature of these phenotypes, the TFIIB E62K mutant was characterized in vitro. The mutant interacts with TATA-binding protein normally. In three different assays, the mutant can also interact with RNA polymerase II and recruit it and the other basal transcription factors to a promoter. Despite the ability to assemble a transcription complex, the TFIIB E62K protein is severely defective in transcription in vitro. Therefore, the role of TFIIB must be more than simply bridging TATA-binding protein and polymerase at the promoter. We propose that the region around Glu-62 in yeast TFIIB plays a role in start site selection, perhaps mediating a conformational change in the polymerase or the DNA during the search for initiation sites. This step may be related to the yeast-specific spacing between TATA elements and start sites since mutations of the corresponding glutamate in mammalian TFIIB do not produce a similar effect.
A PWM Buck Converter With Load-Adaptive Power Transistor Scaling Scheme Using Analog-Digital Hybrid Control for High Energy Efficiency in Implantable Biomedical Systems

We report a pulse width modulation (PWM) buck converter that is able to achieve a power conversion efficiency (PCE) of >80% in light loads (<;100 μA) for implantable biomedical systems. In order to achieve a high PCE for the given light loads, the buck converter adaptively reconfigures the size of power PMOS and NMOS transistors and their gate drivers in accordance with load currents, while operating at a fixed frequency of 1 MHz. The buck converter employs the analog-digital hybrid control scheme for coarse/fine adjustment of power transistors. The coarse digital control generates an approximate duty cycle necessary for driving a given load and selects an appropriate width of power transistors to minimize redundant power dissipation. The fine analog control provides the final tuning of the duty cycle to compensate for the error from the coarse digital control. The mode switching between the analog and digital controls is accomplished by a mode arbiter which estimates the average of duty cycles for the given load condition from limit cycle oscillations (LCO) induced by coarse adjustment. The fabricated buck converter achieved a peak efficiency of 86.3% at 1.4 mA and >80% efficiency for a wide range of load conditions from 45 μA to 4.1 mA, while generating 1 V output from 2.5-3.3 V supply. The converter occupies 0.375 mm2 in 0.18 μm CMOS processes and requires two external components: 1.2 μF capacitor and 6.8 μH inductor.
Semi-automating small-scale source code reuse via structural correspondence

Developers perform small-scale reuse tasks to save time and to increase the quality of their code, but due to their small scale, the costs of such tasks can quickly outweigh their benefits. Existing approaches focus on locating source code for reuse but do not support the integration of the located code within the developer's system, thereby leaving the developer with the burden of performing integration manually. This paper presents an approach that uses the developer's context to help integrate the reused source code into the developer's own source code. The approach approximates a theoretical framework (higher-order anti-unification modulo theories), known to be undecidable in general, to determine candidate correspondences between the source code to be reused and the developer's current (incomplete) system. This approach has been implemented in a prototype tool, called Jigsaw, that identifies and evaluates candidate correspondences greedily with respect to the highest similarity. Situations involving multiple candidate correspondences with similarities above a defined threshold are presented to the developer for resolution. Two empirical evaluations were conducted: an experiment comparing the quality of Jigsaw's results against suspected cases of small-scale reuse in an industrial system; and case studies with two industrial developers to consider its practical usefulness and usability issues.
The Prediction in Computer Color Matching of Dentistry Based on GA+BP Neural Network

Although the use of computer color matching can reduce the influence of subjective factors by technicians, matching the color of a natural tooth with a ceramic restoration is still one of the most challenging topics in esthetic prosthodontics. Back propagation neural network (BPNN) has already been introduced into the computer color matching in dentistry, but it has disadvantages such as unstable and low accuracy. In our study, we adopt genetic algorithm (GA) to optimize the initial weights and threshold values in BPNN for improving the matching precision. To our knowledge, we firstly combine the BPNN with GA in computer color matching in dentistry. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method improves the precision and prediction robustness of the color matching in restorative dentistry.
Automatic learning of domain model for personalized hypermedia applications

This paper deals with the automatic building of personalized hypermedia. We build upon ideas developed for educational hypermedia; the definition of a domain model and the use of overlay user models. Since much work has been done on learning user models and adapting hypermedia based on such models, we tackle the core problem: the automatic definition of a domain model for a static hypermedia.
Slack matching quasi delay-insensitive circuits

Slack matching is an optimization that determines the amount of buffering that must be added to each channel of a slack elastic asynchronous system in order to reduce its cycle time to a specified target. We present two methods of expressing the slack matching problem as a mixed integer linear programming problem. The first method is applicable to systems composed of either full-buffers or half-buffers but not both. The second method is applicable to systems composed of any combination of full-buffers and half-buffers
Psychiatric, Somatic and Other Functional Gastrointestinal Disorders in Patients With Irritable Bowel Syndrome at a Tertiary Care Center

Background/Aims To study the prevalence of somatic and psychiatric co-morbidities in the patients of irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) and to assess the quality of life (QOL) of these patients. Methods One hundred and eighty-four IBS patients and 198 controls were included. Diagnosis of IBS, its sub-classification and assessment of other functional gastrointestinal disorders (FGIDs) was made on basis of Rome III criteria. Severity of IBS was assessed using IBS severity scoring system. Psychiatric evaluation was done using Patient Heath Questionnaire. QOL was evaluated using WHO QOL-BREF. Results One hundred and forty-seven (79.9%) and 158 (85.9%) patients with IBS had at least one other FGID or at least one somatic co-morbidity, respectively. Higher number of patients had at least one psychiatric co-morbidity compared to controls (79.9% vs 34.3%; P < 0.001). Major depressive syndrome (47.3% vs 5.1%; P < 0.001), somatoform disorder (50% vs 14.6%; P < 0.001) and panic syndrome (44% vs 11.6%; P < 0.001) were more common in IBS than controls. Only 14 (7.6%) patients were receiving drug treatment for their psychiatric illness. Severe IBS symptoms were present in significantly higher number of patients with constipation predominant IBS than diarrhea predominant IBS. Those with severe disease had higher prevalence of psychiatric (95.1%) and somatic (96.7%) co-morbidities compared with mild disease. QOL of IBS patients was significantly lower in all four domains compared to controls. Presence of at least one other FGID was significantly associated with presence of one or more psychiatric co-morbidity (P < 0.001). Conclusions Majority of IBS patients presenting to a tertiary care center had associated psychiatric, somatic co-morbidities and reduced QOL. Very few of them received specific psychiatric treatment.
Instruction punning: lightweight instrumentation for x86-64

Existing techniques for injecting probes into running applications are limited; they either fail to support probing arbitrary locations, or to support scalable, rapid toggling of probes. We introduce a new technique on x86-64, called instruction punning, which allows scalable probes at any instruction. The key idea is that when we inject a jump instruction, the relative address of the jump serves simultaneously as data and as an instruction sequence. We show that this approach achieves probe invocation overheads of only a few dozen cycles, and probe activation/deactivation costs that are cheaper than a system call, even when all threads in the system are both invoking probes and toggling them.
Community Development and Sport Participation

Many sport organizations face the challenge of declining sport participation. Traditional methods of addressing this challenge such as promotional ads and top-down initiatives that ignore community needs have not succeeded in sustaining sport participation. This action research study assessed the impact of the building tennis communities model, a community development approach based on three key elements: identifying a community champion, developing collaborative partnerships, and delivering quality sport programming. Eighteen communities across Canada were supported by the national sport governing body, Tennis Canada, to participate in the study. Findings demonstrated that communities were able to identify a community champion and deliver quality programs that aimed to increase and sustain tennis participation; however, partnership building was implemented in a very preliminary and incomplete manner. Recommendations about the benefits of using a community development approach to not only increase sport p.
Rho GTPases as regulators of mitosis and cytokinesis in mammalian cells

Rho GTPases regulate a diverse range of cellular functions primarily through their ability to modulate microtubule dynamics and the actin-myosin cytoskeleton. Both of these cytoskeletal structures are crucial for a mitotic cell division. Specifically, their assembly and disassembly is tightly regulated in a temporal manner to ensure that each mitotic stage occurs in the correct sequential order and not prematurely until the previous stage is completed. Thus, it is not surprising that the Rho GTPases, RhoA, and Cdc42, have reported roles in several stages of mitosis: cell cortex stiffening during cell rounding, mitotic spindle formation, and bi-orient attachment of the spindle microtubules to the kinetochore and during cytokinesis play multiple roles in establishing the division plane, assembly, and activation of the contractile ring, membrane ingression, and abscission. Here, I review the molecular mechanisms regulating the spatial and temporal activation of RhoA and Cdc42 during mitosis, and how this is critical for mitotic progression and completion.
Thermodynamic analysis of structure-activity relationships of drugs. Prediction of optimal structure.

A new quantitative and comprehensive approach relating structures of congeneric drugs to their relative biological activities is presented. The analysis is derived on the basis that structure-activity relationships represent a family, a different situation applying to each phenomenon such as drug absorption, drug transport, drug transformation, and drug excretion. The present treatment considers the relationship under equilibrium or quasiequilibrium conditions, thus permitting rigorous thermodynamic treatment. On the basis of the effect of structural changes on the distributive tendencies of the drug in various body tissues, including the receptor site, relationships have been derived which are surprisingly in good agreement with available experimental data. The approach suggests a rational way to predict the degree of lipophilicity which would result in maximal activity.