Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Genetic, Environmental, and Disease-Associated Correlates of Vitamin D Status in Children with CKD.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES Vitamin D deficiency is endemic in children with CKD. We sought to investigate the association of genetic disposition, environmental factors, vitamin D supplementation, and renal function on vitamin D status in children with CKD. DESIGN, SETTING, PARTICIPANTS, & MEASUREMENTS Serum 25-hydroxy-vitamin D, 1,25-dihydroxy-vitamin D, and 24,25-dihydroxy-vitamin D concentrations were measured cross-sectionally in 500 children from 12 European countries with CKD stages 3-5. All patients were participants of the Cardiovascular Comorbidity in Children with Chronic Kidney Disease Study, had CKD stage 3-5, and were age 6-18 years old. Patients were genotyped for single-nucleotide polymorphisms in the genes encoding 25-hydroxylase, vitamin D binding protein, 7-dehydrocholesterol reductase, and 24-hydroxylase. Associations of genetic status, season, local solar radiation, oral vitamin D supplementation, and disease-associated factors with vitamin D status were assessed. RESULTS Two thirds of patients were vitamin D deficient (25-hydroxy-vitamin D <16 ng/ml). 25-Hydroxy-vitamin D concentrations varied with season and were twofold higher in vitamin D-supplemented patients (21.6 [14.1] versus 10.4 [10.1] ng/ml; P<0.001). Glomerulopathy, albuminuria, and girls were associated with lower 25-hydroxy-vitamin D levels. 24,25-dihydroxy-vitamin D levels were closely correlated with 25-hydroxy-vitamin D and 1,25-dihydroxy-vitamin D (r=0.87 and r=0.55; both P<0.001). 24,25-dihydroxy-vitamin D concentrations were higher with higher c-terminal fibroblast growth factor 23 and inversely correlated with intact parathyroid hormone. Whereas 25-hydroxy-vitamin D levels were independent of renal function, 24,25-dihydroxy-vitamin D levels were lower with lower eGFR. Vitamin D deficiency was more prevalent in Turkey than in other European regions independent of supplementation status and disease-related factors. Single-nucleotide polymorphisms in the vitamin D binding protein gene were independently associated with lower 25-hydroxy-vitamin D and higher 24,25-dihydroxy-vitamin D. CONCLUSIONS Disease-related factors and vitamin D supplementation are the main correlates of vitamin D status in children with CKD. Variants in the vitamin D binding protein showed weak associations with the vitamin D status.
Social support, overseas adjustments and work performance of foreign labors in Taiwan

The study uses social support as a dependent variable to explore the relationship among social support, overseas adjustment and work performance of the foreignlabours of high technology firms at export and processing zone in Taiwan. A questionnaire survey was used and, out of a total of 518 sent questionnaires, 213 valid ones were collected for data analysis. Findings are: 1) The higher the level of social support, the better the adjustment to living overseas; 2) The higher the level of social support, the better the work performance of the individual; 3) Better overseas adjustment leads to enhanced work performance of the foreign labours; 4) The relationship of overseas adjustments to social support and work performance has a partially mediating effect. Keywords: Social support, overseas adjustments, work performance, foreignlabours, Taiwan.
Parasite diversity and coinfection determine pathogen infection success and host fitness

While the importance of changes in host biodiversity for disease risk continues to gain empirical support, the influence of natural variation in parasite diversity on epidemiological outcomes remains largely overlooked. Here, we combined field infection data from 2,191 amphibian hosts representing 158 parasite assemblages with mechanistic experiments to evaluate the influence of parasite richness on both parasite transmission and host fitness. Using a guild of larval trematode parasites (six species) and an amphibian host, our experiments contrasted the effects of parasite richness vs. composition, observed vs. randomized assemblages, and additive vs. replacement designs. Consistent with the dilution effect hypothesis extended to intrahost diversity, increases in parasite richness reduced overall infection success, including infections by the most virulent parasite. However, the effects of parasite richness on host growth and survival were context dependent; pathology increased when parasites were administered additively, even when the presence of the most pathogenic species was held constant, but decreased when added species replaced or reduced virulent species, emphasizing the importance of community composition and assembly. These results were similar or stronger when community structures were weighted by their observed frequencies in nature. The field data also revealed the highly nested structure of parasite assemblages, with virulent species generally occupying basal positions, suggesting that increases in parasite richness and antagonism in nature will decrease virulent infections. Our findings emphasize the importance of parasite biodiversity and coinfection in affecting epidemiological responses and highlight the value of integrating research on biodiversity and community ecology for understanding infectious diseases.
Investigation of PON1 192 and PON1 55 polymorphisms in ovarian cancer patients in Turkish population.

BACKGROUND Ovarian cancer is the leading cause of death due to gynecological malignancies among women. Oxidative stress is potentially harmful to cells and reactive oxygen species are known to be involved in the initiation and progression of cancer. Paraoxonase (PON1) is an antioxidative enzyme, which eliminates lipid peroxides. PON1 has two common polymorphisms (M/L55 and A/B192) that influence PON1 concentration and activity. PATIENTS AND METHODS Whether or not the M/L55 or A/B192 genotype relates with ovarian cancer was studied in 51 patients and 54 controls. Polymerase chain reaction (PCR) restriction fragment length polymorphism (RFLP), and agarose gel electrophoresis techniques were used to determine these polymorphisms. RESULTS The proportion of smokers was significantly higher in the patients than the controls (26.9% vs. 7%; Chi-square: 7.81, p:0.005; Odds ratio (OR): 4.88 95% CI: 1.49-15.99). The frequencies of the PON1 192 AA, BB and AB genotypes among the patients were 0.76, 0.12 and 0.12 and among the control subjects, 0.33, 0.11 and 0.56, respectively. The AA genotype frequency was significantly higher in the patients than the controls (Chi-square: 19.242, p=0.000; OR: 2.80 95% CI:1.653-4.757). The frequencies of the PON1 55 LL, MM and LM genotypes among the patients were 0.53, 0.10 and 0.37 and among the control subjects there were 0.46, 0.04 and 0.50, respectively. The MM genotype frequency was higher in the patients than the controls, but not statistically significantly (p>0.05). CONCLUSION The two polymorphisms were associated with the age of onset of ovarian cancer, which increased in the genotype order AB<AA<BB in the PON1 192 polymorphism and LM<LL<MM in the PON1 55 polymorphism. The PON1 192 AA genotype may play an important role as a risk factor for ovarian cancer in the Turkish population and the A and L alleles may be associated with early onset of disease.
Genetics of Autism Spectrum Disorder: Current Status and Possible Clinical Applications

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is one of the most complex behavioral disorders with a strong genetic influence. The objectives of this article are to review the current status of genetic research in ASD, and to provide information regarding the potential candidate genes, mutations, and genetic loci possibly related to pathogenesis in ASD. Investigations on monogenic causes of ASD, candidate genes among common variants, rare de novo mutations, and copy number variations are reviewed. The current possible clinical applications of the genetic knowledge and their future possibilities are highlighted.
SECURE AND EFFICIENT ANONYMOUS AUTHENTICATION FOR DECENTRALIZED ACCESS CONTROL IN CLOUD DATA

Cloud computing’s multi-tenancy feature, which provides privacy, security and access control challenges, because of sharing of physical resources among untrusted tenants. In order to achieve safe storage, policy based file access control, policy based file assured deletion and policy based renewal of a file stored in a cloud environment, a suitable encryption technique with key management should be applied before outsourcing the data. We propose a new decentralized access control scheme for secure data storage in clouds that supports anonymous authentication. In the proposed scheme, the cloud verifies the authenticity of the series without knowing the user’s identity before storing data. Our scheme also has the added feature of access control in which only valid users are able to decrypt the stored information. The scheme prevents replay attacks and supports creation, modification, and reading data stored in the cloud. We also address user revocation. Moreover, our authentication and access control scheme is decentralized and robust, unlike other access control schemes designed for clouds which are centralized. The communication, computation, and storage overheads are comparable to centralized approaches.
Behavioral Risk Factors and Latino Body Mass Index: A Cross-Sectional Study in Missouri

Obesity is the fastest-growing cause of disease and death in the United States, with minority populations suffering some of the most severe consequences. Latinos constitute 16% of the U.S. population as of 2010, and have a higher proportion of the population that is overweight and obese compared with their non-Hispanic Black and White counterparts. Although there are over 15.8 million Latino residents living in non-gateway states (outside California, Texas, Arizona, Illinois, and New York), there is little research exploring obesity factors among Latinos outside of gateway states. The aim of this paper was to study socio-economic characteristics, mental health, insurance status, physical activity, and fruit and vegetable consumption, in relation to body mass index (BMI) among Latinos living in a non-gateway state. The results showed that income, employment status, marital status, insurance status, physical activity, fruit and vegetable consumption, and mental health were all associated with BMI.
Compilation et optimisation statique des communications hôte-accélérateur

La puissance de calcul disponible dans les machines hybrides a base d'accelerateurs materiels de type GPU necessite de reecrire les programmes selon un modele complexe et reparti : les donnees traitees doivent etre copiees entre memoire de l'hote et memoire de l'accelerateur. Cette contrainte est regulierement identifiee comme le goulot d'etranglement. Nous proposons une transformation automatique qui genere statiquement des instructions de copies entre l'hote et l'accelerateur selon deux strategies " au plus tot " et " au plus tard ". De plus, les communications inutiles ou redondantes sont evitees. Nous presentons les resultats obtenus avec des tests pris parmi les Polybench 2.0, les Rodinia, et sur une simulation numerique reelle. Nous obtenons une acceleration moyenne de 4 a 5 par rapport a une parallelisation naive sur un GPU moderne avec PAR4ALL, HMPP, et PGI ; et de 3.5 par rapport a une version OPENMP avec une machine equipee de 12 coeurs. Title: Static compilation analysis for host-accelerator Abstract: We present an automatic, static program transformation that schedules and generates efficient memory transfers between a computer host and its GPU like hardware accelerator, addressing a well-known performance bottleneck. Our static automatic approach uses two simple heuristics: to perform transfers to the accelerator as early as possible and to delay transfers back from the accelerator as late as possible. In the generated code, redundant communications due to data reuse between kernel executions are avoided. We present experimental results obtained with the Polybench 2.0, some Rodinia benchmarks, and with a real numerical simulation. We obtain an average speedup of 4 to 5 when compared to a naive parallelization using a modern GPU with PAR4ALL, HMPP, and PGI, and 3.5 when compared to an OPENMP version using a 12-core multiprocessor.
Plasma matrix metalloproteinase-9 activity in cats with lymphoma.

In this study, plasma MMP-9 activity was evaluated in cats with lymphoma. Plasma samples were obtained from 26 cats with lymphoma before treatment. From 13 of the included 26 cats, plasma samples were obtained 4 weeks after the initiation of treatment. Plasma samples were also obtained from 10 healthy cats as a control. Plasma MMP-9 activity was examined by gelatin zymography and semi-quantitative value (arbitrary unit; a.u.) for each sample was calculated. Relatively high levels of MMP-9 were observed in cats with lymphoma compared with those in healthy control cats. MMP-9 quantification through zymography showed significantly higher activity in cats with lymphoma (median, 0.63 a.u.; range, 0.23-3.24 a.u.) than in healthy controls (0.22 a.u.; 0.12-0.46 a.u.; P < 0.01). MMP-9 activities were significantly different before (0.73 a.u.; 0.30-3.24 a.u.) and after treatment (0.50 a.u.; 0.14-1.32 a.u.; P = 0.017). Measuring plasma MMP-9 activity in cats with lymphoma may become an appropriate monitoring tool for feline lymphoma.
The active electrosensory range of Gymnotus omarorum

SUMMARY This article reports a biophysical and behavioral assessment of the active electrolocation range of Gymnotus omarorum. Physical measurements show that the stimulus field of a point on the sensory mosaic (i.e. the potential positions in which an object may cause a significant departure of the transcutaneous field from basal in the absence of an object) consists of relatively extended volumes surrounding this point. The shape of this stimulus field is dependent on the position of the point on the receptive mosaic and the size of the object. Although the limit of stimulus fields is difficult to assess (it depends on receptor threshold), departure from the basal field decays rapidly, vanishing at about 1.5 diameters for conductive spheres. This short range was predictable from earlier theoretical constructs and experimental data. Here, we addressed the contribution of three different but synergetic mechanisms by which electrosensory signals attenuate with object distance. Using novelty responses as an indicator of object detection we confirmed that the active electrosensory detection range is very short. Behavioral data also indicate that the ability to precisely locate a small object of edible size decays even more rapidly than the ability to detect it. The role of active electroreception is discussed in the context of the fish's habitat.
Human papillomavirus testing for primary cervical cancer screening.

The Papanicolau smear (Pap smear) is the current method most commonly used to screen for cervical cancer. Cervical cytology (Pap smear) is used to predict the likelihood of abnormal histology. Histology as determined by biopsy is defined as normal, cervical intra-epithelial level grade 1 (CIN 1), cervical intra-epithelial level, grade 2 (CIN 2) carcinoma in situ (CIN 3 or invasive carcinoma. The current system for reporting cervical cytology in the United States is the Bethesda System that was most recently updated in 2001. The most common cytological findings are listed in Table 1. Table 1: Classification of Cervical Squamous Cell Pathology Cytology (Papanicolau test) Negative Atypical squamous cells – undetermined significance (ASC-US) Atypical squamous cellscannot exclude HSIL (ASC-H)
A generalization of some existence results on orthogonal designs for STBCs

It is shown that two theorems regarding the existence of generalized linear processing orthogonal designs (GLPOD) are valid under more general conditions than those for which they have been stated and proved (for original paper see V. Tarokh et al., "Space-time block codes from orthogonal designs", ibid., vol. 45, p. 1456-1467 (1999)).
Prepared for submission to JHEP Entanglement of heavy quark impurities and generalized gravitational entropy

We calculate the contribution from non-conformal heavy quark sources to the entanglement entropy (EE) of a spherical region in N = 4 SUSY Yang-Mills theory. We apply the generalized gravitational entropy method to non-conformal probe D-brane embeddings in AdS5×S, dual to pointlike impurities exhibiting flows between quarks in large-rank tensor representations and the fundamental representation. For the D5-brane embedding which describes the screening of fundamental quarks in the UV to the antisymmetric tensor representation in the IR, the EE excess decreases non-monotonically towards its IR asymptotic value, tracking the qualitative behaviour of the one-point function of static fields sourced by the impurity. We also examine two classes of D3-brane embeddings, one which connects a symmetric representation source in the UV to fundamental quarks in the IR, and a second category which yields the symmetric representation source on the Coulomb branch. The EE excess for the former increases from the UV to the IR, whilst decreasing and becoming negative for the latter. In all cases, the probe free energy on hyperbolic space with β = 2π increases monotonically towards the IR, supporting its interpretation as a relative entropy. We identify universal corrections, depending logarithmically on the VEV, for the symmetric representation on the Coulomb branch. ar X iv :1 71 1. 01 55 4v 1 [ he pth ] 5 N ov 2 01 7
COMPORTAMENTO DE PLANTAS DE SOJA ORIGINADAS DE SEMENTES DE DIFERENTES NÍVEIS DE QUALIDADE FISIOLÓGICA

O trabalho teve como objetivo avaliar o efeito da variacao de vigor de sementes de soja, dentro de um mesmo lote, sobre o comportamento individual das plantas em uma populacao estabelecida. Foi conduzido um experimento onde foram utilizadas sementes de soja, variedade CD - 202, com germinacao acima de 90%, semeadas em uma area de 150 m2 espacadas em 50 cm na entre linha. A semeadura foi realizada em covas, espacadas sete centimetros entre si, depositando cinco sementes por cova. Para estabelecer o nivel de vigor das sementes auferido a cada cova, utilizou-se como criterio data de emergencia das plântulas, onde as sementes que emergiram no quarto e/ou quinto dia, apos a semeadura, foram consideradas plantas provenientes de sementes de alto vigor e aquelas que emergiram no setimo dia, apos a semeadura, foram consideradas plantas oriundas de sementes de baixo vigor. A distribuicao das plântulas de alto e baixo vigor nas linhas foi determinada ao acaso, com quatro repeticoes. Foram avaliadas as seguintes variaveis: estatura de planta, numero de vagens por planta, numero de graos por vagem, numero de graos por planta, rendimento de graos por planta e rendimento de graos por hectare. Concluiu-se que plantas provenientes de sementes de alto vigor demonstram melhor desempenho fitotecnico do que as sementes de baixo vigor em todas as variaveis analisadas, revelando que a desuniformidade de vigor dentro de um mesmo lote de sementes influenciam diretamente no comportamento individual das plantas, o que compromete o potencial produtivo em ate 17%.
The role of prostaglandins and nitric oxide in the response of bone to mechanical forces.

We have developed an experimental model whereby bone is exposed to a brief episode of mechanical stimulation, which is followed by bone formation. The earliest response is in osteocytes, which express c-fos and insulin-like growth factor (IGF-1) within 30-60min. Thirty-six to 72h after loading bone matrix gene expression occurs on bone surfaces. The osteogenic response can be suppressed by a single dose of nitric oxide synthase (NOS) or prostaglandin (PG) synthase inhibitors, if these are administered just before mechanical stimulation: similar doses after stimulation have no effect. There is a later phase of indomethacin-sensitivity associated with COX-2 expression in bone at 6h. Thus, mechanically induced osteogenesis involves early expression of c-fos and IGF-1 by osteocytes, which are believed to be the strain-sensitive cells in bone. Both NOS and PG synthase, either in parallel or in sequence, are crucial to the initial transduction of the mechanical stimulus into an osteogenic response.
Optimal Integration and Characteristics of Vertical Array Devices for Ultra-High Density, Bit-Cost Scalable Flash Memory

Optimal process integration for array devices of bit-cost scalable (BiCS) flash memory is successfully developed. We adopt SiN-based gate dielectrics for the consistency with the 'gate-first' process which is unique to BiCS flash technology, and 'macaroni' body FETs for better controllability over the sub-threshold characteristics of depletion-mode poly-silicon transistors. With these technologies and newly devised 4F2 cell array, BiCS flash becomes a promising candidate for future ultra-high density memory.
Avaliação da reputação das empresas brasileiras através do Índice de Reputação Financeira

Pesquisas empiricas evidenciam que empresas com boa reputacao apresentam diversas vantagens financeiras e economicas. Enquanto algumas pesquisas apontam como se cria a reputacao corporativa, outras pesquisas mostram os efeitos financeiros e economicos conquistados com a boa reputacao. Esta pesquisa propoe criar um Indice de Reputacao Financeira atraves de dados financeiros e economicos apurado pelas empresas brasileiras. Para isto, sera analisado no periodo de 5 anos (2009-2013) junto as empresas com maior liquidez listadas na BMF (ii) Valor de mercado e (iii) Endividamento. Com intuito de minimizar os efeitos causados por fatores que podem aumentar o desempenho da empresa serao incluidos as variaveis de controle: tamanho e desempenho. De acordo com a literatura, as empresas com boa reputacao apresentam desempenhos financeiros superiores, maior valor de mercado e menor endividamento. Dessa forma, as empresas participantes dessa pesquisa terao sua reputacao ranqueada com base em seus resultados economicos e financeiros a qual sao apontados pela literatura como consequencia de uma boa reputacao. Assim, nao se busca nessa pesquisa compreender a causa da reputacao, mas sua consequencia nos resultados financeiros e economicos das empresas. Para atingir esse objetivo pesquisa, tomou-se como verdade os achados empiricos encontrados sobre reputacao em pesquisas anteriores.