Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Investigating the molecular mechanism of Shroom-Rock interaction and its role in cellular and tissue morphogenesis

During development cells undergo highly synchronized, dynamic morphogenetic movements to pattern the complex 3D architecture of tissues and organs involving processes like cell adhesion, migration, shape and polarity. This cellular remodeling is brought about by proteins that can spatially and temporally modulate the dynamics and organization of the cytoskeleton. Shroom is a class of actin-associated proteins that has been implicated in regulating cell and tissue architecture. Shroom3 along with another cytoskeleton regulator protein Rock, a kinase, locally activates non-muscle myosin II and facilitates assembly of a contractile actomyosin network at the apical surface of cells which subsequently alters cell shape and behavior. In order to elucidate the molecular mechanism and dynamics of Shroom-Rock interaction it becomes important to map the residues mediating this interaction. My project aims to dissect the molecular nature of Shroom-Rock interaction using a variety of biochemical and cell based assays, guided by structural studies and novel Shroom3 mutants. Shroom SD2 is known to form a three segmented antiparallel coiled-coil dimer. We have identified a highly conserved patch of surface exposed residues in Shroom SD2 that are important for Rock binding and interiorly buried residues required for Shroom dimerization. I have shown that the SD2 mutants that fail to bind Rock or dimerize also fail to cause apical constriction in MDCK cells. I have also shown specifically an Arginine residue in Shroom SD2 to be essential for Rock binding, apical constriction and neural tube morphogenesis in mice. Next, we mapped the SBD of Rock to a stretch of 79 amino acids in its coiled–coil region which is highly conserved across species. Using mutational analysis as well as in vitro and in vivo assays I have identified surface patches of highly conserved residues in Rock SBD that are important for Shroom binding, co-localization with Shroom, and apical constriction of MDCK cells. These results supplemented by the crystal structure of Rock SBD have facilitated a better understanding of the dynamics of Shroom-Rock interaction and ultimately cell morphogenesis. Overall, elucidating the Shroom-Rock interaction has helped establish an evolutionarily conserved signaling module as a paradigm for cellular and tissue morphogenesis.
Certain Conditions Originating in the Perinatal Period and Their Correlation with Complications of Pregnancy

Aim: The aim of this work is to study certain conditions originating in the perinatal period and their correlation with complications of pregnancy. Methods: The statistical methods were used to derive the results of this work are Student t-test in order to check the statistical significance of the conditions originating in the perinatal period in relation to gender of the child and the Pearson correlation coefficient for the relationship between these conditions and the complications of pregnancy. Results: The results showed that there is no statistically significant difference in the number of certain conditions originating in the perinatal period in relation to gender of the child while, there is a statistically significant relationship between these conditions with complications of pregnancy. Conclusions: This study has shown that there is a strong correlation between certain conditions originating in the perinatal period and complications of pregnancy. Moreover, from all these conditions of perinatal period, most deaths are observed in slow fetal growth, fetal malnutrition and disorders related to short gestation and low birth weight.
Les enjeux socio-économiques autour de l’agroforesterie villageoise à Aguié (Niger)

En 2003 et 2004, des études sont réalisées dans deux villages d’Aguié (Dan Saga et Guidan Bakoye) situés dans la région de Maradi (Centre-sud du Niger), grâce à un partenariat sous forme d’un Projet Interuniversitaire Ciblé (PIC) entre l’Université Abdou Moumouni de Niamey (Niger), l’Université Catholique de Louvain (Belgique), la Faculté universitaire des Sciences agronomiques de Gembloux (Belgique), l’Université de Liège (Belgique), l’asbl ENDA Intermondes et le Projet PPILDA, ex PDRAA d’Aguié (Niger). Ces études, dont la demande émane des paysans, portent sur l’évaluation de la régénération naturelle issue de la protection des rejets ligneux dans les champs en vue de définir les possibilités et modalités de création de marchés ruraux de bois. Dan Saga et Guidan Bakoye sont des zones à Combretum glutinosum et Piliostigma reticulatum où la régénération naturelle assistée est pratiquée par toutes les catégories sociales, avec des densités d’arbres de plus de 100 pieds à l’hectare. Ces densités augmentent avec l’éloignement des champs par rapport aux villages. Les quantités de bois de feu et de bois de service offertes sur le marché informel pourraient générer des revenus de plus de 1 million de francs CFA chaque semaine (10 à 50 fagots de 25 kg chacun). Cependant, l’étroitesse du marché due à l’absence d’acheteurs potentiels ne permet d’écouler que le tiers de la production, rendant plus que nécessaire la création d’un réseau d’écoulement des produits. Ce réseau serait un groupement de villages n’appartenant pas forcément à la même entité administrative mais organisé autour de préoccupations socio-économiques communes. Le Projet PPILDA a donné le nom d’ «Intervillages» à un tel réseau. La gestion des ressources naturelles et particulièrement de la régénération naturelle des ligneux a favorisé l’émergence d’une multitude d’acteurs dont les intérêts, souvent divergents, ont entraîné une déstructuration de la société traditionnelle. L’adaptation à ces mutations sociales ne pourra se faire qu’à travers une politique incitative en faveur de l’agroforesterie, une redéfinition des rôles des différents acteurs ainsi qu’un important investissement dans le renforcement des capacités de ces acteurs. Les enjeux socio-économiques autour de l’agroforesterie villageoise à Aguié (Niger)
ACCIDENT PREVALENCE AND ACCIDENT ASSOCIATED RISK FACTORS AMONG ELDERLY PEOPLE LIVING IN NURSING HOMES IN

Introduction: Accidents of old age is an important health problem for the cases of morbidity and mortality. The aim of this study was to determine the accident prevalence and to identify associated risk factors among elderly people living in nursing homes in Manisa city. Materials and Method: This cross sectional study was conducted in all nursing homes (n=4) Manisa city in Aegean region of Turkey. The data were collected in March 2010May 2010. The population of the study included elderly people living nursing homes (n=260). Of those elderly people, 210 (80.8%) were face to face interviewed by means of a questionaire. The questionaire included three forms: “sociodemographic variables form”, “Brief Disability Questionnaire”, and “accident experience form”. All statistical analyses were performed using SPSS 11.0. Descriptive statistics, the χ2 test, p for trend and logistic regression models were used for data analysis. Results: Prevalence of at least one accident experience in the previous year was 38.6% (n=81) in the study population. The most frequent accident type and accident place were falls (63.3%) and stairs, respectively. The most frequent accident reasons were balance disorder among personal reasons (20.2%) and wet and uneven floor among enviromental reasons (12.8%). We have found the use of an assistive device and disability was an important risk factor for accidents. Conclusion: Accidents are common among elderly elderly people living in nursing homes.
An investigation into the phytochemical constituents of Moringa oleifera aqueous root extracts

The crude aqueous roots extract of Moringa oleifera was subjected to sequential fractionation with Chloroform, Ethyl acetate and n-butanol. The extracts (Crude, Chloroform, Ethyl acetate, n-butanol and residue) were further subjected to phyto-chemical analysis to determine the constituents of the root extracts. Results of phyto-chemical analysis showned that the crude extracts contained Carbohydrates, Saponins, Cardiac glycosides, Terpenes and Steroids, Flavonoids and Alkaloids. The chloroform portion had Carbohydrates, Cardiac glycosides, Terpenes and Steroids and Flavonoids. Ethyl acetate portions have Carbohydrates, Saponins, Cardiac glycoside, Terpenes and Steroids. The n-butanol portion has Carbohydrates and Alkaloids while the residue portion had carbohydrates, Saponins, Flavonoids and Alkaloids. However, all the extracts showed the absence of Tannins, Phlobatannins and Anthraquinones in this study. The chemical compounds found in these various extracts of Moringa oleifera roots have good pharmacological properties. The traditional application of the roots of Moringa oleifera as poultice and decoction may have a scientific or pharmacological basis.
The movement continuum in children with asthma attacks in Kuwait

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Abscisic acid effects on ethylene production and respiration rates in detached apple fruits at differnt stages of development

Apple fruits (Malus domestica. Borkh. c.v. Red Winesap) collected at different stages of development (92, 120 and 147 days after full bloom, a.f.b.) were treated by injection with 1 mM ABA. This treatment induced an increase in respiration and ethylene production compared to controls treated with water or untreated, and ripening was advanced. This effect was especially pronounced in the youngest fruits (92 days a.f.b.) in which the control did not show any change related to ripening during three weeks. Treatments by infiltration gave rather similar results although less pronounced. These results suggest that the capacity of the fruit to produce ethylene and to ripen is related to the ABA content. ABA treatment is able to induce ripening even in rather young fruits
Factors involved in patients’ perceptions of self-improvement after chronic pain treatment

ABSTRACT Background Patients’ self-reported levels of improvement after having attended a chronic pain management program can provide a subjective rating of how successful they perceive they were at accomplishing their goals in the program. Past studies have demonstrated that successful patients differ from less successful ones on several cognitive–behavioral factors such as coping strategies over physical characteristics such as pain intensity. Aims This study explored factors that determine patients’ perceptions of self-improvement after undergoing chronic pain treatment in a pain management program. Methods Participants (n = 174) underwent a 4-week, interdisciplinary, multimodal, chronic pain management program at a hospital located in southern Ontario. Questionnaire packages that evaluate pain intensity, pain-related disability, emotional distress (e.g., depression, anxiety, catastrophizing), acceptance of pain (activity engagement and pain willingness), readiness to change, and use of adaptive or maladaptive coping strategies were completed by patients at admission and discharge. Participants were grouped into one of three categories depending on their rating of self-improvement on the Self-Evaluation Scale (SES). The groups were compared on the magnitude of change they reported on the variables mentioned above. Results Changes in emotional distress, general health, readiness to change, activity engagement, and adaptive coping strategies (e.g., task persistence, pacing, and seeking social support) were significantly associated with differences in ratings of self-improvement. Conclusions This study provided insight into what patients value most when rating their self-improvement, which can then be used to facilitate increased patient success and satisfaction with treatment.
Advanced Exercise Endocrinology

Chapter 1. Unique Properties of Endocrine and Autonomic Messengers Chapter 2. Activation of Non-Hormonal Signaling During Exercise Chapter 3. Autonomic and Hormonal Control of the Cardiorespiratory System Chapter 4. Body Fluid Balance Chapter 5. Hormones and the Fuel Use in Exercise Chapter 6. Hormonal Control of Energy Expenditure and Intake Chapter 7. Exercise and Reproductive Hormones Chapter 8. Hormonal Mediation in Training Adaptations Chapter 9. Exercise and Endocrine Rhythms Chapter 10. Measuring Hormones.
HD 165054: An Astrometric Calibration Field for High-contrast Imagers in Baade’s Window

We present a study of the HD 165054 astrometric calibration field that has been periodically observed with the Gemini Planet Imager (GPI). HD 165054 is a bright star within Baade’s Window, a region of the galactic plane with relatively low extinction from interstellar dust. HD 165054 was selected as a calibrator target due to the high number density of stars within this region (∼3 stars per square arcsecond with H < 22), necessary because of the small field of view of the GPI. Using nine epochs spanning over five years, we have fit a standard five-parameter astrometric model to the astrometry of seven background stars within close proximity to HD 165054 (ρ < 2″). We achieved a proper motion precision of ∼0.3 mas yr−1 and constrained the parallax of each star to be ≲1 mas. Our measured proper motions and parallax limits are consistent with the background stars being a part of the galactic bulge. Using these measurements, we find no evidence of any systematic trend of either the plate scale or the north angle offset of GPI between 2014 and 2019. We compared our model describing the motions of the seven background stars to observations of the same field in 2014 and 2018 obtained with Keck/NIRC2, an instrument with excellent astrometric calibration. We find that the predicted position of the background sources is consistent with that measured by NIRC2, within the uncertainties of the calibration of the two instruments. In the future, we will use this field as a standard astrometric calibrator for the upgrade of GPI and potentially for other high-contrast imagers.
YERSINIOSIS IN CAPTIVE CAPYBARAS (HYDROCHAERIS HYDROCHAERIS)

Summary: Four young female capybaras (Hydrochaeris hydrochaeris), three to four months old, died in the late autumn of year 2001 in the Ljubljana Zoo. Three of them were submitted for dissection. Granulomatous lesions in small intestine and mesenteric lymph nodes with severe haemorrhagic enteritis and ascites were found in all capybaras. Microscopically pyogranulomatous enteritis, lymphadenitis, hepatitis, splenitis, and pneumonia were diagnosed in two capybaras and pyogranulomatous enteritis, lymphadenitis, hepatitis, splenitis and diffuse fibrinopurulent pneumonia in one. Yersinia pseudotuberculosis was isolated from small intestine, liver, lung and spleen from all dissected capybaras.
SoftWear: Software-Only In-Memory Wear-Leveling for Non-Volatile Main Memory

Several emerging technologies for byte-addressable non-volatile memory (NVM) have been considered to replace DRAM as the main memory in computer systems during the last years. The disadvantage of a lower write endurance, compared to DRAM, of NVM technologies like Phase-Change Memory (PCM) or Ferroelectric RAM (FeRAM) has been addressed in the literature. As a solution, in-memory wear-leveling techniques have been proposed, which aim to balance the wear-level over all memory cells to achieve an increased memory lifetime. Generally, to apply such advanced aging-aware wear-leveling techniques proposed in the literature, additional special hardware is introduced into the memory system to provide the necessary information about the cell age and thus enable aging-aware wear-leveling decisions. This paper proposes software-only aging-aware wear-leveling based on common CPU features and does not rely on any additional hardware support from the memory subsystem. Specifically, we exploit the memory management unit (MMU), performance counters, and interrupts to approximate the memory write counts as an aging indicator. Although the software-only approach may lead to slightly worse wear-leveling, it is applicable on commonly available hardware. We achieve page-level coarse-grained wear-leveling by approximating the current cell age through statistical sampling and performing physical memory remapping through the MMU. This method results in non-uniform memory usage patterns within a memory page. Hence, we further propose a fine-grained wear-leveling in the stack region of C / C++ compiled software. By applying both wear-leveling techniques, we achieve up to $78.43\%$ of the ideal memory lifetime, which is a lifetime improvement of more than a factor of $900$ compared to the lifetime without any wear-leveling.
Universal topological quantum computations with Majorana-Fibonacci-epsilon edge modes on chiral topological superconductor multilayers

Xi Luo, Yu-Ge Chen, Ye-Min Zhan, Bin Chen, and Yue Yu2,3,4∗ 1. College of Science, University of Shanghai for Science and Technology, Shanghai 200093, PR China 2. State Key Laboratory of Surface Physics, Fudan University, Shanghai 200433, China 3.Center for Field Theory and Particle Physics, Department of Physics, Fudan University, Shanghai 200433, China 4. Collaborative Innovation Center of Advanced Microstructures, Nanjing 210093, China (Dated: April 9, 2020)
Resultants over principal Artinian rings

The resultant of two univariate polynomials is an invariant of great importance in commutative algebra and vastly used in computer algebra systems. Here we present an algorithm to compute it over Artinian principal rings with a modified version of the Euclidean algorithm. Using the same strategy, we show how the reduced resultant and a pair of Bezout coefficient can be computed. Particular attention is devoted to the special case of $\mathbf{Z}/n\mathbf{Z}$, where we perform a detailed analysis of the asymptotic cost of the algorithm. Finally, we illustrate how the algorithms can be exploited to improve ideal arithmetic in number fields and polynomial arithmetic over $p$-adic fields.
Depth Sensing Beyond LiDAR Range

Depth sensing is a critical component of autonomous driving technologies, but today’s LiDAR- or stereo camera– based solutions have limited range. We seek to increase the maximum range of self-driving vehicles’ depth perception modules for the sake of better safety. To that end, we propose a novel three-camera system that utilizes small field of view cameras. Our system, along with our novel algorithm for computing metric depth, does not require full pre-calibration and can output dense depth maps with practically acceptable accuracy for scenes and objects at long distances not well covered by most commercial LiDARs.
PolyLinkR: A linkage-sensitive gene set enrichment R package

We introduce PolyLinkR, an R package for gene set enrichment analysis that implements a novel null-model that accounts for linkage disequilibrium between genes belonging to the same gene set - a potential cause of false positives that is often not controlled for in similar tools. Our benchmarks show that PolyLinkR has improved performance compared to two similar tools, achieving comparable power to detect enriched gene sets while producing less than one falsely detected gene set on average, even at high genetic clustering levels and nominal false discovery rates of 20%.
Time-evolving controllability of effective connectivity networks during seizure progression

Significance Responsive neurostimulation is an increasingly accessible treatment for medication-resistant epilepsy that aims to suppress seizures using electrical stimulation from implanted intracranial electrodes. However, the optimal cortical location and time point for intervening once a seizure begins are not well understood. Here we represent a seizure as a series of effective connectivity networks over time and compute metrics of network controllability and optimal control energy. Our results allow us to characterize when and where the brain network may be the most responsive to an external stimulus. Over one third of the estimated 3 million people with epilepsy in the United States are medication resistant. Responsive neurostimulation from chronically implanted electrodes provides a promising treatment alternative to resective surgery. However, determining optimal personalized stimulation parameters, including when and where to intervene to guarantee a positive patient outcome, is a major open challenge. Network neuroscience and control theory offer useful tools that may guide improvements in parameter selection for control of anomalous neural activity. Here we use a method to characterize dynamic controllability across consecutive effective connectivity (EC) networks based on regularized partial correlations between implanted electrodes during the onset, propagation, and termination regimes of 34 seizures. We estimate regularized partial correlation adjacency matrices from 1-s time windows of intracranial electrocorticography recordings using the Graphical Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selection Operator (GLASSO). Average and modal controllability metrics calculated from each resulting EC network track the time-varying controllability of the brain on an evolving landscape of conditionally dependent network interactions. We show that average controllability increases throughout a seizure and is negatively correlated with modal controllability throughout. Our results support the hypothesis that the energy required to drive the brain to a seizure-free state from an ictal state is smallest during seizure onset, yet we find that applying control energy at electrodes in the seizure onset zone may not always be energetically favorable. Our work suggests that a low-complexity model of time-evolving controllability may offer insights for developing and improving control strategies targeting seizure suppression.
GeoFlink: A Framework for the Real-time Processing of Spatial Streams

Apache Flink is an open-source system for the scalable processing of batch and streaming data. Flink does not natively support efficient processing of spatial data streams, which is the requirement of many applications dealing with spatial data. Besides Flink, other scalable spatial data processing platforms including GeoSpark, Spatial Hadoop, GeoMesa and Parallel Secondo do not support streaming workloads and can only handle static/batch workloads. Hence this work presents GeoFlink, which extends Apache Flink to support spatial data types, index and continuous queries. To enable efficient processing of continuous spatial queries and for the effective data distribution among the Flink cluster nodes, a grid-based index is introduced. The grid index enables the pruning of spatial objects which cannot be part of a spatial query result and thus can guarantee efficient query processing, similarly it helps in preserving spatial data proximity, hence resulting in effective data distribution. GeoFlink currently supports spatial range, spatial $k$NN and spatial join queries. An extensive experimental study on real spatial data streams show that GeoFlink achieves several orders of magnitude higher query performance than other ordinary distributed approaches.