Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Recombinant IgA Is Sufficient To Prevent Influenza Virus Transmission in Guinea Pigs

ABSTRACT A serum hemagglutination inhibition (HAI) titer of 40 or greater is thought to be associated with reduced influenza virus pathogenesis in humans and is often used as a correlate of protection in influenza vaccine studies. We have previously demonstrated that intramuscular vaccination of guinea pigs with inactivated influenza virus generates HAI titers greater than 300 but does not protect vaccinated animals from becoming infected with influenza virus by transmission from an infected cage mate. Only guinea pigs intranasally inoculated with a live influenza virus or a live attenuated virus vaccine, prior to challenge, were protected from transmission (A. C. Lowen et al., J. Virol. 83:2803–2818, 2009.). Because the serum HAI titer is mostly determined by IgG content, these results led us to speculate that prevention of viral transmission may require IgA antibodies or cellular immune responses. To evaluate this hypothesis, guinea pigs and ferrets were administered a potent, neutralizing mouse IgG monoclonal antibody, 30D1 (Ms 30D1 IgG), against the A/California/04/2009 (H1N1) virus hemagglutinin and exposed to respiratory droplets from animals infected with this virus. Even though HAI titers were greater than 160 1 day postadministration, Ms 30D1 IgG did not prevent airborne transmission to passively immunized recipient animals. In contrast, intramuscular administration of recombinant 30D1 IgA (Ms 30D1 IgA) prevented transmission to 88% of recipient guinea pigs, and Ms 30D1 IgA was detected in animal nasal washes. Ms 30D1 IgG administered intranasally also prevented transmission, suggesting the importance of mucosal immunity in preventing influenza virus transmission. Collectively, our data indicate that IgG antibodies may prevent pathogenesis associated with influenza virus infection but do not protect from virus infection by airborne transmission, while IgA antibodies are more important for preventing transmission of influenza viruses.
Radioisotope‐guided surgery in patients with pheochromocytoma and recurrent medullary thyroid carcinoma

The objective of this study was to appraise the detection of metastases of medullary thyroid carcinoma (MTC) and pheochromocytoma using radioguided surgery (RGS) and to compare the results with external imaging modalities, surgical palpation, and histopathologic findings.
Adherence to asthma medication: a question of ability?

to treatment. The relatively few studies in this area have typically explored direct associations between personality and adherence with conflicting results. Emilsson and colleagues take an interesting and innovative approach; they apply a theoretical framework of how personality might influence adherence 8 which recognises that the influence of personality might be indirect. For example, our personality might affect the way in which we think about treatment and our tendency to develop positive or negative beliefs about it, as well as how effective we are at overcoming practical difficulties and developing effective routines. The findings of their study in 35 Swedish adults with asthma are consistent with this theoretical approach. In essence, personality was not directly associated with reported adherence but did relate to the key beliefs about asthma treatment that have been associated with adherence across studies. 3 All five personality dimensions (Extraversion, Openness, Neuroticism, Agreeableness and Conscientiousness) were correlated with a validated measure of how patients judge their need for treatment relative to their concerns about potential adverse effects (the necessity concerns differential), which in turn was related to reported adherence. The authors also presented data between gender analyses, but it is difficult to interpret these due to the small sample size (only 10 men).
Prevention of breast cancer

Modifiable lifestyle factors may reduce the risk of developing breast cancer. Obesity is associated particularly with post‐menopausal breast cancer. Diet is important, and exercise equivalent to running for up to 8 hours each week reduces the risk of breast cancer, both in its own right and through reducing obesity. Alcohol consumption may be responsible for 5.8% of breast cancers in Australia and it is recommended to reduce this to two standard drinks per day. Drinking alcohol and smoking increases the risk for breast cancer and, therefore, it is important to quit tobacco smoking. Prolonged use of combined oestrogen and progesterone hormone replacement therapy and oral contraceptives may increase breast cancer risk and this must be factored into individual decisions about their use. Ionising radiation, either from diagnostic or therapeutic radiation or through occupational exposure, is associated with a high incidence of breast cancer and exposure may be reduced in some cases. Tamoxifen chemoprevention may reduce the incidence of oestrogen receptor positive cancer in 51% of women with high risk of breast cancer. Uncommon but serious side effects include thromboembolism and uterine cancer. Raloxifene, which can also reduce osteoporosis, can be used in post‐menopausal women and is not associated with the development of uterine cancer. Surgical prophylaxis with bilateral mastectomy and salpingo‐oophorectomy can reduce the risk of breast cancer in patients carrying BRCA1 or BRCA2 mutations. For preventive treatments, mammographic screening can identify other women at high risk.
Effects of Limited Aeration and of the ArcAB System on Intermediary Pyruvate Catabolism in Escherichia coli

ABSTRACT The capacity of Escherichia coli to adapt its catabolism to prevailing redox conditions resides mainly in three catabolic branch points involving (i) pyruvate formate-lyase (PFL) and the pyruvate dehydrogenase complex (PDHc), (ii) the exclusively fermentative enzymes and those of the Krebs cycle, and (iii) the alternative terminal cytochrome bd and cytochrome bo oxidases. A quantitative analysis of the relative catabolic fluxes through these pathways is presented for steady-state glucose-limited chemostat cultures with controlled oxygen availability ranging from full aerobiosis to complete anaerobiosis. Remarkably, PFL contributed significantly to the catabolic flux under microaerobic conditions and was found to be active simultaneously with PDHc and cytochrome bdoxidase-dependent respiration. The synthesis of PFL and cytochromebd oxidase was found to be maximal in the lower microaerobic range but not in a ΔArcA mutant, and we conclude that the Arc system is more active with respect to regulation of these two positively regulated operons during microaerobiosis than during anaerobiosis.
APPLYING SEMANTIC TECHNOLOGY TO BUSINESS NEWS ANALYSIS

This article addresses business news analysis by using artificial intelligence. An interdisciplinary method combining financial textual data mining and ontology-based reasoning is proposed and evaluated. The experiments are performed using a well-known Cyc ontology and textual material from the financial domain. Our experiments show that using semantic technologies for business news analysis helps to provide the user with more relevant answers to his/her queries.
FACTORS OF MORTALITY AND MORBIDITY IN NECROTIZING ENTEROCOLITIS

Necrotizing enterocolitis (NEC) is a devastating disease that is rapidly becoming the leading cause of neonatal mortality and morbidity. It is the most common gastro intestinal emergency among neonates and is characterized by severe inflammation and necrosis of the intestines mainly affecting the terminal ileum. The overall incidence of NEC can range from 0,72 to 1.8 per 1000 live births mainly preterm and low birth weight infants being affected(6). Mortality rates are high and ranged from 12% to 50% (5, 8, 10). A single institutional study was performed analyzing the patients admitted between 2003 and 2007 at the Children’s Hospital “Louis Turcanu” with the confirmed diagnosis of NEC. A total of 17 patients were included in the study. Data regarding age, sex, gestational age, birth weight, maternal age, Bell stage, predisposing conditions, diet, method of treatment being collected. We compared the mortality rates between distinct subgroups of the patients with data from previous reports in the literature. NEC had occurred in 17 patients, 9 boys and 8 girls. 15 patients were preterm infants or were small for gestational age. Previous to NEC 13 patients were fed with formula and 4received human milk. There were 15 patients under 2500g at birth and 2 over 2500g. In 10 cases the debut of the disease was in the first 2 weeks of life. Overall mortality was 53%. Preterm infants had a higher mortality rate (57%) than term infants (33%). Morality rates increase with Bell stages from none in Stage I A to 100% for stage III A and 85% for stage III B. NEC develops mainly in preterm infants. Preterm infants also tend to develop more severe cases and necessitate surgical interventions more often. In term neonates NEC have usually an underlying condition. NEC occurs more often in formula fed infants. Factors like the age of the patient and maternal age have poor influence on mortality.
Extraction , Encapsulation and Utilization of Red Pigments from Roselle ( Hibiscus sabdariffa L . ) as Natural Food

The present work was carried out to produce a dry powder of red colour from roselle calyces for colouring some food products using microencapsulation technique. The stability of the encapsulated pigments was investigated during storage under different water activities. The results showed that ethanol acidified with 1.5N HCl (85:15) had the greatest efficiency in extracting roselle pigments followed by 2% citric acid solution while distilled water was the less effective. The results indicated that at low pH values (1.5, 2, and 3); the pigment extracts exhibited their greatest stabilities during the entire holding time. Data showed that roselle pigment extracts heated for 30 min at temperatures of 60, 70, 80, 90, and 100°C, retained 99.87, 99.24, 94.49, 86.35, and 78.59% of their anthocyanins contents, respectively. As heating time was extended to 60 min., the retention values decreased to 96.99, 86.75, 82.10, 76.72, and 57.69%, respectively. The effect of three different encapsulating agents i.e. Maltodextrin D.E. 10, Maltodextrin D.E. 20, and gum Arabic on pigments stability was investigated. The degradation followed first – order reaction kinetics and was strongly dependent on aw and the matrix. Among the polymeric matrices, which largely elongated the half-life of roselle anthocyanins, maltodextrin DE 20 was found as the most effective carrier in stabilizing the pigments under all storage conditions examined. The half-life periods for anthocyanins encapsulated in maltodextrin DE 20 were 433.1, 238.96, 80.58, and 94.93 days for storage water activities of 0.43, 0.53, 0.64 and 0.75, respectively. The prepared encapsulated pigments were utilized in colouring some food products included strawberry jam and hard candy. ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ
Test Case Generation and Optimization of Object-Oriented Software using UML Behavioral Models

Testing guarantees the quality of software to be developed in terms of presence of bugs or errors. Testing can be separated into two categories such as White Box and Black Box testing. White box testing is done through detail analysis of program structure where as black box methodology deals with specification and design document i.e. without program details. Thus black box testing methodology holds major advantages, as tester can generate the test cases before code is developed, using specification and design document. Off the late, Object-Oriented program have changed the scenario of software development industry in terms of software development and its supporting technology. The object-oriented features like inheritance and encapsulation has made it easy and suitable confined to design. The inheritance feature encourages to re-use the developed components where as the encapsulation conceals the details from others. And other features of object-oriented program like polymorphism, data abstraction and modularity have increased its richness. However these features have increased the job of software tester. Special attraction are needed to look into these features while testing is carried out.
Prognostic implications of Fas‐ligand expression in nasopharyngeal carcinoma

In nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC), Fas‐ligand (Fas‐L)–mediated apoptosis might contribute to the immune privilege of tumors. In some cancers, dysregulation of Fas‐L protein in tumors might lead to disease progression. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the correlations between Fas‐L expression and the clinical outcomes in patients with NPC.
Crystal Structures of Phosphodiesterases 4 and 5 in Complex with Inhibitor 3-Isobutyl-1-methylxanthine Suggest a Conformation Determinant of Inhibitor Selectivity*

Cyclic nucleotide phosphodiesterases (PDEs) are a superfamily of enzymes controlling cellular concentrations of the second messengers cAMP and cGMP. Crystal structures of the catalytic domains of cGMP-specific PDE5A1 and cAMP-specific PDE4D2 in complex with the nonselective inhibitor 3-isobutyl-1-methylxanthine have been determined at medium resolution. The catalytic domain of PDE5A1 has the same topological folding as that of PDE4D2, but three regions show different tertiary structures, including residues 79-113, 208-224 (H-loop), and 341-364 (M-loop) in PDE4D2 or 535-566, 661-676, and 787-812 in PDE5A1, respectively. Because H- and M-loops are involved in binding of the selective inhibitors, the different conformations of the loops, thus the distinct shapes of the active sites, will be a determinant of inhibitor selectivity in PDEs. IBMX binds to a subpocket that comprises key residues Ile-336, Phe-340, Gln-369, and Phe-372 of PDE4D2 or Val-782, Phe-786, Gln-817, and Phe-820 of PDE5A1. This subpocket may be a common site for binding nonselective inhibitors of PDEs.
Yield stress measurements of aqueous foams in the dry limit

This paper reports measurements of yield stress of aqueous foams approaching the dry foam limit using a pendulum device. Traditionally, the vane rheometer has been used to measure the yield stress in liquids that exhibit wall slip. However, using the simple and inexpensive pendulum technique, shear rates many orders of magnitudes lower can be achieved. The pendulum was used to observe the change in yield stress for the foam as the gas fraction and bubble size increased. The local gas fraction in the foam was found by measuring the sonic velocity, and the bubble size was determined photographically. Strong support is found for the existence of a true yield stress in aqueous foams at the dry foam limit. Yield stress results, once scaled by σ/〈R〉, agree well with data from previous studies.
The Role of On-line Retailer Brand and Infomediary Reputation in Increasing Consumer Purchase Intention

Lower search costs are one of the major benefits of on-line shopping. In the past, when search costs were relatively high, consumers relied on extrinsic cues like brand and price. The lowering of search costs with the advent of the Internet has changed the way consumers use external cues. In addition, the emergence of the on-line "infomediary" has spawned complex interactions among infomediary reputation, manufacturer brand, and retailer brand. This paper shows the main effects of these factors and explores two-way interaction effects. It demonstrates that a well-known on-line retailer brand increases purchase intention for a weak manufacturer brand more than for a strong one, and by contrast, that a reputable infomediary increases purchase intention for a strong manufacturer brand more than for a weak one.
Thyroid function and hyperfunction during gestation.

I. Physiology of Pregnancy FOLLOWING implantation, a series of hormonal and metabolic events occur that help to shield the fetus from unfavorable changes in the maternal environment. From an endocrine standpoint these changes are controlled by steroid production in the fetal adrenals and gonads and in the placenta, as well as polypeptide hormones produced by the fetal pituitary and placenta. There is a constant hormonal interplay among fetus, mother, and placenta during pregnancy. Human CG (hCG) concentrations rapidly increase ensuring a supply of progesterone necessary for the maintenance of pregnancy before placental production is assured. These endocrine changes, including chorionic somatomammotropin production, also alter fuel metabolism, perhaps ensuring substrate for fetal growth (1). Serum PRL levels increase as do levels of CRH as a result of pituitary and hypothalamic stimulation (2). Maternal blood volume increases by 40% above nonpregnant values due to hormonal changes and venous distension tha.
Activation of c‐Jun in the nuclei of neurons of the CA‐1 in thrombin preconditioning occurs via PAR‐1

Recently it has been shown that the c‐Jun N‐terminal kinase (JNK) plays a role in thrombin preconditioning (TPC) in vivo and in vitro. To investigate further the pathways involved in TPC, we performed an immunohistochemical study in hippocampal slice cultures. Here we show that the major target of JNK, the AP‐1 transcription factor c‐Jun, is activated by phosphorylation in the nuclei of neurons of the CA1 region by using phospho‐specific antibodies against the two JNK phosphorylation sites. The activation is early and transient, peaking at 90 min and not present by 3 hr after low‐dose thrombin administration. Treatment of cultures with a synthetic thrombin receptor agonist results in the same c‐Jun activation profile and protection against subsequent OGD, both of which are prevented by specific JNK inhibitors, showing that thrombin signals through PAR‐1 to JNK. By using an antibody against the Ser 73 phosphorylation site of c‐Jun, we identify possible additional TPC substrates. © 2009 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Assessment of Elementary School Students’ Sun Protection Behaviors

Abstract: Background/Objectives: Studies suggest that excessive sun exposure in childhood contributes to the development of skin cancer later in life. Methods: This study explores 4th grade student assessment of their sun protection behaviors. This study used baseline data collected in the Fall of 2006 for the Sun Protection for Florida’s Children (SPF) project. In brief, the SPF project is a group randomized trial to test the effectiveness of a school based intervention promoting sun protection in general, and hat use in particular, in Hillsborough County Schools, Florida. The data reported in this study were collected at baseline before any intervention activities was initiated. Results: The self‐reported use of various methods of sun protection was low. Only a small percentage of students wore long sleeves or a hat with a brim before leaving for school. In addition, few students wore a hat with a wide brim when outside but not at school. Students spent an average of 59.1 minutes per week outdoors while attending school and 35.5 minutes during peak sun exposure. Conclusion: Sun exposure at school poses a significant risk to student health and more needs to be carried out to promote the use of a wide‐brimmed hat and limiting student sun exposure.
Drosophila lilliputian is required for proneural gene expression in retinal development

Background: Proper neurogenesis in the developing Drosophila retina requires the regulated expression of the basic helix‐loop‐helix (bHLH) proneural transcription factors Atonal (Ato) and Daughterless (Da). Factors that control the timing and spatial expression of these bHLH proneural genes in the retina are required for the proper formation and function of the adult eye and nervous system. Results: Here we report that lilliputian (lilli), the Drosophila homolog of the FMR2/AF4 family of proteins, regulates the transcription of ato and da in the developing fly retina. We find that lilli controls ato expression at multiple enhancer elements. We also find that lilli contributes to ato auto‐regulation in the morphogenetic furrow by first regulating the expression of da prior to ato. We show that FMR2 regulates the ato and da homologs MATH5 and TCF12 in human cells, suggesting a conservation of this regulation from flies to humans. Conclusions: We conclude that lilliputian is part of the genetic program that regulates the expression of proneural genes in the developing retina. Developmental Dynamics 241:553–562, 2012. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
In Vitro Susceptibility Testing of Aspergillus spp.: Comparison of Etest and Reference Microdilution Methods for Determining Voriconazole and Itraconazole MICs

ABSTRACT The performance of the Etest for voriconazole and for itraconazole susceptibility testing of 376 isolates of Aspergillus spp. was assessed in comparison with the National Committee for Clinical Laboratory Standards (NCCLS) proposed standard microdilution broth method. The NCCLS method employed RPMI 1640 broth medium, and MICs were read after incubation for 48 h at 35°C. Etest MICs were determined with RPMI agar containing 2% glucose and were read after incubation for 48 h at 35°C. The isolates included A. fumigatus, A. flavus, A. niger, A. terreus, A. versicolor, A. glaucus, A. nidulans, A. ustus, and A. sydowii. Overall agreement percentages between the Etest and microdilution MICs were 97.6% for voriconazole and 95.8% for itraconazole. Where a discrepancy was observed between Etest and the reference method, the Etest tended to give lower values with voriconazole and higher values with itraconazole. The Etest method using RPMI agar appears to be a useful method for determining the voriconazole and itraconazole susceptibilities of Aspergillus spp.
Design of the Knowledge System Based on Basic Rules

According to the ideas of the space base in linear algebra, this article applies techniques of database and object-oriented programming to present a method of design of the knowledge system based on basic rules. The concept of the basic decision rule is given, the result that any certain (or uncertain) rule can be generated by some certain (or certain and uncertain) basis decision rules is proved, and the model of the knowledge system based on basic rules is also proposed. Finally, the description of algorithm of extracting rules was given and the efficiency of the algorithm was analyzed as well in this paper.
Requirements engineering: artefact-based customisation

Requirements Engineering (RE) is still insufficiently integrated into development process models. Volatile project environments additionally hamper the decision about which artefacts to produce and how to produce them in a syntactically complete manner. Yet missing is an integrated RE approach that (1) serves as orientation to create domain-specific RE artefacts and (2) gives guidance to customise them at organisational and at project level. In this thesis, we contribute an artefact-based customisation approach for RE. First, we analyse possible notions of artefact orientation and infer a meta model. We then contribute an artefact-based RE reference model for business information systems and an artefact-based customisation approach. We finally evaluate our contribution with two case studies and show how artefact orientation enables a flexible process for the creation of syntactically complete results.