Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Molecular epidemiology of two international sprout-borne Salmonella outbreaks

Sprout-borne Salmonella outbreaks in Finland have increased during the last 10 years. The latest two were caused by Salmonella enterica serovar Bovismorbificans (antigenic structure 6,8:r:1,5) in 1994 and S. enterica serovar Stanley (4,5, 12:d:1,2) in 1995. In this study, the restriction fragment length polymorphism of genomic DNA after pulsed-field gel electrophoresis (PFGE) and antimicrobial resistance profiles of the outbreak and nonoutbreak strains were compared. In each separate outbreak, the PFGE patterns of the outbreak strains (40 strains of S. enterica serovar Bovismorbificans and 28 strains of S. enterica serovar Stanley) after digestion of genomic DNA with restriction enzyme XbaI were indistinguishable from each other but differed clearly from those of the nonoutbreak strains (26 strains of S. enterica serovar Bovismorbificans and 40 strains of S. enterica serovar Stanley). The restriction enzyme XhoI did not differentiate the outbreak and nonoutbreak strains. The S. enterica serovar Stanley strains associated with the outbreak also had a unique antimicrobial resistance pattern, whereas all S. enterica serovar Bovismorbificans strains, both outbreak and nonoutbreak strains, were sensitive to all antimicrobial agents tested. Thus, the molecular typing confirmed that the S. enterica serovar Bovismorbificans outbreak isolates from humans and sprout salad were identical and strongly supported the epidemiological finding that S. enterica serovar Stanley outbreak isolates also originated from contaminated alfalfa seeds. It also confirmed that the sources of similar outbreaks in Sweden in 1994 caused by S. enterica serovar Bovismorbificans and in the United States in 1995 caused by S. enterica serovar Stanley and the source of the Finnish outbreaks were common.
Hemostatic dressings in civil prehospital practice: 30 uses of QuikClot Combat Gauze

To report the use and describe the interest of hemostatic dressings in a civilian setting, we provided medical prehospital teams with QuikClot Combat Gauze (QCG) and asked physicians to complete a specific questionnaire after each use. Thirty uses were prospectively reported. The wounds were mostly caused by cold steel (n=15) and were primarily cervicocephalic (n=16), with 19/30 active arterial bleedings. For 26/30 uses, hemostatic dressing was justified by the inefficiency of other hemostasis techniques. Those 30 applications were associated with 22 complete cessations of bleeding, six decreases of bleeding, and ineffectiveness in two cases. The application of QCG permitted the removal of an effective tourniquet that was applied initially for three patients. No side-effects were reported. The provision of hemostatic dressings in civilian resuscitation ambulances was useful by providing an additional tool to limit bleeding while rapidly transporting the injured patient to a surgical facility.
Functional Organization of the Projection From Area 2 to Area 4γ in the Cat

Caria, Marcello A. , Takeshi Kaneko, Akihisa Kimura, and Hiroshi Asanuma. Functional organization of the projection from area 2 to area 4γ in the cat. J. Neurophysiol. 77: 3107–3114, 1997. It has been shown that tetanic stimulation of area 2 of the somatosensory cortex produces long-term potentiation in neurons in area 4γ, and this has been suggested as the basis of learning new motor skills. The purpose of this study was to further elucidate the characteristics of this projection by the use of evoked potentials in area 4γ elicited by intracortical microstimulation of area 2. The experiments were carried out in cats and the following results were obtained. 1) In six animals, stimulation of a given site in area 2 elicited evoked potentials in a restricted region of area 4γ, the size of which ranged from 1 to 1.5 mm2. These responses were labeled “localized responses. ” The evoked potentials were recorded from the superficial layers of the cortex, and were positive monophasic in shape. 2) In 16 animals, stimu.
Comparison of the PACE 2 Assay, Two Amplification Assays, and Clearview EIA for Detection of Chlamydia trachomatis in Female Endocervical and Urine Specimens

ABSTRACT Screening for sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) in a greater proportion of sexually active patients has become an accepted protocol by most health care providers. The purpose of this study was to compare the current test methods for detection of Chlamydia trachomatis used at the University of South Alabama, the PACE 2 assay (Gen-Probe) and the Clearview EIA (Wampole Laboratories), with two amplification technologies, the AMP CT (Gen-Probe) and LCx (Abbott) assays. In addition, a number of demographic parameters were ascertained by asking questions at the time of examination as well as for health care provider concerns and preferences. One urine and four endocervical swab specimens were collected in random order from 787 female patients attending one of four obstetrics-gynecology clinics. Eighty-seven percent of patients had no STD-related symptoms. Patients were considered positive for C. trachomatis if three or more assays (swab and/or urine) were positive. Abbott and Gen-Probe confirmed discrepant results by alternate amplified assays. A total of 66 true-positive specimens were detected by use of the combination of endocervical swabs and urine specimens. After discrepant analysis, sensitivities for endocervical swab specimens for the EIA and the PACE 2, LCx, and AMP CT assays were 50, 81, 97, and 100%, respectively. Sensitivities for the LCx and AMP CT assays with urine specimens were 98 and 81%, respectively. The prevalence of C. trachomatiswas 8.4%, as determined by amplification technology. Overall, the amplification technologies were the most sensitive methods with either swab (AMP CT assay) or urine (LCx assay) specimens. The PACE 2 assay offered the advantage of a simpler and less expensive assay with acceptable sensitivity. The clearview CT EIA, while yielding a rapid in-office result, had unacceptably low sensitivity. The wide variation in performance with amplification assays with urine specimens as reported in both this study and the literature obviates the need to clarify optimal parameters for this specimen type.
Self-adaptive communication for collaborative mobile entities in ERCMS

Adaptation of communication is required for maintaining the connectivity and the quality of communication in group-wide collaborative activities. This becomes challenging to handle when considering mobile entities in a wireless environment, requiring responsiveness and availability of the communication system. We address these challenges in the context of the ROSACE project where mobile ground and flying robots have to collaborate with each other and with remote human and artificial actors to save and rescue in case of disasters such as forest fires. This paper aims to expose a communication component architecture allowing to manage a cooperative adaptation which is aware of the activity and resource context into pervasive environment. This allows providing the appropriate adaptation of the activity in response to evolutions of the activity requirements and the changes in relation with the communication resource constraints. In this paper, we present a simulation of a ROSACE use case. The results show how ROSACE entities collaborate to maintain the connectivity and to enhance the quality of communications.
Parameters related to lipid metabolism as markers of myelination in mouse brain

Myelination, during both normal development and with respect to disorders of myelination, is commonly studied by morphological and/or biochemical techniques that assay as their end‐points the extent of myelination. The rate of myelination is potentially a more useful parameter, but it is difficult and time‐consuming to establish, requiring a complete developmental study with labor‐intensive methodology. We report herein development of methodology to assay the absolute rate of myelination at any desired time during development. This involves intraperitoneal injection of 3H2O to label body water pools, followed by determination of label in the myelin‐specific lipid, cerebroside. The absolute amount of cerebroside synthesized can then be calculated from the specific radioactivity of body water and knowledge of the number of hydrogens from water incorporated into cerebroside. During development, the rate of cerebroside synthesis correlated well with the rate of accumulation of the myelin‐specific components, myelin basic protein and cerebroside. For purposes of control, we also tested other putative, albeit less quantitative, indices of the rate of myelination. Levels of mRNA for ceramide galactosyltransferase (rate‐limiting enzyme in cerebroside synthesis) and for myelin basic protein did not closely correlate with myelination at all times. Cholesterol synthesis closely matched the rate of cholesterol accumulation but did not track well with myelination. Synthesis of fatty acids did not correlate well with accumulation of either fatty acids (phospholipids) or myelin markers. We conclude that measurement of cerebroside synthesis rates provides a good measure of the rate of myelination. This approach may be useful as an additional parameter for examining the effects of environmental or genetic alterations on the rate of myelination.
Ultrafast transient dynamics of Zn(II) porphyrins: Observation of vibrational coherence by controlling chirp of femtosecond pulses

Femtosecond coherence spectroscopic study on porphyrin molecules has demonstrated that the oscillatory features residing at the transient absorption and fluorescence decay profiles are strongly correlated with the lifetimes of the excited states and the displacements of the minima of the potential energy surfaces that are involved in the pump and probe laser pulses. We have attained a greater degree of control in the wave packet dynamics in the transient absorption by controlling the chirp of the ultrashort optical pulses. This feature provides a clue to the excited potential energy surface such as its curvature and displacement. For two representative porphyrin monomers, ZnII tetraphenylporphyrin and ZnII octaethylporphyrin, we were able to obtain detailed information on the excited state dynamics and subsequent structural changes based on the comparison between the frequency spectra retrieved from the oscillatory features in the transient absorption and fluorescence temporal profiles and the ground stat.
Pricing and Capacity Rationing for Rentals with Uncertain Durations

We consider a rental firm with two types of customers. Contract customers pay fixed, prenegotiated rental fees and expect a high quality of service. Walk-in customers have no contractual relations with the firm and are “shopping for price. ” Given multiple contract and walk-in classes, the rental firm has to decide when to offer service to contract customers and what fees to charge walk-in customers for service. We formulate this rental management problem as a problem in stochastic control and characterize optimal policies for managing contract and walk-in customers. We also consider static, myopic controls that are simpler to implement, and we analytically establish conditions under which these policies perform optimally. Complementary numerical tests provide a sense of the range of systems for which myopic policies are effective.
The Anesthetic Cascade: A Theory of How Anesthesia Suppresses Consciousness

ADEQUATE surgical anesthesia must achieve three goals: immobility, amnesia, and absence of awareness. After the evidence of anesthetic lipophilicity was presented by Meyer 1 and Overton, 2 it was widely assumed that all these actions were accomplished at some unitary site. 2 A body of evidence has now accumulated demonstrating that for many anesthetic agents, the dose required to suppress consciousness exceeds the amnestic dose but is substantially less then that required for surgical immobility during noxious stimuli. 3,4 This suggests that these three dimensions may be mediated by different regions of the central nervous system. As has been pointed out by Rampil, 5 the variability among anesthetics of the ratios of concentrations needed to suppress consciousness, to block memory, and to achieve surgical immobility further invalidate the unitary hypothesis. display two distinct modes: either functioning as relay cells that depolarize and produce spikes in response to an adequate input volley from sensory pathways or as oscillatory cells that produce rhythmic bursts of high-frequency spikes repeated in a rhythmic oscillatory pattern. The mode of activity is determined by the resting membrane potential of the TCR neuron and the strength of its synaptic interactions with the sensory inputs and the RE neurons. Hyperpolarization of the TCR neurons by the RE neurons blocks transmission by TCR neurons of sensory input to the cortex and enhances slow rhythmic oscillations.
The Proteomic Investigation of Chromatin Functional Domains Reveals Novel Synergisms among Distinct Heterochromatin Components*

Chromatin is a highly dynamic, well-structured nucleoprotein complex of DNA and proteins that controls virtually all DNA transactions. Chromatin dynamicity is regulated at specific loci by the presence of various associated proteins, histones, post-translational modifications, histone variants, and DNA methylation. Until now the characterization of the proteomic component of chromatin domains has been held back by the challenge of enriching distinguishable, homogeneous regions for subsequent mass spectrometry analysis. Here we describe a modified protocol for chromatin immunoprecipitation combined with quantitative proteomics based on stable isotope labeling by amino acids in cell culture to identify known and novel histone modifications, variants, and complexes that specifically associate with silent and active chromatin domains. Our chromatin proteomics strategy revealed unique functional interactions among various chromatin modifiers, suggesting new regulatory pathways, such as a heterochromatin-specific modulation of DNA damage response involving H2A.X and WICH, both enriched in silent domains. Chromatin proteomics expands the arsenal of tools for deciphering how all the distinct protein components act together to enforce a given region-specific chromatin status.
Attenuation of Oxidative Neuronal Necrosis by a Dopamine D1 Agonist in Mouse Cortical Cell Cultures

Events which lead to an increase in intracellular free radicals induce necrotic cell death of cultured cortical neurons. In the present study, we report that treatment with 1 microM (+/-)-SKF-38393 hydrochloride, a selective D1 agonist, as well as 100 microM trolox, a lipophilic vitamin E analogue, significantly prevented oxidative-related necrotic cell death following exposure to 10 microM Fe2+ or 1 mM buthionine sulfoximine, an inhibitor of gamma-glutamylcysteine synthetase. The neuroprotective effect of (+/-)-SKF-38393 hydrochloride was partially reversed by addition of (+/-)-SKF-83566 hydrochloride, a selective D1 antagonist. Quinelorane dihydrochloride, a selective D2 agonist, did not influence free radical neurotoxicity. Interestingly, inclusion of (+/-)-SKF-38393 hydrochloride or quinelorane dihydrochloride did not attenuate apoptotic cell death of cortical neurons deprived of serum. The present study provides evidence that (+/-)-SKF-38393 hydrochloride attenuates oxidative neuronal necrosis, which has unique therapeutic potential for the treatment of various neurodegenerative diseases linked to oxidative stress.
Cosmic production of quarkonium?

It has been suggested that pair annihilation of heavy Majorana fermions in the galactic halo into quarkonium plus a monochromatic photon could occur at an observable rate. Here we show that a calculation of Srednicki, Theisen, and Silk seriously overestimates the rate for this process, by an ordre of magnitude or more, as a result of neglecting the bound-state structure of quarkonium. It may nevertheless still be possible to resolve the correspondingly smaller gamma-ray line flux over the diffuse cosmic background by use of the currently planned space-borne superconducting magnet spectrometer faciltiy with an energy resolution of 1% or better.
PrP-containing aggresomes are cytosolic components of an ER quality control mechanism

ABSTRACT Limited detoxification capacity often directs aggregation-prone, potentially hazardous, misfolded proteins to be deposited in designated cytosolic compartments known as ‘aggresomes’. The roles of aggresomes as cellular quality control centers, and the cellular origin of the deposits contained within these structures, remain to be characterized. Here, we utilized the observation that the prion protein (PrP, also known as PRNP) accumulates in aggresomes following the inhibition of folding chaperones, members of the cyclophilin family, to address these questions. We found that misfolded PrP molecules must pass through the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) in order to be deposited in aggresomes, that the Golgi plays no role in this process and that cytosolic PrP species are not deposited in pre-existing aggresomes. Prior to their deposition in the aggresome, PrP molecules lose the ER localization signal and have to acquire a GPI anchor. Our discoveries indicate that PrP aggresomes are cytosolic overflow deposition centers for the ER quality control mechanisms and highlight the importance of these structures for the maintenance of protein homeostasis within the ER. Summary: Prion protein (PrP)-containing cytosolic aggresomes are components of a quality-control mechanism of the ER. PrP molecules that fail to enter the ER will not be deposited in pre-existing aggresomes.
Point-cloud simplification with bounded geometric deviations

This paper presents a new method for point cloud simplification. The method searches for a subset of the original point cloud data such that the maximum geometric deviation between the original and simplified data sets is below a specified error bound. The underlying principle of the simplification process is to partition the original data set into piecewise point clusters and represent each cluster by a single point. By iteratively updating the partition and efficiently evaluating the resulting geometric deviations, the proposed method is able to yield a simplified point cloud that satisfies the error bound constraint and contains near minimum number of data points.
Health benefits of physical activity in older patients: a review

As the number of elderly persons in our country increases, more attention is being given to geriatric healthcare needs and successful ageing is becoming an important topic in medical literature. Concept of successful ageing is in first line on a preventive approach of care for older people. Promotion of regular physical activity is one of the main non‐pharmaceutical measures proposed to older subjects as low rate of physical activity is frequently noticed in this age group. Moderate but regular physical activity is associated with a reduction in total mortality among older people, a positive effect on primary prevention of coronary heart disease and a significant benefit on the lipid profile. Improving body composition with a reduction in fat mass, reducing blood pressure and prevention of stroke, as well as type 2 diabetes, are also well established. Prevention of some cancers (especially that of breast and colon), increasing bone density and prevention of falls are also reported. Moreover, some longitudinal studies suggest that physical activity is linked to a reduced risk of developing dementia and Alzheimer’s disease in particular.
GA-SVR and Pseudo-position-aided GPS/INS Integration during GPS Outage

The performance of Global Positioning System and Inertial Navigation System (GPS/INS) integrated navigation is reduced when GPS is blocked. This paper proposes an algorithm to overcome the condition where GPS is unavailable. Together with a parameter-optimised Genetic Algorithm (GA), a Support Vector Regression (SVR) algorithm is used to construct the mapping function between the specific force, angular rate increments of INS measurements and the increments of the GPS position. During GPS outages, the real-time pseudo-GPS position is predicted with the mapping function, and the corresponding covariance matrix is estimated by an improved adaptive filtering algorithm. A GPS/INS integration scheme is demonstrated where the vehicle travels along a straight line and around a curve, with respect to both low-speed-stable and high-speed-unstable navigation platforms. The results show that the proposed algorithm provides a better performance when GPS is unavailable.
Identification of Vibrio proteolyticus with a differential medium and a specific probe

A differential medium (VP8) and a specific probe, based on the variable region V3 of the 16S rRNA gene, for the detection of Vibrio proteolyticus are defined. The medium contains 8% NaCl, which allows selective growth of moderately halophilic Vibrio strains. D-Sorbitol, as the main carbon source, differentiates the species that can ferment it by the pH indicators cresol red and bromothymol blue. V. proteolyticus and 8 of 418 strains studied grew on the medium and used the D-sorbitol, forming bright yellow colonies. An oligonucleotide, based on the variable region V3 of the 16S rRNA gene (5'CGCTAACGTCAAATAATGCATCTA3'), was used as the specific probe (V3VPR). Only three strains of Vibrio sp. and one strain identified as V. natriegens cross-hybridized with the probe. However, unlike V. proteolyticus, none of the strains grew on VP8. The combined use of VP8 medium and the probe allowed an unequivocal identification of V. proteolyticus.
Phosphophoryn, a biomineralization template protein: pH‐dependent protein folding experiments

The protein folding behavior of a polyelectrolyte protein, bovine dentine phosphophoryn (BDPP), in the pH range of 1.82–11.0 has been investigated. One‐ and two‐dimensional nmr spectroscopy has been utilized to obtain proton spin assignments for amino acid residues in D2O and in H2O. One‐dimensional 31P‐nmr experiments verify the existence of three separate classes of O‐phosphoserine (PSer) resonances in BDPP (α, β, χ), representing three distinct PSer residue populations at pH 6.94. By means of pH titration and 1H‐nmr, five populations of Asp residues can be identified. Three of these populations exhibit secondary inflection points on their pH titration curves that correspond to an observed pKa of 6.17–6.95. The presence or absence of secondary inflection points for Asp populations and the 31P‐nmr chemical shift dispersion for the three PSer residue populations indicate that BDPP may be comprised of homologous (Asp‐Asp)n. (PSer‐PSer)n, and heterologous (PSer‐Asp)n sequences arranged into polyelectrolyte cluster regions.
Enacting E-Relations with Ancient Chinese Military Stratagem

This study investigates the dynamics of forming organizational relationships enabled by the application of emerging information technology within a large, newly formed Chinese telecom enterprise. It aims to understand the formation process of e-relations in the wider network context. An interpretive case study approach is adopted, which involved the collection of qualitative data through semi-structured interviews and observations. This paper illustrates the importance of culture in shaping e-relations within the network context. It concludes that "the 36 Ji," ancient Chinese stratagems relating to the Chinese cultural context, help to improve our understanding of the various ways to manage e-relations in Chinese-based businesses.