Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Going down the rabbit hole: a review on methods characterizing selection and demography in natural populations

Characterizing species history and identifying loci underlying local adaptation is crucial in functional ecology, evolutionary biology, conservation and agronomy. The ongoing and constant improvement of next-generation sequencing (NGS) techniques has facilitated the production of an ever-increasing number of genetic markers across genomes of non-model species. The study of variation in these markers across natural populations has deepened the understanding of how population history and selection act on genomes. Population genomics now provides tools to better integrate selection into a historical framework, and take into account selection when reconstructing demographic history. However, this improvement has come with a burst of analytical tools that can confuse users. Such confusion can limit the amount of information effectively retrieved from complex genomic datasets. In addition, the lack of a unified analytical pipeline impairs the diffusion of the most recent analytical tools into fields like conservation biology. To address this need, we describe possible analytical protocols and link these with more than 70 methods dealing with genome-scale datasets. We summarise the strategies they use to infer demographic history and selection, and discuss some of their limitations. A website listing these methods is available at www.methodspopgen. com.
Salicylic acid induced sweet potato resistance to Ralstonia solanacearum through antioxidant enzymes

Resistance of sweet potato to Ralstonia solanacearum in different concentrations of salicylic acid(SA) were investigated.Being treated with SA for 3 days and then inoculated with R.solanacearum,sweet potato was induced resistance against the disease.The concentration of SA to induce resistance was 1 to 7 mmol·L-1,and 5 mmol·L-1 of SA was most effective.With SA under R.solanacearum stress,superoxide dismutase(SOD) and catalase(CAT) activities in sweet potato leaf increased,while peroxidase(POD) activities decreased.Synchronously the concentrations of H2O2 and malondinaldehyde(MDA) decreased.It was concluded that pretreatment of sweet potato with SA may decrease lipid peroxidation effect,thus increase disease resistance.
Physiological response to drought stresses and drought resistances evaluation of different Kentucky bluegrass varieties

To compare the drought resistance of bluegrass seedlings,the 14 varieties of Kentucky bluegrass seed were sowing after disinfection in the plastic pots,then thinned after emergence and fixed strains at 2to 3true leaf,left 15 uniform growth and distribution plants in every pot and regularly watering to ensure the normal growth of the seedlings.Drought stress trails were identified at 2to 3true leaf period by adding the PEG-6000 according to the Michel formula which are:0MPa(control),-0.3,-0.6,-0.9,-1.2MPa in the study.Then supplement water every two days to maintain the concentration.Two groups of drought treatment and control(normal watering)were set to simulate drought stress of 14 bluegrass cultivars and four replications were set by treatment.The physiological and biochemical index,such as chlorophyll(CHL),malondialdehyde(MDA)content,proline(Pro)content,peroxidase(POD)and superoxide dismutase(SOD)activity were measured and analyzed.The content of CHL was decreased;and the content of the Pro,MDA and SOD showed upward trend;the POD activity increased at first and then decreased and finally increase again in the bluegrass seedlings;Drought resistance of 14 bluegrass varieties were obtained by subordinate function the order is:The No.3StorpyNo. 10 Narrow leaf bluegrassNo.1MeriNo. 2Geronimoi=No.9Blue apphireNo.7Kentucky bluegrassNo.11 Kentucky bluegrassNo.4Kentucky bluegrassNo.5 WabashNo.8Bluegrass=No.13KentuckyNo. 14 Kentucky bluegrassNo.6Monopoly=No.12 Fylking.
Percutaneous Penetration of N-Nitrosodiethanolamine through Human Skin (in Vitro): Comparison of Finite and Infinite Dose Applications from Cosmetic Vehicles

N-Nitroso compounds (nitrosamines) have been detected at the parts per billion level in a wide variety of matrices including industrial chemicals, pharmaceuticals, and food. Although N-nitrosodiethanolamine (NDELA) may be detected as an impurity in some cosmetic products, studies on NDELA absorption through human skin have been limited. A study to determine the extent of NDELA absorption following topical application was therefore undertaken to assist in the proper assessment of risk following unintended exposure. NDELA absorption was measured in vitro through human cadaver skin using isopropyl myristate (IPM) and generic prototype personal-care formulations (sunscreen and shampoo) spiked with [14C]NDELA. When applied as a finite dose at a concentration of 0.06% or lower, NDELA absorption was found to be a linear function of concentration. Total absorption at 48 hr ranged from approximately 35 to 65% of the dose and was formulation dependent (IPM > shampoo > or = sunscreen). Absorption occurred relatively rapidly from all formulations and peak rates of absorption were seen within the first 5 hr from the IPM and shampoo formulations. When applied as an infinite dose, total NDELA absorption followed a different rank order (shampoo > or = IPM > sunscreen) and evidence of barrier damage was seen with the shampoo formulation.
A novel mode of human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) activation: ligation of CD28 alone induces HIV-1 replication in naturally infected lymphocytes

Induction of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) replication in infected CD4+ T lymphocytes requires cellular activation. The ligation of CD28, a signal-transducing receptor with a natural ligand on activated B cells and antigen-presenting cells, provides a costimulating signal for interleukin 2 production and T-cell proliferation as well as coactivation of the transfected HIV long terminal repeat in Jurkat cells. The aim of the present study was to investigate the ability of CD28 ligation to activate HIV type 1 (HIV-1) replication in naturally infected CD4+ lymphocytes either alone or in combination with immobilized anti-CD3 monoclonal antibody. Our results show that HIV-1 was successfully isolated from 16 of 28 patients. For 5 of these 16, virus was isolated only when anti-CD28 was added in combination with the anti-CD3. Moreover, stimulation by anti-CD28 alone induced HIV-1 replication in 5 of 12 patients tested, in the absence of cell proliferation. We found no correlation between the level of CD3- or CD28-induced proliferative response and induction of HIV-1 replication. Therefore, CD28 ligation, a nonmitogenic CD4+ T-cell activation signal, is sufficient to induce transcription and replication of HIV-1 in naturally infected lymphocytes.
Coordinating information from perception and working memory

Individuals must often coordinate information in working memory with information from perception. The demands of coordination have been analyzed in terms of the cost to switch attention. Coordination is considered in terms of the organization of control processes. Ss in 4 experiments performed list-processing tasks that sometimes required alternation between sets of items that were held in working memory or were currently displayed. Experiment 1 demonstrated that performance was slower and more error-prone when alternating between sets than when reporting a single set. On alternation tasks, latency varied with serial position, indicating that Ss paused between pairs of responses. In Experiment 2, this serial position function was observed for tasks requiring alternation between sets of information in the same modality (memory or perception). Experiments 3 and 4 demonstrate that this effect depends on the requirement to generate a new sequence of responses. A model of control processes for coordination is developed and tested. Language: en
SEXUAL SELECTION IN THE BARN SWALLOW HIRUNDO RUSTICA. III. FEMALE TAIL ORNAMENTS.

Male secondary sexual characters are often expressed in females, and the maintenance of the character in females can be due to either direct selection on females favoring the maintenance of the trait, or a correlated response to selection in males. Here I report on determinants of and phenotypic selection on tail length of female barn swallows Hirundo rustica. The homologous trait in males is under strong directional sexual selection. Female tail length was positively associated with several reproductive parameters including total seasonal reproductive success, even when controlling for year and age effects. A change in female tail length from one year to another was often associated with a change in the reproductive parameters correlated with absolute tail length. There was little evidence for an association between female tail length and the duration of the incubation period (only females incubate) and absolute and relative female provisioning rates of offspring, and subsequent size of offspring. Tail length of female barn swallows was positively correlated with that of their mates. Female tail length was a heritable trait as determined from regression of the tail trait of offspring on that of their mother and their father, and there was a positive genetic correlation between the tail trait in males and females. In conclusion, female tail length reliably reflects female reproductive potential, and the trait appears to be under directional selection, which may result in an evolutionary response to selection because of the heritability of the tail trait.
Chondroitin sulfate: extraction, purification, microbial and chemical synthesis

Chondroitin sulfate, a type of acid mucopolysaccharide possessing a variety of bioactivities, has attracted tremendous interest due to its use in the relief of joint diseases. It has been widely applied in different fields, such as medicine, biotechnology, pharmacy, textiles, food and cosmetics. This mini-review focuses on the main methods of its extraction and purification, and recent advances in bio-syntheses and chemical synthesis of such molecules. In addition, further studies in these aspects are proposed based on current research. © 2014 Society of Chemical Industry
Feedback Linearly Extended Discrete Functions

We study a new flexible method to extend linearly the graph of a non-linear, and usually not bijective, function so that the resulting extension is a bijection. Our motivation comes from cryptography. Examples from symmetric cryptography are given as how the extension was used implicitly in the construction of some well-known block ciphers. The method heavily relies on ideas brought from linear coding theory and secret sharing. We are interested in the behaviour of the composition of many extensions, and especially the space of parameters that defines a family of equations based on finite differences or linear forms. For any linear extension, we characterize entirely the space of parameters for which such equations are solvable in terms of the space of parameters that render those equations for the corresponding non-linear extended functions solvable. Conditions are also derived to assess the solvability of those kind of equations in terms of the number of compositions or iterations. As the number of iterations increases, we give corollaries that show how those equations remain solvable only for a particular subset of parameters which might be trivial or not. The proofs of those properties rely mostly on tools from linear algebra.
Part-Guided Attention Learning for Vehicle Instance Retrieval

Vehicle instance retrieval (IR) often requires one to recognize the fine-grained visual differences between vehicles. Besides the holistic appearance of vehicles which is easily affected by the viewpoint variation and distortion, vehicle parts also provide crucial cues to differentiate near-identical vehicles. Motivated by these observations, we introduce a Part-Guided Attention Network (PGAN) to pinpoint the prominent part regions and effectively combine the global and local information for discriminative feature learning. PGAN first detects the locations of different part components and salient regions regardless of the vehicle identity, which serves as the bottom-up attention to narrow down the possible searching regions. To estimate the importance of detected parts, we propose a Part Attention Module (PAM) to adaptively locate the most discriminative regions with high-attention weights and suppress the distraction of irrelevant parts with relatively low weights. The PAM is guided by the identification loss and therefore provides top-down attention that enables attention to be calculated at the level of car parts and other salient regions. Finally, we aggregate the global appearance and local features together to improve the feature performance further. The PGAN combines part-guided bottom-up and top-down attention, global and local visual features in an end-to-end framework. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method achieves new state-of-the-art vehicle IR performance on four large-scale benchmark datasets.1
The Role of Parametric Instabilities in Turbulence Generation and Proton Heating: Hybrid Simulations of Parallel-propagating Alfvén Waves

Large-amplitude Alfvén waves tend to be unstable to parametric instabilities that result in a decay process of the initial wave into different daughter waves depending upon the amplitude of the fluctuations and the plasma beta. The propagation angle with respect to the mean magnetic field of the daughter waves plays an important role in determining the type of decay. In this paper, we revisit this problem by means of multidimensional hybrid simulations. In particular, we study the decay and the subsequent nonlinear evolution of large-amplitude Alfvén waves by investigating the saturation mechanism of the instability and its final nonlinear state reached for different wave amplitudes and plasma beta conditions. As opposed to one-dimensional simulations where the Decay instability is suppressed for increasing plasma beta values, we find that the decay process in multidimensions persists at large values of the plasma beta via the filamentation/magnetosonic decay instabilities. In general, the decay process acts as a trigger both to develop a perpendicular turbulent cascade and to enhance mean field-aligned wave–particle interactions. We find indeed that the saturated state is characterized by a turbulent plasma displaying a field-aligned beam at the Alfvén speed and increased temperatures that we ascribe to the Landau resonance and pitch-angle scattering in phase space.
Exact ground state and elementary excitations of a topological spin chain

A novel Bethe Ansatz scheme is proposed to deal with topological quantum integrable systems. As an example, the anti-periodic XXZ spin chain, a typical correlated many-body system embedded in a topological manifold, is examined. Conserved "momentum" and "charge" operators are constructed despite the absence of translational invariance and $U(1)$ symmetry. The ground state energy and elementary excitations are derived exactly. It is found that two intrinsic fractional (one half) zero modes exist in most of the eigenstates. The elementary excitations show quite a different picture from that in the periodic boundary case. This method can be applied to other quantum integrable models with nontrivial topology or boundary conditions.
Quantumized Microwave Detection Based on Λ-Type Three-Level Superconducting System: HMM Modeling and Performance Prediction

We adopt artificial $\Lambda $ -type three-level system with superconducting devices for microwave signal detection, where the signal intensity reaches the level of discrete photons instead of continuous waveform. Based on the state transition principles of the three-level system, we propose a statistical model for microwave signal detection. In addition, achievable transmission rates and signal detection based on the proposed statistical models are investigated for low temperature conditions in deep space communication scenario. It is predicted that high sensitivity can be achieved by the proposed system. We further characterize the received signal considering the saturation phenomenon of three-level system, which reveals negligible performance degradation caused by saturation under weak received power regime.
Age and the self-perception of ability : a twin study analysis

Two thousand nine hundred seventy-four adults, including 678 monozygotic and 547 dizygotic twin pairs, aged 27-86 years, self-rated ability on 6 factors: Interpersonal Competence, Workplace Skills, Trade Skills, Intellectual and Cultural, Domestic Skills, and Athletic Competition. Age accounted for no more than 2% of the variance on any factor, and, although there were significant gender effects, no significant Age X Gender interactions were observed. Twin similarity did not vary significantly with age, and biometrical variance component estimates were statistically homogeneous across age with talent factor variance being apportioned approximately equally to genetic and nonshared environmental factors. Consistent failure to find age effects as well as consistent observation of significant heritability support the conclusion that self-concept crystallizes early in adulthood and reflects genetically influenced psychological characteristics.
The fractionation of sea salt and acids during transport across an Antarctic ice shelf

Analyses of Cl - , NO 3 - , SO 4 2- , Na and Mg made on a series of surface snow samples, collected at 4 km intervals along a 116 km traverse of the Fimbul Ice Shelf in Dronning Maud Land, show that fractionation of some of the sea salt species has taken place. There is depletion of Mg compared to Na in the coastal part of the traverse, but the bulk sea water ratio is maintained further inland. Evidence for Cl - fractionation is less clear, with a depletion in some sections and an enrichment in others compared to Na. Taken over the whole data-set of 120 samples, the bulk sea water ratio between the marine ions Na, Mg and Cl appears to be conservatively maintained. For all of the sea-salt components, the general trend in concentration was an increase from the ice shelf front to a maximum value approximately 45 km inland, before decreasing to a value of 10% of the maximum by the end of the traverse. Non sea-salt sulphate followed a similar trend to 45 km, but the subsequent decrease in concentration was less rapid, suggesting a greater residence time for sulphate derived from marine biogenic activity than for sea-salt aerosol. Relatively high concentrations of nitrate were found in all of the surface snow samples in comparison to samples taken from shallow pits at each end of the traverse. This may be an indication of a post depositional loss of nitrate from the snow surface. DOI: 10.1034/j.1600-0889.1993. 00009.x
Effect of AM Fungi on Salt Resistance of Maize

With the aim of determining whether the arbuscular mycorrhizal(AM) inoculation would affect biomass,salt injury series,electrical permeation rate,contents of malondialdehyde,H2O2 and O-·2,and protective enzyme activities in maize leaves under salt stress,a greenhouse experiment was carried out with or without Glomus mosseae at 5 NaCl levels(0,0.5,1.0,1.5,2.0 g/kg dry substrate). The results showed that the AM inoculation increased maize biomass,decreased salt injury series.Compared with non-mycorrhizal plants,mycorrhizal plants had higher catalase activity and lower activities of peroxidase,polyphenol oxidase and ascorbic acid oxidase;at 0,0.5 and 1.0 g/kg NaCl levels,the superoxide dismutase activity in mycorrhizal plants was lower than that in non-mycorrhizal plants;While,at 1.5 and 2.0 g/kg NaCl levels,the superoxide dismutase activity in mycorrhizal plants was higher;AM fungal colonization decreased the electrical permeation rate and contents of malondialdehyde,H2O2 and O-·2 in leaves.The results presented here indicate that the AM fungal colonization improves the salt resistance of maize plants,and alleviates the deleterious effect of the peroxidation stress induced by salt stress on maize plants not only through improving protective enzyme activities,but also through other non-enzymatic mechanisms.
Flattering and unflattering personality portraits of integratively simple and complex managers.

Research has revealed a good deal about both the situational determinants and judgmental and behavioral consequences of integrative complexity. Little is known, however, about people who are prone to think in integratively simple or complex ways. The present study fills this gap by drawing on data collected during in-depth assessments of master of business administration candidates. Integrative complexity was correlated with a broad range of self-report, observer-rating, semiprojective, and managerial-simulation measures. Results revealed a more complex pattern of correlates than one would expect from the flattering theoretical portrayals of integrative complexity. On self-report measures, complex persons scored higher on openness and creativity and lower on social compliance and conscientiousness. On personality-observer ratings, they emerged as narcissistic and somewhat antagonistic. On managerial-observer ratings, complex persons emerged as higher on initiative and self-objectivity. On semiprojective measures, complex persons scored higher on power motivation. The integratively complex manager is reminiscent of creative architects, scientists, and writers who participated in previous assessments over the past 3 decades.
Effect of caecectomy on the fiber and protein digestibility of 5 common feedstuffs

The current experiment was designed to explore effects of caecectomy on the fiber and protein digestibility.Twelve adult male Yangzhou geese were randomly divided into two groups and one group was caecectomized.The geese were fasted 24 h and the endogenous protein loss were detected by collecting all excrement in 24 h.They were employed to measure protein digestibility of the corn,soybean meal,cottonseed meal,corn distillers dried grains with solubles(DDGS) and alfalfa grass powder.True protein digestibility was measured with nitrogen-free diet method(NFD) and fasting method(FAS). The fibre digestibility of the soybean meal,cottonseed meal,DDGS and alfalfa grass powder was measured by the same method.The results showed that protein digestibility of soybean meal,DDGS and alfalfa grass powder in caecectomized birds was extremely significantly lower than that in intact ones(P0.01). The CF,NDF digestibility of soybean meal and DDGS in caecectomized birds was significantly lower than that in intact birds(P0.05),while the ADF digestibility of soybean meal and cottonseed meal in caecectomized birds was significantly lower than that in intact birds(P0.05). It was concluded that fiber and protein digestibility of some feedstuffs for caecectomized geese were changed.
Advance on the Study of Transcription Factors in Higher Plants

Transcription factors play important roles in the regulation of plant growth and development, as well as its response to environment. A typical higher plant transcription factor usually contains a DNA-binding domain, a tran- scription regulation domain, a oligomerization site and a nuclear localization domain. Transcription factors interact with cis-elements and regulate the expression of target genes through these domains. Recent studies show that tran- scription factors are efficient new molecular tools for the manipulation of plant growth and development. In this re- view, we summarized the current knowledge in the study of higher plant transcription factor, with emphasis on the regulation of transcription factor on higher plant development and morphogenesis, as well as the application of tran- scription factor in plant improvement.