Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Lectin-binding sites as markers of Golgi subcompartments: proximal-to- distal maturation of oligosaccharides

We investigated the subcellular sites of glycoprotein oligosaccharide maturation by using lectin conjugates to stain lightly-fixed, saponin- permeabilized myeloma cells. At the electron microscopic level, concanavalin A-peroxidase stains the cisternal space of the nuclear envelope, the rough endoplasmic reticulum, and cisternae along the proximal face of the Golgi stack. Conversely, wheat germ agglutinin- peroxidase stains cisternae along the distal face of the Golgi stack, associated vesicles, and the cell surface. These observations confirm the existence of two qualitatively distinct Golgi subcompartments, show that the lectin conjugates can be employed as relatively proximal or distal Golgi markers under conditions of excellent ultrastructural preservation, suggest that the asymmetric distribution of qualitatively distinct oligosaccharides is a property of underlying cellular components and not simply of the principal secretory product, and suggest that the oligosaccharide structure recognized by wheat germ agglutinin is attained during transport from the proximal toward the distal face of the Golgi stack.
IDENTIFICATION OF A HYBRID FUZZY MODEL OF A BATCH REACTOR FOR SIMULATION AND CONTROL

The complex hybrid and nonlinear nature of many processes that are met in practice causes problems with both structure modelling and parameter identiﬁcation; therefore, obtaining a model that is suitable for MPC is often a difﬁcult task. In this paper we focus on using the hybrid fuzzy model formulation. The framework is suitable for modelling nonlinear hybrid systems and can be implemented in model predictive control design. The basic idea of this paper is to present an iden-tiﬁcation method for a hybrid fuzzy model based on a fuzzy clustering algorithm. In the paper, we ﬁrst introduce the hybrid fuzzy model. We present the hierarchical structure and the generalization of the Takagi-Sugeno formulation for the nonlinear hybrid system and give the output of the hybrid fuzzy model in a compact form. Next, we tackle the identiﬁcation method. We treat the fuzzy clustering algorithm, deal with the projections of the fuzzy clusters into the input space of the hybrid fuzzy model and explain the estimation of the parameters of the hybrid fuzzy model by means of a modiﬁed least-squares method. Furthermore, we verify the usability of the proposed identiﬁcation approach on a hybrid nonlinear batch reactor example. The result suggest that the batch reactor can be efﬁciently identiﬁed and thus formulated as a hybrid fuzzy model, which can eventually be used for model predictive control purposes.
Plant performance and morpho-functional differentiation in response to edaphic variation in Iberian columbines: cues for range distribution?

Aims Experimental studies of the response to environmental variation of closely related taxa are needed to understand the mechanisms underlying phenotypic divergence, habitat segregation and range span within a radiating genus. We explored the magnitude of phenotypic differentiation and adaptive plasticity in relation to edaphic variation and its significance for habitat segregation and range span in Iberian columbines. Methods We performed a common garden experiment varying soil type (calcareous vs. siliceous) and depth (rocky-shallow vs. deep) with two pairs of widespread and narrowly distributed subspecies of Iberian columbines: Aquilegia vulgaris (subspp. vulgaris and nevadensis) and Aquilegia pyrenaica (subspp. pyrenaica and cazorlensis). We compared tolerance to edaphic variation, trait differentiation and adaptive plasticity of 10 morpho-functional traits between species and distribution ranges. Additionally, we obtained estimates of the competitive environment faced by each taxon in two to four populations per taxa. Important Findings Results partially support hypotheses of higher competitive ability and tolerance to edaphic variation in widespread than in narrow endemic taxa. At the species level, the widely distributed taxon was the most tolerant to edaphic variation. Within species, no consistent pattern emerged since the population from the most widespread subspecies was the most tolerant in A. vulgaris but not in A. pyrenaica. Columbines were differentiated in many traits at species and range level. However, the pattern of differentiation does not fully support the hypothesis of higher specialization and stress toler ance in narrow endemics. Although plasticity was generally low, the results support the hypothesis of adaptive plasticity in widespread but not in restricted taxa at least at species level. Ecological differences (adaptive plasticity and competitive ability among others) may have contributed to phenotypic divergence and edaphic niche segregation, as well as to differences in range span among columbines.
Weed seeds in rice seed shipments: A case study

Abstract The Seed Health Unit of the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) conducts seed quarantine tests of incoming and outgoing rice seeds. Forty‐eight percent of the incoming shipments did not carry the necessary phytosanitary certificate from the point of origin. Fifteen percent of the incoming rice seed shipments and 0.3% of the outgoing rice seed shipments were contaminated with weed seeds. Twenty weed species were identified as rice seed contaminants. Echinochloa spp. were the most frequent, with as many as 436 seeds per seed‐lot. Storage fungi Penicillium spp. , Aspergillus sp. and Rhizopus sp. were detected in incoming Echinochloa spp. weed seeds. Pathogenic seedborne fungi such as Bipolaris oryzae and Fusarium moniliforme were detected from IRRI field‐collected Echinochloa spp. seeds. More care in processing rice seeds for germplasm exchange is needed to prevent weed seed contamination and spread.
Island use as an anti-predator tactic by parturient elk and nursery herds in Riding Mountain National Park, Manitoba

Wildlife Society Bulletin 2004, 32(4):1321–1324 Peer edited Elk (Cervus elaphus) breed seasonally to take advantage of fluctuations in forage quality and quantity (Sadlier 1987). A single, highly developed calf is produced annually, usually in late May or early June (Greer 1966), while forage quantity is increasing and forage quality reaches a maximum (Kittams 1953, Flook 1970, Collins and Urness 1983). Despite having access to the highest-quality forage, cows must balance increased foraging demands associated with high energetic costs of lactation (Carl and Robbins 1988) with protection of calves from predators. Elk are gregarious. However, great variation in degree of sociality exists between seasons, sexes, and populations (Peek 2003). Murie (1951) observed cows seeking seclusion from other elk before and during parturition. Calves hide for the first 18–20 days of their lives but associate with the cow for short periods to nurse (Lent 1974). Calves often join nursery herds a few weeks after parturition and remain in cow–calf groups of various sizes through the summer. Nursery herds reach their maximum size within 6 weeks after birth (Franklin and Lieb 1979). The size of these aggregations appears related to vegetation density, with the largest groups appearing in the most open habitats (Clutton-Brock 1974). A possible reason for variation in aggregation size is that large groups in open terrain provide individuals security from predators (Crook 1970, Kie 1999). In other words, group size substitutes for cover as an antipredator strategy. As a calf grows, attention from its mother normally decreases. Altmann (1952) and McCullough (1969) observed that cows repel strange calves and allow only their own to suckle. Predation on elk calves by wolves (Canis lupus), coyotes (C. latrans), black bears (Ursus americanus), and other carnivores can be significant during the calving and post-calving period (Houston 1978, Carbyn 1983, Gese and Grothe 1995, Smith 1996). Thus, predation can affect population dynamics of elk, especially through its influence on calf survival (Peek 2003). In nursery groups, calves typically stay close together while cows are feeding. Calf groups appear to maintain their collective focus on a single female for long periods (Geist 2002). Altmann (1952) and Harper et al. (1967) considered this a form of “babysitting. ” However, Geist (2002) suggested this was an adaptive strategy, which reduces confusion when a dangerous situation occurs. Herein, we report 23 years of observational data, documenting use of a lake island by elk for cooperative rearing of calves. Sharing responsibilities of raising calves may increase feeding time of individual cows during the post-calving period and reduce risk of predation. Use of islands as calving and calfrearing habitat has been reported for caribou From the Field: Island use as an anti-predator tactic by parturient elk and nursery herds in Riding Mountain National Park, Manitoba
Automatic Breast Cancer Detection System Using Automatic Breast Cancer Detection System Using Automatic Breast Cancer Detection System Using Automatic Breast Cancer Detection System Using Randomized Feature Selection Technique Randomized Feature Selection Technique Randomized Feature Selection Techn

Breast cancer is becoming a leading cause of death among women in the whole world, meanwhile, it is confirmed that the early detection and accurate diagnosis of this disease can ensure a long survival of the patients. Feature selection is an important part of most learning algorithms especially for high dimensional data sets. Due to the existence of irrelevant and redundant attributes, selecting only the relevant attributes of the data gives higher predictive accuracy expected from a machine learning method. This project was therefore designed to develop an automatic feature construction technique that will select relevant features from extracted features for classification of breast cancer. Breast images used in the developed system were acquired from segmented images from an available database. Extraction of discriminate features from the segmented breast images was carried out using Gray Level Co-occurrence Matrix. Selection of features from the extracted features was carried out using Randomized feature selection method. Based on the selected features, segmented breast images were classified into normal, benign and malignant using K-Nearest Neighbour. The developed system was evaluated using sensitivity, specificity and overall accuracy. The randomized feature selection algorithm with KNN classifier achieved a sensitivity of 87.04%, specificity of 87.65% and overall accuracy of 87.41%. The developed system has improved the technique of detection and classification of breast cancers in terms of overall accuracy. Therefore, this system can be adopted in medical field for better classification of breast cancer.
Adaptive Cost-Sensitive Sparse Representation Truncated Gradient Online Classification (ACSSRTGC)

: The data stream classification tasks are batch learning, suffers from poor efficiency and lack of scalability. Recently cost-sensitive online classification algorithms pooled with adaptive regularization introduced classification. In practical applications, most of the data set is imbalanced state in expressions of class division. The proposed Adaptive Cost-Sensitive Sparse Representation Truncated Gradient based Classification (ACSSRTGC) for the difficulty of class-imbalance. The test samples, class labels are predicted by reducing the losses incurred due to misclassification, acquired through the computation of the posterior probabilities. The proposed algorithms are theoretically analysed and their efficiency and characteristics are empirically validated in elaborate experiments via the German and Covtype dataset. The results of the methods are measured via the classification metrics and implemented in MATLAB environment. This research experiment result outperforms the cost sensitive online gradient descent technique and adoptive regularized cost-sensitive online descent approach.
Impact of Salmonella enterica Type III Secretion System Effectors on the Eukaryotic Host Cell

Type III secretion systems are molecular machines used by many Gram-negative bacterial pathogens to inject proteins, known as effectors, directly into eukaryotic host cells. These proteins manipulate host signal transduction pathways and cellular processes to the pathogen’s advantage. Salmonella enterica possesses two virulence-related type III secretion systems that deliver more than forty effectors. This paper reviews our current knowledge about the functions, biochemical activities, host targets, and impact on host cells of these effectors. First, the concerted action of effectors at the cellular level in relevant aspects of the interaction between Salmonella and its hosts is analyzed. Then, particular issues that will drive research in the field in the near future are discussed. Finally, detailed information about each individual effector is provided.
INFUSE: Invisible plausibly-deniable file system for NAND flash

Abstract Protecting sensitive data stored on local storage devices e.g., laptops, tablets etc. is essential for privacy. When adversaries are powerful enough to coerce users to reveal encryption keys/passwords, encryption alone becomes insufficient for data protection. Additional mechanisms are required to hide the very presence of sensitive data. Plausibly deniable storage systems (PDS) are designed to defend against such powerful adversaries. Plausible deniability allows a user to deny the existence of certain stored data even when an adversary has access to the storage medium. However, existing plausible deniability solutions leave users at the mercy of adversaries suspicious of their very use. Indeed, it may be difficult to justify the use of a plausible deniability system while claiming that no sensitive data is being hidden. This work introduces INFUSE, a plausibly-deniable file system that hides not only contents but also the evidence that a particular system is being used to hide data. INFUSE is “invisible” (identical layout with standard file system), provides redundancy, handles overwrites, survives data loss, and is secure in the presence of multi-snapshot adversaries. INFUSE is efficient. Public data operations are orders of magnitude faster than existing multi-snapshot resilient PD systems, and only 15% slower than a standard non-PD baseline, and hidden data operations perform comparably to existing systems.
Running head: PREDICTING RECALL 1 Predicting Recall of Words and Lists

For more than a half-century, lists of words have served as the memoranda of choice in studies of human memory. To better understand why some words and lists are easier to recall than others, we estimated multivariate models of word and list recall. In each of the 23 sessions, subjects (N = 98) studied and recalled the same set of 576 words, presented in 24 study-test lists. Fitting a statistical model to these data revealed positive effects of animacy, contextual diversity, valence, arousal, concreteness, and semantic structure on recall of individual words. We next asked whether a similar approach would allow us to account for list-level variability in recall performance. Here we hypothesized that semantically coherent lists would be most memorable. Consistent with this prediction, we found that semantic similarity, weighted by temporal distance, was a strong positive predictor of list-level recall. Additionally, we found significant effects of average contextual diversity, valence, animacy, and concreteness on list-level recall. Our findings extend previous models of item-level recall, and show that aggregate measures of item recallability also account for variability in list-level performance.
Efficient Recovery of Structrual Health Monitoring Signal based on Kronecker Compressive Sensing

In structural health monitoring (SHM), sensors intermittently monitor the structure and send the data to a remote server for further processing. Data compression can be used to reduce the required storage, and for efficient use of communication bandwidth, because of the huge volumes of sensor data produced from the monitoring sensors. Recently, compressive sampling (CS) had been introduced as an efficient, fast, and linear method of sampling data. The length of the signal for compression has a direct relation to the complexity of the compression system and the quality of the recovered system. In traditional CS approaches, the length of the signal was experimentally chosen. If we compress the signal in a smaller size, the compression system would be more efficient in terms of required computational complexity and time for compression. On the other hand, if we decrease the length of the signal too much, the quality of the reconstructed signal would be degraded. Very recently, the Kronecker technique in CS recovery has been introduced in order to compensate for the loss of accuracy. In this work, we investigate the applicability of Kronecker-based CS recovery for Seismic signals. The simulation results show that this technique in recovery can highly improve the quality, while sensors can compress the signal in minimal size. Applying the Kronecker technique in recovery enabled us to recover the original seismic signal with high accuracy up to 7 dB.
Comparative Analysis of the Automated Penetration Testing Tools

The requirement of performing security audit is growing day by day as the cyber threat is increasing. One of the key components in this process of securing the network is to perform penetration test of the network and web applications. With this growing need there is also a growing need of standardisation/benchmarking in the processes followed and tools used by penetration testers. In this research based thesis we look at the modern day automated web penetration testing tools and compare them with industry known OWASP Benchmark for vulnerabilities. We also address the lack of literature for framework which evaluates scanners with 360-degree view. To evaluate scanner, we performed two case studies with 4 scanners. Our research shows that, scanners with web proxy and configured crawling perform better as compared to point and shoot scanners. It was also observed that scanners with active maintenance life cycle performed better. The conclusion drawn from this research is, to detect multiple vulnerabilities more than one automated scanning tools should be used. This gives more reliable results.
Spatio-temporal patterns of fishing pressure on UK marine landscapes, and their implications for spatial planning and management

The spatio-temporal distribution of fishing pressure on marine landscapes in offshore UK (England and Wales) waters is assessed, based on a time-series of fishing vessel monitoring system (VMS) data for UK and foreign fleets deploying beam and otter trawls, and scallop dredges. The results reveal that marine landscapes with coarse or mixed sediments and weak or moderate tide stress are heavily fished. Marine landscapes experienced different intensities of fishing pressure depending on their spatial location in UK offshore waters and the regional heterogeneity of landscape types. Spatial patterns of fishing pressure vary by region, but within regions, patches of high fishing pressure remain centred at the same locations. When designing marine management plans, it is important to take account of the spatial extent and patchiness of fishing activity, and the consistency with which areas are fished in the same region from year to year. Descriptions of the spatial distribution of fishing pressures will become more meaningful at a local level if they also reflect the sensitivity of the habitats to those pressures. The further development of such sensitivity analyses, using life-history traits or measures of benthic production, is now becoming a priority.
Angiotensin II effect on calcium mobilization and mitogen-activated protein kinase activation in human umbilical vein endothelial cells

Angiotensin II (Ang II) stimulation of human umbilical vein endothelial cells (HUVEC) provoked a transient increase in intracellular calcium concentration ([Ca2+]i) and induced a phosphorylation on mitogen-activated protein kinase/extracellular signal regulated kinase (MAPK/ERK). Treatment of HUVEC with Ca2+-ATPase inhibitor thapsigargin or Ca2+ ionophore A23187 resulted in a significant increase in ERK1/2 phosphorylation. Ang II-stimulated ERK1/2 phosphorylation was sensitive to the pretreatment of cells with U73122, a selective phospholipase C (PLC) inhibitor, resulting in a pronounced decrease of ERK1/2 phosphorylation. Additionally, Ang II-induced ERK1/2 phosphorylation was prominently reduced by the removal of Ca2+ from extracellular medium. Furthermore, activation of ERK1/2 was mimicked by phorbol 12-myristate acetate, a protein kinase C (PKC) activator, while the Ang II-provoked ERK1/2 phosphorylation was markedly attenuated by a PKC inhibition after the treatment of HUVEC with GFX109203X, a specific PKC inhibitor. This study demonstrated that Ang II mediates an increase in the MAPK/ERK phosphorylation in HUVEC which is dependent on [Ca2+]i and PKC activation.
Effect of (2-chloro-4-pyridyl)-N-phenylurea (CPPU) on artemisinin production in hairy root culture of Artemisia annua L

-1 (4 µM), 2.5 mg L -1 (10 μM) and 5 mg L -1 (20 μM) in the form of (2-chloro-4-pyridyl)-N-phenylurea (CPPU) was applied to culture media after 10 days of subculture. Artemisinin content was measured at different exposure periods (0, 24, 48, and 72 h). Our result shows that the highest artemisinin content was observed from hairy root that was treated with 5 mg L -1 (20 μM) of CPPU for 72 h which were about 3 folds higher than that of non-treated culture.
Effect of Water Acidification and Sanitation on Performance, Gut Microbial Population and Carcass Characteristics of Broiler Chicken

Management of water is of utmost importance in order to ensure better performance of poultry birds. A study was thus conducted to evaluate the effect of water acidification and sanitation on performance, gut microbial population and carcass characteristics of broiler chicken. A total of 144 broiler chickens aged one-week were utilized for the study up to 6 weeks of age. The birds were distributed into 4 treatment groups of three replicates of 12 chickens. Untreated drinking water was routinely used in the control group (T1). In T2 and T3, acidifier and sanitizer were used in an amount of 1ml and 5ml/20 liters of water, respectively, while in T4 a combination of acidifier and sanitizer was used in similar doses. There was a significant effect of acidification and sanitization of water on body weight gain and feed conversion ratio of broiler chicken. The combination of acidifier and sanitizer (T4) was found to be highly effective in improving chickens’ performance, followed by sanitizer alone (T3) and acidifier alone (T2), compared to the control group. There was no significant effect on various carcass characteristics of broiler chicken except for the gut pH and intestinal length. There was a significant effect on the pH value of various intestinal segments in broiler chickens using acidifier treated water (T2) compared to T1 and T3, but no statistical effect was noticed between T2and T4. A similar trend was noticed in the length of intestines of broiler chickens in various treatment groups. There was a significant reduction in Caecal Coliform Count ( in all the treatment groups that was used acidifier and sanitizer compared to the control group.