Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Eclectic characterisation of chemically modified cell-derived matrices obtained by metabolic glycoengineering and re-assessment of commonly used methods

Azide-bearing cell-derived extracellular matrices (“clickECMs”) have emerged as a highly exciting new class of biomaterials. They conserve substantial characteristics of the natural extracellular matrix (ECM) and offer simultaneously small abiotic functional groups that enable bioorthogonal bioconjugation reactions. Despite their attractiveness, investigation of their biomolecular composition is very challenging due to the insoluble and highly complex nature of cell-derived matrices (CDMs). Yet, thorough qualitative and quantitative analysis of the overall material composition, organisation, localisation, and distribution of typical ECM-specific biomolecules is essential for consistent advancement of CDMs and the understanding of the prospective functions of the developed biomaterial. In this study, we evaluated frequently used methods for the analysis of complex CDMs. Sodium dodecyl sulphate polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis (SDS-PAGE) and (immune)histochemical staining methods in combination with several microscopic techniques were found to be highly eligible. Commercially available colorimetric protein assays turned out to deliver inaccurate information on CDMs. In contrast, we determined the nitrogen content of CDMs by elementary analysis and converted it into total protein content using conversion factors which were calculated from matching amino acid compositions. The amount of insoluble collagens was assessed based on the hydroxyproline content. The Sircol™ assay was identified as a suitable method to quantify soluble collagens while the Blyscan™ assay was found to be well-suited for the quantification of sulphated glycosaminoglycans (sGAGs). Eventually, we propose a series of suitable methods to reliably characterise the biomolecular composition of fibroblast-derived clickECM.
A Relational Turbulence Model of Sexual Communication in Couples With Depression

Couples coping with depression are prone to unique and pervasive sexual intimacy challenges and experience troubles communicating effectively. Successful sexual communication improves sexual and relationship satisfaction, making communication particularly important for couples facing sexual difficulties. In this study, the relational turbulence model serves as a framework to examine associations between sexual communication and both sexual and relationship satisfaction in couples (N = 106) in which one or both partners live with depression. Results of a cross-sectional survey suggest sexual communication mediates relationships between both relational uncertainty and interference from a partner with sexual/relationship satisfaction. Results illuminate functions of communication about sex as couples navigate sexual and relational effects of depression.
Achieving Gender Equity Is Our Responsibility: Leadership Matters.

Across academic medicine, and particularly among faculty and medical school leadership, the status quo is unacceptable when it comes to gender diversity, equity, and inclusion. The Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) has launched a bold gender equity initiative, endorsed by its Board of Directors, to implore academic medical institutions to take meaningful and effective actions.Defining what progress should look like to guide these actions is worth deeper exploration. It is not enough to measure the representation of different genders at various levels of leadership within our institutions. Research and experience we share suggests more must be done, especially for women of diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds. What is needed is a fundamental conversation about privilege, intersectionality across different backgrounds, and progress.Institutional leaders have a choice to make. Will we make gender equity a top priority systemwide because we recognize that doing so leads to organizational excellence? Do we understand that establishing a robust, comprehensive definition of gender equity and how it is practiced will result in better outcomes for all? And are we ready and able to prioritize and be accountable for efforts that are measurable, with clear definitions of progress; driven and reinforced by leadership directives; inclusive of all, including men as well as women of diverse backgrounds and orientations; and systemic rather than ad-hoc? Implementing such actions requires initiating difficult conversations, making conscious choices, and modeling best practices from leaders who have successfully made gender equity a priority.
Aircraft Pilots Workload Analysis: Heart Rate Variability Objective Measures and NASA-Task Load Index Subjective Evaluation

Workload and fatigue of aircraft pilots represent an argument of great interest in the framework of human factors and a pivotal point to be considered in aviation safety. 75% of aircraft accidents are related to human errors that, in most cases, are due to high level of mental workload and fatigue. There exist several subjective or objective metrics to quantify the pilots’ workload level, with both linear and nonlinear relationships reported in the literature. The main research objective of the present work is to analyze the relationships between objective and subjective workload measurements by looking for a correlation between metrics belonging to the subjective and biometric rating methods. More particularly, the Heart Rate Variability (HRV) is used for the objective analysis, whereas the NASA-TLX questionnaire is the tool chosen for the subjective evaluation of the workload. Two different flight scenarios were considered for the studies: the take-off phase with the initial climb and the final approach phase with the landing. A Maneuver Error Index (MEI) is also introduced to evaluate the pilot flight performance according to mission requirements. Both qualitative and quantitative correlation analyses were performed among the MEI, subjective and objective measurements. Monotonic relationships were found within the HRV indexes, and a nonlinear relationship is proposed among NASA-TLX and HRV indexes. These findings suggest that the relationship between workload, biometric data, and performance indexes are characterized by intricate patterns of nonlinear relationships.
Cryptococcus Neoformans: Primeiro Caso Relatado de Isolamento em Fezes de Pombos no Município de Votuporanga-São Paulo

Cryptococcocus neoformans and Cryptococcus gattii are closely related pathogenic fungi that cause pneumonia and meningitis in both immunocompromised and immunocompetent hosts. Both species are found in the environment, and are acquired via inhalation, leading to an initial pulmonary infection. We evaluated 48 air samples and 32 samples of pigeon excreta from June to August, 2007. The presence of capsule was examined with Indian ink preparation. They were also tested for urease and phenoloxidase enzymes. Cryptococcus neoformans was recovered from pigeon excreta in 3.1%. The results suggest that climatic conditions can affect the occurrence of the yeast in different environmental sources.
Feammox Acidimicrobiaceae bacterium A6, a lithoautotrophic electrode-colonizing bacterium

An Acidimicrobiaceae bacterium A6 (A6), from the Acitnobacteria phylum was recently identified as a microorganism that can carry out anaerobic ammonium oxidation coupled to iron reduction, a process also known as Feammox. Being an iron-reducing bacterium, A6 was studied as a potential electrode-reducing bacterium that may transfer electrons extracellularly onto electrodes while gaining energy from ammonium oxidation. Actinobacteria species have been overlooked as electrogenic bacteria, and the importance of lithoautotrophic iron-reducers as electrode-reducing bacteria at anodes has not been addressed. By installing electrodes in soil of a forested riparian wetland where A6 thrives, as well as in A6 bioaugmented constructed wetland (CW) mesocosms, characteristics and performances of this organism as an electrode-reducing bacterium candidate were investigated. In this study, we show that Acidimicrobiaceae bacterium A6 is a lithoautotrophic bacterium, capable of colonizing electrodes in the field as well as in CW mesocosoms, and that it appears to be an electrode-reducing bacterium since there was a boost in current production shortly after the CWs were seeded with Acidimicrobiaceae bacterium A6. IMPORTANCE Most studies on electrogenic microorganisms have focused on the most abundant heterotrophs, while other microorganisms also commonly present in electrode microbial communities such as Actinobacteria have been overlooked. The novel Acidimicrobiaceae bacterium A6 (Actinobacteria) is an iron-reducing bacterium that can colonize the surface of anodes and is linked to electrical current production, making it an electrode-reducing candidate. Furthermore, A6 can carry out anaerobic ammonium oxidation coupled to iron reduction, therefore, findings from this study open up the possibility of using electrodes instead of iron as electron acceptors as a mean to promote A6 to treat ammonium containing wastewater more efficiently. Altogether, this study expands our knowledge on electrogenic bacteria and opens up the possibility to develop Feammox based technologies coupled to bioelectric systems for the treatment NH4+ and other contaminants in anoxic systems.
The effect of substrate and enzyme concentration on the glucose syrup production from red sorghum starch by enzymatic hydrolysis

Red sorghum starch contains 19% amylose and 34% amylopectin but low gluten, therefore, it is not suitable for bakery production. On the other hand, red sorghum is potential for glucose syrup production. Glucose syrup can be produced by enzymatic hydrolysis from starch by liquefaction process with α-amylase and saccharification process with glucoamylase. Enzyme concentration plays an important role in the yield of hydrolysis process. This experiment aimed to produced glucose syrup from red sorghum starch by hydrolysis enzymatic method. Liquid α-amylase and glucoamylase were applied for red sorghum starch with particle size 125 µm. Concentrations of α-amylase and glucoamylase were 0.2 and 0.27% (v/v), respectively. Substrate concentration was varied at 10, 20, 30, and 40% (w/v) for each 300 ml substrate solution. Liquefaction process was carried out at 90°C for 60 min whereas saccharification process was carried out at 60°C for 120 min with constant pH 6 for each process. The substrate was then strained as the hydrolysate. The hydrolysate was analyzed for its reducing sugar content by dinitrosalicylic acid (DNS) reagent. The glucose concentration was analyzed by HPLC. The highest reducing sugar concentration was 191.60 g/l, 17.44% glucose observed for 40% substrate and 0.27% enzyme concentration, respectively.
N-terminal phosphorylation of Huntingtin: A molecular switch for regulating Htt aggregation, helical conformation, internalization and nuclear targeting

Phosphorylation of exon1 of the Huntingtin protein (Httex1) has been shown to play important roles in regulating the structure, toxicity and cellular properties of N-terminal fragments and the full-length Huntingtin protein. Here, we investigated and compared the effect of bona fide phosphorylation at S13 and/or S16 on the structure, aggregation, membrane binding, and subcellular properties of mutant Httex1-Q18A. We show that serine phosphorylation at either S13 or S16 strongly disrupts the amphipathic α-helix of the N-terminus, inhibits the aggregation of mutant Httex1 and prompts the internalization and nuclear targeting of Httex1 preformed aggregates. In synthetic peptides phosphorylation at S13 and/or S16 strongly disrupted the amphipathic α-helix of the N-terminal 17 residues (Nt17) of Httex1 and Nt17 membrane binding. Our studies on peptides bearing a different combination of phosphorylation sites within Nt17 revealed a novel phosphorylation-dependent switch for regulating the structure of Httex1 involving crosstalk between phosphorylation at T3 and S13 or S16. Together, our results provide novel insights into the role of phosphorylation in regulating Httex1 structure and function in health and disease and underscore the critical importance of identifying enzymes responsible for regulating Htt phosphorylation and their potential as therapeutic targets for the treatment of Huntington’s disease.
Nonasymptotic support recovery for high‐dimensional sparse covariance matrices

For high‐dimensional data, the standard empirical estimator for the covariance matrix is very poor, and thus many methods have been proposed to more accurately estimate the covariance structure of high‐dimensional data. In this article, we consider estimation under the assumption of sparsity but regularize with respect to the individual false‐positive rate for incorrectly including a matrix entry in the support of the final estimator. The two benefits of this approach are (1) an interpretable regularization parameter removing the need for computationally expensive tuning and (2) extremely fast computation time arising from use of a binary search algorithm implemented to find the best estimator within a carefully constructed operator norm ball. We compare our approach to universal thresholding estimators and lasso‐style penalized estimators on both simulated data and data from gene expression for cancerous tumours.
Emerging zoonoses in Indonesia: implication for the future

World Health Organization (WHO) defines zoonotic diseases (zoonoses) as those diseases and infections which are naturally transmitted between vertebrate animals and humans. More than 250 zoonoses have been described, over 60% of pathogens that cause diseases in humans are zoonoses of animals, and 75% of emerging infectious diseases. Most pandemics are caused by zoonoses.
Takagi–Sugeno Observer Design for Remaining Useful Life Estimation of Li-Ion Battery System Under Faults

Among the existing estimation schemes of a battery state of charge, most deal with an assumption that the faults will never occur in the system. Nevertheless, faults may have a crucial impact on the state of charge estimation accuracy. The paper proposes a novel observer design to estimate the state of charge and the remaining useful life of a Li-ion battery system under voltage and current measurement faults. The approach starts with converting the battery system into the descriptor Takagi–Sugeno form, where the state includes the original states along with the voltage and current measurement faults. Moreover, external disturbances are bounded by an ellipsoid based on the so-called Quadratic Boundedness approach, which ensures the system stability. The second-order Resistor-Capacitor equivalent circuit model is considered to verify the performance and correctness of the proposed observer. Subsequently, a real battery model is designed with experimental data of the Li-ion 18650 battery delivered from the NASA benchmark. Another experiment deals with an automated guided vehicle fed with a battery of which the remaining useful life is estimated. Finally, the results are compared with another estimation scheme based on the same benchmark.
Relational Work in Peer Advice in a Chinese Corporate Online Discussion Forum

Former studies on advice has been focused on health and educational settings either online or offline, where the advice-giver usually enjoys an advantageous power relationship with the advice-seeker. Studies of advice in Chinese discourse are no exception. Given the insufficiency of studies on advice given by peers of equity power relations in Chinese discourse and the necessity to investigate into relational aspects, this study explores peer advice given by coworkers in a Chinese corporate online discussion forum, analyzing the advising strategies and the relational work involved. Analysis of data shows that Chinese make use of direct advising strategies more often than either conventionally or non-conventionally indirect strategies. Further examination of peer advice texts indicates that people are doing various types of relational work in giving advice to others online: mock closeness, impoliteness, solidarity and non-politeness. This study may, hopefully, help to deepen our understanding of advice-giving and relational work in Chinese discourse, especially in online discourse.
Species-specific biomass drives macroalgal benthic primary production on temperate rocky reefs

Temperate rocky reefs dominated by the giant kelp, Macrocystis pyrifera, support diverse assemblages of benthic macroalgae that provide a suite of ecosystem services, including high rates of primary production in aquatic ecosystems. These forests and the benthic macroalgae that inhabit them are facing both short-term losses and long-term declines throughout much of their range in the eastern Pacific Ocean. Here, we quantified patterns of benthic macroalgal biomass and irradiance on rocky reefs that had intact kelp forests and nearby reefs where the benthic macroalgae had been lost due to deforestation at three sites along the California, USA and Baja California, MEX coasts during the springs and summers of 2017 and 2018. We then modeled how the loss of macroalgae from these reefs impacted net benthic productivity using species-specific, mass-dependent rates of photosynthesis and respiration that we measured in the laboratory. Our results show that the macroalgal assemblages at these sites were dominated by a few species of stipitate kelps and fleshy red algae whose relative abundances were spatially and temporally variable, and which exhibited variable rates of photosynthesis and respiration. Together, our model estimates that the dominant macroalgae on these reefs contribute 15 to 4,300 mg C m d to net benthic primary production, and that this is driven primarily by a few dominant taxa that have large biomasses and high rates of photosynthesis and / or respiration. Consequently, we propose that the loss of these macroalgae results in the loss of an important contribution to primary production and overall ecosystem function.
International Students’ Experiences at a Saudi University and Academic Leaders’ Perceptions Regarding Them

This qualitative study addresses international students’ experiences at a Saudi university to gain insight into the challenges these students encounter during their studies. The study also explores academic leaders’ perceptions in supporting international students. The guiding theories behind this study include culture shock and socialization. I conducted interviews with 16 international students and 10 academic leaders at a university in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to gain an understanding of their perspectives. The findings were then analyzed for common trends. The interviews showed that some students experienced greater culture shock than others, including language barriers, when coming from non-Arab countries, and women faced more challenges than men. Meanwhile, the academic leaders and faculty in this study appeared to understand international students’ experiences. Despite the rise in international students attending Saudi universities on full scholarships, limited research has considered this unique student population. This study addresses this gap and discusses future directions. This paper discusses implications for higher-education personnel and international students. The paper recommends providing sufficient material to allow students to prepare for culture shock before coming to Saudi Arabia and making professors and personnel more available to students for support.
Trapped continental shelf waves with a free surface

Abstract A number of recent results have shown that within the shallow water, rigid-lid approximation, alongshore variations in the bathymetry, i.e. a submerged ridge, can lead to continental shelf waves (CSWs) that are localised geographically at the ridge and then decay both along and away from the coast. Removing the rigid-lid assumption, introduces the superinertial Poincaré waves and a Kelvin wave that is present at all frequencies. This implies that the spectrum of the associated wave operator, which is bounded for the rigid lid case, is continuous and unbounded for the free-surface case. In the rigid-lid case the localisation of modes are isolated eigenvalues lying above the continuous spectrum whereas any localised modes for the free-surface problem must necessarily be embedded in the continuous spectrum. The purpose of this work is to construct trapped CSWs analytically and numerically for a non-rectilinear shelf. A regular asymptotic method is employed by considering a slowly varying, non-rectilinear shelf with an approximate boundary condition at the shelf–ocean boundary. It is shown that even with the free-surface present, trapped CSWs do indeed exist for the submerged ridge topography. Comparison with highly accurate numerical results demonstrates the accuracy of the asymptotic method and also allows the consideration of shelves that abut an open ocean so avoiding the approximate boundary condition at the shelf–ocean boundary.
Ecological risk assessment of mercury and other heavy metals in soils of coal mining area: A case study from the eastern part of a Jharia coal field, India

ABSTRACT Mercury (Hg) and other heavy metals, such as arsenic (As), cadmium (Cd), cobalt (Co), chromium (Cr), copper (Cu), lead (Pb), manganese (Mn), and zinc (Zn), were analyzed in coal (bituminous), roadside soil, reclaimed mine soil, core zone soil, and reference soil (agriculture soil) along three soil profiles (0–10, 10–20, and 20–30 cm) in a coal mining area (Jharkhand, India) inhabited by economically marginalized dense population. Higher toxic metal concentrations in coal (0.47 mg Hg/kg, 2.81 mg As/kg, and 13 mg Pb/kg, 2.61 mg Cd/kg) can cause ecological hazard in the area. Roadside soil has the highest Hg (2.32 mg/kg), and core zone soil has the highest Pb (15.7 mg/kg) concentration. Hg concentration in roadside soil indicates high potential ecological risk, while Cd contamination in mining area can be put under moderate ecological risk. Roadside soils shows highest Ecological Risk Index (ERI) value of 339, indicating considerable ecological risk, and Hg alone contributes 64% of ERI value. Higher ERI and (Hg) were due to the deposition of coal dust from mining activities and transportation.
Hospital/Home Medical Assistant Robot

Now a day’s health-care facilities increasingly depend on health-care staffs. By aging populace, there is an upsurge in number of old people present in the labor force and even in health-care division. It is significant to take care of aging workforce present in healthcare sector. So, for this process hospitals are providing an opportunity to mobile robots because of rapid technological progress accomplished of working and cooperating with humans and surroundings. This paper presents a design of Hospital/home medical assistant robot that consist of both combination of network system and robotics system for transmitting, receiving and sending information to care taker or doctor. As the robot gets a distress signal which is obtained from the patient, it tries to contact the care taker or doctor. If the robot is unable to contact, it will try to find out the location of doctor or the care taker and then display the condition of the patient so that the doctor can act as early as possible. Doctor or caretaker can access the robot at any time and get the live video feed of the patient at any time.