Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Ultrafiltration rate and diabetes as useful indicators of cardiovascular-related death in hemodialysis patients below 60 years of age

The survival rate of elderly hemodialyzed (HD) patients is commonly thought to be poor. In a prospective, single center, non-interventional, observational study, the cause of all-cause and cardiovascular (CV) and heart failure (HF) mortality in this patient group were examined and compared with a younger cohort (below 60 years). The study included 223 patients (90 women and 133 men) with age ranging from 34.5 to 75.0 years treated with HD. Median duration of HD was 70.0 months (24.0-120.0). Mortality data was collected over a period of six years. We divided patients into groups: <60 (n=123), ≥60 years (n=100), and with (n=33) and without DM type 2 (n=190). During a six-year follow-up, 100 patients (44.8%) died, including 83 (37.2%) patients who died due to CV reasons. Median follow-up was 2015.0 days (946.0-2463.0) with the median time to death of 1166.0 days (654.5-1631.0). The factors negatively affecting patients’ survival in univariate Cox regression analysis included for all-cause mortality were: inter-dialytic weight gain (IDWG) (hazard ratio [HR]=1.60; p=0.01), ultrafiltration (UF) rate (HR=3.63; p=0.012) for group <60 years; for CV death: UF rate (HR=4.20; p=0.03), DM (HR=5.11; p=0.002) for group <60 years; for HF death: mellitus type 2 (DM) (HR=2.93; p=0.027) for group ≥60 years). In a multi variate Cox regression analysis for patients <60 years, the UF rate was the only independent predictor of all-cause mortality (HR 3.63 (1.34-9.67); p=0.011). Both DM (HR 4.91 (1.71-14.10); p=0.003) and UF rate (HR 3.62 (1.04-12.61); p=0.044) were independent predictors of CV-related mortality in patients <60 years. The UF rate can be a simple, useful indicator of higher long-term all-cause and CV mortality in HD patients <60 years of age. Also, DM may be a predictor of CV–related mortality in younger HD patients. all-cause mortality • cardiovascular mortality diabetes • ultrafiltration
Principal component based adaptive association test of multiple traits using GWAS summary statistics

Genetics hold great promise to precision medicine by tailoring treatment to the individual patient based on their genetic profiles. Toward this goal, many large-scale genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have been performed in the last decade to identify genetic variants associated with various traits and diseases. They have successfully identified tens of thousands of disease-related variants. However they have explained only a small proportion of the overall trait heritability for most traits and are of very limited clinical use. This is partly owing to the small effect sizes of most genetic variants, and the common practice of “testing association between one trait and one genetic variant at a time” in most GWAS, even when multiple related traits are often measured for each individual. Increasing evidence suggests that many genetic variants can influence multiple traits simultaneously, and we can gain more power by testing association of multiple traits simultaneously. It is appealing to develop novel multi-trait association test methods that need only GWAS summary data, since it is generally very hard to access the individual-level GWAS phenotype and genotype data. Most existing GWAS summary data based association test methods have relied on ad hoc approach or crude Monte Carlo approximation. In this paper we develop rigorous statistical methods for efficient and powerful multi-trait association test. We develop robust and efficient methods to accurately estimate the marginal trait correlation matrix using only GWAS summary data. We construct the principal component (PC) based association test from the summary statistics. PC based test has optimal power when the underlying multi-trait signal can be captured by the first PC, and otherwise it will have suboptimal performance. We develop an adaptive test by optimally weighting the PC based test and the omnibus chi-square test to achieve robust performance under various scenarios. We develop efficient numerical algorithms to compute the analytical p-values for all the proposed tests without the need of Monte Carlo sampling. We illustrate the utility of proposed methods through application to the GWAS meta-analysis summary data for multiple lipids and glycemic traits. We identify multiple novel loci that were missed by individual trait based association test. All the proposed methods are implemented in an R package available at http://www.github. com/baolinwu/MTAR. The developed R programs are extremely efficient: it takes less than two minutes to compute the list of genome-wide significant SNPs for all proposed multi-trait tests for the lipids GWAS summary data with 2.5 million SNPs on a single Linux desktop.
Dietary niche separation of rodents and shrews in an African savanna

While niche separation and relationships with environmental conditions of large mammals of the African savanna have been studied intensively, less conspicuous components have not received similar attention. This is the case of Kafue National Park (KNP), Zambia, where mechanisms supporting coexistence among rodent and shrew species remain unclear, much less the influence of fire on their dietary resource use. Here, we use stable carbon and nitrogen isotopes to assess dietary resource use and partitioning among rodents and shrews found in three vegetation formations of KNP. According to the nitrogen isotope signatures, rodents are one to two trophic levels above primary production, save for Mus triton that is above by two to three. Shrews are two trophic levels above primary production. Among shrews, factors allowing coexistence of similar sized species could not be resolved. Rodent species of the same assemblage either differ in body mass by a factor of two (following Hutchinson's rule) or similar sized species occupy different trophic levels or dietary guilds based on their isotopic nitrogen or carbon signatures. At sites with frequent fires, rodents have broader dietary niches than at sites with low fire frequencies. This could either indicate relaxed competition under high fire frequencies as rodent populations do not reach the carrying capacity of the habitat, or it could reflect reduced competition due to lower species numbers under high versus low fire recurrence regimes. The results indicate competition as an important component structuring rodent communities in Zambian savannas, thus suggesting limited resources.
Comparative Study of the Floral Biology in Two Ornithophilous Species of Cactaceae: Melocactus zehntneri and Opuntia palmadora

Summary: The family Cactaceae is widely distributed in South and North America and presents a large spectrum of floral biotypes: melittophily, sphingophily, ornithophily and chiropterophily. The floral biology of Melocactus zehntneri (Br. & Rose) Liietzelb. (subfamily Cactoideae) and Opuntia palmadora Br. & Rose (subfamily Opuntioideae) was studied in a caatinga vegetation, in the district of Alagoinha in Pernambuco, Brazil. M. zehntneri and O. palmadora have tube-shaped flowers, hermaphrodite, without odour, lilac and red respectively. The floral anthesis of O. palmadora is diurnal and the flowers last 48 hours, the nectar is secreted and stored in the nectariferous chamber, and is more copious on the first morning of anthesis (20µl). The sugar concentration of nectar varies between 23 and 30%. Anthesis in M. zehntneri occurs at 14:30h, and the flower remains open even up to 18:30h. The nectar secretion is constant, and is more copious from 15:30h (35µ1), when the visits are more frequent. The sugar concentration of nectar is about 27%. The flowering of the two species overlaps during 3 months, however the peaks of flowering of each species do not coincide. It reduces the competition for the pollinators. The flowers of the two species are typically ornithophilous, and are visited and pollinated by the same species of hummingbird, Chlorostilbon aureoventris. The visits are regular, at intervals of 15 to 30 minutes. The two species are self-compatible.
γ-total dominating graphs of paths and cycles

A total dominating set for a graph G = (V (G), E(G)) is a subset D of V (G) such that every vertex in V (G) is adjacent to some vertex in D. The total domination number of G, denoted by γt(G), is the minimum cardinality of a total dominating set of G. A total dominating set of cardinality γt(G) is called a γ-total dominating set. Let T Dγ be the set of all γ-total dominating sets in G. We define the γ-total dominating graph of G, denoted by T Dγ(G), to be the graph whose vertex set is T Dγ, and two γ-total dominating sets D1 and D2 from T Dγ are adjacent in T Dγ(G) if D1 = D2\{u}∪{v} for some u ∈ D2 and v / ∈ D2. In this paper, we present γ-total dominating graphs of paths and cycles.
Type III Secreted Effectors as Molecular Probes of Eukaryotic Systems

Successful bacterial pathogens manipulate crucial intracellular host processes as a virulence strategy. One particular potent mechanism utilized by bacterial phytopathogens is to inject virulence factors (effectors) directly into the host cell. While many effectors have been identified and shown to suppress plant immune responses, very few have well-characterized enzymatic activities or host targets. To overcome the challenges of functional analysis of effectors, I designed two heterologous screens to characterize effector proteins of the bacterial phytopathogen Pseudomonas syringae. Specifically, my objective was to identify those P. syringae effectors that target evolutionarily conserved host proteins or processes and to subsequently elucidate the molecular mechanisms of these effectors. The first heterologous screen that I performed was to utilize tandem-affinity-purification (TAP)-tagged effectors in human cells to identify potential interacting host proteins. The second heterologous screen iii utilized a high-throughput genomics approach in yeast, known as the pathogenic genetic array (PGA), to characterize P. syringae effectors. Using the first heterologous approach, I have identified HopZ1a as the first bacterial phytopathogen effector that binds tubulin. I have shown that HopZ1a is an acetyltransferase activated by the eukaryotic co-factor, phytic acid. In vitro, activated HopZ1a acetylates itself and tubulin. In Arabidopsis thaliana, activated HopZ1a causes microtubule destruction, disrupts the secretory pathway and suppresses cell wall-mediated defense. The acetyltransferase activity of HopZ1a is dependent on the conserved catalytic cysteine residue (C216) and a conserved lysine residue (K289). Using the second heterologous screen in yeast, I have shown that HopZ1a may target the mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK) signaling cascades. Together, my work has identified novel eukaryotic targets and elucidated the virulence functions of HopZ1a.
Quantitative analysis of proteotoxicity associated with neurodegenerative disease

Neurodegenerative diseases are a costly burden, both economically and in terms of human suffering. A common feature of neurodegenerative diseases is that they stem from problems with protein folding, but the underlying biology that leads to neuron death is not well understood. Due to this lack of mechanistic information there are currently no therapeutics that treat underlying mechanisms that lead to cell loss. This thesis explores the link between complications in protein folding and cell death. In the first part of this thesis, I combined modeling of the proteotoxicity of polyglutamine (as exemplified in Huntington's Disease) in Saccharomyces cerevisiae with microfluidics and automated microscopy. From these studies, I have found that glutamine-rich proteins suppress the toxicity of poly-glutamine expanded Huntingtin by physically interacting and sequestering the protein at the IPOD (insoluble protein deposit) quality control compartment. These studies have provided new insight into possible therapeutic strategies and how the proteomes of different cell types may protect or sensitize sells to specific proteotoxic stresses. In the second part of this thesis, I quantitatively and systematically studied the toxicity of a-synuclein, which is implicated in the synucleinopathy family of diseases, including Parkinson's Disease. To systematically study the effect of toxic levels of a-synuclein expression on cellular homeostasis, I constructed a library of fluorescent reporters and utilized automated, high-throughput microscopy to image changes in reporter localization and abundance in response to a-synuclein toxicity. The results from this study have illuminated a number of pathways that were not previously studied for a-synuclein toxicity and have tied together disparate findings from many other studies. Additionally, I have shown that our experimental strategy is generalizable and can be applied other yeast models of neurodegenerative toxicity, such as poly-glutamine and AO 1-42. In summary, the quantitative studies presented in this thesis have expanded our understanding of the mechanisms underlying a variety of toxicities related to neurodegeneration. The biological insights gained from these studies have helped illuminate new areas of inquiry that may be used to combat these diseases.
A checklist of Lichens of Rajasthan, India

The paper presents an updated list of 90 species of lichens from the state of Rajasthan, India. Three species marked by an asterisk (*) viz. Malmidea psychotrioides (Kalb & Lücking) Kalb, Rivas Plata & Lumbsch, Staurothele rugulosa (A. Massal.) Arnold and Willeya diffractella (Nyl.) Müll. Arg. are new records for India while 35 species marked by double asterisks (**) are new records for Rajasthan.
Weed Control for Soybean (Glycine max) Planted in a Stale or Undisturbed Seedbed on Clay Soil

Field studies were conducted for three consecutive years to determine if PRE and/or POST herbicides were needed in addition to preplant foliar-applied glyphosate and POST cultivation for maximum seed yield of irrigated and nonirrigated soybean planted in stale and undisturbed seedbeds on clay soil. Soybean seed yields following the use of PRE and POST herbicides alone or in combination were similar in all years, and exceeded seed yield following the use of glyphosate plus POST cultivation only. Plantings made in no-till and fall-till seedbeds produced similar seed yields when both PRE and POST herbicides were used. These results indicate that glyphosate plus cultivation was not adequate for soybean in stale seedbed plantings, and that either PRE or POST herbicides, but not both, were required for maximum seed yield.
A continental-scale assessment of variability in leaf traits: within species, across sites and between seasons

Plant species show considerable leaf trait variability that should be accounted for in dynamic global vegetation models (DGVMs). In particular, differences in the acclimation of leaf traits during periods more and less favourable to growth have rarely been examined. We conducted a field study of leaf trait variation at seven sites spanning a range of climates and latitudes across the Australian continent; 80 native plant species were included. We measured key traits associated with leaf structure, chemistry and metabolism during the favourable and unfavourable growing seasons. Leaf traits differed widely in the degree of seasonal variation displayed. Leaf mass per unit area (M-a) showed none. At the other extreme, seasonal variation accounted for nearly a third of total variability in dark respiration (R-dark). At the non-tropical sites, carboxylation capacity (V-cmax) at the prevailing growth temperature was typically higher in summer than in winter. When V-cmax was normalized to a common reference temperature (25 degrees C), however, the opposite pattern was observed for about 30% of the species. This suggests that metabolic acclimation is possible, but far from universal. Intraspecific variationcombining measurements of individual plants repeated at contrasting seasons, different leaves from the same individual, and multiple conspecific plants at a given sitedominated total variation for leaf metabolic traits V-cmax and R-dark. By contrast, site location was the major source of variation (53%) for M-a. Interspecific trait variation ranged from only 13% of total variation for V-cmax up to 43% for nitrogen content per unit leaf area. These findings do not support a common practice in DGVMs of assigning fixed leaf trait values to plant functional types. Trait-based models should allow for interspecific differences, together with spatial and temporal plasticity in leaf structural, chemical and metabolic traits.
CONTRIBUTION A L’ETUDE DE L’ENTOMOPHAGIE A KINSHASA

The data collected during this study indicate that entomophagy is well integrated in Kinshasa. This eating habit is practiced in the same way by almost 80% of men and women of all ages and levels of education. Its cultural significance and the role exercised by women in this sector, main actors and beneficiaries of the income generated by the trade of insects, were also highlighted. The chemical composition of 11 species of insects sold in local markets has been studied to better characterize their nutritional intake. High levels of protein, essential amino acids and lipids similar to those reported by some authors have been found, but also levels significantly higher than those reported for species of the same family. Molecular typing based on random primers (RAPD) has been performed to identify a species consumed akin to a reference species. Although the results are inconclusive about the similarity between these two species, the primers that gave the best amplification products are proposed. The results of this study thus highlight the contribution of entomophagy to reduce food insecurity in Kinshasa, its social implications (contribution to poverty alleviation and empowerment of women) with respect to revenues generated by the trade of insects, and remaining requirements for a better characterization of species consumed in the country's capital. Key-words: Entomophagy, proteins, amino acids, lipids, culture, income, insects.
Physiological response to transportation stress at different flocking densities in hot humid and winter seasons in goats and assessment of pretreatment of Vitamin C, Electrolyte and Jaggery

Present study was conducted to investigate the seasonal effects of transportation of goats (Alpine x Beetle) at different flocking densities, supplemented with Vitamin C in group I, Vitamin C + Electrolyte in group II and Jaggery in group III, 3 days before transport of animal, during winter and hot-humid seasons. The goats were selected from LRC, NDRI Karnal and were of 10-12 months old. Each group consisted of 25 goats each, divided into high (15) and low (10) flocking densities, transported for 8h with average speed of 25 Km/h. All the animals were kept off-feed and deprived of water during the transportation period. Physiological responses (Respiration rate, Rectal temperature, Pulse rate and Skin temperature) were recorded before and after transportation. A significant increase (P less than 0.05) in ST, RT, RR and PR were recorded just after unloading in both the flocking density groups and during both seasons which then declined to basal values (P less than 0.05) within 6-12 hours post transportation. Supplementation with Vitamin C, Vitamin C + Electrolyte and Jaggery aided in reducing transportation stress but Vitamin C + Electrolyte combination proved more beneficial in alleviating transportation stress in the goats.
In vitro Free Radical Scavenging and Antioxidant Activities of Aqueous Extracts of Crateva adansonii (Three-leaf Plant)

Ethnopharmacological Relevance: Crateva adansonii popularly known as Three-Leaf plant is used in some South Eastern part of Nigeria by traditional medicine practitioners to treat certain diseases such as infertility and infection. Aim: This research work aimed at investigating the in vitro antioxidant activities of various parts of Crateva adansonii (Three-leaf plant) an Eastern Nigerian medicinal additive using various method of extraction (hot and cold extracts prepared from the root, leaf and stem bark of the plant). This is to know the best method that would give highest antioxidant properties. Study Design: This work was designed to compare the antioxidant activities of various parts of Original Research Article Maduka et al.; JAMPS, 15(4): 1-8, 2017; Article no.JAMPS. 38321 2 Crateva adansonii under Ferric thiocyanate (FCT) assay. These include; Hot root extract, cold root extract, hot leaf extract, cold leaf extract, hot stem-bark extract and cold-stem bark extract at various durations. The study was also designed to study the in vitro antioxidative activities, including thiobabituric acid (TBA) assay, diphenyl-β-picrylhydrazyl (DPPH) radical scavenging effects and reducing power as standard evaluation methods. Place of Study and Duration of Study: This study took place at the Department of Biochemistry, Faculty of Science, University of Maiduguri, Borno, State Nigeria and the duration of study was eight weeks Methodology: Parameters were analyzed spectrophotometrically using UVVIS spectrophotometer (model 725G, China) at room temperature. Hot and cold water were used for the extraction. Results: It was observed that the antioxidant activities using FTC assay increased as the peroxide concentration decreased with time in all the extracts. The results showed that the hot extracts inhibited lipid peroxidation more than the cold extracts. The hot root extract showed the highest reducing power (p<0.05) among all the other extracts. Hot root extract showed stronger antioxidant activities under FTC assay than cold root extract. Hot leaf extract did not show stronger antioxidant activities than cold leaf extract while hot stem bark extract did not show stronger antioxidant activities than cold stem bark extract. The results were analyzed by one way ANOVA using SPSS statistical soft ware version 16. Conclusion: The extracts showed a positive DPPH test with the HLE, CRE, and CLE showing strong antioxidant actions respectively. The results demonstrated that the extracts from C. adansonii scavenged free radical, and reduced lipid peroxidation and could serve as a potential source of natural antioxidants. Hot water is therefore better than cold water when doing root extraction of this plant.