Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The In Silico Characterization of a Salicylic Acid Analogue Coding Gene Clusters in Selected Pseudomonas fluorescens Strains

Background: The microbial genome sequences provide solid in silico framework for interpretation of their drug-like chemical scaffolds biosynthetic potentials. Pseudomonas fluorescens strains are metabolically versatile and producing therapeutically important natural products. Objectives: The key objective of the present study was to mine the publically available data of P. fluorescens strains genomes for putative drug-like metabolites identification. Materials and Methods: We implemented the computational biology resources of AntiSMASH and BAGEL3 for the secondary metabolites prediction from P. fluorescens strains genome sequences. The predicted secondary metabolites were evaluated using drug discovery chemoinformatics resources, like Drugbank database search and molecular docking inspection. Results: The analyses unveiled a wide array of chemical scaffolds biosynthesis in different P. fluorescens strains. Subsequently, the drug-like potential evaluation of these metabolites identified few strains, including P. fluorescens PT14, P. fluorescens A5O6, and P. fluorescens FW300-N2E3 that harbor the biosynthetic gene clusters for salicylic acid-like metabolite biosynthesis. The molecular docking inspection of this metabolite against human cyclooxygenase and aldo-keto reductase targets revealed its feasible inhibitory potentials like other salicylate compounds. Conclusion: The computational biology and drug discovery analyses identified different gene clusters in P. fluorescens genomes coding for salicylic acid-like chemotypes biosynthesis. These gene clusters may worthy to target through metabolic engineering for the massive production of salicylates-like chemical scaffolds from microbial resources.
Why is blood group a risk marker for myocardial infarction

Background: P2Y12 inhibitors are indicated in patients following percutaneous coronary intervention. Several studies have demonstrated that high on treatment platelet reactivity is correlated with outcomes yet prospective studies of guided therapy have failed to show benefit. There is a paucity of studies on the platelet aggregation response to ADP before P2Y12 therapy is started. The aim of this study was to characterize platelet responses to 20 μM ADP by light transmission aggregometry (LTA) in a homogenous population. Methods: Platelet aggregation was assessed in 201 patients on dual antiplatelet therapy, 98 patients on aspirin alone and 47 normal, healthy volunteers free from anti-platelet medication. Results: Consensus guidelines suggest that a platelet aggregation response in response to the agonist ADP of < 57% is an adequate therapeutic response to P2Y12 inhibition. Seven healthy donors and 38 patients taking aspirin only had aggregation responses below 57%. Conclusions: The results of our study demonstrate that 15% of normal donors and 38% of patients taking aspirin only would be classified as having a therapeutic response to P2Y12 inhibition using current guidelines.
Wideband and Miniaturized Forward-Wave Directional Coupler Using Periodical Parallel Plates and Vertical Meander Lines

A wideband and miniaturized forward-wave directional coupler using periodical loaded <italic>LC</italic> network is proposed in this brief. The loaded <italic>LC</italic> network consists of parallel plates and vertical meander lines. The coupler is designed with impedance matching, and a large phase difference with a small variation between the even and odd modes within a wide frequency range. These propagation characteristics are calculated and predicted by a unit cell using Bloch-Floquet theorem. Finally, a prototype is fabricated by low-temperature co-fired ceramic (LTCC) technology. The electric length of the proposed coupler is 1.52 <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${\boldsymbol{\lambda }}$ </tex-math></inline-formula><italic>g</italic>. The operating bandwidth of the coupling level of 1.5 dB is from 5.5 to 9 GHz, and its fractional bandwidth is 48.28%. Good agreement is achieved between the simulated and measured results.
Exploring the roles of the C-terminal of Pol2, the catalytic subunit of DNA Polymerase ɛ, in replication and checkpoint response

During DNA duplication, the eukaryotic replisome functionally and physically links the unwinding of the template DNA with the synthesis of the novel strand. In Saccharomyces cerevisiae, the latter task is performed by three DNA polymerases, namely Pol α and Pol δ synthesizing the lagging strand, and Pol e the leading strand. Uniquely among the polymerases, Pol e is also involved in origin firing and is associated with activation of the S-phase checkpoint. Pol2, its catalytic subunit, is characterized by an N-terminus that contains exonuclease and polymerase domains, and an essential C-terminus. C-terminal mutants have been shown to have a range of phenotypes, including defects in origin firing, replication, DNA damage repair and checkpoint activation. However, it is unclear if all these defects arise from its origin firing deficiency or whether the C-terminus has a multi-faceted role in the functioning and maintenance of the replisome. In the work I will present, I have observed that expression of the last 236 residues of Pol2 was sufficient to partially suppress the defects in origin firing, fork progression and checkpoint signaling inherent to a truncation mutant, pol2-11. Furthermore, I identified conserved residues essential for suppressive effects of the C-terminal fragment, possibly indicating their importance in the unique versatility of this polymerase. Finally, I observed that, independently of origin firing, Pol2 appears to play a crucial role in signaling the DNA damage checkpoint.
ARetrospective,Canadian Multi-Center Study Examining the Impactof Prior Response to Abiraterone Acetate on Eff|cacyofDocetaxelinMetastaticCastration-Resistant Prostate Cancer

BACKGROUND. Questions about optimal sequencing of systemic therapy in metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer (mCRPC) and whether cross-resistance occurs between different drugs remain largely unanswered. Previous studies have produced conflicting data on the activity of docetaxel in patients who did not attain a prostate-specific antigen (PSA) response to abiraterone acetate (abiraterone). We investigated whether the biochemical response to abiraterone is associated with efficacy of subsequent docetaxel therapy. METHODS. mCRPC patients treated with docetaxel after abiraterone were retrospectively identified at three Canadian institutions. Patients who had also received docetaxel prior to abiraterone were termed “docetaxel-experienced,” while those not treated with docetaxel prior
How do healthcare practitioners talk about end-of-life conversations? A poetic inquiry

Despite agreement that end-of-life conversations should happen early on in the illness trajectory, it is widely acknowledged that healthcare practitioners often engage in these conversations when death is imminent or avoid the conversation altogether. Healthcare practitioners’ feelings of distress influence how end-of-life conversations are approached, yet thorough exploration of this emotional experience and its impact are largely missing from the literature. The aims of this preliminary scoping literature review using poetic inquiry were to examine physicians’ and nurses’ emotional distress in their accounts of how they approach end-of-life conversations, and to map key concepts relevant to exploring barriers to these conversations. The poetic findings highlight the differing nature of distress for physicians and nurses. Physicians’ distress appears to stem from adhering to their role of ‘curer’ when communicating with terminally ill adult patients at the end of life, whereas the sources of nurses’ distress appear to be interprofessional hierarchies and conflicts. Future research and training that uses methods to decentre and disrupt hierarchies and ingrained practices will be important to nursing practice and in improving end-of-life conversations. Arts-based approaches are one such method that could be pursued.
On the invariance property of reduced supervisors from the perspective of vector discrete-event systems

The relabelling mechanism is employed in symmetric discrete-event systems to obtain a control-equivalent supervisor in the relabelled level. If we apply procedure supreduce to this supervisor, with buffer sizes fixed, the result is a reduced supervisor independent of the numbers of components in each group of symmetric discrete-event systems. In this paper, we show the invariance property of reduced supervisors by utilising the semantics of vector discrete-event systems. Namely, a control congruence is generated based on the results to achieve optimal supervisory control of vector discrete-event systems. The approach is applied to two representative manufacturing facilities.
Changing perspective on obesity: genetic and environmental health consequences in the offspring

The prevalence of obesity and overweight has reached epidemic proportions with globally more than 1 billion adults being overweight and an estimated 400 million clinically obese with a projected rise to over 700 million by 2015 1 . The condition – once affecting only high-income countries – is now a major global health concern touching all communities across all ages and socioeconomic groups. The traditional view that overweight and obesity is exclusively the result of over-indulgence in energy-dense, nutrient-poor foods with high levels of sugar and saturated fats is widespread. This is not necessarily the case promoting an urgent need to raise awareness about the multidisciplinary origins of this condition. For example; maternal exposure to a variety of fat-dense diets under differing environmental conditions and fetal developmental phases may adversely impact upon metabolic parameters predisposing the infant to an increased risk of overweight and obesity in early childhood, and reduced fertility later in adult life. By emphasizing that the condition maybe the product of both past and present circumstance, we are challenging contemporary food security improvements. It is for this reason that the present review focuses on both the science and the ethics. Bioscience ethics can usefully be linked to the discipline of epigenetics – namely environmentally triggered changes in gene expression promoting lasting legacies in subsequent generations. Importantly, epigenetic insights reveal how positive or negative environmental influences may promote resilience, or otherwise, in the offspring. By integrating ethics and the life sciences, unique educational opportunities for advancing biological understanding within the scaffolding of ethics can be created.
Knowledge Representation Learning with Dynamic Path

Representation learning aims to embed knowledge graphs into a low-dimensional, dense, and real-valued vector space, in which entities and relations in a knowledge graph are represented as vectors. Many models have been proposed in the literature for the embedding. A model will perform better if it can capture more information than other models during the embedding process. Compared with the classical model TransE, the model PTransE takes into account not only direct relations but also multi-step relations (i.e, paths) between each pair of entities, and thereby achieves significant improvement in the tasks of entity prediction and relation prediction. However, in the case that there are many multi-step relations between a pair of entities, PTransE doesn’t make any distinguish between them. In this paper, by introducing dynamic factors into the path embedding process of the PTransE model, we propose a dynamic path translation (DPT) method to capture different paths between each pair of entities. Experimental results show that the DPT method has a significant improvement in the entity prediction task and the relation prediction task.
INVESTING IN PRESCHOOL AGE CHILDREN – A CASE STUDY OF VIDZEME REGION (LATVIA)

Social investments are important for a child’s development and future success. Parental leaves and Early Childhood Education and Care services (ECEC) are among main forms of social investment, contributing to child poverty reduction and increasing equality, as well as underpinning the potential for skilled workers in the future. The aim of the paper is to analyse availability of the main forms of social investment in preschool age children - early childhood education services and parental leaves, in Vidzeme region (Latvia) for a case study. An analysis of policy documents, parents’ surveys at pre-school institutions, interviews with education institution representatives and local authorities regarding education and social matters were conducted in the research. The support system for parents is still dominated by the “passive” form of support system. However, social investment policies are becoming increasingly more important. This is achieved by supporting parents' access to social investment services and by increasing the amount of parental leave benefits. In 2013-2015 funding for child-care and family policy has increased. Expenditure growth was mostly affected by an increase in the allowance for childcare and the minimum parental allowance. The availability of ECEC is moderate, but since 2009 private institutions and since 2013 babysitting services have been co-funded at the national level till May 31, 2016 to improve it. Since September 2015 a 3-year innovative project “Vouchers for the provision of child minder services to workers with nonstandard work schedules” has been introduced too, to promote parental employment and work and family balance. In Vidzeme region, for example, service availability is additionally stimulated by free transport services, ECEC fee discounts for poor, low-income and large families, etc. Results show that the availability of ECEC has been improved and there has been signs of positive changes in children’s development. Nevertheless, the availability of ECEC is moderate, and in some poorer municipalities in Latvia Matthew effects can be spotted – the middle and highest strata of society use services to a higher extend then the low-income society.
Structural characterization of amyloid beta oligomers with functional links associated to alzheimer’s disease

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is the most common form of dementia. It was first described in 1906 by Alois Alzheimer. Later on, in 1984 George Glenner and Colin Masters isolated the amyloid-beta (Aβ) peptide from a human brain and associated it to the disease. Since then the amyloid hypothesis has been a rather controversial matter discussed among the scientific community. A possible explanation is the high complexity of the target due to the variety of aggregation forms that Aβ can adopt. Therefore, understanding the links between protein aggregation and neurotoxicity, and specially obtaining the 3D structures of the aggregates responsible for neurotoxicity is key to design effective diagnostic and therapeutic strategies. Unfortunately, this remains one of the most important unresolved issues in the field. The group of Dr. Carulla has been working on the hypothesis that Aβ interacts with the cell membrane leading to ionic dyshomeostasis. In order to study this scenario, the group has changed the paradigm and treated Aβ as a membrane protein and applied well known methodologies used to characterize this family of proteins to study Aβ. By doing so, the group has proved that Aβ is able to form a type of oligomer in the presence of detergent micelles which adopts a very specific and defined structure with characteristics of a β-barrel assembly and functions as a pore. They refer to these type of oligomer as β-Barrel Pore-Forming Oligomer (βPFO). Hereby we present the work carried out to identify by using different biophysical techniques, the 3D structure of βPFO. we have used detergents to study the oligomerization process in a membrane mimetic environment. Micelles compared to other more native-like biomimetics environments based on lipids, will enable the application of novel mass spectrometry (MS) strategies and well-established solution NMR techniques thus providing high-resolution structural information. Since the accumulation of different amounts of Aβ in the membrane is a plausible scenario in the context of the disease, we have used different Aβ to detergent micelle ratios ([Aβ]:[M]) to study the role of this variable in the oligomerization process of Aβ.
The cost of coalition compromise: The electoral effects of holding salient portfolios

This article highlights the electoral effects of holding salient portfolios within a coalition government. For voters, holding ministries can be seen as a symbol of a party’s success within the coalition. As a voting heuristic, parties not controlling the portfolios on issues important to their platforms signal their failure to achieve these goals. Following this perspective, we hypothesize that the difference between coalition parties that hold salient portfolios and those that do not partially predicts the extent of the electoral cost of coalition participation. Using a data set that covers 11 European parliamentary democracies between 1966 and 2002, we show that for junior coalition partners there is an electoral reward for holding their most salient portfolio. There is also an electoral benefit for a junior partner to hold a larger number of portfolios if they do not control their most salient portfolio. Conversely, holding their most salient portfolio and a larger number of additional ministries results in greater electoral losses in the subsequent parliamentary election. These results indicate that parties’ success at negotiating for their policy priorities in coalition governments holds consequences for their future electoral success.
The Sultanate of silence: A critical analysis of the Omani newspapers’ coverage of the 2011 protests

While many studies about the Arab Spring have been conducted, Oman has been largely omitted from scholarly debates. This dissertation aims to address this research gap by examining the role of two Omani newspapers (Oman Daily and Al-Watan) during the 2011 protests. It will analyse two aspects of Omani journalism: news content and news production practices. A content analysis of over 800 news stories over 74 days from both newspapers was conducted to examine how they represented the protests. A close examination of the newspapers agendas shows that news about the protests and public demands were ignored during January and February 2011. After the state made various concessions, media attention then focussed on the government’s response to public demands. However, when protests became more violent, the newspapers intensified their coverage about the demonstrations. Both newspapers engaged in more critical coverage, undermining the protests by focusing on patriotism, violence and internal divisions. This thesis also explores if and how the newspapers’ coverage differs from that of citizens’ debates in Sablat Oman forum, one of the most popular forums in the country in 2011. A sample of 1783 posts was collected from the forum within the same period of time. Semi structured interviews with 15 journalists from both newspapers show that journalists encountered several constraints in their reporting from inside and outside their organizations. Political pressure, however, was of paramount influence, which made journalists cautious to adopt an empowering representation of the protests. Overall, the study reinforces the ‘protest paradigm’ thesis long established in academic literature about the media representation of demonstrations, and argues that the politicized nature of the Omani media contributed to weaken protest coverage. Both newspapers acted as a sphere of ‘confirmed’ intellectuals (Spielhaus 2012, p. 8) that continued to serve the government instead of reflecting the Omanis’ concerns.
PEMANFAATAN LIMBAH DAUN NANAS (Ananas comosus) SEBAGAI BAHAN BAKU PEMBUATAN PLASTIK BIODEGRADABLE

Biodegradable plastic (bioplastics) is a polymer that can be degraded and made from renewable sources, including cellulose obtained from pineapple leaves. The purpose of this study is to determine the mechanical properties of bioplastics from cellulose, determine the optimum conditions based on the concentration of chitosan variations on cellulose solution and the addition of glycerol plasticizers to the mechanical properties of biodegradable plastic produced. This study begins with the manufacture of cellulose from pineapple leaves through a process of delignification and bleaching and then making biodegradable plastic 1% cellulose raw material with a variation of chitosan with a variation of 1%; 2%; 3% and the addition of plasticizer glycerol 1%, 2% and 3% (v/v). The results obtained will be observed by tensile tests, SEM tests, swelling tests, and biodegradation. The results obtained in the morphological test with the SEM test showed that cellulose was not evenly distributed. The tensile strength test for the addition of chitosan showed that the concentration of 3% had the highest tensile strength value of 11.8 MPa while the tensile strength of the addition of glycerol showed that the concentration of 3% had the highest tensile strength value of 3.6 MPa. The swelling test shows that glycerol concentration influences biodegradable plastic water resistance and glycerol 3% has the highest percentage of water resistance, 16.6%. In the biodegradable plastic degradation test with 3% glycerol experiencing the fastest degradation, this shows that glycerol has an effect on biodegradable plastic degradation
Effect of a strength or hypertrophy training protocol, each performed using two different modes of resistance, on biomechanical, biochemical and anthropometric parameters

The study aimed to analyse the effectiveness of two variants of 8-week strength training (hypertrophy, strength) with different modes of resistance. Healthy male subjects (n=75) were allocated to five groups of equal size: hypertrophy training with a variable cam (Hyp-Cam), hypertrophy training with disc plates (Hyp-Disc), maximal strength training with a variable cam (Str-Cam), maximal strength training with disc plates (Str-Disc), and a control group (CG). The Hyp-Cam and Str-Cam groups trained with a machine where the load was adjusted to the strength capabilities of the elbow flexors. The Hyp-Disc and Str-Disc groups trained on a separate machine in which a load was applied with disc plates. The CG did not train. All groups were assessed for changes and differences in one-repetition (1RM) lifts, isokinetic muscle torque, arm circumference and arm skinfold thickness, and plasma creatine kinase (CK) activity. Within the 8-week training period the 1RM increased (p<.001) in all groups by over 20%, without significant between-group differences. Muscle torque increased significantly (p<.001) only in the Hyp-Cam group (by 13.7%). Arm circumference at rest increased by 1.7 cm (p<.001) and 1.1 cm (p<.001) in the Hyp-Cam and Hyp-Disc groups, respectively, but not in the Str-Cam (0.3 cm; p>.05) or Str-Disc (0.2 cm; p>.05) group. Skinfold thickness of the biceps and triceps decreased more within the 8-week period in Str-Cam (by 1.1 and 2.1 cm; p<.001 and p<.001 respectively) and Str-Disc (0.7 and 1.5 cm; p<.001 and p<.01 respectively) than in Hyp-Cam (by 0.4 and 1.8 cm; p>.05 and p<.01 respectively) and Hyp-Disc groups (by 0.2 and 1.4 cm; p>.05 and p<.05 respectively). CK activity was significantly (p<.05) elevated in each training group except Hyp-Cam (p>.05). The 8-week hypertrophy training with a variable cam results in greater peak muscle torque improvement than in the other examined protocols, with an insignificant increase in training-induced muscle damage indices.