Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Mapping and sequencing of cardiolipins from Geobacillus stearothermophilus NRS 2004/3a by positive and negative ion nanoESI-QTOF-MS and MS/MS.

In the course of systematic studies on surface layer (S-layer) glycoproteins of bacilli, the chloroform/methanol extract from whole cells of Geobacillus stearothermophilus NRS 2004/3a has been submitted to MS analysis. Glucosylated cardiolipins were found as minor components of the total lipid and phospholipid mixture by de novo identification. After purification of the crude extract using a combined column chromatography/2D TLC protocol, structural investigations of components in the lipid fraction by high resolution ESI-QTOF MS analysis provided evidence about homologous molecules attributable to the cardiolipin species containing a glycosylated backbone, and about a diversity of ester-linked fatty acid substituents. In comparative studies by positive and negative ion nanoESI-QTOF-CID-MS, maps of cardiolipin molecular ions were obtained, followed by MS/MS of the most abundant species, to provide structural details of D-glucopyranosylcardiolipin and the fatty acid substituent patterns. Experiments of the parent ion scan type revealed the presence of fatty acid moieties as isobaric combinations, represented in single molecular ion species.
Characterization of target injury of murine acute graft-versus-host disease directed to multiple minor histocompatibility antigens elicited by either CD4+ or CD8+ effector cells.

The precise identity of effector mononuclear cells capable of eliciting acute graft-versus-host disease (AGVHD) is controversial. In this study, highly purified subsets of donor T cells were used to produce AGVHD to multiple minor histocompatibility (H) antigens in two strain combinations of mice matched for the major histocompatibility complex (MHC). In the C3H.SW- greater than B6 strain combination, only CD8+ effector cells produced histologic evidence of AGVHD in skin and liver, which peaked 3 weeks after transplant. In the B10.D2- greater than DBA/2 strain combination, CD4+ effector cells, and to a lesser extent, CD8+ cells, mediated disease in skin, liver, and intestine, which peaked during the fourth week after transplant. Analysis of skin and liver from both combinations showed target cell injury that was phenotypically similar and resembled that previously described in human disease in other studies. In addition, prominent epithelial injury also was detected in oropharyngeal mucosa, esophagus, hepatobiliary ducts, and seminal vesicle in both transplant settings. These findings indicate that functionally different subsets of donor T cells may be capable of initiating common pathways of cellular injury in selected target sites in AGVHD, and have potential implications for strategies that seek to ablate disease development by manipulation of donor marrow before transplantation.
Multi-shot person re-identification using a novel video covariance approach

Multi-shot person re-identification in video surveillance applications has been regarded as a very difficult problem due to the low-quality of video frames, context changes and the rich intra-personal appearance variations. In this paper, we present a novel video covariance approach called VICOVAP, which considers video sequences to extract appearance features, captures moving regions of interest and finds the correlation between video frames. Therefore, it implicitly encodes the described human motion by the integration of temporal information and decreases the effect of noise using some operators such as Gabor and LBP. To exploit all the samples of each person and model them with a centroid of a set of vectors, we have subsequently applied the K-means clustering algorithm. We evaluated our VICOVAP on the publicly available CAVIAR and PRID-2011 multi-shot datasets and demonstrated good performance in comparison with the current state-of-the-art.
Mental health in Dutch children: (II) the prevalence of psychiatric disorder and relationship between measures

This study concerns the second, more clinically oriented, part of our epidemiological project. The prevalence of child psychiatric disorders in random samples of 8- and 11-year-old children is assessed by using standardized parent- and child-interviews. The relationships between different measures of child psychopathology are determined. Furthermore, additional validity measures of the Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL) and Teacher Report Form (TRF) developed by Achenbach, are provided. Of the 153 8- and 11-year-old children selected through a two-stage sampling procedure, 116 (76%) children and their parents were intensively clinically assessed. The correlation between CBCL and direct child assessment is . 42, whereas the correlation between the TRF and direct child assessment is . 28. The correlation between TRF and CBCL is . 26. The implications of the low correlation between raters who saw children is different situations are emphasized. The weight given to reports from different sources varies with the kind of problem the child exhibits. It is concluded that more research is needed to investigate the relative value of different types of data for different conditions. Seven percent of the 8- and 11-year-olds were judged severely disordered, whereas for 26% the clinicians judged the child to be moderately or severely disordered. The high prevalence rates found in our study compared with others is partly attributed to the arbitrary nature of clinical judgement. ANOVAs and discriminant function analysis were performed to obtain those CBCL items that showed the best discrimination between children who were clinically judged disordered and children from the normative comparison group. Many items found to be good discriminators of clinical status in this study were among the best discriminators of referral status in the earlier reported part of the study. A number of family and social factors were found to be associated with psychiatric disorder. These findings support those in other studies.
Filter and Wrapper-based Feature Selection Using Mutual Information for Rolling Elements Bearing Diagnosis

Corresponding author. Abstract Simultaneously to select most relevant and least redundant(MRLR) features is a crucial task in the complex engineering system such as rolling element bearing fault diagnosis. In practices, a common assumption is that features and class variables are linearly distributed, while features are evaluated in terms of relevancy and redundancy in the filter method. This study, therefore, proposes a hybrid feature selection scheme (HFS)— is a combination of filter and wrapper algorithms—for effectively identifying most discriminant feature subset that can be further utilized with a classier. This paper applies mutual information-based most relevant and least redundant(MRLR) evaluation metric with genetic algorithm (GA) to yield a series of discriminatory subsets candidates. Outputs of GA are further refined in wrapper phase to select a most discriminate subset, which produces better classification accuracy. The efficacy of the proposed HFS-MRLR is verified with a fault diagnosis application for low-speed rolling element bearing under various conditions
Patrones altitudinales de las comunidades vegetales en el Chocó biogeográfico del Valle del Cauca, Colombia

Se estudió la estructura y la diversidad vegetal de cinco localidades en el Chocó biogeográfico para determinar los patrones altitudinales de la vegetación leñosa y evaluar el efecto de los parámetros climáticos. En cada localidad se muestrearon diez parcelas de 50 x 2m, y se incluyeron todos los individuos con un diámetro a la altura del pecho de 2,5 cm o mayor. Además, se tuvieron en cuenta los datos de siete localidades del Chocó biogeográfico muestreadas con el mismo método. Las familias Arecaceae, Rubiaceae y Melastomataceae fueron las más ricas y abundantes, con los más altos índices de valor de importancia. La diversidad alfa fue más alta en las elevaciones bajas y menor en la zona más alta. Al agregar las otras localidades, el patrón altitudinal de riqueza disminuyó al aumentar la altitud. La riqueza de las plantas tuvo una acusada relación lineal con la temperatura, y una relación logarítmica con la precipitación, de tal manera que las zonas del Chocó biogeográfico con una temperatura y humedad relativa más altas presentaron mayor riqueza, aunque la precipitación podría alcanzar un punto de saturación, limitando así el aumento de la diversidad de plantas. © 2018. Acad. Colomb. Cienc. Ex. Fis. Nat.
Chive : A System for Collaborative Exploratory Data Analysis

Exploratory data analysis is a process which involves rapid iteration and creation of multiple views of a dataset to explore the data, test hypotheses and find interesting patterns. To facilitate this process, we present Chive, a system for collaborative exploratory data analysis which keeps track of the complete history of analysts’ exploratory process, allows them to quickly revert to any visualisation produced in the process, to search through this history for related visualisations, and to collaborate by sharing their exploration histories with other analysts and building on their work.
Essential Mitotic Functions of DNA Topoisomerase IIα Are Not Adopted by Topoisomerase IIβ in Human H69 Cells*

Unique functions of mammalian DNA-topoisomerases IIα and -β are suggested by their distinct cellular distribution and chromatin binding at mitosis. Here, we studied H69-VP cells that, due to a homozygous mutation, express topoisomerase IIα mostly outside the nucleus. In these cells topoisomerase IIβ showed a normal nuclear localization. However, at mitosis it diffused away from the chromatin despite the nuclear lack of the α-isoform. 80% of these cells performed chromosome condensation and disjunction with the aid of cytosolic topoisomerase IIα, which bound to the mitotic chromatin with low affinity. However, the genotype of these cells was highly polyploid indicating an increased rate of non-disjunction. In 20% of the mutant cells neither topoisomerase II isoform was bound to the mitotic chromatin, which appeared as an unstructured DNA spheroid unable to undergo disjunction and cytokinesis. Parental H69 cells expressing topoisomerase IIα inside the nucleus exhibited high affinity binding of the enzyme to the mitotic chromatin. Their genotype was mostly diploid and stable. We conclude (i) that high affinity chromatin binding of topoisomerase IIα is essential for chromosome condensation/disjunction and (ii) that topoisomerase IIβ does not adopt these functions.
Automated Vehicles: Autonomous or Connected?

Summary form only given. Fully automated vehicles have been a research topic for more than 30 years. In 1994, the Prometheus European project ended 8 years of research with demonstration of fully autonomous driving on the A1 highway near Paris. In 2005 the DARPA Challenge ended with 4 vehicles running fully autonomously over an off-road course of more than 100km and in 2007, the DARPA Urban Challenge presented several autonomous vehicles operating simultaneously with other manually driven vehicles in an urban environment. More recently and based essentially on the expertise of the best DARPA teams, Google demonstrated several autonomous vehicles that were driven several thousands of miles in California and Nevada, forcing these states (and Florida) to pass legislation concerning the operation of autonomous vehicles on public roads. In 2010, a team from Parma University demonstrated 2 automated vehicles driving in tandem from Italy to China. These concepts of "autonomous" (meaning without communication with other vehicles or infrastructure) vehicles will soon appear on the market if the legislative barriers concerning the safety can be lifted. However, this approach does not seem to bring much improvements in terms of road capacity as long as the automatic vehicles are autonomous and share the road space with non-cooperative vehicles. However, automated vehicles do not need to be autonomous in the sense that they can be connected. Through communication, automated vehicles can become much more efficient, for example by implementing platoon operation as in the Chauffeur or Sartre European projects or the AHS Project in the USA that ended in 1997 with a demonstration of 8 fully automated vehicles driving in a platoon on a highway in San Diego. Automatic vehicles can also cooperate with the infrastructure to improve the flow of traffic by variable speed limits or intersection management. Through communications, automated and regular vehicles can also cooperate to improve safety and efficiency. Finally, cooperative automatic vehicles can form a very efficient transport system in the case of cybercars: a public transport system in dedicated areas such as those operating at Heathrow airport or Masdar, the eco-city of Abu-Dhabi. The European project CityMobil-2 is now preparing large scale demonstrations of such cooperative vehicles in five cities.
Interactions among three distinct CesA proteins essential for cellulose synthesis

In a screen to identify novel cellulose deficient mutants, three lines were shown to be allelic and define a novel complementation group, irregular xylem5 (irx5). IRX5 was cloned and encodes a member of the CesA family of cellulose synthase catalytic subunits (AtCesA4). irx5 plants have an identical phenotype to previously described mutations in two other members of this gene family (IRX1 and IRX3). IRX5, IRX3, and IRX1 are coexpressed in exactly the same cells, and all three proteins interact in detergent solubilized extracts, suggesting that three members of this gene family are required for cellulose synthesis in secondary cell walls. The association of IRX1 and IRX3 was reduced to undetectable levels in the absence of IRX5. Consequently, these data suggest that IRX5, IRX3, and IRX1 are all essential components of the cellulose synthesizing complex and the presence of all three subunits is required for the correct assembly of this complex.
Myosin II contributes to the posterior contraction and the anterior extension during the retraction phase in migrating Dictyostelium cells

Cells must exert force against the substrate to migrate. We examined the vectors (both the direction and the magnitude) of the traction force generated by Dictyostelium cells using an improved non-wrinkling silicone substrate. During migration, the cells showed two `alternate' phases of locomotory behavior, an extension phase and a retraction phase. In accordance with these phases, two alternate patterns were identified in the traction force. During the extension phase, the cell exerted a `pulling force' toward the cell body in the anterior and the posterior regions and a `pushing force' in the side of the cell (pattern 1). During the retraction phase, the cell exerted a `pushing force' in the anterior region, although the force disappeared in the side and the posterior regions of the cell (pattern 2). Myosin II heavy chain null cells showed a single pattern in their traction force comparable to `pattern 1', although they still had the alternate biphasic locomotory behavior similar to the wild-type cells. Therefore, the generation of `pushing force' in the anterior and the cancellation of the traction force in the side and the posterior during the retraction phase were deficient in myosin knock-out mutant cells, suggesting that these activities depend on myosin II via the posterior contraction. Considering all these results, we hypothesized that there is a highly coordinated, biphasic mechanism of cell migration in Dictyostelium.
Relay node deployment strategies in heterogeneous wireless sensor networks: multiple-hop communication case

While a lot of existing research attempts to extend the lifetime of a wireless sensor network (WSN) by designing energy efficient networking protocols, the impact of random device deployment on system lifetime is not stressed enough. Some research efforts have tried to optimize device deployment with respect to lifetime by assuming devices can be placed deliberately. However, the methodologies and solutions therein are not applicable to a randomly deployed large scale WSN. In this research, we propose three random deployment strategies for relay nodes in a heterogeneous WSN, namely, connectivity- oriented, lifetime-oriented and hybrid deployment. We investigate how a strategy can affect both connectivity and network lifetime of a multi-hop heterogeneous WSN, in which relay nodes transmit data to the base station via multi-hop relay. The performance of the three strategies is evaluated through simulations. The results of this research provide a viable solution to the problem of optimizing provisioning of a large scale heterogeneous WSN.
Demo: Distance Measurement in Wireless Sensor Networks with low cost components

If the WSN is located in an outdoor environment, standard solutions like GPS can be applied. If GPS is not available it is possible to measure the radio propagation properties beforehand or install beacons on known positions to allow a WSN node to determine its position. In our scenario we suffer from the problem that we do not have any a priori information about the environment, as we want to localize WSN nodes within an ad hoc network. Known solutions without special hardware support usually exploit the received signal strength indicator (RSSI) to approximate the distance to an anchor node. In several publications and own experiments the RSSI based approach performed very bad concerning accuracy in unknown environments [6].
Real time image processing on parallel arrays for gigascale integration

Portable multimedia systems require high performance, high efficiency, and the ability to exploit future gigascale VLSI technology. Limits of fixture on-chip interconnect, as projected in the National Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (NTRS), increase communication costs and prevent the scaling of existing architectural approaches. New architectures must better exploit physical data locality to reduce the demand on global interconnects. This dissertation presents a system-level approach to localize computation and communication in an efficient computing platform. Research contributions include system models that capture interconnect-demand and describe architectures in gigascale technologies, and systolic synthesis procedures to map algorithms for area I/O arrays using planar streams. The system models average 60% more accurate in predictions of wire demand than existing stochastic models. A new area I/O systolic architecture is presented to exploit the physical locality of planar data streams by processing the data where it falls. New synthesis procedures for planar data streams presented in this thesis provide a three times increase in performance over previous techniques. Simulation results show that area I/O can provide additional average speedups of 16 times by exploiting additional data parallelism. This systolic array is approximately two orders of magnitude more area and power efficient than DSP and general-purpose microprocessors.
Activation of Nur77 in microglia attenuates proinflammatory mediators production and protects dopaminergic neurons from inflammation‐induced cell death

Microglia‐mediated neuroinflammation plays a critical role in the pathological development of Parkinson's disease (PD). Orphan nuclear receptor Nur77 (Nur77) is abundant in neurons, while its role in microglia‐mediated neuroinflammation remains unclear. The present data demonstrated that the expression of Nur77 in microglia was reduced accompanied by microglia activation in response to lipopolysaccharide (LPS) in vitro and in experimental 1‐methyl‐4‐phenyl‐1,2,3,6‐tetrahydropyridine‐PD mouse model. Nur77 over‐expression or application of Nur77 agonist cytosporone B suppressed the expression of proinflammatory genes, such as inducible nitric oxide NOS, cyclooxygenase‐2, IL‐1β, and tumor necrosis factor‐α in the activated microglia, while silenced Nur77 exaggerated the inflammatory responses in microglia. Moreover, activation of Nur77 suppressed the LPS‐induced NF‐κB activation which was partly dependent on p38 MAPK activity, since inhibition of p38 MAPK by SB203580 abolished the LPS‐activated NF‐κB in microglia. On the other hand, inhibition of p38 MAPK attenuated LPS‐induced Nur77 reduction. Furthermore, in a microglia‐conditioned cultured media system, Nur77 ameliorated the cytotoxicity to MN9D dopaminergic cells. Lastly, cytosporone B attenuated microglia activation and loss of dopaminergic neuron in the substantia nigra pars compacta (SNpc) of 1‐methyl‐4‐phenyl‐1,2,3,6‐tetrahydropyridine‐PD mouse model. Taken together, these findings revealed the first evidence that Nur77 was an important modulator in microglia function that associated with microglia‐mediated dopaminergic neurotoxicity, and thus modulation of Nur77 may represent a potential novel target for treatment for neurodegenerative disease.
26.9 A 0.038mm2 SAW-less multiband transceiver using an N-Path SC gain loop

N-path filtering has been intensely rekindled as a replacement of costly SAW filters, making possible of multiband blocker-tolerant receivers (RXs) at small area and power, e.g., [1]. This paper proposes an N-Path Switched-Capacitor (SC) Gain Loop that is reconfigurable as an RF-tunable transmitter (TX) or RX with LO-defined center frequency. Comparatively, a SAW-less RX should be able to amplify a weak in-band (IB) signal in the presence of large out-of-band (OB) blockers, whereas a SAW-less TX should be able to deliver a large IB signal with low spectral leakage and OB noise. Such discrepancy inspires exploration of an RX-TX-compatible N-path technique to realize a multiband transceiver (TXR) with zero on-chip inductors and external matching components. Our TXR aims at the multiband LTE standard, and comparable performances are achieved at a die size 24× smaller than the recent art [2, 3].
Bioconverted Orostachys japonicas Extracts Suppress Angiogenic Activity of Ms-1 Endothelial Cells

Orostachys japonicus A. Berger (), known as Wa-song in Korea, has been reported to exert various biological effects, such as anti-tumor, anti-oxidant, and anti-febrile effects. However, the anti-angiogenic effects of O. japonicus extracts remain to be investigated. In the present study, we demonstrated the anti-angiogenic effects of bioconverted O. japonicus extract (BOE) in Ms-1 mouse endothelial cells and compared them with the bioactivities of O. japonicus extract (OE). BOE, but not OE, were found to exert anti-angiogenic effects, including inhibition of cell migration, cell adhesion, tube formation of Ms-1 cells, and blood vessel formation of matrigel plug assay in vivo. Furthermore, protein levels of phosphorylated Src kinase were lower in BOE-treated cells than in OE-treated cells. Treatment with OE or BOE did not influence cell viability during the experimental period. Bioconverted extract of O. japonicus have anti-angiogenic effects in vitro and vivo, but non-bioconverted extract do not. We suggest that these observed anti-angiogenic effects are caused by the changes in the composition of bioactive compounds in the extracts as a result of biological conversion.
Prevalence of Leptospira interrogans serovar hardjo in the genital and urinary tracts of non-pregnant cattle

In a bacteriological investigation of 60 cows and heifers from an abattoir Leptospira interrogans serovar hardjo was isolated from 39 (65 per cent) animals. The genital tract (57 per cent) appeared to be as important a site of hardjo localisation as the urinary tract (62 per cent). This is believed to be the first report of genital hardjo infection in naturally infected cattle.