Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Regulation of Tissue Immune Responses by Local Glucocorticoids at Epithelial Barriers and Their Impact on Interorgan Crosstalk

The anti-inflammatory role of extra-adrenal glucocorticoid (GC) synthesis at epithelial barriers is of increasing interest with regard to the search for alternatives to synthetic corticosteroids in the therapy of inflammatory disorders. Despite being very effective in many situations the use of synthetic corticosteroids is often controversial, as exemplified in the treatment of influenza patients and only recently in the current COVID-19 pandemic. Exploring the regulatory capacity of locally produced GCs in balancing immune responses in barrier tissues and in pathogenic disorders that lead to symptoms in multiple organs, could provide new perspectives for drug development. Intestine, skin and lung represent the first contact zones between potentially harmful pathogens or substances and the body, and are therefore important sites of immunoregulatory mechanisms. Here, we review the role of locally produced GCs in the regulation of type 2 immune responses, like asthma, atopic dermatitis and ulcerative colitis, as well as type 1 and type 3 infectious, inflammatory and autoimmune diseases, like influenza infection, psoriasis and Crohn’s disease. In particular, we focus on the role of locally produced GCs in the interorgan communication, referred to as gut-skin axis, gut-lung axis or lung-skin axis, all of which are interconnected in the pathogenic crosstalk atopic march.
Continuous MYD88 Activation Is Associated With Expansion and Then Transformation of IgM Differentiating Plasma Cells

Activating mutations of MYD88 (MYD88L265P being the far most frequent) are found in most cases of Waldenström macroglobulinemia (WM) as well as in various aggressive B-cell lymphoma entities with features of plasma cell (PC) differentiation, such as activated B-cell type diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL). To understand how MYD88 activation exerts its transformation potential, we developed a new mouse model in which the MYD88L252P protein, the murine ortholog of human MYD88L265P, is continuously expressed in CD19 positive B-cells together with the Yellow Fluorescent Protein (Myd88L252P mice). In bone marrow, IgM B and plasma cells were expanded with a CD138 expression continuum from IgMhigh CD138low to IgMlow CD138high cells and the progressive loss of the B220 marker. Serum protein electrophoresis (SPE) longitudinal analysis of 40 Myd88L252P mice (16 to 56 weeks old) demonstrated that ageing was first associated with serum polyclonal hyper gammaglobulinemia (hyper Ig) and followed by a monoclonal immunoglobulin (Ig) peak related to a progressive increase in IgM serum levels. All Myd88L252P mice exhibited spleen enlargement which was directly correlated with the SPE profile and was maximal for monoclonal Ig peaks. Myd88L252P mice exhibited very early increased IgM PC differentiation. Most likely due to an early increase in the Ki67 proliferation index, IgM lymphoplasmacytic (LP) and plasma cells continuously expanded with age being first associated with hyper Ig and then with monoclonal Ig peak. This peak was consistently associated with a spleen LP-like B-cell lymphoma. Clonal expression of both membrane and secreted µ chain isoforms was demonstrated at the mRNA level by high throughput sequencing. The Myd88L252P tumor transcriptomic signature identified both proliferation and canonical NF-κB p65/RelA activation. Comparison with MYD88L265P WM showed that Myd88L252P tumors also shared the typical lymphoplasmacytic transcriptomic signature of WM bone marrow purified tumor B-cells. Altogether these results demonstrate for the first time that continuous MYD88 activation is specifically associated with clonal transformation of differentiating IgM B-cells. Since MYD88L252P targets the IgM PC differentiation continuum, it provides an interesting preclinical model for development of new therapeutic approaches to both WM and aggressive MYD88 associated DLBCLs.
Unraveling Root Development Through Single-Cell Omics and Reconstruction of Gene Regulatory Networks

Over the last decades, research on postembryonic root development has been facilitated by “omics” technologies. Among these technologies, microarrays first, and RNA sequencing (RNA-seq) later, have provided transcriptional information on the underlying molecular processes establishing the basis of System Biology studies in roots. Cell fate specification and development have been widely studied in the primary root, which involved the identification of many cell type transcriptomes and the reconstruction of gene regulatory networks (GRN). The study of lateral root (LR) development has not been an exception. However, the molecular mechanisms regulating cell fate specification during LR formation remain largely unexplored. Recently, single-cell RNA-seq (scRNA-seq) studies have addressed the specification of tissues from stem cells in the primary root. scRNA-seq studies are anticipated to be a useful approach to decipher cell fate specification and patterning during LR formation. In this review, we address the different scRNA-seq strategies used both in plants and animals and how we could take advantage of scRNA-seq to unravel new regulatory mechanisms and reconstruct GRN. In addition, we discuss how to integrate scRNA-seq results with previous RNA-seq datasets and GRN. We also address relevant findings obtained through single-cell based studies and how LR developmental studies could be facilitated by scRNA-seq approaches and subsequent GRN inference. The use of single-cell approaches to investigate LR formation could help to decipher fundamental biological mechanisms such as cell memory, synchronization, polarization, or pluripotency.
Respiratory Aspergillus Colonization Was Associated With Relapse of Acute Exacerbation in Patients With Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease: Analysis of Data From A Retrospective Cohort Study

Background: Patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) are more susceptible to Aspergillus colonization or infection. Several studies have demonstrated that invasive pulmonary Aspergillosis (IPA) and Aspergillus hypersensitivity (AH) have a detrimental effect on COPD. However, it remains to be clarified whether Aspergillus colonization is associated with acute exacerbation of COPD (AECOPD). This study aimed to explore the impact of Aspergillus colonization in the lower respiratory tract on AECOPD. Method: Patients with Aspergillus colonization were identified from a retrospective cohort of hospitalized AECOPD from 2011 to 2016 in eight centers in Shanghai, China. The demographic information, conditions of the stable stage, clinical characteristics during hospitalization, and 1-year follow-up information after discharge were collected and compared to participants without fungi colonization. Result: Twenty-six hospitalized AECOPD patients with Aspergillus colonization and 72 controls were included in the final analysis after excluding patients with other fungi isolation and matching. The rates of recurrence of acute exacerbation within 90 days and 180 days after discharge in the patients with Aspergillus colonization were both significantly higher than that in the fungi negative patients (90 days: 19.2 vs. 4.2%, p = 0.029; 180 days: 23.1 vs. 4.2%, p = 0.010), and the all-cause mortality within 1 year was also higher (11.5 vs. 0.0%, p = 0.017). Multivariate logistic regression analysis showed that Aspergillus colonization was an independent risk factor for the recurrence of acute exacerbation within 90 days and 180 days (90 days: OR = 8.661, 95% CI: 1.496-50.159, p = 0.016; 180 days: OR =10.723, 95% CI: 1.936-59.394, p = 0.007). Conclusion: Aspergillus colonization may predict poor prognosis of AECOPD while leading to an increased risk of recurrent AECOPD in a short period.
Exosome-Contained APOH Associated With Antiphospholipid Syndrome

Background Antiphospholipid syndrome (APS) is a systemic autoimmune disease that can lead to thrombosis and/or pregnancy complications. Exosomes, membrane-encapsulated vesicles that are released into the extracellular environment by many types of cells, can carry signals to recipient cells to affect angiogenesis, apoptosis, and inflammation. There is increasing evidence suggesting that exosomes play critical roles in pregnancy. However, the contribution of exosomes to APS is still unknown. Methods Peripheral plasma was collected from healthy early pregnancy patients (NC-exos) and early pregnancy patients with APS (APS-exos) for exosome extraction and characterization. The effect of exosomes from different sources on pregnancy outcomes was determined by establishing a mouse pregnancy model. Following the coincubation of exosomes and human umbilical vein endothelial cells (HUVECs), functional tests examined the features of APS-exos. The APS-exos and NC-exos were analyzed by quantitative proteomics of whole protein tandem mass tag (TMT) markers to explore the different compositions and identify key proteins. After incubation with HUVECs, functional tests investigated the characteristics of key exosomal proteins. Western blot analysis was used to identify the key pathways. Results In the mouse model, APS-exos caused an APS-like birth outcome. In vitro experiments showed that APS-exos inhibited the migration and tube formation of HUVECs. Quantitative proteomics analysis identified 27 upregulated proteins and 9 downregulated proteins in APS-exos versus NC-exos. We hypothesized that apolipoprotein H (APOH) may be a core protein, and the analysis of clinical samples was consistent with finding from the proteomic TMT analysis. APOH-exos led to APS-like birth outcomes. APOH-exos directly enter HUVECs and may play a role through the phospho-extracellular signal-regulated kinase pathway. Conclusions Our study suggests that both APS-exos and APOH-exos impair vascular development and lead to pregnancy complications. APOH-exos may be key actors in the pathogenesis of APS. This study provides new insights into the pathogenesis of APS and potential new targets for therapeutic intervention.
Reflective Decision Making within the Discourse of Urban Elementary Engineering Classrooms

The emergence of engineering in K-12 education has promoted the need for research on discursive practices associated with successful pre-college engineering. Specifically, elementary students need support for engaging in collaborative, reflective decision-making during engineering design activities. In this poster, we describe an initial phase of work that looked to identify connections between elementary students’ reflective decision-making linguistic practices and students’ community/home-based linguistic practices.
Comparison of Antiradical Activities and Compositions of Essential Oils of Two Origanum spp. from Turkey

Hydro-distilled essential oils from the aerial parts of Origanum vulgare L. subsp. hirtum (Link) Letsw. (OVH) and Origanum onites L. (OO) were analyzed by GC/MS. Twelve compounds comprising 98.89% of the (OVH) essential oil were characterized, and the main components were thymol (58.35%) and γ-terpinene (23.22%). Twenty compounds representing 94.58% of the (OO) essential oil were identified, among which carvacrol (73.90%) and γ-terpinene (5.96%) were the major ones. Antiradical activities of essential oils investigated were tested using the DPPH radical-scavenging method. DPPH radical scavenging activities of two Origanum species essential oils were very high, and this was obviously related to their chemical compositions which were markedly rich in phenolic components such as thymol and carvacrol.
Make to Relate: Narratives Of, and As, Community Practice

As young people design, build, and problem-solve within maker spaces and clubs, they talk about making. We analyze short interviews with youth makers, conducted during presentations of their products, and hypothesize a progression through frames of participation. Moving from exploration, to exchange, and on to deliberate engagement, these frames reflect changes in the nature of participation, appropriation of community practices and dispositions, and adoption of making as a tool for identity work and interest development.
Sink or Swim: Understanding the Evolution of User Behaviors in an Online Educational Community

: Online educational communities provide spaces for teachers to find resources, create instructional activities, and share these activities with others. Engagement with such online communities can be affected by how participants were initially recruited and supported. But what happens when these support and dissemination are removed? This study investigates the evolution of user behaviors after dissemination activities are completed. The results suggest that once dissemination activities ended, users’ consumer behaviors continued while their contributor behaviors decreased.
Distributed Cognition and Gesture: Propagating a Functional System Through Impromptu Teaching

On a beach in France, a lifeguard makes three attempts to teach a colleague how to use a wristwatch and the sun to find compass directions. Each attempt involves constructing and coordinating representations in multiple spaces: sand, surroundings, watch, and air (gesture space). Close examination reveals how the hands, eyes, and body construct and connect these representations and enact their coordination in a cognitive functional system.
Machine Learning Technology Overview In Terms Of Digital Marketing And Personalization

The research is dedicated to artificial intelligence technology usage in digital marketing personalization. The doctoral theses will aim to create a machine learning algorithm that will increase sales by personalized marketing in electronic commerce website. Machine learning algorithms can be used to find the unobservable probability density function in density estimation problems. Learning algorithms learn on their own based on previous experience and generate their sequences of learning experiences, to acquire new skills through self-guided exploration and social interaction with humans. An entirely personalized advertising experience can be a reality in the nearby future using learning algorithms with training data and new behaviour patterns appearance using unsupervised learning algorithms. Artificial intelligence technology will create website specific adverts in all sales funnels individually.
Not a Magic Bullet: The Effect of Scaffolding on Knowledge and Attitudes in Online Simulations

: Common wisdom and prior research suggest that students with low prior knowledge are in greater need for scaffolding. However, some forms of scaffolding may overload novice-students’ cognitive capacity or short-circuit productive exploration of the problem space. Hence, we evaluate the effectiveness of scaffolding in a virtual simulation in physics, considering students’ attitudes and prior knowledge. 100 undergraduate students completed either a scaffolded or a relatively unstructured activity, followed by another unstructured activity. While the given scaffolding was beneficial for students with high prior knowledge, it did not assist students with low prior knowledge. Furthermore, the scaffolded activity increased students’ attitudes towards memory-and-recall in a way that transferred to the later unsupported activity, where these goals were no longer appropriate. Last, prior knowledge did not contribute to learning outcomes in the presence of intuitive grounded feedback. We explain these results in terms of productive failure and cognitive load.
Talk as a Window into Collaborative Lesson Design: Designing a Common Rubric in an Elementary School Work Circle

This poster aims to illustrate the analytic value of a design conversation that occurred during a multi-year practitioner-researcher partnership. This partnership takes the form of work circles (Fogleman, Fishman, & Krajcik, 2006; Reiser et al., 2000; Shrader et al., 1999; Shrader et al., 2001), which are a participatory, collaborative design setting. We present an example of how a dialogue between elementary teachers and university researchers offers a window into the design process and design itself.
Predicting Performance Behaviors during Question Generation in a Game-Like Intelligent Tutoring System

: The present research investigates learning constructs predicting performance behaviors during question generation in a serious game known as Operation ARA. In a between-subjects design, undergraduate students ( N=66 ) completed the three teaching modules of the game, teaching the basic factual information, application of knowledge, and finally question generation about scientific research cases. Results suggest that constructs such as time-on-task, discrimination, and generation along with type of instruction (factual vs. applied) impact student behaviors during question generation.
This paper is included in the Proceedings of the 19th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies.

Kariz is a new architecture for caching data from datalakes accessed, potentially concurrently, by multiple analytic platforms. It integrates rich information from analytics platforms with global knowledge about demand and resource availability to enable sophisticated cache management and prefetching strategies that, for example, combine historical run time information with job dependency graphs (DAGs), information about the cache state and sharing across compute clusters. Our prototype supports multiple analytic frameworks (Pig/Hadoop and Spark), and we show that the required changes are modest. We have implemented three algorithms in Kariz for optimizing the caching of individual queries (one from the literature, and two novel to our platform) and three policies for optimizing across queries from, potentially, multiple differentclusters. Withan algorithm thatfullyexploits the rich information available from Kariz, we demonstrate major speedups (as much as 3×) for TPC-H and TPC-DS.
Framing Sociocultural Interactions to Design Equitable Learning Environments

Many racial and ethnic minority (REM) students (i.e., African Americans, Hispanics, Native Americans, Pacific Islanders, and some Asian Americans) in the U.S. continue to underperform on academic tasks. Partially but not entirely explained by socioeconomic factors, REM underperformance is associated with different and inequitable sociocultural demands between informal and formal settings where REM children learn and develop. “Culturally responsive” classroom teaching is posited to help remedy this situation, but conceptual clarity and empirical support are limited. To address these limitations I recommend the learning sciences closely study cultural dimensions of social interactions across diverse classroom settings. Derived from a synthesis of research and theoretical traditions, I present an emergent framework of sociocultural interactions in classroom settings—10 dimensions organized into three domains: Life Applications, Self in Group, and Agency. I describe the constructs and address implications for design research: the need for reliable observation, and stronger theories of classroom settings/contexts.
Scale-Up Effects of CO2 Capture by Methyldiethanolamine (MDEA) Solutions in Terms of Loading Capacity

In the present study, results from three different CO2 capture experimental scales (laboratory, pilot unit, and a larger pilot unit), using aqueous amine solutions of methyldiethanolamine (MDEA) 20 wt %, are compared in terms of loading capacity. All three tested scales produced results regarding CO2 absorption using MDEA aqueous solutions, which were largely in accordance with the theoretical loading capacity of the used amine. Nevertheless, the observed differences between the theoretical and actual absorption behaviors of MDEA solutions for the different scales can be justified with the relative weight that process variables exhibit when the process is scaled up. Therefore, in order to achieve a correct scale-up of the process, simulations should be performed in order to define the best set of operational parameters in order to achieve high production yields and therefore more process profitability.
Fuzzy Control of Hydrogen Generation by the Reaction of Activated Aluminum Particles and Water

The purpose of this paper is to design a fuzzy control system for generating hydrogen at a desired level by a reaction between water and activated aluminum particles. The activated aluminum particles are produced shredded aluminum sawdust. It is difficult to characterize the reaction quantitatively because the characteristics of hydrogen generating reaction vary as depending on the samples, the environment of the reaction and so on. The experimental system consists of a fuel cell (FC) of 100[W], a water tank, a reaction vessel, pressure sensors, a water pump, a radiator and a one-chip microcomputer. The fuzzy control system is designed to determine the quantum of water which is supplied to the activated aluminum particles. The error forms a desired value of the pressure of the reaction vessel and the change of the error are chosen as the labels of the fuzzy membership functions. The proposed fuzzy control system is applied to maintain the pressure of the reaction vessel of the developed hydrogen generation system at a certain level. The developed hydrogen generation system is confirmed to provide hydrogen to the FC by experiments under various conditions.
Adhesion strength of biofilm developed in an attached-growth reactor

In this study a novel methodology is proposed to estimate the adhesion strength of biofilm developed in an attached-growth reactor. The time variation of adhesion strength was quantified in the course of formation of a biofilm consisting of denitrifiers. The model biofilm was formed on the surfaces of polyvinyl-chloride plates placed in a rectangular open-channel reactor. The result indicates that the adhesion strength was not uniformly distributed throughout biofilm, but had a tendency to increase with biofilm depth and with the progression of biofilm formation. For example on the 32nd day from start-up the adhesion strength near the substratum interface attained a level in the order of 10 2 dyne·cm −2 , whereas that in the vicinity of biofilm outer surface was only in the order of 10 0 dyne·cm −2 . As well the biofilm dry density did not remain constant throughout biofilm, having a tendency similar to that of the adhesion strength. A strong correlation was observed between the dry density and the extracellular biopolymer content per unit biofilm volume. It was suggested that the adhesion strength was significantly affected by the dry density.
Prevalence of hypertension in pregnancy and its associated factors among women attending antenatal clinics in Bengaluru

Background: Hypertension in pregnancy is a major challenge in antenatal practice due to its impact on obstetric and foetal outcomes. Objective: To assess the prevalence of hypertension during pregnancy and its associated risk factors among pregnant women availing of antenatal care at public sector hospitals in Bengaluru, Southern India. Methods: The sample frame included pregnant women who were attending the antenatal clinic at three public sector hospitals. The data were analyzed for 783 pregnant women who had completed their baseline visit over a period of 18 months (September 2017 to March 2019). The blood pressure was categorized based on the American College of Cardiology/American Heart Association 2017 guidelines. Results: Out of the 783 respondents who were examined, 13.9% were found to be hypertensive. The adjusted Odd's ratio was significantly higher for those who were employed outside the house and obese respondents. Other factors such as higher maternal age, lower socioeconomic status, pregnancy-related anxiety, prenatal depression, nulliparity appeared to increase the risk. Conclusion: Hypertension during pregnancy continues to be a matter of concern. Risk factor profiling of pregnant women is of utmost importance to identify those who may be likely to develop hypertensive disorders during pregnancy.