Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Degradation of Phenylurea Diuron Herbicide by Coral Bacterium

Bakteri yang diisolasi dari permukaan karang mampu menggunakan senyawa herbisida fenilurea diuron sebagai sumber karbon dan energi. Organisme ini mampu menggunakan diuron hingga 125 mg/l. Namun fase lag dan waktu untuk mendegradasi mengalami kelambatan bila berada pada konsentrasi diatas 100 mg/l diuron. Kinetika pertumbuhan bakteri ini dilakukan secara kultur batch. Estimasi laju pertumbuhan maksimum (imax) sebesar 0,46 j-1 diperoleh dari pengukuran turbiditas dan nilai konstanta kejenuhan pertumbuhan (Ks) sebesar 49,5 mg/l diuron. Pengaruh konsentrasi diuron paling tinggi pada laju penggunaan substrat spesifik (o) adalah 0,0195 j-1 yang diperoleh pada perlakuan konsentrasi 125 mg/l diuron. Kata kunci : bakteri karang, diuron, kinetika pertumbuhan A bacterium which utilizes phenylurea diuron as a sole source of carbon and energy was isolated from coral surface. The organism utilized diuron up to 125 mg per liter. The lag phase and time for degradation, however, were severely prolonged at diuron concentrations above 100 mg/liter. The growth kinetics of coral bacterium was studied in batch culture. Estimation of maximum growth rates (imax), obtained from turbidity measurements, was 0.46 h-1 and half-saturation growth constant (Cs) was 49.5 mg/l diuron. The highest effect of diuron concentration on the specific substrate removal rate (o) is 0.0195 h-1 obtained from 125 mg/l diuron concentration. Key words : coral bacterium , diuron, growth kinetics
Priming by Timing: Arabidopsis thaliana Adjusts Its Priming Response to Lepidoptera Eggs to the Time of Larval Hatching

Plants can respond to eggs laid by herbivorous insects on their leaves by preparing (priming) their defense against the hatching larvae. Egg-mediated priming of defense is known for several plant species, including Brassicaceae. However, it is unknown yet for how long the eggs need to remain on a plant until a primed defense state is reached, which is ecologically manifested by reduced performance of the hatching larvae. To address this question, we used Arabidopsis thaliana, which carried eggs of the butterfly Pieris brassicae for 1–6 days prior to exposure to larval feeding. Our results show that larvae gained less biomass the longer the eggs had previously been on the plant. The strongest priming effect was obtained when eggs had been on the plant for 5 or 6 days, i.e., for (almost) the entire development time of the Pieris embryo inside the egg until larval hatching. Transcript levels of priming-responsive genes, levels of jasmonic acid-isoleucine (JA-Ile), and of the egg-inducible phytoalexin camalexin increased with the egg exposure time. Larval performance studies on mutant plants revealed that camalexin is dispensable for anti-herbivore defense against P. brassicae larvae, whereas JA-Ile – in concert with egg-induced salicylic acid (SA) – seems to be important for signaling egg-mediated primed defense. Thus, A. thaliana adjusts the kinetics of its egg-primed response to the time point of larval hatching. Hence, the plant is optimally prepared just in time prior to larval hatching.
Exploring Functional Impairment in Light of Prolonged Grief Disorder: A Prospective, Population-Based Cohort Study

Background: Functional impairment is essential in the diagnostic criteria for prolonged grief disorder (PGD) in the ICD-11. It refers to the negative impact on everyday life, including inability to maintain the usual level of functioning. We aimed to assess the extent of functional impairment, emotion-related role limitation, and impaired social functioning before and after bereavement, and to explore associations with PGD, as measured by the 13-item Prolonged Grief Scale (PGDPG13). Method: Relatives of terminally ill patients (n = 1,622) completed a questionnaire before and after bereavement. The questionnaire assessed “overall functional impairment” (PG-13 item) and “aspects of functional impairment” measured by mean scores of the 36-item Short Form Survey (SF-36) subscales emotional role and social functioning (0: worst; 100: best). We analyzed associations between PGDPG13 and functional impairment prior to bereavement using logistic regression models adjusted for age, gender, personal relation, education, time interval to patient's death, and pre-loss grief. Results: In total, 51% reported overall functional impairment before bereavement, 27% reported functional impairment at 6 months after bereavement, and 19% reported functional impairment at 3 years after bereavement. The mean emotional role score was 47.5 (95%CI: 45.4–49.7) before bereavement, increasing to 77.4 (95%CI: 75.7–79.0) at 3 years after bereavement, compared to 85.1 (95%CI: 77.6–92.6) in a reference sample. Mean social functioning score increased gradually reaching the mean of the reference sample at 3 years after bereavement. PGDPG13 was present in 26% of those with overall functional impairment at 6 months after bereavement, decreasing to 11% at 3 years after bereavement. Pre-bereavement measures of emotional role and social functioning were associated with PGDPG13at 6 months and 3 years after bereavement. Discussion: Overall functional impairment was prevalent as reflected in low scores on daily activities and social functioning compared to a reference sample. Functioning may be an important factor during caregiving and bereavement and pre-bereavement functional impairment was associated with PGDPG13. Future studies should investigate if maintaining daily activities and social functioning before bereavement could be key in early supportive care. Moreover, the role of functional impairment in bereavement interventions should be explored.
OXYGEN ATOM TRANSFER FROM A PHOSPHINE OXIDE TO TUNGSTEN(II) COMPOUNDS

WCl{sub 2}(PMePh{sub 2}){sub 4} (1) reacts rapidly with Ph{sub 2}P(O)CH{sub 2}CH{sub 2}PPh{sub 2} (5, the monooxide of diphos) to give an adduct, WCl{sub 2}(Ph{sub 2}P(O)Ch{sub 2}CH{sub 2}PPh{sub 2})(PMePh{sub 2}){sub 2} (6). On being heated at 80C for 8 h, 6 rearranges by transferring the phosphoryl oxygen to tungsten, with the formation of tungsten-oxo complexes W(O)Cl{sub 2}(diphos)(PMePh{sub 2}) (7) and W(O)Cl{sub 2}(PMEPh{sub 2}){sub 3} (2), as well as WCl{sub 2}(diphos)(PMePh{sub 2}){sub 2} (8). This is the first example of oxygen atom transfer from a phosphine oxide to a metal center, a remarkable reaction because of the strength of the P-O bond (roughly 130 kcal/mol). The presence of an oxygen atom transfer step in this reaction has been confirmed by oxygen-18-labeling studies. WCl{sub 2}(PMe{sub 3}){sub 4} (9) also deoxygenates 5, forming similar and 9 indicating that the chelating nature of 5 is needed to assist the initial coordination of the phosphoryl oxygen. The kinetic barriers to deoxygenation of phosphine oxides lie both in the initial coordination of the phosphine oxide and in the actual oxygen atom transfer step. Allyl- and vinylphosphine oxides also react with 1, but oxygen atom transfer from these substrates has not been observed. 34 refs., 2 figs., 3more » tabs. « less
Linear parameter-varying model for a refuellable zinc–air battery

Due to the increasing trend of using renewable energy, the development of an energy storage system (ESS) attracts great research interest. A zinc–air battery (ZAB) is a promising ESS due to its high capacity, low cost and high potential to support circular economy principles. However, despite ZABs' technological advancements, a generic dynamic model for a ZAB, which is a key component for effective battery management and monitoring, is still lacking. ZABs show nonlinear behaviour where the steady-state gain is strongly dependent on operating conditions. The present study aims to develop a dynamic model, being capable of predicting the nonlinear dynamic behaviour of a refuellable ZAB, using a linear parameter-varying (LPV) technique. The LPV model is constructed from a family of linear time-invariant models, where the discharge current level is used as a scheduling parameter. The developed LPV model is benchmarked against linear and nonlinear model counterparts. Herein, the LPV model performs remarkably well in capturing the nonlinear behaviour of a ZAB. It significantly outperforms the linear model. Overall, the LPV approach provides a systematic way to construct a robust dynamic model which well represents the nonlinear behaviour of a ZAB.
Loss of Mitochondrial Control Impacts Renal Health

Disruption of mitochondrial biosynthesis or dynamics, or loss of control over mitochondrial regulation leads to a significant alteration in fuel preference and metabolic shifts that potentially affect the health of kidney cells. Mitochondria regulate metabolic networks which affect multiple cellular processes. Indeed, mitochondria have established themselves as therapeutic targets in several diseases. The importance of mitochondria in regulating the pathogenesis of several diseases has been recognized, however, there is limited understanding of mitochondrial biology in the kidney. This review provides an overview of mitochondrial dysfunction in kidney diseases. We describe the importance of mitochondria and mitochondrial sirtuins in the regulation of renal metabolic shifts in diverse cells types, and review this loss of control leads to increased cell-to-cell transdifferentiation processes and myofibroblast-metabolic shifts, which affect the pathophysiology of several kidney diseases. In addition, we examine mitochondrial-targeted therapeutic agents that offer potential leads in combating kidney diseases.
Proteome of the Triatomine Digestive Tract: From Catalytic to Immune Pathways; Focusing on Annexin Expression

Rhodnius prolixus, Panstrongylus megistus, Triatoma infestans, and Dipetalogaster maxima are all triatomines and potential vectors of the protozoan Trypanosoma cruzi responsible for human Chagas’ disease. Considering that the T. cruzi’s cycle occurs inside the triatomine digestive tract (TDT), the analysis of the TDT protein profile is an essential step to understand TDT physiology during T. cruzi infection. To characterize the protein profile of TDT of D. maxima, P. megistus, R. prolixus, and T. infestans, a shotgun liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS) approach was applied in this report. Most proteins were found to be closely related to metabolic pathways such as gluconeogenesis/glycolysis, citrate cycle, fatty acid metabolism, oxidative phosphorylation, but also to the immune system. We annotated this new proteome contribution gathering it with those previously published in accordance with Gene Ontology and KEGG. Enzymes were classified in terms of class, acceptor, and function, while the proteins from the immune system were annotated by reference to the pathways of humoral response, cell cycle regulation, Toll, IMD, JNK, Jak-STAT, and MAPK, as available from the Insect Innate Immunity Database (IIID). These pathways were further subclassified in recognition, signaling, response, coagulation, melanization and none. Finally, phylogenetic affinities and gene expression of annexins were investigated for understanding their role in the protection and homeostasis of intestinal epithelial cells against the inflammation.
The Combination of Hemogram Indexes to Predict Exacerbation in Stable Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease

Background: Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is characterized by pulmonary and systemic inflammatory processes, and exacerbation of COPD represents a critical moment in the progression of COPD. Several biomarkers of inflammation have been proposed to have a predictive function in acute exacerbation. However, their use is still limited in routine clinical practice. The purpose of our study is to explore the prognostic efficacy of novel inflammatory hemogram indexes in the exacerbation among stable COPD patients. Method: A total of 275 stable COPD patients from the Shanghai COPD Investigation Comorbidity Program were analyzed in our study. Blood examinations, especially ratio indexes like platelet–lymphocyte ratio (PLR), platelet × neutrophil/lymphocyte ratio [systemic immune-inflammation index (SII)], and monocyte × neutrophil/lymphocyte ratio [systemic inflammation response index (SIRI)], lung function test, CT scans, and questionnaires were performed at baseline and routine follow-ups. Clinical characteristics and information of exacerbations were collected every 6 months. The relationship between hemogram indexes and diverse degrees of exacerbation was assessed by logistic regression. The receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve and area under the curve (AUC) were used to evaluate the ability of hemogram indexes to predict exacerbation of COPD. Furthermore, the discrimination and accuracy of combined indexes were measured by ROC and calibration curve. Result: There was a significant positive correlation between PLR levels and total exacerbation of COPD patients in a stable stage in a year. Also, the predictive ability of PLR exceeded any other ratio indexes, with an AUC of 0.66. SII and SIRI ranked second only to PLR, with an AUC of 0.64. When combining PLR with other indexes (sex, COPD year, and St. George's Respiratory Questionnaire scores), they were considered as the most suitable panel of index to predict total exacerbation. Based on the result of the ROC curve and calibration curve, the combination shows optimal discrimination and accuracy to predict exacerbation events in COPD patients. Conclusion: The hemogram indexes PLR, SII, and SIRI were associated with COPD exacerbation. Moreover, the prediction capacity of exacerbation was significantly elevated after combining inflammatory hemogram index PLR with other indexes, which will make it a promisingly simple and effective marker to predict exacerbation in patients with stable COPD.
Expression and Function of WNT6: From Development to Disease

WNT family member 6 (WNT6) is a member of the highly conserved WNT protein family. It plays an essential role in the normal development process, not only in embryonic morphogenesis, but also in post-natal homeostasis. WNT6 functions in mice and humans. This review summarizes the current findings on the biological functions of WNT6, describing its involvement in regulating embryogenesis, decidualization, and organ development. Aberrant WNT6 signaling is related to various pathologies, such as promoting cancer development, lung tuberculosis, and kidney fibrosis and improving the symptoms of Rett syndrome (RTT). Thus, due to its various functions, WNT6 has great potential for in-depth research. This work not only describes the signaling mechanism and function of WNT6 under physiological and pathological conditions, but also provides a theoretical basis for targeted therapy.
Integrated Transcriptomic and Proteomic Analyses Reveal the Role of NprR in Bacillus anthracis Extracellular Protease Expression Regulation and Oxidative Stress Responses

NprR is a protein of Bacillus anthracis that exhibits moonlighting functions as either a phosphatase or a neutral protease regulator that belongs to the RNPP family. We previously observed that the extracellular protease activity of an nprR deletion mutant significantly decreased within in vitro cultures. To identify the genes within the regulatory network of nprR that contribute to its protease activity, integrated transcriptomic and proteomic analyses were conducted here by comparing the nprR deletion mutant and parent strains. A total of 366 differentially expressed genes (DEGs) between the strains were observed via RNA-seq analysis. In addition, label-free LC-MS/MS analysis revealed 503 differentially expressed proteins (DEPs) within the intracellular protein fraction and 213 extracellular DEPs with significant expressional differences between the strains. The majority of DEGs and DEPs were involved in environmental information processing and metabolism. Integrated transcriptomic and proteomic analyses indicated that oxidation-reduction-related GO terms for intracellular DEPs and endopeptidase-related GO terms for extracellular DEPs were significantly enriched in the mutant strain. Notably, many genes involved in protease activity were largely downregulated in the nprR deletion mutant cultures. Moreover, western blot analysis revealed that the major extracellular neutral protease Npr599 was barely expressed in the nprR deletion mutant strain. The mutant also exhibited impaired degradation of protective antigen, which is a major B. anthracis toxin component, thereby resulting in higher protein yields. Concomitantly, another global transcriptional regulator, SpxA1, was also dramatically downregulated in the nprR deletion mutant, resulting in higher sensitivity to oxidative and disulfide stress. These data consequently indicate that NprR is a transcriptional regulator that controls genes whose products function as extracellular proteases and also is involved in oxidative stress responses. This study thus contributes to a more comprehensive understanding of the biological function of NprR, and especially in the middle growth stages of B. anthracis.
Biomodulina T (InmunyVital®) Restores T Cells and Helps Contain COVID-19

T-cell levels and their functions are related to the severity and lethality of COVID-19. T-cells develop in the thymus gland and play a central role in the adaptive immune response. During aging, the thymus gland slowly shrinks, and levels of the thymic factors it produces decrease in the blood, reducing T-cell differentiation. Moreover, thymus-dependent immunity, including T-cell immunity and thymus-dependent antibody production, diminishes with thymus size in adults, which is known as “immunosenescence. ” This is the main reason older adults and immunocompromised individuals are generally at a higher risk of becoming severely ill from COVID-19.
Exploiting WordNet Synset and Hypernym Representations for Answer Selection

Answer selection (AS) is an important subtask of document-based question answering (DQA). In this task, the candidate answers come from the same document, and each answer sentence is semantically related to the given question, which makes it more challenging to select the true answer. WordNet provides powerful knowledge about concepts and their semantic relations so we employ WordNet to enrich the abilities of paraphrasing and reasoning of the network-based question answering model. Specifically, we exploit the synset and hypernym concepts to enrich the word representation and incorporate the similarity scores of two concepts that share the synset or hypernym relations into the attention mechanism. The proposed WordNet-enhanced hierarchical model (WEHM) consists of four modules, including WordNet-enhanced word representation, sentence encoding, WordNet-enhanced attention mechanism, and hierarchical document encoding. Extensive experiments on the public WikiQA and SelQA datasets demonstrate that our proposed model significantly improves the baseline system and outperforms all existing state-of-the-art methods by a large margin.
Document-Level Neural Machine Translation Using BERT as Context Encoder

Large-scale pre-trained representations such as BERT have been widely used in many natural language understanding tasks. The methods of incorporating BERT into document-level machine translation are still being explored. BERT is able to understand sentence relationships since BERT is pre-trained using the next sentence prediction task. In our work, we leverage this property to improve document-level machine translation. In our proposed model, BERT performs as a context encoder to achieve document-level contextual information, which is then integrated into both the encoder and decoder. Experiment results show that our proposed method can significantly outperform strong document-level machine translation baselines on BLEU score. Moreover, the ablation study shows our method can capture document-level context information to boost translation performance.
Self-Supervised Learning for Pairwise Data Refinement

Pairwise data automatically constructed from weakly supervised signals has been widely used for training deep learning models. Pairwise datasets such as parallel texts can have uneven quality levels overall, but usually contain data subsets that are more useful as learning examples. We present two methods to refine data that are aimed to obtain that kind of subsets in a self-supervised way. Our methods are based on iteratively training dual-encoder models to compute similarity scores. We evaluate our methods on de-noising parallel texts and training neural machine translation models. We find that: (i) The self-supervised refinement achieves most machine translation gains in the first iteration, but following iterations further improve its intrinsic evaluation. (ii) Machine translations can improve the de-noising performance when combined with selection steps. (iii) Our methods are able to reach the performance of a supervised method. Being entirely self-supervised, our methods are well-suited to handle pairwise data without the need of prior knowledge or human annotations.
Transformer-based Approach for Predicting Chemical Compound Structures

By predicting chemical compound structures from their names, we can better comprehend chemical compounds written in text and identify the same chemical compound given different notations for database creation. Previous methods have predicted the chemical compound structures from their names and represented them by Simplified Molecular Input Line Entry System (SMILES) strings. However, these methods mainly apply handcrafted rules, and cannot predict the structures of chemical compound names not covered by the rules. Instead of handcrafted rules, we propose Transformer-based models that predict SMILES strings from chemical compound names. We improve the conventional Transformer-based model by introducing two features: (1) a loss function that constrains the number of atoms of each element in the structure, and (2) a multi-task learning approach that predicts both SMILES strings and InChI strings (another string representation of chemical compound structures). In evaluation experiments, our methods achieved higher F-measures than previous rule-based approaches (Open Parser for Systematic IUPAC Nomenclature and two commercially used products), and the conventional Transformer-based model. We release the dataset used in this paper as a benchmark for the future research.
Dispersions of Silica Particles in Surfactant Phases

Addition of surfactants to aqueous dispersions of silica may either enhance or depress the colloidal stability of the dispersions. With a nonionic surfactant that forms micelles (Triton X-100), dilute silica dispersions have enhanced stability if the silica particles are fully covered with adsorbed surfactant micelles. Concentrated dispersions are also stable provided that the particles remain separated by at least one layer of micelles. Beyond full coverage, excess micelles may cause depletion flocculation of the silica particles. With a nonionic surfactant that forms vesicles and bilayers (polyoxyethylene alkyl ether C12E4), the effects of surface coverage are the same; however, the critical separation between particles is the thickness of two bilayers. Beyond full coverage, the surfactant forms a lamellar phase which excludes the particles.
Riddle Me This: What Do Top Management Team Boundary Spanning, Team Conflict Trajectories, Team Creativity, Faultlines, Grit, and Global Virtual Teams, Have in Common? Answer: Outstanding 2019 GOM Articles

Group & Organization Management 2020, Vol. 45(6) 747–761 © The Author(s) 2020 Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions DOI: 10.1177/1059601120978313 journals.sagepub.com/home/gom Riddle Me This: What Do Top Management Team Boundary Spanning, Team Conflict Trajectories, Team Creativity, Faultlines, Grit, and Global Virtual Teams, Have in Common? Answer: Outstanding 2019 GOM Articles