Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Thermally inactivated simian virus 40 tsA58 mutant T antigen cannot initiate viral DNA replication in vitro

The mutation in the temperature-sensitive tsA58 mutant T antigen (Ala-438----Val) lies within the presumptive ATP-binding fold. We have constructed a recombinant baculovirus that expresses large quantities of the tsA58 T antigen in infected insect cells. The mutant T antigen mediated simian virus 40 origin-containing DNA (ori-DNA) synthesis in vitro to nearly the same extent as similar quantities of wild-type T antigen at 33 degrees C. However, if wild-type and tsA58 T antigens were heated at 41 degrees C in replication extracts prior to addition of template DNA, the tsA58 T antigen but not the wild type was completely inactivated. The mutant protein displayed greater thermosensitivity for many of the DNA replication activities of T antigen than did the wild-type protein. Some of the replication functions of tsA58 T antigen were differentially affected depending on the presence or absence of ATP during the preheating period. When tsA58 T antigen was preheated in the presence of ATP at 41 degrees C for a time sufficient to completely inactivate its ability to replicate ori-DNA in vitro, it displayed substantial ATPase and normal DNA helicase activities. Conversely, when preheated in the absence of nucleotide, it completely lost both ATPase and helicase activities. Preheating tsA58 T antigen, even in the presence of ATP, led to drastic reductions in its ability to bind to and unwind DNA containing the replication origin. The mutant T antigen also displayed thermosensitivity for binding to and unwinding nonspecific double-stranded DNA in the presence of ATP. Our results suggest that the interactions of T antigen with ATP that are involved in T-antigen DNA binding and DNA helicase activities are different. Moreover, we conclude, consistent with its phenotype in vivo, that the tsA58 T antigen is defective in the initiation but not in the putative elongation functions of T antigen in vitro.
Rôle émergent des oestrogènes dans le cancer de la prostate : sulfate d'oestrone : marqueur de l’agressivité tumorale

Il est acquis que les oestrogenes sont des inducteurs de la croissance et de la transformation pathologique du tissu prostatique. Les oestrogenes, dont le sulfate d'oestrone (SE1), precurseur de formes oestrogenes actives, seraient impliques dans la progression de l'agressivite du cancer de la prostate par 2 mecanismes majeurs : d'une part stimulation de la croissance tumorale par l'activation des recepteurs des oestrogenes, d'autre part, par accumulation de catabolites genotoxiques derives des oestrogenes. Dans cette these, nous avons etudie, chez les sujets non traites en bonne sante ou presentant un cancer de la prostate nouvellement diagnostique, les concentrations plasmatiques des principaux steroides impliques dans l'homeostasie de la prostate. Le developpement d'un dosage specifique du SEI nous a permis de montrer chez l'homme la stabilite avec l'âge du SE1 sanguin et la correlation entre l'augmentation du SE1 plasmatique et l'agressivite du cancer de la prostate. Au cours du vieillissement, la competition entre le SE1 et le SDHEA vis-a-vis de l'enzyme sulfatase pourrait impliquer un accroissement regulier du produit de clivage du SE1 au detriment de celui du SDHEA. En effet, chez les patients atteints d'un cancer de la prostate de mauvais pronostic, le SE1 a semble se comporter comme une source significative d'oestradiol, ce qui n'a pas ete retrouve dans le cancer de bon pronostic. Il nous a semble important de mesurer la biodisponibilite de la testosterone chez nos differents sujets. Une etude critique des aspects analytiques de cette determination chez l'homme en bonne sante non hypogonade a precede l'application de ce dosage aux patients atteints de cancer de la prostate.
Resume driving after a refueling pit stop.

he indications for implantation of cardioverter defibrillators (ICD) have broadened from secondary prevention for survivors of sudden cardiac death to primary prevention for high-risk conditions, such as Brugada syndrome, depressed left ventricular ejection fraction and hypertrophic cardiomyopathy.1–3 Furthermore, the indications for cardiac resynchronization therapy with defibrillator (CRTD) are soon likely to include New York Heart Association class II heart failure.4–6 With the increasing rate of both implantation of ICD and CRT-D because of the broadening of indications and the inclusion of patients with a long life expectancy, the number of generator replacements is growing, despite longer battery longevity.
Developmental Effects of Sublethal Mitochondrial Injury in Mouse Oocytes1

Abstract Mitochondrial dysfunction may be acquired or inherited by oocytes without detectable morphological abnormalities. This pathology may account for some examples of unexplained pregnancy loss in women following transfer of morphologically normal in vitro fertilization (IVF) embryos. The present study was intended to determine whether sublethal mitochondrial injury in mouse oocytes before IVF negatively affects pre- and postimplantation development, and to further define the latency of developmental compromise in relation to aberrant mitochondrial metabolism. Mature mouse oocytes were loaded with the mitochondrial fluorophore rhodamine-123 and photosensitized for 20 sec, a duration previously found to permit preimplantation embryo development to the blastocyst stage and so deemed “sublethal. ” This treatment resulted in some aberrations in cytoplasmic patterning of organelles, but did not inhibit zygote mitochondrial metabolism. Blastocyst development following IVF was not signficantly inhibited following sublethal oocyte photosensitization; however, a decrease in trophectoderm cell numbers was observed relative to untreated controls. Following intrauterine transfer, blastocysts derived from sublethally photosensitized oocytes implanted but later aborted at a higher rate, formed fetuses with lower average weights, and, in rare cases, formed abnormal fetuses relative to controls. Photosensitization for more prolonged durations resulted in failed fertilization (2 min) and rapid oocyte degeneration (10 min). Therefore, photosensitization duration and the consequent degree of mitochondrial dysfunction are negatively related to the onset of developmental compromise. Acquired low-level mitochondrial injury is heritable by the resultant embryos and can cause postimplantation developmental compromise that may be relevant to some clinically observed outcomes following human assisted reproduction strategies, including reduced birth weights for gestational age. Future strategies for the detection and prevention of mitochondrial dysfunction may assist in improving outcomes for some clinically infertile women.
The Role of Insulin in Wound Healing Process: Mechanism of Action and Pharmaceutical Applications

Skin is a complex tissue, which comprises multiple layers. An injury to this stratified structure is considered to be the beginning of a sequence of events designed to restore skin integrity. Depending on the diameter and severity of a wound, deleterious physiological and metabolic changes can occur, leading to impaired wound healing and increased morbidity and mortality. While wound dressings provide some form of protection and remedy, the main challenge is to restore local metabolic pathways to normality, especially in the comprised patient suffering from chronic illness, such as diabetes. The implications of this disease in particular have prompted investigations into topical insulin as a potential and promising therapeutic intervention. This mini-review describes the possible mechanisms of insulin that are responsible for stimulating the cellular and molecular pathways, thereby enhancing the wound healing process. Examples of systemic and topical insulin applications are mentioned, together with an evaluation of the critical role played by insulin in tissue regeneration.
Correlation analysis of natural environment test and laboratory accelerated test

There is a growing concern about correlation analysis of natural environment test and laboratory accelerated test, especially test about corrosion of metal, nonmetal and coatings. This paper will concentrate on correlation analysis from simulation ability, accelerating ability and reproducibility. As an illustration, exposure test in marine atmospheric environment and salt spray test in laboratory of Parylene C coating were performed. And conclusions were reached that there was satisfactory correlation between these two tests and accelerated ratio was also gained.
A decentralised navigation architecture

Presents an efficient method of multi-sensor estimation for the navigation of vehicles. A decentralised architecture is used for the fusion of information obtained from several asynchronous measurements. The issue of the synchronisation of the information, which is critical in the proposed method, is addressed. The information form of the Kalman filter (information filter) is used as the main algorithm for position estimation. The method is implemented as part of the navigation system for an autonomous land vehicle. The navigation system includes two independent loops which communicate through an assimilation unit. One loop incorporates inertial and GPS information and the other uses millimetre wave radar and encoder measurements to obtain local estimates. The information obtained from each measurement is then broadcast to the other loops after being synchronised. This information is used in an assimilation stage to achieve more accurate estimates. The assimilation takes place periodically, where the assimilation frequency can be selected. The performance of the navigation method is examined by comparing the resulting position estimates to those of independent navigation loops.
Regulation of G 6 PD acetylation by KAT 9 / SIRT 2 modulates NADPH homeostasis and cell survival during oxidative stress

Thank you for submitting your manuscript for consideration by The EMBO Journal and my apologies for the unusually long duration of the review period in this case. Your study has now been seen by two referees whose comments are shown below. As you will see, while the referees do express interest in the work and topic in principle, they do not offer strong support for publication in The EMBO Journal.
Social Information Embedded in Vocalizations Induces Neurogenomic and Behavioral Responses

Social cues facilitate relationships within communities. Zebra finches form long-term stable mate pairs and produce offspring within a multi-family, multi-generational community that can include hundreds of birds. Males use song to communicate in this complex environment. Males sing as part of their courtship display but also abundantly throughout each day, suggesting a role for their vocal signature outside of a reproductive context. One advantage of a vocal social cue is that it can be exchanged when birds are out of visual contact, as regularly occurs in a zebra finch community. Previous works have demonstrated that females hearing song are affected by their social relationship to the bird singing it, and the immediate social context. Here, we probed the question of whether or not the song itself carried social information, as would be expected from the situations when males sing outside of view of the female. We quantified behavioral and neurogenomic responses to two songs we predicted would have distinct “attractive” qualities in adult females housed in either mixed sex or female-only social communities. Our results show that only mixed sex-housed females show distinctive behavioral and neurogenomic responses to attractive songs. These data are consistent with the idea that the acoustic properties of song carry social information, and that the current social situation modulates the neural and behavioral responses to these signals.
Association of simple anthropometric measures of obesity with visceral fat and the metabolic syndrome in male Caucasian and Indo‐Asian subjects

Aims The aims of this study were first, to investigate the relationship between simple anthropometric measures of obesity with visceral fat as assessed by a single slice magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)‐scan in patients attending a hospital clinic. Second, to determine which anthropometric measure best relates to the adverse metabolic profile of the metabolic syndrome.
Excitation modeling based on waveform interpolation for HMM-based speech synthesis

It is generally known that a well-designed excitation produces high quality signals in hidden Markov model (HMM)-based speech synthesis systems. This paper proposes a novel tech- niques for generating excitation based on the waveform inter- polation (WI). For modeling WI parameters, we implemented statistical method like principal component analysis (PCA). The parameters of the proposed excitation modeling techniques can be easily combined with the conventional speech synthesis sys- tem under the HMM framework. From a number of experi- ments, the proposed method has been found to generate more naturally sounding speech. Index Terms: HMM-based speech synthesis, Waveform Inter- polation, Principal Component Analysis In this paper, we propose a novel approach to excitation modeling under the waveform interpolation (WI) framework. For parameterizing the excitation generation model, a charac- teristic waveform (CW) is extracted from each frame of LP residual signals. To derive a compact representation of each CW, we apply principal component analysis (PCA) to a collec- tion of the extracted CW's. Once PCA is done, each CW can be compactly approximated as a linear combination of a few PCA basis vectors. The statistical distribution of the linear com- bination coefficients and their dynamics can be efficiently de- scribed by means of HMM's for which the relevant parameters are estimated by following the conventional HMM training pro- cedure. Given a sentence we want to synthesize, the sequence of CW's can be generated from the trained HMM's according to the maximum likelihood (ML) criterion. The WI algorithm enables a smooth transition between adjacent CW's resulting in a more natural excitation signal. The major advantages of the proposed technique are twofold. First, instead of using a fixed set of waveforms such as the impulse train and the ran- dom noise, the proposed method finds CWs which represents the excitation waveforms from the various kinds of modeling in frequency domain. Second, the WI approach lets the excita- tion signal evolve smoothly, which may reduce the audible arti- facts of the synthesized speech. From a number of experiments on speech synthesis, it has been demonstrated that the propose technique enhances the quality of the synthesized speech.
Oleoyl serine, an endogenous N-acyl amide, modulates bone remodeling and mass

Bone mass is determined by a continuous remodeling process, whereby the mineralized matrix is being removed by osteoclasts and subsequently replaced with newly formed bone tissue produced by osteoblasts. Here we report the presence of endogenous amides of long-chain fatty acids with amino acids or with ethanolamine (N-acyl amides) in mouse bone. Of these compounds, N-oleoyl-l-serine (OS) had the highest activity in an osteoblast proliferation assay. In these cells, OS triggers a Gi-protein-coupled receptor and Erk1/2. It also mitigates osteoclast number by promoting osteoclast apoptosis through the inhibition of Erk1/2 phosphorylation and receptor activator of nuclear-κB ligand (RANKL) expression in bone marrow stromal cells and osteoblasts. In intact mice, OS moderately increases bone volume density mainly by inhibiting bone resorption. However, in a mouse ovariectomy (OVX) model for osteoporosis, OS effectively rescues bone loss by increasing bone formation and markedly restraining bone resorption. The differential effect of exogenous OS in the OVX vs. intact animals is apparently a result of an OVX-induced decrease in skeletal OS levels. These data show that OS is a previously unexplored lipid regulator of bone remodeling. It represents a lead to antiosteoporotic drug discovery, advantageous to currently available therapies, which are essentially either proformative or antiresorptive.
The CEO as organizational architect: an interview with Xerox's Paul Allaire. Interview by Robert Howard.

As chairman and CEO of the Xerox Corporation, Paul Allaire leads a company that is a microcosm of the changes transforming American business. With the introduction of the first plain-paper copier in 1959, Xerox invented a new industry and launched itself on a decade of spectacular growth. But easy growth led Xerox to neglect the fundamentals of its core business, leaving the company vulnerable to low-cost Japanese competition. Starting in the mid-1980s, Xerox embarked on a long-term effort to regain its dominant position in world copier markets and to create a new platform for future growth. Thanks to the company's Leadership through Quality program, Xerox became the first major U.S. company to win back market share from the Japanese. Allaire describes his efforts to take Xerox's corporate transformation to a new level. Since becoming CEO in 1990, he has repositioned Xerox as "the document company" at the intersection of the worlds of paper-based and electronic information. And he has guided the company through a fundamental redesign of what he calls the "organizational architecture" of Xerox's document processing business. Few CEOs have approached the process of organizational redesign as systematically and methodically as Allaire has. He has created a new corporate structure that balances independent business divisions with integrated R&D and customer operations organizations. He has redefined managerial roles and responsibilities, changed the way managers are selected and compensated, and renewed the company's senior management ranks. And he has articulated the new values and behaviors Xerox managers will need to thrive in a more competitive and fast-changing business environment.
The psychopathology of affectivity: conceptual and historical aspects

Synopsis The disorders of affect have not contributed much to the diagnostic definition of mental disease, and their phenomenological description has never achieved the richness of the psychopathology of perception or cognition. This paper shows how the subordinate role played by affectivity in the Western concept of man led to the early and enduring view of mental illness as an exclusive disturbance of intellect. Attempts by nineteenth-century alienists to challenge this notion were only partially successful, due to the conceptual unmanageability of most forms of affective behaviour and the terminological redundancy that this engendered. These efforts were frustrated by the rebirth of Associationism, the rise of brain localization experiments, the peripheralist definition of the emotions and, finally, by the unfolding of Darwinism. As a result, no autonomous psychopathology of affectivity was ever developed. The eventual recognition of the so-called ‘primary’ disorders of mood has not led, however, to a refinement in the semiology of the experiences themselves. This has been impeded by the use of descriptive behavioural surrogates or by metapsychological accounts of affect as a form of energy or as a driving force. None of these developments has contributed to the clinical description of the mood disorders.
Immune function in aged mice IV. Loss of T cell and B cell function in thymus‐dependent antibody responses

The decline in antibody‐forming potential with age was studied in mice by analyzing the relative contributions of T and B cells in collaborative PFC responses to the T cell‐dependent antigens, dinitrophenylated (DNP) keyhole limpet hemocyanin, DNP‐human IgG, fowl IgG and sheep red blood cells. The experimental system involved the adoptive transfer of purified lymphocyte populations derived from the spleens of old and young mice into young irradiated recipients. An unequivocal reduction in B cell function was demonstrated in both primary and secondary antibody responses. In the former, young T cells failed to restore responsiveness to old B cells, while in the latter, similar results were obtained, even if old B cells were primed in the presence of young T cells. Despite the lower level of antibody production in old mice compared with young, no decrease in the number of antigen‐binding cells (detected by resetting and autoradiography) was observed. Taken together, these results suggest that a defect exists in B cells which is independent of T cell help, and that it is not due to cell depletion but rather to a qualitative abnormality in the cells themselves.
The Effect of Walking in High- and Low-Heeled Shoes on Erector Spinae Activity and Pelvis Kinematics During Gait

ObjectiveWearing high-heeled shoes may produce deleterious effects on the musculoskeletal system. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the changes in electromyographic (EMG) activity of the erector spinae muscles and pelvis kinematics during gait while wearing low- and high-heeled shoes in both young and middle-aged adult women. DesignIn 31 young women (20–25 yrs) and 15 middle-aged women (45–55 yrs) without back pain, the EMG activity of the erector spinae muscle and pelvis kinematics in the sagittal, frontal, and transverse planes were assessed during gait on flat surface at natural speeds in three conditions: without shoes and in low- (4 cm) and high- (10 cm) heeled shoes. ResultsIn younger women, significant differences in lumbar erector spinae EMG activity were observed during gait at initial ground contact as well as in toe off between the three conditions, with an increasing amount of EMG activity being observed in association with increased heel height. In middle-aged women, significantly higher lumbar erector spinae EMG activity was noted during gait with high-heeled shoes compared with gait without shoes. Interestingly, younger women exhibited an increase in pelvic range of motion in the sagittal plane during high-heeled gait compared with low-heeled gait and walking without shows; however, this compensatory response was not observed in middle-aged women. ConclusionsFrom a clinical perspective, increased lumbar erector spinae muscle activity associated with wearing high-heeled shoes could exacerbate muscle overuse and lead to low back problems. The lower pelvic range of motion associated with wearing high heels in middle-aged women may indicate that tissues in the lumbopelvic region become more rigid with age and that the harmful effect of high-heeled shoes on posture and spinal tissues may be more pronounced with advancing age.
Phragmoplastin, a dynamin‐like protein associated with cell plate formation in plants.

Cytokinesis in a plant cell is accomplished by the formation of a cell plate in the center of the phragmoplast. Little is known of the molecular events associated with this process. In this study, we report the identification of a dynamin‐like protein from soybean and demonstrate that this protein is associated with the formation of the cell plate. Plant dynamin‐like (PDL) protein contains 610 amino acids showing high homology with other members of the dynamin protein family. Western blot experiments demonstrated that it is associated with the non‐ionic detergent‐resistant fraction of membranes. Indirect immunofluorescence microscopy localized PDL to the cell plate in dividing soybean root tip cells. Double labeling experiments demonstrated that, unlike phragmoplast microtubules which are concentrated on the periphery of the forming plate, PDL is located across the whole width of the newly formed cell plate. Based on the temporal and spatial organization of PDL in the phragmoplast, we termed this protein ‘phragmoplastin’. The data suggest that phragmoplastin may be associated with exocytic vesicles that are depositing cell plate material during cytokinesis in the plant cell.