Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Viper metalloproteinase (Agkistrodon halys pallas) with antimicrobial activity against multi‐drug resistant human pathogens

Metalloproteinases are abundant enzymes in crotalidae and viperidae snake venoms. Snake venom metalloproteinases (SVMPs) comprise a family of zinc‐dependent enzymes, which display many different biological activities. A 23.1 kDa protein was isolated from Agkistrodon halys (pallas, Chinese viper) snake venom. The toxin is a single chain polypeptide with a molecular weight of 23146.61 and an N‐terminal sequence (MIQVLLVTICLAVFPYQGSSIILES) relatively similar to that of other metalloprotein‐like proteases isolated from the snake venoms of the Viperidae family. The antibacterial effect of Agkistrodon halys metalloproteinase (AHM) on Burkholderia pseudomallei (strains TES and KHW), Escherichia coli, Enterobacter aerogenes, Proteus vulgaris, Proteus mirabilis, Pseudomonas aeruginosa (Gram‐negative bacteria) and Staphylococcus aureus (Gram‐positive bacterium) was studied at a concentration 120 µM. Interestingly, we found that the metalloproteinase exhibited antibacterial properties and was more active against S. aureus, P. vulgaris, P. mirabilis and multi‐drug resistant B. pseudomallei (strain KHW) bacteria. AHM variants with high bacteriostatic activity (MIC 1.875–60 µM) also tended to be less cytotoxic against U‐937 human monocytic cells up to 1 mM concentrations. These results suggest that this metalloprotein exerts its antimicrobial effect by altering membrane packing and inhibiting mechanosensitive targets. J. Cell. Physiol. 216: 54–68, 2008. © 2008 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Sonar and LiDAR investigation of lineaments offshore between central New England and the New England seamounts, USA

High-resolution multibeam echosounder (MBES) and light detection and ranging (LiDAR) data, combined with regional gravity and aeromagnetic anomaly maps of the western Gulf of Maine, reveal numerous lineaments between central New England and the New England seamounts. Most of these lineaments crosscut the NE-SWtrending accreted terranes, suggesting that they may be surface expressions of deep basement-rooted faults that have fractured upward through the overlying accreted terranes or may have formed by the upward push of magmas produced by the New England hotspot. The 1755 Cape Ann earthquake may have occurred on a fault associated with one of these lineaments. The MBES data also reveal a NW-SE-oriented scarp just offshore from Biddeford Pool, Maine (Biddeford Pool scarp), a 60-km-long, 20-km-wide Isles of Shoals lineament zone just offshore from southeastern New Hampshire, a 50-m-long zone of mostly low-lying, WNW-ESE-trending, submerged ridge-like features and scarps east of Boston, Massachusetts, and a ~180-km-long, WNW-ESE-trending Olympus lineament zone that traverses the continental margin south of Georges Bank. Three submarine canyons are sinistrally offset ~1–1.2 km along the Thresher canyon lineament of the Olympus lineament zone.
The Jak-STAT pathway: cytokine signalling from the receptor to the nucleus.

The Jak-STAT pathway was originally discovered through the study of interferon induced intracellular signal transduction. Meanwhile, a large number of cytokines, hormones and growth factors have been found to activate Jaks and STATs. Jaks (Janus Kinases) are a unique class of tyrosine kinases that associate with cytokine receptors. Upon ligand binding, they activate members of the Signal Transducers and Activators of Transcription (STAT) family through phosphorylation on a single tyrosine. Activated STATs form dimers, translocate to the nucleus, bind to specific response elements in promotors of target genes, and transcriptionally activate these genes. Both positive and negative regulations of the Jak-STAT pathway have been identified. In a positive feedback loop, interferons transcriptionally activate the genes for components of the interferon stimulated gene factor 3 (ISGF3). A number of cytokines that activate the Jak-STAT pathway, e.g. IL-6, IL-4, LIF, G-CSF, have been shown to upregulate the expression of SOCS-JABs-SSIs, a recently discovered class of STAT inhibitors. Targeted disruption of genes for a number of Jaks and STATs in mice have revealed specific biological functions for many of them. Although most of the STATs are activated in cell culture by many different ligands, STAT knockout mice mostly show defects in a single or a few cytokine dependent processes. STAT1 knockout mice have an impaired interferon signalling, STAT4 knockouts impaired IL-12 signalling, STAT5a knockouts impaired prolactin signalling, STAT5b knockouts impaired growth hormone signalling, and STAT6 knockout impaired IL-4 and IL-13 signalling. Defects in the Jak-STAT pathway have already been identified in a number of human diseases. Prominent amongst them are leukaemias, lymphomas and inherited immunodeficiency syndromes. It can be expected that additional Jak-STAT related diseases will be identified over the next years. To date, specific STAT inhibitory drugs are not known, but a number of specific protein-protein interactions in the Jak-STAT pathway are potential targets for pharmaceutical interventions.
Implicaciones oceanograficas de los foraminiferos bentonicos recientes en la bahia y plataforma gaditana. Taxonomia y asociaciones

Se han analizado un total de 23.400 foraminiferos bentonicos recientes extraidos de 50 muestras procedentes de un amplio sector del talud, plataforma y bahia de cadiz, habiendose determinado y descrito un total de 170 especies distintas se ha relacionado la distribucion areal de cada una de estas especies con las caracteristicas sedimentologicas y oceanograficas de la zona y citado por primera vez para las costas de la peninsula iberica un total de 17 especies y 2 mas para el litoral atlantico de las mismas. A partir de analisis factorial en modo-q se han determinado 6 asociaciones distintas. Tambien se ha realizado un estudio comparativo con areas marinas atlanticas y mediterraneas adyacentes encontrandose las mayores similitudes con lugares atlanticos con condiciones oceanograficas similares.
Exploring teachers’ sense of professional identity in relation to their experiences in two deprived rural districts of Northern Ghana

The main aim of this study was to understand how public basic school teachers in two deprived rural districts of Northern Ghana make sense of their professional identity based on interpretation of their experiences. Thus, the conceptual framework was based on teachers’ experiences in relation to the contextual dimension of their work (i.e. the school environment, community and district education management); the professional dimension and the personal dimension. Data collection was carried out in Ghana from December 2016 to February 2017. Seven teachers were purposively selected across the Bongo and Nabdam Districts to serve as focus teachers for the study, although in line with the data collection method, there was the opportunity to interact with many other teachers during observation of the focus teachers in their schools. Data collection utilised semi-structured interviews and participant observations, while analysis involved exploring themes inherent in the data. Five key themes emerged from the analysis of teachers’ experiences: ‘recognition’; ‘respect and regard’; ‘support’; ‘voice’ and ‘commitment’. Analysis of these themes together with the profiles of focus teachers revealed that teachers’ sense of professional identity was influenced not only by their personal values of making a difference in the lives of children, but also by their experiences in the classrooms, schools, community, District Education Offices and policy environment. Consequently, there emerged competing dimensions of teachers’ sense of professional identity as they were torn between sustaining their personal values in teaching and coping with constraints imposed by their work environment. Teachers still demonstrated commitment to fulfilling their personal values and professional responsibilities. However, they were prone to losing their sense of commitment, as constantly striving without the enabling conditions to do so was taking a toll on them. The findings have implications for policy and practice which include the need to create contexts for teachers to participate in policy decisions. Education authorities, school heads and parents also need to support teachers, empathise with them, and show appreciation through praise and valuing of teachers’ expertise. On their own part, teachers need to feel valued inwardly, so they can feel a positive sense of identity as teachers who are making significant contributions to the lives of children and development of society.
Removal of neutrophil gelatinase‐associated lipocalin by extracorporeal therapies

Neutrophil gelatinase‐associated lipocalin (NGAL) protein is an early biomarker for acute kidney injury (AKI). It is unknown if extracorporeal therapies (EC) have an effect on circulating NGAL levels. This study was designed to describe the kinetics of NGAL molecule in different EC techniques and to evaluate NGAL clearance in different operational conditions. A mock hemofiltration (HF) and hemoperfusion (HP) setup was used. NGAL was added to the blood reservoir and then measured at 30‐minute intervals from arterial, venous, and ultrafiltrate (UF) lines. Removal kinetics and NGAL sieving coefficient were calculated. In our experiments, baseline NGAL concentration averaged 452 μg/L. There was a consistent downward trend throughout the experiment. NGAL concentration in the UF was between 80 and 90 μg/L, though it showed a slight increase in the second hour. The sieving coefficient of NGAL ranged from 0.2 to 0.4 during HF and it appeared to increase with time, suggesting an initial effect of membrane adsorption. HP proved clearly that there was adsorption of NGAL by the membrane and the point of saturation occured at approximately 60 minutes from the start of circulation. Our evaluation demonstrates that NGAL can be adsorbed and ultrafiltrated with polysulfone membranes. This should be taken into consideration when using NGAL as an AKI biomarker in patients undergoing EC circulation.
Analysis of harmonics in indoor Lighting System with LED and fluorescent luminaire

Lighting system is an important part in everyday life. Today, lighting technology has been developing in many aspects. Technology such as Light Emitting Diode (LED) luminaire has been applied to indoor lighting system to replace conventional luminaire. LED lamps have many advantages such as less energy consumption, long life cycle and environmental friendly issue due to without toxic component. However, installation cost is main concern for investor regarding changing conventional lamp toward LED. So, the lighting system in some building are consist of both conventional and LED luminaires. In such a case the power quality must be taken into consideration. This paper aims to study power quality problem in term of harmonics generated by lighting system consisting of both fluorescent and LED luminaires. The obtained result can be used to design filter circuit for harmonic reduction in lighting system.
An Area-Efficient CMOS Current-Mode Phase-Locked Loop

This paper introduces a new architecture of phase-locked loops called current-mode phase-locked loops. The proposed phase-locked loop removes the need for a charge pump and a RC loop filter as conventional voltage-mode phase- locked loops, eliminating the design difficulties including current mismatches of charge pumps and large silicon area requirement of the RC loop filter. Instead, the proposed current-mode phase- locked loop utilizes a current-mode RL loop filter with CMOS active inductors to provide the desired control current to the downstream current-controlled oscillator. A modified bang-bang phase/frequency detector that converts the phase difference between the incoming digital waveform and the local clock into a binary signal is proposed. A current-reuse current-controlled oscillator is also developed. Simulation results demonstrates that the proposed current-mode phase-locked loop provides an significantly reduced lock time as compared with the corresponding voltage-mode phase-locked loop with approximately 90% silicon area reduction.
Information retrieval in neural networks. - I. Eigenproblems in neural networks

2014 Consideration of the eigenproblem of the synaptic matrix in Hopfield’s model of neural networks suggests to introduce a matrix built up from an orthogonal set, orthogonal to the original memories. With this new scheme, capacity storage is significantly enhanced and robustness at least conserved. Revue Phys. Appl. 22 (1987) 1321-1325 OCTOBRE 1987, PAGE Classification Physics Abstracts 42.30 42.80 84.20P
VERY LARGE ARRAY OBSERVATIONS OF AMMONIA IN INFRARED-DARK CLOUDS. I. COLUMN DENSITY AND TEMPERATURE STRUCTURE

We present Very Large Array observations of NH3 (1,1) and (2,2) in a sample of six infrared-dark clouds (IRDCs) with distances from 2 to 5 kpc. We find that ammonia serves as an excellent tracer of dense gas in IRDCs, showing no evidence of depletion, and the average abundance in these clouds is 8.1 × 10−7. Our sample consists of four IRDCs with 24 μm embedded protostars and two that appear starless. We calculate the kinetic temperature of the gas in IRDCs and find no significant difference between starless and star-forming IRDCs. We find that the bulk of the gas is between 8 and 13 K, indicating that any embedded or nearby stars or clusters do not affect the gas temperature dramatically. Though IRDCs have temperatures and volume densities on par with local star formation regions of lower mass, they consist of much more mass which induces very high internal pressures. In order for IRDCs to survive as coherent structures, the internal pressure must be balanced by a confining pressure provided by the high concentration of molecular clouds in the spiral arm in which they reside. The high molecular concentration and pressure are roughly consistent with gas dynamics of a bar galaxy.
On the Quest for an Acyclic Graph

The paper aims at finding acyclic graphs under a given set of constraints. More specifically, given a propositional formula {\phi} over edges of a fixed-size graph, the objective is to find a model of {\phi} that corresponds to a graph that is acyclic. The paper proposes several encodings of the problem and compares them in an experimental evaluation using stateof-the-art SAT solvers.
Paradigm Completion for Derivational Morphology

The generation of complex derived word forms has been an overlooked problem in NLP; we fill this gap by applying neural sequence-to-sequence models to the task. We overview the theoretical motivation for a paradigmatic treatment of derivational morphology, and introduce the task of derivational paradigm completion as a parallel to inflectional paradigm completion. State-of-the-art neural models adapted from the inflection task are able to learn the range of derivation patterns, and outperform a non-neural baseline by 16.4%. However, due to semantic, historical, and lexical considerations involved in derivational morphology, future work will be needed to achieve performance parity with inflection-generating systems.
User Interfaces for Personal Knowledge Management with Semantic Technologies

This thesis describes iMapping and QuiKey, two novel user interface concepts for dealing with structured information. iMapping is a visual knowledge mapping technique based on zooming, which combines the advantages of several existing approaches and scales up to very large maps. QuiKey is a text-based tool to interact with graph-structured knowledge bases with very high interaction efficiency. Both tools have been implemented and positively evaluated in user studies.
Safety and Tolerability of Esterified Phytosterols Administered in Reduced-Fat Spread and Salad Dressing to Healthy Adult Men and Women

Objective/Design: The safety and tolerability of three levels of plant sterol-esters administered in reduced-fat spread and salad dressing vs. control products were evaluated in this randomized, double-blind, four-arm parallel study. Methods: Eighty-four free-living men and women consumed reduced-fat spread and salad dressing providing 0.0 g/day (n = 21), 3.0 g/day (n = 21), 6.0 g/day (n = 19) or 9.0 g/day (n = 23) of phytosterols as esters for an eight-week treatment period. Results: Side effects did not differ among the groups during the study, and there were no study product-related serious adverse events. There were no changes in clinical laboratory values in response to phytosterol intake. Blood concentrations of all fat-soluble vitamins remained within normal reference ranges, and there were no differences in serum vitamin responses among the four groups. Alpha- and trans-β-carotene levels were reduced in the 9.0 g/day group vs. control (p < 0.05), but all carotenoid values remained within normal ranges throughout the study. All groups receiving phytosterols had significant increases in serum campesterol vs. control (p < 0.001), but β-sitosterol responses did not differ from control. Total, low-density lipoprotein (LDL) and high-density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol responses did not differ significantly among the groups. The total:HDL cholesterol response in the 9.0 g/day group was significantly different from the control group response (−9.6% vs. 2.6%, p < 0.05). A median increase of 7.8% in serum triglycerides was observed in the control group, which differed significantly from the response in the 3.0 g/day arm (−13.3%, p < 0.05). Discussion: The results of this study indicate that phytosterol esters are well tolerated and show no evidence of adverse effects at a daily intake of up to 9.0 g of phytosterols for eight weeks.
Experimental Relationship Between Compressional Wave Attenuation and Surface Strains in Brittle Rock

Linear ultrasonic testing (LUT) has been extensively used as a tool for the evaluation of damage processes in various materials ranging from synthetic metals to natural geomaterials, such as rocks. A key limitation of LUT‐based damage studies to date is the lack of explicit evidence used in associating material damage with the changes in measured LUT attributes (e.g., ultrasonic wave amplitude and velocity). In this study, the evolution of the full‐field strains in brittle rock specimens (Lyons sandstone) subjected to failure are analyzed in real time and linked with the changes in the ultrasonic wave amplitude in localized areas illuminated by ultrasonic beams, termed as the ultrasonic image areas. The noncontact optical full‐field displacement measurement method of 2‐D digital image correlation is implemented in combination with the LUT procedure to continuously track changes in the ultrasonic wave amplitude with the evolution of strains across the surface of the uniaxially loaded intact rock specimens. The ultrasonic amplitude showed near‐linear correlation with the intensity of inelastic tensile strain recorded in the rock specimens. The results from the study corroborate that the ultrasonic changes are in fact influenced by the regions of tensile cracking, which is the primary inelastic deformation mechanism in brittle rocks.
Very thin ITO/metal mesh hybrid films for a high-performance transparent conductive layer in GaN-based light-emitting diodes

In this paper, we introduce very thin Indium tin oxide (ITO) layers (5, 10, and 15 nm) hybridized with a metal mesh to produce high-performance transparent conductive layers (TCLs) in near-ultraviolet light-emitting diodes (NUV LEDs). Using UV–vis–IR spectrometry, Hall measurement, and atomic force microscopy, we found that 10 nm was the optimal thickness for the very thin ITO layers in terms of outstanding transmittance and sheet resistance values as well as stable contact properties when hybridized with the metal mesh. The proposed layers showed a value of 4.56 Ω/□ for sheet resistance and a value of 89.1% for transmittance. Moreover, the NUV LEDs fabricated with the hybrid TCLs achieved ∼140% enhanced light output power compared to that of 150 nm thick ITO layers. Finally, to verify the practical usage of the TCLs for industrial applications, we packaged the NUV LED chips and obtained improved turn-on voltage (3.48 V) and light output power (∼116%) performance.
The Role of Labor Unions in Corporate Transparency: Focusing on the Role of Governance in Auditor Change Process

This study investigates how the presence and power of labor unions are associated with auditor replacement, more specifically, external auditor tenure and the direction of auditor change. External auditor tenure and direction have been of great interest to stakeholders, as they are very likely associated with the financial reporting quality and corporate transparency, crucial factors for sustainable business. We are focusing on the role of the labor union, one of the key stakeholders involved in corporate governance and transparent operations, in external auditor selection processes. During the annual wage bargaining process, labor unions that rely on financial information face information asymmetry because financial statements are provided by the management. Therefore, labor unions have a high demand for independent and capable external auditors. This demand is likely to shorten auditor tenure and/or prompt changes to higher-quality auditors. Using a sample of 4568 firm-years listed in the Korean stock markets for the period of 2005 to 2008, we find evidence that the presence and power of labor unions significantly decrease external auditor tenure. We also find that the direction of auditor changes with the presence and power of labor unions is likely from non-industry specialist auditors to industry specialist auditors. This study contributes to the extant literature by extending the previous research on auditor selection and the governance role of labor unions.
Evidence for the Formation of a Heptameric Ion Channel Complex by the Hepatitis C Virus P7 Protein in Vitro*

The p7 protein of hepatitis C virus functions as an ion channel both in vitro and in cell-based assays and is inhibited by amantadine, long alkyl chain imino-sugar derivatives, and amiloride compounds. Future drug design will be greatly aided by information on the stoichiometry and high resolution structure of p7 ion channel complexes. Here, we have refined a bacterial expression system for p7 based on a glutathione S-transferase fusion methodology that circumvents the inherent problems of hydrophobic protein purification and the limitations of chemical synthesis. Rotational averaging and harmonic analysis of transmission electron micrographs of glutathione S-transferase-FLAG-p7 fusion proteins in liposomes revealed a heptameric stoichiometry. The oligomerization of p7 protein was then confirmed by SDS-PAGE and mass spectrometry analysis of pure, concentrated FLAG-p7. The same protein was also confirmed to function as an ion channel in suspended lipid bilayers and was inhibited by amantadine. These data validate this system as a means of generating high resolution structural information on the p7 ion channel complex.