Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
An Allosteric Inhibitory Site Conserved in the Ectodomain of P2X Receptor Channels

P2X receptors constitute a gene family of cation channels gated by extracellular ATP. They mediate fast ionotropic purinergic signaling in neurons and non-excitable cell types in vertebrates. The highly calcium-permeable P2X4 subtype has been shown to play a significant role in cardiovascular physiology, inflammatory responses and neuro-immune communication. We previously reported the discovery of a P2X4-selective antagonist, the small organic compound BX430, with submicromolar potency for human P2X4 receptors and marked species-dependence (Ase et al., 2015). The present study investigates the molecular basis of P2X4 inhibition by the non-competitive blocker BX430 using a structural and functional approach relying on mutagenesis and electrophysiology. We provide evidence for the critical contribution of a single hydrophobic residue located in the ectodomain of P2X4 channel subunits, Ile312 in human P2X4, which determines blockade by BX430. We also show that the nature of this extracellular residue in various vertebrate P2X4 orthologs underlies their specific sensitivity or resistance to the inhibitory effects of BX430. Taking advantage of high-resolution crystallographic data available on zebrafish P2X4, we used molecular dynamics simulation to model the docking of BX430 on an allosteric binding site around Ile315 (zebrafish numbering) in the ectodomain of P2X4. We also observed that the only substitution I312D (human numbering) that renders P2X4 silent by itself has also a profound silencing effect on all other P2X subtypes tested when introduced at homologous positions. The generic impact of this aspartate mutation on P2X function indicates that the pre-TM2 subregion involved is conserved functionally and defines a novel allosteric inhibitory site present in all P2X receptor channels. This conserved structure-channel activity relationship might be exploited for the rational design of potent P2X subtype-selective antagonists of therapeutic value.
Diffuse Large B-Cell Lymphoma: Recognition of Markers for Targeted Therapy

Diffuse large B-cell lymphomas (DLBCL)s, the most common type of Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, constitute a heterogeneous group of disorders including different disease sites, strikingly diverse molecular features and a profound variability in the clinical behavior. Molecular studies and clinical trials have partially revealed the underlying causes for this variability and have made possible the recognition of some molecular variants susceptible of specific therapeutic approaches. The main histogenetic groups include the germinal center, activated B cells, thymic B cells and terminally differentiated B cells, a basic scheme where the large majority of DLBCL cases can be ascribed. The nodal/extranodal origin, specific mutational changes and microenvironment peculiarities provide additional layers of complexity. Here, we summarize the status of the knowledge and make some specific proposals for addressing the future development of targeted therapy for DLBC cases.
Microorganism-Based Larval Diets Affect Mosquito Development, Size and Nutritional Reserves in the Yellow Fever Mosquito Aedes aegypti (Diptera: Culicidae)

Background Mosquito larvae feed on organic detritus from the environment, particularly microorganisms comprising bacteria, protozoa, and algae as well as crustaceans, plant debris, and insect exuviae. Little attention has been paid to nutritional studies in Aedes aegypti larvae. Objectives We investigated the effects of yeast, bacteria and microalgae diets on larval development, pupation time, adult size, emergence, survivorship, lifespan, and wing morphology. Materials and Methods Microorganisms (or Tetramin® as control) were offered as the only source of food to recently hatched first instar larvae and their development was followed until the adult stage. Protein, carbohydrate, glycogen, and lipid were analyzed in single larvae to correlate energetic reserve accumulation by larva with the developmental rates and nutritional content observed. FITC-labeled microorganisms were offered to fourth instar larvae, and its ingestion was recorded by fluorescence microscopy and quantitation. Results and Discussion Immature stages developed in all diets, however, larvae fed with bacteria and microalgae showed a severe delay in development rates, pupation time, adult emergence and low survivorship. Adult males emerged earlier as expected and had longer survival than females. Diets with better nutritional quality resulted in adults with bigger wings. Asaia sp. and Escherichia coli resulted in better nutrition and developmental parameters and seemed to be the best bacterial candidates to future studies using symbiont-based control. The diet quality was measured and presented different protein and carbohydrate amounts. Bacteria had the lowest protein and carbohydrate rates, yeasts had the highest carbohydrate amount and microalgae showed the highest protein content. Larvae fed with microalgae seem not to be able to process and store these diets properly. Larvae were shown to be able to process yeast cells and store their energetic components efficiently. Conclusion Together, our results point that Ae. aegypti larvae show high plasticity to feed, being able to develop under different microorganism-based diets. The important role of Ae. aegypti in the spread of infectious diseases requires further biological studies in order to understand the vector physiology and thus to manage the larval natural breeding sites aiming a better mosquito control.
Buffets: An Efficient and Composable Storage Idiom for Explicit Decoupled Data Orchestration

Accelerators spend significant area and effort on custom on-chip buffering. Unfortunately, these solutions are strongly tied to particular designs, hampering re-usability across other accelerators or domains. We present buffets, an efficient and composable storage idiom for the needs of accelerators that is independent of any particular design. Buffets have several distinguishing characteristics, including efficient decoupled fills and accesses with fine-grained synchronization, hierarchical composition, and efficient multi-casting. We implement buffets in RTL and show that they only add 2% control overhead over an 8KB RAM. When compared with DMA-managed double-buffered scratchpads and caches across a range of workloads, buffets improve energy-delay-product by 1.53x and 5.39x, respectively.
Smartphones enhance the management of learning processes in higher education: a case study in Ajman University, United Arab Emirates

Nowadays, students of this generation, specifically seen within higher education, are progressively depending on the means of technology to navigate through their daily lives. A wide variety of smart mobile and tablets devices are used, as digital instruments by university students to support ubiquitous accesses to sources of information and data. Consequently, facilitate the management of students' administrative requirements, e-learning platforms, personal interactions and communication between themselves and their professors. The purpose of this study is to understand mobile technology ownership and usage behaviors among students in Ajman University, United Arab Emirates. The study intends to observe the frequency of technology usage (regarding digital devices) as a tool to access Ajman University's interactive learning platform, Moodle. The objective is to notice whether this provides support or enhances their learning process in any way. This quantitative research paper aims to provide data on students' usage of digital devices in the university and to examine the students' level of skill of technology literacy. This study verifies that smartphones are indeed the preferable digital device for these students to access information and data through learning platforms inside and outside the university.
Falsification of hybrid systems using symbolic reachability and trajectory splicing

The falsification of a hybrid system aims at finding trajectories that violate a given safety property. This is a challenging problem, and the practical applicability of current falsification algorithms still suffers from their high time complexity. In contrast to falsification, verification algorithms aim at providing guarantees that no such trajectories exist. Recent symbolic reachability techniques are capable of efficiently computing linear constraints that enclose all trajectories of the system with reasonable precision. In this paper, we leverage the power of symbolic reachability algorithms to improve the scalability of falsification techniques. Recent approaches to falsification reduce the problem to a nonlinear optimization problem. We propose to reduce the search space of the optimization problem by adding linear state constraints obtained with a reachability algorithm. We showcase the efficiency of our approach on a number of standard hybrid systems benchmarks demonstrating the performance increase in speed and number of falsifyable instances.
On the decidability of linear bounded periodic cyber-physical systems

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs) are integrations of distributed computing systems with physical processes via a networking with actuators and sensors, where feedback loops among the components allow the physical processes to affect the computations and vice versa. Although CPSs can be found in several complex and sometimes critical real-world domains, their verification and validation often relies on simulation-test systems rather then automatic methodologies to formally verify safety requirements. In this work, we prove the decidability of the reachability problem for discrete-time linear CPSs whose physical process in isolation has a periodic behavior, up to an initial transitory phase.
Effect of Harmonics on Ferroresonance in Low Voltage Power Factor Correction System—A Case Study

This paper presents a case study of three-phase ferroresonance in a low-voltage power factor correction system and investigates the influence of harmonic distortion on the occurrence of ferroresonance. Ferroresonance is an extremely dangerous and rare phenomenon that causes overvoltages and overcurrents in the system and degrades the power quality. The study is carried out on real field measurements in an industrial plant where ferroresonance occurs in the power factor correction (PFC) system at the detuned reactor. The three-phase ferroresonance analysed in this paper is an extremely rare phenomenon that has never been reported in this type of configuration. The measurement results have shown that in this type of configuration the high harmonic distortion is a necessary condition for ferroresonance to occur. In such conditions, switching on the capacitor stage triggers the ferroresonance with quasi-periodic oscillations supported by the medium voltage grid. The main contribution is the analysis of the three-phase ferroresonance in the detuned PFC system and the influence of the harmonics on the occurrence of the ferroresonance in such a case. The possible solutions to this problem and recommendations to avoid this phenomenon are discussed.
Thermally Control of Light Propagation in Plasmonics Waveguide and Filter

An active ultra-compact plasmonic waveguide composed of a subwavelength slit and perforated in vanadium dioxide (VO 2 ) followed by a metallic layer is proposed and numerically analyzed. Refractive index variation of VO 2 by external stimuli provides a feasible way for tuning the optical properties of the waveguide. Varying the refractive index of VO 2 corresponds with changing the phase of VO 2 to the metallic state (“on” state). Consequently, the entire structure becomes a typical metal–insulator–metal (MIM) waveguide that routes the incident light through the slit. In addition, during the “off” state, the incident light thereby propagates in the slit and VO 2 medium and mitigates rapidly. By adding a MIM waveguide attached to the Fabry–Perot (FP) cavity, spectrally wide stopband and passband filtering features in telecommunication frequency regime are demonstrated. Tailoring the resonance wavelength can be performed through the geometrical parameters. Such active plasmonic waveguides with high transmission, coupling, and compact size can be utilized in future fully integrated all plasmonic chip technology.
A Natural Scene Edge Detection Algorithm Based on Image Fusion

Convolutional neural network (CNN) has been widely used in the edge detection areas and shown competitive results. However, with the increase of receptive fields, the convolution features in CNN gradually become rough and difficult to figure out. To tackle with the problem, a novel network is proposed in this paper, making full use of the multi-scale and multi-level information of the object to perform image-to-image prediction, and combining all distinctive convolution features in a holistic manner. Further, the effect of simply connecting the feature map is enhanced by an image fusion algorithm to improve the utilization of features. The feature maps obtained by convolutions of each layer are fused through the fusion network to obtain a more detailed feature. The improved algorithm is validated in the BSDS500 dataset and the ODS F-measure has reached 0.818, which significantly exceeds the current state-of-the-art results.
Plant-Based Diets Are Associated With Lower Adiposity Levels Among Hispanic/Latino Adults in the Adventist Multi-Ethnic Nutrition (AMEN) Study

Background: The Hispanic/Latino population in the US is experiencing high rates of obesity and cardio-metabolic disease that may be attributable to a nutrition transition away from traditional diets emphasizing whole plant foods. In the US, plant-based diets have been shown to be effective in preventing and controlling obesity and cardio-metabolic disease in large samples of primarily non-Hispanic subjects. Studying this association in US Hispanic/Latinos could inform culturally tailored interventions. Objective: To examine whether the plant-based diet pattern that is frequently followed by Hispanic/Latino Seventh-day Adventists is associated with lower levels of adiposity and adiposity-related biomarkers. Methods: The Adventist Multiethnic Nutrition Study (AMEN) enrolled 74 Seventh-day Adventists from five Hispanic/Latino churches within a 20 mile radius of Loma Linda, CA into a cross-sectional study of diet (24 h recalls, surveys) and health (anthropometrics and biomarkers). Results: Vegetarian diet patterns (Vegan, Lacto-ovo vegetarian, Pesco-vegetarian) were associated with significantly lower BMI (24.5 kg/m2 vs. 27.9 kg/m2, p = 0.006), waist circumference (34.8 in vs. 37.5 in, p = 0.01), and fat mass (18.3 kg vs. 23.9 kg, p = 0.007), as compared to non-vegetarians. Adiposity was positively associated with pro-inflammatory cytokines (Interleukin-6) in this sample, but adjusting for this effect did not alter the associations with vegetarian diet. Conclusions: Plant-based eating as practiced by US-based Hispanic/Latino Seventh-day Adventists is associated with BMI in the recommended range. Further work is needed to characterize this type of diet for use in obesity-related interventions among Hispanic/Latinos in the US.
4-Bromo-4’-chloro pyrazoline analog of curcumin augmented anticancer activity against human cervical cancer, HeLa cells: in silico-guided analysis, synthesis, and in vitro cytotoxicity

Abstract Inspired by the synergistic effects of hetero-aromatic scaffolds on curcumin, a novel array of pyrazoline substituted curcumin analogs was designed. Multi-scale computational studies were carried out to target the proposed analogs on human kinase β (IKK-β), a potential anti-cancer target. In molecular docking analysis, all the eleven molecules were observed to bind the target site and 4-bromo-4’-chloro analog displayed three hydrogen bond interactions with a docking score of –11.534 kcal/mol higher than parent molecule, curcumin (docking score = –7.12 kcal/mol) as the propellant shaped of analogs aided in proper binding with Kinase Domain binding pocket. The molecular dynamics and simulations studies revealed that the stable complexes of lead molecule were developed as the minimal deviations per residue of protein found within the range of 0.11 to 0.92 Å. The proposed compounds were synthesized, characterized and biologically evaluated against human cervical cancer cell line, HeLa, using standard MTT cell assay. Bio-evaluation studies exhibited superior cytotoxic profile for many analogs as Chloro bromo analog with IC50 value (8.7 µg/mL) exhibited fivefolds improvement in the potency in comparison to curcumin (IC50 = 42.4 µg/mL) but was less potent than the standard drug, paclitaxel (IC50 = 0.008µg/mL). The apoptotic effect was evaluated in the terms of caspase-3 enzyme cleavage and exhibited 70.5% of apoptosis significantly (p < 0.05) higher than 19.9% induced by curcumin. In short, 4-bromo-4’-chloro analog was the potent cytotoxic agent in this structural class and must be evaluated further under a set of stringent parameters for transforming in to a clinically viable therapeutic molecule. Communicated by Ramaswamy H. Sarma
Importance of medication compliance and lifestyle modification in heart failure readmission: single centre cohort study

Type of funding sources: None. Medication poor adherence is a common problem among heart failure (HF) patients. Inadequate compliance of drugs lead to increased HF exacerbations, higher risk for hospital admission and death. Despite this recent attention to HF readmission, we know relatively little about its actual causes despite the fact that patients are in many ways best positioned to identify the underlying factors that contribute to their readmissions. To systematically investigate the patients" perspectives about the reasons for their hospital readmission related to drug compliance in chronic heart failure patients . Method and Materials Patients were recruited for this study was admitted to national institute of cardiovascular diseases, through emergency department. Patients discharged with a primary discharge diagnosis for HF who were then readmitted for any cause in the subsequent 6 month were eligible for the study. Eligible patients were approached, consented, and interviewed within the next 24 hours while they were still in hospital. For the readmission, median length of stay was 6 days. Total 500 patient included, out of which 375 (75%) were male and most important cause of heart failure is ischaemic cardiomyopathy 400 (80%). No death recorded. Common reasons for readmission are lack of counselling 200(40%), noncompliance medication ; under dose 75(15%), non-compliance 60(12%), volume over load 50(10%), hypertension 50(10%), secondary infection 35(7%). We concluded that patient compliance of medication, appropriate fluid intake, self-care and life style modification are the important elements to care off according to this study which can be improve with psychotherapies and proper counselling session. For physician side proper information and detail discussion should be done with patient at the time of diagnosis.
The erectile dysfunction as a marker of cardiovascular disease: a review

Abstract Cardiovascular disease (CVD) and erectile dysfunction (ED) are two conditions that often coexist. Both diseases are consequences of the systemic vascular disease, sharing common risk factors, like diabetes mellitus, arterial hypertension, smoking, obesity, dyslipidaemia. Furthermore, they share the same pathological basis, endothelial dysfunction. Symptoms of ED precede with three to five years the clinical manifestations of CVD. This period may be a window of opportunity for the early initiation of a prompt therapeutic action for cardiovascular risk factors. This article reviews the incidence and prevalence of CVD and ED, the common risk factors, the pathophysiological link between the two diseases, and the current diagnosis and management strategies of patients with CVD and ED, in order to prevent myocardial infarction, stroke or heart failure.
Cardiovascular Programming During and After Diabetic Pregnancy: Role of Placental Dysfunction and IUGR

Intrauterine growth restriction (IUGR) is a condition whereby a fetus is unable to achieve its genetically determined potential size. IUGR is a global health challenge due to high mortality and morbidity amongst affected neonates. It is a multifactorial condition caused by maternal, fetal, placental, and genetic confounders. Babies born of diabetic pregnancies are usually large for gestational age but under certain conditions whereby prolonged uncontrolled hyperglycemia leads to placental dysfunction, the outcome of the pregnancy is an intrauterine growth restricted fetus with clinical features of malnutrition. Placental dysfunction leads to undernutrition and hypoxia, which triggers gene modification in the developing fetus due to fetal adaptation to adverse utero environmental conditions. Thus, in utero gene modification results in future cardiovascular programming in postnatal and adult life. Ongoing research aims to broaden our understanding of the molecular mechanisms and pathological pathways involved in fetal programming due to IUGR. There is a need for the development of effective preventive and therapeutic strategies for the management of growth-restricted infants. Information on the mechanisms involved with in utero epigenetic modification leading to development of cardiovascular disease in adult life will increase our understanding and allow the identification of susceptible individuals as well as the design of targeted prevention strategies. This article aims to systematically review the latest molecular mechanisms involved in the pathogenesis of IUGR in cardiovascular programming. Animal models of IUGR that used nutrient restriction and hypoxia to mimic the clinical conditions in humans of reduced flow of nutrients and oxygen to the fetus will be discussed in terms of cardiac remodeling and epigenetic programming of cardiovascular disease. Experimental evidence of long-term fetal programming due to IUGR will also be included.
Factores ambientales y su relación con el nitrógeno contenido en proteínas solubles totales (PST) en Carya illinoinensis

Nitrogen is one of the most important nutritive elements for the growth and development of plants. Nitrogen is stored in perennial organs in the form of proteins during the fall and winter and is mobilized to the shoots during the spring. The present study aimed to determine which environmental variables influence the protein nitrogen content stored in the pecan stem. Four trees of each variety were selected, and trunk samples were extracted monthly during an annual productive cycle. A multiple linear regression analysis was performed to observe the influence of environmental variables. The results obtained suggest that the protein nitrogen content can be predicted from the variables temperature, irradiation, and relative humidity.
Similarity Detection of Color Image based on Main Color Table

With the wider use of huge amount of images, more reasonable retrieval algorithms are becoming more and more important. This paper proposed an image similarity detection algorithm for image content based retrieval. The algorithm can extract the main color of the image, and improve the traditional methods in similarity detection performance. Because the eigenvalues of different regions of the image may be quite different, only using the global features of the image as matching eigenvalues will lead to a large error in similarity judgment, so image segmentation technology has always been the key technology in color image processing. In this paper, a more advanced block technology is used to segment the image of different regions, which can effectively reflect the spatial information of different images.