Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Novel dual-fluorescent flow cytometric approach for quantification of macrophages infected with Leishmania infantum parasites

Abstract Abstract Flow cytometry analysis emerges as an alternative methodology to microscopy for determination of the Leishmania-infection rates of macrophages. Various flow cytometric approaches have been established for the quantification of Leishmania parasites within host cells, labelled either directly fluorescent dyes or indirectly with fluorescently conjugated antibodies. Although these techniques allow accurate quantification of infection, they fail at detection of non-infected macrophages specifically. This study introduces a new flow cytometric approach for the determination of infection rates of macrophages infected by Leishmania infantum parasites. Prior to infection, J774A.1 macrophages and L. infantum promastigotes were stained separately with PKH26 and PKH67 dyes, respectively. Dual staining enabled detection of each cell type, where non-infected macrophages were also recorded for the quantification. Dual-PKH staining achieved high success in selective staining of promastigotes (99.71%) and macrophages (99.57%). The percentages of parasite-infected macrophages were determined for initial 1:2.5 and 1:10 infection ratios as 15.68 and 61.70%, respectively; indicating significant increase in infection rate parallel to the initial treatment ratio. These results demonstrated that the introduced dual-fluorescence flow cytometric approach can be successfully used as an accurate and rapid quantification method for L. infantum-infected macrophages and strengthens the hypothesis that flow cytometric approaches could replace conventional microscopic methodologies.
Exploring discrepant knowledge of partner sexual behaviour to inform self-risk assessment in a high HIV burdened district in rural KwaZulu-Natal

ABSTRACT Understanding the sexual relationships of young women is critical for preventing HIV infections. This study aimed to describe the sexual behaviour of partners, comparing the accuracy of sexual health knowledge between partners. The study took place in 2017 in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. Purposive sampling was used to select 18–27-year-old sexually active women. Consenting female participants completed a structured and semi-structured interview, while consenting male sexual partners identified through the female participant completed a structured questionnaire on sexual health information. Using a reflexive inductive approach and thematic analysis, we identified key discrepancies in the assumptions partners make about each other’s sexual health information. Twenty-three sexual dyads were identified and four key discrepancies were identified: Age: partners either over or underestimated the age of their partners, HIV status: where partners were unaware of, or incorrectly assumed their partner’s status, Lack of awareness of partner’s concurrent relationships and more general knowledge of the partner’s sexual health behaviours. Discussions about sexual health are mediated by relationship length, type of partner, power and perceived fidelity. While it is possible to undertake dyadic level research, ethical tensions remain. Sex-positive and egalitarian sexual health interventions that target the individual, as well as the sexual relationship, are needed.
A systematic review on the application of vascular endothelial growth factors in preeclampsia.

BACKGROUND Hypertensive disorders of pregnancy (HDP) is a disease associated with elevated blood pressure during pregnancy, accounting for 5-10% of all pregnancies, which includes: gestational hypertension, preeclampsia (PE), eclampsia, chronic hypertension with superimposed PE and chronic hypertension. PE is the most prevalent type of HDP that seriously threatens the life and health of mothers and infants. In-depth exploration of the pathogenesis can play an early role in predicting the disease. METHODS A literature search was conducted in PubMed, Embase, Google Scholar, and other databases in the article. It was investigated by searching for literature published between 1993 and March 2021; the subject terms included-"vascular endothelial growth factor", "preeclampsia", and "pathogenesis". In the article, the inclusion criteria of literature should meet the definition of PE. It was excluded as reviews, case reports, narrative reviews, and publications that lack key information. RESULTS Vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) family factor research provides pivotal value for early clinical prediction of PE. Soluble fms-like tyrosine kinase-1 (sFlt-1)/placental growth factor (PlGF) became a marker for early prediction of PE. Through the included 51 articles, the analysis of VEGF in PE and its pathway factors was summarized to clarify the pathogenesis further and provide innovative ideas for future research directions and clinical diagnosis. DISCUSSION A systematic review of the VEGF family in the pathogenesis of PE was concluded in the study to find angiogenesis markers of PE from the pathogenesis of the available literature. Therefore, early intervention of clinical diseases could reduce maternal complications and ensure the maximum health of mothers and babies. There are differences in the research results of factors in the VEGF family, and further research is needed to provide accurate clinical evidence.
Adaptability of Simple Classifier and Active Learning in Music Emotion Recognition

∗ This article selects five common classifiers in music emotion recognition, namely SVM (kernel function: RBF), SVM (kernel function: LINEAR), kNN (K = 3) and kNN (K = 5), as well as GMM, application active learning performs music emotional classification. The exper-iment uses 365 music clips in the PMEmo data set, and after manual labeling, they are divided into four groups: HAPPY, SAD, ANGRY and RELAX according to the Thayer emotion model and the classification effect is judged by comparing F1-measure. Experiments show that active learning can reduce the need for manual labeling by about 78%, and it can help to achieve better results with fewer labels. At the same time, among the three simple classifiers, the SVM model and active learning have a better degree of adaptation in the field of music emotion recognition.
Personal Identification using Gait Data on Slipper-device with Accelerometer

In this paper we presented a method of gait identification by slippers with an accelerometer to perform privacy-friendly personal identification. The gait data from accelerometer during walking is adopted from developed slipper devices as the personal unique data used for identification. Gait data is processed by Fast Fourier Transform to extract the frequency features and the Support vector machine (SVM) is used to identify the subject. Through assessing the different segmentation window size and various sensor positions, the results showed that an average accuracy was 95.0% using six sensors, and an average accuracy of 93.3% using three sensors placed at optimal positions.
Activity-dependent regulation of mitochondrial motility in developing cortical dendrites

Developing neurons form synapses at a high rate. Synaptic transmission is very energy-demanding and likely requires ATP production by mitochondria nearby. Mitochondria might be targeted to active synapses in young dendrites, but whether such motility regulation mechanisms exist is unclear. We investigated the relationship between mitochondrial motility and neuronal activity in the primary visual cortex of young mice in vivo and in slice cultures. During the first 2 postnatal weeks, mitochondrial motility decreases while the frequency of neuronal activity increases. Global calcium transients do not affect mitochondrial motility. However, individual synaptic transmission events precede local mitochondrial arrest. Pharmacological stimulation of synaptic vesicle release, but not focal glutamate application alone, stops mitochondria, suggesting that an unidentified factor co-released with glutamate is required for mitochondrial arrest. A computational model of synaptic transmission-mediated mitochondrial arrest shows that the developmental increase in synapse number and transmission frequency can contribute substantially to the age-dependent decrease of mitochondrial motility.
Comment on “A Gibbs Sampler for a Class of Random Convex Polytopes” by P.E. Jacob, R. Gong, P.T. Edlefsen and A.P. Dempster

I would like to thank the Editorial Board for inviting me to comment on this article, since it has introduced me to notions I was not fully aware of. I would also like to congratulate the authors on successfully addressing a complex problem, and for their very clear presentation despite the sometimes complicated notations and formulations. I must confess that my view of the stochastic world is slightly different from the authors’ one since I am Bayesian, with a deep interest in Bayesian robustness, and this is the link to this article. As a consequence, I will comment on the article stemming from my Bayesian experience and I will be quite biased because of it. I am planning to discuss some ideas and tools from the robust Bayesian world which might be useful also for those interested in the Dempster-Shafer (DS) approach. The article has aroused various curiosities in me and stimulated some reflections, also about my own research. Indeed, the first thought concerns the interpretation of the typical assumptions and findings in Bayesian robustness (see Rios Insua, and Ruggeri 2000). In a very simplified formulation, the posterior probability of a measurable subset A in the parameter space would span, under a class of prior distributions, a range of values and would be bounded, say, by 0.2 ≤ P(A) ≤ 0.7, whereas its complement AC would be bounded by 0.3 ≤ P(AC) ≤ 0.8. Using the terminology of the Dempster-Shafer theory, we could say that there is a 0.2 (posterior) probability definitely “for” A, 0.3 definitely “against” A and 0.5 as “don’t know. ” The latter value would disappear by choosing just one prior distribution and it could be reduced by considering a smaller class of priors, leading to smaller ranges. Those bounds could actually be used also a priori to define a class of distributions representing the expert’s knowledge “for,” “against” and “don’t know. ” Both prior and posterior interpretations are, in my opinion, worthy of reflections by robust Bayesians and I wonder if this parallelism could stimulate some reflections by DS followers. I went through the mathematical proofs of the article and I found them to be very solid (as expected after the journal’s customary thorough review process). At the same time, the goals of the article are first clearly illustrated and then achieved. Therefore my comments will concern few aspects of the algorithm, further possible applications of the proposed method and comparison with (robust) Bayesian methods, with the hope of stimulating cross-fertilization between the two approaches. I am wondering if the inequality in (3.3) holds for all possible paths across the L edges. I think it would be interesting
Convex Influences

We introduce a new notion of influence for symmetric convex sets over Gaussian space, which we term"convex influence". We show that this new notion of influence shares many of the familiar properties of influences of variables for monotone Boolean functions $f: \{\pm1\}^n \to \{\pm1\}. $ Our main results for convex influences give Gaussian space analogues of many important results on influences for monotone Boolean functions. These include (robust) characterizations of extremal functions, the Poincar\'e inequality, the Kahn-Kalai-Linial theorem, a sharp threshold theorem of Kalai, a stability version of the Kruskal-Katona theorem due to O'Donnell and Wimmer, and some partial results towards a Gaussian space analogue of Friedgut's junta theorem. The proofs of our results for convex influences use very different techniques than the analogous proofs for Boolean influences over $\{\pm1\}^n$. Taken as a whole, our results extend the emerging analogy between symmetric convex sets in Gaussian space and monotone Boolean functions from $\{\pm1\}^n$ to $\{\pm1\}$
Limits on Relativistic Quantum Measurement

Requiring causality on measurements in quantum field theory seems to impose strong conditions on a selfadjoint operator to be really measurable. This may seem limiting and artificial in the operator language of algebraic quantum field theory (AQFT), but is essential for a truly relativistic theory. Recent publications attempt to deal with this issue by including the apparatus into the formalism, connecting AQFT with measurement theory, but other options have been suggested. In this essay, I discuss the causality conditions on self-adjoint operators both in the language of AQFT and in the language of quantum information theory. I then present measurement theory in AQFT, modelling the apparatus as a quantum field with coupling to the measured system restricted to a region of spacetime. I highlight how this approach leads to a causally well behaved theory. Finally, I attempt to formulate the causality conditions on measurements in the Feynman path integral approach, using the concept of decoherent histories. I claim that the path integral approach has problems with causality similar to the operator based approaches and that even here causality is an a posteriori condition.
Two Contact Binaries with Mass Ratios Close to the Minimum Mass Ratio

The cutoff mass ratio is under debate for contact binaries. In this paper, we present the investigation of two contact binaries with mass ratios close to the low mass ratio limit. It is found that the mass ratios of VSX J082700.8+462850 (hereafter J082700) and 1SWASP J132829.37+555246.1 (hereafter J132829) are both less than 0.1 (q ∼ 0.055 for J082700 and q ∼ 0.089 for J132829). J082700 is a shallow contact binary with a contact degree of ∼19%, and J132829 is a deep contact system with a fill-out factor of ∼70%. The O − C diagram analysis indicated that the two systems manifested long-term period decreases. In addition, J082700 exhibits a cyclic modulation which is more likely resulting from the Applegate mechanism. In order to explore the properties of extremely low mass ratio contact binaries (ELMRCBs), we carried out a statistical analysis on contact binaries with mass ratios of q ≲ 0.1 and discovered that the values of J spin/J orb of three systems are greater than 1/3. Two possible explanations can interpret this phenomenon. One explanation is that some physical processes, unknown to date, are not considered when Hut presented the dynamic stability criterion. The other explanation is that the dimensionless gyration radius (k) should be smaller than the value we used (k 2 = 0.06). We also found that the formation of ELMRCBs possibly has two channels. The study of evolutionary states of ELMRCBs reveals that their evolutionary states are similar with those of normal W UMa contact binaries.
Comprehensive analysis of pivotal biomarkers, immune cell infiltration and therapeutic drugs for steroid-induced osteonecrosis of the femoral head

ABSTRACT Steroid-induced osteonecrosis of the femoral head (SONFH) is a progressive disease that leads to an increased disability rate. This study aimed to ascertain biomarkers, infiltrating immune cells, and therapeutic drugs for SONFH. The gene expression profile of the GSE123568 dataset was downloaded from the Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) database. The differentially expressed genes (DEGs) were identified using the NetworkAnalyst platform. Functional enrichment, protein-protein interaction network (PPI), and module analyses were performed using Metascape tools. An immune cell abundance identifier was used to explore immune cell infiltration. Furthermore, hub genes were identified based on maximal clique centrality (MCC) evaluation using cytoHubba application and confirmed by qRT-PCR using clinical samples. Finally, the L1000 platform was used to determine potential drugs for SONFH treatment. The SONFH mouse model was used to determine the therapeutic effects of aspirin. In total, 429 DEGs were identified in SONFH samples. Functional enrichment analysis showed that these DEGs were enriched in myeloid leukocyte activation and osteoclast differentiation processes. A set of nine immune cell types was confirmed to be markedly different between the SONFH and control samples. All 10 hub genes were significantly highly expressed in the serum of SONFH patients, as shown by qRT-PCR. Finally, the therapeutic effect of aspirin on SONFH was examined in animal experiments. Taken together, our data revealed the hub genes and infiltrating immune cells in SONFH, and we also screened potential drugs for use in SONFH treatment.
The autonomy of international organizations? The analysis of major powers’ influence over the World Bank’s aid policies

Are international organizations autonomous actors in global politics? This paper investigates whether and how major powers influence the World Bank’s official development assistance policies. Despite the World Bank’s attempts to maintain independence from its member states, we argue that major powers are still influential. Testing this expectation with the data of official development assistance provisions between 1981 and 2017, we find that the World Bank provides a higher amount of official development assistance to the recipient countries that receive a higher amount of such assistance from the major powers such as the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany and Japan. In addition, the World Bank is prone to provide a higher amount of official development assistance to the recipients that have a similar preference to the major powers. This study sheds light on the relations between major powers and international organizations.
An integrative review of chronic illness mHealth self-care interventions: Mapping technology features to patient outcomes

Mobile health (mHealth)—hand-held technologies to address health priorities—has significant potential to answer the growing need for patient chronic illness self-care interventions. Previous reviews examined mHealth effect on patient outcomes. None have a detailed examination and mapping of specific technology features to targeted health outcomes. Examine recent chronic illness mHealth self-care interventions; map the study descriptors, mHealth technology features, and study outcomes. (1) Information extracted from PubMed, CINAHL, and Web of Science databases for clinical outcomes studies published 2010–January 2020; and (2) realist synthesis techniques for within and across case analysis. From 652 records, 32 studies were examined. Median study duration was 19.5 weeks. Median sample size was 62 participants. About 47% of interventions used solely patient input versus digital input; 50% sent tailored messages versus generic messages; 22% augmented the intervention with human interaction. Studies with positive clinical outcomes had higher use of digital input. Software descriptions were lacking. Most studies built interventions: only two incorporated target audience participation in development. We recommend researchers provide sufficient system description detail. Future research includes: data input characteristics; impact of augmentation with human interaction on outcomes; and development decisions.
Towards media systems framework in Asia Chinese and Korean media on framing the initial COVID-19 pandemic

Due to the relative lack of media comparison studies within Asian contexts, theoretical frameworks based in Western societies have been applied to knowledge production in the global South. Using a ‘most different’ design, this study compares the dimensions of media systems reflected in two Chinese and two Korean newspapers in their initial coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic. Content analysis showed statistically significant differences in distribution of sources, topics and valence, usage of frame types, and actors including domestic government and foreign entities held responsible between the two groups of media. Based on political implications of crisis on Chinese and Korean news content, we mainly discuss political instrumentalization and parallelism in the media in an Asian context. Finally, we open up the dimensions of media system from an Asian perspective and address the need for future research.
Gene Expression Analysis Reveals Key Genes and Signalings Associated with the Prognosis of Prostate Cancer

It is urgent to identify novel biomarkers for prostate cancer (PCa) prognosis and to understand the mechanisms regulating the tumorigenesis for PCa treatment. In this study, GSE17951 and TCGA were used to identify the differentially expressed genes (DEGs). Our study demonstrated that 1533 genes with increased expression and 2301 genes with decreased expression in PCa. Bioinformatics analysis data indicated that these up-regulated genes had an association with the modulation of mitotic nuclear division, sister chromatid cohesion, cell division, and cell cycle. Additionally, our results revealed downregulated genes took part in modulating extracellular matrix organization, angiogenesis, signal transduction, and Ras signaling pathway. Hub upregulated and downregulated PPI networks were identified by protein-protein interaction (PPI) network analysis and MCODE analysis. Of note, 12 cell cycle regulators, comprising CCNB1, CCNB2, PLK1, TTK, AURKA, CDC20, BUB1, PTTG1, CDC45, CDC25C, CCNA2, and BUB1B, were demonstrated to function crucially in PCa development. By detecting their expression in PCa cell lines, we confirmed that these cell cycle regulator expressions were heightened in PCa cells. GEPIA databases analysis showed that higher expression of these cell cycle regulators was correlated to shorter disease-free survival (DFS) time in PCa samples. Our findings collectively suggested targeting cell cycle pathways may offer novel prognosis and treatment biomarkers for PCa.
Competitive Advantage of Geosmithia morbida in Low-Moisture Wood May Explain Historical Outbreaks of Thousand Cankers Disease and Predict the Future Fate of Juglans nigra Within Its Native Range

Bark beetles vector symbiotic fungi and the success of these mutualisms may be limited by competition from other microbes. The outcome of fungal competition is strongly influenced by the physical and chemical conditions of the wood they inhabit. These conditions are in turn subject to climatic variation. In particular, wood moisture content (MC) influences fungal competition and, therefore, could help determine environmental suitability for thousand cankers disease (TCD) caused by Geosmithia morbida and its vector Pityophthorus juglandis. We conducted competition experiments in Juglans nigra wood that was naturally or artificially colonized by G. morbida and other fungi over a range of wood MC expected across prevailing United States climatic conditions. G. morbida outcompeted antagonistic fungi Clonostachys and Trichoderma spp. at <5% equilibrium moisture content. Aspergillus spp. outcompeted G. morbida at low moisture in wood from Indiana. We fit a logistic regression model to results of the competition experiments to predict survival of G. morbida across the United States. Expected survival of G. morbida was highest in historical TCD epicenters and accounted for the low incidence and severity of TCD in the eastern United States. Our results also predict that under future climate scenarios, the area impacted by TCD will expand into the native range of J. nigra. Given its role in emergent forest health threats, climate change should be a key consideration in the assessment of risks to hardwood resources.