Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Global Regulatory Pathways Converge To Control Expression of Pseudomonas aeruginosa Type IV Pili

Pseudomonas aeruginosa is an opportunistic pathogen responsible for a wide range of infections. An extensive repertoire of virulence factors aid in P. aeruginosa pathogenesis. ABSTRACT The opportunistic pathogen Pseudomonas aeruginosa relies upon type IV pili (Tfp) for host colonization and virulence. Tfp are retractile surface appendages that promote adherence to host tissue and mediate twitching motility, a form of surface-associated translocation. Tfp are composed of a major structural pilin protein (PilA), several less abundant, fiber-associated pilin-like proteins (FimU, PilV, PilW, PilX, and PilE), and a pilus-associated tip adhesin and surface sensor (PilY1). Several proteins critical for Tfp biogenesis and surface sensing are encoded by the fimU-pilVWXY1Y2E operon. Tfp biogenesis is regulated by the global transcription factor Vfr and its allosteric effector, cyclic AMP (cAMP). Our investigation into the basis for reduced Tfp production in cAMP/vfr mutants revealed a defect in the expression of the fimU operon. We found that cAMP/Vfr activation of the fimU operon occurs via direct binding of Vfr to a specific fimU promoter sequence. We also refined the role of the AlgZ/AlgR two-component system in fimU regulation by demonstrating that phosphorylation of the response regulator AlgR is required for maximal binding to the fimU promoter region in vitro. Vfr also regulates expression of the algZR operon, revealing an indirect regulatory loop affecting fimU operon transcription. Overall, these results demonstrate that two linked but independent regulatory systems couple the expression of Tfp biogenesis and surface sensing genes and highlight the regulatory complexity governing expression of P. aeruginosa virulence factors. IMPORTANCE Pseudomonas aeruginosa is an opportunistic pathogen responsible for a wide range of infections. An extensive repertoire of virulence factors aid in P. aeruginosa pathogenesis. Type IV pili (Tfp) play a critical role in host colonization and infection by promoting adherence to host tissue, facilitating twitching motility and mediating surface-associated behaviors. The fimU operon encodes several pilus-associated proteins that are essential for proper Tfp function and surface sensing. In this study, we report that linked but independent regulatory systems dictate Tfp biogenesis. We also demonstrated the importance of different phosphorylation states of the AlgZ/AlgR two-component system and its role in Tfp biogenesis. Overall, this study furthers our understanding of the complex regulatory mechanisms that govern the production of a critical and multifaceted virulence factor.
Assessment of Plasmodium falciparum Artemisinin Resistance Independent of kelch13 Polymorphisms and with Escalating Malaria in Bangladesh

Malaria elimination is a Millennium Development Goal. Artemisinins, fast-acting antimalarial drugs, have played a key role in malaria elimination. ABSTRACT Emerging resistance to artemisinin drugs threatens the elimination of malaria. Resistance is widespread in South East Asia (SEA) and Myanmar. Neighboring Bangladesh, where 90% of infections occur in the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHTs), lacks recent assessment. We undertook a prospective study in the sole district-level hospital in Bandarban, a CHT district with low population densities but 60% of reported malaria cases. Thirty patients presented with malaria in 2018. An increase to 68 patients in 2019 correlated with the district-level rise in malaria, rainfall, humidity, and temperature. Twenty-four patients (7 in 2018 and 17 in 2019) with uncomplicated Plasmodium falciparum monoinfection were assessed for clearing parasites after starting artemisinin combination therapy (ACT). The median (range) time to clear half of the initial parasites was 5.6 (1.5 to 9.6) h, with 20% of patients showing a median of 8 h. There was no correlation between parasite clearance and initial parasitemia, blood cell counts, or mutations of P. falciparum gene Pfkelch13 (the molecular marker of artemisinin resistance [AR]). The in vitro ring-stage survival assay (RSA) revealed one (of four) culture-adapted strains with a quantifiable resistance of 2.01% ± 0.1% (mean ± standard error of the mean [SEM]). Regression analyses of in vivo and in vitro measurements of the four CHT strains and WHO-validated K13 resistance mutations yielded good correlation (R2 = 0.7; ρ = 0.9, P < 0.005), strengthening evaluation of emerging AR with small sample sizes, a challenge in many low/moderate-prevalence sites. There is an urgent need to deploy multiple, complementary approaches to understand the evolutionary dynamics of the emergence of P. falciparum resistant to artemisinin derivatives in countries where malaria is endemic. IMPORTANCE Malaria elimination is a Millennium Development Goal. Artemisinins, fast-acting antimalarial drugs, have played a key role in malaria elimination. Emergence of artemisinin resistance threatens the global elimination of malaria. Over the last decade, advanced clinical and laboratory methods have documented its spread throughout South East Asia and Myanmar. Neighboring Bangladesh lies in the historical path of dissemination of antimalarial resistance to the rest of the world, yet it has not been evaluated by combinations of leading methods, particularly in the highland Chittagong Hill Tracts adjacent to Myanmar which contain >90% of malaria in Bangladesh. We show the first establishment of capacity to assess clinical artemisinin resistance directly in patients in the hilltops and laboratory adaptation of Bangladeshi parasite strains from a remote, sparsely populated malaria frontier that is responsive to climate. Our study also provides a generalized model for comprehensive monitoring of drug resistance for countries where malaria is endemic.
AARC Clinical Practice Guidelines: Artificial Airway Suctioning

Artificial airway suctioning is a key component of airway management and a core skill for clinicians charged with assuring airway patency. Suctioning of the artificial airway is a common procedure performed worldwide on a daily basis. As such, it is imperative that clinicians are familiar with the most-effective and efficient methods to perform the procedure. We conducted a systematic review to assist in the development of evidence-based recommendations that pertain to the care of patients with artificial airways. From our systematic review, we developed guidelines and recommendations that addressed questions related to the indications, complications, timing, duration, and methods of artificial airway suctioning. By using a modified version of the RAND/UCLA Appropriateness Method, the following recommendations for suctioning were developed for neonatal, pediatric, and adult patients with an artificial airway: (1) breath sounds, visual secretions in the artificial airway, and a sawtooth pattern on the ventilator waveform are indicators for suctioning pediatric and adult patients, and an acute increase in airway resistance may be an indicator for suctioning in neonates; (2) as-needed only, rather than scheduled, suctioning is sufficient for neonatal and pediatric patients; (3) both closed and open suction systems may be used to safely and effectively remove secretions from the artificial airway of adult patients; (4) preoxygenation should be performed before suctioning in pediatric and adult patients; (5) the use of normal saline solution should generally be avoided during suctioning; (6) during open suctioning, sterile technique should be used; (7) suction catheters should occlude < 70% of the endotracheal tube lumen in neonates and < 50% in pediatric and adult patients, and suction pressure should be kept below –120 mm Hg in neonatal and pediatric patients and –200 mm Hg in adult patients; (8) suction should be applied for a maximum of 15 s per suctioning procedure; (9) deep suctioning should only be used when shallow suctioning is ineffective; (10) routine bronchoscopy for secretion removal is not recommended; and (11) devices used to clear endotracheal tubes may be used when airway resistance is increased due to secretion accumulation
Patent Quality And Company Performance: A Sample within the USA Biotechnology and Pharmaceutical Industry

This article presents the patent quality relation to firm performance for a sample from the US Biotechnology and Pharmaceutical Industry. Innovation value (INNV/PAT), innovation importance (INNV/PAT) and overall quality (q)are used as measurement of patent quality and book to market ratio (B/M), firm value (FV), and market capitalization (MCP) are used as measurements of performance. The sample consists of a yearly average of 600 companies, and 285, 000 patents from year 1999 up to 2009. The results show that total revenue is related to patenting and RD MCAP, B/M, and FVrelate to quality (q) with average growth of 9.4%. These results imply that innovation outputs are perceived and valued differently by stakeholders, and markets. These effects suggest that the qualitative indexes are useful for understanding stock market activity and firm valuation for specific industrial sectors.
Chemical Composition, Antioxidant, Antimicrobial and Cholinesterase Inhibitory Activities of Essential Oils from the Leaves and Rhizomes of Acorus macrospadiceus (Yamamoto) F. N.Wei et Y. K. Li

Abstract Acorus macrospadiceus is an aromatic herb that is widely distributed in southwest China. However, reports on the biological activities of its essential oil (EO) are limited. In the present study, the chemical composition, antioxidant, antimicrobial and cholinesterase inhibitory activities were determined for essential oils extracted from the leaves and rhizomes of this species. The essential oils were extracted by hydrodistillation and analysed by gas chromatography/mass spectrometry (GC/MS) and gas chromatography with a flame ionization detector (GC/FID). Antioxidant activity was examined using DPPH, ABTS and FRAP assays. Antimicrobial activity was evaluated by determining the minimum inhibitory concentrations (MICs) and minimum microbiocidal concentrations (MMCs). Acetylcholinesterase and butyrylcholinesterase inhibitory activities of the essential oils were also tested to evaluate the potential effect of the EOs on neurodegenerative disease. A total of 15 and 19 components were identified in the leaf and rhizome EOs, representing 99.24% and 98.35% of the total composition, respectively. Estragole was found to be the most abundant compound at 98.14% and 94.69% of the leaf and rhizome EOs, respectively. The essential oils displayed weak antioxidant and acetylcholinesterase inhibitory activities. The essential oils showed higher inhibitory effects against Candida albicans than other strains, with a MIC of 3.13 mg/mL, indicating possible use in the treatment of Candida infections.
Enhanced growth model of software reliability with generalized inflection S-shaped testing-effort function

Abstract The software project manager must plan and conduct testing activities economically and efficiently. Due to the constraints, such as limited testing resources, delivery time, and cost, it isn’t easy to conclude. The software reliability growth models (SRGMs) based on testing-effort, help the project manager in the decision process. Therefore, we reckon the testing effort function (TEF) during model formulation. This paper introduces a new model for estimating the growth of software reliability. This model incorporates generalized inflection S-shaped (GISS) distribution for TEF. Here, the TEF is involved as a time-dependent failure rate function. Besides, the developed model is in perfect debugging environment. Here, we estimate the values of the unknown parameters by the least square estimation (LSE). All the performance measures are calculated using real software failure data-set and comparisons made between the proposed model and the existing models. It is noted that the performance of the proposed model prediction for the total number of faults is more trustworthy.
Fractures of Anterior Frontal Sinus Wall and Superior Eye-Socket Wall Related to a Clinical Case

The fractures of the frontal sinuses represent around 5-15% of the total combined cranio-facial trauma. Frontal bone fractures are usually produced through impaction, also leading to injuries of the paranasal, orbital and frontal sinuses. As a general rule, open reduction and fracture immobilization with wicks and osteosynthesis plates is bespoken. There are many clues regarding surgical procedure in case of frontal bone trauma. First of all, and probably the most obvious of them all, is the case of impacted fractures. The current paper points out the benefits of the huge progress made in the medical field during the last 20 years in relation to the surgical treatment and imagistic methods of diagnosis in case of major cranio-maxillofacial trauma. Immediately after the imagistic diagnosis of the comminuted frontal bone and the superior eye-socket wall fractures, the surgical treatment is being elected, more specifically the reduction and immobilization of the fractures. Material used: osteosynthesis plates, titanium screws and wick, the practitioner considering clinical, paraclinical and anamnestic data.
Worst-case topological entropy and minimal data rate for state estimation of switched linear systems

In this paper, we study the problem of estimating the state of a switched linear system (SLS), when the observation of the system is subject to communication constraints. We introduce the concept of worst-case topological entropy of such systems, and we show that this quantity is equal to the minimal data rate (number of bits per second) required for the state estimation of the system under arbitrary switching. Furthermore, we provide a closed-form expression for the worst-case topological entropy of switched linear systems, showing that its evaluation reduces to the computation of the joint spectral radius (JSR) of some lifted switched linear system obtained from the original one by using tools from multilinear algebra, and thus can benefit from well-established algorithms for the stability analysis of switched linear systems. Finally, drawing on this expression, we describe a practical coder-decoder that estimates the state of the system and operates at a data rate arbitrarily close to the worst-case topological entropy.
Message Complexity of Multi-Valued Implicit Agreement with Shared Random Bits

An agreement protocol enables a system of n nodes in a distributed network to agree on a common input value. In the implicit version of the problem, only a subset of the nodes are required to decide the common value. This paper focuses on the message complexity of randomized implicit agreement in synchronous distributed networks. It has been shown by Augustine et al. [PODC 2018] that if the nodes have access to a shared coin, then implicit agreement can be solved with high probability1 using messages2 in expectation. However, their algorithm works only for binary input values, i.e, the input values given to the nodes are from the set {0, 1}. In this paper, we extended the result to the multi-valued setting where the input values may come from a larger but constant sized domain. We present an algorithm that solves the multi-valued implicit agreement problem with matching performance guarantees as in binary agreement.
Botnet Mapping Based on Intersections of Traces

Volumetric attacks are a growing concern for current Internet services. These attacks overwhelm Internet services with requests that prevent legitimate users from accessing the service or dramatically increase operational costs. While bot networks account for most volumetric attacks, the current approaches focus on mitigating a single attack. Our work argues that botnets create distinct patterns that can be detected by analyzing multiple traces from previous attacks. We formalize this idea into concrete bot network mapping algorithms and demonstrate their effectiveness in diverse conditions. Such a mapping implies that mitigation of future attacks is considerably easier, threatening the business model behind bot networks.
Knowledge-Based Conversational Recommender Systems Enhanced by Dialogue Policy Learning

The conversational recommender system (CRS) provides personalized recommendations for users through dialogues. Knowledge-based CRS, which applies external knowledge graphs into the CRS, can provide knowledge-aware recommendations, and has proved successful in many fields. However, existing models suffer from two limitations. First, previous knowledge-based CRSs ignore the transfer of topics in the conversation and cannot handle multi-task recommendation dialogues. Second, it takes many inquiries for traditional models to obtain knowledge-based user profiles, which affect the user’s interactive experience. In this work, we use the dialogue policy learning to tackle these issues, and propose a model called CRSDP, standing for knowledge-based Conversational Recommender Systems enhanced by Dialogue Policy learning. We leverage the actor-critic framework to learn a dialogue policy in the reinforcement learning paradigm. The optimized dialogue policy leads the conversation strategically in multi-task dialogue scenarios, determines the user preference in fewer turns, and makes effective recommendations. We evaluate the performance of the model in the recommendation task and the conversation task. Experimental results validate the effectiveness of our model.
A Literature Review About Burnout Syndrome and How it Can Be Prevented

Abstract Burnout syndrome refers to the appearance of a physical and mental exhaustion state that occurs as a result of a high stress level, associated with excessive workload. Burnout is characterized by three components- emotional exhaustion, depersonalization and personal accomplishment. Its diagnosis is established by using the Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI). According to MBI, burnout is defined by the presence of a high level of emotional exhaustion and depersonalization while personal accomplishment is low. The prevention and treatment of burnout syndrome includes lifestyle changing measures, mindfulness, mental wellness programmes and cognitive behavioural therapy.
The sustainable industrial water cycle - a review of the economics and approach

Studies suggest that only 31% of Europe is thought to have a water supply that is either plentiful or sufficient to meet demands until 2015, and water stress indexes show a number of countries with traditionally wet climates such as Belgium and Bulgaria, under significant water stress. Therefore, there is both a desire and a need to reduce the consumption of water over much of Europe. For industry, often economics determine the viability of water recycling, which does not necessarily fall under the standards currently being set for the major water reuse schemes. While the additional annual recycling capacity in Western Europe is set to increase by 10%, much of the Global market is focussed on major reuse facilities based on the municipal sector. Within the industrial sector there are opportunities to achieve major changes in the water cycle which can have a significant impact on total water consumption. The impact on regional water consumption by industries efforts can be massive, as industry accounts for 50% of the water consumption in Western Europe. When benchmarked data across industry sectors is analysed, we find that industries ranging from paper mills, dairy, beverage, ceramic and electronics have opportunities to reduce their water consumption by around 50%. But what are the mechanisms that drive actions in the industry water cycle, and how great can the impact be? This paper explores industrial water costs across Europe, and the drivers leading to reduced water consumption. As operators of water and wastewater facilities for many industrial customers across Europe, Ondeo Industrial Solutions examine the raw water costs and the viability of recycle schemes. Economics is not the only driver towards the reduction in water consumption on industrial sites. There are political and legislative drivers that can often override the economics such as the European PPC (Pollution Prevention and Control) directive that can often lead to a programme of water consumption reductions.
Design of Distributed Fusion Predictor and Filter without Feedback for Nonlinear System with Correlated Noises and Random Parameter Matrices

Abstract This work presents distributed predictor and filter without feedback for nonlinear stochastic uncertain system with correlated noises. Firstly, for the problem that the process noise and measurement noise are correlated, the two-step prediction theorem based on projection theorem is used to replace the one-step prediction theorem, and the two-step prediction value of a single sensor is obtained. Secondly, the two-step prediction value of each sensor state is used as the measurement information to modify the distributed fusion predictor to obtain the distributed fusion prediction value. Then, according to the projection theorem, the prediction value of distributed fusion is used as measurement information to modify the filtering value of distributed fusion. Finally, the Cubature Kalman filter (CKF) algorithm is used to implement the algorithm proposed in this paper. By comparison with existing methods, the algorithm proposed in this paper solves the problem that existing methods cannot handle state estimation and prediction problems for nonlinear multi-sensor stochastic uncertain systems with correlated noises.
Synthesis and characterization of noble metal/metal oxide nanoparticles and their potential antidiabetic effect on biochemical parameters and wound healing

Abstract The study assessed the antidiabetic effect of Solenostemma argel and its nanoformulations with silver/gold nanocomposites (CNPs), zinc oxide nanoparticles (ZnONPs), and metaformin drug. Experimental groups consisted of normal control, diabetic control, and four diabetic groups treated with metformin, CNPs, ZnONPs, and bulk argel leaf extract (So-argel). Transmission electron microscopy characterization showed that the synthesized CNPs and ZnONPs were of variable sizes and dimensions and were quasi-spherical in shape. Particle sizes measured by dynamic light scattering were 106 and 139 nm for CNPs and ZnONPs, respectively. Also, the polydispersity index values were 0.473 and 0.269 for CNPs and ZnONPs, respectively. The biochemical parameters were as follows: the group treated with bulk So-argel (105.00 ± 4.041 mg·dL−1) and CNPs (109.00 ± 8.373 mg·dL−1) showed a more profound anti-hyperglycemic effect and were comparable to the control (88.40 ± 2.249). Liver and kidney functions (p ≤ 0.05) improved with So-argel and its nanoformulations compared to metformin. However, bulk argel (170.33 ± 20.431 and 38.00 ± 3.05 U·L−1) and the nanocomposite (228.33 ± 11.464 and 48.00 ± 5.291 U·L−1) were efficacious in lowering serum levels of liver enzymes (AST and ALT, respectively). No significant difference was observed between urea levels. Nevertheless, bulk So-argel (0.26 ± 0.007) and CNPs (0.24 ± 0.018) were more effective than ZnONPs (0.41 ± 0.289) on serum creatinine. Nanotreatment exhibited a reduction in lesions size/healing. Overall, nanoparticles may offer a safe potential for Type 2 diabetes management.