Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Population Dynamics of Tsetse flies at Salt Lick B and Guruntun Areas of Yankari National Park Bauchi State Nigeria

Objective: The aim of the research was to Identity tsetse species distribution present in salt lick B and Guruntun area of Yankari National Park and to determine the apparent density of the flies, Materials and Methods: Twenty biconical traps were mounted between salt lick B area and Guruntun River side. Coordinates and GPS positions were determined for each trap set. Results: Two dominant species of tsetse flies were found mostly in the two sides, which include G. tachinoides and G. morsitan . Three thousand and forty seven (3,047) flies were collected during the period, out of which 2,827 were G. tachinoides with apparent density of 70.68, while 220 were G. morsitans with apparent density of 5.5. Out of the 2,827, G. tachinoides 2,415 were females with apparent density of 60.4 while 412 were males with apparent density of 20.6. Conclusion the patterns of fly distribution in the two locations especially the female GlossinaTachnoides showed that tsetse fly is a still a major hindrance to wild life population in Yankari National Park. There is a need for intervention in other to reduce the fly population in the two areas which serves as a major site during game viewing and research.
Organizational readiness and implementation fidelity of an early childhood education and care-specific physical activity policy intervention: findings from the Play Active trial

Abstract Background Many children do not accumulate sufficient physical activity for good health and development at early childhood education and care (ECEC). This study examined the association between ECEC organizational readiness and implementation fidelity of an ECEC-specific physical activity policy intervention. Methods Play Active aimed to improve the ECEC educator’s physical activity practices. We investigated the implementation of Play Active using a Type 1 hybrid study (January 2021–March 2022). Associations between organizational readiness factors and service-level implementation fidelity were examined using linear regressions. Fidelity data were collected from project records, educator surveys and website analytics. Results ECEC services with higher levels of organizational commitment and capacity at pre-implementation reported higher fidelity scores compared to services with lower organizational commitment and capacity (all Ps < 0.05). Similarly, services who perceived intervention acceptability and appropriateness at pre-implementation to be high had higher fidelity scores (P < 0.05). Perceived feasibility and organizational efficacy of Play Active were associated with higher but nonsignificant fidelity scores. Conclusions Results indicate that organizational readiness factors may influence the implementation of ECEC-specific physical activity policy interventions. Therefore, strategies to improve organizational readiness should be developed and tested. These findings warrant confirmation in the ECEC and other settings and with other health behavior interventions.
Enhanced recovery after thoracic surgery in low- and middle-income countries: Feasibility and outcomes

Background Enhanced Recovery After Surgery (ERAS) applies multimodal, perioperative, and evidence-based practices to decrease postoperative morbi-mortality, the length of hospital stay, and hospitalization costs. Implementing enhanced recovery after thoracic surgery (ERATS) in low- and middle-income countries (LMIC) is problematic. This randomized controlled trial evaluated the feasibility and effectiveness of an ERATS protocol adapted to LMIC conditions in Tunisia. Materials and Methods We conducted this randomized controlled trial between December 2015 and August 2017 in the Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery Department at Habib Bourguiba University Hospital of Sfax, Tunisia. Results One hundred patients undergoing thoracic surgery were randomly allocated to the ERATS group or Control group. During the postoperative phase, 13 patients (13%) were excluded secondary. These complication rates were lower in the ERATS group: lack of reexpansion (14.63% vs 16.10%: p = 0.72), pleural effusion (0% vs 10.86%, p = 0.05), and prolonged air leak (17.07% vs 30.43%, p = 0.14). The pain level decreased significantly in the ERATS group from postoperative H3 (p = 0.006). This difference was significant at H6 (p = 0.001), H24 (p = 0.05), H48 (p = 0.01), discharge (p = 0.002), and after 15 days (p = 0.01), with a decreased analgesic consumption. The length of hospital stay was shorter in the ERAS group (median six days vs seven days, p = 0.17). Conclusion This study provides an adapted ERATS protocol, applicable regardless of the surgical approach or the type of resection and suitable for LMIC hospital's conditions. This protocol can improve the postoperative outcomes of thoracic surgery.
Hepatic Artery Infusion Pump Chemotherapy for Colorectal Liver Metastases: What Does the Colorectal Surgeon Need to Know?

CASE SUMMARY: An otherwise healthy 40-year-old man was diagnosed with invasive adenocarcinoma of the rectum with more than 20 colorectal liver metastases (CRLM). Although the response to systemic chemotherapy was robust, extensive CRLM precluded curative intent resection. The patient was offered hepatic artery infusion pump (HAIP) placement with primary tumor resection and systemic and hepatic artery infusion chemotherapy (HAIC).
A qualitative phenomenological exploration of prolonged grief in New Delhi, India

Prolonged grief disorder (PGD) is a condition characterized by difficulty in coping effectively with the loss of loved ones. The proposed diagnostic criteria for PGD have been based predominantly on research from developed Western nations. The cultural variations associated with experience and expression of grief and associated mourning rituals have not been considered comprehensively. The current study aimed to understand the experience of prolonged grief in India through a qualitative enquiry with mental health professionals (focus group discussions) and affected individuals (key informant interviews). Several novel findings diverging from the current understanding of manifestation and narratives of PGD emerged from the study, including differences in the social contexts of bereavement and culture-specific magico-religious beliefs and idioms of distress. The findings point to limitations of existing diagnostic systems for PGD. The results of this study suggest that the assumption of content equivalence for psychiatric disorders across cultures may not be justified and that there is a need to develop culturally sensitive diagnostic criteria and assessment scales for PGD.
Medial temporal lobe hyperconnectivity is key to Alzheimer's disease: Insight from physiological aging to dementia

Curing Alzheimer's disease (AD) remains hampered by an incomplete understanding of its pathophysiology and progression. Dysfunction within medial temporal lobe networks may provide key insights, as AD proteins seem to propagate specifically through the anterior-temporal (AT) and posterior-medial (PM) systems. Using monocentric longitudinal data from 267 participants spanning physiological aging to the full AD continuum, we found that advancing age was associated with decreased PM connectivity and increased AT connectivity over adult life. When specifically assessing AD-relevant connectivity changes, all AD-associated clinicopathological features, including elevated amyloid burden, AD-typical glucose hypometabolism, hippocampal atrophy, greater cognitive impairment and faster progression from MCI to AD-dementia, were consistently linked to AT hyperconnectivity in healthy to AD-demented older adults. Our comprehensive approach allowed us to reveal that excessive connectivity within the AT network is a pivotal mechanism catalysing pathological process and progression of AD. Such findings hold promise for early diagnosis and therapeutic strategies targeting these specific network alterations.
vmrseq: Probabilistic Modeling of Single-cell Methylation Heterogeneity

Single-cell DNA methylation measurements reveal genome-scale inter-cellular epigenetic heterogeneity, but extreme sparsity and noise challenges rigorous analysis. Previous methods to detect variably methylated regions (VMRs) have relied on predefined regions or sliding windows, and report regions insensitive to heterogeneity level present in input. We present vmrseq, a statistical method that overcomes these challenges to detect VMRs with increased accuracy in synthetic benchmarks and improved feature selection in case studies. vmrseq also highlights context-dependent correlations between methylation and gene expression, supporting previous findings and facilitating novel hypotheses on epigenetic regulation. vmrseq is available at https://github.com/nshen7/vmrseq.
MaUGT79 confers drought tolerance by regulating scopolin biosynthesis in plants

The coumarin scopoletin and its glycosylated form scopolin constitute a vast class of natural products that are considered to be high-value compounds, distributed widely in the plant kingdom, they help plants adapt to environmental stresses. However, the underlying molecular mechanism of how scopolin is involved in the regulation of plant drought tolerance remains largely unexplored. Here, UDP-glycosyltransferase 79 (MaUGT79) was genetically mapped as the target gene by bulk segregant analysis sequencing (BSA-seq) from two Melilotus albus near-isogenic lines (NILs). MaUGT79 exhibits glucosyltransferase activity toward scopoletin. The expression of MaUGT79 is induced by drought stress and it was found to mediate scopolin accumulation and reactive oxygen species (ROS) scavenging under drought stress. Moreover, the transcription of MaUGT79 was demonstrated to be directly and positively regulated by MaMYB4, which is a key integrator of both scopolin biosynthesis and drought tolerance. Collectively, this study reveals that MaMYB4 is a positive regulator in drought stress by targeting the MaUGT79 promoter and activating its expression to coordinately mediate scopolin biosynthesis and drought tolerance, providing insights into the regulatory mechanism for plant growth adaption to environmental changes through accumulation of scopolin.
Modification of clinical dental impression methods to obtain dental traits from living and whole non-mammalian vertebrates

Dental impressions are routinely in human and veterinary clinical settings to capture dental characteristics three dimensionally for the evaluation of pathology, morphology, eruption patterns, and mastication function. While these aspects of dentition are of great interest to evolutionary biologists, ecologists, and biomechanics researchers, impressions have rarely been used in studies of non-mammalian vertebrates (e.g., fishes) and/or for non-medical research. Studies of animal dentition usually require euthanasia and specimen dissection, low-resolution CT scans and impressions or extractions of individual teeth for study. These practices prevent invivo longitudinal studies that factors growth and other chronological changes. For example, it is possible to infer feeding ecology by scanning or observing the surface of teeth and quantifying micrometer-scale topographical abrasions caused by feeding behavior. It is also possible to track tooth replacement or changes in occlusion through time. Here, we describe a method for dental impression that can preserve the life of the vertebrate specimen, be used non-destructively with museum specimens, and has a wide range of applications in organismal research. We demonstrate this method using living specimens of Polypterus senegalus, a non-teleost fish (Actinopterygii), in a laboratory setting.
The quantitative genetics of gene expression in Mimulus guttatus

Gene expression can be influenced by genetic variants that are closely linked to the expressed gene (cis eQTLs) and variants in other parts of the genome (trans eQTLs). We created a multiparental mapping population by sampling genotypes from a single natural population of Mimulus guttatus and scored gene expression in the leaves of 1,588 plants. We find that nearly every measured gene exhibits cis regulatory variation (91% have FDR < 0.05) and that cis eQTLs are usually allelic series with three or more functionally distinct alleles. The cis locus explains about two thirds of the standing genetic variance (on average) but varies among genes and tends to be greatest when there is high indel variation in the upstream regulatory region and high nucleotide diversity in the coding sequence. Despite mapping over 10,000 trans eQTL / affected gene pairs, most of the genetic variance generated by trans acting loci remains unexplained. This implies a large reservoir of trans acting genes with subtle or diffuse effects. Mapped trans eQTLs show lower allelic diversity but much higher genetic dominance than cis eQTLs. Several analyses also indicate that trans eQTL make a substantial contribution to the genetic correlations in expression among different genes. They may thus be essential determinants of “gene expression modules”, which has important implications for the evolution of gene expression and also how it is studied by geneticists. Author summary Mimulus guttatus (yellow monkeyflower) is a model for the study of quantitative trait evolution in natural populations. Research has focused mainly on whole organism traits like flower size or herbivore resistance, but the level of expression of a gene is also a quantitative trait. In this study, we dissect leaf transcriptome variation using a breeding design that estimates the contribution of individual loci to expression variation (eQTLs). We find at least rough agreement to the “oligogenic model” where a major locus (the cis regulatory region) generates much of the genetic variation in the population. While associations studies routinely characterize genetic effects as binary (the two alternatives at a single nucleotide polymorphism or “SNP”), this description proves insufficient for Mimulus. Most loci exhibit multiple, and in some cases, a continuum of alleles. We find that trans eQTLs have different features than cis eQTLs, both in terms of the diversity and genetic dominance of alleles. These genetic features of eQTLs are critical determinants of the “G matrix”, the genetic variances and covariances among all genes. The G matrix determines how gene expression will evolve under selection in response to changing environmental conditions. Our finding of large effect sizes and high allelic diversity suggests that the G matrix may be surprisingly malleable, even on ecological timescales.
Plant-pollinator interactions in apple orchards from a production and conservation perspective

In an agricultural landscape, production and conservation ideally go hand in hand. In a win-win scenario, conservation measures provide support for biodiversity and crop production, mediated by pollination for example. Hedges and flower strips are conservation measures that support pollinating insects, such as wild bees and hoverflies. They can be beneficial for crop pollination, but also harmful by dragging away pollinators from crops if flowering simultaneously. Here, we studied plant-pollinator interactions from two different perspectives. First we look at the apple-flower/production perspective investigating whether plant-pollinator networks in apple orchards differ with adjacent flower strips and hedges compared to isolated orchards. With help of the Bayes factor, we investigated similarity and conclude that there are no differences between pollination networks with or without adjacent flower strips and hedges. Second, we look at the pollinator/conservation perspective and analyse the impact of hedges and flower strips on pollinators and their interactions with plants before and after the apple bloom in April. We show that apple pollinators use more flower resources in flower strips and hedges across the whole season compared to isolated orchards. In orchards with flower strips and hedges interactions are more constant over time. We conclude that flower strips and hedges are beneficial for conservation of apple pollinators without being harmful for apple flower pollination being crucial for production.
Septins throughout phylogeny are predicted to have a transmembrane domain, which in Caenorhabditis elegans is functionally important.

Septins, a conserved family of filament-forming proteins, contribute to eukaryotic cell division, polarity, and membrane trafficking. Septins are thought to act in these processes by scaffolding other proteins to the plasma membrane. The mechanisms by which septins associate with the plasma membrane are not well understood but can involve two polybasic domains and/or an amphipathic helix. We discovered that the genomes of organisms throughout phylogeny, but not most commonly used model organisms, encode one or more septins predicted to have transmembrane domains. The nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, which was thought to express only two septin proteins, UNC-59 and UNC-61, translates multiple isoforms of UNC-61, and one isoform, UNC-61a, is predicted to contain a transmembrane domain. UNC-61a localizes specifically to the apical membrane of the C. elegans vulva and is important for maintaining vulval morphology. UNC-61a partially compensates for the loss of the other two UNC-61 isoforms, UNC-61b and UNC-61c. The UNC-61a transmembrane domain is sufficient to localize a fluorophore to membranes in mammalian cells, and its deletion from UNC-61a recapitulates the phenotypes of unc-61a null animals. The localization and loss-of-function phenotypes of UNC-61a and its transmembrane domain suggest roles in cell polarity and secretion and help explain the cellular and ssue biological underpinnings of C. elegans septin null alleles’ enigmatically hypomorphic phenotypes. Together, our findings reveal a novel mechanism of septin-membrane association with profound implications for the dynamics and regulation of this association.
Comparative analysis of gene regulatory networks identifies conserved regulators in seed plants

Gene regulatory networks based on transcription factors control development and environmental responses in plants. Networks calculated by the machine learning algorithm random forest decision tree-based regression for the grasses barley, maize, wheat, Brachypodium, sorghum, and rice compared with Arabidopsis and an alga show substantial conservation. The degree of conservation depends on phylogenetic closeness. The processes, which are conserved between all species include basic cellular functions while the processes conserved in the grasses also more specific gene ontology terms. In the three species with a carbon concentration mechanism, photorespiration is partially disassociated from photosynthetic regulation. In contrast, in the C4 species, the regulation of C4 genes associates with photosynthetic regulation. The comparative analyses reveal conserved transcription factors, which control photosynthesis in seed plants but not in the alga. An analysis pipeline for the general transfer of information between the small weed Arabidopsis and the commercially relevant grasses is presented.
Molecular identification and artificial pathogenicity of Fusarium solani ; the causal pathogen of wilt on Centaurea ragusina in Egypt

: In this study, the causal agent of Centuarea ragusina wilt disease was recorded for the first time in Egypt. Morphological characterization and DNA sequencing showed that the pathogen was Fusarium solani . A pathogenicity test conducted gave 60 % infection. A pure culture of F. solani was isolated on potato dextrose agar (PDA) at 25 °C from diseased plants and deposited in the culture collection of the Assiut University Mycological Centre as AUMC 9299 and the ITS sequence was uploaded to GenBank as accession number MG734215.
Testing Models of Complexity Aversion

In this paper we aim to investigate how the complexity of a decision-task may change an agents strategic behaviour as a result of increased cognitive fatigue. In this framework, complexity is defined as a function of the number of outcomes in a lottery. Using Bayesian inference techniques, we quantitatively specify and estimate adaptive toolbox models of cognition, which we rigorously test against popular expectation based models; modified to account for complexity aversion. We find that for the majority of the subjects, a tool-box model performs best both in-sample
Optimizing Latency and Reliability of Pipeline Workflow Applications

: Mapping applications onto heterogeneous platforms is a diﬃcult challenge, even for simple application patterns such as pipeline graphs. The problem is even more complex when processors are subject to failure during the execution of the application. In this paper, we study the complexity of a bi-criteria mapping which aims at optimizing the latency ( i.e. , the response time) and the reliability ( i.e. , the probability that the computation will be successful) of the application. Latency is minimized by using faster processors, while reliability is increased by replicating computations on a set of processors. However, replication increases latency (additional communications, slower processors). The application fails to be executed only if all the processors fail during execution. While simple polynomial algorithms can be found for fully homogeneous platforms, the problem becomes NP-hard when tackling heterogeneous platforms. This is yet another illustration of the additional complexity added by heterogeneity.
A Five Year Experience with Cervical Disc Prosthesis and Review of the Literature

: Patients with cervicobrachialgia and cervical spine stenosis can be treated by a ventral discectomy and implantation of prosthesis. Retrospectively, a study of the cases between 2003 and 2013 was performed with an evaluation of the clinical course and follow-up. Materials and Methods: Between May 2002 and August 2003, 50 cases were treated, in 2008 there were 248 cases, whereas a ventral discectomy was performed with implantation of a Bryan cervical prosthesis. Only 50 operated cases were followed up until January 2013. The mean age was 45 years (range 31 – 64 years), 25 males, and 25 females. Results: Prior to surgery 20 Patients had pain > 50 on VAS, 5 years later about 4 patients. Motor deficits were in 11 patients prior and in 5 patients after the surgery, but in all cases there was a significant improvement. 8 Patients had sensory deficits prior and 8 after the surgery. No myelopathy has been occurred after 5 years, prior to surgery in 3 cases this was observed. Ability to work: 11 full time, 4 part time, 1 unable to work and 4 retired. Back to work ratio 85%. About 20 out of 50 patients were available for reexamination and interview after the implantation of the prostheses. 18 were very satisfied with the outcome, 19 would do the surgery again and 19 would recommend this operation to a friend. Radiological findings: ratio of motion > 2° in 33 patients, < 2° in 11 patients and in 6 patients heterotopic ossification had occurred. There is no statistical correlation between clinical outcome and rate of motion. Correlation after Pearson: ODOM p= 0.27 and 0.247 respectively. Complications: Voice: One permanent paralysis of recurrent nerve. Bleeding: In 2 patients with re-bleeding a surgical evacuation was required on the day of surgery with uneventful further recovery. Dislocation of prosthesis: one patient with uneventful complete recovery after surgical replacement. So far there was no single case of infection or removal of prosthesis. Conclusions: Implantation of cervical disc prostheses is not associated with an increased risk for the patient as compared to conventional fusion. A preservation of motion for several years in 70% to 80% may be expected. Cervical disc prosthesis appears to be particularly practicable in younger age groups up to the age of 65 years. The long term effect of the prosthesis on adjacent level disease in comparison to fusion is unclear as of yet.