Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
NMR solution structure of the peptidoglycan-binding SPOR domain from E. coli DamX: insights into septal localization

SPOR domains are present in thousands of bacterial proteins and probably bind septal peptidoglycan (PG), but the details of the SPOR:PG interaction have yet to be elucidated. Here we characterize the structure and function of the SPOR domain for an Escherichia coli division protein named DamX. NMR revealed the domain comprises a 4-stranded antiparallel β -sheet buttressed on one side by two α helices. A third helix, designated α 3, associates with the other face of the β sheet but this helix is relatively mobile. Site-directed mutagenesis revealed the face of the β -sheet that interacts with α 3 is important for septal localization and binding to PG sacculi. The position and mobility of α 3 suggest it might regulate PG binding, but although α 3 deletion mutants still localized to the septal ring, they were too unstable to use in a PG binding assay. Finally, to assess the importance of the SPOR domain in DamX function, we constructed and characterized E. coli mutants that produced DamX proteins with SPOR domain point mutations or SPOR domain deletions. These studies revealed the SPOR domain is important for multiple activities associated with DamX—targeting the protein to the division site, conferring full resistance to the bile salt deoxycholate, improving the efficiency of cell division when DamX is produced at normal levels, and inhibiting cell division when DamX is overproduced.
V ARIATIONAL I NFERENCE FOR L ASER D ISTURBANCE D ETECTION IN P OWDER B ED F USION

In this study we use variational inference to learn a dynamics model from a highspeed video stream of a laser melting process. We compare two deep generative sequence models and evaluate them on video prediction and anomaly detection tasks. We find that the latent representation provides sufficient robustness to detect anomalies to high levels of performance (AUROC=0.9999). The method is generally applicable to high dimensional time-series modelling and distils the temporal data-stream to a single metric.
5-hydroxytryptamine mediated neurotransmission modulates spontaneous and vagal evoked glutamate release in the nucleus tractus solitary (NTS) - effect of uptake blockade

The effect of blockade of either 5-HT/serotonin transporter (5-HTT/SERT) with citalopram or the organic cation transporter 3 (OCT3)/plasma membrane monoamine transporter (PMAT) with decynium-22 on spontaneous and evoked release of 5-HT in the NTS was investigated in the rat brainstem slice treated with gabazine. 5-HT release was measured indirectly by changes in frequency and amplitude of glutamatergic mEPSCs (in the presence of TTX) and evoked EPSCs. Blockade of 5-HT 3 receptors with granisetron reduced, while the 5-HT 3 agonist phenylbiguanide, increased the frequency of mEPSCs. 5-HT decreased mEPSC frequency at low, and increased frequency at high concentrations. This inhibition was blocked by the 5-HT 1A antagonist WAY-100635, which was ineffective on its own, while the excitation was reversed by granisetron. Addition of citalopram or decynium-22 caused inhibition, which was prevented by 5-HT 1A blockade. Thus in the NTS the spontaneous release of 5-HT is able activate 5-HT 3 receptors but not 5-HT 1A receptors as the release in their vicinity is removed by uptake. The ineffectiveness of corticosterone suggests that the low-affinity, high-capacity transporter is PMAT not OCT3. For evoked 5-HT release only decynium-22 caused an increase in amplitude of EPSCs, with a decrease in the paired pulse ratio and increased the number of spontaneous EPSCs after 20Hz stimulation. Thus for the evoked release of 5-HT the low-affinity, high-capacity transporter PMAT but not the 5-HTT/SERT is important in the regulation of changes in 5-HT extracellular concentration. slices Measurement of in due
Endovascular treatment of brain arteriovenous malformations: Our clinical experience

Aim: The aim of this study is to evaluate the preoperative characteristics and post- operative results of cerebral arteriovenous malformations (cAVM) cases that we treated endovascularly. Endovascular embolization has started to be used as an adjuvant therapy to other treatments in the treatment of cAVM. However, with the increase of technical developments and professional experience over time; endovascular techniques have started to be the primary treatment method in the treatment of AVMs. Materials and Methods: Complaints, angiographic evaluation and treatment data of 12 patients with cAVM who were treated with endovascular methods between January 2018 and December 2020 were retrospectively reviewed. Results: Eight of the patients (66.6%) were male and 4 (33.3%) were female. AVM localizations were cerebral in eleven (91.6%) patients and cerebellar in one (8.3%) patient. According to the Spetzler-Martin grading system; 5 cases (41.6%) were classified as grade 2, 4 cases (33.3%) as grade 3, 2 cases (16.6%) as grade 4 and 1 case (8.3%) as grade 5. During the endovascular treatment procedure, iatrogenic rupture occurred in the AVM nidus in one patient. No other intraoperative or postoperative complications developed in any of the other cases. Total thrombosis was achieved in 5 cases (41.6%) and partial thrombosis in 7 cases (58.3). These 7 cases with partially thrombosis achieved (58.3%), were referred to radiosurgery after endovascular procedure. Total thrombosis was seen in 3 of these 7 patients (42.8%) after radiosurgery. The total thrombosis rate in all cases was 66.6% (n:8). The mean follow-up period was 23.8 months (12-40). Conclusion: Therapeutic embolization may be a viable option for cAVMs in selected cases. In complex cAVM cases, embolization is thought to provide a high rate of thrombosis or excision of the lesions, reducing the risks of bleeding and other complications before surgical treatment or radiosurgery.
Deep Reinforcement Learning-based Authentic Dialogue Generation To Protect Youth From Cybergrooming

Cybergrooming is defined as a crime towards 001 potential victims, especially teens, by build-002 ing close personal relationships with them with 003 the purpose of sexual exploitation via online 004 media. Cyber or online sexual grooming has 005 been recognized as a serious cybercrime. How-006 ever, there have been insufficient programs 007 to proactively protect the youth from cyber-008 grooming. In this work, we present a gener-009 ative chatbot framework, called SERI (Stop 010 cybERgroomIng), that can generate simulated 011 conversations between a perpetrator chatbot 012 and a potential victim chatbot. To realize the 013 simulation of authentic conversations in the 014 context of cybergrooming, we take deep rein-015 forcement learning (DRL)-based dialogue gen-016 eration for authentic simulation of the conver-017 sations between a potential victim and a perpe-018 trator (i.e., cybergroomer). The design of the 019 SERI is motivated to ensure a safe and authen-020 tic environment to strengthen the youth’s pre-021 cautionary awareness of cybergrooming while 022 any unnecessary ethical issues (e.g., the poten-023 tial misuse of the SERI) are removed or mini-024 mized. We developed the SERI as a preliminary 025 platform that can deploy the perpetrator chat-026 bot to interact with human users (i.e., youth) to 027 observe youth users’ responses to strangers or 028 acquaintances and collect the reactions when 029 the youth users are asked for private or sensitive 030 information by the perpetrator. We evaluated 031 the quality of conversations generated by the 032 SERI based on open-source, referenced, unref-033 erenced metrics, and human evaluation. 034
IL-13 and Prevents Axonal Injury with a Recombinant TCR Ligand Induces Autoimmune Encephalomyelitis in SJL Mice Treatment of Passive Experimental

The major goal of this study was to evaluate the efﬁcacy and mechanism of a rTCR ligand (RTL) construct (I-A s /proteolipid protein (PLP)-139–151 peptide (cid:1) RTL401) for treatment of SJL/J mice developing passive experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis (EAE) that did not involve coimmunization with the highly inﬂammatory CFA. Our results demonstrated clearly that RTL401 was highly effective in treating passive EAE, with kinetics of recovery from disease very similar to treatment of actively induced EAE. The potent RTL401 treatment effect was reﬂected by a partial reduction of inﬁltrating mononuclear cells into CNS, minimal inﬂammatory lesions in spinal cord, and preservation of axons injured in vehicle-treated mice during the progression of EAE. Interestingly, in the absence of CFA, RTL401 treatment strongly enhanced production of the Th2 cytokine, IL-13, in spleen, blood, and spinal cord tissue, with variable effects on other Th1 and Th2 cytokines, and no signiﬁcant effect on the Th3 cytokine, TGF- (cid:2) 1, or on FoxP3 that is expressed by regulatory T cells. Moreover, pretreatment of PLP-139–151-speciﬁc T cells with RTL401 in vitro induced high levels of secreted IL-13, with lesser induction of other pro- and anti-inﬂammatory cytokines. Given the importance of IL-13 for protection against EAE, these data strongly implicate IL-13 as a dominant regulatory cytokine induced by RTL therapy. Pronounced IL-13 levels coupled with marked reduction in IL-6 levels secreted by PLP-speciﬁc
Ανασκόπηση Vitamin E and Its Impact on Poultry Health and Production: An Update

: The main goals of recent poultry production sectors are to enhance the immune response of the birds, improve the performance, reduce mortalities and reduce stressors. These goals are achievable with dietary supplemen tationof vitamins. Vitamin E is one of the fat-soluble vitamin that has been used from last decades for different poultry production types. The inoculation level of vitamin E in the diet of poultry depends on several factors. Low or high level of vitamin E can induce severe adverse economic losses in poultry industry. Vitamin E has been regarded as a potent chain-breaking antioxidant as well as immuno-stimulator for both cell-mediated and humoral immunity. Vitamin E is added to the diet of broilers, layers and breeders especially those under heat stress conditions. Inbroilers, vitamin E can improve the health conditions, feed efficiency and immunity. However, in layers and breeders, it enhances the egg’s quantity and quality as well as the fertility; respectively. Moreover, vitamin E proves its efficacy in modifying the car cass trait or meat quality of broilers. Therefore, this review article aimed to investigate the forms and inoculation levels vitamin E, the role of this vitamin in the biological process as well as its effect on different poultry production types, carcass qualityand hematological parameters.
Effect of acute heat stress on production performance and egg quality in four strains of chickens

The objective of this study was to investigate differences between four strains of chickens on laying hen productivity and egg quality under acute heat stress (AHS). The study consisted of 44 hens from each of the Fayoumi (FY), Golden Sabahia (GS), White Leghorn (WL) and Lohman Brown (LB) strains that were 30 weeks old. They were allotted to two groups (a thermoneutral temperature regime (26.0 ± 1 ºC) and the AHS regime (35 ± 1 ºC) and 55 ± 5% relative humidity) for six hours. Egg number and feed intake were recorded. After imposition of the AHS, four hens per strain per treatment were randomly selected and slaughtered to calculate the relative mass of various organs and the number of follicles. Acute heat stress decreased feed intake of all strains significantly. There was a significant interaction between temperature treatment and strain on feed intake, egg weight, surface area of egg, yolk index, yolk weight, and albumen weight and on the relative weights of the various organs, except for the gizzard. Thus, the magnitude of the effects of AHS was strain dependent, with GS seemingly being less affected than the other strains. ______________________________________________________________________________________
Expression of GFP Gene Driven by the Olive Flounder ( Paralichthys olivaceus ) hsc70 Promoter in Trangenic Medaka ( Oryzias latipes )

Heat shock proteins (HSPs) are a family of highly conserved proteins playing an important role in the functioning of unstressed and stressed cells. The HSP70 family, the most widely studied of the hsps, is constitutively expressed (hsc70) in unstressed cells and is also induced in response to stressors (hsp70), especially those affecting the protein machinery. The HSP/HSC70 proteins act as molecular chaperones and are crucial for protein functioning, including folding, intracellular localization, regulation, secretion, and protein degradation. Here, we report the identification and characterization of the putative amino acid sequence deduced from one cDNA clone identified as heat shock protein 70. The alignment showed that the putative sequence is 100% identical to the heat shock protein 70 cognate (HSC 70) of olive flounder. The 5 ′′ -flanking region sequence (approximate-ly 1 kb) ahead of the hsc70 gene was cloned by genome walking and a putative core promoter region and transcription elements were identified. We characterized the promoter of the olive flounder hsc70 gene by examining the ability of 5 ′′ -upstream fragments to drive expression of green fluorescent protein (GFP) in live embryos.
The Impact of Minerals on Wheat Plants Grown under Salinity Stress

The present work has been conducted to study the impact of Zn (20 and 200 µM) or Ni (1 and 100 µM) on growth, metabolic activities, osmotic pressure and heavy metal of wheat cultivar (cv. Gimiza 11) under salt stress conditions. Harvest index was significantly decreased by 75% at −0.3 MPa and −1.2 MPa decreased by 53%. Length of root, stem and spike, and leaf area were slightly reduced up to −0.9 MPa NaCl level, after that a significant reduction was recorded. Total sugar was increased in the shoot and spike, while decreased in the root with increasing salinity levels. On the other side, total protein was increased in the shoot while decreased in both the root and spike. Osmotic pressure was increased as increasing salinity levels. Treatment of wheat plants with Zn or Ni alleviated generally salt injury in the harvest index, length of root, shoot and spike and leaf area. This effect was more obvious with Zn treatments. Mineralization treatments increased total sugar in the three tested organs while did not change the total protein. Zn content was increased at −1.2 MPa level while Ni was decreased. Treatments with Zn or Ni mostly increased Zn while causing a reduction in the Ni content. These treatments also increased the values of osmotic pressure compared with the equivalent levels of control plants.
Debiased Self-Training for Semi-Supervised Learning

Deep neural networks achieve remarkable performances on a wide range of tasks with the aid of large-scale labeled datasets. Yet these datasets are time-consuming and labor-exhaustive to obtain on realistic tasks. To mitigate the requirement for labeled data, self-training is widely used in semi-supervised learning by iteratively assigning pseudo labels to unlabeled samples. Despite its popularity, self-training is well-believed to be unreliable and often leads to training instability. Our experimental studies further reveal that the bias in semi-supervised learning arises from both the problem itself and the inappropriate training with potentially incorrect pseudo labels, which accumulates the error in the iterative self-training process. To reduce the above bias, we propose Debiased Self-Training (DST). First, the generation and utilization of pseudo labels are decoupled by two parameter-independent classifier heads to avoid direct error accumulation. Second, we estimate the worst case of self-training bias, where the pseudo labeling function is accurate on labeled samples, yet makes as many mistakes as possible on unlabeled samples. We then adversarially optimize the representations to improve the quality of pseudo labels by avoiding the worst case. Extensive experiments justify that DST achieves an average improvement of 6.3% against state-of-the-art methods on standard semi-supervised learning benchmark datasets and 18.9%$ against FixMatch on 13 diverse tasks. Furthermore, DST can be seamlessly adapted to other self-training methods and help stabilize their training and balance performance across classes in both cases of training from scratch and finetuning from pre-trained models.
Smoothness and effective regularizations in learned embeddings for shape matching

Many innovative applications require establishing correspondences among 3D geometric objects. However, the countless possible deformations of smooth surfaces make shape matching a challenging task. Finding an embedding to represent the different shapes in high-dimensional space where the matching is easier to solve is a well-trodden path that has given many outstanding solutions. Recently, a new trend has shown advantages in learning such representations. This novel idea motivated us to investigate which properties differentiate these data-driven embeddings and which ones promote state-of-the-art results. In this study, we analyze, for the first time, properties that arise in data-driven learned embedding and their relation to the shape-matching task. Our discoveries highlight the close link between matching and smoothness, which naturally emerge from training. Also, we demonstrate the relation between the orthogonality of the embedding and the bijectivity of the correspondence. Our experiments show exciting results, overcoming well-established alternatives and shedding a different light on relevant contexts and properties for learned embeddings.
Dissipative Deep Neural Dynamical Systems

In this paper, we provide sufficient conditions for dissipativity and local asymptotic stability of discrete-time dynamical systems parametrized by deep neural networks. We leverage the representation of neural networks as pointwise affine maps, thus exposing their local linear operators and making them accessible to classical system analytic and design methods. This allows us to “crack open the black box” of the neural dynamical system’s behavior by evaluating their dissipativity, and estimating their stationary points and state-space partitioning. We relate the norms of these local linear operators to the energy stored in the dissipative system with supply rates represented by their aggregate bias terms. Empirically, we analyze the variance in dynamical behavior and eigenvalue spectra of these local linear operators with varying weight factorizations, activation functions, bias terms, and depths.
Schubert calculus and Intersection theory of Flag manifolds

Hilbert's 15th problem called for a rigorous foundation of Schubert's calculus, in which a long standing and challenging part is Schubert's problem of characteristics. In the course of securing the foundation of algebraic geometry, Van der Waerden and Andr\'{e} Weil attributed the problem to the determination of the intersection theory of flag manifolds. This article surveys the background, content, and resolution of the problem of characteristics. Our main results are a unified formula for the characteristics, and a system description for the intersection rings of flag manifolds. We illustrate the effectiveness of the formula and the algorithm via explicit examples.
ConTesse: Accurate Occluding Contours for Subdivision Surfaces

This article proposes a method for computing the visible occluding contours of subdivision surfaces. The article first introduces new theory for contour visibility of smooth surfaces. Necessary and sufficient conditions are introduced for when a sampled occluding contour is valid, that is, when it may be assigned consistent visibility. Previous methods do not guarantee these conditions, which helps explain why smooth contour visibility has been such a challenging problem in the past. The article then proposes an algorithm that, given a subdivision surface, finds sampled contours satisfying these conditions, and then generates a new triangle mesh matching the given occluding contours. The contours of the output triangle mesh may then be rendered with standard non-photorealistic rendering algorithms, using the mesh for visibility computation. The method can be applied to any triangle mesh, by treating it as the base mesh of a subdivision surface.
Geschlechts-, alters- und störungsgruppenbezogeneMessinvarianzbeiBindungsinstrumenten Überprüfung mithilfe der 8-Item-Version des Experiences in Close Relationships Questionnaire

from the SOPHO-Net project and a clinical sample from the psychotherapy hospital Tiefenbrunn, using the 8-item version of the experiences in close relationships questionnaire (ECR-RD8). Besides group comparisons, the data were used to test the measurement invariance (conﬁgural, metric and scalar) related to age, sex and group membership. The analyses showed that complete measurement invariance was found for age and sex, but only metric invariance for the patient status. Corresponding with an available meta-analysis, females revealed higher attachment anxiety than men. Age diﬀerences indicate less attachment anxiety in higher age and more attachment avoidance particularly in younger persons (14–24 years).
VU Research Portal Endovascular aortic aneurysm repair

General rights Copyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the public portal are retained by the authors and/or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. • Users may download and print one copy of any publication from the public portal for the purpose of private study or research. • You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain • You may freely distribute the URL identifying the publication in the public portal ?
A deconvolution path for mixtures

: We propose a class of estimators for deconvolution in mixture models based on a simple two-step “bin-and-smooth” procedure applied to histogram counts. The method is both statistically and computationally eﬃcient: by exploiting recent advances in convex optimization, we are able to provide a full deconvolution path that shows the estimate for the mi- xing distribution across a range of plausible degrees of smoothness, at far less cost than a full Bayesian analysis. This enables practitioners to con- duct a sensitivity analysis with minimal eﬀort. This is especially important for applied data analysis, given the ill-posed nature of the deconvolution problem. Our results establish the favorable theoretical properties of our estimator and show that it oﬀers state-of-the-art performance when com- pared to benchmark methods across a range of scenarios.