bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
The Rare Anomaly That Can Be Confused With Fracture: Os Odontoideum
Authors: Aydin Fahri , Bayraktutan Ummugulsum , Sade Recep , Polat Gokhan , Pirimoğlu Berhan 
Published: December 2019

Abstract
Os odontoideum is a rare anomaly of the second cervical vertebra. The odontoid process is separated by a wide gap from the vertebral body in this anomaly. It can be associated with atlantoaxial instability.
Inhibition of Dimethylarginine Dimethylaminohydrolase 1 Improves the Outcome of Sepsis in Pregnant Mice
Authors: Zölner Julia , Lambden Simon , Nasri Noor Mohd , Johnson Mark R. , Leiper James 
Published: December 2019

ABSTRACT
Sepsis is one of the most important causes of maternal mortality. In our previous work, we established a polymicrobial sepsis (cecal ligation and puncture [CLP]) model in murine pregnancy and found that pregnant mice had a greater susceptibility to septic shock. In this model, mortality seemed to be associated with the development of early hemodynamic dysfunction and although circulating cytokine levels were similar, “off target” lung inflammatory cell numbers were greater in pregnant mice.
Here, we have used the same CLP model to test the hypothesis that inhibiting the metabolism of the endogenous inhibitor of nitric oxide synthase, asymmetric dimethylarginine would improve the outcome of sepsis in pregnancy. We used a dimethylarginine dimethylaminohydrolase 1-selective inhibitor (L-257), which reduces vascular nitric oxide synthesis without impairing immune cell function, in combination with a broad-spectrum antibiotic (Imipenem) and studied the outcome of septic shock in pregnant mice. Treatments were administered 3 h after CLP and samples were taken 3 h later. Both Imipenem and L-257 treatment alone slightly improved mortality rates from 13% (NaCl) to 20% (Imipenem) and 33% (L-257), whereas the combination of Imipenem and L-257 significantly improved survival to 50%. Imipenem and L-257 together prevented cardiovascular collapse and improved both organ function and bacterial killing, but did not reduce lung inflammatory cell numbers and actually increased lung cytokine levels.
These data suggest that conventional management in combination with selective inhibition of DDAH1 may have therapeutic potential in the management of sepsis in pregnancy.
Glucose metabolism promotes neonatal heart regeneration
Authors: Martinez Viviana M Fajardo , Feng Iris , Chen Bao Ying , Perez Cesar A , Shi Baochen , Clark Peter , Tian Rong , Lien Ching-Ling , Pellegrini Matteo , Christofk Heather , Nakano Haruko , Nakano Atsushi 
Published: December 2019

AbstractThe mammalian heart switches its main metabolic substrate from glucose to fatty acids shortly after birth. This metabolic switch coincides with the loss of regenerative capacity in the heart. However, it is unknown whether glucose metabolism itself regulates heart regeneration. Here, we report that glucose metabolism is a determinant of regenerative capacity in the neonatal mammalian heart. Cardiac-specific overexpression of Glut1, the embryonic form of constitutively active glucose transporter, resulted in an increase in glucose uptake and concomitant glycogen storage in postnatal heart. Upon cryoinjury, Glut1 transgenic hearts showed higher regenerative capacity with less fibrosis than non-transgenic control hearts. Interestingly, flow cytometry analysis revealed two distinct populations of ventricular cardiomyocytes: Tnnt2-high and Tnnt2-low cardiomyocytes, the latter of which showed significantly higher mitotic activity in response to high intracellular glucose in Glut1 transgenic hearts. Metabolic profiling shows that Glut1-transgenic hearts have a significant increase in the glucose metabolites upon injury, and inhibition of the nucleotide biosynthesis abrogated the regenerative advantage of high intra-cardiomyocyte glucose level. Our data suggest that the increased in glucose metabolism promotes cardiac regeneration in neonatal mouse heart.
A head-fixation system for continuous monitoring of force generated during behavior
Authors: Hughes Ryan N. , Bakhurin Konstantin I. , Barter Joseph W. , Zhang Jinyong , Yin Henry H. 
Published: December 2019

AbstractMany studies in neuroscience use head-fixed behavioral preparations, which confer a number of advantages, including the ability to limit the behavioral repertoire and use techniques for large-scale monitoring of neural activity. But traditional studies using this approach use extremely limited behavioral measures, in part because it is difficult to detect the subtle movements and postural adjustments that animals naturally exhibit during head fixation. Here we report a new head-fixed setup with analog load cells capable of precisely monitoring the continuous forces exerted by mice. The load cells reveal the dynamic nature of movements generated not only around the time of task-relevant events, such as presentation of stimuli and rewards, but also during periods in between these events, when there is no apparent overt behavior. It generates a new and rich set of behavioral measures that have been neglected in previous experiments. We detail the construction of the system, which can be 3D-printed and assembled at low cost, show behavioral results collected from head-fixed mice, and demonstrate that neural activity can be highly correlated with the subtle, whole-body movements continuously produced during head restraint.
Dietary restriction transforms the protein sulfhydrome in a tissue-specific and cystathionine γ-lyase-dependent manner
Authors: Bithi Nazmin , Link Christopher , Wang Rui , Willard Belinda , Hine Christopher 
Published: December 2019

AbstractHydrogen sulfide (H2S) is a cytoprotective redox-active metabolite that signals through protein sulfhydration (R-SSnH). Despite the known importance of sulfhydration on relatively few identified proteins, tissue-specific sulfhydrome profiles and their associated functions are not well characterized, specifically under conditions known to modulate H2S production. We hypothesized that dietary restriction (DR), which increases lifespan and boosts endogenous H2S production, expands functional tissue-specific sulfhydromes. Here, we found that 50% DR enriched total sulfhydrated proteins in liver, kidney, muscle, and brain but decreased these in heart of adult male mice. DR promoted sulfhydration in numerous metabolic and aging-related pathways. Mice lacking the H2S producing enzyme cystathionine γ-lyase (CGL) had decreased liver and kidney protein sulfhydration and failed to functionally augment their sulfhydrome in response to DR. Overall, we defined tissue- and CGL-dependent sulfhydromes and how diet transforms their makeup, underscoring the breadth for DR and H2S to impact biological processes and organismal health.One Sentence SummaryDietary restriction altered the tissue-specific enrichment of sulfhydrated proteins and their downstream signaling pathways in liver, kidney, skeletal muscle, brain, heart, and plasma that was partly dependent on the hydrogen sulfide producing enzyme cystathionine γ-lyase.
AdaReg: Data Adaptive Robust Estimation in Linear Regression with Application in GTEx Gene Expressions
Authors: Wang Meng , Jiang Lihua , Snyder Michael P. 
Published: December 2019

AbstractWith the development of high-throughput RNA sequencing (RNA-seq) technology, the Genotype Tissue-Expression (GTEx) project (Consortium et al., 2015) generated a valuable resource of gene expression data from more than 11,000 samples. The large-scale data set is a powerful resource for understanding the human transcriptome. However, the technical variation, sequencing background noise and unknown factors make the statistical analysis challenging. To eliminate the possibility that outliers might affect the estimation of population distribution, we need a more robust estimation method, a method that will adapt to heterogeneous genes and further optimize the estimate for each gene. We followed the approach of the robust estimation based on γ-density-power-weight (Fujisawa and Eguchi, 2008; Windham, 1995), where γ is the exponent of density weight which controls the balance between bias and variance. As far as we know, our work is the first to propose a procedure to tune the parameter γ to balance the bias-variance trade-off under the mixture distributions. We constructed a robust likelihood criterion based on weighted densities in the mixture model of Gaussian population distribution mixed with unknown outlier distribution, and developed a data-adaptive γ-selection procedure embedded into the robust estimation. We provided a heuristic analysis on the selection criterion and found that our practical selection trend under various γ’s in average performance has similar capability to capture minimizer γ as the inestimable Mean Squared Error (MSE) trend from our simulation studies under a series of settings. Our data-adaptive robustifying procedure in the linear regression problem (AdaReg) shows a significant advantage in both simulation studies and real data application of heart samples from the GTEx project compared to the fixed γ procedure and other robust methods. This paper discusses some limitations of this method, and future work.
Differential rapid plasticity in auditory and visual responses in the primarily multisensory orbitofrontal cortex
Authors: Sharma Sudha , Bandyopadhyay Sharba 
Published: December 2019

AbstractIn a dynamic environment with rapidly changing contingencies, the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) guides flexible behavior through coding of stimulus value. Although stimulus-evoked responses in the OFC are known to convey outcome, baseline sensory response properties in the mouse OFC are poorly understood. To understand mechanisms involved in stimulus value/outcome encoding it is important to know the response properties of single neurons in the mouse OFC, purely from a sensory perspective. Ruling out effects of behavioral state, memory and others, we studied the anesthetized mouse OFC responses to auditory, visual and audiovisual/multisensory stimuli, multisensory associations and sensory-driven input organization to the OFC. Almost all, OFC single neurons were found to be multisensory in nature, with sublinear to supralinear integration of the component unisensory stimuli. With a novel multisensory oddball stimulus set, we show that the OFC receives both unisensory as well as multisensory inputs, further corroborated by retrograde tracers showing labeling in secondary auditory and visual cortices, which we find to also have similar multisensory integration and responses. With long audiovisual pairing/association, we show rapid plasticity in OFC single neurons, with a strong visual bias, leading to a strong depression of auditory responses and effective enhancement of visual responses. Such rapid multisensory association driven plasticity is absent in the auditory and visual cortices, suggesting its emergence in the OFC. Based on the above results we propose a hypothetical local circuit model in the OFC that integrates auditory and visual information which participates in computing stimulus value in dynamic multisensory environments.Significance StatementProperties and modification of sensory responses of neurons in the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) involved in flexible behavior through stimulus value/outcome encoding are poorly understood. Such responses are critical in providing the framework for the encoding of stimulus value based on behavioral context while also directing plastic changes in sensory regions. The mouse OFC is found to be primarily multisensory with varied nonlinear interactions, explained by unisensory and multisensory inputs. Audio-visual associations cause rapid plastic changes in the OFC, which bias visual responses while suppressing auditory responses. Similar plasticity was absent in the sensory cortex. Thus the observed intrinsic visual bias in the OFC weighs visual stimuli more than associated auditory stimuli in value encoding in a dynamic multisensory environment.
Quantifying exploration in reward-based motor learning
Authors: van Mastrigt Nina M. , Smeets Jeroen B.J. , van der Kooij Katinka 
Published: December 2019

AbstractExploration in reward-based motor learning is observable in experimental data as increased variability. In order to quantify exploration, we compare three methods for estimating other sources of variability: sensorimotor noise. We use a task in which participants could receive stochastic binary reward feedback following a target-directed weight shift. Participants first performed 6 baseline blocks without feedback, and next twenty blocks alternating with and without feedback. Variability was assessed based on trial-to-trial changes in movement endpoint. We estimated sensorimotor noise by the median squared trial-to-trial change in movement endpoint for trials in which no exploration is expected. We identified three types of such trials: trials in baseline blocks, trials in the blocks without feedback, and rewarded trials in the blocks with feedback. We estimated exploration by the median squared trial-to-trial change following non-rewarded trials minus sensorimotor noise. As expected, variability was larger following non-rewarded trials than following rewarded trials. This indicates that our reward-based weight-shifting task successfully induced exploration. Most importantly, our three estimates of sensorimotor noise differed: the estimate based on rewarded trials was significantly lower than the estimates based on the two types of trials without feedback. Consequently, the estimates of exploration also differed. We conclude that the quantification of exploration depends critically on the type of trials used to estimate sensorimotor noise. We recommend the use of variability following rewarded trials.
Opposing patterns of abnormal D1 and D2 receptor dependent cortico-striatal plasticity explain increased risk taking in patients with DYT1 dystonia
Authors: Gilbertson Tom , Arkadir David , Steele J. Douglas 
Published: December 2019

AbstractPatients with dystonia caused by the mutated TOR1A gene exhibit a risk neutral behaviour compared to controls who are risk averse in the same reinforcement learning task. We hypothesised this increased risk taking could be reproduced by a reinforcement learning model which included biologically realistic striatal plasticity learning rules. We aimed to test whether a specific combination of cortico-striatal plasticity abnormalities at D1 and D2 receptors could explain the abnormal behaviour. We found a model of cortico-striatal plasticity could generate simulated behaviour indistinguishable from patients only when both D1 and D2 plasticity was abnormally increased in opposite directions: specifically when D1 synaptic potentiation and D2 depotentiation were both increased. This result is consistent with previous observations in rodent models of cortico-striatal plasticity at D1 receptors, but contrasts with the pattern reported in vitro for D2 synapses. This suggests that additional factors in patients who manifest motor symptoms may lead to divergent effects on D2 synaptic plasticity that are not apparent in rodent models of this disease.
Prognostic significances of interleukin-17-producing cells and Th17 cells in malignant cancers: a meta-analysis of the literatures
Authors: Luo Yong , Yu Ting , Yi Cheng , Shi Huashan 
Published: December 2019

AbstractBackground and purposeAs a proinflammatory factor, interleukin-17 (IL-17) can play a role in both tumor promotion and suppression. IL-17 is traditionally regarded as secreting mainly by CD4+T helper cells (Th17 cells), while other immune subsets have been proved to produce IL-17, called IL-17+cells. Considerable studies have drawn controversial conclusions about association between IL-17+/Th17 cells and prognosis of cancer patients. This meta-analysis was performed to systematically and quantitatively analyze prognostic values of IL-17+cells and Th17 cells in cancer patients.MethodsA comprehensive retrieval was conducted in Pubmed (MEDLINE) and EMBASE databases. Pooled risk ratios (RRs) or hazard ratios (HRs) and corresponding 95% confidence intervals (CI) were calculated to evaluate the prognostic values of IL-17+cells and Th17 cells in cancer patients.ResultsA total of 42 studies with 5039 patitents were included. High IL-17+cells was significantly associated with tumor recurrence (RR = 4.23, 95% CI [1.58, 11.35]), worse disease free survival (DFS) (HR = 1.84, 95% CI [1.22, 2.77]) and overall survival (OS) (HR = 1.39, 95% CI [1.04, 1.87]), especially in cancers of digestive system. Besides, no significant difference was observed between high IL-17+cells and histological grade, lymph node metastasis, tumor volume, clinical stages or distant metastasis. Moreover, there was no significant difference in OS between high and low Th17 cells in cancer patients (HR = 0.93, 95% CI [0.58, 1.49]).ConclusionsThis meta-analysis suggests high IL-17+cells could be an indicator for worse survival in patients with malignant cancers, especially with cancers of digestive system. Although high Th17 cells appears to have non-statistically significance on prognosis, more clinical studies should be implemented to investigate the underlying function of Th17 cells within tumor microenvironment. This study put forward a new insight for potential application of anti-IL-17 target therapy in cancer therapeutics.
Electrodeposition of Ni-W and Ni-W-P films using a pulse current technique and their application for hydrogen evolution in an acidic solution
Authors: Abdel Hamid Zeinab , Hassan H.B. , Sultan Mohamed 
Published: December 2019

Purpose
The improvement of the hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) performance requires more efficient and inexpensive electrocatalysts. The purpose of this study is to prepare Ni-W and Ni-W-P thin films using the electrodeposition technique using a pulse current and investigate their behaviors toward HER in an acidic solution.

Design/methodology/approach
The aim is to prepare Ni-W and Ni-W-P films by the electrodeposition technique using a pulse current and estimate their performance for the HER. The surface morphologies and chemical compositions of the deposited films were assessed using scanning electron microscopy, energy-dispersive X-ray analysis and X-ray diffraction. Linear sweep voltammetry, chronoamperometry, Tafel plots and electrochemical impedance spectroscopy were used to evaluate the prepared electrodes toward the hydrogen evolution process.

Findings
The main conclusion is that the surface morphology of Ni–W deposited film is a crystalline structure, while that of Ni-W-P deposit is an amorphous structure. HER activity on Ni-W electrodes increases with decreasing the Wt.% of W to 7.83 Wt.% in the prepared electrodes. In addition, the presence of P enhances HER activity, which increases with increasing the Wt.% of P in the prepared Ni-W-P electrodes. Both Ni-W (7.83 Wt.% W) and Ni-W-P (20.34 Wt.% P), which have been prepared at 8 A dm−2 display the best performance toward HER compared to the other prepared electrodes. They exhibit high catalytic activities toward HER, which is evidenced by high hydrogen evolution current density values of 9.52 and 33.98 mA cm−2, low onset potentials of −0.73 and −0.63 V, low Tafel slopes of −125 mV/dec, high exchange current densities of 0.058 and 0.20 mA cm−2, low charge transfer resistances (Rct) of 226.28 and 75.8 ohm·cm2 for Ni-W (7.83  Wt.% W) and Ni-W-P (20.34  Wt.% P), respectively; moreover, they exhibited considerable stabilities too.

Originality/value
The results presented in this work are an insight into understanding the performance of the prepared Cu electrodes coated by Ni-W and Ni-W-P films toward HER. In this work, a consistent assessment of the results achieved on laboratory scale has been conducted.
Age and tenure diversity on the work floor
Authors: Thommes Kirsten , Klabuhn Janny 
Published: December 2019

PurposePast research on how to compose a team is ambiguous, especially with respect to diversity dimensions. The authors argue that previous inconsistencies in results have arisen for two main reasons. First, there is a lack of clarity about the concept of age diversity, as age separation, age variety and age disparity are frequently used synonymously, but capture very different aspects of diversity. Second, in many research settings, age and tenure diversity have been intertwined. When staffing teams, many staff managers ask for staffing advise concerning staff diversity in order to enhance efficiency. This staffing problem is mainly a question how homogeneous and heterogeneous teams should be composed. In this paper, the authors capture both – age and tenure diversity – as well as their interaction and argue that age separation and tenure variety are most likely to affect team performance in a routine task. The paper aims to discuss these issues.Design/methodology/approachThe authors are testing the hypothesis using rich quantitative field data from a steel company.FindingsThe results show that age separation decreases performance while tenure variety increases performance. Moreover, the beneficial effects of tenure variety cannot arise when age separation is too large.Research limitations/implicationsThe authors show that diversity research is very sensitive to the operationalization of diversity.Practical implicationsManagers can benefit from the study by learning how to optimally staff teams: while age diversity should be low, tenure diversity can be high.Originality/valueDue to the unique data set, the authors can separate the influence of tenure and age diversity.
Numerical analysis of pump-signal-direction effect on the performance of EDFA systems
Authors: Parali Ufuk , Pinar Cahit 
Published: December 2019

Purpose
The purpose of this study is to develop new tandem configurations of erbium-doped fiber amplifier (EDFA) using all possible pump-signal-direction schemes in simulation to identify a system configuration with the best performance in the means of the highest gain with the lowest noise figure (NF) output.

Design/methodology/approach
The spatial evolution of the physical properties such as gain, NF, population density and amplified spontaneous emission along the total length of the double-stage single-pass EDFA and single-stage double-pass EDFA configurations under all possible pumping direction schemes was investigated. Giles and Desurvire method was used for the mathematical modeling of these configurations where the two level coupled system model equations was solved in MATLAB. In the simulation of the all proposed configurations, an input signal of −35 dBm at the wavelength of 1550 nm and a total of 14 mW pump power at the wavelength of 1480 nm was used for a consistent analysis.

Findings
The numerical value of the results obtained is specific to the input parameter values used in the simulations; however, configuration-wise, the EDFA systems found with the best performance are not parameter specific.

Originality/value
The results of this numerical work will help future experimental research of designing and developing ultra-efficient EDFA systems.