bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Friendly regulates membrane depolarization induced mitophagy in Arabidopsis
Authors: Ma Juncai , Liang Zizhen , Zhao Jierui , Wang Pengfei , Ma Wenlong , Fernandez Andrade Juan A. , Zeng Yonglun , Grujic Nenad , Jiang Liwen , Dagdas Yasin , Kang Byung-Ho 
Published: July 2020

AbstractThe oxidative environment within the mitochondria makes them particularly vulnerable to proteotoxic stress. To maintain a healthy mitochondrial network, eukaryotes have evolved multi-tiered quality control pathways. If the stress cannot be alleviated, defective mitochondria are selectively removed by autophagy via a process termed mitophagy. Despite significant advances in metazoans and yeast, in plants, the molecular underpinnings of mitophagy are largely unknown. Here, using time-lapse imaging, electron tomography and biochemical assays, we show that uncoupler treatments cause loss of mitochondrial membrane potential and induce autophagy in Arabidopsis. The damaged mitochondria are selectively engulfed by autophagosomes that are ATG5 dependent and labelled by ATG8 proteins. Friendly, a member of the Clustered Mitochondria protein family, is recruited to the damaged mitochondria to mediate mitophagy. In addition to stress, mitophagy is also induced during de-etiolation, a major cellular transformation during photomorphogenesis that involves chloroplast biogenesis. De-etiolation triggered mitophagy regulates cotyledon greening, pointing towards an inter-organellar cross-talk mechanism. Altogether our results demonstrate how plants employ mitophagy to recycle damaged mitochondria during stress and development.
UGT76B1, a promiscuous hub of small molecule-based immune signaling, glucosylates N-hydroxypipecolic acid and controls basal pathogen defense
Authors: Bauer Sibylle , Mekonnen Dereje W. , Hartmann Michael , Janowski Robert , Lange Birgit , Geist Birgit , Zeier Jürgen , Schäffner Anton R. 
Published: July 2020

ABSTRACTGlucosylation modulates the biological activity of small molecules and frequently leads to their inactivation. TheArabidopsis thalianaglucosyltransferase UGT76B1 is involved in conjugating the stress hormone salicylic acid (SA) as well as isoleucic acid (ILA). Here, we show that UGT76B1 also glucosylates N-hydroxypipecolic acid (NHP), which is synthesized by FLAVIN-DEPENDENT MONOOXYGENASE 1 (FMO1) and activates systemic acquired resistance (SAR). Upon pathogen attack, Arabidopsis leaves accumulate two distinct NHP hexose conjugates, NHP-O-β-glucoside and NHP glucose ester, which are oppositely regulated by SA.ugt76b1mutants specifically fail to generate the NHP-O-β-glucoside, and recombinant UGT76B1 synthesizes NHP-O-β-glucosidein vitroin competition with SA and ILA. The loss ofUGT76B1elevates the endogenous levels of NHP in addition to SA and ILA and establishes a SAR-like, primed immune status without pathogen infestation. The introgression of thefmo1background lacking NHP biosynthesis intougt76b1abolishes the SAR-like resistance phenotype indicating an important function of UGT76B1-mediated NHP glucosylation in balancing the defense status. Our results further indicate that ILA promotes and SA finally executes the NHP-triggered immunity via the glucosyltransferase UGT76B1 as the common metabolic hub. Thus, UGT76B1 controls the levels of active NHP, SA, and ILA in concert to modulate plant immune signaling.
Costs and benefits of toxin production in a dinoflagellate
Authors: Ryderheim Fredrik , Selander Erik , Kiørboe Thomas 
Published: July 2020

AbstractMany phytoplankton respond to chemical cues from grazers by upregulating defensive capabilities. Inducible defences like these are often assumed to come at a cost to the organism, but these trade-offs have not been experimentally established. A reason for this may be that costs only become evident under resource limiting conditions. Here, we exposed the toxin-producing dinoflagellateAlexandrium minutumto chemical cues from copepods under different levels of nitrogen limitation. Induced cells had higher cellular toxin content and a larger fraction of the cells were rejected by a copepod, demonstrating the clear benefits of toxin production. Induced cells also had a higher carbon and nitrogen content, despite an up to 25% reduction in cell size. Unexpectedly, induced cells seemed to grow faster than controls, likely owing to a higher nutrient affinity due to reduced size. We thus found no clear trade-offs, rather the opposite. However, we argue that indirect ecological costs that do not manifest under laboratory conditions are important and that the induction of toxins specific to particular defences prevents the cells from constantly synthesizing the large array of secondary metabolites that they are capable of producing.
ProtTrans: Towards Cracking the Language of Life’s Code Through Self-Supervised Learning
Authors: Elnaggar Ahmed , Heinzinger Michael , Dallago Christian , Rehawi Ghalia , Wang Yu , Jones Llion , Gibbs Tom , Feher Tamas , Angerer Christoph , Steinegger Martin , Bhowmik Debsindhu , Rost Burkhard 
Published: July 2020

AbstractComputational biology and bioinformatics provide vast data gold-mines from protein sequences, ideal for Language Models taken from NLP. These LMs reach for new prediction frontiers at low inference costs. Here, we trained two auto-regressive models (Transformer-XL, XLNet) and four auto-encoder models (BERT, Albert, Electra, T5) on data from UniRef and BFD containing up to 393 billion amino acids. The LMs were trained on the Summit supercomputer using 5616 GPUs and TPU Pod up-to 1024 cores.Dimensionality reduction revealed that the raw protein LM-embeddingsfrom unlabeled data captured some biophysical features of protein sequences. We validated the advantage of using theembeddingsas exclusive input for several subsequent tasks. The first was a per-residue prediction of protein secondary structure (3-state accuracy Q3=81%-87%); the second were per-protein predictions of protein sub-cellular localization (ten-state accuracy: Q10=81%) and membrane vs. water-soluble (2-state accuracy Q2=91%). For the per-residue predictions the transfer of the most informative embeddings (ProtT5) for the first time outperformed the state-of-the-art without using evolutionary information thereby bypassing expensive database searches. Taken together, the results implied that protein LMs learned some of thegrammarof thelanguage of life. To facilitate future work, we released our models athttps://github.com/agemagician/ProtTrans.
UKBCC: a cohort curation package for UK Biobank
Authors: Kiral Isabell , Willems Nathalie , Goudey Benjamin 
Published: July 2020

AbstractSummaryThe UK Biobank (UKB) has quickly become a critical resource for researchers conducting a wide-range of biomedical studies (Bycroftet al.,2018). The database is constructed from heterogeneous data sources, employs several different encoding schemes, and is disparately distributed throughout UKB servers. Consequently, querying these data remains complicated, making it difficult to quickly identify participants who meet a given set of criteria. We have developed UK Biobank Cohort Curator (UKBCC), a Python tool that allows researchers to rapidly construct cohorts based on a set of search terms. Here, we describe the UKBCC implementation, critical sub-modules and functions, and outline its usage through an example use case for replicable cohort creation.AvailabilityUKBCC is available through PyPi (https://pypi.org/project/ukbcc) and as open source code on GitHub (https://github.com/tool-bin/ukbcc).Contactisa.kiral@gmail.com
An answer from Marxist economics to Weber's hypothesis about China: a concurrent discussion of the direction of rural reform in China
Authors: Yang Jiguo 
Published: July 2020

PurposeWeber's hypothesis about China is the hypothesis forwarded by Weber that why capitalist production did not appear in eastern countries such as China in the first place. Weber considered that the reason may be Chinese Confucianism and Taoism lack protestant ethic like Western countries.Design/methodology/approachThe clarification has aroused wide discussion, meanwhile, East Asian capitalism belonging to the Chinese cultural circle has successfully refuted Weber's proposition. Chinese scholars have a broad debate around this topic while no agreement has been reached. This paper tries to explain Weber's hypothesis by Marx's theory of capital origin, which can be explained that the landlord economy caused by China's federal society under centralism leads to the result that the commodity of labor cannot exist in that environment.FindingsThe answer from Marxist economics has not only solved an enormous theoretical problem, but also it has vital practical significance. It easily clarifies the fact that the commodity of labor in full sense still cannot emerge in China nowadays, which is an important reason causing China to enter the New Normal and New Era.Originality/valueTherefore, it leaves China the only way of the socialist road with Chinese characteristics and revitalizing China's rural economy, which means China can only promote rural industrialization and urbanization under the principle of adhering to rural collective ownership, while implementing various forms of integrated agricultural and industrial business models based on local conditions.
Police brutality and four other ways racism kills Black people
Authors: Holmes IV Oscar 
Published: July 2020

PurposeThis article was written in response to the #BlackLivesMatter social justice protests that erupted around the world in response to the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery in 2020.Design/methodology/approachThis article weaves personal experiences, published research and current events and social issues to build the case that there are many ways that racism kills Black people.FindingsAlthough antiblack police brutality looms largely in people's minds of how racism kills Black people, less conspicuous ways that racism kills Black people are often overlooked.Originality/valueIn this article, the author highlights: (1) the perennial expectation that Black people cater to other people's needs and desires; (2) performative activism and allyship; (3) assigning Black people the responsibility for fixing racism and (4) thinking education, mentoring or wealth is the panacea for racism as these less conspicuous ways that racism kills Black people.
Reusable learning objects: a blended learning tool in teaching computer-aided design to engineering undergraduates
Authors: Onofrei George , Ferry Paul 
Published: July 2020

PurposeBlended learning is an emerging trend across many educational settings, adopting the purposeful integration of traditional face-to-face and online teaching to establishing an engaging learning experience for the students. Blended learning provides an ideal platform for the implementation of reusable learning objects (RLOs) as a pedagogical tool to support classroom instruction.Design/methodology/approachThis study had conducted a quasi-experiment followed by semi-structured interviews to determine if a blended learning approach using RLOs can enhance students’ learning in an undergraduate engineering computer-aided design (CAD) module. This study involved learners studying engineering in two different academic years.FindingsStudents from the first year were taught using traditional face-to-face teaching approach. The cohort of students from the subsequent year adopted a blended learning approach: face to face and access to a series of RLOs. The analysis revealed statistical evidence that the use of blended learning had a significant impact on the students' end of term exam grades in the CAD module in comparison to the students who undertook traditional face-to-face teaching approach. The qualitative findings highlighted the positive impact of RLOs on students’ learning behaviour, engagement and knowledge retention.Originality/valueThis study provided empirical evidence of the benefits of using RLOs as a blended learning tool in engineering domain. From a theoretical perspective, the findings highlighted the importance of good instructional design and sound theoretical underpinning of the pedagogical strategy. From a practical point of view, this study informed academics on how to improve learner's academic achievement using RLOs.
Farmer groups, collective marketing and smallholder farm performance in rural Ghana
Authors: Abdul-Rahaman Awal , Abdulai Awudu 
Published: July 2020

PurposeRapid transformation of agrifood value chains because of population growth, urbanization, rising consumer incomes and increased demand for food quality and safety has resulted in the need for smallholder farmers to coordinate horizontally through group formation and collective marketing to improve farm performance in developing countries. This paper aims to examine the factors that influence farmer group membership and collective marketing decisions and their impacts on smallholder farm performance in rural Ghana.Design/methodology/approachUsing data from a recent survey of 447 rice farmers in rural Ghana, an endogenous switching regression model is employed to account for selection bias arising from both observable and unobservable farmer attributes.FindingsThe data reveal that group members and collective marketing participants obtained higher prices and also incurred lower input costs. The econometric estimates show that age, access to credit, mobile phone ownership, distance to market and road status are the main drivers of group membership and collective marketing decisions. The authors also find positive and significant impacts of farmer group membership and collective marketing on farm net revenues.Research limitations/implicationsThe findings from this study suggest that government and donor support for the formation of farmer groups during implementation of agriculture and value chain interventions should as well incorporate strategies to facilitate collective marketing.Originality/valueTo the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to examine the role farmer groups and collective marketing play in improving smallholder farm performance.
New approach for target setting mechanism of course outcomes in higher education accreditation
Authors: P Dayananda , Latte Mrityunjaya V. , Raisinghani Mahesh S. , CN Sowmyarani 
Published: July 2020

PurposeStandard quality is very highly important parameter in the education sector. Accreditation is a process where standard quality of education is given and the process of continuous improvement is defined. Emphasizing quality of student education is achieved through outcome-based education system (OBE). Program outcomes signify the comprehension, skills and attitude the students should have at the end of the program. At the end of each course, course outcomes signify the knowledge acquired by the students. Course outcomes assessment is one of the key aspects of the OBE model. In this research, the following four factors: subject quality, number of times subject handled by faculty members, faculty experience and student quality with different weightage, are used for analysis of the target setting for individual courses, used for higher education accreditation. This new approach for target setting will improve the teaching and learning process.Design/methodology/approachFour factors: subject quality, number of times subject handled by faculty members, faculty experience and student quality with different weightage, are used for analysis of the target setting for individual courses, used for higher education accreditation.Practical implicationsUsing proposed approach, higher targets can be achieved in teaching and learning.FindingsNew approach for target setting will improve the teaching and learning process.Research limitations/implicationsProposed approach for target setting will improve the teaching and learning process; it should be implemented across all engineering colleges or universities.Social implicationsAll engineering colleges will have impact on teaching and learning process.Originality/valueThe following four factors: subject quality, number of times subject handled by faculty members, faculty experience and student quality with different weightage, are used for analysis of the target setting for individual courses, used for higher education accreditation.
Impacts of capital structure: profitability of construction companies in Ethiopia
Authors: W. Fekadu Agmas 
Published: July 2020

Purpose
Capital structure decisions are important decisions for any business activity because they have considerable influence on the worth and cost of companies. Most previous studies in Ethiopia were primarily focused on identifying and measuring problems in banking sectors and other sectors and paying little attention to the construction sector. The purpose of this study is mainly to fill the gap by examining the effects of capital structure on the profitability of construction firms in Ethiopia.

Design/methodology/approach
To test hypotheses of the study, time series secondary data were gathered from the sample of 30 grade one construction companies in Ethiopia during the 2011–2015 period. To examine the correlation among capital structures and its determinants, random effect multiple regression models were used.

Findings
From the regression outcomes, the study indicates that capital structure measured by debt to equity and long-term debt to total assets has a significant positive correlation with return on equity (ROE) and return on assets (ROA) of sampled construction companies. However, the capital structure measured by debt to assets has a significant negative correlation with ROE and ROA of sampled construction companies in Ethiopia.

Originality/value
This paper is the author’s original work and assures that the paper was not undertaken anywhere and is also not published in any journal before.
Artificial intelligence and real estate - not just an evolution, a real game changer!
Authors: Cajias Marcelo 
Published: July 2020

PurposeDigitalisation and AI are the most intensively discussed topics in the real estate industry. The subject aims at increasing the efficiency of existing processes and the institutional side of the industry is really interested. And in some ways, this is a breakthrough. This article elaborates on the current status quo and future path of the industry.Design/methodology/approachThe real estate industry is evolving, and parts of the business are increasingly being conquered by “proptechs” and “fintechs”. They have come into real estate to stay not because they discovered inefficiencies in the way one manages and does business with real estate, but because they come with an arsenal of new technologies that can change the whole game. The article discusses a path for changing the game in real estate.Findings“location, location, location” has now evolved to “data, data, data”. However, there is one essential aspect that must be considered before the latter can become the real value creator: the ability of market players to analyse data. And this does not mean being an excellent Excel user. The near future sees a solution called Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) meaning that the econometric world constructed decades ago has an expiry date.Originality/valueOne needs to delete two myths from their mind: data quantity is proportional to accurate insights and that bringing your data to a cloud will deliver you with all the insights your business needs almost immediately.
Come together: trust, sociability and individual investors' stock-portfolio returns
Authors: Stålnacke Oscar 
Published: July 2020

PurposePrevious studies have found that trusting and sociable individuals are more likely to participate in the stock market and hold risky assets. The purpose of this paper is to explore if trust and sociability also are related to individual investors' stock-portfolio returns.Design/methodology/approachThe authors study the questions in the paper by linking survey measures of trust and sociability to investors' actual stock portfolios.FindingsThe authors find that trusting investors acquire higher raw and risk-adjusted stock-portfolio returns, but that the returns do not differ depending on how sociable investors are. These results suggest that trust is important for investors' stock-portfolio decisions, and that trusting investors tend to perform better in the stock market than less-trusting investors.Originality/valueThis is, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, the first paper that relates survey measures of trust and sociability to investors' actual stock-portfolio holdings. This is important to increase the understanding for how trust and sociability are related to the financial decisions individuals makes.
Football stocks: a new asset class attractive to institutional investors? Empirical results and impulses for researching investor motivations beyond return
Authors: Prigge Stefan , Tegtmeier Lars 
Published: July 2020

PurposeThe aims of the research are twofold: (1) exploring whether football club stocks can be considered an asset class of their own; (2) investigating whether football stocks enable well-diversified investors to achieve more efficient risk-return combinations.Design/methodology/approachUsing efficient frontier optimization, a base portfolio, with standard stocks and bonds, and a corresponding enhanced portfolio, which includes football stocks in the investment opportunity set, are defined. This procedure is applied to four portfolio composition rules. Pairwise comparisons of portfolio Sharpe ratios include a test for statistical significance.FindingsThe results indicate a low correlation of football stocks and standard stocks; thus, football stocks could be considered an asset class of their own. Nevertheless, the addition of football stocks to a well-diversified portfolio does not improve its risk-return efficiency because the weak performance of football stocks eliminates their advantage of low correlation.Research limitations/implicationsThis study contributes to the evidence that investments in football are different from ‘ordinary’ investments and need further research, particularly into market participants and their investment motives.Practical implicationsFootball stocks are not attractive to pure financial investors. Thus, football clubs need to know more about which side benefits are appreciated by which kind of investor and how much it costs to produce these side benefits.Originality/valueTo the best of authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to analyse the risk-return efficiency of football stocks from the perspective of a pure financial investor, i.e. an investor in football stocks who does not earn side benefits, such as strategic investors or fan investors.