bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Novel candidate genes for impaired nephron development in a rat model with inherited nephron deficit and albuminuria
Authors: Herlan Laura , Schulz Angela , Schulte Leonard , Schulz Herbert , Hübner Norbert , Kreutz Reinhold 
Published: July 2015

SummaryDefects in nephrogenesis can have detrimental effects on cardiovascular and renal health in adult life. This is confirmed by observations in the Munich Wistar Frömter (MWF) rat that exhibits a congenital nephron deficit and renal failure with age. Here, we performed genome‐wide transcriptome analysis in embryonic kidneys to identify candidate genes for the reduced nephron number in MWF. We compared MWF rats at embryonic day (E)15.5 with stage‐matched spontaneously hypertensive rats (SHR) at E16. Microarray analysis revealed 311 transcripts representing 253 known genes with differential expression between MWF and SHR (fold change > +1.5 or < −1.5, respectively). Genes located on rat chromosome (RNO) 6 were of special interest because RNO6 carries genetic loci previously linked to the nephron deficit and renal damage in MWF. Differentially expressed genes located on RNO6 were further investigated by Real‐time PCR including the late‐stage of fetal kidney development, i.e. E19.0/E19.5, and week 4 of postnatal life when nephrogenesis is completed. Seven genes including Abcg5, Ab1‐233, Efcab11, Fntb, Gpx2, Lrrn3, and Rtn1 were assigned on RNO6 and their differential expression was confirmed. Thus, we identified several genes that may act as crucial players in nephron development and are responsible for the nephron deficit in the MWF model.
Antimicrobial stewardship in Australian emergency departments
Authors: Welch Susan 
Published: July 2015

AbstractObjectiveThe present study aims to determine and describe the involvement of Australian EDs in antimicrobial stewardship (AMS) and the role of Emergency Medicine Pharmacists (EMPs).MethodsA Surveymonkey® questionnaire was devised, piloted and distributed to all members of the Society of Hospital Pharmacists of Australia Committee of Specialty Practice EM via the online discussion forum and email distribution list.ResultsThere were 41 respondents, 35 (85%) of which had an EMP at their hospital. Of respondents, 30 (73%) were EMP, nine were involved in ED and wanted to contribute to the survey and two were neither. Thirty‐four (83%) had a hospital AMS programme. All other questions had 29 respondents. Twenty‐three of 29 (79%) had an AMS committee, and 14/23 (61%) had an ED representation. Twenty‐eight of 29 (97%) had a restricted antimicrobial policy. Twenty‐one of 29 (72%) had a specialist AMS pharmacist, and 12/21 (57%) were involved in the ED. Eleven of 29 (37%) had ED‐specific antimicrobial guidelines. A variety of electronic AMS support is available in EDs. EDs had access to a hospital antibiogram (6) and used it to inform AMS. Point prevalence surveys often involved the ED. EMPs were involved with antimicrobial education via ward rounds (6) and didactic sessions (7), guideline development (4), and monitoring of ED antimicrobial prescribing, 21/29 (72%). Multiple ways of controlling ED antimicrobials were used including: providing a limited range of after‐hours antimicrobials, predetermined trauma packs, review of ED stock and follow up of restricted antimicrobials. Fourteen of 29 (48%) had conducted ED antimicrobial drug use evaluations.ConclusionThe ED can be a focus for AMS and is at many sites surveyed. The EMP can provide an important role in this programme.
Establishing the role of detoxifying enzymes in field‐evolved resistance to various insecticides in the brown planthopper (Nilaparvata lugens) in South India
Authors: Malathi Vijayakumar Maheshwari , Jalali Sushil K. , Gowda Dandinashivara K. Sidde , Mohan Muthugounder , Venkatesan Thiruvengadam 
Published: July 2015

AbstractThe brown planthopper (BPH), Nilaparvata lugens (Stål), is one of the major pests of rice throughout Asia. Extensive use of insecticides for suppressing N. lugens has resulted in the development of insecticide resistance leading to frequent control failures in the field. The aim of the present study was to evaluate resistance in the field populations of N. lugens from major rice growing states of South India to various insecticides. We also determined the activity of detoxifying enzymes (esterases [ESTs], glutathione S‐transferases [GSTs], and mixed‐function oxidases [MFOs]). Moderate levels of resistance were detected in the field populations to acephate, thiamethoxam and buprofezin (resistance factors 1.05–20.92 fold, 4.52–14.99 fold, and 1.00–18.09 fold, respectively) as compared with susceptible strain while there were low levels of resistance to imidacloprid (resistance factor 1.23–6.70 fold) and complete sensitivity to etofenoprox (resistance factor 1.05–1.66 fold). EST activities in the field populations were 1.06 to 3.09 times higher than the susceptible strain while for GST and MFO the ratios varied from 1.29 to 3.41 and 1.03 to 1.76, respectively. The EST activity was found to be correlated to acephate resistance (r = 0.999, P ≥ 0.001). The high selection pressure of organophosphate, neonicotinoid, and insect growth regulator (IGR) in the field is likely to be contributing for resistance in BPH to multiple insecticides, leading to control failures. The results obtained will be beneficial to IPM recommendations for the use of effective insecticides against BPH.
Abdominal pain symptoms are associated with anxiety and depression in young children
Authors: von Gontard Alexander , Moritz Anne‐Michaela , Thome‐Granz Sigrid , Equit Monika 
Published: July 2015

AbstractAimAbdominal pain symptoms and incontinence are common in childhood. The aim of this study was to analyse abdominal pain symptoms and their associations with incontinence and symptoms of anxiety and depression in young children.MethodsWe examined 1130 children during the school entry check‐up (mean age 6.2 years) and 951 participated in the study. Parents completed a questionnaire contained 11 items regarding Rome‐III functional gastrointestinal disorders (FGIDs) and incontinence and 14 items from the anxious/depressed scale of the Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL).ResultsOf the 951 children (55.6% boys) we recruited, 30.1% had experienced abdominal pain symptoms in the past two months and 14% had complained of them at least once a week. In addition, 2.6% had irritable bowel syndrome, 11.3% had childhood functional abdominal pain, 2.4% were affected by faecal incontinence, 2.1% were affected by daytime urinary incontinence, and 5.5% were affected by nocturnal enuresis. One in ten (10.6%) had symptoms of anxiety and depression, and these were significantly higher in the children with FGIDs, particularly if they were also incontinent.ConclusionNearly a third of the children (30.1%) had abdominal pain symptoms, and FGIDs were associated with significantly higher symptoms of anxiety and depression, especially if children were also incontinent.
Small MultiPiles: Piling Time to Explore Temporal Patterns in Dynamic Networks
Authors: Bach B. , Henry‐Riche N. , Dwyer T. , Madhyastha T. , Fekete J‐D. , Grabowski T. 
Published: July 2015

AbstractWe introduce MultiPiles, a visualization to explore time‐series of dense, weighted networks. MultiPiles is based on the physical analogy of piling adjacency matrices, each one representing a single temporal snapshot. Common interfaces for visualizing dynamic networks use techniques such as: flipping/animation; small multiples; or summary views in isolation. Our proposed ‘piling’ metaphor presents a hybrid of these techniques, leveraging each one's advantages, as well as offering the ability to scale to networks with hundreds of temporal snapshots. While the MultiPiles technique is applicable to many domains, our prototype was initially designed to help neuroscientists investigate changes in brain connectivity networks over several hundred snapshots. The piling metaphor and associated interaction and visual encodings allowed neuroscientists to explore their data, prior to a statistical analysis. They detected high‐level temporal patterns in individual networks and this helped them to formulate and reject several hypotheses.
Visual Assessment of Alleged Plagiarism Cases
Authors: Riehmann P. , Potthast M. , Stein B. , Froehlich B. 
Published: July 2015

AbstractWe developed a visual analysis tool to support the verification, assessment, and presentation of alleged cases of plagiarism. The analysis of a suspicious document typically results in a compilation of categorized “finding spots”. The categorization reveals the way in which the suspicious text fragment was created from the source, e.g. by obfuscation, translation, or by shake and paste. We provide a three‐level approach for exploring the finding spots in context. The overview shows the relationship of the entire suspicious document to the set of source documents. A glyph‐based view reveals the structural and textual differences and similarities of a set of finding spots and their corresponding source text fragments. For further analysis and editing of the finding spot's assessment, the actual text fragments can be embedded side‐by‐side in the diffline view. The different views are tied together by versatile navigation and selection operations. Our expert reviewers confirm that our tool provides a significant improvement over existing static visualizations for assessing plagiarism cases.
Exploring Traffic Dynamics in Urban Environments Using Vector‐Valued Functions
Authors: Poco Jorge , Doraiswamy Harish , Vo Huy. T. , Comba João L. D. , Freire Juliana , Silva Cláudio. T. 
Published: July 2015

AbstractThe traffic infrastructure greatly impacts the quality of life in urban environments. To optimize this infrastructure, engineers and decision makers need to explore traffic data. In doing so, they face two important challenges: the sparseness of speed sensors that cover only a limited number of road segments, and the complexity of traffic patterns they need to analyze. In this paper we take a first step at addressing these challenges. We use New York City (NYC) taxi trips as sensors to capture traffic information. While taxis provide substantial coverage of the city, the data captured about taxi trips contain neither the location of taxis at frequent intervals nor their routes. We propose an efficient traffic model to derive speed and direction information from these data, and show that it provides reliable estimates. Using these estimates, we define a time‐varying vector‐valued function on a directed graph representing the road network, and adapt techniques used for vector fields to visualize the traffic dynamics. We demonstrate the utility of our technique in several case studies that reveal interesting mobility patterns in NYC's traffic. These patterns were validated by experts from NYC's Department of Transportation and the NYC Taxi & Limousine Commission, who also provided interesting insights into these results.
Uncovering Representative Groups in Multidimensional Projections
Authors: Joia P. , Petronetto F. , Nonato L.G. 
Published: July 2015

AbstractMultidimensional projection‐based visualization methods typically rely on clustering and attribute selection mechanisms to enable visual analysis of multidimensional data. Clustering is often employed to group similar instances according to their distance in the visual space. However, considering only distances in the visual space may be misleading due to projection errors as well as the lack of guarantees to ensure that distinct clusters contain instances with different content. Identifying clusters made up of a few elements is also an issue for most clustering methods. In this work we propose a novel multidimensional projection‐based visualization technique that relies on representative instances to define clusters in the visual space. Representative instances are selected by a deterministic sampling scheme derived from matrix decomposition, which is sensitive to the variability of data while still been able to handle classes with a small number of instances. Moreover, the sampling mechanism can easily be adapted to select relevant attributes from each cluster. Therefore, our methodology unifies sampling, clustering, and feature selection in a simple framework. A comprehensive set of experiments validate our methodology, showing it outperforms most existing sampling and feature selection techniques. A case study shows the effectiveness of the proposed methodology as a visual data analysis tool.
A Novel Framework for Visual Detection and Exploration of Performance Bottlenecks in Organic Photovoltaic Solar Cell Materials
Authors: Aboulhassan A. , Baum D. , Wodo O. , Ganapathysubramanian B. , Amassian A. , Hadwiger M. 
Published: July 2015

AbstractCurrent characterization methods of the so‐called Bulk Heterojunction (BHJ), which is the main material of Organic Photovoltaic (OPV) solar cells, are limited to the analysis of global fabrication parameters. This reduces the efficiency of the BHJ design process, since it misses critical information about the local performance bottlenecks in the morphology of the material. In this paper, we propose a novel framework that fills this gap through visual characterization and exploration of local structure‐performance correlations. We also propose a formula that correlates the structural features with the performance bottlenecks. Since research into BHJ materials is highly multidisciplinary, our framework enables a visual feedback strategy that allows scientists to build intuition about the best choices of fabrication parameters. We evaluate the usefulness of our proposed system by obtaining new BHJ characterizations. Furthermore, we show that our approach could substantially reduce the turnaround time.
Visual Analytics for Correlation‐Based Comparison of Time Series Ensembles
Authors: Köthur P. , Witt C. , Sips M. , Marwan N. , Schinkel S. , Dransch D. 
Published: July 2015

AbstractAn established approach to studying interrelations between two non‐stationary time series is to compute the ‘windowed’ cross‐correlation (WCC). The time series are divided into intervals and the cross‐correlation between corresponding intervals is calculated. The outcome is a matrix that describes the correlation between two time series for different intervals and varying time lags. This important technique can only be used to compare two single time series. However, many applications require the comparison of ensembles of time series. Therefore, we propose a visual analytics approach that extends the WCC to support a correlation‐based comparison of two ensembles of time series. We compute the pairwise WCC between all time series from the two ensembles, which results in hundreds of thousands of WCC matrices. Statistical measures are used to derive a concise description of the time‐varying correlations between the ensembles as well as the uncertainty of the correlation values. We further introduce a visually scalable overview visualization of the computed correlation and uncertainty information. These components are combined with multiple linked views into a visual analytics system to support configuration of the WCC as well as detailed analysis of correlation patterns between two ensembles. Two use cases from very different domains, cognitive science and paleoclimatology, demonstrate the utility of our approach.
The Zinc Ion Chelating Agent TPEN Attenuates Neuronal Death/apoptosis Caused by Hypoxia/ischemia Via Mediating the Pathophysiological Cascade Including Excitotoxicity, Oxidative Stress, and Inflammation
Authors: Wang Wei‐Ming , Liu Zhao , Liu Ai‐Jun , Wang Yu‐Xiang , Wang Hong‐Gang , An Di , Heng Bin , Xie Lai‐Hua , Duan Jun‐Li , Liu Yan‐Qiang 
Published: July 2015

SummaryAimsWe aim to determine the significant effect of TPEN, a Zn2+ chelator, in mediating the pathophysiological cascade in neuron death/apoptosis induced by hypoxia/ischemia.MethodsWe conducted both in vivo and in vitro experiments in this study. PC12 cells were used to establish hypoxia/ischemia model by applying oxygen–glucose deprivation (OGD). SHR‐SP rats were used to establish an acute ischemic model by electrocoagulating middle cerebral artery occlusion. The effect of TPEN on neuron death/apoptosis was evaluated. In addition, the relative biomarks of excitotoxicity, oxidative stress, and inflammation reactions in hypoxia/ischemia PC12 cell model as well as in SHR‐SP rat hypoxia/ischemia model were also assessed.ResultsTPEN significantly attenuates the neurological deficit, reduced the cerebral infarction area and the ratio of apoptotic neurons, and increased the expression of GluR2 in the rat hypoxia/ischemia brain. TPEN also increased blood SOD activity, decreased blood NOS activity and blood MDA and IL‐6 contents in rats under hypoxia/ischemia. In addition, TPEN significantly inhibited the death and apoptosis of cells and attenuated the alteration of GluR2 and NR2 expression caused by OGD or OGD plus high Zn2+ treatments.ConclusionsZn2+ is involved in neural cell apoptosis and/or death caused by hypoxia/ischemia via mediating excitotoxicity, oxidative stress, and inflammation.
Considering the impact of climate change on human communities significantly alters the outcome of species and site‐based vulnerability assessments
Authors: Segan Daniel B. , Hole David G. , Donatti Camila I. , Zganjar Chris , Martin Shaun , Butchart Stuart H. M. , Watson James E. M. 
Published: July 2015

AbstractAimHuman activities are largely responsible for the processes that threaten biodiversity, yet potential changes in human behaviour as a response to climate change are ignored in most species and site‐based vulnerability assessments (VAs). Here we assess how incorporation of the potential impact of climate change on humans alters our view of vulnerability when using well‐established site and species VA methodologies.LocationSouthern Africa.MethodsOur baseline was two published studies that used accepted VA methodologies aimed at examining the direct impacts of climate changes on species and sites. The first identified potential shifts in the distributions of 164 restricted‐range avian species, the second forecasted species turnover in 331 Important Bird and Biodiversity Areas (IBAs). We used a published spatially explicit assessment of potential climate change impacts on people to evaluate which species and sites overlap with human populations most likely to be impacted. By doing this, we were able to assess how the integration of potential climate impacts on human populations changes our perception of which species and sites are most vulnerable to climate change.ResultsWe found no correlation between species and sites most likely to be impacted directly by climate change and those where the potential response of human populations could drive major indirect impacts. The relative vulnerability of individual species and sites shifted when potential impacts of climate change on human communities were considered, with more than one‐fifth of species and one‐tenth of sites moving from ‘low’ to ‘high’ risk.Main conclusionsStandard VA methodologies that fail to consider how people are likely to respond to climate change will result in systematically biased assessments. This may lead to the implementation of inappropriate management actions, and a failure to address those species or sites that may be uniquely, or additionally, imperilled by the impacts of human responses to climate change.
Quantifying the activity levels and behavioural responses of butterfly species to habitat boundaries
Authors: MAIR LOUISE , THOMAS CHRIS D. , FRANCO ALDINA M. A. , HILL JANE K. 
Published: July 2015

1. The ability of species' to undergo climate‐driven range shifts across fragmented landscapes depends on their dispersal ability as well as the structure of the landscape. For species' range shifts to occur, individuals must first leave suitable habitat to seek new habitat; this is likely to depend on the rate of movement of individuals within habitat and the likelihood that a boundary is crossed, once it is encountered. For three species of butterfly with contrasting histories of recent range expansion, we examined the propensity of individuals to move within a habitat and their responses to habitat boundaries.2. We quantified the extent to which Plebejus argus (Linnaeus) (a declining habitat specialist), Aricia agestis (Schiffermuller) (an expanding generalist) and Polymmatus icarus (Rottemburg) (a geographically ubiquitous generalist) crossed habitat boundaries into unsuitable habitat and moved within suitable habitat. The observed movement was then related to individual and environmental conditions.3. Species differed in their activity levels in accordance within their recent distribution patterns (P. icarus > A. agestis > P. argus). Our results for P. argus suggest that movement may be motivated by nectar‐seeking, and that males generally move more than females. All three species tended to avoid crossing habitat boundaries; however the proportion of individuals crossing habitat boundaries did not differ significantly among species.4. We conclude that levels of activity within a habitat, which will affect the frequency with which individuals encounter habitat boundaries, rather than behavioural responses to the boundaries, may be important drivers of distribution change.
Hypoxia increases the expression of enamel genes and cytokines in an ameloblast‐derived cell line
Authors: Sidaly Rivan , Landin Maria A. , Suo Zhenhe , Snead Malcolm L. , Lyngstadaas Ståle P. , Reseland Janne E. 
Published: July 2015

The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of hypoxic conditions on the expression of enamel genes and on the secretion of alkaline phosphatase (ALP), lactate dehydrogenase (LDH), cytokines, and interleukins by an ameloblast‐derived cell line. Murine ameloblast‐derived cells (LS‐8 cells) were exposed to 1% oxygen for 24 and 48 h and harvested after 1, 2, 3, and 7 d. The effect of culture in hypoxic conditions on the expression of structural enamel matrix genes and on the secretion of cytokines and interleukins, as well as ALP and LDH, into the cell‐culture medium was calculated relative to the expression and secretion of these factors by untreated cells (controls) at each time point. Hypoxia increased expression of the structural enamel matrix genes amelogenin (Amelx), ameloblastin (Ambn), and enamelin (Enam), and the enamel protease matrix metalloproteinase‐20 (Mmp20). Expression of hypoxia‐inducible factor 1‐alpha (Hif1α), and secretion of several vascularization factors and pro‐inflammatory factors, were increased after 24 and 48 h of hypoxia. The ALP activity was reduced after 24 and 48 h of hypoxia, whereas the LDH level in the cell‐culture medium was higher after 24 h of hypoxic conditions compared with 48 h. In conclusion, hypoxic exposure may disrupt the controlled fine‐tuned expression and processing of enamel genes, and promote the secretion of pro‐inflammatory factors.