bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Water-stable boroxine structure with dynamic covalent bonds
Authors: Li Xiaopei , Zhang Yongjie , Shi Zhenqiang , Wang Dongdong , Yang Hang , Zhang Yahui , Qin Haijuan , Lu Wenqi , Chen Junjun , Li Yan , Qing Guangyan 
Published: February 2024

AbstractBoroxines are significant structures in the production of covalent organic frameworks, anion receptors, self-healing materials, and others. However, their utilization in aqueous media is a formidable task due to hydrolytic instability. Here we report a water-stable boroxine structure discovered from 2-hydroxyphenylboronic acid. We find that, under ambient environments, 2-hydroxyphenylboronic acid undergoes spontaneous dehydration to form a dimer with dynamic covalent bonds and aggregation-induced enhanced emission activity. Intriguingly, upon exposure to water, the dimer rapidly transforms into a boroxine structure with excellent pH stability and water-compatible dynamic covalent bonds. Building upon these discoveries, we report the strong binding capacity of boroxines toward fluoride ions in aqueous media, and develop a boroxine-based hydrogel with high acid–base stability and reversible gel–sol transition. This discovery of the water-stable boroxine structure breaks the constraint of boroxines not being applicable in aqueous environments, opening a new era of researches in boroxine chemistry.
Dansgaard-Oeschger cycles of the penultimate and last glacial period recorded in stalagmites from Türkiye
Authors: Held F. , Cheng H. , Edwards R. L. , Tüysüz O. , Koç K. , Fleitmann D. 
Published: February 2024

AbstractThe last glacial period is characterized by abrupt climate oscillations, also known as Dansgaard-Oeschger (D-O) cycles. However, D-O cycles remain poorly documented in climate proxy records covering the penultimate glacial period. Here we present highly resolved and precisely dated speleothem time series from Sofular Cave in northern Türkiye to provide clear evidence for D-O cycles during Marine Isotope Stage (MIS) 6 as well as MIS 2-4. D-O cycles are most clearly expressed in the Sofular carbon isotope time series, which correlate inversely with regional sea surface temperature (SST) records from the Black Sea. The pacing of D-O cycles is almost twice as long during MIS 6 compared to MIS 2-4, and could be related to a weaker Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) and a different mean climate during MIS 6 compared to MIS 2-4, leading most likely to a higher threshold for the occurrence of D-O cycles.
Molecular basis of SAP05-mediated ubiquitin-independent proteasomal degradation of transcription factors
Authors: Yan Xiaojie , Yuan Xinxin , Lv Jianke , Zhang Bing , Huang Yongle , Li Qianqian , Ma Jinfeng , Li Yanran , Wang Xiaolu , Li Yao , Yu Ying , Liu Quanyan , Liu Tong , Mi Wenyi , Dong Cheng 
Published: February 2024

AbstractSAP05, a secreted effector by the obligate parasitic bacteria phytoplasma, bridges host SPL and GATA transcription factors (TFs) to the 26 S proteasome subunit RPN10 for ubiquitination-independent degradation. Here, we report the crystal structures of SAP05 in complex with SPL5, GATA18 and RPN10, which provide detailed insights into the protein-protein interactions involving SAP05. SAP05 employs two opposing lobes with an acidic path and a hydrophobic path to contact TFs and RPN10, respectively. Our crystal structures, in conjunction with mutagenesis and degradation assays, reveal that SAP05 targets plant GATAs but not animal GATAs dependent on their direct salt-bridged electrostatic interactions. Additionally, SAP05 hijacks plant RPN10 but not animal RPN10 due to structural steric hindrance and the key hydrophobic interactions. This study provides valuable molecular-level information into the modulation of host proteins to prevent insect-borne diseases.
Benchmarking signal quality and spatiotemporal distribution of interictal spikes in prolonged human iEEG recordings using CorTec wireless brain interchange
Authors: Ayyoubi Amir Hossein , Fazli Besheli Behrang , Quach Michael M. , Gavvala Jay R. , Goldman Alica M. , Swamy Chandra Prakash , Bartoli Eleonora , Curry Daniel J. , Sheth Sameer A. , Francis David J. , Ince Nuri F. 
Published: February 2024

AbstractNeuromodulation through implantable pulse generators (IPGs) represents an important treatment approach for neurological disorders. While the field has observed the success of state-of-the-art interventions, such as deep brain stimulation (DBS) or responsive neurostimulation (RNS), implantable systems face various technical challenges, including the restriction of recording from a limited number of brain sites, power management, and limited external access to the assessed neural data in a continuous fashion. To the best of our knowledge, for the first time in this study, we investigated the feasibility of recording human intracranial EEG (iEEG) using a benchtop version of the Brain Interchange (BIC) unit of CorTec, which is a portable, wireless, and externally powered implant with sensing and stimulation capabilities. We developed a MATLAB/SIMULINK-based rapid prototyping environment and a graphical user interface (GUI) to acquire and visualize the iEEG captured from all 32 channels of the BIC unit. We recorded prolonged iEEG (~ 24 h) from three human subjects with externalized depth leads using the BIC and commercially available clinical amplifiers simultaneously in the epilepsy monitoring unit (EMU). The iEEG signal quality of both streams was compared, and the results demonstrated a comparable power spectral density (PSD) in all the systems in the low-frequency band (< 80 Hz). However, notable differences were primarily observed above 100 Hz, where the clinical amplifiers were associated with lower noise floor (BIC-17 dB vs. clinical amplifiers <  − 25 dB). We employed an established spike detector to assess and compare the spike rates in each iEEG stream. We observed over 90% conformity between the spikes rates and their spatial distribution captured with BIC and clinical systems. Additionally, we quantified the packet loss characteristic in the iEEG signal during the wireless data transfer and conducted a series of simulations to compare the performance of different interpolation methods for recovering the missing packets in signals at different frequency bands. We noted that simple linear interpolation has the potential to recover the signal and reduce the noise floor with modest packet loss levels reaching up to 10%. Overall, our results indicate that while tethered clinical amplifiers exhibited noticeably better noise floor above 80 Hz, epileptic spikes can still be detected successfully in the iEEG recorded with the externally powered wireless BIC unit opening the road for future closed-loop neuromodulation applications with continuous access to brain activity.
Forecasting Sauter mean droplet size and examining the range of droplet sizes in a Tenova liquid–liquid extraction column
Authors: Rahimpour Neshat , Bahmanyar Hossein , Hemmati Alireza , Asadollahzadeh Mehdi 
Published: February 2024

AbstractA new type of Tenova pulsed extraction column was introduced in 2017. It is the newest generation of pulsed columns. Due to the internal equipment of this column and the lack of moving parts and the simplicity and speed of repairs and maintenance, it has been the focus of researchers in recent years. No correlations for predicting the mean drop size and drop size distribution of the Tenova column have been reported. The Sauter mean drop diameter and drop size distribution are investigated for a Tenova pulsed column with a diameter and an active height of 7.4 and 73 cm, respectively. Three standard chemical systems of isobutyl acetate-water, isobutanol-water, and toluene-water have been used. The effects of pulse intensity, dispersed and continuous phase flow rates have been taken into account. In each experiment, 200–300 drops have been analyzed in a total of 10,000 drops. The investigation covered a spectrum of physical properties, notably surface tension (within a range of 1.75–36 mN/m). Operating conditions including pulse intensity (in the range of 0.2–2 cm/s) and the flow rate of continuous and dispersed phases (in the range of 8–30 L/h) have been investigated. Methods based on artificial intelligence (AI) such as multilayer perceptron neural networks and gene expression programming were combined with a dimensional analysis approach to provide a new approach to estimating the mean drop diameter (d32). Experimental results have been compared with the equations found by other researchers in similar columns. The variation of drop size distribution has also been experimentally obtained.Methods based on artificial intelligence (AI) such as multilayer perceptron neural networks and gene expression programming were combined with a dimensional analysis approach to provide a new approach to estimating the mean drop diameter (d32). Experimental results have been compared with the equations found by other researchers in similar columns. The variation of drop size distribution has also been experimentally obtained.
The impact of corporate governance on the total factor productivity of pharmaceutical enterprises: a study based on the fsQCA method
Authors: Gao Liquan , Dong Fei 
Published: February 2024

AbstractThe pharmaceutical industry is an important industry for the national economy and the people's livelihood, which is not only beneficial to the people's livelihood, but also has huge commercial value. How to promote the development of Chinese pharmaceutical industry is an urgent problem to be solved. In this study, 47 listed pharmaceutical companies are taken as cases, and Qualitative Comparative Analysis of Fuzzy Sets (fsQCA) is used to analyze the influence of five antecedent conditions on the total factor productivity of pharmaceutical enterprises from the perspective of corporate governance, and to explore the composition to Total Factor Productivity (TFP) improvement. The results are as follows. First, single corporate governance factor does not constitute the necessary condition to improve the TFP of pharmaceutical enterprises. Second, there are three configurations of high TFP of pharmaceutical enterprises, among these, two configurations belong to regulatory constraints type and one configuration belongs to the active board type. There is only one configurations to low TFP of pharmaceutical enterprises: the passive board. Based on the perspective of configuration, this paper discusses how corporate governance drives TFP improvement in pharmaceutical enterprises, which can provide systematic thinking and practical guidance for each company to promote its TFP improvement according to its own corporate structure.
Long noncoding RNA SNHG1 promotes breast cancer progression by regulating the miR-641/RRS1 axis
Authors: Deng Lin , Wang Jun , Song Junying , Wu Qinglan , Gong Zunshuang , Song Jinlian , Hou Lin 
Published: February 2024

AbstractAn increasing number of studies have indicated the crucial involvement of long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) in the onset and progression of malignancies. However, a complete understanding of the molecular mechanism underlying the effect of abnormally expressed lncRNAs on breast cancer (BC) remains elusive. This study aimed to elucidate the influence of the lncRNA small nucleolar RNA host gene 1 (SNHG1) on BC progression and its underlying mechanism. Our findings revealed a conspicuous up-regulation of SNHG1 in both BC tissues and cells. The downregulation of SNHG1 was observed to inhibit BC cell proliferation, migration, invasion, and epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT) processes, while simultaneously promoting apoptosis. Furthermore, dual-luciferase reporter gene and RNA pull-down assays established that SNHG1 targeted miR-641 expression, while miR-641 targeted RRS1. Rescue studies demonstrated that in vitro SNHG1 silencing could be reversed by the miR-641 inhibitor, as well as by RRS1 upregulation. Moreover, in vivo downregulation of SNHG1 was found to inhibit BC growth. Through the inhibition of the miR-641 level, SNHG1 elevated the level of the downstream target RRS1, thereby fostering BC growth, migration, and invasion while inhibiting apoptosis. These findings suggest that SNHG1 may represent a potential therapeutic target for BC treatment.
Three measures of internet use, social media use and video game playing as predictors of insomnia during the pandemic among students
Authors: Selak Špela , Šorgo Andrej , Crnkovič Nuša , Gabrovec Branko , Cesar Katarina , Žmavc Mark 
Published: February 2024

AbstractExisting research indicates that the relationship between digital technology use and insomnia can largely depend on which digital technology measure and which insomnia measure is considered. Data on 4261 Slovenian tertiary students was gathered through an online survey in February 2021, which included measures of depression and insomnia symptoms, as well as measures of internet, social media and video game use divided into three measurement levels (use, duration of use, addictive use). Regression analysis revealed an apparent effect of measurement level, where addictive use measures consistently outperformed other technology use measures in predicting insomnia. Regardless of measurement level, social media use seems to produce more risk for insomnia, compared to playing video games or general internet use for leisure purposes. Importantly, a single measure of depression symptoms explained more variance in insomnia than the nine measures of digital technology use combined, meaning that the effect of digital technology on sleep should not be overstated. Most of the effect of social media use on insomnia may in fact be explained by understanding users' depression symptoms. In case of gaming, a larger part of its effect on insomnia is independent of depression symptoms.
Innovative approaches in soil carbon sequestration modelling for better prediction with limited data
Authors: Davoudabadi Mohammad Javad , Pagendam Daniel , Drovandi Christopher , Baldock Jeff , White Gentry 
Published: February 2024

AbstractSoil carbon accounting and prediction play a key role in building decision support systems for land managers selling carbon credits, in the spirit of the Paris and Kyoto protocol agreements. Land managers typically rely on computationally complex models fit using sparse datasets to make these accounts and predictions. The model complexity and sparsity of the data can lead to over-fitting, leading to inaccurate results when making predictions with new data. Modellers address over-fitting by simplifying their models and reducing the number of parameters, and in the current context this could involve neglecting some soil organic carbon (SOC) components. In this study, we introduce two novel SOC models and a new RothC-like model and investigate how the SOC components and complexity of the SOC models affect the SOC prediction in the presence of small and sparse time series data. We develop model selection methods that can identify the soil carbon model with the best predictive performance, in light of the available data. Through this analysis we reveal that commonly used complex soil carbon models can over-fit in the presence of sparse time series data, and our simpler models can produce more accurate predictions.
Audiovisual integration in the McGurk effect is impervious to music training
Authors: Lee Hsing-Hao , Groves Karleigh , Ripollés Pablo , Carrasco Marisa 
Published: February 2024

AbstractThe McGurk effect refers to an audiovisual speech illusion where the discrepant auditory and visual syllables produce a fused percept between the visual and auditory component. However, little is known about how individual differences contribute to the McGurk effect. Here, we examined whether music training experience—which involves audiovisual integration—can modulate the McGurk effect. Seventy-three participants completed the Goldsmiths Musical Sophistication Index (Gold-MSI) questionnaire to evaluate their music expertise on a continuous scale. Gold-MSI considers participants’ daily-life exposure to music learning experiences (formal and informal), instead of merely classifying people into different groups according to how many years they have been trained in music. Participants were instructed to report, via a 3-alternative forced choice task, “what a person said”: /Ba/, /Ga/ or /Da/. The experiment consisted of 96 audiovisual congruent trials and 96 audiovisual incongruent (McGurk) trials. We observed no significant correlations between the susceptibility of the McGurk effect and the different subscales of the Gold-MSI (active engagement, perceptual abilities, music training, singing abilities, emotion) or the general musical sophistication composite score. Together, these findings suggest that music training experience does not modulate audiovisual integration in speech as reflected by the McGurk effect.
Discovery of lung adenocarcinoma tumor antigens and ferroptosis subtypes for developing mRNA vaccines
Authors: Chen Yan , Zhang Changwen , Li Yu , Tan Xiaoyu , Li Wentao , Tan Sen , Liu Guangnan 
Published: February 2024

AbstractmRNA vaccines are becoming a feasible alternative for treating cancer. To develop mRNA vaccines against LUAD, potential antigens were identified and LUAD ferroptosis subtypes distinguished for selecting appropriate patients. The genome expression omnibus, cancer genome atlas (TCGA) and FerrDB were used to collect gene expression profiles, clinical information, and the genes involved in ferroptosis, respectively. cBioPortal was used to visualize and compare genetic alterations, GEPIA2 to calculate prognostic factors of the selected antigens, and TIMER to visualize the relationship between potential antigens and tumor immune cell infiltration. Consensus clustering analysis was utilized to identify ferroptosis subtypes and their prognostic value assessed by Log-rank and cox regression tests. The modules of ferroptosis-related gene screening were conducted by weight gene co-expression network analysis. The LUAD ferroptosis landscape was visualized through dimensionality reduction and graph learning. Six tumor antigens had obvious LUAD-mutations, positively correlated with different antigen-presenting cells, and might induce tumor cell ferroptosis. LUAD patients were stratified into three ferroptosis subtypes (FS1, FS2, and FS3) according to diverse molecular, cellular, and clinical characteristics. FS3 showed the highest tumor mutation burden and the most somatic mutations, deemed potential indicators of mRNA vaccine effectiveness. Moreover, different ferroptosis subtypes expressed distinct immune checkpoints and immunogenic cell death modulators. AGPS, NRAS, MTDH, PANX1, NOX4, and PPARD are potentially suitable for mRNA vaccinations against LUAD, specifically in patients with FS3 tumors. This study defines vaccination candidates and establishes a theoretical basis for LUAD mRNA vaccinations.
Signs of criticality in social explosions
Authors: Beiró Mariano G. , Chung Ning Ning , Chew Lock Yue , Gandica Yérali 
Published: February 2024

AbstractThe success of an on-line movement could be defined in terms of the shift to large-scale and the later off-line massive street actions of protests. The role of social media in this process is to facilitate the transformation from small or local feelings of disagreement into large-scale social actions. The way how social media achieves that effect is by growing clusters of people and groups with similar effervescent feelings, which otherwise would not be in touch with each other. It is natural to think that these kinds of macro social actions, as a consequence of the spontaneous and massive interactions, will attain the growth and divergence of those clusters, like the correlation length of statistical physics, giving rise to important simplifications on several statistics. In this work, we report the presence of signs of criticality in social demonstrations. Namely, similar power-law exponents are found whenever the distributions are calculated either considering time windows of the same length or with the same number of hashtag usages. In particular, the exponents for the distributions during the event were found to be smaller than before the event, and this is also observed either if we count the hashtags only once per user or if all their usages are considered. By means of network representations, we show that the systems present two kinds of high connectedness, characterised by either high or low values of modularity. The importance of analysing systems near a critical point is that any small disturbance can escalate and induce large-scale—nationwide—chain reactions.
Using genome-wide data to ascertain taxonomic status and assess population genetic structure for Houston toads (Bufo [= Anaxyrus] houstonensis)
Authors: Sirsi Shashwat , Rodriguez David , Forstner Michael R. J. 
Published: February 2024

AbstractThe Houston toad (Bufo [= Anaxyrus] houstonensis) is an endangered amphibian with a small geographic range. Land-use changes have primarily driven decline in B. houstonensis with population supplementation predominant among efforts to reduce its current extinction risk. However, there has been historic uncertainty regarding the evolutionary and conservation significance of B. houstonensis. To this end, we used 1170 genome-wide nuclear DNA markers to examine phylogenetic relationships between our focal taxon, representatives of the Nearctic B. americanus group, and B. nebulifer, a sympatric Middle American species. Phylogenetic analyses indicate B. houstonensis is a taxon that is distinct from B. americanus. We corroborated such genetic distinctiveness with an admixture analysis that provided support for recent reproductive isolation between B. americanus and B. houstonensis. However, ABBA-BABA tests for ancient admixture indicated historic gene flow between Nearctic species while no signal of historic gene flow was detected between Nearctic and Middle-American species. We used an admixture analysis to recognize four Management Units (MU) based on observed genetic differentiation within B. houstonensis and recommend captive propagation, population supplementation, and habitat restoration efforts specific to each MU. Our results re-affirm the evolutionary novelty of an endangered relict.