This paper describes a particular statistical approach to chronological data from assemblages of archaeological finds (namely pottery) using Gaussian curves: the method enables us to obtain a graphic ...representation of chronological patterns that avoids an excessive flattening of data, adding an extra dimension to the usual linear temporal concepts. This enables us to arrive at more likely absolute dating and also visualize residuality. The method has been built during the study of a stratigraphic context from the Site of Ancient Ships of Pisa – San Rossore, Italy, and applied to its pottery. Archaeologists may find in the model a useful tool that is easy to apply.
Alteration of mucosal and systemic immune responses may play an important role in the pathogenesis of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). The aim of this study was to evaluate natural immune responses ...(i.e., phagocytosis, killing, and antibacterial activity), serum autoantibodies (antineutrophil cytoplasmic antibodies ANCA and anti-lactoferrin LF antibodies), and plasma endotoxins in patients affected by ulcerative colitis (UC) and Crohn's disease (CD).
Blood samples were obtained from 71 patients with UC, 32 patients with CD, and 32 control subjects. Disease activity was scored using Truelove's criteria in patients with UC and the Crohn's Disease Activity Index (CDAI) in patients with CD. Candida albicans served as a target for evaluation of phagocytosis and killing exerted by polymorphonuclear cells (PMN) and monocytes (MO), whereas Salmonella typhi was used for assessing lymphocyte-mediated antibacterial activity. ANCA were detected by indirect immunofluorescence, whereas anti-LF antibodies were assayed by means of enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay. Plasma endotoxins were measured by Limulus amoebocyte lysate assay.
Phagocytosis and killing exerted by PMN and MO, as well as lymphocyte-mediated antibacterial activity, were significantly reduced (p < 0.0001) in patients affected by UC and CD in comparison with controls, irrespective of either disease activity or treatment. Plasma endotoxins were detected in 12/71 (17%) patients with UC, and in 10/32 (31%) patients with CD. ANCA were present in 42/71 (59%) patients with UC and in 3/32 (9%) patients with CD, whereas anti-LF antibodies were detected in 31 (44%) UC patients and in six (19%) CD patients. No significant differences in phagocytosis and killing exerted by PMN were found between ANCA-positive and ANCA-negative UC patients.
Our data demonstrate an impairment of natural immunity exerted by peripheral blood phagocytes and lymphocytes in patients with UC and CD. ANCA and anti-LF antibodies were present mainly in UC patients but their presence did not affect PMN-mediated phagocytosis and killing. Finally, plasma endotoxins may contribute to the chronic inflammatory status, likely by inducing release of proinflammatory mediators.
Let K be an algebraically closed field of null characteristic and p(z) a Hilbert polynomial. We look for the minimal Castelnuovo-Mumford regularity m
p(z)
of closed subschemes of projective spaces ...over K with Hilbert polynomial p(z). Experimental evidences led us to consider the idea that m
p(z)
could be achieved by schemes having a suitable minimal Hilbert function. We give a constructive proof of this fact. Moreover, we are able to compute the minimal Castelnuovo-Mumford regularity m
ϱ
p(z)
of schemes with Hilbert polynomial p(z) and given regularity ϱ of the Hilbert function, and also the minimal Castelnuovo-Mumford regularity m
u
of schemes with Hilbert function u. These results find applications in the study of Hilbert schemes. They are obtained by means of minimal Hilbert functions and of two new constructive methods which are based on the notion of growth-height-lexicographic Borel set and called ideal graft and extended lifting.
Abstract
Human polymorphonuclear cells (PMN) and monocytes (MO) from four ovarian cancer patients and seventeen normal donors were in vitro pretreated with different concentrations (25, 50 and 100IU, ...respectively) of rhGM-CSF. Phagocytosis and killing of PMN and MO as well as PMN polarization were evaluated in cancer patients before treatment (T0) and at the end of each chemotherapeutic cycle (T1, T2, T3 and T4, respectively) in comparison with normal donors. RhGM-CSF did not affect phagocytosis and killing of PMN and MO. On the other hand, this cytokine was per se endowed with the capacity to enhance PMN polarization in both cancer patients (at T2 interval) and normal donors.
Candida activates complement via all three pathways leading to opsonisation and anaphylaxis. The aim of the study was to investigate the influence of the terminal complement system on Candida ...infections. Thus, fungal cell growth, mitochondrial activity and phagocytosis by polymorphonuclear leukocytes (PMNLs) as well as specific virulence factors, such as release of secreted aspartic protease (Sap) and adherence to epithelial cells, were assessed under the influence of normal or C6/C7-depleted serum. Candida (C.) dubliniensis was used in all experiments as prototype because of its known increased expression of Saps and its strong geno- and phenotypical similarity to the most abundant Candida species C. albicans. Being exposed to sufficient quantities of complement, fungal growth decreased and phagocytosis increased but mitochondrial activities of the yeast increased as well. Concerning the virulence factors, both adhesion and especially Sap release were markedly reduced in the presence of high serum concentrations. Interestingly, at low serum concentrations some opposite effects (an augmented cell growth, a higher Sap release and a stronger adhesion) were observed. In particular, it was shown that the presence of terminal complement factors, and thus the generation of the membrane attack complex, clearly induced a higher fungal mitochondrial activation and has an effect on host defence against yeast cells by augmenting phagocytosis.
In the last 2 years, medical researchers and clinical scientists have paid close attention to the problem of respiratory sound classification to classify COVID-19 disease symptoms. In the physical ...world, very few AI-based (Artificial Intelligence) techniques are often used to detect COVID-19/SARS-CoV-2 respiratory disease symptoms from the human respiratory system-generated acoustic sounds such as acoustic voice sound, breathing (inhale and exhale) sounds, and cough sound. We propose a light-weight Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) with Modified-Mel-frequency Cepstral Coefficient (M-MFCC) using different depths and kernel sizes to classify COVID-19 and other respiratory sound disease symptoms such as Asthma, Pertussis, and Bronchitis. The proposed network outperforms conventional feature extraction models and existing Deep Learning (DL) models for COVID-19/SARS-CoV-2 classification accuracy in the range of 4–10%. The model’s performance is compared with the COVID-19 crowdsourced benchmark dataset and gives a competitive performance. We applied different receptive fields and depths in the proposed model to get different contextual information that should aid in classification. And our experiments suggested 1
×
12 receptive fields and a depth of 5-Layer for the light-weight CNN to extract and identify the features from respiratory sound data. The model is also trained and tested with different modalities of data to showcase its effectiveness in classification.
Human respiratory sound auscultation (HRSA) parameters have been the real choice for detecting human respiratory diseases in the last few years. It is a challenging task to extract the respiratory ...sound features from the breath, voice, and cough sounds. The existing methods failed to extract the sound features to diagnose respiratory diseases. We proposed and evaluated a new regularized deep convolutional neural network (RDCNN) architecture to accept COVID-19 sound data and essential sound features. The proposed architecture is trained with the COVID-19 sound data sets and gives a better learning curve than any other state-of-the-art model. We examine the performance of RDCNN with Max-Pooling (Model-1) and without Max-Pooling (Model-2) functions. In this work, we observed that RDCNN model performance with three sound feature extraction methods Soft-Mel frequency channel, Log-Mel frequency spectrum, and Modified Mel-frequency Cepstral Coefficient (MMFCC) spectrum for COVID-19 sound data sets (KDD-data, ComParE2021-CCS-CSS-Data, and NeurlPs2021-data). To amplify the models’ performance, we applied the augmentation technique along with regularization. We have also carried out this work to estimate the mutation of SARS-CoV-2 in the five waves using prognostic models (fractal-based). The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance on the COVID-19 sound data set to identify COVID-19 disease symptoms. The model’s learnable parameter gradients have vanished in the intermediate layers while optimizing the prediction error which is addressed with our proposed RDCNN model. Our experiments suggested that 3 × 3 kernel size for regularized deep CNN (without max-pooling) shows 2–3% better classification accuracy compared to RDCNN with max-pooling. The experimental results suggest that this new approach may achieve the finest results on respiratory diseases.
Polished rice is one of the commonly consumed staple foods across the world. However, it contains limited nutrients especially iron (Fe) and zinc (Zn). To identify promising recombinant inbred lines ...(RILs) for grain Zn and single plant yield, 190 RILs developed from PR116 and Ranbir Basmati were evaluated in two environments (E1 and E2). A subset of 44 contrasting RILs for grain Zn was screened in another two environments (E3 and E4). Phenotypic data was collected for 10 traits, viz., days to 50% flowering, plant height, panicle length, number of tillers, single plant yield (SPY), test weight, Fe and Zn in brown (IBR, ZBR), and polished rice (IPR, ZPR). Stepwise regression analysis of trait data in 190 RILs and a subset of 44 RILs revealed the interdependence of ZPR, ZBR, IPR, and IBR and the negative association of grain Zn with single plant yield. Based on the additive main effect and multiplicative interaction (AMMI) and genotype and genotype × environment interaction (GGE) analyses of the subset of 44 RILs across four environments (E1-E4), six promising RILs were identified for ZPR with >28 ppm. Mapping of 190 RILs with 102 simple sequence repeats (SSRs) resulted in 13 QTLs for best linear unbiased estimates (BLUEs) of traits including advantage over check (AOC). Using genotype-based sequencing (GBS), the subset of 44 RILs was mapped with 1035 single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) and 21 QTLs were identified. More than 100 epistatic interactions were observed. A major QTL
(PV 37.84%) and another QTL
(PV 15.47%) were identified for grain Zn in polished rice. A common major QTL (
and
) was also identified on chromosome 2 for grain Zn content across SSR and SNP maps. Two potential candidate genes related to transporters were identified based on network analyses in the genomic regions of QTL < 3 Mb. The RILs identified for grain Zn and SPY were nominated for national evaluation as under rice biofortification, and two QTLs identified based on BLUEs could be used in the rice biofortification breeding programs.
Polished rice is widely consumed staple food across the globe, however, it contains limited nutrients especially iron (Fe) and zinc (Zn). To identify promising genotypes for grain Zn, a total of 40 ...genotypes consisting 20 rice landraces, and 20 released high yielding rice varieties were evaluated in three environments (wet seasons 2014, 2015 and 2016) for nine traits including days to 50% flowering (DFF), plant height (PH), panicle length (PL), total number of tillers (TNT), single plant yield (SPY), Fe and Zn in brown (IBR, ZBR) and polished rice (IPR, ZPR). Additive Main Effect and Multiplicative Interaction (AMMI), Genotype and Genotype × Environment Interaction (GGE) analyses identified genotypes G22 (Edavankudi Pokkali), G17 (Taraori Basmati), G27 (Chittimuthyalu) and G26 (Kalanamak) stable for ZPR and G8 (Savitri) stable for SPY across three environments. Significant negative correlation between yield and grain Zn was reaffirmed. Regression analysis indicated the contribution of traits toward ZPR and SPY and also desirable level of grain Zn in brown rice. A total of 39,137 polymorphic single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) were obtained through double digest restriction site associated DNA (dd-RAD) sequencing of 40 genotypes. Association analyses with nine phenotypic traits revealed 188 stable SNPs with six traits across three environments. ZPR was associated with SNPs located in three putative candidate genes (LOC_Os03g47980, LOC_Os07g47950 and LOC_Os07g48050) on chromosomes 3 and 7. The genomic region of chromosome 7 co localized with reported genomic regions (rMQTL
7
.
1
) and OsNAS3 candidate gene. SPY was found to be associated with 12 stable SNPs located in 11 putative candidate genes on chromosome 1, 6, and 12. Characterization of rice landraces and varieties in terms of stability for their grain Zn and yield identified promising donors and recipients along with genomic regions in the present study to be deployed rice Zn biofortification breeding program.
In the past decade, increasing efforts have been devoted to the study of galectins, a family of evolutionarily conserved glycan-binding proteins with multifunctional properties. Galectins function, ...either intracellularly or extracellularly, as key biological mediators capable of monitoring changes occurring on the cell surface during fundamental biological processes such as cellular communication, inflammation, development, and differentiation. Their highly conserved structures, exquisite carbohydrate specificity, and ability to modulate a broad spectrum of biological processes have captivated a wide range of scientists from a wide spectrum of disciplines, including biochemistry, biophysics, cell biology, and physiology. However, in spite of enormous efforts to dissect the functions and properties of these glycan-binding proteins, limited information about how structural and biochemical aspects of these proteins can influence biological functions is available. In this review, we aim to integrate structural, biochemical, and functional aspects of this bewildering and ancient family of glycan-binding proteins and discuss their implications in physiologic and pathologic settings.
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