Functional characterization of infiltrating T lymphocytes in human hepatic allografts

We have employed recently developed techniques in T-cell culturing to study the nature and function of infiltrating hepatic allograft T cells. Using the rationale that intragraft T cells are activated during cell mediated damage to the allograft, we were able to show that these cells would propagate and remain functionally active in the presence of the T-cell growth factor, IL-2. In several instances, phenotyiic analysis of cells grown in this manner was very similar to that found within the graft. Both proliferative and cytotoxic responses could be detected from the cultured cell lines. The majority of the proliferative responses were donor-directed and immunogenetic analysis could define donor-directed HLA reactivity, to either class I or class II antigens, or both. Monoclonal anti-HLA antibodies inhibition profiles verified the apparent HLA reactivity. In a smaller percentage of cases, only IL-2 responsiveness could be detected, and no HLA reactivity could be determined. Cytotoxicity could be detected against both class I and class II antigens, however, those cells which demonstrated a greater magnitude of donor-directed cytotoxicity appeared to be directed against class I antigens. A significant correlation between donor-directed proliferation of biopsy cultured lymphocytes and cellular rejection was found. This model appears to be useful in delineating functions of the intragraft T-cell population during rejection. © 1986

VIVID: A web application for variant interpretation and visualization in multi-dimensional analyses

Large-scale comparative genomics- and population genetic studies generate enormous amounts of polymorphism data in the form of DNA variants. Ultimately, the goal of many of these studies is to associate genetic variants to phenotypes or fitness. We introduce VIVID, an interactive, user-friendly web application that integrates a wide range of approaches for encoding genotypic to phenotypic information in any organism or disease, from an individual or population, in three-dimensional (3D) space. It allows mutation mapping and annotation, calculation of interactions and conservation scores, prediction of harmful effects, analysis of diversity and selection, and 3D visualization of genotypic information encoded in Variant Call Format on AlphaFold2 protein models. VIVID enables the rapid assessment of genes of interest in the study of adaptive evolution and the genetic load, and it helps prioritizing targets for experimental validation. We demonstrate the utility of VIVID by exploring the evolutionary genetics of the parasitic protist Plasmodium falciparum, revealing geographic variation in the signature of balancing selection in potential targets of functional antibodies

Financial Characteristics of Companies Audited by Large Audit Firms

Purpose “ The purpose of this paper is to examine how financial characteristics associated with the choice of a big audit firm with further investigation on the agency costs of free cash flows.Design/methodology/approach “ The sample used for this work includes industrial listed companies from Germany and France. To test our hypothesis, we used a number of logit models, extending the standard model selection audit firm, to include the variables of interest. Following previous work, our dependent dummy variable is Big4 or non-Big4.Findings “ We observed that most independent variables in the German companies show similar results to previous work, but we did not have the same results for the French industry. Moreover, our findings suggest that the total debt and dividends can be an important reason for determining the choice of a large audit firm, reducing agency costs of free cash flows.Research limitations/implications “ This study has some limitations on the measurements of the cost of the audit fees and also generates opportunities for additional searching.Originality/value “ The paper provides only one aspect to explain the relationship between the problems of agency costs of free cash flow and influence in choosing a large auditing firm, which stems from investors\u27 demand for higher quality audits

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Delivery of crop pollination services is an insufficient argument for wild pollinator conservation

There is compelling evidence that more diverse ecosystems deliver greater benefits to people, and these ecosystem services have become a key argument for biodiversity conservation. However, it is unclear how much biodiversity is needed to deliver ecosystem services in a cost-effective way. Here we show that, while the contribution of wild bees to crop production is significant, service delivery is restricted to a limited subset of all known bee species. Across crops, years and biogeographical regions, crop-visiting wild bee communities are dominated by a small number of common species, and threatened species are rarely observed on crops. Dominant crop pollinators persist under agricultural expansion and many are easily enhanced by simple conservation measures, suggesting that cost-effective management strategies to promote crop pollination should target a different set of species than management strategies to promote threatened bees. Conserving the biological diversity of bees therefore requires more than just ecosystem-service-based arguments

Les débats sur la ville. 1

217 p.Comment conduire un projet urbain ? Qu'est-ce qu'un espace public ? Comment une meilleure conception des voies peut-elle requalifier un territoire ? Quelles sont les conditions d'élaboration d'un projet métropolitain ? Les villes doivent-elles se plier ou bien se soustraire aux critères imposés par la mondialisation ? Quelles méthodes de planification pour quels objectifs de développement ? Quelle ville vivrons-nous demain : entre étalement péri-urbain et urbanisme de proximité, la prospective tranche-t-elle ? Comment organiser un "service public de la mobilité", à supposer que l'on ait encore besoin de se déplacer ? Telles sont quelques-unes des questions auxquelles ce premier volume des Débats sur la ville apporte des réponses. Il rassemble les textes rédigés à partir des conférences d'éminents urbanistes, économistes, professeurs et consultants français et étrangers, invités par l'Agence d'urbanisme de Bordeaux Métropole d'Aquitaine et par la Chambre de commerce et d'industrie de Bordeaux. La qualité des interventions ici offertes fait de cet ouvrages un outil particulièrement intéressant pour tous ceux qui se sentent concernés par les débats et réflexions sur la ville