First measurements of in-jet fragmentation and correlations of charmed mesons and baryons in pp collisions with ALICE

Fragmentation functions are one of the key components of the factorisation theorem used to calculate heavy-flavour hadron production cross sections. The non-perturbative nature of fragmentation functions necessitates that they are constrained through experimental measurements, commonly performed in the clean environments of $\mathrm{e}^{+}\mathrm{e}^{-}$ and ep collisions. However, recent measurements of charm-hadron transverse-momentum spectra and the ratios of charmed-hadron abundances in pp collisions have questioned the universality of fragmentation functions between leptonic and hadronic collision systems in the baryon sector. In this contribution, we present measurements of differential observables of heavy-flavour hadrons that also consider the hadronic density surrounding the hadron. These measurements provide additional information to the previously reported baryon-to-meson results and allow us closer access to the charm fragmentation functions. We report the fraction of longitudinal momentum carried by $\mathrm{D^{0}}$ and $\mathrm{D^{+}_{s}}$ mesons as well as $\Lambda^{+}_\mathrm{c}$ baryons. We also report the azimuthal correlation distributions between heavy-flavour decay electrons and charged particles in pp and p--Pb collisions, as well as between $\Lambda^{+}_\mathrm{c}$ baryons and charged particles in pp collisions, which provide quantitative access to the angular profile, $p_{\mathrm{T}}$ and multiplicity distributions of the jets produced by the heavy-quark fragmentation

Identification of miR-9-5p as direct regulator of ABCA1 and HDL-driven reverse cholesterol transport in circulating CD14+ cells of patients with metabolic syndrome.

AIMS: Metabolic syndrome (MS) is a cluster of cardio-metabolic risk factors associated with atherosclerosis and low-grade inflammation. Using unbiased expression screenings in peripheral blood mononuclear cells, we depict here a novel expression chart of 678 genes and 84 microRNAs (miRNAs) controlling inflammatory, immune and metabolic responses. In order to further elucidate the link between inflammation and the HDL cholesterol pathway in MS, we focussed on the regulation of the ATP-binding cassette transporter A1 (ABCA1), a key player in cholesterol efflux (CE). METHODS AND RESULTS: ABCA1 mRNA levels are suppressed in CD14+ cells of MS patients and are negatively correlated to body mass index (BMI), insulin-resistance (HOMA-IR) and cardiovascular risk, and positively to HDL cholesterol and CE. miRNA target in silico prediction identified a putative modulatory role of ABCA1 for the nuclear factor kappa-light-chain-enhancer of activated B cell (NF-κB) target miR-9-5p, whose expression pattern was up-regulated in CD14+ cells of MS patients, positively correlated to BMI, HOMA-IR, and triglycerides, and negatively to ABCA1 mRNA levels, HDL cholesterol and CE. Ectopic gain and loss of miR-9-5p function in macrophages modulated ABCA1 mRNA and protein levels, ABCA1 miRNA 3'-untranslated region target sequence reporter assay, and CE into HDL, thus confirming ABCA1 as a target of miR-9-5p. CONCLUSIONS: We identified the NF-κB target miR-9-5p as a negative regulator of ABCA1 adding a novel target pathway in the relationship between inflammation and HDL-driven reverse cholesterol transport for prevention or treatment of atherosclerosis in MS.N/

Identification of miR-9-5p as direct regulator of ABCA1 and HDL-driven reverse cholesterol transport in circulating CD14+ cells of patients with metabolic syndrome.

Aims: Metabolic syndrome (MS) is a cluster of cardio-metabolic risk factors associated with atherosclerosis and low-grade inflammation. Using unbiased expression screenings in peripheral blood mononuclear cells, we depict here a novel expression chart of 678 genes and 84 microRNAs (miRNAs) controlling inflammatory, immune and metabolic responses. In order to further elucidate the link between inflammation and the HDL cholesterol pathway in MS, we focussed on the regulation of the ATP-binding cassette transporter A1 (ABCA1), a key player in cholesterol efflux (CE). Methods and results: ABCA1 mRNA levels are suppressed in CD14+ cells of MS patients and are negatively correlated to body mass index (BMI), insulin-resistance (HOMA-IR) and cardiovascular risk, and positively to HDL cholesterol and CE. miRNA target in silico prediction identified a putative modulatory role of ABCA1 for the nuclear factor kappa-light-chain-enhancer of activated B cell (NF-κB) target miR-9-5p, whose expression pattern was up-regulated in CD14+ cells of MS patients, positively correlated to BMI, HOMA-IR, and triglycerides, and negatively to ABCA1 mRNA levels, HDL cholesterol and CE. Ectopic gain and loss of miR-9-5p function in macrophages modulated ABCA1 mRNA and protein levels, ABCA1 miRNA 3'-untranslated region target sequence reporter assay, and CE into HDL, thus confirming ABCA1 as a target of miR-9-5p. Conclusions: We identified the NF-κB target miR-9-5p as a negative regulator of ABCA1 adding a novel target pathway in the relationship between inflammation and HDL-driven reverse cholesterol transport for prevention or treatment of atherosclerosis in MS.N/

Serum Albumin Is Inversely Associated With Portal Vein Thrombosis in Cirrhosis

We analyzed whether serum albumin is independently associated with portal vein thrombosis (PVT) in liver cirrhosis (LC) and if a biologic plausibility exists. This study was divided into three parts. In part 1 (retrospective analysis), 753 consecutive patients with LC with ultrasound-detected PVT were retrospectively analyzed. In part 2, 112 patients with LC and 56 matched controls were entered in the cross-sectional study. In part 3, 5 patients with cirrhosis were entered in the in vivo study and 4 healthy subjects (HSs) were entered in the in vitro study to explore if albumin may affect platelet activation by modulating oxidative stress. In the 753 patients with LC, the prevalence of PVT was 16.7%; logistic analysis showed that only age (odds ratio [OR], 1.024; P = 0.012) and serum albumin (OR, -0.422; P = 0.0001) significantly predicted patients with PVT. Analyzing the 112 patients with LC and controls, soluble clusters of differentiation (CD)40-ligand (P = 0.0238), soluble Nox2-derived peptide (sNox2-dp; P < 0.0001), and urinary excretion of isoprostanes (P = 0.0078) were higher in patients with LC. In LC, albumin was correlated with sCD4OL (Spearman's rank correlation coefficient [r(s)], -0.33; P < 0.001), sNox2-dp (r(s), -0.57; P < 0.0001), and urinary excretion of isoprostanes (r(s), -0.48; P < 0.0001) levels. The in vivo study showed a progressive decrease in platelet aggregation, sNox2-dp, and urinary 8-iso prostaglandin F2 alpha-III formation 2 hours and 3 days after albumin infusion. Finally, platelet aggregation, sNox2-dp, and isoprostane formation significantly decreased in platelets from HSs incubated with scalar concentrations of albumin. Conclusion: Low serum albumin in LC is associated with PVT, suggesting that albumin could be a modulator of the hemostatic system through interference with mechanisms regulating platelet activation

BLOOM: A 176B-Parameter Open-Access Multilingual Language Model

Large language models (LLMs) have been shown to be able to perform new tasks based on a few demonstrations or natural language instructions. While these capabilities have led to widespread adoption, most LLMs are developed by resource-rich organizations and are frequently kept from the public. As a step towards democratizing this powerful technology, we present BLOOM, a 176B-parameter open-access language model designed and built thanks to a collaboration of hundreds of researchers. BLOOM is a decoder-only Transformer language model that was trained on the ROOTS corpus, a dataset comprising hundreds of sources in 46 natural and 13 programming languages (59 in total). We find that BLOOM achieves competitive performance on a wide variety of benchmarks, with stronger results after undergoing multitask prompted finetuning. To facilitate future research and applications using LLMs, we publicly release our models and code under the Responsible AI License

First measurements of in-jet fragmentation and correlations of charmed mesons and baryons in pp collisions with ALICE

Fragmentation functions are one of the key components of the factorisation theorem used to calculate heavy-flavour hadron production cross sections. The non-perturbative nature of fragmentation functions necessitates that they are constrained through experimental measurements, commonly performed in the clean environments of $\mathrm{e}^{+}\mathrm{e}^{-}$ and ep collisions. However, recent measurements of charm-hadron transverse-momentum spectra and the ratios of charmed-hadron abundances in pp collisions have questioned the universality of fragmentation functions between leptonic and hadronic collision systems in the baryon sector. In this contribution, we present measurements of differential observables of heavy-flavour hadrons that also consider the hadronic density surrounding the hadron. These measurements provide additional information to the previously reported baryon-to-meson results and allow us closer access to the charm fragmentation functions. We report the fraction of longitudinal momentum carried by $\mathrm{D^{0}}$ and $\mathrm{D^{+}_{s}}$ mesons as well as $\Lambda^{+}_\mathrm{c}$ baryons. We also report the azimuthal correlation distributions between heavy-flavour decay electrons and charged particles in pp and p--Pb collisions, as well as between $\Lambda^{+}_\mathrm{c}$ baryons and charged particles in pp collisions, which provide quantitative access to the angular profile, $p_{\mathrm{T}}$ and multiplicity distributions of the jets produced by the heavy-quark fragmentation