Université de Montréal

About: Université de Montréal is a education organization based out in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Context (language use). The organization has 45641 authors who have published 100476 publications receiving 4004007 citations. The organization is also known as: University of Montreal & UdeM.

Cutting Edge: 1,25-dihydroxyvitamin D3 Is a Direct Inducer of Antimicrobial Peptide Gene Expression

Abstract: The hormonal form of vitamin D3, 1,25-dihydroxyvitamin D3 (1,25(OH)2D3), is an immune system modulator and induces expression of the TLR coreceptor CD14. 1,25(OH)2D3 signals through the vitamin D receptor, a ligand-stimulated transcription factor that recognizes specific DNA sequences called vitamin D response elements. In this study, we show that 1,25(OH)2D3 is a direct regulator of antimicrobial innate immune responses. The promoters of the human cathelicidin antimicrobial peptide (camp) and defensin β2 (defB2) genes contain consensus vitamin D response elements that mediate 1,25(OH)2D3-dependent gene expression. 1,25(OH)2D3 induces antimicrobial peptide gene expression in isolated human keratinocytes, monocytes and neutrophils, and human cell lines, and 1,25(OH)2D3 along with LPS synergistically induce camp expression in neutrophils. Moreover, 1,25(OH)2D3 induces corresponding increases in antimicrobial proteins and secretion of antimicrobial activity against pathogens including Pseudomonas aeruginosa. 1,25(OH)2D3 thus directly regulates antimicrobial peptide gene expression, revealing the potential of its analogues in treatment of opportunistic infections.

TARDBP mutations in individuals with sporadic and familial amyotrophic lateral sclerosis

Abstract: Recently, TDP-43 was identified as a key component of ubiquitinated aggregates in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), an adult-onset neurological disorder that leads to the degeneration of motor neurons. Here we report eight missense mutations in nine individuals--six from individuals with sporadic ALS (SALS) and three from those with familial ALS (FALS)--and a concurring increase of a smaller TDP-43 product. These findings further corroborate that TDP-43 is involved in ALS pathogenesis.

Attention-Based Models for Speech Recognition

Abstract: Recurrent sequence generators conditioned on input data through an attention mechanism have recently shown very good performance on a range of tasks in- cluding machine translation, handwriting synthesis and image caption gen- eration. We extend the attention-mechanism with features needed for speech recognition. We show that while an adaptation of the model used for machine translation in reaches a competitive 18.7% phoneme error rate (PER) on the TIMIT phoneme recognition task, it can only be applied to utterances which are roughly as long as the ones it was trained on. We offer a qualitative explanation of this failure and propose a novel and generic method of adding location-awareness to the attention mechanism to alleviate this issue. The new method yields a model that is robust to long inputs and achieves 18% PER in single utterances and 20% in 10-times longer (repeated) utterances. Finally, we propose a change to the at- tention mechanism that prevents it from concentrating too much on single frames, which further reduces PER to 17.6% level.