First detection of Waddlia chondrophila in Africa using SYBR Green real-time PCR on veterinary samples.

Waddlia chondrophila is a strict intracellular microorganism belonging to the order Chlamydiales that has been isolated twice from aborted bovine fetuses, once in USA and once in Germany. This bacterium is now considered as an abortigenic agent in cattle. However, no information is available regarding the presence of this bacterium in Africa. Given the low sensitivity of cell culture to recover such an obligate intracellular bacterium, molecular-based diagnostic approaches are warranted. This report describes the development of a quantitative SYBR Green real-time PCR assay targeting the recA gene of W. chondrophila. Analytical sensitivity was 10 copies of control plasmid DNA per reaction. No cross-amplification was observed when testing pathogens that can cause abortion in cattle. The PCR exhibited a good intra-run and inter-run reproducibility. This real-time PCR was then applied to 150 vaginal swabs taken from Tunisian cows that have aborted. Twelve samples revealed to be Waddlia positive, suggesting a possible role of this bacterium in this setting. This new real-time PCR assay represents a diagnostic tool that may be used to further study the prevalence of Waddlia infection

Molecular prevalence of Chlamydia and Chlamydia-like bacteria in Tunisian domestic ruminant farms and their influencing risk factors

Chlamydia and Chlamydia-like bacteria are well known to infect several organisms and may cause a wide range of diseases, particularly in ruminants. To gain insight into the prevalence and diversity of these intracellular bacteria, we applied a pan-Chlamydiales real-time PCR to 1,134 veterinary samples taken from 130 Tunisian ruminant herds. The true adjusted animal population-level prevalence was 12.9% in cattle, against 8.7% in sheep. In addition, the true adjusted herd-level prevalence of Chlamydiae was 80% in cattle and 25.5% in sheep. Chlamydiales from three familylevel lineages were detected indicating a high biodiversity of Chlamydiales in ruminant herds. Our results showed that Parachlamydia acanthamoebae could be responsiblefor bovine and ovine chlamydiosis in central-eastern Tunisia. Multivariable logistic regression analysis at the animal population level indicated that strata and digestive disorders variables were the important risk factors of bovine and ovine chlamydiosis. However, origin and age variables were found to be associated withbovine and ovine chlamydiosis, respectively. At the herd level, risk factors for Chlamydia positivity were as follows: abortion and herd size for cattle against breeding system, cleaning frequency, quarantine, use of disinfectant and floor type for sheep. Paying attention to these risk factors will help improvement of control programs against this harmful zoonotic disease

Multi Objective Optimization for Sustainable Manufacturing, Application in Turning

International audienceAs manufacturing converts raw materials into products, environmental wastes and emissions are simultaneously generated from the consumption of materials and energy during the manufacturing processes. Then, sustainable manufacturing is defined as the creation of manufactured products using processes that minimize negative environmental impacts, conserve energy and natural resources and that are safe on employees, communities and consumers. Such an approach requires a compromise between ecological and economic aspects to meet the pillars of sustainable development. This paper presents the implementation of particle swarm tool in order to solve multi-objective optimization for sustainable manufacturing. Hence, this study might serve as part of a global approach to model sustainable manufacturing. The main objective of this approach is to develop operations that allow production with respect of ecological, economic and technological constraints. We developed a case study on the cutting conditions during turning at the end of our study

Design and Modeling of a Mechatronic Power System of an Electric Vehicle

International audienc

Protoplasting impact on polyketide activity and characterization of the interspecific fusants from Streptomyces

The influence of protoplasting and protoplast regeneration on antibiotic activity, transfer of biosynthesis encoding genes in local Streptomyces spp. CN207 was studied. The frequency of regenerated protoplasts in the lag phase was 1.7x103 CFU/ml, in the beginning of the exponential phase 0.4x102 CFU/ml, in the exponential growth phase 2.5x103 CFU/ml, and 1.0x105 CFU/ml in stationary phase. The protoplast formation and regeneration technique resulted in a new isolate strain ofStreptomyces spp.PR01 that produced approximately 5 fold more Streptomyces spp. CN207 antibiotic. The protoplast fusion resulted in increased isolation of variants with higher antibiotic activity.Recombinant Streptomyces coelicolor PF04 was increased 10 times more than the wild strain. Theprocesses also affected on the strain resistance to some antibiotics but had no effect on the components of the antibiotic. The characteristics of this recombinant product were similar considerably to Streptomyces spp. CN207 product. Our data, in principal, indicate the possibility of transferring antibiotics cluster genes by fusion and provide a starting point for genetic and biochemicalinvestigations of CN207 biosynthesis

Dimensioning of an Electromagnetic Spindle with Interval Computation Technique

International audienc

Pre-designing of a mechatronic system using an analytical approach with Dymola

This paper presents a pre-dimensioning method applied to a mechatronic system and regarding the vibrational aspect, through a simple modeling process in Dymola environment. We study the vibration transmission between dynamic exciters (motors) and receivers (electronic cards) which are located on a simply supported rectangular plate, using an analytical approach. This new method will allow us to perform representative and robust modeling and simulation. The solution for this issue would be a pre-sizing and pre-positioning procedure. It aims to determine a set of possible technical solutions and principal characteristics before the definitive choice of components and precise sizing of the system. The presented method predicts also behaviour of the mechatronic system. In order to validate the model with respect to the finite element method, selected simulation results are presented

Crowd vs. Expert: What can relevance judgment rationales teach us about assessor disagreement?

© 2018 ACM. While crowdsourcing offers a low-cost, scalable way to collect relevance judgments, lack of transparency with remote crowd work has limited understanding about the quality of collected judgments. In prior work, we showed a variety of benefits from asking crowd workers to provide \em rationales for each relevance judgment \citemcdonnell2016relevant. In this work, we scale up our rationale-based judging design to assess its reliability on the 2014 TREC Web Track, collecting roughly 25K crowd judgments for 5K document-topic pairs. We also study having crowd judges perform topic-focused judging, rather than across topics, finding this improves quality. Overall, we show that crowd judgments can be used to reliably rank IR systems for evaluation. We further explore the potential of rationales to shed new light on reasons for judging disagreement between experts and crowd workers. Our qualitative and quantitative analysis distinguishes subjective vs.\ objective forms of disagreement, as well as the relative importance of each disagreement cause, and we present a new taxonomy for organizing the different types of disagreement we observe. We show that many crowd disagreements seem valid and plausible, with disagreement in many cases due to judging errors by the original TREC assessors. We also share our WebCrowd25k dataset, including: (1) crowd judgments with rationales, and (2) taxonomy category labels for each judging disagreement analyzed

QHAR: Q-Holonic-Based ARchitecture for Self-Configuration of Cyber–Physical Production Systems

Production systems must be able to adapt to increasingly frequent internal and external changes. Cyber-Physical Production Systems (CPPS), thanks to their potential capacity for self-reconfiguration, can cope with this need for adaptation. To implement the self-reconfiguration functionality in economical and safe conditions, CPPS must have appropriate tools and contextualized information. This information can be organized in the form of an architecture. In this paper, after the analysis of several holonic and nonholonic architectures, we propose a holonic architecture that allows for reliable and efficient reconfiguration. We call this architecture QHAR (Q-Holonic-based ARchitecture). QHAR is constructed based on the idea of a Q-holon, which has four dimensions (physical, cyber, human, and energy) and can exchange three flows (energy, data, and materials). It is a generic Holon that can represent any entity or actor of the supply chain. The QHAR is structured in three levels: centralized control level, decentralized control level, and execution level. QHAR implements the principle of an oligarchical control architecture by deploying both hierarchical and heterarchical control approaches. This ensures the overall system performance and reactivity to hazards. The proposed architecture is tested and validated on a case study

Catalytic microreactor with immobilised silver nanocluster for organic pollutant removal from water

The use of microchannels for catalytic reactions represents a considerable experimental opportunity, because of the high surface area to volume ratio these devices typically have. However, incorporating catalysts into microfluidic devices has proven technically challenging. We report the development of a new type of microfluidic device that has a catalytically active metal surface with a large active area built into one of the walls that constitute the microchannel. We test the catalytical activity on an important chemical reaction for drinking water purification: the catalytic ozonation of a typical organic pollutant that is otherwise difficult to remove from the water. pCBA was chosen as model pollutant since it is known to have slow reaction rates with molecular ozone and hence to pose problems in water purification. We find that the catalytic microreactor increases the overall reaction rate by a factor 350 compared to the bulk reaction, owing to both the catalytic activity and the confinement, and is thus highly efficient even for very short residence times