966 research outputs found
The potentiating effect of mandelate and lactate on chemically-induced germination in members of Bacillus cereus sensu lato.
ABSTRACT
Endospores of the genus
Bacillus
can be triggered to germinate by a limited number of chemicals. Mandelate had powerful additive effects on the levels and rates of germination produced in non-heat-shocked spores of
Bacillus anthracis
strain Sterne,
Bacillus cereus
, and
Bacillus thuringiensis
when combined with
l
-alanine and inosine. Mandelate had no germinant effect on its own but was active with these germinants in a dose-dependent manner at concentrations higher than 0.5 mM. The maximum rate and extent of germination were produced in
B. anthracis
by 100 mM
l
-alanine with 10 mM inosine; this was equaled by just 25% of these germinants when supplemented with 10 mM mandelate. Half the maximal germination rate was produced by 40% of the optimum germinant concentrations or 15% of them when supplemented with 0.8 mM mandelate. Germination rates in
B. thuringiensis
were highest around neutrality, but the potentiating effect of mandelate was maintained over a wider pH range than was germination with
l
-alanine and inosine alone. For all species, lactate also promoted germination in the presence of
l
-alanine and inosine; this was further increased by mandelate. Ammonium ions also enhanced
l
-alanine- and inosine-induced germination but only when mandelate was present. In spite of the structural similarities, mandelate did not compete with phenylalanine as a germinant. Mandelate appeared to bind to spores while enhancing germination. There was no effect when mandelate was used in conjunction with nonnutrient germinants. No effect was produced with spores of
Bacillus subtilis
,
Clostridium sporogenes
, or
C. difficile
.
IMPORTANCE
The number of chemicals that can induce germination in the species related to
Bacillus cereus
has been defined for many years, and they conform to specific chemical types. Although not a germinant itself, mandelate has a structure that is different from these germination-active compounds, and its addition to this list represents a significant discovery in the fundamental biology of spore germination. This novel activity may also have important applied relevance given the impact of spores of
B. cereus
in foodborne disease and
B. anthracis
as a threat agent. The destruction of spores of
B. anthracis
, for example, particularly over large outdoor areas, poses significant scientific and logistical problems. The addition of mandelate and lactate to the established mixtures of
l
-alanine and inosine would decrease the amount of the established germinants required and increase the speed and level of germination achieved. The large-scale application of “germinate to decontaminate” strategy may thus become more practicable.
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Towards Analyzing Semantic Robustness of Deep Neural Networks
Despite the impressive performance of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) on various
vision tasks, they still exhibit erroneous high sensitivity toward semantic
primitives (e.g. object pose). We propose a theoretically grounded analysis for
DNN robustness in the semantic space. We qualitatively analyze different DNNs'
semantic robustness by visualizing the DNN global behavior as semantic maps and
observe interesting behavior of some DNNs. Since generating these semantic maps
does not scale well with the dimensionality of the semantic space, we develop a
bottom-up approach to detect robust regions of DNNs. To achieve this, we
formalize the problem of finding robust semantic regions of the network as
optimizing integral bounds and we develop expressions for update directions of
the region bounds. We use our developed formulations to quantitatively evaluate
the semantic robustness of different popular network architectures. We show
through extensive experimentation that several networks, while trained on the
same dataset and enjoying comparable accuracy, do not necessarily perform
similarly in semantic robustness. For example, InceptionV3 is more accurate
despite being less semantically robust than ResNet50. We hope that this tool
will serve as a milestone towards understanding the semantic robustness of
DNNs.Comment: Presented at European conference on computer vision (ECCV 2020)
Workshop on Adversarial Robustness in the Real World (
https://eccv20-adv-workshop.github.io/ ) [best paper award]. The code is
available at https://github.com/ajhamdi/semantic-robustnes
Stress dependent thermal pressurization of a fluid-saturated rock
Temperature increase in saturated porous materials under undrained conditions
leads to thermal pressurization of the pore fluid due to the discrepancy
between the thermal expansion coefficients of the pore fluid and of the solid
matrix. This increase in the pore fluid pressure induces a reduction of the
effective mean stress and can lead to shear failure or hydraulic fracturing.
The equations governing the phenomenon of thermal pressurization are presented
and this phenomenon is studied experimentally for a saturated granular rock in
an undrained heating test under constant isotropic stress. Careful analysis of
the effect of mechanical and thermal deformation of the drainage and pressure
measurement system is performed and a correction of the measured pore pressure
is introduced. The test results are modelled using a non-linear
thermo-poro-elastic constitutive model of the granular rock with emphasis on
the stress-dependent character of the rock compressibility. The effects of
stress and temperature on thermal pressurization observed in the tests are
correctly reproduced by the model
Spectral Pattern Recognition by a Two-Layer Perceptron: Effects of Training Set Size
Pattern recognition in urban areas is one of the most challenging issues in
classifying satellite remote sensing data. Parametric pixel-by-pixel classification
algorithms tend to perform poorly in this context. This is because urban areas
comprise a complex spatial assemblage of disparate land cover types - including
built structures, numerous vegetation types, bare soil and water bodies. Thus,
there is a need for more powerful spectral pattern recognition techniques,
utilizing pixel-by-pixel spectral information as the basis for automated urban
land cover detection. This paper adopts the multi-layer perceptron classifier
suggested and implemented in [5]. The objective of this study is to analyse the
performance and stability of this classifier - trained and tested for supervised
classification (8 a priori given land use classes) of a Landsat-5 TM image
(270 x 360 pixels) from the city of Vienna and its northern surroundings
- along with varying the training data set in the single-training-site case.
The performance is measured in terms of total classification, map user's and
map producer's accuracies. In addition, the stability with initial parameter
conditions, classification error matrices, and error curves are analysed in some
detail. (authors' abstract)Series: Discussion Papers of the Institute for Economic Geography and GIScienc
Crystal structure of Hop2-Mnd1 and mechanistic insights into its role in meiotic recombination
In meiotic DNA recombination, the Hop2-Mnd1 complex promotes Dmc1-mediated single-stranded DNA (ssDNA) invasion into homologous chromosomes to form a synaptic complex by a yet-unclear mechanism. Here, the crystal structure of Hop2-Mnd1 reveals that it forms a curved rod-like structure consisting of three leucine zippers and two kinked junctions. One end of the rod is linked to two juxtaposed winged-helix domains, and the other end is capped by extra ?-helices to form a helical bundle-like structure. Deletion analysis shows that the helical bundle-like structure is sufficient for interacting with the Dmc1-ssDNA nucleofilament, and molecular modeling suggests that the curved rod could be accommodated into the helical groove of the nucleofilament. Remarkably, the winged-helix domains are juxtaposed at fixed relative orientation, and their binding to DNA is likely to perturb the base pairing according to molecular simulations. These findings allow us to propose a model explaining how Hop2-Mnd1 juxtaposes Dmc1-bound ssDNA with distorted recipient double-stranded DNA and thus facilitates strand invasion
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Do emotional difficulties and peer problems hew together from childhood to adolescence? The case of children with a history of developmental language disorder (DLD)
Children and adolescents with developmental language disorder (DLD) are, overall, vulnerable to difficulties in emotional adjustment and in peer relations. However, previous research has shown that different subgroups follow different trajectories in respect of quality of peer relations. Less is known of the trajectories of emotional development. We consider here the possibility that development in these two domains is interrelated: that is, the trajectories of emotional and peer problems will proceed in parallel. We conducted longitudinal joint trajectories analyses of emotional and peer relations in a sample of young people identified as having DLD at age 7 years and seen at intervals up to 16 years. Potential influences on joint trajectory group membership were examined. Findings revealed five distinct joint trajectories. Emotional and peer difficulties do hew together from childhood to adolescence for just over half of the sample, but not all. The variables most clearly associated with group membership were pragmatic language ability, prosociality and parental mental health. This is the first study to examine joint longitudinal trajectories of emotional and peer difficulties in individuals with DLD. We demonstrate that development in individuals with DLD is heterogeneous and identify three key variables associated with personal and social adjustment from childhood to adolescence. Theoretical and clinical implications of these findings are discussed
All clinically-relevant blood components transmit prion disease following a single blood transfusion: a sheep model of vCJD
Variant CJD (vCJD) is an incurable, infectious human disease, likely arising from the consumption of BSE-contaminated meat products. Whilst the epidemic appears to be waning, there is much concern that vCJD infection may be perpetuated in humans by the transfusion of contaminated blood products. Since 2004, several cases of transfusion-associated vCJD transmission have been reported and linked to blood collected from pre-clinically affected donors. Using an animal model in which the disease manifested resembles that of humans affected with vCJD, we examined which blood components used in human medicine are likely to pose the greatest risk of transmitting vCJD via transfusion. We collected two full units of blood from BSE-infected donor animals during the pre-clinical phase of infection. Using methods employed by transfusion services we prepared red cell concentrates, plasma and platelets units (including leucoreduced equivalents). Following transfusion, we showed that all components contain sufficient levels of infectivity to cause disease following only a single transfusion and also that leucoreduction did not prevent disease transmission. These data suggest that all blood components are vectors for prion disease transmission, and highlight the importance of multiple control measures to minimise the risk of human to human transmission of vCJD by blood transfusion
Enteric-coated sodium bicarbonate supplementation improves high-intensity cycling performance in trained cyclists
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