Impact of Intermediate Hyperglycemia and Diabetes on Immune Dysfunction in Tuberculosis

Supplementary Data: Supplementary materials are available at Clinical Infectious Diseases online at https://academic.oup.com/cid/article/72/1/69/5857148#274319223 . Consisting of data provided by the authors to benefit the reader, the posted materials are not copyedited and are the sole responsibility of the authors, so questions or comments should be addressed to the corresponding author.Copyright © The Author(s) 2020. Background: People with diabetes have an increased risk of developing active tuberculosis (TB) and are more likely to have poor TB-treatment outcomes, which may impact on control of TB as the prevalence of diabetes is increasing worldwide. Blood transcriptomes are altered in patients with active TB relative to healthy individuals. The effects of diabetes and intermediate hyperglycemia (IH) on this transcriptomic signature were investigated to enhance understanding of immunological susceptibility in diabetes-TB comorbidity. Methods: Whole blood samples were collected from active TB patients with diabetes (glycated hemoglobin [HbA1c] ≥6.5%) or IH (HbA1c = 5.7% to <6.5%), TB-only patients, and healthy controls in 4 countries: South Africa, Romania, Indonesia, and Peru. Differential blood gene expression was determined by RNA-seq (n = 249). Results: Diabetes increased the magnitude of gene expression change in the host transcriptome in TB, notably showing an increase in genes associated with innate inflammatory and decrease in adaptive immune responses. Strikingly, patients with IH and TB exhibited blood transcriptomes much more similar to patients with diabetes-TB than to patients with only TB. Both diabetes-TB and IH-TB patients had a decreased type I interferon response relative to TB-only patients. Conclusions: Comorbidity in individuals with both TB and diabetes is associated with altered transcriptomes, with an expected enhanced inflammation in the presence of both conditions, but also reduced type I interferon responses in comorbid patients, suggesting an unexpected uncoupling of the TB transcriptome phenotype. These immunological dysfunctions are also present in individuals with IH, showing that altered immunity to TB may also be present in this group. The TB disease outcomes in individuals with IH diagnosed with TB should be investigated further.European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7 2007-2013 - Health) under grant agreement No 305279

Localized versus Locality-Preserving Subspace Projections for Face Recognition

Three different localized representation methods and a manifold learning approach to face recognition are compared in terms of recognition accuracy. The techniques under investigation are (a) local nonnegative matrix factorization (LNMF); (b) independent component analysis (ICA); (c) NMF with sparse constraints (NMFsc); (d) locality-preserving projections (Laplacian faces). A systematic comparative analysis is conducted in terms of distance metric used, number of selected features, and sources of variability on AR and Olivetti face databases. Results indicate that the relative ranking of the methods is highly task-dependent, and the performances vary significantly upon the distance metric used

Using the REA ontology to create interoperability between e-collaboration modeling standards

E-collaboration modeling standards like ISO/IEC 15944 and the UN/CEFACT Modeling Methodology (UMM) provide techniques, terms and reference models for modeling collaborative business processes. They offer a standardized approach for business partners to codify the business conventions, agreements and rules that govern business collaborations and to share business process information. Although effective in creating interoperability between organizations at the business process level, prospective business partners are required to commit to the same modeling standard. In this paper we show how the REA enterprise ontology can be used to semantically relate the ISO/IEC 15944 and UMM e-collaboration standards. Using the REA ontology as a shared business collaboration ontology, business partners can create interoperability between their respective business process models without having to use the same modeling standard