The multitasking Fasciola gigantica Cathepsin B interferes with various functions of goat peripheral blood mononuclear cells in vitro

Cathepsin B, a lysosomal cysteine protease, is thought to be involved in the pathogenesis of Fasciola gigantica infection, but its exact role remains unclear. In the present study, a recombinant F. gigantica cathepsin B (rFgCatB) protein was expressed in the methylotrophic yeast Pichia pastoris. Western blot analysis confirmed the reactivity of the purified rFgCatB protein to serum from F. gigantica-infected goats. The effects of serial concentrations (10, 20, 40, 80, and 160 μg/ml) of rFgCatB on various functions of goat peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) were examined. We demonstrated that rFgCatB protein can specifically bind to the surface of PBMCs. In addition, rFgCatB increased the expression of cytokines (IL-2, IL-4, IL-10, IL-17, TGF-β, and IFN-γ), and increased nitric oxide production and cell apoptosis, but reduced cell viability. These data show that rFgCatB can influence cellular and immunological functions of goat PBMCs. Further characterization of the posttranslational modification and assessment of rFgCatB in immunogenicity studies is warranted

Dual-path TokenLearner for Remote Photoplethysmography-based Physiological Measurement with Facial Videos

Remote photoplethysmography (rPPG) based physiological measurement is an emerging yet crucial vision task, whose challenge lies in exploring accurate rPPG prediction from facial videos accompanied by noises of illumination variations, facial occlusions, head movements, \etc, in a non-contact manner. Existing mainstream CNN-based models make efforts to detect physiological signals by capturing subtle color changes in facial regions of interest (ROI) caused by heartbeats. However, such models are constrained by the limited local spatial or temporal receptive fields in the neural units. Unlike them, a native Transformer-based framework called Dual-path TokenLearner (Dual-TL) is proposed in this paper, which utilizes the concept of learnable tokens to integrate both spatial and temporal informative contexts from the global perspective of the video. Specifically, the proposed Dual-TL uses a Spatial TokenLearner (S-TL) to explore associations in different facial ROIs, which promises the rPPG prediction far away from noisy ROI disturbances. Complementarily, a Temporal TokenLearner (T-TL) is designed to infer the quasi-periodic pattern of heartbeats, which eliminates temporal disturbances such as head movements. The two TokenLearners, S-TL and T-TL, are executed in a dual-path mode. This enables the model to reduce noise disturbances for final rPPG signal prediction. Extensive experiments on four physiological measurement benchmark datasets are conducted. The Dual-TL achieves state-of-the-art performances in both intra- and cross-dataset testings, demonstrating its immense potential as a basic backbone for rPPG measurement. The source code is available at \href{https://github.com/VUT-HFUT/Dual-TL}{https://github.com/VUT-HFUT/Dual-TL

9-[(Furan-2-ylmeth­yl)amino]-5-(3,4,5-trimeth­oxy­phen­yl)-5,5a,8a,9-tetra­hydro­furo[3′,4′:6,7]naphtho­[2,3-d][1,3]dioxol-6(8H)-one

In title compound, C27H27NO8, the dihydrofuran-2(3H)-one ring and the six-membered ring fused to it both display envelope conformations. The dihedral angle between the benzene ring of the benzo[d][1,3]dioxole group and the other benzene ring is 60.59 (2)°. In the crystal, weak inter­molecular C—H⋯O hydrogen bonds link the mol­ecules into a three-dimensional network. The furan ring is disordered over two sets of sites with occupancies of 0.722 (7) and 0.278 (7

9-{[4-(Dimethyl­amino)­benzyl]amino}-5-(4-hy­droxy-3,5-dimeth­oxy­phenyl)-5,5a,8a,9-tetra­hydro­furo[3′,4′:6,7]naphtho­[2,3-d][1,3]dioxol-6(8H)-one methanol monosolvate

In the title compound, C30H32N2O7·CH4O, the tetra­hydro­furan ring and the six-membered ring fused to it both display envelope conformations, with the ring C atom opposite the carbonyl group and the adjacent bridgehead C atom as the flaps, respectively. In the crystal structure, inter­molecular O—H⋯O hydrogen bonds link all moieties into ribbons along [010]. Weak inter­molecular C—H⋯O inter­actions consolidate the crystal packing further

Calibration of metallicity of LAMOST M dwarf stars Using FGK+M wide binaries

Estimating precise metallicity of M dwarfs is a well-known difficult problem due to their complex spectra. In this work, we empirically calibrate the metallicity using wide binaries with a F, G, or K dwarf and a M dwarf companion. With 1308 FGK+M wide binaries well observed by LAMOST, we calibrated M dwarf's [Fe/H] by using the Stellar LAbel Machine (SLAM) model, a data-driven method based on support vector regression (SVR). The [Fe/H] labels of the training data are from FGK companions in range of [-1,0.5] dex. The Teffs are selected from Li et al. (2021), spanning [3100,4400] K. The uncertainties in SLAM estimates of [Fe/H] and Teff are ~0.15 dex and ~40 K, respectively, at snri > 100, where snri is the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) at i-band of M dwarf spectra. We applied the trained SLAM model to determine the [Fe/H] and Teff for ~630,000 M dwarfs with low-resolution spectra in LAMOST DR9. Compared to other literature also using FGK+M wide binaries for calibration, our [Fe/H] estimates show no bias but a scatter of ~ 0.14-0.18 dex. However, the [Fe/H] compared to APOGEE shows a systematic difference of ~ 0.10-0.15 dex with a scatter of ~ 0.15-0.20 dex. While the Teff compared to APOGEE has a bias of 3 K with a scatter of 62 K, it is systematically higher by 180 K compared to other calibrations based on the bolometric temperature. Finally, we calculated the zeta index for 1308 M dwarf secondaries and presents a moderate correlation between zeta and [Fe/H].Comment: 18 pages, 15 Figure

Genome-wide investigation reveals high evolutionary rates in annual model plants

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Rates of molecular evolution vary widely among species. While significant deviations from molecular clock have been found in many taxa, effects of life histories on molecular evolution are not fully understood. In plants, annual/perennial life history traits have long been suspected to influence the evolutionary rates at the molecular level. To date, however, the number of genes investigated on this subject is limited and the conclusions are mixed. To evaluate the possible heterogeneity in evolutionary rates between annual and perennial plants at the genomic level, we investigated 85 nuclear housekeeping genes, 10 non-housekeeping families, and 34 chloroplast genes using the genomic data from model plants including <it>Arabidopsis thaliana </it>and <it>Medicago truncatula </it>for annuals and grape (<it>Vitis vinifera</it>) and popular (<it>Populus trichocarpa</it>) for perennials.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>According to the cross-comparisons among the four species, 74-82% of the nuclear genes and 71-97% of the chloroplast genes suggested higher rates of molecular evolution in the two annuals than those in the two perennials. The significant heterogeneity in evolutionary rate between annuals and perennials was consistently found both in nonsynonymous sites and synonymous sites. While a linear correlation of evolutionary rates in orthologous genes between species was observed in nonsynonymous sites, the correlation was weak or invisible in synonymous sites. This tendency was clearer in nuclear genes than in chloroplast genes, in which the overall evolutionary rate was small. The slope of the regression line was consistently lower than unity, further confirming the higher evolutionary rate in annuals at the genomic level.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>The higher evolutionary rate in annuals than in perennials appears to be a universal phenomenon both in nuclear and chloroplast genomes in the four dicot model plants we investigated. Therefore, such heterogeneity in evolutionary rate should result from factors that have genome-wide influence, most likely those associated with annual/perennial life history. Although we acknowledge current limitations of this kind of study, mainly due to a small sample size available and a distant taxonomic relationship of the model organisms, our results indicate that the genome-wide survey is a promising approach toward further understanding of the mechanism determining the molecular evolutionary rate at the genomic level.</p

Strict ergodicity of affine p-adic dynamical systems on Zp

AbstractLet p⩾2 be a prime number and let Zp be the ring of all p-adic integers. For all α,β,z∈Zp, define Tα,β(z)=αz+β. It is shown that the dynamical system (Zp,Tα,β) is minimal if and only if α∈1+prpZp and β is a unit, here rp=1 (respectively rp=2) if p⩾3 (respectively if p=2), and that when it is minimal, it is strictly ergodic and topologically conjugate to (Zp,T1,1) with an analytic and isometric conjugacy. More importantly, when the system is not minimal, we find all its strictly ergodic components. As application, monomial systems Sn,ρ(z)=ρzn on the group 1+pZp are also discussed