Antifungal Activity of Resveratrol Derivatives against Candida Species

trans-Resveratrol (1a) is a phytoalexin produced by plants in response to infections by pathogens. Its potential activity against clinically relevant opportunistic fungal pathogens has previously been poorly investigated. Evaluated herein are the candidacidal activities of oligomers (2a, 3–5) of 1a purified from Vitis vinifera grape canes and several analogues (1b–1j) of 1a obtained through semisynthesis using methylation and acetylation. Moreover, trans-ε-viniferin (2a), a dimer of 1a, was also subjected to methylation (2b) and acetylation (2c) under nonselective conditions. Neither the natural oligomers of 1a (2a, 3–5) nor the derivatives of 2a were active against Candida albicans SC5314. However, the dimethoxy resveratrol derivatives 1d and 1e exhibited antifungal activity against C. albicans with minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) values of 29–37 μg/mL and against 11 other Candida species. Compound 1e inhibited the yeast-to-hyphae morphogenetic transition of C. albicans at 14 μg/mL

Origami voting: a non-cryptographic approach to transparent ballot verification

International audienceOver the past four decades, fear of election manipulation and hacking has spurred the security technology community to propose a variety of voting systems to implement verifiable voting. Most of these rely on hard to understand cryptographic protocols, which can affect whether users actually verify their selections. Three-Ballot and Vote/Anti-Vote/Vote, two related systems among the few non-cryptographic end-to-end verifiable voting systems, made improvements in security while eliminating complex protocols. They unfortunately suffered from usability issues, and although they did not require cryptographic primitives, they still relied on electronic devices. To address this, we introduce three folded-paper based systems that allow verifiable voting and resist common attacks despite not relying on any cryptography or electronic devices. The proposals are based on 1) semi-translucent ballots, 2) masking tape, or 3) folding and punching. These Origami voting methods help users understand the underlying mechanisms and give them a direct geometric approach to verification

A two-step target binding and selectivity support vector machines approach for virtual screening of dopamine receptor subtype-selective ligands

10.1371/journal.pone.0039076PLoS ONE76

A dataset of acoustic measurements from soundscapes collected worldwide during the COVID-19 pandemic

Political responses to the COVID-19 pandemic led to changes in city soundscapes around the globe. From March to October 2020, a consortium of 261 contributors from 35 countries brought together by the Silent Cities project built a unique soundscape recordings collection to report on local acoustic changes in urban areas. We present this collection here, along with metadata including observational descriptions of the local areas from the contributors, open-source environmental data, open-source confinement levels and calculation of acoustic descriptors. We performed a technical validation of the dataset using statistical models run on a subset of manually annotated soundscapes. Results confirmed the large-scale usability of ecoacoustic indices and automatic sound event recognition in the Silent Cities soundscape collection. We expect this dataset to be useful for research in the multidisciplinary field of environmental sciences

Influence of the pulse energy distribution on the efficiency of ultrasound generation by laser

We have conducted both theoretical and experimental studies of the effect of the energy distribution of the ultrasound generating laser pulse on the amplitude of the longitudinal precursor and on the temporal profile of the displacement for single-point, two-points and line-of-points distributions. These preliminary studies show that the agreement between theory and experiment is generally good and that improvement of the amplitude of the precursor is possible