Mapping the tail fiber as the receptor binding protein responsible for differential host specificity of Pseudomonas aeruginosa bacteriophages PaP1 and JG004.

The first step in bacteriophage infection is recognition and binding to the host receptor, which is mediated by the phage receptor binding protein (RBP). Different RBPs can lead to differential host specificity. In many bacteriophages, such as Escherichia coli and Lactococcal phages, RBPs have been identified as the tail fiber or protruding baseplate proteins. However, the tail fiber-dependent host specificity in Pseudomonas aeruginosa phages has not been well studied. This study aimed to identify and investigate the binding specificity of the RBP of P. aeruginosa phages PaP1 and JG004. These two phages share high DNA sequence homology but exhibit different host specificities. A spontaneous mutant phage was isolated and exhibited broader host range compared with the parental phage JG004. Sequencing of its putative tail fiber and baseplate region indicated a single point mutation in ORF84 (a putative tail fiber gene), which resulted in the replacement of a positively charged lysine (K) by an uncharged asparagine (N). We further demonstrated that the replacement of the tail fiber gene (ORF69) of PaP1 with the corresponding gene from phage JG004 resulted in a recombinant phage that displayed altered host specificity. Our study revealed the tail fiber-dependent host specificity in P. aeruginosa phages and provided an effective tool for its alteration. These contributions may have potential value in phage therapy

One Step Learning, One Step Review

Visual fine-tuning has garnered significant attention with the rise of pre-trained vision models. The current prevailing method, full fine-tuning, suffers from the issue of knowledge forgetting as it focuses solely on fitting the downstream training set. In this paper, we propose a novel weight rollback-based fine-tuning method called OLOR (One step Learning, One step Review). OLOR combines fine-tuning with optimizers, incorporating a weight rollback term into the weight update term at each step. This ensures consistency in the weight range of upstream and downstream models, effectively mitigating knowledge forgetting and enhancing fine-tuning performance. In addition, a layer-wise penalty is presented to employ penalty decay and the diversified decay rate to adjust the weight rollback levels of layers for adapting varying downstream tasks. Through extensive experiments on various tasks such as image classification, object detection, semantic segmentation, and instance segmentation, we demonstrate the general applicability and state-of-the-art performance of our proposed OLOR. Code is available at https://github.com/rainbow-xiao/OLOR-AAAI-2024.Comment: Accepted to the 38th Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2024

A new controller design of electro-hydraulic servo system based on empirical mode decomposition

The signal of electro-hydraulic servo system is non-stationary and time-varying due to the influence of vibration, noise and mechanical impact. The traditional digital filter always suffers delay in time domain and the delay increases along with the increasing of frequency. Considering the features of electro-hydraulic servo system, the Hilbert-Huang transform method is an effective method to decompose the original signal and obtain the noise components. Some improvements are made based on Hilbert Huang transform method and a new real time on-line filtering method is proposed in this paper. This improved filter is able to decompose out the noise components and other interference components from original signal, and remove them off in real time. Based on this new on-line filter, a new controller is also designed. Compared the filtering result with the traditional digital filter, this new controller’s control performance is much better

The Transition Experiences of International Graduate Students in Clark University School of Professional Studies

In the last decade, the School of Professional Studies at Clark University has witnessed a sharp increase in international students. More and more international students in the millennial generation have entered the School of Professional Studies pursuing one of the two-year graduate programs: Master of Science in Professional Studies, Master of Science in Public Administration, and Master of Science in Information Technology. In the past, working adult student dominant the program. These students already had a career outside the classrooms before them came to study. The millennial international students have generated new adjustment problems. Some of the transition issues of international students have been described in the literature, and these issues can be categorized into three types: academic challenges, social isolation, and cultural adjustment. In response to these new trends, the School of Professional Studies has been providing departmental support services for international students since the 2016 fall semester. This Capstone project researched strategies offered by other American universities in dealing with international students’ transition issues and suggested a series of practical solutions for the School of Professional Studies. These practices include the School of Professional Studies International Students Page, Buddy Program, Academic Training Program, and American Survival Program. We hope these strategies will help the School Professional Students to improve inclusion and the environment for international students

Air-to-Ground Channel Characterization for Low-Height UAVs in Realistic Network Deployments

Due to the decrease in cost, size and weight, \acp{UAV} are becoming more and more popular for general-purpose civil and commercial applications. Provision of communication services to \acp{UAV} both for user data and control messaging by using off-the-shelf terrestrial cellular deployments introduces several technical challenges. In this paper, an approach to the air-to-ground channel characterization for low-height \acp{UAV} based on an extensive measurement campaign is proposed, giving special attention to the comparison of the results when a typical directional antenna for network deployments is used and when a quasi-omnidirectional one is considered. Channel characteristics like path loss, shadow fading, root mean square delay and Doppler frequency spreads and the K-factor are statistically characterized for different suburban scenarios.Comment: 15 pages, accepted in IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagatio

The solution structural ensembles of RNA kink-turn motifs and their protein complexes

With the growing number of crystal structures of RNA and RNA/protein complexes, a critical next step is understanding the dynamic behavior of these entities in solution in terms of conformational ensembles and energy landscapes. To this end, we have used X-ray scattering interferometry (XSI) to probe the widespread RNA kink-turn motif and its complexes with the canonical kink-turn binding protein L7Ae. XSI revealed that the folded kink-turn is best described as a restricted conformational ensemble. The ions present in solution alter the nature of this ensemble, and protein binding can perturb the kink-turn ensemble without collapsing it to a unique state. This study demonstrates how XSI can reveal structural and ensemble properties of RNAs and RNA/protein complexes in solution and uncovers the behavior of an important RNA/protein motif. This type of information will be necessary to understand, predict, and engineer the behavior and function of RNAs and their protein complexes

A Mixed-Bouncing Based Non-Stationarity and Consistency 6G V2V Channel Model with Continuously Arbitrary Trajectory

In this paper, a novel three-dimensional (3D) irregularshaped geometry-based stochastic model (IS-GBSM) is proposedfor sixth-generation (6G) millimeter wave (mmWave) massivemultiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) vehicle-to-vehicle(V2V) channels. To investigate the impact of vehicular trafficdensity (VTD) on channel statistics, clusters are divided into staticclusters and dynamic clusters, which are further distinguishedinto static/dynamic single/twin-clusters to capture the mixed bouncingpropagation. A new method, which integrates thevisibility region and birth-death process methods, is developedto model space-time-frequency (S-T-F) non-stationarity of V2Vchannels with time-space (T-S) consistency. The continuouslyarbitrary vehicular movement trajectory (VMT) and soft clusterpower handover are modeled to further ensure channel T-Sconsistency. From the proposed model, key channel statistics arederived. Simulation results show that S-T-F non-stationarity ofchannels with T-S consistency is modeled and the impacts of VTDand VMT on channel statistics are analyzed. The generality ofthe proposed model is validated by comparing simulation resultsand measurement/ray-tracing (RT)-based results