Regular dorsal dimples and damaged mites of Varroa destructor in some Iranian honey bees (Apis mellifera)

The frequency of damaged Varroadestructor Anderson and Trueman (Mesostigmata: Varroidae) found on the bottom board of hives of the honey bee, Apis mellifera L. (Hymenoptera: Apidae) has been used as an indicator of the degree of tolerance or resistance of honey bee colonies against mites. However, it is not clear that this measure is adequate. These injuries should be separated from regular dorsal dimples that have a developmental origin. To investigate damage to Varroa mites and regular dorsal dimples, 32 honey bee (A. mellifera) colonies were selected from four Iranian provinces: Isfahan, Markazi, Qazvin, and Tehran. These colonies were part of the National Honey bee Breeding Program that resulted in province-specific races. In April, Varroa mites were collected from heavily infested colonies and used to infest the 32 experimental colonies. In August, 20 of these colonies were selected (five colonies from each province). Adult bees from these colonies were placed in cages and after introducing mites, damaged mites were collected from each cage every day. The average percentage of injured mites ranged from 0.6 to 3.0% in four provinces. The results did not show any statistical differences between the colonies within provinces for injuries to mites, but there were some differences among province-specific lines. Two kinds of injuries to the mites were observed: injuries to legs and pedipalps, and injuries to other parts of the body. There were also some regular dorsal dimples on dorsal idiosoma of the mites that were placed in categories separate from mites damaged by bees. This type of classification helps identifying damage to mites and comparing them with developmental origin symptoms, and may provide criteria for selecting bees tolerant or resistant to this mite

DBVal: Validating P4 Data Plane Runtime Behavior

The P4 software ecosystem to operate programmable data planes is increasingly becoming complex. The packet-processing behavior is defined by several components: the P4 program, the compiler that maps P4 programs to resource-constrained switch pipeline, the control-plane program that installs rules, and the switch software agents that configure the data plane. Bugs in any one or more of these components would potentially introduce packet-processing errors in the data plane. Prior work verifies P4 programs before deployment and found many program bugs. But bugs can happen in other components after the program deployment and may not be found during testing and only manifest themselves in production. In this work, our goal is to detect packet-processing errors induced by bugs that are not caught (or are difficult to catch) before the P4 program deployment. Our key idea is to let P4 programmers specify the intended packet-processing behavior and validate the actual packet-processing behavior against the intended behavior at runtime. We obtain intended behavior from the P4 programmers in the form of assertions, where each assertion specifies which tables and actions should be applied and in what order on a certain subset of traffic. Next, the assertions are compiled and translated to P4 implementation such that the implementation efficiently tracks the packet execution path, that is, the set of tables applied and actions executed, and then validates the tracked behavior at line rate. We show that our techniques can be used to effectively detect bugs that are difficult, if not impossible, to catch with existing techniques for testing and verifying programmable data planes. © 2021 ACM

Arrested Pneumatization of the Sphenoid Sinus on Large Field-of-View Cone Beam Computed Tomography Studies

Arrested pneumatization of the sphenoid sinus is a normal anatomical variant. The aim of this report is to define cone beam computed tomography (CBCT) characteristics of arrested pneumatization of sphenoid sinus in an effort to help differentiate it from invasive or lytic skull base lesions. Two cases are presented with incidental findings. Both studies, acquired for other diagnostic purposes, demonstrated unique osseous patterns that were eventually deemed to be anatomic variations in the absence of clinical signs and symptoms although the pattern of bone loss and remodeling was diagnosed as pneumatization of the sphenoid sinus by a panel of medical and maxillofacial radiologists following contrasted advanced imaging. It is important to differentiate arrested pneumatization of the sphenoid sinus from lesions, such as arachnoid granulations, acoustic neuroma, glioma, metastatic lesions, meningioma, or chordoma, to prevent unnecessary biopsies or exploratory surgeries that would consequently reduce treatment costs and alleviate anxiety in patients

Use of Fc-engineered antibodies as clearing agents to increase contrast during PET

Despite promise for the use of antibodies as molecular imaging agents in PET, their long in vivo half-lives result in poor contrast and radiation damage to normal tissue. This study describes an approach to overcome these limitations. Methods: Mice bearing human epidermal growth factor receptor type 2 (HER2)-overexpressing tumors were injected with radiolabeled (124I, 125I) HER2-specific antibody (pertuzumab). Pertuzumab injection was followed 8 h later by the delivery of an engineered, antibody-based inhibitor of the receptor, FcRn. Biodistribution analyses and PET were performed at 24 and 48 h after pertuzumab injection. Results: The delivery of the engineered, antibody-based FcRn inhibitor (or Abdeg, for antibody that enhances IgG degradation) results in improved tumor-to-blood ratios, reduced systemic exposure to radiolabel, and increased contrast during PET. Conclusion: Abdegs have considerable potential as agents to stringently regulate antibody dynamics in vivo, resulting in increased contrast during molecular imaging with PET. COPYRIGHT</p