The fungal literature-based occurrence database in southern West Siberia (Russia)

The abstract presents the initiative to develop the Fungal Literature-based Occurrence Database for Southern West Siberia (FuSWS), which mobilizes occurrences of fungi from published literature (literature-based occurrences, Darwin Core MaterialCitation). The FuSWS database includes 28 fields describing species name, publication source, herbarium number (if exists), date of sampling or observation, locality information, vegetation, substrate, and others. The initiative on digitization of literature-based occurrence data started in the northern part of Western Siberia two years ago (Filippova et al. 2021a). The present project extends the initiative to the south and includes eight administrative regions (Sverdlovsk, Omsk, Kurgan, Tomsk, Novosibirsk, Kemerovo, Altay, and Gorny Altay). The area occupies the central to southern part of the West Siberian Plain. It extends for about 1.5 thousand km from the west to the east from the eastern slopes of the Ural Mountains to Yenisey River, and from north to south—about 1.3 thousand km. The total area equals about 1.2 million km2.Currently, the project is actively growing in spatial, collaboration and data accumulation terms. The working group of about 30 mycologists from 16 organizations dedicated to the digitization initiative was created as part of the Siberian Mycological Society (informal organization since 2019). They have created the most complete bibliographic list of mycology-related papers for the Southern West Siberia, including over 800 publications for the last two centuries (the earliest dated 1800). At abstract submission, the database had been populated with a total of about 10K records from about 100 sources. The dataset is uploaded to GBIF, where it is available for online search of species occurrences and/or download (Filippova et al. 2021b) Fig. 1. The project's page with the introduction, templates, bibliography list, video-presentations and written instructions is available at the website of the Siberian Mycological Society (https://sibmyco.org/literaturedatabase).The following protocol describes the digitization workflow in detail:The bibliography of related publications is compiled using Zotero bibliographic manager. Only published works (peer-reviewed papers, conference proceedings, PhD theses, monographs or book chapters) are selected. If possible, the sources are digitized and added to the library as PDF files. The template of the FuSWS database is made with Google Sheets, which allows simultaneous use by several specialists, in a common data format provided. The simple Microsoft Excel template is also available for the offline databasing. The Darwin Core standard is applied to the database field structure to accommodate the relevant information extracted from the publications.From the available bibliography of publications related to the region, only works with species occurrences are selected for the databasing purpose. The main source of occurrences is annotated species lists with exact localities of the records. However, different sorts of other species citations are also extracted, provided that they had the connection to any geography. All occurrences are georeferenced, either from the coordinates provided in the paper, or from the verbatim description of the field work locality. The georeferencing of the verbatim descriptions is made using Yandex or Google map services. Depending on the quality of georeference provided in publications, the uncertainty is estimated as follows: 1) the coordinate of a fruiting structure or a plot provided in the publication gives the uncertainty about 3-30 meters; 2) the coordinate of the field work locality provided in publication gives the uncertainty about 500 m to 5 km; 3) the report of the species presence in a particular region gives the centroid of the area with the uncertainty radius to include its borders.The locality names reported in Russian are translated to English and written in the «locality» field. Russian descriptions are reserved in the field «verbatimLocality» for accuracy.When possible, the «eventDate» is extracted from the annotation data. Whenever this information is absent, the date of the publication is used instead with the remarks in the «verbatimEventDate» field.The ecological features, habitat and substrate preferences are written in the «habitat» field and reserved in Russian.The original scientific names reported in publications are filled in the «originalNameUsage» field. Correction of spelling errors is made using the GBIF Species Matching tool. This tool is also used to create the additional fields of taxonomic hierarchy from species to kingdom, to fill in the «taxonRank» field and to synonymize according to the GBIF Backbone Taxonomy.To track the digitization process, a worksheet is maintained. Each bibliographic record has a series of fields to describe the digitization process and its results: the total number of extracted occurrence records, general description of the occurrence quality, presence of the observation date, details of georeferencing and the name of a person responsible for the digitization

The fungal literature-based occurrence database for southern West Siberia (Russia)

The paper presents the initiative on literature-based occurrence data mobilisation of fungi and fungi-related organisms (literature-based occurrences, Darwin Core MaterialCitation) to develop the Fungal literature-based occurrence database for the southern West Siberia (FuSWS). The initiative on mobilisation of literature-based occurrence data started in the northern part of West Siberia in 2016. The present project extends the initiative to the southern regions and includes ten administrative territories (Tyumen Region, Sverdlovsk Region, Chelyabinsk Region, Omsk Region, Kurgan Region, Tomsk Region, Novosibirsk Region, Kemerovo Region, Altai Territory and Republic of Altai). The area occupies the central to southern part of the West Siberian Plain and extends for about 1.5 K km from the west to the east from the eastern slopes of the Ural Mountains to Yenisey River and from north to south—about 1.3 K km. The total area equals about 1.4 million km . The initiative is actively growing in spatial, collaboration and data accumulation terms. The working group of about 30 mycologists from eight organisations dedicated to the data mobilisation was created as part of the Siberian Mycological Society (informal organisation since 2019). They have compiled the almost complete bibliographic list of mycology-related papers for the southern West Siberia, including over 900 publications for the last two centuries (the earliest dated 1800). All literature sources were digitised and an online library was created to integrate bibliography metadata and digitised papers using Zotero bibliography manager. The analysis of published sources showed that about two-thirds of works contain occurrences of fungi for the scope of mobilisation. At the time of the paper submission, the database had been populated with a total of about 8 K records from 93 sources. The dataset is uploaded to GBIF, where it is available for online search of species occurrences and/or download. The project's page with the introduction, templates, bibliography list, video-presentations and written instructions is available (in Russian) at the web site of the Siberian Mycological Society. The initiative will be continued in the following years to extract the records from all published sources. New information The paper presents the first project with the aim of literature-based occurrence data mobilisation of fungi and fungi-related organisms in the southern West Siberia. The full bibliography and a digital library of all regional mycological publications created for the first time includes about 900 published works. By the time of paper submission, nearly 8 K occurrence records were extracted from about 90 literature sources and integrated into the FuSWS database published in GBIF

Machine-Building Enterprise Work Improvement Based on Application of the Process Approach

Any modern machine-building enterprise is a complex system consisting of many organizational elements with clearly defined functions, boundaries and resources. The size of these resources determines the planned productivity of the enterprise. At the same time, an enterprise is a social system that has non-linear properties, since the human factor is involved. Therefore, situations are possible where even small beneficial changes in the nature of the interaction in the production system can cause a significant increase in productivity. However, situations are also possible when large transformations that consume significant resources do not lead to desired achievements or even worsen the existing state. This article discusses the application of process-oriented thinking in the practical work of an enterprise at all its levels

Unique features of the TCR repertoire of reactivated memory T cells in the experimental mouse tumor model

T cell engineering with T cell receptors (TCR) specific to tumor antigens has become a breakthrough towards personalized cancer adoptive cell immunotherapy. However, the search for therapeutic TCRs is often challenging, and effective strategies are strongly required for the identification and enrichment of tumor-specific T cells that express TCRs with superior functional characteristics. Using an experimental mouse tumor model, we studied sequential changes in TCR repertoire features of T cells involved in the primary and secondary immune responses to allogeneic tumor antigens. In-depth bioinformatics analysis of TCR repertoires showed differences in reactivated memory T cells compared to primarily activated effectors. After cognate antigen re-encounter, memory cells were enriched with clonotypes that express α-chain TCR with high potential cross-reactivity and enhanced strength of interaction with both MHC and docked peptides. Our findings suggest that functionally true memory T cells could be a better source of therapeutic TCRs for adoptive cell therapy. No marked changes were observed in the physicochemical characteristics of TCRβ in reactivated memory clonotypes, indicative of the dominant role of TCRα in the secondary allogeneic immune response. The results of this study could further contribute to the development of TCR-modified T cell products based on the phenomenon of TCR chain centricity

The relationship of seminal transforming growth factor-β1 and interleukin-18 with reproductive success in women exposed to seminal plasma during IVF/ICSI treatment

It has been proposed that the transforming growth factor (TGF)-β1 present in seminal plasma (SP) triggers a female immune response favorable for implantation. We hypothesize that seminal interleukin (IL)-18, a cytokine that can potentially cause implantation failure, interferes with the beneficial effect of TGF-β1. This study aims to determine whether the levels of seminal TGF-β1 and IL-18 are associated with reproductive outcomes in patients exposed to SP during in vitro fertilization (IVF) or IVF with intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI). A prospective study, which included 71 couples undergoing IVF/ICSI was carried out. Female patients were exposed to their partners’ SP via timed intercourse before the day of ovum pick-up (OPU) and also subjected to intravaginal SP application just after OPU. Quantitative measurements of total TGF-β1 (active plus latent) as well as IL-18 were determined by FlowCytomix™ technology in the SP to be used for intravaginal applications. Comparison of SP cytokine profiles between pregnant and non-pregnant groups revealed that pregnancy was correlated with a lower concentration of IL-18 (P = 0.018) and lower content per ejaculate for both of IL-18 (P = 0.0003) and TGF-β1 (P = 0.047). The ratio of TGF-β1-to-IL-18 concentration was significantly higher in the pregnant than in the non-pregnant group (P = 0.026). This study supports the notion that two key cytokines TGF-β1 and IL-18, both present in SP are associated with reproductive outcomes in female patients exposed to SP during IVF/ICSI treatment

A new concept of biocatalytic synthesis of acrylic monomers for obtaining water-soluble acrylic heteropolymers

Rhodococcus strains were designed as model biocatalysts (BCs) for the production of acrylic acid and mixtures of acrylic monomers consisting of acrylamide, acrylic acid, and N-alkylacrylamide (N-isopropylacrylamide). To obtain BC strains, we used, among other approaches, adaptive laboratory evolution (ALE), based on the use of the metabolic pathway of amide utilization. Whole genome sequencing of the strains obtained after ALE, as well as subsequent targeted gene disruption, identified candidate genes for three new amidases that are promising for the development of BCs for the production of acrylic acid from acrylamide. New BCs had two types of amidase activities, acrylamide-hydrolyzing and acrylamide-transferring, and by varying the ratio of these activities in BCs, it is possible to influence the ratio of monomers in the resulting mixtures. Based on these strains, a prototype of a new technological concept for the biocatalytic synthesis of acrylic monomers was developed for the production of water-soluble acrylic heteropolymers containing valuable N-alkylacrylamide units. In addition to the possibility of obtaining mixtures of different compositions, the advantages of the concept are a single starting reagent (acrylamide), more unification of processes (all processes are based on the same type of biocatalyst), and potentially greater safety for personnel and the environment compared to existing chemical technologies

Physiological and Functional Effects of Dominant Active TCRα Expression in Transgenic Mice

A T cell receptor (TCR) consists of α- and β-chains. Accumulating evidence suggests that some TCRs possess chain centricity, i.e., either of the hemi-chains can dominate in antigen recognition and dictate the TCR’s specificity. The introduction of TCRα/β into naive lymphocytes generates antigen-specific T cells that are ready to perform their functions. Transgenesis of the dominant active TCRα creates transgenic animals with improved anti-tumor immune control, and adoptive immunotherapy with TCRα-transduced T cells provides resistance to infections. However, the potential detrimental effects of the dominant hemi-chain TCR’s expression in transgenic animals have not been well investigated. Here, we analyzed, in detail, the functional status of the immune system of recently generated 1D1a transgenic mice expressing the dominant active TCRα specific to the H2-Kb molecule. In their age dynamics, neither autoimmunity due to the random pairing of transgenic TCRα with endogenous TCRβ variants nor significant disturbances in systemic homeostasis were detected in these mice. Although the specific immune response was considerably enhanced in 1D1a mice, responses to third-party alloantigens were not compromised, indicating that the expression of dominant active TCRα did not limit immune reactivity in transgenic mice. Our data suggest that TCRα transgene expression could delay thymic involution and maintain TCRβ repertoire diversity in old transgenic mice. The detected changes in the systemic homeostasis in 1D1a transgenic mice, which are minor and primarily transient, may indicate variations in the ontogeny of wild-type and transgenic mouse lines