A Unified Framework for 3D Point Cloud Visual Grounding

Thanks to its precise spatial referencing, 3D point cloud visual grounding is essential for deep understanding and dynamic interaction in 3D environments, encompassing 3D Referring Expression Comprehension (3DREC) and Segmentation (3DRES). We argue that 3DREC and 3DRES should be unified in one framework, which is also a natural progression in the community. To explain, 3DREC help 3DRES locate the referent, while 3DRES also facilitate 3DREC via more fine-grained language-visual alignment. To achieve this, this paper takes the initiative step to integrate 3DREC and 3DRES into a unified framework, termed 3D Referring Transformer (3DRefTR). Its key idea is to build upon a mature 3DREC model and leverage ready query embeddings and visual tokens from the 3DREC model to construct a dedicated mask branch. Specially, we propose Superpoint Mask Branch, which serves a dual purpose: i) By harnessing on the inherent association between the superpoints and point cloud, it eliminates the heavy computational overhead on the high-resolution visual features for upsampling; ii) By leveraging the heterogeneous CPU-GPU parallelism, while the GPU is occupied generating visual and language tokens, the CPU concurrently produces superpoints, equivalently accomplishing the upsampling computation. This elaborate design enables 3DRefTR to achieve both well-performing 3DRES and 3DREC capacities with only a 6% additional latency compared to the original 3DREC model. Empirical evaluations affirm the superiority of 3DRefTR. Specifically, on the ScanRefer dataset, 3DRefTR surpasses the state-of-the-art 3DRES method by 12.43% in mIoU and improves upon the SOTA 3DREC method by 0.6% [email protected]. The codes and models will be released soon

The Survey of H5N1 Flu Virus in Wild Birds in 14 Provinces of China from 2004 to 2007

The highly pathogenic H5N1 avian influenza emerged in the year 1996 in Asia, and has spread to Europe and Africa recently. At present, effective monitoring and data analysis of H5N1 are not sufficient in Chinese mainland.)) were obviously higher than those in other 13 provinces. The results of sequence analysis indicated that the 17 strains isolated from wild birds were distributed in five clades (2.3.1, 2.2, 2.5, 6, and 7), which suggested that genetic diversity existed among H5N1 viruses isolated from wild birds. The five isolates from Qinghai came from one clade (2.2) and had a short evolutionary distance with the isolates obtained from Qinghai in the year 2005.We have measured the prevalence of H5N1 virus in 56 species of wild birds in 14 provinces of China. Continuous monitoring in the field should be carried out to know whether H5N1 virus can be maintained by wild birds

News Verification by Exploiting Conflicting Social Viewpoints in Microblogs

Fake news spreading in social media severely jeopardizes the veracity of online content. Fortunately, with the interactive and open features of microblogs, skeptical and opposing voices against fake news always arise along with it. The conflicting information, ignored by existing studies, is crucial for news verification. In this paper, we take advantage of this "wisdom of crowds" information to improve news verification by mining conflicting viewpoints in microblogs. First, we discover conflicting viewpoints in news tweets with a topic model method. Based on identified tweets' viewpoints, we then build a credibility propagation network of tweets linked with supporting or opposing relations. Finally, with iterative deduction, the credibility propagation on the network generates the final evaluation result for news. Experiments conducted on a real-world data set show that the news verification performance of our approach significantly outperforms those of the baseline approaches

SIX4 promotes metastasis via activation of the PI3K-AKT pathway in colorectal cancer

Background Several studies report aberrant expression of sine oculis homeobox (SIX) homolog family members during cancer development and progression. SIX4 participates in organ development, such as myogenesis and neurogenesis. However, the expression and clinical implication of SIX4 in colorectal cancer (CRC) remains unclear. Methods The SIX4 expression levels in colorectal patients were assessed in nine different human cancer arrays and compared using patient survival data. SIX4 expression was silenced in two cell culture lines for invasion and wound healing assessment. Finally, bioinformatics assessments ascertained the pathways impacted by SIX4. Results SIX4 was upregulated in The Cancer Genome Atlas CRC cohort and other gene expression omnibus (GEO) cohorts. In addition, SIX4 expression significantly correlated with lymph node metastasis and advanced Tumor Node Metastasis (TNM) stages. Moreover, SIX4 overexpression was related to unfavorable prognosis in CRC patients. Silencing SIX4 inhibited CRC cell metastasis by surpressing AKT phosphorylation. Discussion SIX4 is upregulated in CRC and can be used as a prognosis biomarker

Molecular Characterization and Expression of <i>CmobHLH</i> Genes in Pumpkin

The transcription factor bHLH gene family plays fundamental roles in plant development and mitigating diverse biotic and abiotic stresses. However, the information of bHLH genes in pumpkin (Cucurbita moschata) is still unknown. In this current study, 222 CmobHLH genes were identified and mapped onto different chromosomes through bioinformatics analysis in pumpkin. CmobHLH and AtbHLH proteins could be classified into 19 subfamilies according to the phylogenetic tree. CmobHLH proteins within the same subfamily had similar motif composition and gene structures. Gene ontology (GO), cis-regulatory elements (CREs) and protein–protein interaction analyses suggested the potential regulatory roles of CmobHLH genes during the plant development process and abiotic stresses response in pumpkin. Tissue expression patterns based on transcriptome data demonstrated that CmobHLH genes were involved in pumpkin development process, and they had unique functions in different tissues. The expression patterns of five selected CmobHLH genes after exposure to abiotic stresses showed that the CmobHLH genes played varied roles in the stress responses of pumpkin to NaCl, waterlogging, cold, ABA and drought. In brief, these findings offer important information for further functional research of CmobHLH genes and resistance breeding in pumpkin

The effect of nanocrystalline ZnO with bare special crystal planes on the crystallization behavior, thermal stability and mechanical properties of PLLA

Different crystal planes of nanocrystalline often displayed diverse physical and chemical properties. In this paper, the effects of nano-ZnO with two kinds of crystal planes on crystallization, thermal stability and mechanical properties of PLLA were investigated. The results show that the (1010) planes with no-polar and low surface energy increased the chain mobility of PLLA chain, showed a plasticizing effect; the glass transition temperature, melt and cold crystallization temperature decreased by 12 °C, 10 °C and 12 °C, respectively. The size of spherulites increased and the number of spherulites decreased, the crystal form changed from mixed crystal form α, α′ to unique α crystal form. However, the (0002) planes with polar and high surface energy has highly nucleating effective for PLLA, the crystallization temperature increased to 106.41 °C, the cold crystallization peak disappear. The size of spherulites decreased and the number of spherulites increased. Moreover, the (0002) planes increases the elongation at break of PLLA to 20.34% but the (1010) planes reduces to 7.49%. Their thermo-gravimetric analysis results showed the similar trend. Our results indicate that the interface wettability and compatibility between crystal planes and PLLA, which was caused by the polarity and surface energy of (1010) or (0002) planes played key role in improving the performance of polymers

Quantification of bindings of organometallic ruthenium complexes to GST pi by mass spectrometry

Electrospray ionization mass spectrometry (ESI-MS) has been widely used to identify binding sites of metal complexes to proteins. However, the MS quantification of the metal-protein coordination remains a challenge. We have recently demonstrated by ESI-MS analysis that organometallic ruthenium complexes [(eta(6)-arene)Ru(en)Cl](+) (arene = p-cymene (1), biphenyl (2) or 9,10-dihydrophenanthrene (3); en = ethylenediamine) bound to human glutathione-S-transferase pi (GST pi) at Cys15 and Cys48 within the G-site, and Cys102 and Met92 on the interface of the GST pi dimer, showing inhibitory potency against the enzyme (J. Inorg. Biochem., 128 (2013) 77-84). Herein, we developed a mass spectrometric method to quantify the binding stoichiometry of the three complexes to GST pi. The differences in signal intensities of the heavy-labelled peptides produced by tryptic digestion of the ruthenated GST pi complexes and the respective light-labelled peptides in the tryptic digest of equimolar GST pi were used to calculate the binding stoichiometry at specific residues. The results indicated that the pre-complexation of GST pi with its substrate GSH significantly reduced the bindings of the ruthenium complexes at Met92 and Cys102, but had little impact on the bindings at Cys15 and Cys48. As the inhibitory activities of the ruthenium complexes against GST pi are similar to those against GST pi in complexation with GSH, these results suggest that the inhibition of the ruthenium complexes on GST pi is attributed to the ruthenation at Cys15 and Cys48. The present work provides not only insights into the understanding on the inhibitory mechanism of ruthenium complexes GST pi, but also a general method for quantitative characterization of metal-protein interactions. (C) 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved

Prevention of aggregate formation through mechanism analysis in refolding of recombinant pertactin from Escherichia coli

Production of natural pertactin for pharmaceutical use is limited by its low abundance. In this study, recombinant pertactin was highly expressed in the form of inclusion bodies in E. coll. However, up to 75% of the soluble turned out as aggregates when refolding by pulse-fed batch dilution. The conceivable route for aggregate formation was proposed as that the C-terminus of partially folded intermediate with a strong hydrophobic core would intertwine with that region of newly added denatured protein, resulting in aggregation between proteins with different folding states. The key factor for prevention of aggregate formation was to improve the synchronization of refolding. For this purpose, flash-batch dilution was conducted at a scale of 5 L and achieved a monomeric refolding yield of above 70%. Aggregates formed were efficiently removed along with impurities by one-step chromatography of Ni-resin. The purity of monomeric pertactin was &gt; 98%. An overall yield was 320 mg per liter fermentation liquor with a total recovery of about 59%. The purified protein was characterized by MALDI-TOF, circular dichroism, fluorescence, HPLC and DSC, and showed similar physiochemical properties compared to its natural counterpart. Animal study showed similar immunological responses and antibodies elicited demonstrated a comparable reactivity.</p