PCR detection of Anaplasma phagocytophilum in goat flocks in an area endemic for tick-borne fever in Switzerland

Central Switzerland is a highly endemic region for tick-borne fever (TBF) in cattle, however, little is known about A. phagocytophilum in goats. In the present study, 72 animals from six goat flocks (373 EDTA blood-samples) in Central Switzerland were analysed for A. phagocytophilum DNA. A real-time PCR targeting the msp2 gene of A. phagocytophilum was performed and in positive samples the partial 16S rRNA, groEL and msp4 gene were amplified for sequence analysis. Four DNA extracts were positive. Different sequence types on basis of the amplified genes were found. For comparison, sequences of A. phagocytophilum from 12 cattle (originating from Switzerland and Southern Germany) were analysed. The 16S rRNA gene sequences from cattle were all identical amongst each other, but the groEL and msp4 gene differed depending on the origin of the cattle samples and differed from the variants from goats. This study clearly provides molecular evidence for the presence of different types of A. phagocytophilum in goat flocks in Switzerland, a fact which deserves more thorough attention in clinical studies

PCR detection of

Central Switzerland is a highly endemic region for tick-borne fever (TBF) in cattle, however, little is known about A. phagocytophilum in goats. In the present study, 72 animals from six goat flocks (373 EDTA blood-samples) in Central Switzerland were analysed for A. phagocytophilum DNA. A real-time PCR targeting the msp2 gene of A. phagocytophilum was performed and in positive samples the partial 16S rRNA, groEL and msp4 gene were amplified for sequence analysis. Four DNA extracts were positive. Different sequence types on basis of the amplified genes were found. For comparison, sequences of A. phagocytophilum from 12 cattle (originating from Switzerland and Southern Germany) were analysed. The 16S rRNA gene sequences from cattle were all identical amongst each other, but the groEL and msp4 gene differed depending on the origin of the cattle samples and differed from the variants from goats. This study clearly provides molecular evidence for the presence of different types of A. phagocytophilum in goat flocks in Switzerland, a fact which deserves more thorough attention in clinical studies

Efficient Distributed Linear Programming with Limited Disclosure

Part 7: Privacy-Preserving Data Applications IIInternational audienceIn today’s networked world, resource providers and consumers are distributed globally and locally. However, with resource constraints, optimization is necessary to ensure the best possible usage of such scarce resources. Distributed linear programming (DisLP) problems allow collaborative agents to jointly maximize profits (or minimize costs) with a linear objective function while conforming to several shared as well as local linear constraints. Since each agent’s share of the global constraints and the local constraints generally refer to its private limitations or capacities, serious privacy problems may arise if such information is revealed. While there have been some solutions proposed that allow secure computation of such problems, they typically rely on inefficient protocols with enormous communication cost. In this paper, we present a secure and extremely efficient protocol to solve DisLP problems where constraints are arbitrarily partitioned and no variable is shared between agents. In the entire protocol, each agent learns only a partial solution (about its variables), but learns nothing about the private input/output of other agents, assuming semi-honest behavior. We present a rigorous security proof and communication cost analysis for our protocol and experimentally validate the costs, demonstrating its robustness

Using dynamic asynchronous aggregate search for quality guarantees of multiple web services compositions

With the increasing impact and popularity of Web service technologies in today’s World Wide Web, composition of Web services has received much interest to support enterprise-to-enterprise application integrations. As for service providers and their partners, the Quality of service (QoS) offered by a composite Web service is important. The QoS guarantee for composite services has been investigated in a number of works. However, those works consider only an individual composition or take the viewpoint of a single provider. In this paper, we focus on the problem of QoS guarantees for multiple inter-related compositions and consider the global viewpoints of all providers engaged in the compositions. The contributions of this paper are two folds. We first formalize the problem of QoS guarantees for multi-compositions and show that it can be modelled as a Distributed Constraint Satisfaction Problem (DisCSP). We also take into account the dynamic nature of the Web service environment of which compositions may be formed or dissolved any time. Secondly, we present a dynamic DisCSP algorithm to solve the problem and discuss our initial experiment to show the feasibility of our approach for multiple Web service compositions with QoS guarantees

Dynamic Ordering for Asynchronous Backtracking on DisCSPs

An algorithm that performs asynchronous backtracking on distributed CSP s, with dynamic ordering of agents is proposed, ABT DO. Agents propose reorderings of lower priority agents and send these proposals whenever they send assignment messages. Changes of ordering triggers a different computation of Nogoods. The dynamic ordered asynchronous backtracking algorithm uses polynomial space, similarly to standard ABT. The ABT DO algorithm with three different ordering heuristics is compared to standard ABT on randomly generated DisCSP s. A Nogood-triggered heuristic, inspired by dynamic backtracking, is found to outperform static order ABT by a large factor in run-time and improve the network load

Marker-less 3D Feature Tracking for Mesh-based Motion Capture

We present a novel algorithm that robustly tracks 3D trajectories of features on a moving human who has been recorded with multiple video cameras. Our method does so without special markers in the scene and can be used to track subjects wearing everyday apparel. By using the paths of the 3D points as constraints in a fast mesh deformation approach, we can directly animate a static human body scan such that it performs the same motion as the captured ubject. Our method can therefore be used to directly animate high quality geometry models from unaltered video data which opens the door to new applications in motion capture, 3D Video and computer animation. Since our method does not require a kinematic skeleton and only employs a handful of feature trajectories to generate ifelike animations with realistic surface deformations, it can lso be used to track subjects wearing wide apparel, and even nimals. We demonstrate the performance of our approach using several captured real-world sequences, and also validate its accuracy