Genomic and Proteomic Analyses of the Fungus Arthrobotrys oligospora Provide Insights into Nematode-Trap Formation

Nematode-trapping fungi are “carnivorous” and attack their hosts using specialized trapping devices. The morphological development of these traps is the key indicator of their switch from saprophytic to predacious lifestyles. Here, the genome of the nematode-trapping fungus Arthrobotrys oligospora Fres. (ATCC24927) was reported. The genome contains 40.07 Mb assembled sequence with 11,479 predicted genes. Comparative analysis showed that A. oligospora shared many more genes with pathogenic fungi than with non-pathogenic fungi. Specifically, compared to several sequenced ascomycete fungi, the A. oligospora genome has a larger number of pathogenicity-related genes in the subtilisin, cellulase, cellobiohydrolase, and pectinesterase gene families. Searching against the pathogen-host interaction gene database identified 398 homologous genes involved in pathogenicity in other fungi. The analysis of repetitive sequences provided evidence for repeat-induced point mutations in A. oligospora. Proteomic and quantitative PCR (qPCR) analyses revealed that 90 genes were significantly up-regulated at the early stage of trap-formation by nematode extracts and most of these genes were involved in translation, amino acid metabolism, carbohydrate metabolism, cell wall and membrane biogenesis. Based on the combined genomic, proteomic and qPCR data, a model for the formation of nematode trapping device in this fungus was proposed. In this model, multiple fungal signal transduction pathways are activated by its nematode prey to further regulate downstream genes associated with diverse cellular processes such as energy metabolism, biosynthesis of the cell wall and adhesive proteins, cell division, glycerol accumulation and peroxisome biogenesis. This study will facilitate the identification of pathogenicity-related genes and provide a broad foundation for understanding the molecular and evolutionary mechanisms underlying fungi-nematodes interactions

Improving Loanword Identification in Low-Resource Language with Data Augmentation and Multiple Feature Fusion

Loanword identification is studied in recent years to alleviate data sparseness in several natural language processing (NLP) tasks, such as machine translation, cross-lingual information retrieval, and so on. However, recent studies on this topic usually put efforts on high-resource languages (such as Chinese, English, and Russian); for low-resource languages, such as Uyghur and Mongolian, due to the limitation of resources and lack of annotated data, loanword identification on these languages tends to have lower performance. To overcome this problem, we first propose a lexical constraint-based data augmentation method to generate training data for low-resource language loanword identification; then, a loanword identification model based on a log-linear RNN is introduced to improve the performance of low-resource loanword identification by incorporating features such as word-level embeddings, character-level embeddings, pronunciation similarity, and part-of-speech (POS) into one model. Experimental results on loanword identification in Uyghur (in this study, we mainly focus on Arabic, Chinese, Russian, and Turkish loanwords in Uyghur) showed that our proposed method achieves best performance compared with several strong baseline systems

A Novel Deep Learning Method for Obtaining Bilingual Corpus from Multilingual Website

Machine translation needs a large number of parallel sentence pairs to make sure of having a good translation performance. However, the lack of parallel corpus heavily limits machine translation for low-resources language pairs. We propose a novel method that combines the continuous word embeddings with deep learning to obtain parallel sentences. Since parallel sentences are very invaluable for low-resources language pair, we introduce cross-lingual semantic representation to induce bilingual signals. Our experiments show that we can achieve promising results under lacking external resources for low-resource languages. Finally, we construct a state-of-the-art machine translation system in low-resources language pair

Characteristics of the archaeal and bacterial communities in core sediments from Southern Yap Trench via in situ sampling by the manned submersible Jiaolong

The hadal environment is the deepest part of the ocean and harbors a significant number of unique microbial communities. Here, we collected core sediment samples of Southern Yap Trench with the deep-sea manned submersible Jiaolong and analyzed the microbial community structure and abundance in the samples through high-throughput sequencing and real-time fluorescence quantitative PCR (qPCR), taking physicochemical parameters into account to explore potential environmental drivers and metabolic pathways therein. Considering the typical “V-shape” topography and frequent sediment collapses on trench walls, the core sediments of Southern Yap Trench harbored distinct microbial populations with fluctuating distributions and metabolic processes dominated by Proteobacteria and Thaumarchaeota. To discover the main potential metabolic processes of microbes, functional genes were detected by qPCR. The abundance of bacteria was greater than that of archaea in Southern Yap Trench sediments. The abundance of ammonia-oxidizing archaea (AOA), ammonia-oxidizing bacteria (AOB), sulfate-reducing bacteria (SRB) and denitrifying bacteria (denitrifier) decreased with increasing depth and decreasing total organic carbon (TOC%) and total nitrogen (TN%) and showed a positive and significant correlation with TOC% (P < 0.01), TN% (P < 0.01), TOC/TN molar ratio (C/N ratio) (P < 0.01) and median grain size (P < 0.01). From the perspective of function based on the 16S rRNA gene, aerobic ammonium oxidization, carbon assimilation, and chemoheterotrophic function may be the dominant processes in Southern Yap Trench sediments. Moreover, considering the isolated geomorphological and hydrological characteristics of Southern Yap Trench, we hypothesized that the distinct hadal microbial ecosystem was driven by the endogenous recycling of organic matter in the hadal sediments associated with the trench geomorphology

Fast Focal Point Correction in Prism-Coupled Total Internal Reflection Scanning Imager Using an Electronically Tunable Lens

Total internal reflection (TIR) is useful for interrogating physical and chemical processes that occur at the interface between two transparent media. Yet prism-coupled TIR imaging microscopes suffer from limited sensing areas due to the fact that the interface (the object plane) is not perpendicular to the optical axis of the microscope. In this paper, we show that an electrically tunable lens can be used to rapidly and reproducibly correct the focal length of an oblique-incidence scanning microscope (OI-RD) in a prism-coupled TIR geometry. We demonstrate the performance of such a correction by acquiring an image of a protein microarray over a scan area of 4 cm2 with an effective resolution of less than 20 microns. The electronic focal length tuning eliminates the mechanical movement of the illumination lens in the scanning microscope and in turn the noise and background drift associated with the motion

Fast Focal Point Correction in Prism-Coupled Total Internal Reflection Scanning Imager Using an Electronically Tunable Lens.

Total internal reflection (TIR) is useful for interrogating physical and chemical processes that occur at the interface between two transparent media. Yet prism-coupled TIR imaging microscopes suffer from limited sensing areas due to the fact that the interface (the object plane) is not perpendicular to the optical axis of the microscope. In this paper, we show that an electrically tunable lens can be used to rapidly and reproducibly correct the focal length of an oblique-incidence scanning microscope (OI-RD) in a prism-coupled TIR geometry. We demonstrate the performance of such a correction by acquiring an image of a protein microarray over a scan area of 4 cm² with an effective resolution of less than 20 microns. The electronic focal length tuning eliminates the mechanical movement of the illumination lens in the scanning microscope and in turn the noise and background drift associated with the motion

Fast Focal Point Correction in Prism-Coupled Total Internal Reflection Scanning Imager Using an Electronically Tunable Lens.

Total internal reflection (TIR) is useful for interrogating physical and chemical processes that occur at the interface between two transparent media. Yet prism-coupled TIR imaging microscopes suffer from limited sensing areas due to the fact that the interface (the object plane) is not perpendicular to the optical axis of the microscope. In this paper, we show that an electrically tunable lens can be used to rapidly and reproducibly correct the focal length of an oblique-incidence scanning microscope (OI-RD) in a prism-coupled TIR geometry. We demonstrate the performance of such a correction by acquiring an image of a protein microarray over a scan area of 4 cm² with an effective resolution of less than 20 microns. The electronic focal length tuning eliminates the mechanical movement of the illumination lens in the scanning microscope and in turn the noise and background drift associated with the motion