Screening of linear B-cell epitopes and its proinflammatory activities of Haemophilus parasuis outer membrane protein P2

Haemophilus parasuis is a commensal organism of the upper respiratory tract of pigs, but virulent strains can cause Glässer’s disease, resulting in significant economic losses to the swine industry. OmpP2 is an outer membrane protein of this organism that shows considerable heterogeneity between virulent and non-virulent strains, with classification into genotypes I and II. It also acts as a dominant antigen and is involved in the inflammatory response. In this study, 32 monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) against recombinant OmpP2 (rOmpP2) of different genotypes were tested for reactivity to a panel of OmpP2 peptides. Nine linear B cell epitopes were screened, including five common genotype epitopes (Pt1a, Pt7/Pt7a, Pt9a, Pt17, and Pt19/Pt19a) and two groups of genotype-specific epitopes (Pt5 and Pt5-II, Pt11/Pt11a, and Pt11a-II). In addition, we used positive sera from mice and pigs to screen for five linear B-cell epitopes (Pt4, Pt14, Pt15, Pt21, and Pt22). After porcine alveolar macrophages (PAMs) were stimulated with overlapping OmpP2 peptides, we found that the epitope peptides Pt1 and Pt9, and the loop peptide Pt20 which was adjacent epitopes could all significantly upregulated the mRNA expression levels of IL-1α, IL-1β, IL-6, IL-8, and TNF-α. Additionally, we identified epitope peptides Pt7, Pt11/Pt11a, Pt17, Pt19, and Pt21 and loop peptides Pt13 and Pt18 which adjacent epitopes could also upregulate the mRNA expression levels of most proinflammatory cytokines. This suggested that these peptides may be the virulence-related sites of the OmpP2 protein, with proinflammatory activity. Further study revealed differences in the mRNA expression levels of proinflammatory cytokines, including IL-1β and IL-6, between genotype-specific epitopes, which may be responsible for pathogenic differences between different genotype strains. Here, we profiled a linear B-cell epitope map of the OmpP2 protein and preliminarily analyzed the proinflammatory activities and effects of these epitopes on bacterial virulence, providing a reliable theoretical basis for establishing a method to distinguish strain pathogenicity and to screen candidate peptides for subunit vaccines

ERNIE-mmLayout: Multi-grained MultiModal Transformer for Document Understanding

Recent efforts of multimodal Transformers have improved Visually Rich Document Understanding (VrDU) tasks via incorporating visual and textual information. However, existing approaches mainly focus on fine-grained elements such as words and document image patches, making it hard for them to learn from coarse-grained elements, including natural lexical units like phrases and salient visual regions like prominent image regions. In this paper, we attach more importance to coarse-grained elements containing high-density information and consistent semantics, which are valuable for document understanding. At first, a document graph is proposed to model complex relationships among multi-grained multimodal elements, in which salient visual regions are detected by a cluster-based method. Then, a multi-grained multimodal Transformer called mmLayout is proposed to incorporate coarse-grained information into existing pre-trained fine-grained multimodal Transformers based on the graph. In mmLayout, coarse-grained information is aggregated from fine-grained, and then, after further processing, is fused back into fine-grained for final prediction. Furthermore, common sense enhancement is introduced to exploit the semantic information of natural lexical units. Experimental results on four tasks, including information extraction and document question answering, show that our method can improve the performance of multimodal Transformers based on fine-grained elements and achieve better performance with fewer parameters. Qualitative analyses show that our method can capture consistent semantics in coarse-grained elements.Comment: Accepted by ACM Multimedia 202

Integration of genome-wide identification, transcriptome and association analysis of HSP20 gene family to revealing genetic basis of floral organ number-related traits in tree peony

The HSP20 family is the major member of heat shock proteins that are essential components involved in plant growth, development, and stress response, but little is known about tree peony (Paeonia suffruticosa). In this study, genome-wide analysis combining HSP20 gene family expression analysis of tree peony transcriptome was conducted, and the association between SNPs of HSP20s and flower organ number-related traits was analyzed. A total of 149 members were identified in the P. ostii genome, and divided into 10 subfamilies, most of which were classified into cytoplasm or nucleus. Interestingly, their protein sequences were highly conserved, mainly containing motif 1 or 3. In addition, a total of 38 deferentially expressed HSP20s were identified from transcriptome of flower buds with 5-carpels and polycarpels of P. ostii plants at three developmental stages, among which PoHSP89 and PoHSP133 were further cloned from 271 cultivars for association analysis. It indicated that seven or 19 pairs of associated combinations were obtained with the number of carpel, petal, stamen in PoHSP89 and PoHSP133, which could explain the phenotypic variation by 1.79% to 4.06%, and 1.92% to 12.37%, respectively. It will provide a valuable basis for clarifying the phylogenetic relationship to understand their biological function within the HSP20 gene family, and the identified candidate genes and their corresponding associated SNP loci would reveal the genetic basis on floral organ number variation and be useful for molecular marker-assisted breeding of tree peony in view to improving ornamental traits and yields

Genome-wide association analysis identifies 30 new susceptibility loci for schizophrenia

We conducted a genome-wide association study (GWAS) with replication in 36,180 Chinese individuals and performed further transancestry meta-analyses with data from the Psychiatry Genomics Consortium (PGC2). Approximately 95% of the genome-wide significant (GWS) index alleles (or their proxies) from the PGC2 study were overrepresented in Chinese schizophrenia cases, including ∼50% that achieved nominal significance and ∼75% that continued to be GWS in the transancestry analysis. The Chinese-only analysis identified seven GWS loci; three of these also were GWS in the transancestry analyses, which identified 109 GWS loci, thus yielding a total of 113 GWS loci (30 novel) in at least one of these analyses. We observed improvements in the fine-mapping resolution at many susceptibility loci. Our results provide several lines of evidence supporting candidate genes at many loci and highlight some pathways for further research. Together, our findings provide novel insight into the genetic architecture and biological etiology of schizophrenia

Synthesis and characterization of calcium carbonate whisker from yellow phosphorus slag

In this study, a procedure for producing calcium carbonate whisker through yellow phosphorus slag carbonation without adding any crystal control agents was proposed. The influence of process parameters on the crystal phase and morphology of the product was discussed. The content of aragonite in the product was more than 90% under optimal conditions. The whiteness of the product was 97.6%. The diameter of a single particle was about 1.5–3 μm, and the length of a single particle was about 8–40 μm. Various polymorphs and morphologies of CaCO3 could be formed by adjusting the production conditions. The by-products produced during the whole preparation process could also be reused. The whole preparation process of fibrous aragonite from yellow phosphorus slag without using any chemical additives was also proposed. These indicated that the production strategy had a good application prospect