16,237 research outputs found
Chryseobacterium indologenes improves survival of the Chromobacterium violaceum and violacein production
Chromobacterium violaceum is a human opportunistic pathogen which appears in soil and water environments. It produces a purple-colored bactericide named violacein. The aim of this study was to investigate the correlation between violacein production and the competitive ability of C. violaceum in co-culture with other soil bacteria. The C. violaceum (3), Chryseobacterium indologenes (1), Serratia marcescens (2), Pantoea agglomerans (4 and 5), Enterobacter asburiae (6) and Bacillus megaterium (7), were isolated together from a nest of Crematogaster biroi. In the duel species competition experiments, C. violaceum (3) inhibited the growth of C. indologenes (1), while being dramatically inhibited by S. marcescens (2). The growth of C. violaceum (3) was unaffected by P. agglomerans (4 and 5) and E. asburiae (6), but it was slightly reduced by B. megaterium (7) (after 48 h of incubation). In the multiple competition experiments, the survival of C. violaceum (3) was increased in the presence of C. indologenes (1). The production of violacein was reduced in co-culture with all the examined bacterial strains, except C. indologenes (1). The violacein degradation assay demonstrated that, S. marcescens (2), P. agglomerans (4 and 5) and E. asburiae (6) were capable of decolorizing violacein, while C. indologenes (1) and B. megaterium (7) had no effect on violacein stability in 24 h of incubation. Taken together, these results might be useful for industrial violacein production.Key words: Chromobacterium violaceum, Chryseobacterium indologenes, growth competition, violacein
Sample-Efficient Model-Free Reinforcement Learning with Off-Policy Critics
Value-based reinforcement-learning algorithms provide state-of-the-art
results in model-free discrete-action settings, and tend to outperform
actor-critic algorithms. We argue that actor-critic algorithms are limited by
their need for an on-policy critic. We propose Bootstrapped Dual Policy
Iteration (BDPI), a novel model-free reinforcement-learning algorithm for
continuous states and discrete actions, with an actor and several off-policy
critics. Off-policy critics are compatible with experience replay, ensuring
high sample-efficiency, without the need for off-policy corrections. The actor,
by slowly imitating the average greedy policy of the critics, leads to
high-quality and state-specific exploration, which we compare to Thompson
sampling. Because the actor and critics are fully decoupled, BDPI is remarkably
stable, and unusually robust to its hyper-parameters. BDPI is significantly
more sample-efficient than Bootstrapped DQN, PPO, and ACKTR, on discrete,
continuous and pixel-based tasks. Source code:
https://github.com/vub-ai-lab/bdpi.Comment: Accepted at the European Conference on Machine Learning 2019 (ECML
Uterine infusion of bacteria alters the transcriptome of bovine oocytes
Postpartum uterine infection reduces fertility in dairy cattle; however, the mechanisms of uterine infectionâmediated infertility are unknown. Paradoxically, infectionâinduced infertility persists after the resolution of disease. Oocytes are a finite resource, which are present at various stages of development during uterine infection. It is likely that oocyte development is influenced by uterine infectionâinduced changes to the follicular microenvironment. To better understand the impact of infection on oocyte quality we employed global transcriptomics of oocytes collected from heifers after receiving intrauterine infusion of pathogenic Escherichia coli and Trueperella pyogenes . We hypothesized that the oocyte transcriptome would be altered in response to intrauterine infection. A total of 452 differentially expressed genes were identified in oocytes collected from heifers 4 days after bacteria infusion compared to vehicle infusion, while 539 differentially expressed genes were identified in oocytes collected from heifers 60 days after bacteria infusion. Only 42 genes were differentially expressed in bacteriaâinfused heifers at both Day 4 and Day 60. Interferon, HMGB1, ILK, ILâ6, and TGFâbeta signaling pathways were downregulated in oocytes collected at Day 4 from bacteriaâinfused heifers, while interferon, ILK, and ILâ6 signaling were upregulated in oocytes collected at Day 60 from bacteriaâinfused heifers. These data suggest that bacterial infusion alters the oocyte transcriptome differently at Day 4 and Day 60, suggesting different follicle stages are susceptible to damage. Characterizing the longâterm impacts of uterine infection on the oocyte transcriptome aids in our understanding of how infection causes infertility in dairy cattle
Abnormally high content of free glucosamine residues identified in a preparation of commercially available porcine intestinal heparan sulfate
Heparan sulfate (HS) polysaccharides are ubiquitous in animal tissues as components of proteoglycans, and they participate in many important biological processes. HS carbohydrate chains are complex and can contain rare structural components such as N-unsubstituted glucosamine (GlcN). Commercially available HS preparations have been invaluable in many types of research activities. In the course of preparing microarrays to include probes derived from HS oligosaccharides, we found an unusually high content of GlcN residue in a recently purchased batch of porcine intestinal mucosal HS. Composition and sequence analysis by mass spectrometry of the oligosaccharides obtained after heparin lyase III digestion of the polysaccharide indicated two and three GlcN in the tetrasaccharide and hexasaccharide fractions, respectively. (1)H NMR of the intact polysaccharide showed that this unusual batch differed strikingly from other HS preparations obtained from bovine kidney and porcine intestine. The very high content of GlcN (30%) and low content of GlcNAc (4.2%) determined by disaccharide composition analysis indicated that N-deacetylation and/or N-desulfation may have taken place. HS is widely used by the scientific community to investigate HS structures and activities. Great care has to be taken in drawing conclusions from investigations of structural features of HS and specificities of HS interaction with proteins when commercial HS is used without further analysis. Pending the availability of a validated commercial HS reference preparation, our data may be useful to members of the scientific community who have used the present preparation in their studies
Endothelin receptor a blockade is an ineffective treatment for adriamycin nephropathy
Endothelin is a vasoconstricting peptide that plays a key role in vascular homeostasis, exerting its biologic effects via two receptors, the endothelin receptor A (ETA) and endothelin receptor B (ETB). Activation of ETA and ETB has opposing actions, in which hyperactive ETA is generally vasoconstrictive and pathologic. Selective ETA blockade has been shown to be beneficial in renal injuries such as diabetic nephropathy and can improve proteinuria. Atrasentan is a selective pharmacologic ETA blocker that preferentially inhibits ETA activation. In this study, we evaluated the efficacy of ETA blockade by atrasentan in ameliorating proteinuria and kidney injury in murine adriamycin nephropathy, a model of human focal segmental glomerulosclerosis. We found that ETA expression was unaltered during the course of adriamycin nephropathy. Whether initiated prior to injury in a prevention protocol (5 mg/kg/day, i.p.) or after injury onset in a therapeutic protocol (7 mg/kg or 20 mg/kg three times a week, i.p.), atrasentan did not significantly affect the initiation and progression of adriamycin-induced albuminuria (as measured by urinary albumin-to-creatinine ratios). Indices of glomerular damage were also not improved in atrasentan-treated groups, in either the prevention or therapeutic protocols. Atrasentan also failed to improve kidney function as determined by serum creatinine, histologic damage, and mRNA expression of numerous fibrosis-related genes such as collagen-I and TGF-ÎČ1. Therefore, we conclude that selective blockade of ETA by atrasentan has no effect on preventing or ameliorating proteinuria and kidney injury in adriamycin nephropathy. © 2013 Tan et al
Acupuncture in Treating Hepatic Fibrosis: A Review with Recommendation for Future Studies
Hepatic fibrosis, as a major medical problem, is characterized with significant morbidity and mortality. Acupuncture has potential advantages in treating hepatic fibrosis as acupuncture functions well to reduce Qi and Blood stagnation, resolve stasis and enhance body immunity, which are important factors in treating hepatic fibrosis. The aim of this review was to appraise the current limited evidence of acupuncture in treating hepatic fibrosis from both animal experiments and clinical trials by using both Chinese and western databases and to provide recommendations for future studies
Continuous Experimentation for Automotive Software on the Example of a Heavy Commercial Vehicle in Daily Operation
As the automotive industry focuses its attention more and more towards the
software functionality of vehicles, techniques to deliver new software value at
a fast pace are needed. Continuous Experimentation, a practice coming from the
web-based systems world, is one of such techniques. It enables researchers and
developers to use real-world data to verify their hypothesis and steer the
software evolution based on performances and user preferences, reducing the
reliance on simulations and guesswork. Several challenges prevent the verbatim
adoption of this practice on automotive cyber-physical systems, e.g., safety
concerns and limitations from computational resources; nonetheless, the
automotive field is starting to take interest in this technique. This work aims
at demonstrating and evaluating a prototypical Continuous Experimentation
infrastructure, implemented on a distributed computational system housed in a
commercial truck tractor that is used in daily operations by a logistic company
on public roads. The system comprises computing units and sensors, and software
deployment and data retrieval are only possible remotely via a mobile data
connection due to the commercial interests of the logistics company. This study
shows that the proposed experimentation process resulted in the development
team being able to base software development choices on the real-world data
collected during the experimental procedure. Additionally, a set of previously
identified design criteria to enable Continuous Experimentation on automotive
systems was discussed and their validity confirmed in the light of the
presented work.Comment: Paper accepted to the 14th European Conference on Software
Architecture (ECSA 2020). 16 pages, 5 figure
Recurrent Fusion Network for Image Captioning
Recently, much advance has been made in image captioning, and an
encoder-decoder framework has been adopted by all the state-of-the-art models.
Under this framework, an input image is encoded by a convolutional neural
network (CNN) and then translated into natural language with a recurrent neural
network (RNN). The existing models counting on this framework merely employ one
kind of CNNs, e.g., ResNet or Inception-X, which describe image contents from
only one specific view point. Thus, the semantic meaning of an input image
cannot be comprehensively understood, which restricts the performance of
captioning. In this paper, in order to exploit the complementary information
from multiple encoders, we propose a novel Recurrent Fusion Network (RFNet) for
tackling image captioning. The fusion process in our model can exploit the
interactions among the outputs of the image encoders and then generate new
compact yet informative representations for the decoder. Experiments on the
MSCOCO dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed RFNet, which sets
a new state-of-the-art for image captioning.Comment: ECCV-1
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