Development of Chemical Tools to Study Quorum Sensing in Streptococcus mutans

Streptococcus mutans, a Gram-positive major dental caries pathogen, uses a quorum sensing (QS) system called the competence regulon to colonize the oral cavity and compete with other oral commensal bacteria. QS is a cell-density based communication method bacteria use to regulate gene expression in relation to their population density. S. mutans uses two peptide pheromones, competence stimulating peptide (CSP) and comX-inducing peptide (XIP) as QS regulators. After secretion, CSP is processed by a membrane-localized protease, SepM and then interacts with the cognate transmembrane receptor ComD. XIP is active in chemically defined media (CDM) and after uptake by oligopeptide permease, XIP interacts with a cytosolic receptor ComR. The aim of this study was to develop CSP-based and XIP-based QS modulators that can either activate or inhibit S. mutans QS. To this end, I have performed a systematic structure-activity relationship (SAR) analysis of both CSP and XIP and identified several key structural features that are important for CSP:SepM, CSP:ComD and XIP:ComR interactions. Based on these SAR studies, I established the minimal structural requirements for CSP and XIP activity and rationally designed CSP-based QS activators with activities at the picomolar range and XIP-based QS inhibitors. My studies will help to understand S. mutans QS and lay the foundation to design QS-based therapeutics against S. mutans infections

Paradigms of approaches to research

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Research ethics: Overcoming the exploitative dynamic through ethical research

Research ethics is a framework of principles and guidelines designed to ensure that scientific inquiry protects participants’ rights and welfare while upholding integrity. Core principles includes respect for persons, beneficence, and justice which govern all research stages. Respect for persons requires informed consent, confidentiality, and additional safeguards for individuals with diminished autonomy. Beneficence involves maximizing benefits and minimizing harm. Justice demands equitable distribution of both research burdens and benefits. Despite these safeguards, exploitative dynamics persist when power imbalances enable researchers to pursue agendas at the expense of marginalized communities. Such dynamics manifest as tokenistic participation, extractive “helicopter” research, lack of reciprocity, disregard for local context, and unaddressed harms, all of which erode trust and compromise research validity. Mitigating these issues for ensuring ethical research requires proactive strategies at both the investigator and institutional levels. Researchers should co-design studies with community partners, implement participant-centered informed consent, ensure fair recruitment, prioritize participant welfare, establish benefit-sharing agreements, and maintain transparency and accountability. Academic institutions must bolster ethics infrastructures — streamlining review processes, providing ongoing ethics training, facilitating genuine community engagement, and fostering a culture that rewards ethical conduct. By embedding these measures into research design and oversight, the research community can prevent exploitation, honour participants’ dignity, and advance knowledge in an equitable manner. Upholding rigorous ethical standards not only safeguards scientific credibility but also builds public trust and contributes to a more just and inclusive society.

Unraveling research: Understanding scientific reasoning

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nlpBDpatriots at BLP-2023 Task 2: A Transfer Learning Approach to Bangla Sentiment Analysis

In this paper, we discuss the nlpBDpatriots entry to the shared task on Sentiment Analysis of Bangla Social Media Posts organized at the first workshop on Bangla Language Processing (BLP) co-located with EMNLP. The main objective of this task is to identify the polarity of social media content using a Bangla dataset annotated with positive, neutral, and negative labels provided by the shared task organizers. Our best system for this task is a transfer learning approach with data augmentation which achieved a micro F1 score of 0.71. Our best system ranked 12th among 30 teams that participated in the competition

New Algorithm For Detection of Spinal Cord Tumor using OpenCV

The spinal cord one of the most sensitive and significant parts of the human body lies protected inside the spine the backbone and contains bundles of nerves Any minor problem in the spinal cord can cause debilitation of internal and external functions of the human body One of the complications in the spinal cord is tumor - abnormal growth of tissue In this project we present a new algorithm based on OpenCV to detect spinal cord tumors from MRI sagittal image without human intervention The new algorithm can detect tumor-like substances adjacent to the spinal cord Tests carried out on spinal cord MRI images 33 cervical spinal images showed approximately 90 91 of accuracy rate in detecting tumor

nlpBDpatriots at BLP-2023 Task 1: A Two-Step Classification for Violence Inciting Text Detection in Bangla

In this paper, we discuss the nlpBDpatriots entry to the shared task on Violence Inciting Text Detection (VITD) organized as part of the first workshop on Bangla Language Processing (BLP) co-located with EMNLP. The aim of this task is to identify and classify the violent threats, that provoke further unlawful violent acts. Our best-performing approach for the task is two-step classification using back translation and multilinguality which ranked 6th out of 27 teams with a macro F1 score of 0.74

The Relationship Between Years of Schooling and the Forms of Social Capital: A Study Conducted in an Urban Area, Under Sylhet City

Education and social capital have great contribution to the development. The main endeavor of this article divulges the connection between individual’s years of schooling and their social networks, social norms, civic participation, cooperation and social trust as social capital. To find out the relationship between individual’s years of schooling and their social capital descriptive research design has been followed. Mix-method approach -- Social survey technique and Focused Group Discussion (FGD) -- has been applied for collecting data from study area. To analyze the collected data, Likert Scale, Human Development Index (HDI) and the Spearman’s rho correlation were calculated. Hypotheses have been formulated and tested in congruence with the objectives of the study. From the study, it is found that, positive relation exists between years of schooling and various components of social capital. It also signifies that, educated people have more social network and they maintain the social norms. On the contrary, they have low trust on their neighbors and are less cooperative to them too. It is also revealed, Social Networks Index is more superior over other elements of Social Capital i.e. 0.749 (social network) > 0.671 (social norms) > 0.658 (civic participation) > 0.584 (social Cooperation) > 0.425 (social trust). In conclusion, individual’s years of schooling influenced their social capital but variety of relation exists there because of the influence of others variable.Key words: Years of schooling; Social capital; Social networks; Social norms; Civic participation; Cooperation; Social trus

Paradigms of approaches to research

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MasonTigers@LT-EDI-2024: An Ensemble Approach Towards Detecting Homophobia and Transphobia in Social Media Comments

In this paper, we describe our approaches and results for Task 2 of the LT-EDI 2024 Workshop, aimed at detecting homophobia and/or transphobia across ten languages. Our methodologies include monolingual transformers and ensemble methods, capitalizing on the strengths of each to enhance the performance of the models. The ensemble models worked well, placing our team, MasonTigers, in the top five for eight of the ten languages, as measured by the macro F1 score. Our work emphasizes the efficacy of ensemble methods in multilingual scenarios, addressing the complexities of language-specific tasks