Bis{1-[(1H-benzimidazol-1-yl)methyl-κN 3]-1H-1,2,3,4-tetra­zole}silver(I) nitrate

In the title salt, [Ag(C9H8N6)2]NO3, the central AgI atom is linearly coordinated by the N atoms [171.97 (8)°] from two 1-[(benzimidazol-1-yl)meth­yl]-1H-1,2,3,4-tetra­zole ligands. The benzimidazole rings in adjacent mol­ecules are parallel with an average inter­planar distance of 3.461 Å; adjacent mol­ecules are linked through N—H⋯O hydrogen bonds into a linear chain along the b-axis direction

Substrate Specificity and Plasticity of FERM-Containing Protein Tyrosine Phosphatases

SummaryEpidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) pathway substrate 15 (Eps15) is a newly identified substrate for protein tyrosine phosphatase N3 (PTPN3), which belongs to the FERM-containing PTP subfamily comprising five members including PTPN3, N4, N13, N14, and N21. We solved the crystal structures of the PTPN3-Eps15 phosphopeptide complex and found that His812 of PTPN3 and Pro850 of Eps15 are responsible for the specific interaction between them. We defined the critical role of the additional residue Tyr676 of PTPN3, which is replaced by Ile939 in PTPN14, in recognition of tyrosine phosphorylated Eps15. The WPD loop necessary for catalysis is present in all members but not PTPN21. We identified that Glu instead of Asp in the WPE loop contributes to the catalytic incapability of PTPN21 due to an extended distance beyond protonation targeting a phosphotyrosine substrate. Together with in vivo validations, our results provide novel insights into the substrate specificity and plasticity of FERM-containing PTPs

MPCViT: Searching for MPC-friendly Vision Transformer with Heterogeneous Attention

Secure multi-party computation (MPC) enables computation directly on encrypted data on non-colluding untrusted servers and protects both data and model privacy in deep learning inference. However, existing neural network (NN) architectures, including Vision Transformers (ViTs), are not designed or optimized for MPC protocols and incur significant latency overhead due to the Softmax function in the multi-head attention (MHA). In this paper, we propose an MPC-friendly ViT, dubbed MPCViT, to enable accurate yet efficient ViT inference in MPC. We systematically compare different attention variants in MPC and propose a heterogeneous attention search space, which combines the high-accuracy and MPC-efficient attentions with diverse structure granularities. We further propose a simple yet effective differentiable neural architecture search (NAS) algorithm for fast ViT optimization. MPCViT significantly outperforms prior-art ViT variants in MPC. With the proposed NAS algorithm, our extensive experiments demonstrate that MPCViT achieves 7.9x and 2.8x latency reduction with better accuracy compared to Linformer and MPCFormer on the Tiny-ImageNet dataset, respectively. Further, with proper knowledge distillation (KD), MPCViT even achieves 1.9% better accuracy compared to the baseline ViT with 9.9x latency reduction on the Tiny-ImageNet dataset.Comment: 6 pages, 6 figure

Tetra­aqua­{1-[(1H-1,2,3-benzotriazol-1-yl)meth­yl]-1H-1,2,4-triazole}sulfato­zinc(II) dihydrate

In the title complex, [Zn(SO4)(C9H8N6)(H2O)4]·2H2O, the ZnII ion is six-coordinated by one N atom from a 1-[(1H-1,2,3-benzotriazol-1-yl)meth­yl]-1H-1,2,4-triazole ligand and five O atoms from one monodentate sulfate anion and four water mol­ecules in a distorted octa­hedral geometry. The sulfate tetra­hedron is rotationally disordered over two positions in a 0.618 (19):0.382 (19) ratio. In the crystal, adjacent mol­ecules are linked through O—H⋯O and O—H⋯N hydrogen bonds involving the cation, the anion, and the coordinated and uncoordinated water mol­ecules into a three-dimensional network

Protective efficacy of a broadly cross-reactive swine influenza DNA vaccine encoding M2e, cytotoxic T lymphocyte epitope and consensus H3 hemagglutinin

BACKGROUND: Pigs have been implicated as mixing reservoir for the generation of new pandemic influenza strains, control of swine influenza has both veterinary and public health significance. Unlike human influenza vaccines, strains used for commercially available swine influenza vaccines are not regularly replaced, making the vaccines provide limited protection against antigenically diverse viruses. It is therefore necessary to develop broadly protective swine influenza vaccines that are efficacious to both homologous and heterologous virus infections. In this study, two forms of DNA vaccines were constructed, one was made by fusing M2e to consensus H3HA (MHa), which represents the majority of the HA sequences of H3N2 swine influenza viruses. Another was made by fusing M2e and a conserved CTL epitope (NP147-155) to consensus H3HA (MNHa). Their protective efficacies against homologous and heterologous challenges were tested. RESULTS: BALB/c mice were immunized twice by particle-mediated epidermal delivery (gene gun) with the two DNA vaccines. It was shown that the two vaccines elicited substantial antibody responses, and MNHa induced more significant T cell-mediated immune response than MHa did. Then two H3N2 strains representative of different evolutional and antigenic clusters were used to challenge the vaccine-immunized mice (homosubtypic challenge). Results indicated that both of the DNA vaccines prevented homosubtypic virus infections completely. The vaccines’ heterologous protective efficacies were further tested by challenging with a H1N1 swine influenza virus and a reassortant 2009 pandemic strain. It was found that MNHa reduced the lung viral titers significantly in both challenge groups, histopathological observation showed obvious reduction of lung pathogenesis as compared to MHa and control groups. CONCLUSIONS: The combined utility of the consensus HA and the conserved M2e and CTL epitope can confer complete and partial protection against homologous and heterologous challenges, respectively, in mouse model. This may provide a basis for the development of universal swine influenza vaccines

Assessing the effectiveness of complex dietary candidate probiotics on growth performance, digestive enzyme activity, antioxidant capability, and intestinal microbiota of koi carp (Cyprinus carpio var. koi)

The present study aimed to evaluate the effectiveness of three complex dietary candidate probiotics (LDJ, LAC, and LJD) composing different candidate probiotic combinations on the growth performance, digestive enzyme activities, antioxidant parameters, and intestinal microbiota in koi carp (Cyprinus carpio var. koi). After a 60-days feeding trial, samples from the control and three candidate probiotic groups were obtained and analyzed. The results suggested that all complex dietary candidate probiotic treatments (LDJ, LAC, and LJD) improved the growth performance, nutrition utilization, and intestinal digestive enzyme activities compared with the control group. Furthermore, a dietary supplement with LAC or LJD is more efficient in growth and digestive enzyme than LDJ. The antioxidant enzyme activities, including SOD (superoxide dismutase), CAT (catalase), and GPX (glutathione peroxidase), were intensively improved, the GSH (glutathione) contents increased, and the MDA (malondialdehyde) contents decreased to different extents depending on the tissues and kinds of candidate probiotics. Dietary candidate probiotics also regulated the intestinal microbiota composition: LDJ and LAC increased the proportion of potential candidate probiotics and reduced the level of pollutants reducing bacteria and geosmin producer Nannocystis. The LJD group had a similar pattern of the dominant bacteria to the control sample, suggesting a minor disturbance of the gut microbiota of koi carp. Overall, the multi-strain complex candidate probiotics LAC and LJD are more efficient in growth performance and digestive enzymes

A new AgI complex based on 1-[(1H-benzimidazol-1-yl)meth­yl]-1H-1,2,4-triazole

In the title complex, bis­{μ-1-[(1H-benzimidazol-1-yl)meth­yl]-1H-1,2,4-triazole}disilver(I) dinitrate, [Ag2(C10H9N5)2](NO3)2, the AgI ion is nearly linearly coordinated [N—Ag—N angle is 155.72 (14)°] by two 1-[(1H-benzimidazole-1-yl)meth­yl]-1H-1,2,4-triazole (bmt) ligands. In addition, two bmt ligands link two AgI ions, forming a dinuclear unit with an Ag⋯Ag distance of 5.0179 (15) Å. The whole complex is generated by an inversion centre. The dinuclear units and the NO3 − counter-ions are connected by N—H⋯O hydrogen bonds and weak Ag⋯O inter­actions [2.831 (5), 2.887 (5) and 2.908 (5) Å], leading to a three-dimensional structure