Analysis of interspecies adherence of oral bacteria using a membrane binding assay coupled with polymerase chain reaction-denaturing gradient gel electrophoresis profiling.

Information on co-adherence of different oral bacterial species is important for understanding interspecies interactions within oral microbial community. Current knowledge on this topic is heavily based on pariwise coaggregation of known, cultivable species. In this study, we employed a membrane binding assay coupled with polymerase chain reaction-denaturing gradient gel electrophoresis (PCR-DGGE) to systematically analyze the co-adherence profiles of oral bacterial species, and achieved a more profound knowledge beyond pairwise coaggregation. Two oral bacterial species were selected to serve as "bait": Fusobacterium nucleatum (F. nucleatum) whose ability to adhere to a multitude of oral bacterial species has been extensively studied for pairwise interactions and Streptococcus mutans (S. mutans) whose interacting partners are largely unknown. To enable screening of interacting partner species within bacterial mixtures, cells of the "bait" oral bacterium were immobilized on nitrocellulose membranes which were washed and blocked to prevent unspecific binding. The "prey" bacterial mixtures (including known species or natural saliva samples) were added, unbound cells were washed off after the incubation period and the remaining cells were eluted using 0.2 mol x L(-1) glycine. Genomic DNA was extracted, subjected to 16S rRNA PCR amplification and separation of the resulting PCR products by DGGE. Selected bands were recovered from the gel, sequenced and identified via Nucleotide BLAST searches against different databases. While few bacterial species bound to S. mutans, consistent with previous findings F. nucleatum adhered to a variety of bacterial species including uncultivable and uncharacterized ones. This new approach can more effectively analyze the co-adherence profiles of oral bacteria, and could facilitate the systematic study of interbacterial binding of oral microbial species

Complementary relations of entanglement, coherence, steering and Bell nonlocality inequality violation in three-qubit states

We put forward complementary relations of entanglement, coherence, steering inequality violation, and Bell nonlocality for arbitrary three-qubit states. We show that two families of genuinely entangled three-qubit pure states with single parameter exist, and they exhibit maximum coherence and steering inequality violation for a fixed amount of negativity, respectively. It is found that the negativity is exactly equal to the geometric mean of bipartite concurrences for the three-qubit pure states, although the negativity is always less than or equal to the latter for three-qubit mixed states. Moreover, the complementary relation between negativity and first-order coherence for tripartite entanglement states are established. Furthermore, we investigate the close relation between the negativity and the maximum steering inequality violation. In addition, the complementary relation between negativity and the maximum Bell-inequality violation for arbitrary three-qubit states is obtained. The results provide reliable evidence of fundamental connections among entanglement, coherence, steering inequality violation, and Bell nonlocality.Comment: 11 pages, 5 figure

The decision optimization of product development by considering the customer demand saturation

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to analyze the impacts of over meeting customer demands on the product development process, which is on the basis of the quantitative model of customer demands, development cost and time. Then propose the corresponding product development optimization decision. Design/methodology/approach: First of all, investigate to obtain the customer demand information, and then quantify customer demands weights by using variation coefficient method. Secondly, analyses the relationship between customer demands and product development time and cost based on the quality function deployment and establish corresponding mathematical model. On this basis, put forward the concept of customer demand saturation and optimization decision method of product development, and then apply it in the notebook development process of a company. Finally, when customer demand is saturated, it also needs to prove the consistency of strengthening satisfies customer demands and high attention degree customer demands, and the stability of customer demand saturation under different parameters. Findings: The development cost and the time will rise sharply when over meeting the customer demand. On the basis of considering the customer demand saturation, the relationship between customer demand and development time cost is quantified and balanced. And also there is basically consistent between the sequence of meeting customer demands and customer demands survey results. Originality/value: The paper proposes a model of customer demand saturation. It proves the correctness and effectiveness on the product development decision method.</p

Environment-mediated entropic uncertainty in charging quantum batteries

We studied the dynamics of entropic uncertainty in Markovian and non-Markovian systems during the charging of open quantum batteries (QBs) mediated by a common dissipation environment. In the non-Markovian regime, the battery is almost fully charged efficiently, and the strong non-Markovian property is beneficial for improving the charging power. In addition, the results show that the energy storage is closely related to the couplings of the charger-reservoir and battery-reservoir; that is, the stronger coupling of a charger-reservoir improves energy storage. In particular, entanglement is required to obtain the most stored energy and is accompanied by the least tight entropic bound. Interestingly, it was found that the tightness of the entropic bound can be considered a good indicator of the energy transfer in different charging processes, and the complete energy transfer always corresponds to the tightest entropic bound. Our results provide insight into the optimal charging efficiency of QBs during practical charging.Comment: 9 pages, 6 figures, comments are welcomed. Accepted by Physical Review

Dual Preference Distribution Learning for Item Recommendation

Recommender systems can automatically recommend users with items that they probably like. The goal of them is to model the user-item interaction by effectively representing the users and items. Existing methods have primarily learned the user's preferences and item's features with vectorized embeddings, and modeled the user's general preferences to items by the interaction of them. In fact, users have their specific preferences to item attributes and different preferences are usually related. Therefore, exploring the fine-grained preferences as well as modeling the relationships among user's different preferences could improve the recommendation performance. Toward this end, we propose a dual preference distribution learning framework (DUPLE), which aims to jointly learn a general preference distribution and a specific preference distribution for a given user, where the former corresponds to the user's general preference to items and the latter refers to the user's specific preference to item attributes. Notably, the mean vector of each Gaussian distribution can capture the user's preferences, and the covariance matrix can learn their relationship. Moreover, we can summarize a preferred attribute profile for each user, depicting his/her preferred item attributes. We then can provide the explanation for each recommended item by checking the overlap between its attributes and the user's preferred attribute profile. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments on six public datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and explainability of the DUPLE method.Comment: 23 pages, 7 figures. This manuscript has been accepted by ACM Transactions on Information System

Tetra­aqua­bis(1-hydr­oxy-2-naphthoato-κO 2)magnesium(II)

In the title mononuclear complex, [Mg(C11H7O3)2(H2O)4], the MgII atom is located on a centre of inversion and is coordinated by two O atoms from two 1-hydr­oxy-2-naphthoate ligands and four water mol­ecules in an octa­hedral geometry. The structure is consolidated by inter­molecular O—H⋯O hydrogen bonding, as well as by π–π stacking inter­actions between adjacent naphthyl ring systems [centroid–centroid distance between parallel naphthoate rings is 3.768 (2) Å]

The Technology Study of Camshaft Treated by Laser Bionic Melting Process in Aqueous Media Cooling

Biomimetic coupling wear resistance model was created according to biomimetic coupling phenomenon and biomimetic coupling theory, utilize the preparation of aqueous media by laser cooling techniques, process biological coupling unit on the gray cast iron surface according to the organism form, make the bionic coupled unit in accordance with the laws of organism combination, form bionic coupling surface which is similar to the organism form with material surface to improve the wear resistance of the camshaft. Studies show, the region which dealt with aqueous media by laser can get small grains, and grain size is uniform, hardness and wear resistance is improved. Key words: bionic coupling; laser melting; camshaf

Feedback-based debugging

National Research Foundation (NRF) Singapor