Identification of a novel ß-adrenergic octopamine receptor-like gene (ßAOR-like) and increased ATP-binding cassette B10 (ABCB10) expression in a Rhipicephalus microplus cell line derived from acaricide-resistant ticks

Background: The cattle tick Rhipicephalus (Boophilus) microplus is an economically important parasite of livestock. Effective control of ticks using acaricides is threatened by the emergence of resistance to many existing compounds. Several continuous R. microplus cell lines have been established and provide an under-utilised resource for studies into acaricide targets and potential genetic mutations associated with resistance. As a first step to genetic studies using these resources, this study aimed to determine the presence or absence of two genes and their transcripts that have been linked with acaricide function in cattle ticks: β-adrenergic octopamine receptor (βAOR, associated with amitraz resistance) and ATP-binding cassette B10 (ABCB10, associated with macrocyclic lactone resistance) in six R. microplus cell lines, five other Rhipicephalus spp. cell lines and three cell lines representing other tick genera (Amblyomma variegatum, Ixodes ricinus and Hyalomma anatolicum). Methods: End-point polymerase chain reaction (PCR) was used for detection of the βAOR gene and transcripts in DNA and RNA extracted from the tick cell lines, followed by capillary sequencing of amplicons. Quantitative real-time PCR (qPCR) was performed to determine the levels of expression of ABCB10. Results: βAOR gene expression was detected in all Rhipicephalus spp. cell lines. We observed a second amplicon of approximately 220 bp for the βAOR gene in the R. microplus cell line BME/CTVM6, derived from acaricide-resistant ticks. Sequencing of this transcript variant identified a 36 bp insertion in the βAOR gene, leading to a 12-amino acid insertion (LLKTLALVTIIS) in the first transmembrane domain of the protein. In addition, nine synonymous SNPs were also discovered in R. appendiculatus, R. evertsi and R. sanguineus cell lines. Some of these SNPs appear to be unique to each species, providing potential tools for differentiating the tick species. The BME/CTVM6 cell line had significantly higher ABCB10 (P = 0.002) expression than the other R. micropluscell lines. Conclusions: The present study has identified a new βAOR gene and demonstrated a higher ABCB10 expression level in the BME/CTVM6 cell line, indicating that tick cell lines provide a useful experimental tool for acaricide resistance studies and further elucidation of tick genetics

A First Complete Algorithm for Real Quantifier Elimination in Isabelle/HOL

We formalize a multivariate quantifier elimination (QE) algorithm in the theorem prover Isabelle/HOL. Our algorithm is complete, in that it is able to reduce any quantified formula in the first-order logic of real arithmetic to a logically equivalent quantifier-free formula. The algorithm we formalize is a hybrid mixture of Tarski's original QE algorithm and the Ben-Or, Kozen, and Reif algorithm, and it is the first complete multivariate QE algorithm formalized in Isabelle/HOL

In-situ observation of evolving microstructural damage and associated effective electro-mechanical properties of PZT during bipolar electrical fatigue

We investigate the fatigue behavior of bulk polycrystalline lead zirconate titanate (PZT) during bipolar electric field cycling. We characterize the frequency- and cycle-dependent degradation in both the effective electro-mechanical properties (specifically, the electrical hysteresis and the macroscopic viscoelastic stiffness and damping measured by Broadband Electromechanical Spectroscopy, BES) and the microstructural damage evolution (quantified via scanning electron microscopy). The BES setup enables the mechanical characterization while performing electrical cycling so as to measure the evolving viscoelasticity without remounting the sample; particularly measuring the viscoelastic damping allows us to gain insight into the ferroelectric domain wall activity across the full electric hysteresis and over the full range of cycles. A clear dependence on the electric cycling frequency is observed in the rates of degradation of all measured properties including an up to 10% increase in dynamic compliance and a 70% decrease in electric displacement magnitude. We quantify the evolving micro-crack density across wide ranges of numbers of cycles and compare with changes in the effective compliance. Interestingly, the observed strong degradation in the ferroelectric hysteresis is contrasted by relatively mild changes in the effective viscoelastic moduli, while samples clearly indicate increasing levels of micro-damage

Dampak Magang Merdeka Belajar Kampus Merdeka Bagi Mahasiswa Akuntansi

An internship is an integral part of the higher education curriculum to broaden students' practical understanding of the real world. This research focuses on the Magang Merdeka Belajar Kampus Merdeka (MBKM) program, which was introduced by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Research, and Technology of the Republic of Indonesia in early 2020. The program aims to facilitate students' gaining real-world experience through relevant work practices in their field of study, thereby enhancing graduates' hard and soft skills. Therefore, this research aims to identify the skills acquired by accounting students during their participation in MBKM internship activities across various industries. This study utilized a survey method by distributing a Google Form through social media to accounting students throughout Indonesia who participated in the MBKM internship. The valid sample size obtained was 90 out of 105 eligible respondents, and the data was analyzed using descriptive statistical approaches. The analysis results indicate that the majority of surveyed students have made progress in both hard and soft skills required in the workplace. The majority of students agree that their internship has helped them enhance their confidence in working in the field of accounting and their abilities to work independently and solve problems autonomously, collaborate with others, present in front of the public, analyze data, and exercise judgment in task completion. This study also found that the internship program is effective in enhancing the skills required by the business and industry sectors, resulting in the majority of internship participants receiving job offers upon graduatio

Socratis: Are large multimodal models emotionally aware?

Existing emotion prediction benchmarks contain coarse emotion labels which do not consider the diversity of emotions that an image and text can elicit in humans due to various reasons. Learning diverse reactions to multimodal content is important as intelligent machines take a central role in generating and delivering content to society. To address this gap, we propose Socratis, a societal reactions benchmark, where each image-caption (IC) pair is annotated with multiple emotions and the reasons for feeling them. Socratis contains 18K free-form reactions for 980 emotions on 2075 image-caption pairs from 5 widely-read news and image-caption (IC) datasets. We benchmark the capability of state-of-the-art multimodal large language models to generate the reasons for feeling an emotion given an IC pair. Based on a preliminary human study, we observe that humans prefer human-written reasons over 2 times more often than machine-generated ones. This shows our task is harder than standard generation tasks because it starkly contrasts recent findings where humans cannot tell apart machine vs human-written news articles, for instance. We further see that current captioning metrics based on large vision-language models also fail to correlate with human preferences. We hope that these findings and our benchmark will inspire further research on training emotionally aware models.Comment: ICCV 2023 WECI

Maternal Feeding Practices And Toddlers’ Fruit And Vegetable Consumption: Results From The DIT - Coombe Hospital Birth Cohort In Ireland

Health benefits of fruit and vegetable have been well recognized. However, insufficient consumption of fruit and vegetable is prevalent among toddlers, and has become a global public health issue. Maternal feeding practices are potential factors influencing toddlers’ dietary intake, including fruit and vegetable intake. This study was conducted to explore the influence of maternal feeding practices on toddlers’ fruit and vegetable consumption in Ireland

Programmed Allee Effect in Bacteria Causes a Tradeoff Between Population Spread and Survival

Dispersal is necessary for spread into new habitats, but it has also been shown to inhibit spread. Theoretical studies have suggested that the presence of a strong Allee effect may account for these counterintuitive observations. Experimental demonstration of this notion is lacking due to the difficulty in quantitative analysis of such phenomena in a natural setting. We engineered Escherichia coli to exhibit a strong Allee effect and examined how the Allee effect would affect the spread of the engineered bacteria. We showed that the Allee effect led to a biphasic dependence of bacterial spread on the dispersal rate: spread is promoted for intermediate dispersal rates but inhibited at low or high dispersal rates. The shape of this dependence is contingent upon the initial density of the source population. Moreover, the Allee effect led to a tradeoff between effectiveness of population spread and survival: increasing the number of target patches during dispersal allows more effective spread, but it simultaneously increases the risk of failing to invade or of going extinct. We also observed that total population growth is transiently maximized at an intermediate number of target patches. Finally, we demonstrate that fluctuations in cell growth may contribute to the paradoxical relationship between dispersal and spread. Our results provide direct experimental evidence that the Allee effect can explain the apparently paradoxical effects of dispersal on spread and have implications for guiding the spread of cooperative organisms