Two New and Two Poorly Known Species of Ancistrum (Ciliophora, Scuticociliatia, Thigmotrichida) Parasitizing Marine Molluscs from Chinese Coastal Waters of the Yellow Sea

The morphology and taxonomy of two new and two poorly known ciliate species of Ancistrum, found in the mantle cavity (mainly on gills) of marine molluscs from culture beds and pools along the Chinese coast of the Yellow Sea, were investigated using living observation and silver impregnation. Ancistrum haliotis n. sp. was isolated from the abalone Haliotis discus hannai Ino, A. crassum Fenchel, 1965 from the purple clam Saxidomus purpuratus (Sowerby), A. acutum n. sp. from the surf clam Mactra veneriformis Reeve, and A. japonicum Uyemura, 1937 from both the venus clam Cyclina sinensis (Gmelin) and from Dosinia japonica (Reeve). Ancistrum haliotis differs from its most similar relative A. mytili (Quennerstedt, 1867) by the body outline (anterior portion narrower vs. wider than the posterior portion), the macronuclear shape (broadly ellipsoidal vs. reniform or sausage-like), and by having fewer somatic kineties (28–32 vs. usually more than >40). Ancistrum crassum is characterized by the naked area at the apical end of the cell, the relatively short buccal field occupying about two thirds of the body length, and the posterior-dorsal cone-shaped prolongation. Ancistrum acutum n. sp. and A. japonicum are almost identical in morphometry, but differ distinctly in the live morphology (anterior end pointed and posterior end rounded vs. anterior end narrowly rounded and posterior-dorsal end protruded) and ciliary pattern (all right-side kineties extend to posterior body end vs. all right-side kineties excluding somatic kinety 1 distinctly shortened posteriad, forming a glabrous zone). We neotypify Ancistrum japonicum and discuss the taxonomic status of the four species. Based on an evaluation of all nominal species of Ancistrum and Ancistrumina, we recognize nine valid species of Ancistrum and provide a tabular guide to their identification. Fenchelia Raabe, 1970 is regarded as a junior synonym of Ancistrum Maupas, 1883. We synonymize Ancistrumina nucellae Khan, 1970 with Ancistrum japonicum Uyemura, 1937 and Ancistrum edajimanum Oishi, 1978 with A. crassum Fenchel, 1965

Boosting Multi-Modal E-commerce Attribute Value Extraction via Unified Learning Scheme and Dynamic Range Minimization

With the prosperity of e-commerce industry, various modalities, e.g., vision and language, are utilized to describe product items. It is an enormous challenge to understand such diversified data, especially via extracting the attribute-value pairs in text sequences with the aid of helpful image regions. Although a series of previous works have been dedicated to this task, there remain seldomly investigated obstacles that hinder further improvements: 1) Parameters from up-stream single-modal pretraining are inadequately applied, without proper jointly fine-tuning in a down-stream multi-modal task. 2) To select descriptive parts of images, a simple late fusion is widely applied, regardless of priori knowledge that language-related information should be encoded into a common linguistic embedding space by stronger encoders. 3) Due to diversity across products, their attribute sets tend to vary greatly, but current approaches predict with an unnecessary maximal range and lead to more potential false positives. To address these issues, we propose in this paper a novel approach to boost multi-modal e-commerce attribute value extraction via unified learning scheme and dynamic range minimization: 1) Firstly, a unified scheme is designed to jointly train a multi-modal task with pretrained single-modal parameters. 2) Secondly, a text-guided information range minimization method is proposed to adaptively encode descriptive parts of each modality into an identical space with a powerful pretrained linguistic model. 3) Moreover, a prototype-guided attribute range minimization method is proposed to first determine the proper attribute set of the current product, and then select prototypes to guide the prediction of the chosen attributes. Experiments on the popular multi-modal e-commerce benchmarks show that our approach achieves superior performance over the other state-of-the-art techniques

Characterization and identification of the integrin family in silkworm, Bombyx mori

YesAs an important economic insect, Bombyx mori is also a useful model organism for lepidopteran insect. Integrins are evolutionarily conserved fromsponges to humans, and play vital roles inmany physiological and pathological processes. To explore their diverse functions of integrins in insect, eleven integrins including sixα and five β subunitswere cloned and characterized fromsilkworm. Our results showed that integrins fromsilkwormown more family members compared to other invertebrates. Among those α subunits, integrins α1, α2, and the other four subunits belong to PS1, PS2, and PS3 groups, respectively. The β subunits mainly gather in the insect βν group except the β1 subunit which belongs to the insect β group. Expression profiles demonstrated that the integrins exhibited distinct patterns, but were mainly expressed in hemocytes. α1 and β2 subunits are the predominant ones either in the embryogenesis or larva stages. Interestingly, integrins were significantly up-regulated after stimulated by 20-hydroxyecdysone (20-E) in vivo. These results indicate that integrins performdiverse functions in hemocytes of silkworm. Overall, our results provide a newinsight into the functional and evolutionary features of integrins.National Basic Research Programof China (No. 2012cb114603), the Research Fund for the Doctoral Program of Higher Education of China (20130182110003), the Natural Science Foundation of Chongqing (cstc2013jcyjys0007), and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (SWU111014)

A novel and high-efficient method for the preparation of heat-stable antifungal factor from Lysobacter enzymogenes by high-speed counter-current chromatography

Heat-stable antifungal factor (HSAF) produced by the biocontrol bacterium Lysobacter enzymogenes shows considerable antifungal activity and has broad application potential in the agricultural and medical fields. There is a great demand for pure HSAF compounds in academic or industrial studies. However, an efficient preparation method that produces a high yield and high purity of HSAF is lacking, limiting the development of HSAF as a new drug. In the present study, high-speed counter-current chromatography (HSCCC) combined with column chromatography was successfully developed for the separation and preparation of HSAF from the crude extract of L. enzymogenes OH11. The crude extract was obtained by macroporous resin adsorption and desorption, and the main impurities were partly removed by ultraviolet light (254 nm) and gel filtration (Sephadex LH-20). In the HSCCC procedure, the selected suitable two-phase solvent system (n-hexane/ethyl acetate/methanol/water = 3:5:4:5, v/v, the lower phase added with 0.1% TFA) with a flow rate of 2.0 mL/min and a sample loading size of 100 mg was optimized for the separation. As a result, a total of 42 mg HSAF with a purity of 97.6% and recovery of 91.7% was yielded in one separation. The structure elucidation based on HR-TOF-MS, 1H and 13C NMR, and antifungal activities revealed that the isolated compound was unambiguously identified as HSAF. These results are helpful for separating and producing HSAF at an industrial scale, and they further demonstrate that HSCCC is a useful tool for isolating bioactive constituents from beneficial microorganisms

Intrathermocline eddies observed in the northwestern subtropical Pacific Ocean

Two anticyclonic intrathermocline eddies (ITEs) were detected by an underwater glider in the northwestern subtropical Pacific Ocean during August-October 2019. They both exhibited a lens-shaped vertical structure within the thermocline with their cores located at ~170 m. The North Pacific Subtropical Mode Water (STMW) was found within the cores of these two ITEs. The lens-shaped structure of ITE1 observed by the glider was very clear since the glider seemed to have moved into its core during the observation. Further analysis reveals that ITE1 displayed no signals at the sea surface and lasted for about 20 days (26 August-14 September 2019). ITE1 was locally formed and the water inside it was a mixture of local water and the water in the northern adjacent area. The low-salinity water at 0-50 m from the northern adjacent area extended southwestward and mixed with the local water. As a result, the local salinity-forced restratification caused a potential vorticity (PV) decrease in the subsurface and finally resulted in the generation of ITE1. The baroclinic instability at 50-170 m may be the main energy source for ITE1 generation. On the other hand, the lens-shaped structure of ITE2 observed by the glider was less prominent since the glider did not move into its core. Further analysis reveals that the lens-shaped structure of ITE2 was also very clear near its core and ITE2 displayed clear signals at the surface as an anticyclonic eddy (AE2). AE2/ITE2 was remotely generated within the main formation region of STMW and then moved southwestward. The low PV STMW was trapped in AE2 and a lens-shaped structure developed in the subsurface. Subduction of the STMW caused the generation of ITE2

A method to prolong lithium-ion battery life during the full life cycle

Extended lifetime of lithium-ion batteries decreases economic costs and environmental burdens in achieving sustainable development. Cycle life tests are conducted on 18650-type commercial batteries, exhibiting nonlinear and inconsistent degradation. The accelerated fade dispersion is proposed to be triggered by the evolution of an additional potential of the anode during cycling as measured vs. Li$^+$/Li. A method to prolong the battery cycle lifetime is proposed, in which the lower cutoff voltage is raised to 3 V when the battery reaches a capacity degradation threshold. The results demonstrate a 38.1% increase in throughput at 70% of their beginning of life (BoL) capacity. The method is applied to two other types of lithium-ion batteries. A cycle lifetime extension of 16.7% and 33.7% is achieved at 70% of their BoL capacity, respectively. The proposed method enables lithium-ion batteries to provide long service time, cost savings, and environmental relief while facilitating suitable second-use applications

A novel visual brain-computer interfaces paradigm based on evoked related potentials evoked by weak and small number of stimuli

IntroductionTraditional visual Brain-Computer Interfaces (v-BCIs) usually use large-size stimuli to attract more attention from users and then elicit more distinct and robust EEG responses, which would cause visual fatigue and limit the length of use of the system. On the contrary, small-size stimuli always need multiple and repeated stimulus to code more instructions and increase separability among each code. These common v-BCIs paradigms can cause problems such as redundant coding, long calibration time, and visual fatigue.MethodsTo address these problems, this study presented a novel v-BCI paradigm using weak and small number of stimuli, and realized a nine-instruction v-BCI system that controlled by only three tiny stimuli. Each of these stimuli were located between instructions, occupied area with eccentricities subtended 0.4°, and flashed in the row-column paradigm. The weak stimuli around each instruction would evoke specific evoked related potentials (ERPs), and a template-matching method based on discriminative spatial pattern (DSP) was employed to recognize these ERPs containing the intention of users. Nine subjects participated in the offline and online experiments using this novel paradigm. ResultsThe average accuracy of the offline experiment was 93.46% and the online average information transfer rate (ITR) was 120.95 bits/min. Notably, the highest online ITR achieved 177.5 bits/min.DiscussionThese results demonstrate the feasibility of using a weak and small number of stimuli to implement a friendly v-BCI. Furthermore, the proposed novel paradigm achieved higher ITR than traditional ones using ERPs as the controlled signal, which showed its superior performance and may have great potential of being widely used in various fields

FusionFormer: A Multi-sensory Fusion in Bird's-Eye-View and Temporal Consistent Transformer for 3D Objection

Multi-sensor modal fusion has demonstrated strong advantages in 3D object detection tasks. However, existing methods that fuse multi-modal features through a simple channel concatenation require transformation features into bird's eye view space and may lose the information on Z-axis thus leads to inferior performance. To this end, we propose FusionFormer, an end-to-end multi-modal fusion framework that leverages transformers to fuse multi-modal features and obtain fused BEV features. And based on the flexible adaptability of FusionFormer to the input modality representation, we propose a depth prediction branch that can be added to the framework to improve detection performance in camera-based detection tasks. In addition, we propose a plug-and-play temporal fusion module based on transformers that can fuse historical frame BEV features for more stable and reliable detection results. We evaluate our method on the nuScenes dataset and achieve 72.6% mAP and 75.1% NDS for 3D object detection tasks, outperforming state-of-the-art methods

Electro-Acupuncture Stimulation (EAS) Control by Imaginary Movement with Feedback Based on Electroencephalograph (EEG) Sensoring

Electro-acupuncture stimulation (EAS) technique applies the electrical nerve stimulation therapy on traditional acupuncture points to restore the muscle tension. The rapid promotion and development of brain-computer interface (BCI) technology makes the thought-control of EAS possible. This paper designed a new BCI-control-EAS (BCICEAS) system by using event-related desynchronization (ERD) of EEG signal evoked by imaginary movement. The change of EEG signal was observed in the training and stimulation experiments with visual feedback. The Fisher parameters were extracted from feature frequency bands of EEG and classified into EAS control commands by Mahalanobis distance (MD) classifier. A feedback training technique was employed to correlate the enhancement of relevant EEG feature through a visual interface with a virtual liquid column, whose height varied along with EEG power spectral feature. According to the statistics analysis of 12 subjects, experimental results revealed the effective improvement of feedback training on signal feature and reliable control of EAS. It is expected that the proposed control method can explore a new way for EAS system design and help people who sufferers with severe movement dysfunction

CARM1 Methylates Chromatin Remodeling Factor BAF155 to Enhance Tumor Progression and Metastasis

SummaryCoactivator-associated arginine methyltransferase 1 (CARM1), a coactivator for various cancer-relevant transcription factors, is overexpressed in breast cancer. To elucidate the functions of CARM1 in tumorigenesis, we knocked out CARM1 from several breast cancer cell lines using Zinc-Finger Nuclease technology, which resulted in drastic phenotypic and biochemical changes. The CARM1 KO cell lines enabled identification of CARM1 substrates, notably the SWI/SNF core subunit BAF155. Methylation of BAF155 at R1064 was found to be an independent prognostic biomarker for cancer recurrence and to regulate breast cancer cell migration and metastasis. Furthermore, CARM1-mediated BAF155 methylation affects gene expression by directing methylated BAF155 to unique chromatin regions (e.g., c-Myc pathway genes). Collectively, our studies uncover a mechanism by which BAF155 acquires tumorigenic functions via arginine methylation