Defluorination of 4-fluorothreonine by threonine deaminase

Open Access via the Jisc RSC AgreementPeer reviewedPublisher PD

Identification of 5-Fluoro-5-Deoxy-Ribulose as a Shunt Fluorometabolite in Streptomyces sp. MA37

Funding: This study was funded by an IBioIC PhD studentship (L.W.), a Leverhulme Trust Research Project (H.D. and M.H.T., project no. RPG-2014-418), a Leverhulme Trust–Royal Society Africa award (K.K. and H.D., AA090088), the jointly funded UK Medical Research Council–UK Department for International Development (MRC/DFID) concordat agreement African Research Leaders Award (K.K. and H.D., MR/S00520X/1), and the Royal Society–NSFC Newton Mobility Grant Award (IEC\NSFC\170617 to H.D.).Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Teaching What You Should Teach: A Data-Based Distillation Method

In real teaching scenarios, an excellent teacher always teaches what he (or she) is good at but the student is not. This gives the student the best assistance in making up for his (or her) weaknesses and becoming a good one overall. Enlightened by this, we introduce the "Teaching what you Should Teach" strategy into a knowledge distillation framework, and propose a data-based distillation method named "TST" that searches for desirable augmented samples to assist in distilling more efficiently and rationally. To be specific, we design a neural network-based data augmentation module with priori bias, which assists in finding what meets the teacher's strengths but the student's weaknesses, by learning magnitudes and probabilities to generate suitable data samples. By training the data augmentation module and the generalized distillation paradigm in turn, a student model is learned with excellent generalization ability. To verify the effectiveness of our method, we conducted extensive comparative experiments on object recognition, detection, and segmentation tasks. The results on the CIFAR-10, ImageNet-1k, MS-COCO, and Cityscapes datasets demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on almost all teacher-student pairs. Furthermore, we conduct visualization studies to explore what magnitudes and probabilities are needed for the distillation process.Comment: 13 pages, 4 figure

An unusual metal-bound 4-fluorothreonine transaldolase from Streptomyces sp. MA37 catalyses promiscuous transaldol reactions

Open Access via the Springer Compact Agreement. This study was funded by IBioIC PhD studentship (LW), Leverhulme Trust Research Project (HD and MHT, project No. RPG-2014-418), The Elphinstone Scholarship of University of Aberdeen (QF), Leverhulme Trust-Royal Society Africa award (KK and HD, AA090088) and the jointly funded UK Medical Research Council – UK Department for International Development (MRC/DFID) Concordat agreement African Research Leaders Award (KK and HD, MR/S00520X/1), Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council UK (HD and SW, BB/P00380X/1) and National Natural Science Foundation of China (31,570,033, 31,811,530,299, and 31,870,035 to YY), and the Royal Society-NSFC Newton Mobility Grant Award (IEC\NSFC\170,617 to HD and YY).Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Genomic scanning enabling discovery of a new antibacterial bicyclic carbamate-containing alkaloid

QF and HD are grateful to the University of Aberdeen Elphinstone Scholarship and Scottish Funding Council/ScotCHEM for financial support through the PEER/PERCE Funding. HD and SW thank the financial supports of Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council UK (BBSRC, BB/P00380X/1). HD, SAM and CP thank Business Interaction Vouchers (BIV009) from BBSRC funded Natural Products discovery and bioengineering Network (NPRONET). H.D. and K.K. thank the financial supports of Leverhulme Trust-Royal Society Africa award (AA090088) and the jointly funded UK Medical Research Council-UK Department for International Development (MRC/DFID) Concordat agreement African Research Leaders Award (MR/S00520X/1). YZ and HD thank National Natural Science Foundation of China (31929001).Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Signalling and Bioactive Metabolites from Streptomyces sp. RK44

Q.F. is grateful to the University of Aberdeen Elphinstone Scholarship and Scottish Funding Council/ScotCHEM for financial support through the PEER/PERCE Funding. FM thanks the University of the Philippines for the Faculty, Reps and Staff Development Program (FRAS DP) for the PhD grant fellowship. HD and KK thank the financial supports of Leverhulme Trust-Royal Society Africa award (AA090088) and the jointly funded UK Medical Research Council-UK Department for International Development (MRC/DFID) Concordat agreement African Research Leaders Award (MR/S00520X/1).Peer reviewedPublisher PD

B7-H3 Overexpression Predicts Poor Survival of Cancer Patients: A Meta-Analysis

Background: B7-H3 exhibits altered expression in various cancers. However, the correlation between B7-H3 expression and prognosis of cancer patients remains controversial. Therefore, we elicit a meta-analysis to investigate the potential value of B7-H3 in the prognostic prediction in human cancers. Materials and Methods: We searched PubMed (last update by June 15th, 2016) to identify studies assessing the effect of B7-H3 on survival of cancer patients. Hazard ratios (HRs) for overall survival (OS), recurrence free survival (RFS) and progression-free survival (PFS) from individual studies were calculated and pooled by using a random-effect or fix-effect model, and heterogeneity and publication bias analyses were also performed. Results: Data from 24 observational studies consisting of 4141 patients were summarized. An elevated baseline B7-H3 was significantly correlated with poor OS (pooled HR = 2.09; 95% CI =1.60-2.74; P P = 0.324), year of publication (P = 0.431), ethnicity (P = 0.940), source of HR (P = 0.145), analysis type (P = 0.178) and sample size (P = 0.909) were not significant. Furthermore, high B7-H3 expression also predicted a significantly poor RFS (pooled HR = 1.39; 95% CI = 1.11-1.75; P = 0.004) but not PFS. Conclusions: This meta-analysis clarifies that elevated B7-H3 expression is significantly associated with poor survival in cancer patients

Recent Progresses and Development of Advanced Atomic Layer Deposition towards High-Performance Li-Ion Batteries

Electrode materials and electrolytes play a vital role in device-level performance of rechargeable Li-ion batteries (LIBs). However, electrode structure/component degeneration and electrode-electrolyte sur-/interface evolution are identified as the most crucial obstacles in practical applications. Thanks to its congenital advantages, atomic layer deposition (ALD) methodology has attracted enormous attention in advanced LIBs. This review mainly focuses upon the up-to-date progress and development of the ALD in high-performance LIBs. The significant roles of the ALD in rational design and fabrication of multi-dimensional nanostructured electrode materials, and finely tailoring electrode-electrolyte sur-/interfaces are comprehensively highlighted. Furthermore, we clearly envision that this contribution will motivate more extensive and insightful studies in the ALD to considerably improve Li-storage behaviors. Future trends and prospects to further develop advanced ALD nanotechnology in next-generation LIBs were also presented