Draft Genome Sequence of Streptomyces sp. Strain CT34, Isolated from a Ghanaian Soil Sample

Copyright © 2015 Zhai et al. This work was supported by the China “973” program (2012CB721001), the “863” Program (2012AA092201), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (31170467), and the EU FP7 project PharmaSea (312184). K.K., M.J., and H.D. thank the Royal Society–Leverhulme Trust Africa for the financial support (award AA090088) that enabled the sampling of sediments and subsequent isolation of this unique Ghanaian strain.Non peer reviewedPublisher PD

Molecular characterization of a mosaic locus in the genome of 'Candidatus Liberibacter asiaticus'

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Huanglongbing (HLB) is a highly destructive disease of citrus production worldwide. '<it>Candidatus </it>Liberibacter asiaticus', an unculturable alpha proteobacterium, is a putative pathogen of HLB. Information about the biology and strain diversity of '<it>Ca</it>. L. asiaticus' is currently limited, inhibiting the scope of HLB research and control.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>A genomic region (CLIBASIA_05640 to CLIBASIA_05650) of '<it>Ca</it>. L. asiaticus' showing hyper-sequence variation or locus mosaicism was identified and investigated using 262 bacterial strains (188 from China and 74 from Florida). Based on the characteristic electrophoretic profiles of PCR amplicons generated by a specific primer set, eight electrophoretic types (E-types) were identified, six E-types (A, B, C, D, E, and F) in China and four E-types (A, C, G, and H) in Florida. The '<it>Ca</it>. L. asiaticus' strains from China consisted predominately of E-type A (71.3%) and E-type B (19.7%). In contrast, the '<it>Ca</it>. L. asiaticus' strains from Florida was predominated by E-type G (82.4%). Diversity of '<it>Ca</it>. L. asiaticus' in China was also evidenced. Strains from the high altitude Yunnan Province consisted of five E-types with E-type B being the majority (62.8%), whereas strains from the low altitude coastal Guangdong Province consisted of only two E-types with E-type A as the majority (97.0%). Sequence analyses revealed that variation of DNA amplicons was due to insertion/deletion events at CLIBASIA_05650 and the downstream intergenic region.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>This study demonstrated the genomic mosaicism of '<it>Ca</it>. L. asiaticus' resulted from active DNA insertion/deletion activities. Analyses of strain variation depicted the significant inter- and intra-continent diversity of '<it>Ca</it>. L. asiaticus'.</p

Visual question answering model for fruit tree disease decision-making based on multimodal deep learning

Visual Question Answering (VQA) about diseases is an essential feature of intelligent management in smart agriculture. Currently, research on fruit tree diseases using deep learning mainly uses single-source data information, such as visible images or spectral data, yielding classification and identification results that cannot be directly used in practical agricultural decision-making. In this study, a VQA model for fruit tree diseases based on multimodal feature fusion was designed. Fusing images and Q&amp;A knowledge of disease management, the model obtains the decision-making answer by querying questions about fruit tree disease images to find relevant disease image regions. The main contributions of this study were as follows: (1) a multimodal bilinear factorized pooling model using Tucker decomposition was proposed to fuse the image features with question features: (2) a deep modular co-attention architecture was explored to simultaneously learn the image and question attention to obtain richer graphical features and interactivity. The experiments showed that the proposed unified model combining the bilinear model and co-attentive learning in a new network architecture obtained 86.36% accuracy in decision-making under the condition of limited data (8,450 images and 4,560k Q&amp;A pairs of data), outperforming existing multimodal methods. The data augmentation is adopted on the training set to avoid overfitting. Ten runs of 10-fold cross-validation are used to report the unbiased performance. The proposed multimodal fusion model achieved friendly interaction and fine-grained identification and decision-making performance. Thus, the model can be widely deployed in intelligent agriculture

15,16-Dihydrotanshinone I inhibits the proliferation of MV4-11 by means of apoptosis via antagonizing FLT3-ITD/STAT5/Mcl-1 pathway

Till now, the medicines approved for acute myeloid leukemia with internal tandem duplication mutation of FMS-like tyrosine kinase 3 (FLT3-ITD) display not ideal efficacy. This study aimed to evaluate the effects of 15,16-dihydrotanshinone I on FLT3-ITD acute myeloid leukemia cells. The inhibitory effect of this compound against MV4-11 was determined using CCK-8 assay. Western blotting detecting caspase-3, PARP, and annexin V-APC/7-AAD was carried out. Activation of FLT3, STAT5, and Mcl-1 expression was analyzed by western blotting. The results showed that MV4-11 was sensitive toward dihydrotanshinone I in a dose-dependent manner (p<0.05). MV4-11 apoptosis was induced notably after dihydrotanshinone I treatment. Western blotting revealed suppressed activation of FLT3, STAT5 and decreased Mcl-1 (p<0.05). This study suggests that dihydrotanshinone I inhibits MV4-11 proliferation by apoptosis via antagonizing FLT3-ITD/STAT5/Mcl-1 path-way, which might provide a novel therapy for acute myeloid leukemia

Ferroelectric Photovoltaic Effect

Tetragonal BiFeO3 films with the thickness of 30 nm were grown epitaxially on (001) oriented LaAlO3 substrate by using pulsed laser deposition (PLD). The transverse photovoltaic effects were studied as a function of the sample directions in-plane as well as the angle between the linearly polarized light and the plane of the sample along X and Y directions. The absorption onset and the direct band gap are ~2.25 and ~2.52 eV, respectively. The photocurrent depends not only on the sample directions in-plane but also on the angle between the linearly polarized light and the plane of the sample along X and Y directions. The results indicate that the bulk photovoltaic effect together with the depolarization field was ascribed to this phenomenon. Detailed analysis presents that the polarization direction is along [110] direction and this depolarization field induced photocurrent is equal to ~3.53 μA/cm2. The BPV induced photocurrent can be approximate described as Jx ≈ 2.23cos(2θ), such an angular dependence of photocurrent is produced as a consequence of asymmetric microscopic processes of carriers such as excitation and recombination

Ethanol Activates Immune Response In Lymphoblastoid Cells

The short term effects of alcohol on gene expression in brain tissue cannot directly be studied in humans. Because neuroimmune signaling is altered by alcohol, immune cells are a logical, accessible choice to study and might provide biomarkers. RNAseq was used to study the effects of 48 h exposure to ethanol on lymphoblastoid cell lines (LCLs) from 21 alcoholics and 21 controls. Ethanol exposure resulted in differential expression of 4,577 of the 12,526 genes detectably expressed in the LCLs (FDR ≤ 0.05); 55% of these showed increased expression. Cells from alcoholics and controls responded similarly. The genes whose expression changed fell into many pathways. NFκB, neuroinflammation, IL-6, and dendritic cell maturation pathways were activated, consistent with increased signaling by NFκB, TNF, TGFβ, IL1, IL4, IL18, TLR4, and LPS. Signaling by Interferons A and B decreased, which may be responsible for a slightly blunted immune response compared to 24 h ethanol treatment. EIF2, phospholipase C and VEGF signaling were decreased. Baseline gene expression patterns were similar in LCLs from alcoholics and controls. At relaxed stringency (p<0.05), 1164 genes differed, 340 of which were also affected by ethanol. There was a suggestion of compensation, with 77% showing opposing fold changes. Aldosterone signaling and phospholipase C signaling differed. The pattern of expression was consistent with increased signaling by several cytokines and TLR2 in alcoholics. The cholesterol biosynthesis pathway was lower in alcoholics, including a decrease in the rate-limiting enzyme HMGCR. LCLs show many effects of ethanol exposure, some of which might provide biomarkers for AUD and aid in interpreting the effects of genes identified by GWAS

Metabolic health phenotype better predicts subclinical atherosclerosis than body mass index-based obesity phenotype in the non-alcoholic fatty liver disease population

BackgroundNon-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD), especially lean NAFLD is associated with an increased risk of atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (CVD). It is not currently known which clinical phenotypes of NAFLD contribute most to individual subclinical atherosclerosis risk. We examined the relationship between body mass index (BMI), the metabolically healthy status, and subclinical atherosclerosis in the NAFLD population.MethodsData from asymptomatic NAFLD subjects who participated in a routine health check-up examination were collected. Participants were stratified by BMI (cutoff values: 24.0–27.9 kg/m2 for overweight and ≥28.0 kg/m2 for obesity) and metabolic status, which was defined by Adult Treatment Panel III criteria. Subclinical atherosclerosis was evaluated by brachial-ankle pulse wave velocity (baPWV) in 27,738 participants and by carotid plaque in 14,323 participants.ResultsWithin each BMI strata, metabolically unhealthy subjects had a significantly higher prevalence of subclinical atherosclerosis than metabolically healthy subjects, whereas fewer differences were observed across subjects within the same metabolic category. When BMI and metabolic status were assessed together, a metabolically unhealthy status was the main contributor to the association of clinical phenotypes with the subclinical atherosclerosis burden (all p &lt; 0.001). When BMI and metabolic abnormalities were assessed separately, the incidence of subclinical disease did not increase across BMI categories; however, it increased with an increase in the number of metabolic abnormalities (0, 1, 2 and ≥3).ConclusionA metabolically healthy status in NAFLD patients was closely correlated with subclinical atherosclerosis, beyond that of the BMI-based obesity phenotype. The application of metabolic phenotyping strategies could enable more precise classification in evaluating cardiovascular risk in NAFLD

Influence of Co ion doping on the microstructure, magnetic and dielectric properties of Ni1-xCoxFe2O4 ceramics

Ni1-xCoxFe2O4 (x = 0, 0.2, 0.4, 0.6, 0.8) ceramics were prepared by chemical co-precipitation method and the effect of Co ion doping on the microstructure, magnetic and dielectric properties has been investigated. The results show that the synthesized ceramics display only spinel phase of Ni1-xCoxFe2O4, without other apparent impurities found. The lattice of Ni1-xCoxFe2O4 crystal structure was distorted as a result of the incorporation of Co ion, and the lattice parameters increase with the increase of Co ion content. The grain size decreases slightly with increasing the content of Co ion, indicating a change of particle size and morphology at higher doping content. The results of impedance analysis shows that the sample doped with 80 at.% Co possesses the maximal dielectric constant, while the pure NiFe2O4 sample shows the minimal value when the frequency is below 0.1 MHz. The M-H loops of these ceramics exhibit highly magnetic nature and the saturation magnetization. The remnant magnetization increases linearly with the increase of Co-concentration in nickel ferrite while the coercive field (Hc) shows non-monotonic variation with Co content. The minimal and maximal values of Hc can be obtained when the Co concentrations are 40 and 80 at.%, respectively. The highest value of the saturation magnetization is 63 emu/g obtained with 80 at.% Co doping while the lowest value is ∼31 emu/g for the pure NiFe2O4 ceramics. The abnormal magnetic behaviour is due to the A-B super exchange interaction when magnetic Co2+ ions are added