Glomerular Organization of the Antennal Lobes of the Diamondback Moth, Plutella xylostella L.

The antennal lobe of the moth brain is the primary olfactory center processing information concerning pheromones and plant odors. Plutella xylostella is a major worldwide pest of cruciferous vegetables and its behavior is highly dependent on their olfactory system. However, detailed knowledge of the anatomy and function of the P. xylostella olfactory system remains limited. In the present study, we present the 3-Dimentional (3-D) map of the antennal lobe of P. xylostella, based on confocal microscopic analysis of glomerular segmentation and Neurobiotin backfills of Olfactory Receptor Neurons (ORNs). We identified 74–76 ordinary glomeruli and a macroglomerular complex (MGC) situated at the entrance of the antennal nerve in males. The MGC contained three glomeruli. The volumes of glomeruli in males ranged from 305.83 ± 129.53 to 25440.00 ± 1377.67 μm3. In females, 74–77 glomeruli were found, with the largest glomerulus ELG being situated at the entrance of the antennal nerve. The volumes of glomeruli in females ranged from 802.17 ± 95.68 to 8142.17 ± 509.46 μm3. Sexual dimorphism was observed in anomalous supernumerary, anomalous missing, shape, size, and array of several of the identified glomeruli in both sexes. All glomeruli, except one in the antennal lobe (AL), received projections of antennal ORNs. The glomeruli PV1 in both sexes received input from the labial palp nerve and was assumed as the labial pit organ glomerulus (LPOG). These results provide a foundation for better understanding of coding mechanisms of odors in this important pest insect

Rapid detection of porcine circovirus type 2 using a TaqMan-based real-time PCR

Porcine circovirus type 2 (PCV2) and the associated disease postweaning multisystemic wasting syndrome (PMWS) have caused heavy losses in global agriculture in recent decades. Rapid detection of PCV2 is very important for the effective prophylaxis and treatment of PMWS. To establish a sensitive, specific assay for the detection and quantitation of PCV2, we designed and synthesized specific primers and a probe in the open reading frame 2. The assay had a wide dynamic range with excellent linearity and reliable reproducibility, and detected between 102 and 1010 copies of the genomic DNA per reaction. The coefficient of variation for Ct values varied from 0.59% to 1.05% in the same assay and from 1.9% to 4.2% in 10 different assays. The assay did not cross-react with porcine circovirus type 1, porcine reproductive and respiratory, porcine epidemic diarrhea, transmissible gastroenteritis of pigs and rotavirus. The limits of detection and quantitation were 10 and 100 copies, respectively. Using the established real-time PCR system, 39 of the 40 samples we tested were detected as positive

The Heart Is an Early Target of Anthrax Lethal Toxin in Mice: A Protective Role for Neuronal Nitric Oxide Synthase (nNOS)

Anthrax lethal toxin (LT) induces vascular insufficiency in experimental animals through unknown mechanisms. In this study, we show that neuronal nitric oxide synthase (nNOS) deficiency in mice causes strikingly increased sensitivity to LT, while deficiencies in the two other NOS enzymes (iNOS and eNOS) have no effect on LT-mediated mortality. The increased sensitivity of nNOS−/− mice was independent of macrophage sensitivity to toxin, or cytokine responses, and could be replicated in nNOS-sufficient wild-type (WT) mice through pharmacological inhibition of the enzyme with 7-nitroindazole. Histopathological analyses showed that LT induced architectural changes in heart morphology of nNOS−/− mice, with rapid appearance of novel inter-fiber spaces but no associated apoptosis of cardiomyocytes. LT-treated WT mice had no histopathology observed at the light microscopy level. Electron microscopic analyses of LT-treated mice, however, revealed striking pathological changes in the hearts of both nNOS−/− and WT mice, varying only in severity and timing. Endothelial/capillary necrosis and degeneration, inter-myocyte edema, myofilament and mitochondrial degeneration, and altered sarcoplasmic reticulum cisternae were observed in both LT-treated WT and nNOS−/− mice. Furthermore, multiple biomarkers of cardiac injury (myoglobin, cardiac troponin-I, and heart fatty acid binding protein) were elevated in LT-treated mice very rapidly (by 6 h after LT injection) and reached concentrations rarely reported in mice. Cardiac protective nitrite therapy and allopurinol therapy did not have beneficial effects in LT-treated mice. Surprisingly, the potent nitric oxide scavenger, carboxy-PTIO, showed some protective effect against LT. Echocardiography on LT-treated mice indicated an average reduction in ejection fraction following LT treatment in both nNOS−/− and WT mice, indicative of decreased contractile function in the heart. We report the heart as an early target of LT in mice and discuss a protective role for nNOS against LT-mediated cardiac damage

Research on Speech Emotion Recognition Based on AA-CBGRU Network

Speech emotion recognition is an emerging research field in the 21st century, which is of great significance to human–computer interaction. In order to enable various smart devices to better recognize and understand the emotions contained in human speech, in view of the problems of gradient disappearance and poor learning ability of the time series information in the current speech emotion classification model, an AA-CBGRU network model is proposed for speech emotion recognition. The model first extracts the spectrogram and its first and second order derivative features of the speech signal, then extracts the spatial features of the inputs through the convolutional neural network with residual blocks, then uses the BGRU network with an attention layer to mine deep time series information, and finally uses the full connection layer to achieve the final emotion recognition. The experimental results on the IEMOCAP sentiment corpus show that the model in this paper improves both the weighted accuracy (WA) and the unweighted accuracy (UA)

Research on Speech Emotion Recognition Based on AA-CBGRU Network

Speech emotion recognition is an emerging research field in the 21st century, which is of great significance to human–computer interaction. In order to enable various smart devices to better recognize and understand the emotions contained in human speech, in view of the problems of gradient disappearance and poor learning ability of the time series information in the current speech emotion classification model, an AA-CBGRU network model is proposed for speech emotion recognition. The model first extracts the spectrogram and its first and second order derivative features of the speech signal, then extracts the spatial features of the inputs through the convolutional neural network with residual blocks, then uses the BGRU network with an attention layer to mine deep time series information, and finally uses the full connection layer to achieve the final emotion recognition. The experimental results on the IEMOCAP sentiment corpus show that the model in this paper improves both the weighted accuracy (WA) and the unweighted accuracy (UA)

Deep Reinforcement Learning-Based Resource Allocation for Cellular Vehicular Network Mode 3 with Underlay Approach

Vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication has attracted increasing attention since it can improve road safety and traffic efficiency. In the underlay approach of mode 3, the V2V links need to reuse the spectrum resources preoccupied with vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) links, which will interfere with the V2I links. Therefore, how to allocate wireless resources flexibly and improve the throughput of the V2I links while meeting the low latency requirements of the V2V links needs to be determined. This paper proposes a V2V resource allocation framework based on deep reinforcement learning. The base station (BS) uses a double deep Q network to allocate resources intelligently. In particular, to reduce the signaling overhead for the BS to acquire channel state information (CSI) in mode 3, the BS optimizes the resource allocation strategy based on partial CSI in the framework of this article. The simulation results indicate that the proposed scheme can meet the low latency requirements of V2V links while increasing the capacity of the V2I links compared with the other methods. In addition, the proposed partial CSI design has comparable performance to complete CSI

Lethal and Edema Toxins in the Pathogenesis of Bacillus anthracis Septic Shock: Implications for Therapy

Recent research regarding the structure and function of Bacillus anthracis lethal (LeTx) and edema (ETx) toxins provides growing insights into the pathophysiology and treatment of shock with this lethal bacteria. These are both binary-type toxins composed of protective antigen necessary for their cellular uptake and either lethal or edema factors, the toxigenic moieties. The primary cellular receptors for protective antigen have been identified and constructed and key steps in the extracellular processing and internalization of the toxins clarified. Consistent with the lethal factor's primary action as an intracellular endopeptidase targeting mitogen-activated protein kinase kinases, growing evidence indicates that shock with this toxin does not result from an excessive inflammatory response. In fact, the potent immunosuppressive effects of LeTx may actually contribute to the establishment and persistence of infection. Instead, shock with LeTx may be related to the direct injurious effects of lethal factor on endothelial cell function. Despite the importance of LeTx, very recent studies show that edema factor, a potent adenyl cyclase, has the ability to make a substantial contribution to shock caused by B. anthracis and works additively with LeTx. Furthermore, ETx may contribute to the immunosuppressive effects of LeTx. Therapies under development that target several different steps in the cellular uptake and function of these two toxins have been effective in in vitro and in vivo systems. Understanding how best to apply these agents clinically and how they interact with conventional treatments should be goals for future research

Resource Allocation in V2X Communications Based on Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning with Attention Mechanism

In this paper, we study the joint optimization problem of the spectrum and power allocation for multiple vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) and vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) users in cellular vehicle-to-everything (C-V2X) communication, aiming to maximize the sum rate of V2I links while satisfying the low latency requirements of V2V links. However, channel state information (CSI) is hard to obtain accurately due to the mobility of vehicles. In addition, the effective sensing of state information among vehicles becomes difficult in an environment with complex and diverse information, which is detrimental to vehicles collaborating for resource allocation. Thus, we propose a framework of multi-agent deep reinforcement learning based on attention mechanism (AMARL) to improve the V2X communication performance. Specifically, for vehicle mobility, we model the problem as a multi-agent reinforcement learning process, where each V2V link is regarded an agent and all agents jointly intercommunicate with the environment. Each agent allocates spectrum and power through its deep Q network (DQN). To enhance effective intercommunication and the sense of collaboration among vehicles, we introduce an attention mechanism to focus on more relevant information, which in turn reduces the signaling overhead and optimizes their communication performance more explicitly. Experimental results show that the proposed AMARL-based approach can satisfy the requirements of a high rate for V2I links and low latency for V2V links. It also has an excellent adaptability to environmental change

The Potential Pathogenic Contributions of Endothelial Barrier and Arterial Contractile Dysfunction to Shock Due to B. anthracis Lethal and Edema Toxins

Shock with B. anthracis infection is particularly resistant to conventional cardiovascular support and its mortality rate appears higher than with more common bacterial pathogens. As opposed to many bacteria that lack exotoxins directly depressing hemodynamic function, lethal and edema toxin (LT and ET respectively) both cause shock and likely contribute to the high lethality rate with B. anthracis. Selective inhibition of the toxins is protective in infection models, and administration of either toxin alone in animals produces hypotension with accompanying organ injury and lethality. Shock during infection is typically due to one of two mechanisms: (i) intravascular volume depletion related to disruption of endothelial barrier function; and (ii) extravasation of fluid and/or maladaptive dilation of peripheral resistance arteries. Although some data suggests that LT can produce myocardial dysfunction, growing evidence demonstrates that it may also interfere with endothelial integrity thereby contributing to the extravasation of fluid that helps characterize severe B. anthracis infection. Edema toxin, on the other hand, while known to produce localized tissue edema when injected subcutaneously, has potent vascular relaxant effects that could lead to pathologic arterial dilation. This review will examine recent data supporting a role for these two pathophysiologic mechanisms underlying the shock LT and ET produce. Further research and a better understanding of these mechanisms may lead to improved management of B. anthracis in patients

Technical development and long-term performance observations of long-life asphalt pavement: A case study of Shandong Province

Summary: Based on the investigation of long-life asphalt pavement at home and abroad, the development of long-life asphalt pavement technology in Shandong Province, China is reviewed in this paper. The structural combination characteristics of typical long-life asphalt pavement in Shandong Province and their popularization and application are introduced. The application effect of combined base long-life asphalt pavement, which has been widely promoted, is evaluated. At the same time, taking the Binda perpetual pavement test road in Shandong Province as an example, the dynamic response and long-term performance evolution of long-life asphalt pavement are analyzed over a period of more than 17 years. Sections S1, S2, and S3 present information about full-depth asphalt pavement. Section S4 describes combined base asphalt pavement. The results show that the maximum strain of S1–S4 is within the endurance strain limit. S1, S2, S3 and S4 are all expected to be long-life asphalt pavements. In the current study, Sections S1–S4 were maintained in good condition during a service period of more than 17 years with no structural cracks and good deflection, rutting, and IRI indexes. The deflection index was stable without growth, and the IRI was also relatively stable following the opening to traffic. The rutting depth underwent a slight cumulative increase within 8 years of opening, and then stabilized. The average rutting depth over the 17-year period was less than 15 ​mm. Therefore, S1–S4 meet the design standards required for use as long-life pavements. From the perspectives of resource saving, energy saving, and emission reduction and service performance, full-depth asphalt pavement can be considered to represent a new generation of green and durable pavement structures with great future promotion potential