Actin Cytoskeleton and Golgi Involvement in Barley stripe mosaic virus Movement and Cell Wall Localization of Triple Gene Block Proteins.

Barley stripe mosaic virus (BSMV) induces massive actin filament thickening at the infection front of infected Nicotiana benthamiana leaves. To determine the mechanisms leading to actin remodeling, fluorescent protein fusions of the BSMV triple gene block (TGB) proteins were coexpressed in cells with the actin marker DsRed: Talin. TGB ectopic expression experiments revealed that TGB3 is a major elicitor of filament thickening, that TGB2 resulted in formation of intermediate DsRed:Talin filaments, and that TGB1 alone had no obvious effects on actin filament structure. Latrunculin B (LatB) treatments retarded BSMV cell-to-cell movement, disrupted actin filament organization, and dramatically decreased the proportion of paired TGB3 foci appearing at the cell wall (CW). BSMV infection of transgenic plants tagged with GFP-KDEL exhibited membrane proliferation and vesicle formation that were especially evident around the nucleus. Similar membrane proliferation occurred in plants expressing TGB2 and/or TGB3, and DsRed: Talin fluorescence in these plants colocalized with the ER vesicles. TGB3 also associated with the Golgi apparatus and overlapped with cortical vesicles appearing at the cell periphery. Brefeldin A treatments disrupted Golgi and also altered vesicles at the CW, but failed to interfere with TGB CW localization. Our results indicate that actin cytoskeleton interactions are important in BSMV cell-to-cell movement and for CW localization of TGB3

Nonflammable Lithium Metal Full Cells with Ultra-high Energy Density Based on Coordinated Carbonate Electrolytes

Coupling thin Li metal anodes with high-capacity/high-voltage cathodes such as LiNi0.8Co0.1Mn0.1O2 (NCM811) is a promising way to increase lithium battery energy density. Yet, the realization of high-performance full cells remains a formidable challenge. Here, we demonstrate a new class of highly coordinated, nonflammable carbonate electrolytes based on lithium bis(fluorosulfonyl)imide (UFSI) in propylene carbonate/fluoroethylene carbonate mixtures. Utilizing an optimal salt concentr ation (4 M LiFSI) of the electrolyte results in a unique coordination structure of Li+-FSI-solvent cluster, which is critical for enabling the formation of stable interfaces on both the thin Li metal anode and high-voltage NCM811 cathode. Under highly demanding cell configuration and operating conditions (Li metal anode = 35 mu m, areal capacity/charge voltage of NCM811 cathode = 4.8 mAh cm(-2)/4 .6 V, and anode excess capacity [relative to the cathode] = 0.83), the Li metal-based full cell provides exceptional electrochemical performance (energy densities = 679 Wh kg(cell)(-1)/1,024 Wh L-cell(-1)) coupled with nonflammability

Conductance of a Finite Quantum Wire Connected to Reservoirs

We study a finite quantum wire connected to external leads, and show that the conductance of the system significantly depends upon the length of the quantum wire and the position of the impurity in it. For a very long quantum wire and the impurity far away from its two ends, the conductance has the same behavior as that for an infinity quantum wire above some very little energy scale. However, for a very short quantum wire, the conductance is independent of the electron-electron interactions in it and closing to $e^{2}/(2\pi\hbar)$ in a higher temperature range. While, in a lower temperature range, the conductance shows the same property as that for an infinity quantum wire.Comment: 13 pages, Revtex, no figure, to be published in Phys. Lett.

Bag Formation in Quantum Hall Ferromagnets

Charged skyrmions or spin-textures in the quantum Hall ferromagnet at filling factor nu=1 are reinvestigated using the Hartree-Fock method in the lowest Landau level approximation. It is shown that the single Slater determinant with the minimum energy in the unit charge sector is always of the hedgehog form. It is observed that the magnetization vector's length deviates locally from unity, i.e. a bag is formed which accommodates the excess charge. In terms of a gradient expansion for extended spin-textures a novel O(3) type of effective action is presented, which takes bag formation into account.Comment: 13 pages, 3 figure

Outcomes of Palivizumab Prophylaxis for Respiratory Syncytial Virus Infection in Preterm Children with Bronchopulmonary Dysplasia at a Single Hospital in Korea from 2005 to 2009

This study was performed to evaluate the utilization and outcomes of palivizumab in high risk children born prematurely with chronic lung disease (CLD). A retrospective review of 128 patients was conducted from September 2004 to March 2009 at the Ajou University Hospital. All patients were diagnosed with CLD, were born at ≤35 weeks of gestation, were <2 yr old at the onset of respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) season, and had received medical therapy within six months prior to the RSV season. Fifty-three patients did not receive palivizumab prophylaxis and 75 patients received at least one dose of palivizumab. There were no statistically significant differences between the patients with and without palivizumab prophylaxis with regard to demographic characteristics and risk factors for RSV infection. There were no systemic adverse responses. Compliance with the course of prophylaxis was 92.2%. Hospitalization associated with RSV occurred in 12 cases (22.6%) in the group without prophylaxis and in three cases (4.0%) with prophylaxis. Palivizumab prophylaxis significantly reduced the frequency of RSV-related hospitalization in preterm children with CLD. This is the first retrospective review of palivizumab prophylaxis in Korea. Palivizumab is effective and well tolerated in high risk prematurely born children

3D-interologs: an evolution database of physical protein- protein interactions across multiple genomes

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Comprehensive exploration of protein-protein interactions is a challenging route to understand biological processes. For efficiently enlarging protein interactions annotated with residue-based binding models, we proposed a new concept "3D-domain interolog mapping" with a scoring system to explore all possible protein pairs between the two homolog families, derived from a known 3D-structure dimmer (template), across multiple species. Each family consists of homologous proteins which have interacting domains of the template for studying domain interface evolution of two interacting homolog families.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The 3D-interologs database records the evolution of protein-protein interactions database across multiple species. Based on "3D-domain interolog mapping" and a new scoring function, we infer 173,294 protein-protein interactions by using 1,895 three-dimensional (3D) structure heterodimers to search the UniProt database (4,826,134 protein sequences). The 3D- interologs database comprises 15,124 species and 283,980 protein-protein interactions, including 173,294 interactions (61%) and 110,686 interactions (39%) summarized from the IntAct database. For a protein-protein interaction, the 3D-interologs database shows functional annotations (e.g. Gene Ontology), interacting domains and binding models (e.g. hydrogen-bond interactions and conserved residues). Additionally, this database provides couple-conserved residues and the interacting evolution by exploring the interologs across multiple species. Experimental results reveal that the proposed scoring function obtains good agreement for the binding affinity of 275 mutated residues from the ASEdb. The precision and recall of our method are 0.52 and 0.34, respectively, by using 563 non-redundant heterodimers to search on the Integr8 database (549 complete genomes).</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can infer reliable physical protein-protein interactions and be useful for studying the protein-protein interaction evolution across multiple species. In addition, the top-ranked strategy and template interface score are able to significantly improve the accuracies of identifying protein-protein interactions in a complete genome. The 3D-interologs database is available at <url>http://3D- interologs.life.nctu.edu.tw</url>.</p

ASAP: Accurate semantic segmentation for real time performance

Feature fusion modules from encoder and self-attention module have been adopted in semantic segmentation. However, the computation of these modules is costly and has operational limitations in real-time environments. In addition, segmentation performance is limited in autonomous driving environments with a lot of contextual information perpendicular to the road surface, such as people, buildings, and general objects. In this paper, we propose an efficient feature fusion method, Feature Fusion with Different Norms (FFDN) that utilizes rich global context of multi-level scale and vertical pooling module before self-attention that preserves most contextual information while reducing the complexity of global context encoding in the vertical direction. By doing this, we could handle the properties of representation in global space and reduce additional computational cost. In addition, we analyze low performance in challenging cases including small and vertically featured objects. We achieve the mean Interaction of-union(mIoU) of 73.1 and the Frame Per Second(FPS) of 191, which are comparable results with state-of-the-arts on Cityscapes test datasets.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figure

Development of Components of Analog and Digital Gauges for Training Regulators Safety Check using Virtual Reality

The inspection and check of the pressure regulation facility should be achieved, because it is mandatory item on law of gas safety management. It is more effective education using 3D virtual reality to enable injecting real combustible and toxic gas. Also it give immersion to trainee with virtual experience. In here, we reviewed education on the pressure regulating facility using virtual reality technology and designed a safety training scenario for decomposing and checking the pressure regulators on VR screen. And then we implemented components of an analog and digital pressure gauges using 3D Unity tool to visualize them on the VR education system. Trainee can be educated efficiently interacting their 3D virtual engine with components such as pressure gauges, pipelines, valves, and practical environments. Its effectiveness is demonstrated at the result through questionnaire. Its positive answer of three main inquiries is more 93%. We hope gas risks are reduced by using our virtual education contents at various industrial fields