In vitro specific interactions revealed the infective characteristics of fungal endophytes to grapevine

In the present study a method for co-culture of fungal endophytic strains and grape cells was developed in order to study their interactions, and filter candidates for further safe inoculation in the vineyard. Analysis of morphological and physiological traits was performed by measuring the plant callus and fungal growth, plant cells viability, degree of cell oxidation and the scale of contact or its absence as reaction of the fungal endophyte to the presence of the plant callus. Accordingly, endophytic fungal strains (EFS) were classified on scale of invasion into categories (strong - medium - weak invasive), as well as the contact between the two partners (grow into - grow onto - contact - no contact) and the grape cell oxidation degree (normal (no oxidation) - light - moderate - serious). More included the dominance and distribution of EFS in the plant host, and correlation plots of physiological traits during plant callus and endophytic fungi co–culture were calculated

Re-mine, Learn and Reason: Exploring the Cross-modal Semantic Correlations for Language-guided HOI detection

Human-Object Interaction (HOI) detection is a challenging computer vision task that requires visual models to address the complex interactive relationship between humans and objects and predict HOI triplets. Despite the challenges posed by the numerous interaction combinations, they also offer opportunities for multimodal learning of visual texts. In this paper, we present a systematic and unified framework (RmLR) that enhances HOI detection by incorporating structured text knowledge. Firstly, we qualitatively and quantitatively analyze the loss of interaction information in the two-stage HOI detector and propose a re-mining strategy to generate more comprehensive visual representation.Secondly, we design more fine-grained sentence- and word-level alignment and knowledge transfer strategies to effectively address the many-to-many matching problem between multiple interactions and multiple texts.These strategies alleviate the matching confusion problem that arises when multiple interactions occur simultaneously, thereby improving the effectiveness of the alignment process. Finally, HOI reasoning by visual features augmented with textual knowledge substantially improves the understanding of interactions. Experimental results illustrate the effectiveness of our approach, where state-of-the-art performance is achieved on public benchmarks. We further analyze the effects of different components of our approach to provide insights into its efficacy.Comment: ICCV202

GPT4Tools: Teaching Large Language Model to Use Tools via Self-instruction

This paper aims to efficiently enable Large Language Models (LLMs) to use multimodal tools. Advanced proprietary LLMs, such as ChatGPT and GPT-4, have shown great potential for tool usage through sophisticated prompt engineering. Nevertheless, these models typically rely on prohibitive computational costs and publicly inaccessible data. To address these challenges, we propose the GPT4Tools based on self-instruct to enable open-source LLMs, such as LLaMA and OPT, to use tools. It generates an instruction-following dataset by prompting an advanced teacher with various multi-modal contexts. By using the Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) optimization, our approach facilitates the open-source LLMs to solve a range of visual problems, including visual comprehension and image generation. Moreover, we provide a benchmark to evaluate the ability of LLMs to use tools, which is performed in both zero-shot and fine-tuning ways. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on various language models, which not only significantly improves the accuracy of invoking seen tools, but also enables the zero-shot capacity for unseen tools. The code and demo are available at https://github.com/StevenGrove/GPT4Tools

The immunomodulatory functions and molecular mechanism of a new bursal heptapeptide (BP7) in immune responses and immature B cells

International audienceAbstractThe bursa of Fabricius (BF) is the acknowledged central humoural immune organ unique to birds and plays a vital role in B lymphocyte development. In addition, the unique molecular immune features of bursal-derived biological peptides involved in B cell development are rarely reported. In this paper, a novel bursal heptapeptide (BP7) with the sequence GGCDGAA was isolated from the BF and was shown to enhance the monoclonal antibody production of a hybridoma. A mouse immunization experiment showed that mice immunized with an AIV antigen and BP7 produced strong antibody responses and cell-mediated immune responses. Additionally, BP7 stimulated increased mRNA levels of sIgM in immature mouse WEHI-231 B cells. Gene microarray results confirmed that BP7 regulated 2465 differentially expressed genes in BP7-treated WEHI-231 cells and induced 13 signalling pathways and various immune-related functional processes. Furthermore, we found that BP7 stimulated WEHI-231 cell autophagy and AMPK-ULK1 phosphorylation and regulated Bcl-2 protein expression. Finally, chicken immunization showed that BP7 enhanced the potential antibody and cytokine responses to the AIV antigen. These results suggested that BP7 might be an active biological factor that functions as a potential immunopotentiator, which provided some novel insights into the molecular mechanisms of the effects of bursal peptides on immune functions and B cell differentiation

Host structural stabilization of Li1.232Mn0.615Ni0.154O2 through K-doping attempt: toward superior electrochemical performances

Lithium-rich layered cathodes are known famously for its superior capacity over traditional layered oxides but trapped for lower initial coulombic efficiency, poorer rate capability and worse cyclic stability in spite of diverse attempts. Herein, a new K-stabilized Li-rich layered cathode synthesized through a simple oxalate co-precipitation is reported for its super electrochemical performances. Compared with pristine Li-rich layered cathode, K-stabilized one reaches a higher initial coulombic efficiency of 87% from 76% and outruns for 94% of capacity retention and 244 mAh g-1 of discharge capacity at 0.5C after 100 cycles. Moreover, 133 mAh g-1 of discharge capacity can be delivered even charged at 10C showing a highly-improved rate capability. X-ray diffraction and electrochemical impedance spectroscopy tests show that enlarged Li slab layer caused by K+ accommodation can provide facile Li+ diffusion paths and facilitate Li+ migration from the crystal lattice. As a consequence, the introduction of K+ in the host layered structure can inhibit the detrimental spinel structure growth during cycling. Therefore, the K-stabilized Li-rich layered materials can be considered to be an attractive alternative to meet with the higher power and energy density demands of advanced lithium-ion battery

Expression of COX-2 and Bcl-2 in primary fallopian tube carcinoma: correlations with clinicopathologic features

The aim of this study was to evaluate the expression of COX-2 and Bcl-2 in primary fallopian tube carcinoma (PFTC), as well as their correlations with clinicopathologic features. We studied a cohort of 33 patients with a pathological diagnosis of PFTC. Thirty normal tubal tissues used for controls were obtained from patients diagnosed with uterine myomas. Expression analysis for COX-2 and Bcl-2 was performed using the immunohistochemical technique. The rate of preoperative diagnosis was 18.2%. With a median survival of 61.0 months (95% CI: 43.2 to 78.8 months), the estimated five-year overall survival rate in the 33 patients was 39.0%. Increased expression of COX-2 and Bcl-2 was observed in tumor specimens compared to normal controls (p = 0.026; p = 0.003). The expression rate of COX-2 in node-positive tumors was significantly higher than that of node-negative tumors (p = 0.024). Moreover, the expression rate of COX-2 was statistically significantly higher in patients with infiltration through the serosa (p = 0.019). Positive significant associations were observed between Bcl-2 staining index and FIGO stage (p = 0.015), and between Bcl-2 staining and lymph node metastasis (p = 0.010). There was a significant correlation between COX-2 expression and Bcl-2 staining index (r = 0.517, p = 0.002). We conclude that COX-2 and Bcl-2 may potentially be useful prognostic markers for PFTC. The exact molecular mechanism for correlations between COX-2 and Bcl-2 remains to be elucidated. (Folia Histochemica et Cytobiologica 2011, Vol. 49, No. 3, 389–397

Hepatitis E Virus Infection in Central China Reveals No Evidence of Cross-Species Transmission between Human and Swine in This Area

Hepatitis E virus (HEV) is a zoonotic pathogen of which several species of animal were reported as reservoirs. Swine stands out as the major reservoir for HEV infection in humans, as suggested by the close genetic relationship of swine and human virus. Since 2000, Genotype 4 HEV has become the dominant cause of hepatitis E disease in China. Recent reports showed that genotype 4 HEV is freely transmitted between humans and swine in eastern and southern China. However, the infection status of HEV in human and swine populations in central China is still unclear. This study was conducted in a rural area of central China, where there are many commercial swine farms. A total of 1476 serum and 554 fecal specimens were collected from the general human and swine populations in this area, respectively. The seroepidemiological study was conducted by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay. Conserved genomic sequences of open reading frame 2 were detected using reverse transcription-PCR. The results indicated that the overall viral burden of the general human subjects was 0.95% (14/1476), while 7.0% (39/554) of the swine excreted HEV in stool. The positive rate of anti-HEV IgG and IgM in the serum samples was 7.9% (117/1476) and 1.6% (24/1476), respectively. Phylogenetic analysis based on the 150 nt partial sequence of the capsid protein gene showed that the 53 swine and human HEV isolates in the current study all belonged to genotype 4, clustering into three major groups. However, the HEV isolates prevalent in the human and swine populations were classified into known distinct subgenotypes, which suggested that no cross-species transmission between swine and humans had taken place in this area. This result was confirmed by cloning and phylogenetic analysis of the complete capsid protein gene sequence of three representative HEV strains in the three major groups. The cross reactivity between anti-HEV IgG from human sera and the two representative strains from swine in central China was confirmed by Dot-blot assay. In conclusion, although all the HEV strains prevalent in central China belonged to genotype 4, there is no evidence of cross-species transmission between human and swine in this area

Comparison of Halo Detection from Noisy Weak Lensing Convergence Maps with Gaussian Smoothing and MRLens Treatment

Taking into account the noise from intrinsic ellipticities of source galaxies, we study the efficiency and completeness of halo detections from weak lensing convergence maps. Particularly, with numerical simulations, we compare the Gaussian filter with the so called MRLens treatment based on the modification of the Maximum Entropy Method. For a pure noise field without lensing signals, a Gaussian smoothing results a residual noise field that is approximately Gaussian in statistics if a large enough number of galaxies are included in the smoothing window. On the other hand, the noise field after the MRLens treatment is significantly non-Gaussian, resulting complications in characterizing the noise effects. Considering weak-lensing cluster detections, although the MRLens treatment effectively deletes false peaks arising from noise, it removes the real peaks heavily due to its inability to distinguish real signals with relatively low amplitudes from noise in its restoration process. The higher the noise level is, the larger the removal effects are for the real peaks. For a survey with a source density n_g~30 arcmin^(2), the number of peaks found in an area of 3x3 sq.deg after MRLens filtering is only ~50 for the detection threshold kappa=0.02, while the number of halos with M>5x10^{13} M_{\odot} and with redshift z<=2 in the same area is expected to be ~530. For the Gaussian smoothing treatment, the number of detections is ~260, much larger than that of the MRLens. The Gaussianity of the noise statistics in the Gaussian smoothing case adds further advantages for this method to circumvent the problem of the relatively low efficiency in weak-lensing cluster detections. Therefore, in studies aiming to construct large cluster samples from weak-lensing surveys, the Gaussian smoothing method performs significantly better than the MRLens.Comment: 16 pages, 8 figures, accepted for publication by RA