Holographic insulator/superconductor phase transition with Weyl corrections

We analytically investigate the phase transition between the holographic insulator and superconductor with Weyl corrections by using the variational method for the Sturm-Liouville eigenvalue problem. We find that similar to the curvature corrections, in p-wave model, the higher Weyl couplings make the insulator/superconductor phase transition harder to occur. However, in s-wave case the Weyl corrections do not influence the critical chemical potential, which is in contrast to the effect caused by the curvature corrections. Moreover, we observe that the Weyl corrections will not affect the critical phenomena and the critical exponent of the system always takes the mean-field value in both models. Our analytic results are found to be in good agreement with the numerical findings.Comment: 17 pages, 3 figures and 2 tables. More discussions and references adde

Investigating enzyme communication during base excision repair in Escherichia coli

Mismatch uracil DNA Glycosylase (MUG) from Escherichia coli is an initiating enzyme in the base excision repair (BER) pathway and is responsible for the removal of 3,N4-ethenocytosine and uracil from DNA during the stationary phase of E.coli cell growth. As with other DNA glycosylases, the abasic product is potentially more harmful than the initial lesion. MUG is widely regarded as a “single turnover” enzyme because it still remains tightly bound to its abasic product after cleavage, thus impeding its catalytic turnover. This may be a general protective mechanism to protect the abasic BER intermediate, whereby coordination of enzyme activity in BER is achieved through displacement of the DNA glycosylase by the downstream apurinic-apyrimidinic (AP) endonuclease. Numerous DNA glycosylases have now been cited as having an enhanced turnover in the presence of an AP endonuclease. The aim of this project is to investigate enzyme coordination between MUG and its both downstream AP endonucleases, Exonuclease III (ExoIII) and Endonuclease IV (EndoIV), in the initial steps of BER. We show here that MUG binds its substrate, abasic DNA and non-specific DNA in the differential modes. A 2:1 cooperative binding stoichiometry with abasic DNA is demonstrated to be of functional significance in both product binding and catalysis via fluorescence anisotropy assays, band shift assays and loss-of-function site-directed mutagenesis methods. The effects of the ExoIII and EndoIV on the MUG turnover kinetics with a U•G containing substrate was investigated. Both ExoIII and EndoIV greatly enhance the turnover of MUG. Furthermore, the analysis of both ExoIII catalytic activity dependent and concentration dependent on MUG turnover demonstrate ExoIII may employ a product scavenging mechanism to enhance MUG turnover. These combined results constitute a new concept that MUG has a pre-catalytic discrimination ability to coordinate its reactivity behavior with the other enzymes.Open Acces

Blockchain technology research and application: a systematic literature review and future trends

Blockchain, as the basis for cryptocurrencies, has received extensive attentions recently. Blockchain serves as an immutable distributed ledger technology which allows transactions to be carried out credibly in a decentralized environment. Blockchain-based applications are springing up, covering numerous fields including financial services, reputation system and Internet of Things (IoT), and so on. However, there are still many challenges of blockchain technology such as scalability, security and other issues waiting to be overcome. This article provides a comprehensive overview of blockchain technology and its applications. We begin with a summary of the development of blockchain, and then give an overview of the blockchain architecture and a systematic review of the research and application of blockchain technology in different fields from the perspective of academic research and industry technology. Furthermore, technical challenges and recent developments are also briefly listed. We also looked at the possible future trends of blockchain

MURPHY: Relations Matter in Surgical Workflow Analysis

Autonomous robotic surgery has advanced significantly based on analysis of visual and temporal cues in surgical workflow, but relational cues from domain knowledge remain under investigation. Complex relations in surgical annotations can be divided into intra- and inter-relations, both valuable to autonomous systems to comprehend surgical workflows. Intra- and inter-relations describe the relevance of various categories within a particular annotation type and the relevance of different annotation types, respectively. This paper aims to systematically investigate the importance of relational cues in surgery. First, we contribute the RLLS12M dataset, a large-scale collection of robotic left lateral sectionectomy (RLLS), by curating 50 videos of 50 patients operated by 5 surgeons and annotating a hierarchical workflow, which consists of 3 inter- and 6 intra-relations, 6 steps, 15 tasks, and 38 activities represented as the triplet of 11 instruments, 8 actions, and 16 objects, totaling 2,113,510 video frames and 12,681,060 annotation entities. Correspondingly, we propose a multi-relation purification hybrid network (MURPHY), which aptly incorporates novel relation modules to augment the feature representation by purifying relational features using the intra- and inter-relations embodied in annotations. The intra-relation module leverages a R-GCN to implant visual features in different graph relations, which are aggregated using a targeted relation purification with affinity information measuring label consistency and feature similarity. The inter-relation module is motivated by attention mechanisms to regularize the influence of relational features based on the hierarchy of annotation types from the domain knowledge. Extensive experimental results on the curated RLLS dataset confirm the effectiveness of our approach, demonstrating that relations matter in surgical workflow analysis