Unsaturated Seepage Analysis of Cracked Soil including Development Process of Cracks

Cracks in soil provide preferential pathways for water flow and their morphological parameters significantly affect the hydraulic conductivity of the soil. To study the hydraulic properties of cracks, the dynamic development of cracks in the expansive soil during drying and wetting has been measured in the laboratory. The test results enable the development of the relationships between the cracks morphological parameters and the water content. In this study, the fractal model has been used to predict the soil-water characteristic curve (SWCC) of the cracked soil, including the developmental process of the cracks. The cracked expansive soil has been considered as a crack-pore medium. A dual media flow model has been developed to simulate the seepage characteristics of the cracked expansive soil. The variations in pore water pressure at different part of the model are quite different due to the impact of the cracks. This study proves that seepage characteristics can be better predicted if the impact of cracks is taken into account

Comparative venom gland transcriptome analysis of the scorpion Lychas mucronatus reveals intraspecific toxic gene diversity and new venomous components

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p><it>Lychas mucronatus </it>is one scorpion species widely distributed in Southeast Asia and southern China. Anything is hardly known about its venom components, despite the fact that it can often cause human accidents. In this work, we performed a venomous gland transcriptome analysis by constructing and screening the venom gland cDNA library of the scorpion <it>Lychas mucronatus </it>from Yunnan province and compared it with the previous results of Hainan-sourced <it>Lychas mucronatus</it>.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>A total of sixteen known types of venom peptides and proteins are obtained from the venom gland cDNA library of Yunnan-sourced <it>Lychas mucronatus</it>, which greatly increase the number of currently reported scorpion venom peptides. Interestingly, we also identified nineteen atypical types of venom molecules seldom reported in scorpion species. Surprisingly, the comparative transcriptome analysis of Yunnan-sourced <it>Lychas mucronatus </it>and Hainan-sourced <it>Lychas mucronatus </it>indicated that enormous diversity and vastly abundant difference could be found in venom peptides and proteins between populations of the scorpion <it>Lychas mucronatus </it>from different geographical regions.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>This work characterizes a large number of venom molecules never identified in scorpion species. This result provides a comparative analysis of venom transcriptomes of the scorpion <it>Lychas mucronatus </it>from different geographical regions, which thoroughly reveals the fact that the venom peptides and proteins of the same scorpion species from different geographical regions are highly diversified and scorpion evolves to adapt a new environment by altering the primary structure and abundance of venom peptides and proteins.</p

FashionSAP: Symbols and Attributes Prompt for Fine-grained Fashion Vision-Language Pre-training

Fashion vision-language pre-training models have shown efficacy for a wide range of downstream tasks. However, general vision-language pre-training models pay less attention to fine-grained domain features, while these features are important in distinguishing the specific domain tasks from general tasks. We propose a method for fine-grained fashion vision-language pre-training based on fashion Symbols and Attributes Prompt (FashionSAP) to model fine-grained multi-modalities fashion attributes and characteristics. Firstly, we propose the fashion symbols, a novel abstract fashion concept layer, to represent different fashion items and to generalize various kinds of fine-grained fashion features, making modelling fine-grained attributes more effective. Secondly, the attributes prompt method is proposed to make the model learn specific attributes of fashion items explicitly. We design proper prompt templates according to the format of fashion data. Comprehensive experiments are conducted on two public fashion benchmarks, i.e., FashionGen and FashionIQ, and FashionSAP gets SOTA performances for four popular fashion tasks. The ablation study also shows the proposed abstract fashion symbols, and the attribute prompt method enables the model to acquire fine-grained semantics in the fashion domain effectively. The obvious performance gains from FashionSAP provide a new baseline for future fashion task research

A Scorpion Defensin BmKDfsin4 Inhibits Hepatitis B Virus Replication in Vitro

Hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection is a major worldwide health problem which can cause acute and chronic hepatitis and can significantly increase the risk of liver cirrhosis and primary hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). Nowadays, clinical therapies of HBV infection still mainly rely on nucleotide analogs and interferons, the usage of which is limited by drug-resistant mutation or side effects. Defensins had been reported to effectively inhibit the proliferation of bacteria, fungi, parasites and viruses. Here, we screened the anti-HBV activity of 25 scorpion-derived peptides most recently characterized by our group. Through evaluating anti-HBV activity and cytotoxicity, we found that BmKDfsin4, a scorpion defensin with antibacterial and Kv1.3-blocking activities, has a comparable high inhibitory rate of both HBeAg and HBsAg in HepG2.2.15 culture medium and low cytotoxicity to HepG2.2.15. Then, our experimental results further showed that BmKDfsin4 can dose-dependently decrease the production of HBV DNA and HBV viral proteins in both culture medium and cell lysate. Interestingly, BmKDfsin4 exerted high serum stability. Together, this study indicates that the scorpion defensin BmKDfsin4 also has inhibitory activity against HBV replication along with its antibacterial and potassium ion channel Kv1.3-blocking activities, which shows that BmKDfsin4 is a uniquely multifunctional defensin molecule. Our work also provides a good molecule material which will be used to investigate the link or relationship of its antiviral, antibacterial and ion channel–modulating activities in the future

SdPI, The First Functionally Characterized Kunitz-Type Trypsin Inhibitor from Scorpion Venom

Background: Kunitz-type venom peptides have been isolated from a wide variety of venomous animals. They usually have protease inhibitory activity or potassium channel blocking activity, which by virtue of the effects on predator animals are essential for the survival of venomous animals. However, no Kunitz-type peptides from scorpion venom have been functionally characterized. Principal Findings: A new Kunitz-type venom peptide gene precursor, SdPI, was cloned and characterized from a venom gland cDNA library of the scorpion Lychas mucronatus. It codes for a signal peptide of 21 residues and a mature peptide of 59 residues. The mature SdPI peptide possesses a unique cysteine framework reticulated by three disulfide bridges, different from all reported Kunitz-type proteins. The recombinant SdPI peptide was functionally expressed. It showed trypsin inhibitory activity with high potency (Ki = 1.6610 27 M) and thermostability. Conclusions: The results illustrated that SdPI is a potent and stable serine protease inhibitor. Further mutagenesis and molecular dynamics simulation revealed that SdPI possesses a serine protease inhibitory active site similar to other Kunitztype venom peptides. To our knowledge, SdPI is the first functionally characterized Kunitz-type trypsin inhibitor derive