Lactobacillus pentosus expressing porcine lactoferrin elevates antibacterial activity and improves the efficacy of vaccination against Aujeszky’s disease

In this study, Lactobacillus pentosus expressing porcine lactoferrin (pLF) was tested for in vitro antibacterial activity and for its ability to enhance immunity induced by an orally administered Aujeszky’s disease virus (ADV) vaccine. The cDNA encoding N-terminus of pLF was cloned into a Lactobacillus-specific plasmid to produce L. pentosus pLF expressing transformants (pPG612.1-pLFN/ L. pentosus). The antimicrobial activity of the recombinant pLF protein inhibited bacterial growth in vitro. The supernatant of pPG612.1-pLF-N/L. pentosus had an inhibitory effect on Staphylococcus aureus strain CVCC26003, Bacillus subtilis strain CVCC63501, Escherichia coli strain CVCC10141 and Salmonella enterica ssp. enterica Choleraesuis strain CVCC79102, while it did not inhibit the growth of Lactobacillus casei strain ATCC393. A mouse model was established to test the effectiveness of the orally administered probiotic L. pentosus recombinant strain in the gastrointestinal tract. Mice were immunised with an attenuated porcine Aujeszky’s disease virus (ADV) vaccine. Serum antibody levels determined using a mouse Aujeszky’s disease IgG ELISA showed that IgG levels were significantly higher in the pPG612.1-pLFN/L. pentosus group than in the PBS and Lactobacillus pentosus groups at days 7 and 21 (P < 0.01) and at day 14 (P < 0.05), indicating that this oral recombinant strain can improve the effectiveness of the vaccine and play a role in immune enhancement through humoral immunity. These results suggest that the recombinant Lactobacillus pentosus not only has the beneficial characteristics of lactic acid bacteria but also produces biologically functional lactoferrin

SDFE-LV: A Large-Scale, Multi-Source, and Unconstrained Database for Spotting Dynamic Facial Expressions in Long Videos

In this paper, we present a large-scale, multi-source, and unconstrained database called SDFE-LV for spotting the onset and offset frames of a complete dynamic facial expression from long videos, which is known as the topic of dynamic facial expression spotting (DFES) and a vital prior step for lots of facial expression analysis tasks. Specifically, SDFE-LV consists of 1,191 long videos, each of which contains one or more complete dynamic facial expressions. Moreover, each complete dynamic facial expression in its corresponding long video was independently labeled for five times by 10 well-trained annotators. To the best of our knowledge, SDFE-LV is the first unconstrained large-scale database for the DFES task whose long videos are collected from multiple real-world/closely real-world media sources, e.g., TV interviews, documentaries, movies, and we-media short videos. Therefore, DFES tasks on SDFE-LV database will encounter numerous difficulties in practice such as head posture changes, occlusions, and illumination. We also provided a comprehensive benchmark evaluation from different angles by using lots of recent state-of-the-art deep spotting methods and hence researchers interested in DFES can quickly and easily get started. Finally, with the deep discussions on the experimental evaluation results, we attempt to point out several meaningful directions to deal with DFES tasks and hope that DFES can be better advanced in the future. In addition, SDFE-LV will be freely released for academic use only as soon as possible

The effects of pharmaceutical interventions on potentially inappropriate medications in older patients: a systematic review and meta-analysis

IntroductionPotentially inappropriate medications (PIMs) is a particular concern in older patients and is associated with negative health outcomes. As various interventions have been developed to manage it, we performed a systematic review and meta-analysis to evaluate the effect of pharmaceutical interventions on outcomes of PIMs in older patients.MethodsMeta-analysis of eligible randomized controlled trials (RCTs) was conducted to report the outcomes of pharmaceutical interventions in older patients searching from the databases of Cochrane Library, PubMed, Embase, Web of Science, Clinicaltrials.gov, SinoMed and Chinese Clinical Trial Registry (ChiCTR). The PRISMA guidelines were followed and the protocol was registered in PROSPERO (CRD42019134754). Cochrane bias risk assessment tool and the modified Jadad scale were used to assess the risk bias. RevMan software was used for data processing, analysis and graphical plotting.ResultsSixty-five thousand, nine hundred seventy-one patients in 14 RCTs were included. Of the primary outcomes, pharmaceutical interventions could significantly reduce the incidence of PIMs in older patients (OR = 0.51, 95% CI: 0.42, 0.62; p &lt; 0.001), and the number of PIMs per person (MD = -0.41, 95%CI: −0.51, −0.31; p &lt; 0.001), accompanying by a low heterogeneity. Subgroup analysis showed that the application of computer-based clinical decision support for pharmacological interventions could remarkably decrease the incidence of PIMs and two assessment tools were more effective. Of the secondary outcomes, the meta-analysis showed that pharmacological interventions could reduce the number of drugs used per person (MD = -0.94, 95%CI: −1.51, −0.36; p = 0.001) and 30-day readmission rate (OR = 0.58, 95%CI: 0.36, 0.92; p = 0.02), accompanying by a low heterogeneity. However, the pharmaceutical interventions demonstrated no significant improvement on all-cause mortality and the number of falls.ConclusionOur findings supported the efficacy of pharmaceutical interventions to optimize the use and management of drugs in older patients.Systematic review registrationhttps://clinicaltrials.gov/, CRD42019134754

NF-κB and Snail1a coordinate the cell cycle with gastrulation

The cell cycle needs to strictly coordinate with developmental processes to ensure correct generation of the body plan and different tissues. However, the molecular mechanism underlying the coordination remains largely unknown. In this study, we investigate how the cell cycle coordinates gastrulation cell movements in zebrafish. We present a system to modulate the cell cycle in early zebrafish embryos by manipulating the geminin-Cdt1 balance. Alterations of the cell cycle change the apoptotic level during gastrulation, which correlates with the nuclear level of antiapoptotic nuclear factor κB (NF-κB). NF-κB associates with the Snail1a promoter region on the chromatin and directly activates Snail1a, an important factor controlling cell delamination, which is the initial step of mesendodermal cell movements during gastrulation. In effect, the cell cycle coordinates the delamination of mesendodermal cells through the transcription of Snail1a. Our results suggest a molecular mechanism by which NF-κB and Snail1a coordinate the cell cycle through gastrulation

The complete mitochondrial genome of Populus rotundifolia var. duclouxiana

The complete sequence of the circular mitochondrial (mt) DNA of Populus rotundifolia var. duclouxiana is presented in this study. The size of the P. rotundifolia var. duclouxiana mt genome was 775,549 bp and the GC content of the genome was 44.8%. The P. rotundifolia var. duclouxiana mt genome encoded 58 genes, including 33 protein-coding genes, 22 tRNA genes, and three rRNA genes. Among the 58 genes, three genes contained one intron, one gene contained three introns, and four genes contained four introns. Phylogenetic analysis using seven complete mt genomes of Salicaceae supported that P. rotundifolia var. duclouxiana is most closely related to P. davidiana

Enhanced Sample Self-Revised Network for Cross-Dataset Facial Expression Recognition

Recently, cross-dataset facial expression recognition (FER) has obtained wide attention from researchers. Thanks to the emergence of large-scale facial expression datasets, cross-dataset FER has made great progress. Nevertheless, facial images in large-scale datasets with low quality, subjective annotation, severe occlusion, and rare subject identity can lead to the existence of outlier samples in facial expression datasets. These outlier samples are usually far from the clustering center of the dataset in the feature space, thus resulting in considerable differences in feature distribution, which severely restricts the performance of most cross-dataset facial expression recognition methods. To eliminate the influence of outlier samples on cross-dataset FER, we propose the enhanced sample self-revised network (ESSRN) with a novel outlier-handling mechanism, whose aim is first to seek these outlier samples and then suppress them in dealing with cross-dataset FER. To evaluate the proposed ESSRN, we conduct extensive cross-dataset experiments across RAF-DB, JAFFE, CK+, and FER2013 datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed outlier-handling mechanism can reduce the negative impact of outlier samples on cross-dataset FER effectively and our ESSRN outperforms classic deep unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) methods and the recent state-of-the-art cross-dataset FER results

Copper-Catalyzed Aerobic Oxidative Cross-Dehydrogenative Coupling of Amine and α-Carbonyl Aldehyde: A Practical and Efficient Approach to α-Ketoamides with Wide Substrate Scope

A copper-catalyzed aerobic oxidative cross-dehydrogenative coupling (CDC) of amine with α-carbonyl aldehyde has been developed. Many types of amines are tolerant in this transformation leading to various α-ketoamides compounds. Wide substrate scope, CDC strategy and using air as oxidant make this transformation highly efficient and practical. Molecular oxygen acts not only as the oxidant, but also as an initiator to trigger this catalytic process. Furthermore, mechanism studies show that carbonyl group of α-carbonyl aldehyde plays a role as the directing group to facilitate this chemical process